Maria Grazia Messina

The Media of In-Depth Perception

Picasso’s Work in the Interpretation of Ivan Aksenov

In the 1910s, the reflection on the perception of depth within the avant-garde was as
central as the assumption of perception in motion; it may be its synonym or, rather, one
of its fundamental elements. Artists could not avoid taking into consideration the latest
discoveries of physiology and the psychology of perception, even if only in an uncon-
scious way. Hermann von Helmholtz, in his seminal work Physiologische Optik of 1866,
stated that the structural curvature of the retina, together with the movement of the
eyes, forces the adjustment of binocular vision; and that the visual perceptions of shapes
and spaces related to tactile and motor experience also converge in the act of seeing, in
1
addition to the pure visual sensations of light, shadow, and color. On one hand, this
knowledge implies for the artists the obvious subversion of Euclidean perspective, while
on the other hand it entails the searching for a sense of depth that could be different
from both the impressionist sensation and the prevailing concentration on the opaque-
ness in painting typical of the post-impressionists, according to the definition given by
2
Maurice Denis in 1890, and whose main representative around 1910 was Matisse.
In this context, the new media of visual communication play a central role, as Ivan
Aksenov’s essay on Picasso demonstrates.

In the summer of 1914, between March and May, the Russian literary scholar and critic
Ivan Aksenov, who was close to the circle of Alexandra Exter in Kiev, is in Paris, where he
meets and befriends Picasso. Soon after this time spent in the French capital, Aksenov
writes a first essay on the artist, “Picasso’s Painting.” This text was later added as “Polem-
ical Supplement” to a more extensive work, Picasso i okrestnosti (Picasso and his surround-
ings), published in 1917 with a cover by Exter, and known as the first actual monographic

1 Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (Hamburg & Leipzig: Voss, 1866); von
Helmholtz, Optique Physiologique, trans. E. Javel, N. Th. Klein (Paris: Masson et fils, 1867). See David
Cahn, ed., Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth Century Science (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), Ch. 3, 4, 5.
2 “It is well to remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anec-
dote, is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” Maurice Denis,
“Définition du Néo-traditionnisme,” in Théories: 1890–1910, fourth ed. (Paris: L.Rouart et J. Watelin
Editeurs, 1920). English translation in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 94.

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3
study on the artist and the first volume to have only his name on the cover. Among the
many sources on the works Picasso produced immediately before the Great War that are
available today, Aksenov’s essay deserves to be mentioned for two different reasons.
The record of the many visitors to the studios in Boulevard Raspail and in Rue
Schoelcher between 1913 and the first months of 1914—including the Russian critic
Tugendkhold, contributor to the review Apollon; Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan
Grant, members of the Bloomsbury group, all introduced to Picasso by Gertrude Stein;
the vorticist artist Wyndham Lewis; many Italian futurists; the French writer André
Salmon; and art critic Gustave Coquiot—contributes to render a vivid description of the
experimental atmosphere of the studio. It also includes references to possible conversa-
tions and comments, most of them expressing surprise at the absolute novelty of the
papiers collés, assemblages and constructions, all referred to by Picasso as “still lifes.”
Aksenov is the only critic to offer, at that time, a thoughtful and articulated interpreta-
tion of the fundamental turn taken by Picasso since 1912, a change that allowed the
artist to overcome the deadlock reached with his analytical deconstructions and to start
working with multiple materials. Besides, Aksenov’s formal analysis of Picasso’s work
is extremely acute and detailed, and his interpretation strictly positivist in approach,
for it is influenced by the kind of considerations taken into account in contemporary
Russian avant-garde circles and particularly useful to define Picasso’s recent production.
Aksenov’s essay had been motivated by his intention to radically refute the work on
the Catalan artist written by the philosopher Nikolai Berdjaev and published in March
4
1914 in the Moscow magazine Sophia. In his essay, Berdjaev interpreted Picasso’s works—
which he mainly knew through the paintings inspired by African sculptures in the col-
lection of the businessman Sergei Shchukin—as the sign of an apocalyptic Satanism and
as a metaphor of a tormented disintegration of values. On the other hand, Aksenov’s
approach is more direct and only apparently oversimplified with regard to the inten-
tions and fascinations at work in Picasso’s paintings. His text seems to be influenced
by the essay “Faktura: Creative Principles in the Plastic Arts,” published in January 1914
in Saint Petersburg by Vladimir Markov, a prominent member of the local avant-garde
group Union of Youth. The term faktura referred to the composite and displayed sur-
face of the artwork and to the peculiarities of its materials that stimulate tactile as well

3 Ivan Aksenov, Picasso i okrestnosti (Moscow: Centrifuge, 1917). The “Polemical Supplement, Picasso’s
Painting” is translated in Marilyn McCully ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences
(London: The Arts Council of Great Britain and Thames & Hudson, 1981): 113–18. For the complete
French translation of Aksenov’s book, see Ivan Axionov, Picasso et alentours (Paris: Infolio, 2012).
4 Nikolaj Berdjaev, “Picasso,” Sophia 8 (1914); French translation: Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Mod-
erne 4 (1980): 305–07.

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as visual sensations. In his essay, Markov presented a wide collection of such artworks,
from tribal sculptures to icons up to Picasso’s papiers collés, which he saw during his stay
in Paris in 1913, and which he especially valued for the privilege they bestowed on poor
5
or raw materials, such as newspaper cuttings and the mixture of sand and paint. It is
quite probable that Aksenov arrived in Picasso’s studio guided by this reading. How-
ever, he appears more interested in the artist’s peculiarity of vision, rather than in his
manipulation of different materials. In this case too, another key concept of the Russian
6
avant-garde inspires him, that of svidg, displacement.
The essay’s pragmatic approach seems particularly fitting in restoring the actual
mood of the discussions that took place in the studio and whose content was the art-
ists’ agenda of those days: the daily exchange of experiences that, as we know, was at the
heart of Picasso’s and Braque’s work in a persistently comparative relation. The meager
correspondence exchanged by the two artists and with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahn-
weiler offers only a few glimpses of these relationships, without any direct evidence, as
Picasso himself remarks in a letter to Braque on May 30, 1912: “I can’t write [about] our
7
discussions [on] art.” As an example of these discussions that took place in the studio,
we may recall what Picasso confessed to Kahnweiler in 1933 with his usual intent of
provocative contradiction: “The real Cubism was basically a horridly materialistic affair,
8
a base kind of materialism.” Or, we can appeal to Timothy J. Clark’s conclusion in Fare-
well to an Idea, although in reference to the High Cubism of 1911–1912: “Classic Cubism
is not a grammar of objects or perceptions; it is a set of painterly procedures, habits,
9
styles, performances, which do not add up to a language-game.” Aksenov shares the
same kind of approach. Instead of defining an aesthetics of Cubism, as Albert Gleizes
and Jean Metzinger had already done in Du Cubisme in 1912 and later Kahnweiler and
Vincent Kramář would do, Aksenov, quite ahead of his time, focuses on the media revo-

5 Vladimir Markov (Vladimir Matvejs), Faktura (Saint Petersburg: Soiuz molodezhi, 1914), quoted in
Jean Claude Marcadé, L’Avant-garde russe 1907–1927 (Paris: Flammarion, 2007).
6 See David Burliuk, Cubism (Surface-Plane) (1912), in John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-garde:
Theory and Criticism 1902–1934 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988): 69–77, especially 76.
7 “Je ne peux pas écrire [sur nos] discussions d’art.” William Rubin, “Picasso and Braque: An Introduc-
tion” in William Rubin, ed., Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1989), 48. English trans. in Judith Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” ibid., 393.
8 “Der echte Kubismus war eine abscheuliche materialistiche Angelegenheit, ein niedriger Material-
ismus.” Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Gespräche mit Picasso,” Jahresring 59/60 (1959), 85–86, quoted
in Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 424,
n. 10. See also André Salmon, “Testimony against Gertrude Stein,” Transitio 23 (1935): 14–15, quoted
in McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology, 63: “I was constantly with Picasso, who was nothing of a doc-
trinaire, soon lost interest in it [Cubism] and left its further development to others”; and Georges
Braque, ibid., 64: “We were primarily interested in our work and in the new problem it presented.”
9 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 223.

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lution at work in those years. The dense and manifold network of new urban modes
of communication triggered new modes of perception. As a consequence, artists found
innovative working procedures to shape and bend new mass media devices in the direc-
tion of an elitist metalinguistic research, one that was mainly focused on the modes and
codes of visual representation.

In his book, Aksenov shares with his readers a rare memory condensed into a reveal-
ing image (Bergson’s image-souvenir), the hinge around which all his reading of Picasso’s
cubism revolves: “The words ‘pale ale’ or ‘Bass,’ returning in an almost haunting way in
his paintings, are first to be seen on the glass advertising poster which blocks Boulevard
Raspail’s nearby sidewalk café, La Rotonde. It is the place where Picasso walks his dog (a
10
well-behaved German shepherd), the only walk he takes every day.” For Aksenov, the
transparent screen that blocks the way and compels the gaze into a forced framing of the
planes and objects at the back, which are looked at across the stenciled lettering in lac-
quer and enamel, becomes the key that eventually allows the artist to create true depth
in the painting, quite different from the totally virtual process of graphic perspective.
Indeed, those works made since the beginning of 1913 and again in the first half of
1914 with a mixed technique of oil, paper, and sand, and with the reference to Bass beer,
present a clear-cut and articulated layering of colored planes, which correspond to the
various planes, differently lit, of the represented objects. These objects then appear as if
11
they were both made of glass and reflected beyond a glass screen (fig. 1).
The fact that Picasso took an interest in and practiced glass painting with Serge
12
Férat for a short period, between 1913 and 1914, could be a confirmation. If we accept
the thesis of another expert on the artist, the Czech scholar and art collector Kramář,
this attention to a kind of depth achieved only through the play of planes and volumes
could be read as the other face of that “spatiality of things” that is central to Picasso’s

10 “Les legendes ‘pale ale’ ou ‘Bass’, apparues avec une présence obsédante, figurent sur le panneau
publicitaire vitré qui barre le trottoir du Boulevard Raspail près du café de la Rotonde. C’est l’endroit
où Picasso promène son chien (un brave berger allemand), la seule promenade qu’il fait pendant la
journée.” Axionov, Picasso et alentours, 100–101 (my translation). Compare the in-depth discussion
of the painting Glass, Guitar and Bottle (Paris early 1913), in Anne Umland and Blair Hartzell, eds.,
Picasso: the Making of Cubism 1912–1914 (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 2014), ch. 9.
11 See Pierre Daix, Le cubisme de Picasso, catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes,
1971): cat. no. 567–579, 684–688, 706–718.
12 See John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol. 2: 1907–1917: The Painter of Modern Life (London: Random
House, 1996), 264. See also Picasso’s letter to Kahnweiler from Avignon, July 21, 1914, referring to
photographs of his works sent to him by Kahnweiler: “Mais les petits verres sont vraiment très mal
on ne comprend rien,” quoted in Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, ed., Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, collec-
tion Kahnweiler-Leiris (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984), 171.

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1 Pablo Picasso, Glass, Guitar and Bottle, early 1913.

research. Kramář is the author of the important text Kubismus, a supplement to Der
Weg zum Kubismus by Kahnweiler which was published a short time before it. However,
Aksenov remains indifferent to the neo-Kantian reading offered by Kahnweiler, as well
as to the sort of Neoplatonism, meant as a reference to a kind of painting purely repre-
13
sentative of ideas, recognized by Kramář in Picasso’s works.
The same is true for other texts written before the war, because Aksenov maintains
the same distance from Guillaume Apollinaire’s fantastical evocation of a fourth dimen-
sion, and from the fascination of Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics, which was manifested in
the concept of subjective “lyrical deformation” promoted by Ardengo Soffici between
1911 and 1913. Aksenov takes us back to Picasso’s real and immediate visual culture and
to the radius of his visual horizon in the urban context of Montparnasse; it is here that
we can find the visual contents of his daily experience, which must have been the main
objects of discussion and artistic research in the artists’ studios. As a consequence, in
Aksenov’s work one frequently finds references to shop-windows or to advertising bills,
which represent two paradigms, rather than two devices, of their current way of per-

13 Vincent Kramář, Kubismus (Brno: Nákladem Morav.- Slezské Revue, 1921). French translations from
Le cubisme (Paris: ENSBA, 2002): 30: “objet étant analysé en valeurs spatiales” and 47: “connaissance
pure dans la sphère des idées.”

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ceiving. Braque, with his rich inventiveness, is the true discoverer of these two para-
14
digms, and Aksenov stresses this fact quite honestly; but the author’s real aim is to
demonstrate their workings in Picasso’s practice, by developing in extreme detail some
ideas that had only been hinted at by other witnesses to his work. Apollinaire had been
the first to ascribe this turn to the urgent influences of the urban context, with his ref-
erence to Picasso’s and Braque’s attempts with different materials in his talk “Die mod-
erne Malerei,” held in Berlin in January 1913 and published in the magazine Der Sturm
in the following February: “Picasso and Braque brought in their artworks letters from
signs and other kinds of writing on walls, since in today’s urban environments advertis-
ing bills, signboards, and posters play a very prominent artistic role […] they fulfill the
artists’ search for plastic inspiration.” However, for Apollinaire this inspiration remains
merely theoretical, with no relation to visual perception, only aiming to represent the
15
object as “an idea, that’s to say in its objective truth.” Two months later, in Les peintres
cubistes, published in March 1913, Apollinaire once again stressed the maieutic role of
the shop-windows, this time as a reference to the composition of Juan Gris’s still-life
works, and had prophesied what influence a minor art such as the commodities display
would have on painters in the future. After 1916, Kahnweiler, too, touches on the use of
letters, summoned up as veritable objects, with the purpose of anchoring in a limited
and experienced space an otherwise purely intellectual deconstruction of the objects,
and he attributes its first application to Braque in 1910: “Here again, lyrical painting
uncovered a new world of beauty—this time in posters, display windows and commercial
signs which play so important a role in our visual impressions,” a sentence that con-
16
firms the centrality of this influence in the cubists’ visual culture. On the other hand,
Kramář does not make any direct reference to commodity-related display windows; he
rather restates how Picasso discovers an unprecedented beauty in daily objects, espe-
cially glass ones, which better respond to the artist’s way of seeing, but that, as we said
17
above, he bends to reach the level of “transubstantiation” of what has been perceived.

14 Axionov, Picasso et alentours, 61.

15 “Picasso et Braque introduisaient dans leur œuvres d’art des lettres d’enseignes et d’autres inscrip-
tions, parce que, dans une ville moderne, l’inscription, l’enseigne, la publicité jouent un rôle artis-
tique très importante, et parce qu’elles s’adaptent à cette fin […] suivre une inspiration plastique.”
French trans. in Guillaume Apollinaire, Œuvres en prose complètes, Vol. II, ed. Pierre Caizergues and
Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 503 (my translation).
16 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1920), English transla-
tion: The Rise to Cubism (New York: Wittenborn Schultz Inc., 1949), 10.
17 Kramář, Le Cubisme, 34: “Ces choses transparentes semblent n’avoir plus rien de matériel, n’être plus
de ce monde, comme si elles n’étaient en elles-mêmes qu’une pure démonstration de la plasticité et
des relations spatiales.”

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In comparison to the above sources, Aksenov’s reference to shop-windows and post-

ers is far more radical: he clarifies the effect of spatiality operated by the lettering on
the perceptual process, and the inspiration it offers to the artist for a realistic field of
research related to the existence of transparent surfaces: “Lettering on an invisible glass
framed by an aperture cuts across the object, which has been formally broken up into
parts, and forms the foreground of the picture. The lettering on the poster, emerging
18
from behind the object, establishes the background of the picture.” Shop-windows
and posters are effectively the paradigms that guide Aksenov’s analytical and sensitive
examination of Picasso’s research since 1910, when the problem of depth becomes central
to the artist’s process and he starts working with a perspective of volumes achieved only
through pictorial means, colors and shading, in a creative process that includes such
works as Mlle Léonie and the two versions of Le Poète, all paintings that are cited by the
critic. Figures and objects are dissected into planes spread on the surface of the paint-
ing, a surface itself intended as “shifting,” or transparent, while the different planes,
in order to restore a sense of volume, besides being seen through the angle that bet-
ter shows their distinctive traits, are singled out through their arrangement and their
shading. This reading partly coincides with what Soffici had perceptively observed in
one of his essays published in 1911 in La Voce: the notations of the light, its reflections,
create well-defined planes and take on such a “sense of concreteness” as to be perceived
19
as patches of color or as objects themselves among the other represented objects. This
reading was also shared by Kramář, another extremely acute observer, whose notebooks
contain detailed impressions of Picasso’s paintings viewed during his various stays in
Paris between 1910 and 1913. As regards the paintings of 1910 and 1911, these notes point
to a liberation of light, a multiplicity of luminous fires lit up on the surface of the paint-
20
ing, sometimes imploding as under the ash, other times shining like diamonds. Soffici,
in his memoir, accuses Aksenov of having plagiarized his article from 1911, published
21
again in Cubismo e futurismo in 1914, and recommended to Aksenov by Exter. However,
Aksenov’s text is a more exhaustive and attentive study and can be considered a para-
gon of formalism. Every shaded plane-facet in the paintings of 1911 becomes, under the
scrutiny of Aksenov’s insightful look, a layering of multiple coats of color that overlap

18 Aksenov, “Polemical Supplement,” 114.

19 Ardengo Soffici, “Picasso e Braque,” La Voce 34 (1911): 635–37: “I riflessi è naturale che sian considerati
come semplici macchie cromatiche fra quelle degli altri oggetti e magari prendono forma e corpo
definito, diventando in un certo senso oggetti essi stessi.”
20 Kramář, Le Cubisme, 21: “On voit s’allumer alors dans la surface plane de la toile une pluralité des
foyer lumineux.”
21 See Natalia Adaskina, “Axionov aux alentours de Picasso,” in Axionov, Picasso et alentours, 20–21, 55.

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only in a partial way, so that the making of each layer differentiates itself from the one
underneath, and it eventually contributes to an exponential multiplication of the mak-
ings and their connecting links.
However, this modus operandi, employed by Picasso between 1910 and 1911, results
in the dispersal of the rendering effect of the volumetric relations that he was pursuing:
“The characteristics which define volume were on the verge of disappearing, becoming
22
an indistinct gradation of a great number of elements in an unlimited space.” Then,
the lettering on the transparent surface of shop- windows or on posters becomes the
resort to get out from this pitfall. The letterings, in their individualized flatness, are
made with just one coat of opaque enamel, and they become the necessary element of
relief for the volumes in the foreground or at the back, thanks to their total otherness.
When there is no use of stencil letters, their function is replaced by the inclusion of
objects, or something read as such, and here Aksenov draws a comparison with what
had always been done for the purpose of depth in the painting of Panoramas. As a case
study, Aksenov refers to Le Poète of the summer of 1912, probably seen at Picasso’s solo
exhibition at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in February 1913, or later in Paris at Kah-
nweiler’s (fig. 2).
In this painting the complexity of the layers of color is at its utmost—Aksenov goes
as far as to count eight layers on the same plane—while hair and moustache are rendered
in the flat opaqueness of local color by scratching on the dark oil paint with a decora-
tor’s comb, giving them “a wood finish,” as in Braque’s practice of simulating wood by
the faux-bois device. Each plane/zone of the composition is constituted by a sequence
of entangled surfaces or layers of color that absorb the light in different ways, while
the flat inserts, on the contrary, reflect the light and in so doing they destroy the tonal
and conforming unity, thus achieving a sense of depth. At the same time, the graphic
unity of the work is also compromised, as the continuous and projecting outlines of
the inserts are now contrasting with the fragmented and broken outlines of the repre-
sented objects. Aksenov’s reading is very similar to the one previously proposed by the
German critic Max Raphael in an essay of 1913, which resulted from the close exami-
nation of Picasso’s works that Raphael saw in the artist’s studio in the spring of 1912
and at the above-mentioned exhibition in Munich the following year. For Raphael too,
Picasso works with a kind of depth, which is the result of a relation of volumes, and
of the placement of the objects: “In this way, the space of the painting, once conceived
as infinite depth, was restricted to the objects’ spatial relationship against each other.”

22 Aksenov, “Polemical Supplement,” 114.

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2 Pablo Picasso, The Poet, summer 1912, oil on canvas.

Raphael recognizes in Picasso a sort of horror vacui, or material impulse, sachlich, that
will soon lead him to replace the planes of color, which represented the objects, with a
faithful rendering of the materials—like brown color replaced by the faux bois—until he
will actually insert real pieces of objects such as paper and newspaper cuttings: “No lon-
23
ger a random mess of paint blots, but the exact rendition of the true material.” Equally
consistent is, in Aksenov’s opinion, the turning point that from Le Poète of 1912 leads to
the entire following period of the papiers collés, where the multiple layers of color, meant
as indicators of depth, are replaced by crosshatchings of different frequency and inten-
sity, which are drawn with charcoal on a white sheet and made prominent by the con-
trasting insertion of pasted paper inserts. Aksenov’s interpretation also coincides with
that of another eyewitness, Apollinaire. In Les peintres cubistes of March 1913, Apollinaire
speaks of iconic signs acquiring the value of a trompe l’oeil, as well as the first inser-
tions of different materials, such as a piece of a score, a stamp, a fragment of oilcloth:

23 “Damit war der Raum als unendliche Tiefendimension beschränkt auf die Lage der Dinge zuein-
ander […] Nicht mehr ein beliebiges, zufälliges Fleckengewirr, sondern getreueste Wiedergabe des
realen Materials.” Max Raphael, Von Monet zu Picasso. Grundzüge und Entwicklung der Modernen Malerei
(Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1913), 116–17 (my translation).

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 Maria Grazia Messina

“It is the interior frame of the picture, marking its deep, inner limits, just as the frame
24
marks its exterior limits.” The sentence that Aksenov uses to open this last overview
on the works made with different materials—“The cause had been found and the strug-
gle begun”—has a precise assonance with the writing on a newspaper cutting in one of
25
Picasso’s first papiers collés, “la bataille s’est engagée”: the battle has begun. The many
heterogeneous materials that merge in Picasso’s collages and later in his constructions
and assemblages, which Aksenov only briefly mentions, is for him the ultimate confir-
mation of Picasso’s tenacious focus on the space of everyday life, and his indifference to
philosophical and spiritual tensions: “We have surveyed Picasso’s entire career and have
found that the problems which determined its development were exclusively pictorial,
26
the problems of the painter’s craft.”

It is also to be ascribed to Aksenov’s stubborn pragmatism, a reference that he mentions

twice in relation to cubist deconstruction: technical tables and photographs of airplane
frameworks published at that time in scientific and popular magazines, such as Avia,
Revue des Sciences Aéronautiques, and L’Illustration. Regarding the sources of the undeni-
able stereometry pursued in the first cubist workshop, he puts textbooks aside—and
therefore geometry’s new horizons—while suggesting the need to “guess that it [cubism]
has been influenced by the many photographs of airplanes published at the time, show-
ing them in all their aspects: whole, in halves, and even completely dismantled. These
photographs presented utterly surprising combinations of plans that provoked unprec-
27
edented visual sensations.” This reflection is not included in Aksenov’s first essay on
Picasso of 1915, and certainly seems influenced by the constructivist turn of the Russian
avant-garde and by the aeronautical analogies of Vladimir Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs exhib-
ited since December 1915. We know that Picasso had nicknamed Braque “Wilbourg”—
the mythic aviator Wilbur Wright was at the time well known in France—because of his
paper constructions, now lost, that resembled model airplanes. Besides, we should not

24 “Il est le cadre intérieur du tableau et en marque les limites profondes, de même que le cadre en
marque les limites extérieurs.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes (Paris, Figuière, 1913), in
Apollinaire, Œuvres en prose complètes: 22. English trans.: Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 36.
25 Aksenov, “Polemical Supplement,” 117. Compare Pablo Picasso, Guitare, Partition et Verre, Paris, after
November 18, 1912, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (cat. Daix n. 513).
26 Aksenov, “Polemical Supplement,” 118.
27 “Deviner qu’il a été influencé par les innombrables photograhies d’aréoplanes qui paraissaiente à
la meme époque et les montraient sous tous leur aspects aussi bien entiers qu’à moitié où comple-
tement démolis. Ces photographies présentaient les combinaisons de plans le plus inattendues et
créaient des sensations visuelles inédites.” Axionov, Picasso et alentours, 98 (my translation).

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forget that at the same time that Picasso was working on his first cardboard construc-
tion, Guitare, in October 1912, the Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne was held in Paris,
28
which Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp visited with much interest. Max Raphael
had also come to the conclusion that Picasso’s aim to conceive space as a pure relation of
quantity, in the same way as a clever mechanic would, equated him to a technician: “He
29
tries to force the experience into the engineer’s impersonal format.”

In Russia, Aksenov was close to the avant-garde group Knave of Diamonds, in whose
magazine he had published, in February 1913, an essay on the present state of Russian
painting, where he especially stressed “how strong must be the influence of French
30
prototypes on the work of artists of the present generation.” His attention to urban
popular culture, commercial sign painting, shop-windows, and posters, though, seems
rather to refer to the Russian cubo-futurist milieu of the radical group Donkey’s Tail.
This primitivist origin could explain the reason why Aksenov never refers to photog-
raphy in his interpretation; only in passing, when he introduces Picasso’s assemblages
and constructions, Aksenov notices how in the bric-a-brac of his studio, “sometimes he
31
summoned the photographer.” If we embrace the hypothesis that in Aksenov’s writing
there is the echo of Picasso’s real visual horizon, we must infer that during discussions
and exchanges in his studio, the artist had not revealed much about this very personal
mode of operation. Recent intuitions of Edward Fry, Anne Baldassari, and Jeffrey Weiss
about the mingling of the two practices, painting and photography, in Picasso’s work
seem to offer further validation to that mode of perception that Aksenov ascribes only
32
to the influence of the shop-window and the poster. Picasso mastered photographic
technique through a very personal approach; from the very first attempts, he privileged
shooting from below by placing the camera on his chest, with the result of dilating the

28 Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-garde (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1976),
84–85.
29 “Es wird versucht, das Erlebnis in die unpersönliche Form des Ingenieurs zu zwingen.” Raphael,
Von Monet zu Picasso, 118 (my translation). See also Wyndham Lewis, “Relativism and Picasso’s latest
Work,” Blast 1 (1914): 139–40, quoted in McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology, 54: “Most of Picasso’s latest
work (on canvas as well) is a sort of machinery. Yet these machines neither propel nor make any
known thing […] they lack the one purpose, or even necessity, of a work of Art: namely Life.”
30 Ivan Aksenov, On the Problem of the Contemporary State of Russian Painting (1913), in Bowlt, ed., Russian
Art of the Avant-garde, 63.
31 Aksenov, “Polemical Supplement,” 118.
32 Edward Fry, “Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity,” Art Journal XLVII, 4, Winter 1988: 296–310; Anne Bal-
dassari, Picasso photographe 1901–1916 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994); Jeffrey Weiss et
al., eds., Picasso: the Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Washington, D.C: Princeton University Press,
2003).

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 Maria Grazia Messina

3 Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Clovis Sagot, spring 1910.

objects in the foreground—a fact that Aksenov had noted in the paintings—while main-
taining a sharp legibility of the background. The first test of the functioning of the dis-
play window, and the resulting depth that it allowed, could have been suggested to him
by the process of developing gelatine silver prints from original glass negatives—that he
probably developed himself—as the photographic portraits of the art dealer Clovis Sagot
of 1909 seem to demonstrate, being just preparatory studies for his painted portrait
(fig. 3).
As particularly Weiss has noticed, the experiment with the double exposure involv-
ing the superimposition of the paintings with the head of Fernande, made in Horta
de Ebro in the summer of 1909, opens to the dislocated multilayered vision clearly
expressed in following paintings between 1910 and 1911. Lastly, some altered prints,
marked by superposed ink drawings, contemporary to the period of the first construc-
tions in the early months of 1913, demonstrate an emphasis on depth like the one expe-
rienced through the transparency of the shop-windows marked by stenciled lettering,
also involving the merging of the optical and tactile components of the process of per-
ception (fig. 4).
From the letters exchanged with Kahnweiler between 1912 and 1913, we grasp Pica-
sso’s eager curiosity to verify his own operating procedures by viewing professional
photographs that the art dealer commissioned from the renowned photographer Déle-
tang, once he received the artist’s last works from his summer residences in Sorgues or

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4 Pablo Picasso, Photographic composition with Construction with Guitar Player and Violin, early 1913.

Céret. A letter written to Kahnweiler on June 20, 1912, from Céret is revealing: “I have
just received the photographs and I am very happy with them. They are beautiful and
prove me right. The Ripolin enamel paintings, or Ripolin-like paintings, are the best
33
ones.” These photographs have a maieutic role; on Good Friday 1913, Picasso writes
from Céret: “Yesterday I received the photographs, that please me as usual, because I am
34
surprised. I see my paintings differently from how they are.”

To connect the new painting to a vision of depth intended as vision in transparency was
a known thesis. Already in the Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista in April 1910 there
was a reference to the objects glimpsed through or reflected in the windows of a moving
tramway, a reference influenced by two different suggestions: the scientific discovery
of X-rays and radiology on one side, and the esotericism of the initiated vision of The-
osophy on the other. But also in the works of Robert Delaunay, whose first examples
date back to 1910, as well as in the paintings of Umberto Boccioni exhibited in Paris

33 “Je viens de recevoir les photos et je suis bien content de les voir elles son très belles et me don-
nent raison. Ce sont les tableaux Ripolin ou genre Ripolin que sont le mieux.” Monod Fontaine, ed.,
Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, 169. English trans. in Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 396.
34 “ J’ai reçu ier les photos que sont bien et que me plaisent toujours car j’ai la surprise. Je vois mes
tableaux autrement que côme ils sont.” Monod Fontaine, ed., Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, 170.
English trans. in Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 415.

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 Maria Grazia Messina

in February 1912, it is possible to read the centrality of the motif of looking through
a reflecting window. And we could also mention Duchamp’s painting on glass, whose
first attempts date from 1913, the year of Picasso’s glass paintings. At the core of each of
these works, seeing in depth seems to be the true result of a vision in motion, rooted in
our bodily experience of space, simultaneously focused on different directions at differ-
ent degrees. Paintings may offer a synthesis of the process as much as they succeed to
mobilize the observer’s gaze in a watchful, alert—not contemplative—activity.
Given this context, the true distinctive quality of Aksenov’s reading of depth in
Picasso’s painting is his strictly formalist and empirical approach: the simulation of
depth pursued by the artist is related to the fascination of specific media, such as the
shop-window, the poster, and the photographic print, while in the critical voice of the
Parisian avant-garde profondeur remains a concept imbued with Bergson’s philosophy
and its outcome, as is evident in Apollinaire’s thesis, as well as in the assumptions of
Gleizes and Metzinger. But the judgment of Picasso on all this literature is negative,
confirming that it was Aksenov who saw, or registered, the truth. In a letter written to
Kahnweiler on April 11, 1913, just after receiving Apollinaire’s Les peintres cubistes, Picasso
says: “As for me, I’ve received Apollinaire’s book on cubism. I’m quite disappointed with
35
all this chatter. ”

35 “Moi, j’ai reçu le livre d’Apollinaire sur le cubisme. Je suis bien désolé de tous ces potins.” Monod
Fontaine, ed., Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, 170. English trans. in Cousins, “Documentary Chronol-
ogy,” 416.

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