To begin with Cubism: If the paradox -- the contradiction -- of Picasso and Braque's attempts at landscape painting 1909 was that the space functioned increasingly as still-life, and that although purportedly set outside, the outdoors as they conceive it is closed-off and increasingly surface-level. These Cubist landscapes demonstrate, pace Worringer, a "fear of space" -- fear of far distances, of atmosphere and regression towards the horizon -- accompanied by a will not to abstraction (nor to "empathy") but to something closer to what Riegl calls "tactile" or "haptic" values. Cubism wants to bring things close-up and near-to-hand, not in the sense Benjamin gives to the eradication of distance, but as a reassertion of the auratic presence of things. It wants to test the limits of aura, too, both in pictures (the minimum of distance as an effect of the near abandonment of the figure, of thingness, of coherent shape) and in life (the maximum of bohemian proximity to the objects of the Cubist nature-morte). For "aura," read tangibility, also self-possession. Objects are auratic in Picasso's world insofar as they make manifest their innerness as a site of tactile interest. One makes one's way through a Cubist painting in the manner of a rock-climber, by securing a foothold, a handhold, a hole for a finger or two. Totally unlike Matisse's paintings, which eradicate all footholds and handholds (his phobia of holes), opting instead to control the route of the viewer's optical freefall.
What is paradoxical, or contradictory, about early Cubist "landscapes" is, in other words, the "insideness" of the outside. Even in 1909, Cubism is gravitating quickly towards its true topos, the studio-apartment. In Léger's Cubism, developed around 1908-9, following Braque's summer at L'Estaque, Cubism's originary contradiction is elevated into the working principle of a career; Léger gives it the name "contrastes des formes," but the contrast is really between the verticality of the Cubist ground -- Cézanne's kitchen table tipped up flush with the canvas surface, and broken up, dematerializing into a field of facets and planes -- and what Léger called the "subject," i.e. the human figure or arrangement of objects positioned at the center of the picture. Léger's paintings show us what was dangerous about the Cubist world as it had emerged in Braque and Picasso's early canvases: Cubism's resources and procedures tended to obfuscate the distinction between earth and sky, between rock and house, between figure and ground (remember that Braque's canvases of 1908 did not include human figures). My sense of things is that Léger saw and understood that the human figure would not be compatible with the world of Cubist landscape; rather than retreat to the still-life, however, he decided to remain in an ambiguous inside-outside space, and to derive the maximum of energy, or "contrast," from this incompatibility.
When Cubism does go indoors, then, it is not only to reaffirm its allegiance to the still life and the portrait; it is also to clarify its architectural and phenomenal conditions, and to ensconse itself in a world and a space (the bohemian apartment) capable of accomodating Cubism's radical formal dis-integration of the ground plane without jettisoning the figure and the object in the process. If Picasso's paintings done at Cadaques in 1910 veer again towards the landscape format, his canvases of the following year augment the no-man's land of the faceted, fractured ground with, on the one hand, more surface-level scumbling and passage-esque pseudo-divisionism ("genre Signac"), and on the other, more tokens and signs of the tactile: eyes, moustaches, curtain ties, guitar strings, etc. The point is to insist on the irrelevance of architecture for Cubism: it should not need to evoke space directly (indeed, its resources are incapable of this), it can rather count on the unquestioned givenness of its milieu. In my view, Cubism's confidence in the givenness of its architectural surround -- its version of "room space" -- depended on the hermeticism of Picasso and Braque's practice in the "heroic years" of Cubist experimentation. The paintings were meant to be seen in and as a part of their milieu; they argue for the durability of Parisian bohemianism and fail or succeed depending on the viewer's ability to imagine this world in its material reality. Cubism proclaims that the one thing, the painting, can’t do without the other, the space in which it is painted, and out of which it occasionally emerged. It insists upon the real durability of the bohemian studio-apartment so as to annihilate it, or dematerialize it, pictorially. Cubism was a matter of demonstrating potlatch-style that it was capable of destroying what it possessed (not in reality, of course, but in -- and as -- the imagined space of the picture) -- that it was its own master.
The turn away from Cubism should thus be considered in terms of a loss of faith in the durability and self-enclosure of the bohemian world. The problem is stated well enough in a photograph taken in Picasso's studio in 1913: it shows a Cubist sketch hung from the wall (or perhaps from the ceiling), to which Picasso -- or someone else -- has affixed a pair of arms made of newspaper and a paper guitar. The mixed-media guitarist stands before a real cafe table, upon which sit archetypal Cubist objects: a bottle of wine and a briar-pipe. The message is, I would argue, that Cubism is in danger of becoming a caricature of itself, and of its bohemian stock of subjects and objects. Collage and papier collé are attempts at incorporating within the scene of the studio still life both the degradation of the bohemian world and the encroachment of the world outside; key tropes of this are the newspaper, strips of wallpaper, and the tabletop.
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