PATRICIA LEIGHTEN, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi + 198; 8 color pls.; 106 black-and-white ills. $35

Bracketed by the monumental Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1980 and last year's more focused exhibition, "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," at the same institution, the last decade ushered in a new generation of scholarship on Picasso. As fresh approaches to the examination of Cubism in particular have been advanced by writers using methodologies ranging from semiotics to Marxism, Picasso studies have been immeasurably enriched, and Picasso's art has been revealed to us in much greater complexity.[1] Patricia Leighten' s Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 adds yet another dimension to such scholarship as the author attempts to "retrieve a lost political context for [Picasso's] early career" (p. 10) within the framework of the anarchist movements in Spain and France, and thus to re-engage a political voice for the artist even in his most abstract and hermetic Cubist works.

Leighten begins her study with a discussion of the ways in which Picasso assimilated aspects of anarchist ideas in Barcelona and Madrid through his immediate circle, and responded to these ideas in his art. The specific historical events and political processes that frame Leighten' s account of anarchism in Spain are the National Disaster of 1898 (in which Spain lost the last remnants of her colonial empire and her foreign markets following the unpopular Spanish-American War), and the growth of Catalan nationalism. There is no question, as Leighten properly observes, that artists and intellectuals in Madrid and Barcelona were united in their opposition to the central government, and that anarchist rhetoric provided them with strategies to critique the regime. For example, Isidro Nonell's drawings "Espana despues de la guerra" and the texts that Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Rusinol, Gener, and Azorm published in Picasso's short-lived journal Arte joven were surely calculated indictments of the government. However, when Leighten writes that Arte joven "reliably confirms Picasso's self-consciously political postures" (p. 19), we are obliged to examine more fully the nature of these postures within the broader framework of Spanish society.

Leighten is correct in noting that articles in Arte joven (and a range of other journals that she cites, including Joventut in Barcelona) were colored by intellectual anarchist ideas. Moreover, Leighten's selection of particular literary passages, which she relates to Picasso' s socially critical paintings and drawings of prostitutes, beggars, and other outcasts, is compelling. However, intellectual or philosophical anarchism articulated within the aesthetic domain must be distinguished from militant, revolutionary anarchism in Spain at this time. Noting the "enormous number of related and often contradictory theories, attitudes, and social critiques" that characterized fin-de-siecle anarchism, the author asserts, "the artistic and political bohemias of Barcelona and Paris were especially attracted to the most extreme individualist rhetoric of destruction, which could be metaphorically expressed in their art without actually requiring them to live out its injunctions literally" (pp. 14, 15). Yet Leighten never explores the nature of this philosophical anarchism, which merits close scrutiny. Indeed, if we are to grasp more fully Picasso's relationship to intellectual anarchism, we are obliged to evaluate the attitudes, social position, and educational backgrounds of Spanish anarchist writers and artists, many of whom came from within the ranks of the industrial bourgeoisie. Here, Leighten fails to recognize the crucial contradiction of a class that sustained a moderate culture of opposition to itself in Madrid and Barcelona. In fundamental ways, the castizismo so prevalent in the writings of the "Men of 1898" -- the search for a pure and timeless Castilian essence --is escapist: rather than proposing a solution to the abuses of industrial capitalism, it withdraws into racial atavisms, imaging a distant past in place of a future utopia. Indeed, in Spain, the libertarian, theoretical anarchism that these individuals advanced was itself a middle-class construction that never promoted revolution, and consequently did not receive popular support among the movement's proletarian rank and file.[2]

The importance of clearly defining the manifold components within Spanish intellectual anarchism in turn bears directly on Leighten' s discussion of Picasso's Barcelona contacts. Here, the author indiscriminately places a politically diverse group of artists and writers under the anarchist umbrella. Alfred Opisso, Pompeu Gener, Joan Maragall, Jaume Brossa, and Alexandre Cortada are described as "literary anarchist and radical writers" (p. 17). Although Brossa was one of the more radical voices in the Catalan press of the mid-1890s, his inclusion here is especially misleading. Brossa was living in exile in Paris when Picasso became involved with advanced literary and artistic tertulies in Barcelona, particularly the group that gathered at the Quatre Gats tavern.[3] Similarly, Leighten's characterization of Maragall as an anarchist, and her description of how Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas "were assimilated into the anarchist camp" (p. 18), despite their more conservative Catalanist politics, merits careful consideration. As a moderate, Maragall never abandoned his class. He wrote for both the Diario de Barcelona, the mouthpiece of the conservative bourgeoisie, and the more radical and progressive journal L'Avenc, where Jaume Brossa served as an editor in 1892-93. Maragall's opposition to the Madrid government, and to outmoded political and social institutions in Barcelona, must be understood in terms of the reformatory and regenerationist nature of the Catalanist movement on the cultural front, before it was consolidated into a coherent political platform in 1906. To describe Maragall as a "literary" anarchist in this regard is to misrepresent his ideological orientation and simplify a complex historical process. Similarly, Leighten points to Rusinol's play L'Heroe of 1903 as an expose of "the plight of the Catalan textile workers" (p. 24), suggesting that the author had become "radicalized" over the years. In fact, while the play was a biting condemnation of Spanish militarism following the recent catastrophic campaigns in Cuba and the Philippines -- a point of view that Spanish anarchists shared -- L'Heroe proposed the work ethic of the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie as a panacea for Spain's sufferings. In fundamental ways, Rusinol's conservative solution to Spain's catastrophic situation was deeply at odds with the anarchist condemnation of industrial capitalism. Moreover, when Rusinol did criticize the Catalan bourgeoisie, his attacks were primarily leveled against the excessive materialism and provincialism of his class in the aesthetic and cultural spheres.[4]

Indeed, Leighten does not take into account the Catalan Modernistes' deeply ambivalent attitude toward industrialism as a lever for national regeneration. On the one hand, their retrieval of indigenous art and folklore was intimately tied to the construction of a distinct Catalan national identity, to which both radicals and conservatives (who each had a voice in the journal Joventut) were dedicated. On the other hand, the Modernistes, including Jaume Brossa, recognized that an unmediated return to pre-industrial traditions could impede the necessary modernization and Europeanization of Catalan culture and society. In important respects, Kropotkin's vision of an anarchist utopia was supplanted by the modernista project of national cultural reconstruction, a fundamental contradiction that Leighten does not address.

A careful review of the current literature on Modernisme might have enabled the author to gain access to the full complexities and nuances of Catalan cultural politics at this time.[5] For example, when Catalan authors did employ pastoral archetypes and racial atavisms, they often embodied meanings antithetical to those Leighten ascribes to anarchism. In one instance, following Josep Palau i Fabra, Leighten correctly relates the classical Mediterranean allusions that entered Picasso' s art during his sojourn in Gosol in the summer of 1906 to Eugenio d'Ors's call for the "'Mediterraneanization' of Catalan art" (p. 81), noting that Ors "made his appeal on moral, and by implication political grounds" (p. 82). Indeed, the political dimension of Ors's classical doctrine is not in question; however, it represented the aesthetic expression of conservative Catalan nationalism precisely in conjunction with the Catalan bourgeoisie's consolidation of political hegemony in 1906.[6] What, then, are we to make of Picasso's assimilation of Ors's classicism if, following the implications of Leighten's argument, his references and allusions reflect his political orientation?

Once again, Leighten furnishes a one-sided and at times misguided reading of the historical data. An analysis of the very contradictions of anarchism in relation to the increasingly politicized direction of Catalanism between the years 1890 and 1906 is missing from her analysis. If we are to do justice to the idea of a politically engaged Picasso --and I agree with Leighten that this represents an important project --we must move beyond the narrow question of how Picasso assimilated anarchist ideas in general, and consider how anarchism actually functioned within Spanish and Catalan society. Only then will we be able to understand the full import and direction of Picasso's social criticism.

To begin to sort out these issues, we must return to the problem of defining anarchism itself in its various intellectual formulations. At the beginning of her study, Leighten perceptively describes anarchism as a multivalent movement. The different levels of anarchist thought are more fully articulated in a later chapter, in which the author distinguishes the radical individualists who looked to Nietzsche and Max Stirner from those who followed Kropotkin's model of anarchist communism. Nevertheless, Leighten consistently returns to Kropotkin' s model in her analysis of Picasso's dual project to expose the inequities of the social facade (through his images of a marginalized society of beggars and outcasts), while providing a view of a more harmonious and rational life (his pastoral vision). But rather than clarifying Picasso's assimilation of anarchist doctrines here, Leighten muddies the waters. As the author realizes, Spanish artists, writers, and intellectuals were drawn to the individualist anarchism of Stirner and Nietzsche precisely because their ideas offered a vehicle to challenge the rigid aesthetic hierarchies of their society. To then read revolutionary content in this challenge is, I believe, to misconstrue the meaning of a political act.[7]

The same objections can in fact be raised about the author's reading of the decidedly different Parisian milieu. On one occasion, Leighten goes through considerable pains to explain how in his memoirs Andre Salmon "typically downplayed any genuinely political motives in the art or behavior of his circle, yet ... nevertheless returned frequently to the subject of their political attitudes" (p. 71). But if Salmon emphasized the ivory-tower hermeticism of his group, there is no need for us to read contradiction in this fact, as Salmon's model in the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner placed the cultivation of the self (and by extension, of one's art) above the needs of the community. [8] Similarly, Apollinaire's insistence on the artist's function " to modify the illusions of the public in accordance with his own creating" (p. 58) is ultimately related to Kropotkin's view of art as the deepest expression of a culture "at every social, political, and philosophical level" (p. 58), just as it affirms the Nietzschean construction of the artist as an elite and privileged being who, in Apollinaire's words, "orders the universe in accordance with his personal requirements" (p. 59). Indeed, we are obliged to define the reciprocal, and at time antagonistic, relationship between collective and individualist anarchism, which bears directly on any interpretation of how early modernism functions at the aesthetic level.[9] Leighten's view that "social and esthetic theory could become one for those more concerned with pursuing their radical art than with recognizing the contradictions between Kropotkin and Nietzsche" (p. 43) will not suffice.

The very hermeticism of Cubism should in turn stimulate us to consider the extent to which "radical" politics effectively had been transformed in the art and literature produced within Picasso's immediate circle. Leighten charts a progressive elitism -- what I see instead as a retrenchment of political content -- in Apollinaire's poetry, "from an early Symbolism through an awareness and criticism of the society around him to a modernist idiom" (p. 61). The same developmental stages, of course, can be charted for Picasso's work. Leighten also cites a passage by Salmon, published in Les Soirees de Paris in February 1912, as an example of how the author "amusingly meditated on the changing relations of poetry to political radicalism . . ." (p. 56). But the text in question is telling in a very different way. Salmon writes:

Until I was twenty life was beautiful.... Everything was easier. The free-verse poets were revolutionaries and the regular poets were republicans. Magre or Viele-Griffin, one could choose. It was very convenient. Today everything is more complicated, one is utterly confused. One no longer even knows who is a vers libriste; the republicans are revolutionaries and each is classic. It is too difficult, I renounce it (p. 56)[10]

In a more critical reading, Salmon's ironic though incisive commentary points to a decided blurring of the boundaries between Left and Right in the aesthetic sphere in France in the years immediately preceding the war. At that time, the Left coopted much of the discourse of nationalism and its aesthetic application in the doctrine of classicism that the Right had formulated a generation earlier. Moreover, though Leighten is correct to note the "serious and permanent governmental swing to the left" (p. 49) in French politics following the separation of Church and State in 1905, this very separation paved the way for the moderate faction within the Radical movement to reach an understanding with moderates further to the Right.[11] This is not the place to debate the manifold crises in French parliamentary democracy that gave rise to this peculiar situation.[12] My point is that the aesthetic radicalism of la bande a Picasso -- their modernist idiom -- exists in a deeply complex and problematical relationship to these political developments, and cannot be reduced to a simple causative model.

Leighten's argument, however, hinges precisely on a direct relationship between aesthetic radicalism and political radicalism. Writing about Picasso's earliest scenes of urban misery in Barcelona, Leighten asserts that Isidro Nonell's own "commitment to a commercially unsuccessful radical style depicting politically charged subjects offered a powerful example, which Picasso followed" (p. 32). But if Picasso's and Nonell' s assaults on artistic tradition were implicitly subversive in a political sense, what are we to make of the high level of formal innovation in the work of Alexandre de Riquer, Picasso's contemporary, whose politics were decidedly conservative7 Later in her analysis, Leighten applies the same argument to Picasso's early Paris years. The story of Alfred Jarry presenting Picasso with his cherished revolver is, for Leighten, an act of symbolic transference, prompting Picasso "to move on to a more revolutionary artistic position, pushing himself on from the meditative, privatistic, and still narrative paintings of 1904-05 to the more formal abstractions of 1905 and 1906" (p. 68). In stating this, the author sets the stage for another kind of transference, in which style will increasingly bear the burden of revolutionary content in Picasso's Cubist paintings, as the artist's early anarchist esthetics are "transformed into a metaphor for artistic 'revolution. '"

Leighten locates the decisive turning point for this transformation in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Attacking the academic tradition of the nude head-on by allusion to primitive and Iberian art, Picasso' s style, for Leighten, "constitutes part of the subject matter that he was exploring" (p. 84). According to the author, this subject matter involves a direct challenge to the "'bankrupt' Western artistic tradition" (p. 88), and an indictment of Western colonialism in Africa, informed by Jarry's own anticolonialist satires. Both of these assertions, however, are problematic. In an important respect, Picasso upholds the Western artistic tradition just as he challenges it -- his ambivalence is endemic to the '98 Generation in Spain. Several years ago John Richardson,[13] building upon the researches of Ron Johnson,[14] discussed Picasso's cultural dialogue with El Greco in the Demoiselles, specifically pointing to a possible source in El Greco's Apocalyptic Vision (Metropolitan Museum of Art), which was then in the Paris collection of Picasso' s friend, the celebrated Basque painter Ignacio Zuloaga (whom Leighten erroneously describes on a different occasion as a "Valencian peasant painter" [p. 18]). As Jonathan Brown has observed, Manuel B. Cossio, in his ground-breaking study of El Greco published in 1908, specifically aligned the painter with the Spanish national tradition and physiognomy, responding to the '98 Generation's search for an essential and authentic (castizo) Castile.[15] Contrary to Leighten's arguments, then, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon can be located both within and outside the Spanish tradition. To emphasize the latter reading at the expense of the former is to misunderstand the great richness of this painting. In fact, Picasso had long maintained a cultural dialogue with his national heritage (a dialogue that the "theoretical" or "intellectual" anarchists of his generation -- Azorin, Baroja, Unamuno -- had initiated). Even Picasso's monumental Woman in Blue of 1901 (fig. 28), which Leighten describes simply as one of the "grotesquely self-satisfied women of the Madrid period" (p. 82), looks pointedly -- and I believe without mockery-to Velazquez. The large size of this Salon picture (measuring 133.5 x 101cm), which Picasso exhibited at the "Exposicion de Bellas Artes" in Madrid that same year (precisely when he was launching Arte loven), again demonstrates the ambivalent relationship of his generation to official culture.

Leighten's second assertion concerning Picasso's anticolonialist posture is equally debatable. Jarry's satires are compelling evidence of his political sympathies, but they provide little more than contextual, and therefore circumstantial, evidence of Picasso's. To support her claim of how "the tremendous powers of primitive spirituality . . . overwhelm the decadent European tradition in an undeniable act of moral rebellion" (p. 88), Leighten points to a drawing of 1905 in Picasso's sketchbook of a crudely rendered figure in a pastoral setting, complete with grass hut, river, and palm trees (fig. 64). While the author would like us to read the figure as an emaciated victim of colonial oppression, close scrutiny of Picasso's caricatural mode reveals an entirely unsympathetic image of cultural otherness.

Similarly, if, as Leighten implies, Picasso indicts the system of economic exploitation that places an exchange value on the female body, what are we to make of his ambivalent attitude toward such a decadent bourgeois practice as prostitution? The anarchist writer Felicien Fagus hit the nail on the head in his review of Picasso's exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill in April 1902. Commenting upon Picasso's Courtesar, with a Jeweled Collar (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), which the artist painted in Paris in 1901, Fagus described the "unconscious dignity" of the figure, whose fixed stare, costume, and bodily pose make "something hieratic out of her."[16] Indeed, there is a way in which Picasso created secular madonnas of fallen women and beggars in his Blue Period works, ennobling -- and here one cannot avoid the term "aestheticizing" -- tragedy and oppression. Picasso's complex attitudes toward prostitutes (and the ways in which prostitution functioned in the society in which these attitudes were formed), in relation to his complex and ambivalent attitudes toward women, is ultimately at issue. In her reductive attempt to "read" the Demoiselles within the context of anarchism and anticolonialism, Leighten ultimately impoverishes its content. If Picasso's seminal painting represents "La Propagande par le fait," its message, however disturbing, is highly equivocal.

If we now return to the issue of the transfer of anarchist content to the aesthetic sphere in Picasso's subsequent Cubist works as the means through which the artist found new and challenging ways to distance himself from bourgeois society, we must inevitably face the contradiction of Picasso's complicity with that society through patronage and the marketplace, and explore how his aesthetic challenge was critically received. David Cottington has directly engaged the former issue, and I point readers to his analysis of the ways in which Cubism, particularly Picasso's papiers colles, simultaneously challenges established canons of representation while sustaining ruling-class aesthetic ideologies. [17] By opting not to engage this critical issue --as she states in her introduction -- Leighten is unable to view Cubism in its full historical dimension. Interested, rather, in what Picasso might have "thought was the political matrix and content of this] art" (p. 112), she approaches the more limited issue of Cubism's immediate critical reception. Disengaging Cubism from postwar formalism's systematic denial of social content, Leighten looks to the negative criticism of the movement to confirm contemporary interpretations of Cubism as revolutionary, unpatriotic, and anarchic. I would argue, however, that Leighten's selections are unjudicious and distort the historical record through a curious inversion: the positive criticism is in fact more telling and reliable.

Let us for the moment examine the published responses of three well- known authors to the work of the "Salon" Cubists (Picasso should not be included among this group). Writing in February 1912, Olivier-Hourcade stated: "L'effort actuel est loin d'etre anarchique en sa diversite. C'est au contraire, semble-ttil, un retour ... aux seines traditions. "[18] Similarly, Jean Granie, noting how the Cubists differentiated the prolongation of a pure classical spirit from the corrupt pseudoclassicism of the Academy, wrote: "On les taxa d'anarchie. Ils s'attestent nettement classiques, et le danger reside plutot dans leur austerite janseniste. "[19] Finally, even the anarchist critic Gustave Kahn noted in October 1911, and not without a degree of irony, "Ce qui est un peu inquietant pour l'avenir du cubisme, ctest ce que sa base offre de classique et de reactionnaire, ce dont la critique actuelle n'est pas innocente. "[20] Are we to interpret these responses as merely rhetorical postures launched by critics to defend the work of their friends, who were often under siege by a hostile public? Or do the subtexts of classicism and the French tradition that are present in Salon Cubist criticism (and repeated in the writings of the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger) point to the assimilation of conservative discourses by the Left that only a full historical reading of the forces shaping the Cubist movement can reveal? Of course, we must distinguish Salon Cubism from the work of Picasso and Braque, as did their contemporaries. But if we again turn to Leighten's argument, we are forced to ask whether the art of the Salon Cubists represents any less of an assault in the bourgeois conventions of painting than Picasso's Cubism. Once again, Leighten's insistence upon equating political with aesthetic radicalism prevents her from asking questions that would not only expose the contradictions of Picasso's art within the broader framework of French society, but might encourage a very different interpretation of what she perceives to be his political content.

That perception bears directly on Leighten's interpretation of Picasso' s collages of 1912-14, the point from which she launches her investigation of Picasso and anarchism in her introduction. Asserting that "the collages reflect in surprisingly direct ways the political theories in which Picasso was immersed during his early days in Barcelona and Paris" (p. 105), Leighten sets to the task of reading the newspaper fragments in order to confirm Picasso's "continued interest in and manipulation of anarchist themes and social critique" (p. 121). Within the framework of the broad antiwar campaign that the French Left waged at this time, Leighten interprets the newspapers as conscious statements of Picasso's pacifist stance at the time of the Balkan Wars. Here, Leighten describes Picasso's "courage" in maintaining such a position, as France, and ultimately the patriotic Braque and Apollinaire, prepared for war. Reducing Picasso's inclusion of specific texts to a defensive posture, Leighten literally reads the newspapers as justifications of his noncombatant position.

The texts in question are harrowing indeed: gruesome eyewitness accounts of battlefields littered with victims of the Balkan Wars have their analogue in equally horrific chronicles of suicide, murder, and insanity at home -- "evidence of a bourgeois society in terminal stages of pathology" (p. 139), according to Leighten. With one exception, Picasso culled these texts from the sensationalist Parisian newspaper Le Journal, carefully avoiding radical or anarchist journals that "would have replaced description with polemic" (p. 130). But if Picasso avoided such polemics, as Leighten argues, are we justified in advancing a specific political interpretation? Did Picasso intend these newspaper clippings to encode a pacifist subtext, or are we imposing such a reading on the texts? Finally, are the texts themselves ultimately neutralized by their aesthetic function within the work of art, fulfilling a prescribed role within Picasso's complex organization of pictorial signs? Rosalind Krauss has argued that the impossibility of fixing meanings outside the play of signs -- the very circumstantiality of meaning structured within given sets of relations -- is the master principle at work in Picasso's papiers colles.[21] Whether or not we wish to accept her thesis, which limits interpretation to the frame of the picture, it is clear that where Leighten finds programmatic content, Picasso himself remains purposefully ambiguous. In Guitar, Sheet-Music and Wineglass of November 1912 (pi. Vll), Picasso's first or second exercise in the medium of papier colle (which is reproduced on the jacket of Leighten's book), the artist discreetly cuts off a portion of the headline and thereby disrupts the narrative continuity of the text, eliminating the specificity of its reference to fighting "sur les Lignes de Tchataldja." This adumbration, which now reads "LA BATAILLE S'EST ENGAGE," surely does not refer "literally to the [First Balkan] war and perhaps metaphorically to Picasso's personal struggle with the issues it raised," nor "to the formal challenge represented by the unprecedented and outrageous use of collage in art," nor for that matter to the idea of the "eclat of the first battle" (p. 126), as Leighten suggests. Rather, Picasso's masterly papier colle exists precisely at the junction where meaning itself is structured, where signs are detached from their referents, and where poetic fissures are opened. Picasso's wit is unmistakable here as he delights in the challenges of representation --LE JOU[rnal], as the text announces -- of Cubist play.

In the end, as one is confronted by the historical contradictions of anarchism, the considerable difficulties in defining the components of the movement clearly and applying them judiciously to an analysis of Picasso's art, and the significant challenges to Leighten's interpretations that Marxist and semiotic analyses pose, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 is unconvincing. If we are to explore Picasso's intentions -- the ways in which he consciously responded to anarchist ideas and theories -- we must then step back and examine how his ideas, attitudes, and aesthetic strategies functioned not only in his art, but within the broader society. Although Leighten is to be commended for engaging an important and largely overlooked issue in Picasso studies, her reductive and literal analysis of this important chapter in the artist's career obscures the brilliance and complexity of his work.

[1] W. Rubin, ed., Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, New York, 1980, and idem, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, New York, 1989. The following is a selected bibliography of recent critical revisions of Cubism: L. Gamwell, Cubist Criticism, Ann Arbor, 1980; R. Johnson, "The Demoiselles d'Avignon and Dionysian Destruction," and "Picasso' s Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Theater of the Absurd," Arts Magazine, October 1980, 94-101 and 102-113; M. Gedo, "Art as Exorcism: Picasso' s Demoiselles d'Avignon," Arts Magazine, October 1980,94-101 and 102113; R. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," Art in America, LXVIII, 1980, 90-96; J.M. Nash, "The Nature of Cubism: A Study of Conflicting Explanations, " Art History, Ill, 4, 1980, 435-447; W. Rubin, "From Narrative to 'Iconic' in Picasso: The Buried Allegory in Bread and Fruitdish on a Table and the Role of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Art Bulletin, LXV, 1983, 615-649; D. Cottington, "Cubism, Law and Order: The Criticism of Jacques Riviere," Burlington Magazine, CXXVI, 1984,744-750; P. Leighten, "Picasso's Collages and the Threat of War, 1912-13," Art Bulletin, LXVII, 1985,653-72; and M. Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism, Philadelphia, London, and Toronto, 1985. See also "Revising Cubism," a special issue of the Art Journal edited by Patricia Leighten (XLVII, 4, Winter 1988, 269-367), with articles by: D. Robbins, "Abbreviated Historiography of Cubism"; E.F. Fry, "Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity" ; C. Poggi, "Frames of Reference: Table and Tableau in Picasso's Collages and Constructions"; L. Dalrymple Henderson, "X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists" ; R.M. Antliff, "Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment"; D. Cottington, "What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912"; and R. Jensen, "The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art."

[2] For a discussion of these points, see G.R. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898, Berkeley, 1989; and C.B. Aguinaga, Juventut del 98, Madrid, 1970.

[3] As first noted by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn in a letter to the editor of the Art Bulletin (LXIX, 1987, 133-134). Leighten contradicts herself in her discussion of Brossa. She notes that Brossa had gone into exile following an antiterrorist crackdown by the military in 1897 (p.27), yet describes Brossa on another occasion as "Picasso' s friend from Barcelona" (p. 71).

[4] For a full account of Rusinol's politics, see "Rusinol, profug del Modernisme A proposit de L'heroe," in J.L. Marfany, Aspectes del modernisme, Barcelona, 1984.

[5] In addition to Marfany, ibid., see also E. Valenti, El primer modernismo catalan, Barcelona, 1973; and V.Cacho Viu, ea., Els modernistes i el nacionalisme cultural (1881-1906), Barcelona, 1984, for an analysis of Modernisme in the political and aesthetic spheres.

[6] Similarly, Picasso took the time to transcribe in both Catalan and French the fifth poem from Joan Maragall's celebrated Vistes al mar in his Gosol sketchbook. See D. Cooper, ea., Picasso Carnet Catalan, Paris, 1958. As Marfany has observed, Maragall elaborated a specific nationalist mythology, stressing continuity, cohesion, and renewal in the Vistes that paralleled his increasing conservatism. (as in n. 4, 99-185), 99-185.

[7] In a very different application, Nietzsche's philosophy was influential in Catalonia not only for its emphasis on extreme individualism, but for its vitalist components. Catalan authors turned to the Nietzschean concept of the vital force of a people as a tool for national cultural and political reconstruction. In this respect, in addition to confirming anarchist individualism, Nietzsche's philosophy also had deeply authorial implications in Catalonia. By 1906, Nietzsche's ideas were specifically applied to the conservative doctrine of Catalan cultural imperialism that Eugenio d'Ors and Enric Prat de la Riba professed. For a full account of the manifold uses of Nietzsche's writings, see V.Cacho Viu, ea., Els modernistes i el nacionalisme cultural.

[8] Two recent studies by Beth Susan Gersh-Nesic provide the most current scholarship on Salmon's criticism with respect to his Stirnerian intellectual model "Andre Salmon in Perspective," Rutgers Art Review, IX-X, 1988-89, 151-158; and "The Early Giticism of Andre Salmon A Study of His Thoughts on Cubism," Ph.D. dies., City University of New York, 1989.

[9] Gersh-Nesic, "The Early Criticism of Andre Salmon," chap. 3.

[10] Gersh-Nesic offers a more precise translation of Salmon's phrasing, C'est trop dificile, j'y renonce,,' as "It's too difficult, I give up." Ibid., 101, n. 13.

[11] See Eugen Weber's analysis of this phenomenon in The Nationalist Kevival in France, 1905-1914, Berkeley, 1959.

[12] In addition to Weber, ibid., see M. Curtis, Three Against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barres, and Maurras, Princeton, 1959.

[13] J. Richardson, "Picasso's Apocalyptic Whorehouse," New York Review of Books, XXXIV, 23 April 1987.

[14] R. Johnson, "Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Theater of the Absurd" (as in n. 1).

[15] J. Brown, "Introduction El Greco, the Man and the Myths," in El Greco of Toledo, Boston, 1982, 15-33.

[16] Felicien Fagus, review of the Picasso and Louis Bernard-Lemaire exhibition at Galerie B. Weill, La Revue Blanche (1 September 1902); translated in P. Daix, G. Boudaille, and J. Rosselet, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods, Greenwich, 1966, 334.

[17] Cottington (as in n. 1, "What the Papers Say.").

[18] Olivier-Hourcade, "La Tendance de la peinture contemporaine, La Revue de France et des pays francais, Paris, February, 1912, 35- 41.

[19] J. Granie, "Les Cubistes," Revue d'Europe et d'Amerique. Cited in L.C. Breunig and C. Chevalier, eds., Guillaume Apollinaire, Meditations esthetiques: Les Peintres cubistes, Paris, 1980, 204.

[20] G Kahn, "Le Salon d'Automne. Peinture et sculpture," Mercure de France, Paris, 16 October 1911, 868-870.

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By ROBERT S. LUBAR, Institute of Fine Arts 1, East 78th Street New York, NY 10021

Copyright 1990 by College Art Association. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of College Art Association.

Lubar, R.S., Book reviews.., Vol. 72, Art Bulletin, 09-01-1990, pp 505.

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