The Tower and The Castle: Remarkable Modern Art

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Western societies saw accelerated industrial advancement coupled with marked intellectual and social change. How was this revolution embodied in art? Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the ‘reverberators,’ so to speak -- sent to explore what the upheaval meant through their paintings and collages.

Both artists, influenced by Cézanne, can be said to have invented a new movement. Picasso and Braque defied the laws of traditional painting with its apparent timelessness, stability, and classical perspective. They began painting abstract art – the non-figurative representation of an observed world in flux. The Cubism movement was their response to a world changed by shifting philosophical and scientific realities. 

Cubists translated the ideas of philosophers like Henri Bergson on memory, perception, duration of time, and space and altered their canvases to reflect this new platform or aesthetic. Perception and knowledge were believed to be ever-changing, altered by experience and accumulated memories. It was the artist’s task to capture this fluidity and this new way of looking at information. While Picasso and Braque were credited with inventing this unique visual language, such artists as Juan Gris, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp stretched it. They were major examples of the Cubist movement in its Analytic and Synthetic varieties. 

Analytical Cubism’s imperatives were defined as: a diversity of perspectives, deconstruction of forms and fragmentation, the emphasis on two-dimensional construction, the blurring of lines between the object and the environment, and subdued coloration. Synthetic Cubism was a synthesis of invented forms using paper collages (papier collé) with bold coloration, patterns, and textures. 

Two lights of the Analytical Cubism movement were Robert Delaunay and one of Cubism’s founders, Georges Braque. Their proficiency in the fundamental aspects of this offshoot of Cubism was on display in their respective pieces, Red Eiffel Tower (1910-1911) and The Castle of La Roche-Guyon (1909). 

Delaunay and Braque attempted to glean the ethereal and changeable quality of human perspective and knowledge. They rejected the copying of nature by conventional methods, and sought to express diversity and complexity through fragmentation of objects and blurring boundaries between an object and the environment. Shapes were perceived as being in transition. Pictorial configuration was advanced, and a shallow, relief-like space was created to provide limited distance between objects and what appeared in the foreground and background. The gaze of the viewer was directed, but there was no imaginary distance to lead the eye toward an interior object. The whole canvas demanded study.

In Castle of La Roche-Guyon, Braque began to experiment in earnest with Analytical Cubism. He deconstructed a known piece of architecture, reconfiguring the castle into something entirely distinctive. He did not copy it as a static object, but gave it a fragmented appearance. Braque vertically arranged the space with geometric forms and faceted planes that appeared to sit precariously on the surface of a high elevation. The lines between the fractured vision of the castle and the surrounding foliage and trees were blurred, almost unrecognizable, as broad strokes of greens, browns, and grays. Two- and three-dimensional perspectives were made interchangeable, and the colors were hushed and hazy – gray, white, brown, and green. The green was iridescent. 

In Red Eiffel Tower by Delaunay, one can see that he embraced most of the rubrics of Analytical Cubism through his study of the iconic symbol of the Paris cityscape, the Eiffel Tower. In this painting, he captured the zip, mobility, and vibrancy of the new industrial age, the new century. The picture was far from static or homogeneous; it churned with fragmented shapes, planes, and facets of the tower and the surrounding buildings and sky. Two- and three-dimensional perspectives were made interchangeable. The space around the tower was shaded in blues, whites, and grays. The vertical tower was red, with its brilliant latticework ready to twist and soar. The picture was energetic and off-kilter, embracing modernity. Unlike those in the Braque work and other Analytical Cubist renderings, the colors were not understated; whites and blues infused the canvas with light, and red was a bold counterpoint. 

Political, social, technological, and intellectual shifts in the modern age laid the groundwork for Cubism’s seismic shift in the art world. The experimentation created a new movement with talented adherents. Cubism as a general movement both introduced and influenced Analytical Cubism. Braque created the prototype and Delaunay adopted these guiding principles. The fragmentation, interchangeable dimensions, blurring of perspective, and coloration reflected their grasp of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Both artists produced models of this movement in their paintings, The Castle of La Roche-Guyon and Red Eiffel Tower. 

Cubist artists such as Braque and Delaunay opened the doors for future abstract artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, to explore new methods, new forms, and new ideas. Analytical Cubism showed artists a groundbreaking way forward. 

This essay is based on a paper written for an Art History class on Modernism here in 2017. Claire Kitz (Hamilton ‘19) was Editor-in-Chief for Enquiry in her senior year. She currently works at a consulting firm in Chicago.

I Have Called You Friends

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame hosted its 20th annual Fall Conference on November 7-9. The purpose of this forum is to delve into the full range of the Catholic and Christian intellectual traditions and thereby provide a means of engagement with wider communities in discussions of ethics, culture, and policy. Past topics have included Beauty, Justice, Poverty, the “Culture of Life,” Modernity, and Freedom. The theme this year was “I Have Called You Friends.” Conference speakers surveyed friendship from Aristotelian concepts of it to current descriptive ones; the subject was examined across a myriad of disciplines, including philosophy, the arts, the sciences, and theology. Learned scholars from across the United States and Europe came to opine on permanent questions: What is the meaning and value of friendship, and what does it reveal in light of Christian and Catholic teaching? What are the ancient, modern, social, political, and spiritual truths about it? 

Over the three days, there were multiple groups of one, two, and three lecturers, with a chairperson/facilitator and question-and-answer periods. The keynote speakers were Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School, the Most Rev. Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, and Whit Stillman, writer, director, and filmmaker of “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” “The Last Days of Disco,” and “Love & Friendship.” Each keynote speaker contributed a distinctive perspective on the intellectual ecosystem of friendship.

Just as a sampling, the colloquium sessions ranged from When I was in Prison You Visited Me: Incarceration, Ministry, and The Abolition of Friendship, to Beauty Beheld in Common and Friendship, to Building Social Capital, to “If You Love Those Who Love You”: The Problem of Preference. The Beauty Beheld in Common and Friendship colloquium had two erudite scholars and art historians, one from Paris and the other from Rome, Jennifer Donnelly and Elizabeth Lev. Donnelly’s topic was “Moldy Relics and Modern Art: Mass, Museum, and Friendship with Objects,” and Lev’s was “The Art of Friendship: The Sacred Conversation.” As a Hamilton ‘19 graduate in Art History and Classical Studies, I found their presentations on how art, architecture, and objects can cultivate and inspire dialogue, model friendship, and provoke a spiritual response both noteworthy and moving. These talks were followed by a lively question-and-answer period.

The conversations and exchanges were enhanced by the size of the roster and the audience: more than 100 speakers and more than 1,000 attendees. Past and present speakers at the annual conference have included such intellectual lights as Alasdair MacIntyre, Sir Roger Scruton, John Finnis, Mary Ann Glendon, Charles Taylor, James Heckman, the aforementioned Jennifer Donnelly and Elizabeth Lev, John Waters, Monsignor Timothy Verdon, Rémi Brague, Giulio De Ligio, Pia de Solenni, David Bentley Hart, Etsuro Sotoo, Gilbert Meilaender, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

Each contributor fulfilled the Ethics and Culture center conference’s purpose: to reinforce the habit of intellectual and philosophical inquiry; to define, ask, clarify, and add to the discussion of the question: What is humanity’s ideal road map in the modern world? The annual conference, as I see it, has sought to broaden the Christian and Catholic moral anthology and thereby recognize the power of the individual, of institutions, and of art and other human products to inform and mold the culture--not to the current zeitgeist, but toward more coherent ways of thinking and being. 

The Christian canon, as conference participants attested, could be an antidote to moral failure and societal chaos. The moral imagination was shown as relevant to such discussions, with examples including Aristotle, Plato, Vergil, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Waugh, Chesterton, Weil, Yeats, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Jean Vanier, and T. S. Eliot. They spoke to us across space and time.

The Fall Conference offered those who attended it a conversation about what is possible, about the values lost and longed for in humanity, and a respite from political rows and scorched-earth rhetoric. It was a courageous venture intending to influence minds and change hearts--by fostering dialogue and asking: What do the common good and friendship look like on campuses, in broader communities, in the United States and the world? Perhaps venues such as this conference can serve as a conduit, link, or passage “between those who believe in values realizable in time on earth, and those who believe in values realized out of time ...” (Eliot). A resounding “amen” to that labor is owed.

Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo painted “Paradise” in tempera and gold in 1445. A copy of the artwork was on the cover of the Fall Conference program. The original artwork can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.