BASEL.- Developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early years of the twentieth century, Cubism revolutionized visual art. The exhibition The Cubist Cosmos. From Picasso to Léger at the Kunstmuseum Basel now unfurls an expansive panorama of the era and invites visitors to rediscover some of its greatest masterpieces. Produced in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the chronologically organized show brings together numerous eminent Cubist works from both collections to create a setting in which the famous paintings gifted to the Kunstmuseum by Raoul La Roche shine like never before. Rounded out by treasures on loan from international collections, the presentation in Basel showcases ca. 130 works for a comprehensive survey of this seminal chapter in the history of modernism.

With its enormous innovative energy, Cubism influenced the course of twentieth-century art history in ways that are hard to overstate and is an adventure for the eyes even today, challenging our habits of seeing. With unbridled creative élan, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque overthrew one seemingly immovable building block of the traditional understanding of art after another, and within a few years, their radical ideas had set visual art on a completely new foundation. The splintering of form that is the hallmark of Cubism results from a rejection of art’s mimetic relation to reality; combining symbols and fragments, the Cubist work speaks not just to the beholder’s sense of sight but to her intellect as well. Integrating novel materials into their art, the Cubists questioned the notion of high culture and engaged in a playful and experimental inquiry into vernacular culture, which was transplanted into the work in collages of newspaper articles and wallpapers.

Picasso and Braque and the spirit of innovation
On the one hand, The Cubist Cosmos. From Picasso to Léger bears witness to the pioneering achievements of Picasso and Braque; the duo has long been regarded as the driving force behind Cubism. On the other hand, the show expands on this decades-old canonical understanding of the movement by painting a broader and more nuanced picture, spotlighting the artists known as the Salon Cubists: starting in 1910, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and other artists in Paris adopted the new visual language and took it in new directions. Paintings in large formats that celebrated modern life were on display in the Paris Salons from 1911 on. These events were instrumental in popularizing Cubism with international audiences.

The Cubist Cosmos. From Picasso to Léger retraces the various strands of Cubism’s evolution from 1908 until the years after World War I. This broad temporal scope allows the exhibition to illuminate the movement’s enormous stylistic range as well as its revolutionary potential, which anticipates many subsequent developments in the art of the twentieth century.

Nine chronologically and thematically focused sections illustrate how Picasso and Braque, encouraged by the inspiration they draw from African, Polynesian, and Micronesian sculptures and other sources, break free from traditional Western academicism and the classical conception of art (Primitivism, room 1). Braque’s earth-toned Large Nude (1907/08) is one outstanding work from this period, during which the artists probe the qualities of the archaic, “wild,” and aboriginal. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of Paul Cézanne, they learn how to abandon the ideal of imitating nature and instead devise ways to articulate the picture’s own logic, its inner necessity (The Influence of Cézanne, room 2).

Experimentation with crystalline elements
Beginning in 1908, the landscapes that the two artists paint in L’Estaque and their still lifes with musical instruments feature crystalline and quasi-geometric elements which seem to be molded by an intrinsic organizational principle that is intellectual first and foremost. At the same time, they begin to pare down their palette, first to shades of green and brown and then, even more radically, to a luminous gray and brown, which are virtually the only colors in Braque’s Broc et Violon (1909/10) and Picasso’s Nu assis (1909/10) (Piercing the Closed Form, room 3).

Braque and Picasso delve into each of their new inventions with palpable zest for experimentation, which is reflected in the principle of repetition and variation that defines their work. This almost serialist approach is evident as they test the possibilities of another innovation: the introduction into the picture of letters, fragments of words, and symbols, which appeal to the beholder’s capacity for inductive reasoning as much as her eye—to make sense of a composition, she must synthesize and interpret its various elements, as in Braque’s Le Portugais (1911/12), one of the celebrated masterpieces in the Kunstmuseum’s collection (Letters and Signs, room 4).

Portraits of art dealers and writers such as Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and DanielHenry Kahnweiler highlight an important aspect of the movement’s history, suggesting the network of publishers, collectors, and poets around the Cubists who encouraged their innovative ideas and disseminated them in the literary world of the time (Writers and Critics, room 5).

Two rooms of the exhibition are dedicated to the profound changes that commence in 1912, when the artists return to color and invent the collage. One (room 6) demonstrates their experimental use of materials and color, while the other (room 7) examines collage and assemblage as techniques combining newspaper clippings, wallpapers, and other fragments of the physical world.

Finally, The Cubist Cosmos illustrates the adoption and transformation of this visual language by avant-garde circles in Paris with major works that were shown in the Paris Salons between 1911 and 1914. Henri Le Fauconnier’s Abundance (1910/11), Jean Metzinger’s Femme au cheval (1912), Francis Picabia’s Udnie (1913), and Sonia Delaunay’s Prismes électriques (1914) are only a few examples from this chapter of the history of Cubism (The “Cubist Salons”, room 8).

The last room is reserved for the developments in Cubism after the outbreak of World War I. The works of those Cubists who were called up for service reflect their experience of life in the trenches. Two of the movement’s protagonists, Gris and Picasso, remained in Paris; some of the latter’s paintings from this period approach the threshold of abstraction (World War I room 9).