How cubism was received and interpreted by American artists is the subject of the catalog Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art, 1909-1936, published by the Hollis Taggart Galleries for its recent exhibition. Curated by Stacey B. Epstein, the exhibition featured approximately forty paintings and works on paper, many borrowed from museums and private collections, suggesting the broad range of inquiry and individual responses that were characteristic of the American encounter with cubism. Bolstered by an informative and absorbing essay by John Cauman, the catalog is richly illustrated with color plates of the exhibited works and supplementary images, which provide a context for understanding the works in the exhibition and a sense of the environment in which some of the artists worked. Cauman’s take on cubism is primarily historical; he is concerned with showing the connections among the artists in the group, their sponsors and patrons, and their sources in France. There is not much new ground uncovered here, but what the catalog sets out to do—to provide an overview of critical interactions and events—it does well, particularly in the first section of Cauman’s text, which begins with a discussion of the early decampment of American artists for Paris and the first local exhibitions of cubist painting, particularly among the New York circle that included Max Weber, John Marin, and Alfred Stieglitz. Proceeding chronologically, it concludes with an account of the work of a second generation of artists like Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky, and the eventual reconciliation of cubism in American museums during the interwar period, when the first tentative efforts were made to integrate cubism, both American and European, into the canon of art history.

“Cubism” is a term that both catalog and exhibition interpret broadly. This was very much the case during the heyday of the movement, and if Cauman’s essay seems overly attentive to the historical and personal connections of the American school to the two leading progenitors of cubism in Paris, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it quickly comes to light that there was much more at stake in their work than a mere absorption of the formal strategies of the Parisian milieu. The artists were plainly taking their work in another direction, both in their respective artistic practices and the themes and subjects to which they gravitated. By 1913, and even more insistently in the immediate postwar period, they had already produced a diverse body of work and made a transition to a vocabulary that was far more urban than the classical repertoire of bathing scenes and nudes with which many began. This was the case with Max Weber, whose New York Bridges, Buildings, and Subways (1912, catalogue no. 37), shown at the exhibition, is an absolutely ebullient painting, a paean to city progress. It could easily be a pendant to John Marin’s later New York Harbor (c.1925, cat. no. 20), a faceted watercolor of projecting piers, dominated by the stout, opaque hull of a ship on the water. Even Morton Schamberg’s Telephone (1916, cat. no. 30) shows a material enthrallment with mechanics that situates it neatly in the fold of a modern, urban inventory of themes. Such observations are familiar fare in standard accounts of this period, and it is to the credit of the organizers of the exhibition, and Cauman himself, that other issues are probed as well, particularly the question of how artists like Weber, Marin, and others arrived at cubism in the first place. As is plainly evident from the works exhibited, they were not only reacting to having seen the work of Picasso and Braque during their trips abroad, but also to nearly identical sources of inspiration. As we read in the catalog, Oscar Bluemner, Manierre Dawson, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Marin, and Weber all traveled to France in the years before the First World War, and were voracious observers of the local artistic scene. By 1905, Weber was already living in Paris, visiting the salons and galleries regularly, where he attended Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne. It was one of the most influential exhibitions of its day, and Weber saw it at a time when Picasso, and Braque in particular, were also discovering Cézanne’s work. In view of historical chronology, this makes him a contemporary participant and not merely a subsequent imitator, as has often been claimed.

By 1909, we read, Weber “had already begun to assimilate the influence of Picasso,” and “in all likelihood” had seen two important paintings in Picasso’s studio, then largely unknown: the Demoiselles d’Avignon and Three Women.1 The artist Morgan Russell certainly had occasion to view the latter painting at the Paris apartment of Gertrude Stein, who owned it with her brother Leo, and he made a sketch of it, too, an intrepid and careful study dating to 1911 (Fig. 19). It is not clear, however, that Weber himself actually saw canonical paintings such as these first-hand, or simply knew them from reproduction. Both appeared in Gelett Burgess’s article “The Wild Men of Paris,” which was published in the Architectural Record in 1910 and was one of the first mentions of Picasso, Braque, and their fellow French Cubists to appear in the American press. There is little doubt that Weber saw some of Picasso’s work in Paris and met with the artist on at least one occasion before returning to New York in early 1909, but much of his work, and particularly that shown in the exhibition, fails to imply such a thorough correlation. In Weber’s Group of Figures (1911, cat. no. 36), there are certain phrases that might be traced to Picasso—the cocked hip of the reclining figure in the foreground and the pointed elbow of the thickset, standing figure, for example, which appear in the Demoiselles d’Avignon and Three Women, respectively—but here the artist emerges as much more of a fauve. The plasticity and contour in the figure of the reclining woman in the painting has more in common with Matisse’s Blue Nude of 1907, and here it is important to emphasize Weber’s own contact with Matisse, with whom he studied in 1908 in a school of painting that Matisse founded with the help of two other Americans, Michael and Sarah Stein. The displaced buttocks of the standing figure in the left of Weber’s painting, however, are an irrefutable departure, a passage that seems almost unthinkable without Braque’s Large Nude of 1907. As in Braque’s canvas, her buttocks are brought forward to become contiguous with the profile of her extended thigh, in a way that her pose would normally not allow. Closer to Picasso is Man Ray, whose Cubist Figure (1913, Fig. 23) was tucked away on one of the upper floors of the gallery during the exhibition, the features of the figure’s face aggressively dispersed. Similarly worth taking into consideration is Man Ray’s portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1913, Fig. 24), reproduced in the catalog, and much could be written about the monumental A.D. MCMXIV (1914, cat. no. 19), lent to the exhibition by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

When Weber exhibited at Stieglitz’s gallery in New York in early 1911, just before an exhibition of Picasso’s works on paper was about to open, the reaction was predictably severe. We learn, for example, that one critic described Weber’s figures as “travesties of the human form,”2 a response that seems as characteristic for its day as the random, entirely unsystematic use of terms such as cubism, futurism, and expressionism to denote work such as Weber’s in reviews in the press. What is most interesting about this early American reaction to cubism is how closely it echoes public responses overseas; we could be reading reviews from an exhibition in Berlin, Munich, Prague, or even Paris, and easily hear similar remarks. Indeed by the time that the Armory show opened in New York in 1913, the custom of lampooning and journalistic reproach was so thoroughly entrenched in the press that the historical value of this battery of rejoinders seems questionable, as does relying on them to gauge precisely how welcoming or provincial the local public may have been. More compelling are the designations of cubism and its local proponents as “extremist” or “revolutionary,” which are cited by Cauman in the catalog from period reviews.3 These are terms that imply a political departure as well as an aesthetic one, and were certainly relevant in the context of the first generation of Cubists in New York. Man Ray, we learn, studied drawing at the Francisco Ferrer Center, “an institution with anarchist leanings,” and Weber also had leftist, anarchist political leanings.4 It goes without saying that many in the local press also viewed cubism as a ‘foreign’ style, or perceived its early proponents to be foreigners, and this too might bear further examination. Weber emigrated from Poland at a young age, and Man Ray, although born in the United States, courted the exotic designation; both were of Jewish descent.

Cauman is not at all mistaken when he writes that in 1913, New York “remained aesthetically provincial,”5 but it bears keeping in mind that it was no more reluctant to embrace new art than other parts of the world where the impact of cubism was felt, and probably less so. Such admissions seem like an unnecessary concession to the conspicuous and continual absence of American cubism from the canon of art history and to its frequent designation as a ‘derivative’ mode of painting, at least in view of the evidence that is presented here, which points to the contrary. Considering the account offered in the catalog and the paintings in the exhibition, many of which date to the period of 1909 to 1911, it does not seem warranted to conclude that this was really the case, or that America was “late to recognize Cubism.”6 In many respects, artists in the United States were much quicker than most to recognize and react to the new turn in painting that cubism represented. In some cases, they were already enjoying the benefit of first-hand study in Paris at a time when many artists abroad were still studying the work of artists like Picasso in reproduction, or knew little about it. Cauman appropriately gives much of the credit to the broad circle of patrons, benefactors, and dealers who were initially supportive of cubism, like Stieglitz, but also to its later interpreters, like Alfred Barr. The 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition that Barr organized at the Museum of Modern Art was one of the first institutional appraisals of cubism in the United States, and it too was not lacking in political overtones. Like many of his contemporaries, Barr reacted to the rising tide of reactionary politics in Europe and its accompanying surge in socialist realism by adopting a stance that brought him in close agreement with many artists, like Weber, who were some twenty years his senior: seeing in cubism an indication of not only artistic, but also personal and social freedom,7 a marriage of terms that surely enjoyed greater currency on the early American scene than has been commonly acknowledged.