1907|PICASSO LESSONS
We
can only imagine the impact this larger-than-life painting had on contemporary
viewers 93 years ago---its attack on the very foundation
of painting's presumed visual raison d'etre is so original that the disturbance
must have been visceral. Braque was one of the first to see it. It altered
the genetic code of his plastic intelligence forever. I suspect that for many
today, certainly for these eyes, it has lost none of its power to challenge,
interrogate or instruct.
Braque
called everyday space (the space we associate with perspectival reality) visual
space. He called the collapsed and contradictory painterly space
that Picasso suggests here tactile space. "Visual space
separates objects from one another. Tactile space separates us from objects,"
he wrote. When paint is in the service of situating its subject as much within
the realistic boundaries of the two-dimensional x-y plane as within the illusional
boundaries defined by the z-axis, tactile space is the result. In other words,
tactile space is the "real" space between us and the surface of
the painting itself. Perception of this space is heightened when the illusion
of perspectival visual space is reduced. Ultimately, then, the interplay
of form and space in the Demoiselles contributes to a game
of affirmation and denial vis a vis the illusion of perspectival space versus
the reality of the flatness of the painting canvas itself. Folded fabrics
(i.e., surfaces), folded forms, and folded space are rendered with beguiling
equivalence---oscillating between solidity
and impermanence.
1.
Diptych (1:1): Two women on either side of the woman in the center.
Columnar, caught between a diagonal stance and assertive frontality, the center
woman divides the canvas essentially in half. Thus, in the context of a work
of startling invention, we find the ultimate convention: a solid object in
the middle of a painting (a figure in the center of a field). (I call it "target-art,"
because it implicitly defines a spatial field in a manner analogous to that
celebrated by an archer, for whom hitting the bull's eye is the thing. Cubism
did little to disrupt this convention.) Due to the placement of this woman,
as well as to the handling of other aspects of the painting, lateral
centripetal forces prevail---that is, the principal orthogonal
visual rays, though distracted at times to the periphery, tend inward towards
the center; 
...or,
towards a shifted center, slightly to the right, in keeping
with the diagonal forces that lead the eye to the right into the z-axis of
the visual space. With linear precision, Picasso gives visible evidence to
these two invisible vertical axes by a series of contour breaks, contiguities,
intersections and edges along their length. Note also the exactitude with
respect to the horizontal centerline. The principal diagonals of the x-y plane
(shown in the diagram) clearly inform the geometrization of the canvas, both
in terms of formal inflections and figural positioning. Moreover, they establish
diagonal centrifugal forces, in tension with the centripetal
lateral forces.
2.
Triptych (1:1:1) Reading from left to right: one woman +
two women + two women. The canvas is divided into dynamically counterbalanced
thirds. This second set of diagonals also clearly contributes to delineational
rigor.
3.
Split-screen 1 (2:1) Another reading of sub-division
into thirds, this time 2/3 against 1/3. Three women, left, are played against
two woman, right. The attention shifts to the second woman from the left,
the center figure of the trio. We focus on her aggressively frontality.
This
sub-frame or variation of split-screen 1, employing the contours of the left
trio of women themselves as boundaries, shows the second woman from the left
to be even more precisely the emphatic "central" focus of the painting
at this moment in time. Note how her right upper arm becomes for a moment
spatially dislocated, advancing enigmatically into the foreground. (This is
true also of her "dismembered" left leg, as mentioned above.)
4.
Split-screen 2 (1:3) The left woman, embedded in
the terra cotta wall, is isolated from/played against the other four. She
is "inside," they are "outside"---or the reverse.
Jagged, simultaneously layered and flat, this woman and her interlocked background
give authority and presence to the periphery. Picasso has
established a rectilinear architectonic datum or edge---a condition that
would inform Mondrian's paintings beginning in 1916. The canvas is effectively
divided into four vertical parts. The right vertical line proves to be as
practical as the other two. Again the diagonals are organizationally meaningful.
And the vertical sub-division second from the right invites contemplation...
The
principal rip in the homogeneous fabric of the painting's
spatial constriction is here, at the third-point from the right, where the
illusion of deep space is simultaneously affirmed and denied.
On the one hand, space can be inferred as extending into the atmospheric blue
(and clouds) of day. It is the deepest space in the painting. The three women
to the left lead the eye along the diagonal into the z-axis
of the painting, and the gaze is released through the gash in the fabric to
the landscape beyond. It is a window to the world outside.
The standing woman at the right, positioned the deepest of the five, together
with the seated woman in front of her (looking simultaneously back at us and
out the "window"), assist in ushering our gaze on out through this
irregular aperture. They contribute to the impression that a significant
void is being allowed to open into and out of the cramped tent-like
quarters of the brothel. As if a waft of wind breezes through to refresh the
scene and expand the otherwise compressed foreground and middleground. On
the other hand, no sooner does one construe it in this way than the space
immediately jumps forward---advancing in solid
mirror-like fragments to occupy a z-axis space between the two right woman,
if not advancing to the ultimate foreground, and thus insisting on the tactile
space of the painting. That is, it suddenly becomes an advancing reflective
solid as opposed to a retreating atmospheric void.
Its spatial position and material substance is equivocal.
In perhaps the ultimate move of spatial abstraction in
this painting, Picasso links the blue void of the background with the table
and fruit of the foreground (bottom edge). Sometimes narrow, sometimes wide---sometimes window,
sometimes table with fruit---this remarkable figural
gash and visual caesura winds its way from top to
bottom of the painting on the slight x-y oblique. 
It thereby physically isolates the three woman on the left from
the two on the right, dramatically collapses the picture space from front
to back, underscoring the reality of the painting's two-dimensionality, and
creates the presence of a turbulent, unmistakable... 
Negative space was obviously
on the mind of Richard Diebenkorn in this painting, "Seated Figure with
Hat," 1967. The yellow fragments that bracket the back and front of the
woman (left and right) are just as intentionalized and figural as the body
of the woman herself. This allows an inverted reading wherein
the viewer can see yellow field fragments as solid and the woman as void,
thereby yielding permanence and equivocality to the positive/negative construction.
Though the periphery of Picasso's "The Poet" is weak, whereas the
Diebenkorn shows a heightened concern with the edges, each painting in its
own way diagrams the intercontingency of a principal figure
and its field. (See my essay Significant Space.) 
© 2000|MADISON GRAY
_5.21.2000
............ .....................................transfiguring the
space between...........