Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM
objects acquired the status of art because of their formal properties—their
properties as “autonomous” artworks—their having this status helped to endow
the subject-matter of modern art, consciously concerned with those formal properties,
with an ahistorical, timeless character.
Just as Antiquity was seen in the late eighteenth century as a golden age
before the fall into modernity, the “primitive” was seen by the modern artist as
outside history, culture in the domain of nature. Eighteenth-century prints portrayed
Pacific natives and Native Americans as classical Greeks; 15 Picasso’s
painting, in contrast, portrays modern women as wearing what look like African
masks for faces. The economic forces of modern society which tore these masks
(along with natural riches and, earlier, human beings themselves) from Africa
and the Pacific and made them resources for Western artistic production are
hidden here, precisely because of Picasso’s success in using these forms to represent
his, modern, experience of woman, society, and art in a guise apparently
timeless because supposedly primeval.
The “primitive” here represents not (like the Antique) an ideal to which society
aspires, but an inner essence lurking beneath the veneer of culture. It is both
threatening, spelling chaos and destruction, and liberatory, implying freedom
from convention—a freedom best exercised by the artist who like Picasso
replaces convention in giving form to these spirits. Primitivism thus expresses a
sense of the instability of modern society, and at the same time represents this
experience as eternal, rooted in the nature of things; just as the modern prostitute
is seen in an image like this one as an incarnation of the essential force of
female sexuality. In the same way, the artist claims to find in his personal
resources the elements of a universal language of form, independent of socialcultural
determination.
History
We can no longer see such works other than through the lens formed by the history
that separates us from them. When William Rubin thoughtlessly writes of
Picasso’s painting that “the center, left- and right-hand demoiselles communicate
progressively darkening insights [my emphasis] into the nature of femininity”
he is speaking with the voice of an age gone by. 16 The views not only of women
but of the nature of art implicit in this picture are simply no longer acceptable as
they might have been, at least in certain avant-garde circles, in 1907 or 1913 or
even 1940. It is hard today to imagine that art is a universal language or think of
15 See, for example, the illustration in Rubin, “Primitivism,” p. 6.
16 Rubin, “Picasso,” p. 252. That he actually means it is shown by a later passage in which he
speaks of Picasso’s “deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body,” matched with “craving
for and ecstatic idealization of it,” as “inherently banal material” that is yet “so amplified by the
spirit of genius that it emerges as a new insight—all the more universal for being so commonplace”
(pp. 251–4).
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