Looking at painting in occupied Paris: Georges Braque`s spectators

597427
research-article2015
FRC0010.1177/0957155815597427French Cultural studiesPap
French Cultural Studies
Looking at painting in occupied
Paris: Georges Braque’s spectators
French Cultural Studies
2016, Vol. 27(1) 32­–46
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0957155815597427
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Jennifer Pap
University of Denver, USA
Abstract
Georges Braque worked in his Paris studio throughout the Occupation, painting interior scenes
that seemed largely unresponsive to the historical events surrounding him. Viewers of his painting,
however, brought diverse assumptions about the historical moment to their written accounts of
his painting. Braque defined his painting as a process that left the domain of ideas behind, in order
to discover a pictorial space of metamorphosis. But viewers, no doubt because of their own
historical or aesthetic understanding, may or may not have taken the paintings’ cues about how
to look. This article discusses the forms of spectatorship as evidenced in the textual descriptions
of Braque’s work by writers, Resisters, German officers or Nazi sympathisers, and argues that
these accounts of viewing painting resituate the artwork in the historical moment that surrounds
the painter’s studio.
Keywords
art policy, Georges Braque, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Gerhard Heller, Ernst Jünger, Occupation,
Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge, Vichy
Il n’est en art qu’une chose qui vaille: celle que l’on ne peut expliquer. (Braque, 1971: 13)
Braque in occupied Paris
Georges Braque fled Paris after the defeat of France in 1940, but soon returned to live and work
there throughout the war. The city where he and Picasso had radicalised painting during the Cubist
years was now occupied. Outside were Vichy propaganda and acts and policies of exclusion that
extended into the art world. When Braque exhibited his work in the 1943 Salon d’Automne, for
instance, he was forced to enter a space in which Vichy’s anti-Jewish statutes deprived many artists, art critics or gallery owners of the basic right to pursue their established activities in the art
world. In addition, admiring German officers visited his studio, and his work was reviewed by the
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Pap, University of Denver, Department of Languages and Literatures, 2000 East Asbury Avenue, Denver, CO
80208, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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fascist Drieu La Rochelle in the pages of the journal Comœdia (more on this below), where art
news and art criticism often focused on artists who were willing to go on tours of Germany or
otherwise cooperate with the occupying presence or with Vichy’s cultural programme.1
Braque had already had his work interrupted by a world war. Like many other artists and writers, he went to war in 1914, leaving behind, temporarily, the Paris that was the capital of avantgarde painting. World War I dispersed many artists, to be sure. But the Occupation of Paris explicitly
undermined any unifying creative energy. Given the Vichy policies, there was certainly no place
for a public presence of innovative painters as a group. There were a few painters who, like Braque,
continued to create important work in Paris, but in isolation: Pablo Picasso and Jean Fautrier, for
instance, were painting works whose content and formal qualities were not only innovative, but in
blatant contrast with Vichy taste and fascist principles. Picasso could not exhibit (his Guernica was
in the United States by 1939), and Fautrier’s ‘Hostages’ series, a stunning response to the reprisal
shooting of more than 40 innocent people by the Germans, was obviously not visible to the public
eye until it was shown in Paris in November 1945.2
On the other hand, earlier avant-garde styles appeared, recycled, in the work of various artists
who were quite palatable to the Vichy government. Cone (1992a) shows that the work of this group
(named the ‘Tricolor Painters’ by one critic), though hailed as bold by some critics at the time,
actually anchored conservative ideas. Echoes of Fauvism and of Cubist forms in their paintings
were, of course, no longer new formal ideas. In addition, they were mobilised in paintings that
expressed solid traditional ‘French’ values akin to those in the Vichy cultural programme.
Although Vichy’s control of public visual space cast its shadow over the conditions of artistic
production and taste,3 Braque’s studio was the site of aesthetic practices that ran counter to the rigid
ideologies of nationalism and exclusion that had been holding much of Europe in their sway. This
was so because of the painter’s continuing artistic practice, which was based on recognising world
understanding as being in fluctuation.
On ne peut pas avoir toujours son chapeau à la main: C’est pourquoi on a inventé le porte-manteaux. Moi
j’ai trouvé la peinture pour suspendre à un clou mes idées. Cela permet d’en changer et d’éviter l’idée fixe.
(Braque, 1971: 46)
This note was probably written well before the war, and referred to painting rather than politics.
But it and other comments show an artist who allows painting to pull his activity of thinking into a
space of uncertainty. Metaphorical or anecdotal meanings do not come to organise the objects of
the painting: ‘Le peintre ne tâche pas de reconstituer une anecdote mais de constituer un fait pictural’ (Braque, 1971: 22). Instead, objects taking their place on the canvas transform and appear to
fluctuate as they enter into mutual influence with each other and with the spaces and sensations
around them. ‘Le Climat: Il faut arriver à une certaine température qui rende les choses malléables’
(1971: 27).
Braque’s wartime studio was in a position of contradiction: surrounded by the broad historical
crisis and the daily reality of Occupation, it was also an interior space whose brushes, easels, paintings and palettes became the subject matter of the paintings that were made there. Braque never
responded directly, in painting, to the events of the two world wars that he lived through. There is
no Guernica in his case. When he was asked about the relation of painting to its time or the historical moment, he cautioned about the difficulty of measuring the nature of such a connection:
Les événements contemporains influencent le peintre, cela va de soi, mais dans quelle mesure et sous
quelle forme ils se mêlent à son travail, cela ne peut être déterminé.
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…
Les changements de régime interviennent forcément dans la vie du peintre puisqu’il subit son époque,
comme chacun. Mais son travail dépend trop du passé pour qu’il puisse l’aborder avec une conscience
claire des modifications de l’heure présente. Qui a dit: ‘Il faut réaliser sa vie antérieure’? Il faut bien
matériellement, le temps de se réaliser et si la conception, l’exécution d’une toile exigent dix années de
recherches, comment veut-on que son auteur se tienne au courant? Un tableau n’est pas un instantané.
(Braque, 1939: 65–6)
The epoch is present (the painter is subject to his times, like everyone else) while also apart from
the long-term creative process of the painter. The ‘ten years of research’ – one could also understand ‘recherches’ as ‘searching’ – clearly include both public (political) and private (aesthetic)
awareness. Braque takes care in his answer to bring forward the part of painting that endures
despite regime changes, holding true to its own needs and processes.
But what do we spectators expect? What story of the events of the time are we accustomed to
see in the painting? Certainly, there was a long Western tradition of painting historical scenes that
held until the late nineteenth century. Such paintings were expected to capture a significant and
readable scene, representing a public event in a particular interpretive frame. By refusing to see a
painting as a ‘snapshot’, Braque steers away from this. Cubism and other modern ways of painting
sought something else besides naturalistic representation, and so obviously the presence of history
would be different. But spectators may still activate expectations about an artist’s response to history. The question remains alive: otherwise why would Cahiers d’art have posed the question to
artists for its 1939 issue?4 The writers discussed in this article bring their own interpretive frames
to their viewing of Braque, some understanding the painter’s message about the equivocal presence
of histories, others either missing that message or ignoring it.
Indeed, Braque’s signal to the spectator is a challenging one. He sought an understanding not of
the physical world but one that he gained in the physical world, one that was independent of the
established answers of rhetorical or aesthetic traditions. What does it mean to be a spectator of such
painting? The easels that often appear on the picture plane of Braque’s paintings from the 1940s
could be understood to invite the spectator to see through the artist’s eyes, or through the process
of painting. Thus they would signal a chance to see objects not as they appear in real space, but in
the transforming space of the artwork. In the 1942 Grand intérieur à la palette, for instance, we see
part of the potted plant, the palette, brushes, the tablecloth, and other objects ‘through’ the wooden
easel’s transparency which itself, clearly occupies the picture plane (Figure 1). The flowerpot, the
tablecloth, and other objects match the colour of the easel in some sections but seem to possess
their own colour when not ‘seen through’ the easel. Thus they hover between the picture plane and
the deeper space. The colours of the objects, to say nothing of their forms, may have changed in
response to the colours and forms of other objects in the painting. Such painting is no ‘window on
the world’ in the old sense of a distilled and framed segment of reality; rather, it is a re-visioning of
a world that we join with and change by looking at it. As spaces, contours and objects respond to
and change each other, one could argue that human thought and existence also must leave their
rigid certainties behind and embrace a modest attentiveness.
Thus, returning to the question of the effect that ‘les événements contemporains’ have on painting, this ambiguous space of perception in Braque’s paintings has political relevance, as Butler has
argued:
it is precisely their turning inward, to unknown worlds of imagined experiences, that makes them relevant
to questions of aesthetics and politics for his contemporaries. … Braque created complex spatial and
symbolic systems that require careful visual navigation and analysis. Although the viewer is invited into
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Figure 1. Georges Braque, Grand intérieur à la palette, 1942. Oil and sand on canvas, 141.3 × 195.6 cm.
Photographer: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. With permission of The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.
these worlds, to imagine entering these spaces and touching these objects, the experience is often troubled
and incomplete. It is this very ambiguity … that makes them defy easy categorization and opens them up
to questions of political engagement. (Butler, 2013: 13–14)
Braque’s art effects a philosophical dissolve on the certainties of ideology.
Spectators of flux
This visioning of the world as being resistant to categories of knowing was shared by contemporaries such as the writers Francis Ponge and Jean Paulhan. Both were active in the Resistance: Ponge
in the Front National des intellectuels, sponsored by the Communist Party; Paulhan in the Groupe
du Musée de l’Homme and the Comité National d’Écrivains. As writers, they closely witnessed the
interplay of language and historical events. They each turned a scrutinising eye to the interplay of
literary practice with the actions and decisions of wartime.5 Like Braque, they were readers of
uncertainties. They found that objects and the human experience were ill-served by the given forms
of language that seemed to aim at certainty and fixed categories: Ponge’s title Le Parti pris des
choses exemplifies this in that it names a stance taken with the object world; a promise to attend to
it without the interference of humanity’s ‘ready-made words’. He voices the despair of young people who want to escape from such language: ‘Les paroles sont toutes faites et s’expriment: elles ne
m’expriment pas. Là encore j’étouffe’ (Ponge, 1972: 157). He finds in Braque’s treatment of simple objects a way of thinking beyond the old orders of being that define and oppress humanity:
Car enfin nous voilà aux prises avec les casseroles, les brocs, les caisses de bois blanc, un outil, un caillou,
une herbe, un poisson mort, un morceau de charbon.
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Voilà des objets à qui nous demandons, car d’eux nous savons l’obtenir, qu’ils nous tirent hors de notre
nuit, hors du vieil homme (et d’un soi-disant humanisme), pour nous révéler l’Homme, l’Ordre à venir.
(Ponge, 1977a [1947]: 76)
Paulhan constructs a similar encounter with objects. He seems to see humanity faced with a time
of lost meaning, and summoned to take heed of modernity’s remnants.
Il est des moments de misère intérieure où le soleil et les forêts, les maisons et les rues brusquement
perdent leur raison et leur éclat - ne nous disent plus rien. Nous devenons incapables de sentiments nobles,
non seulement raisonnables. C’est alors aux choses muettes et absurdes, aux débris et aux restes de
poubelles qu’appartient le sens: c’est eux qui ne nous laissent pas en repos; c’est l’odeur d’un plat brisé,
c’est un homme qui boite, une chaumière en lambeaux, une souris morte dans un coin de chambre, qui ont
brusquement l’air de posséder, au-delà de leur apparence, une signification qu’ils brûlent de nous
transmettre, un secret dont ils pourraient nous faire confidence – et nous nous efforçons d’aller au-delà de
leur premier aspect. Nous poursuivons en eux quelque sens secret. Poursuite vertigineuse mais inefficace – et
qui nous semblerait inutile ou sotte si elle ne s’accompagnait étrangement d’une sorte d’extase. (Paulhan,
1970: 24)
Whether because of the experience of war, Occupation and resistance, or for their own poetic/
philosophical reasons, these writers have noticed reason’s exhaustion and summon us to turn to a
new connection with the world in its inchoate presence.
Braque was their companion in attending to the world in these open-ended ways, and it follows
from this that Paulhan and Ponge would reverse our expectations about viewing painting when
they wrote about his work. Ponge recounts a visit to Braque’s house and the moment when an
oblique glimpse of a still life (he does not give the title) chokes him up with a sob that cannot be
clearly explained (Ponge, 1977b: 300). The moment of seeing the painting is truncated in a number
of ways: it is brief, the writer/spectator sees it from outside the room through a half-open door, and
he finds himself at a loss for words. In another essay, he presents the moment of viewing a painting
as something that shocks and confuses, stirring up doubt for the viewers of Braque’s painting:
‘Nous sommes de nouveau jetés nus, comme l’homme primitif, devant la nature’ (Ponge, 1977a
[1947] : 75).
Paulhan, in a similar vein, presents himself as a doubting and self-questioning narrator when he
writes about Braque’s paintings. The narrator should be our guide, but in ‘Braque le patron’ (1946),
he darts around the painting that is ostensibly the subject of the essay, forgetting some details,
going back to see it again, wondering if it has been properly understood or described. His relationship to the painting unfolds in a series of scenes that seem to be comprised of the trivia of daily life
such as a visit to his doctor, a walk down a street past some galleries, or the lemons in the painting
itself. Thus Paulhan denies, in a number of ways, the authority of his own voice to narrate visual
compositions.
Ponge and Paulhan are not critics of the paintings – or not only that – but viewers transformed
by the paintings’ fluidities and ambiguities. They do not define or control the paintings, but follow
in their wake into a visual order where objects, relations and values are always still in flux.
Spectators of progress
But in the occupied city, nothing dictates that all viewers will respond to the potential of the paintings in this way. Contemporary spectators of Braque’s paintings were not all the same and they
would pull the import of the artist’s work in one direction or another, depending on their
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understanding of the work’s principles or on their desire for a particular historical meaning. As
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger write of their encounters with Braque’s work, they imply
for it a particular place in history, one that accorded with a particular view of the ‘European’ future
and the principles that should define it. While Paulhan and Ponge were particularly receptive to
Braque’s questioning of verities, and engaged in their own ways in interrogating received ideas in
their writing, others drew his painting into a narrative of progress and strength of being recalling
fascist or pro-Vichy ideas of a new ‘Europe’.
In fact, Paulhan himself is made to play a surprising role in a post-war memoir written by
Lieutenant Gerhard Heller, who had worked as a censor in the literary section of the Propagandastaffel
in occupied Paris. Heller was an enthusiastic visitor to Braque’s studio, and devotes a chapter to his
experiences with artists during the war. In his 1981 memoir, Heller presents himself as a Francophile,
in love with the culture, who did his best to protect those writers that he could. He proudly pictures
himself in a photograph taken with Drieu la Rochelle on the cover of the book, but among his four
epigraphs is one from Sartre saying that the first step is ‘le refus’, and one from Marcel Jouandeau
claiming that friendship transcends divisions of political state: ‘L’amitié est ma seule patrie’
(Heller, 1981: 7).6 However one evaluates Heller’s actions during the Occupation, it is clear that
the stories he constructs around Braque’s painting and other art attest to his desire to see himself as
friend of the French. At the centre of this book is his adulation of Jean Paulhan, whom he claims as
his teacher in the appreciation of modern painting and literature. Paulhan glows in Heller’s description of him as a brilliant spectator and mentor who showed him how to look beyond resemblance.
They had discussions about painting that were no doubt well informed, and perhaps they did lead
Heller into a deeper understanding of an art that truly attracted him. But the rhetoric of this memoir
takes this connection between art lovers a good deal further, as it casts their shared viewing of art
as a scene of rebirth with Paulhan as master/father:
Ce Socrate (Paulhan), progressivement, à travers toutes nos rencontres, aida mon esprit, ma sensibilité,
mon être tout entier, au laborieux mais jubilant accouchement d’un homme nouveau. J’avais trouvé en lui,
comme en nul autre, cette ‘figure paternelle’ dont ma jeunesse avait besoin. (Heller, 1981: 117)
How ironic that Paulhan, whom we know for the acuity of his writing on Braque’s transformations
of object and unsettling of ideas, should become the instrument of Heller’s story-making. Through
Braque and Paulhan, as he writes about them, Heller has created an image of his own rebirth above
the fray of history and the uniform he wore. This is akin to other narratives of his pure intentions
that he sprinkles through the book. He recounts that Braque said: ‘Ne m’appelez pas “maître”, ni
“monsieur Braque”, mais tout simplement “Braque” et je vous dirai “Heller”!’ (1981: 120) No
identifying titles or military ranks need be used in the space of the studio. In his recollection of a
visit to Picasso, Heller reports the two men sharing the idea that if it were up to them, there would
be no war. Even though he admits the practical insignificance of the scene in the atelier, (‘La simple bonne volonté de deux hommes était bien impuissante à trancher ainsi les immenses problèmes
posés par la guerre en 1942!’), such comfortable affirmations establish Heller as an art lover and
Francophile, and give him a life story separate from anything that his uniform involved or required
(1981: 119). Paulhan and Heller pull spectatorship in opposing directions, revealing the diverse
interpretations individual spectators have of their historical situation.
Drieu La Rochelle’s August 1941 article about Braque in Comœdia (see note 1) constructs yet
another story of spectatorship, placing Braque’s work in the context of a hierarchy of understanding
and taste that reflects social and political values. We will see that he creates a scene of the painting
and its viewer suggestive of a call to order about which he would write a few months later in the
Nouvelle Revue Française, casting France as the country that had left its strength behind:
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J’aime trop la force, j’ai trop admiré son déploiement dans mon pays à ses belles époques, et trop
désespérément souhaité sa renaissance, pour ne pas la saluer là où elle est et tâcher d’en ramener sur les
miens les avantages dont nous ne sûmes plus nous faire les initiateurs. (Drieu la Rochelle, 1942: 109)
He loves force ‘là où elle est’, and so he welcomes it in the German regime, wishing to bring it back
to ‘his own’. Echoing common Vichy claims of French decadence, Drieu goes on to postulate that
Germany’s culture, with its nobility unharmed by a rising bourgeois class (‘de tels désastres’), has
been able to form (to mould) the populace appropriately:
en Allemagne la noblesse qui n’avait pas connu de tels désastres a apporté toute sa force dans les casernes
et a pu s’y offrir à la masse populaire comme un moule habile qui recevait autant qu’il donnait de forme.
Une caste dirigeante doit toujours se prêter à l’impulsion populaire.
La caste, voilà ce qui a ineffablement manqué à la France et surtout à la France militaire de ces derniers
temps. Il y avait certes des souvenirs de cette caste en France, mais qui, comme débris insolites et déformés,
ne pouvaient faire que du mal en confirmant la nation dans sa méfiance et dans sa désaffection. (Drieu la
Rochelle, 1942: 107)
Drieu’s idea that France must reform and rise above its grotesque leftovers of a true caste system
(‘débris insolites et déformés’) can be seen echoing in his way of crafting the article on Braque.
He conjures up a scene with an ignorant visitor to a museum who is in need of a lecture about
understanding this painting. In this theatrical way, Drieu displays the need for a weak bourgeoisie to learn about strong construction. The article begins with condescension, addressing someone (‘you’) who ‘hasn’t taken the trouble to instruct himself about art’, telling him that ‘Talent
may have more power and divinity than your mediocrity.’7 It’s a rehashing of the old conflict
between a cultivated elite and the philistines who cannot understand their art, with an added
ideological resonance due to Drieu’s belief that France must regain its aristocratic qualities. If
this ignorant viewer had only been taught about Braque as all French schoolchildren are taught
the tragic dramas of the great Corneille, he would see that Braque’s work is not formless but
highly constructed:
Et vous, Monsieur, vous êtes devant un Braque et vous vous dites: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ Vous ne
voyez qu’une grande bouillie verdâtre? Mais si vous n’aviez appris en classe à le vénérer, qu’est-ce que tout
de go vous admettriez des longues tirades de Corneille, autre grand Normand? Peut-être enverriez-vous
Cinna au diable en vous écriant que c’est de l’abstraction et de l’amphigouri. Eh bien, à partir du moment
où vous admettrez que Braque ne représente rien sur sa toile – rien de ce que vous attendez – c’est-à-dire ni
une figure humaine, ni un paysage, mais qu’il se sert des couleurs comme un musicien se sert des sons,
peut-être à la longue apercevrez-vous que Braque est un grand architecte, un grand compositeur, qu’il
construit et harmonise comme ne le fait aucun de vos peintres de tout repos, qu’il est beaucoup plus amant
de la sévérité et de l’ordre, de la science et de la raison que tel ou tel fabricant de nus, tel peinturlureur de
fesses que vous admirez chez les confiseurs des Champs-Élysées. (Drieu la Rochelle, 1941: 2)8
The reference to schoolboy learning diminishes the spectator, and the fact that the classical play in
question is Corneille’s Cinna, a play extolling the wise forgiveness of an absolute monarch, also
points to the idea of hierarchical values that France must recover in order to become politically
meaningful to Drieu. Left alone, this poor museum-goer only sees something formless (‘Vous ne
voyez qu’une grande bouillie verdâtre?’) and he needs to be taught the great ‘sévérité’, ‘order’,
‘science’, and ‘raison’ that Braque commands, just as Corneille’s brilliance was drummed into him
in school.
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The essay seems less concerned with an idea of the artist’s genius than with endowing him with
a kind of nobility. Not only does his art give the model of elite culture; the article also reminds us
that Braque is a Norman (thus an Aryan):
Braque ajoute grandement à la lignée des peintres français et normands et … ceux qui réfléchissent
trouvent un enchaînement certain entre les grandes ordonnances sévèrement riches de ce peintre et les
orchestrations magistralement contenues de Poussin. (Drieu la Rochelle, 1941: 2)
This claim for a lineage shared with Poussin has art historical merit,9 but the mention of the great
French painter and his Norman identity also gives Braque a stamp of cultural and ethnic approval:
linked to the great masters, he is a pure Frenchman as well. Drieu liked to speak of his own Norman
roots, linking them to Frenchness. In 1942 he wrote:
bien que grand amateur et grand défenseur d’une espèce de démesuré dans l’histoire de la littérature
française, pratiquement je suis un Normand, comme tous les Normands scrupuleusement soumis aux
disciplines de la Seine et de la Loire. Il y avait en moi aussi une tendance à sortir des gonds français comme
Malraux, mais j’étais trop étreint par le drame de Paris pour aller à l’étranger; et je ne suis allé en Espagne
ou en Allemagne ou en Russie que pour vérifier les prévisions toutes concentrées sur la France. (Drieu la
Rochelle, 1973: 18)
The hierarchy of taste and nationality is, of course, one of race as well. Braque’s Norman identity, for Drieu, is a way to imply racial and cultural exceptionalism at a time when anti-Semitic
art criticism claimed that ‘French art is in a bad way’,10 or that aesthetic form itself was being
contaminated by foreigners. An unpublished document written by one of the directors of Vichy’s
Fine Arts Administration stated that:
Jewish painting, like all Jewish arts, is parasitical. It took the Jews to deform and bring into disrepute
Cézanne’s lesson … Three hundred Jewish painters have grown on French aesthetics like mistletoe on an
apple tree. They have disfigured it, arrogantly caricatured it … It is not a political matter to proscribe this
debilitating ferment and to prevent freedom from turning into license. It is a matter of hygiene. (cited by
Dorléac, 2008: 58)11
It is in this wartime cultural context that Drieu describes a pure Norman ‘construction’, and rhetorically distances Braque’s art from what is ‘decadent’ in France. His art criticism displays his hopes
about finding a European structure against the ‘illnesses’ of surrealism, the Third Republic, and
other past ‘weaknesses’ that the right wing liked to berate.
In fact, though, as we have seen, Braque had a long-term dedication to placing objects in a malleable space, and to eliciting fluctuations in the objects themselves. This clashes with Drieu’s
emphasis on construction. As John Richardson explained in 1959, summing up his analysis of the
painter’s treatment of objects in a number of still-lives painted between 1931 and 1938:
if we penetrate beneath the rich facture and decorative surface of these works, we will see that they
constitute a persistent struggle on the part of Braque to escape from the traditional view that an object has
only one specific meaning or reality. By painting things as if in a state of metamorphosis or flux, Braque
tries to convey that, on the contrary, nothing is cut-and-dried and that any object can serve countless
purposes and assume a different identity in a different context. (Richardson, 1959: 22)
Braque’s own words, as well as his paintings, corroborate this aspect of his painting again and
again: his works create an atmosphere that discovers and enables the fluctuating meanings of
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objects; he aims to create a physical state of metamorphosis, in which the context changes the
identity of objects. This is a world of things that are not ‘cut-and-dried’.
Ernst Jünger noticed the ‘taste for matter’ in Braque’s paintings, but drew its significance in
his own direction. A German officer stationed in Paris in an administrative role, Jünger
immersed himself in the cultural life of Paris: he went to museums, visited artists’ studios and
interacted with artists and writers at salons.12 His wartime diaries record observations of the
literary and artistic world, often focusing simply on the life of salons and the conversation
there. He visited Braque’s studio and wrote about the painter in his diary, seemingly recognising the part of Braque’s work that was not ‘cut-and-dried’, but quickly engaging it in a synthesis
with a higher order of grand vision:
In the realms of the mind, there are climbers and there are miners: climbers are driven by the instinct of
fatherhood, miners by a taste for matter. Climbers scale the summits, gaining a clear view. Miners fathom
ever deeper wells, where the idea is revealed to the mind in its drowsiness, all its fertility and crystalline
splendour … But the greatest men are driven by both forces – they use a double measure, like the Andes,
whose topmost crests seem to cleave the mirror of the seas. Their kingdom, however, extends from the
pure air where the condor glides to the monsters of the deep. (cited by Danchev, 2005: 220–1)13
‘A taste for matter’: Jünger seems more open to unformed matter than the Vichy/German culture
of anti-decadence would be.14 However, in this passage, the depths of matter holds a perfect idea
(‘crystalline splendour’). For Jünger, if Braque ‘mines’ matter, he does it with the clarity of a
‘father’ commanding the ‘kingdom’ of high and low. Knowledge of the deep is verified by the
glory of the towering heights where pure air dominates, and the future of humanity (the progeny of
fathers) depends on this clear-sighted overview. The ‘greatest’ – like Braque – combine the clarity
of the ‘summits’ with this willingness to dive into matter. Following this reading, Braque’s sawdust
and the rawness of the paint as he used it would answer to an overarching plan of creation, rather
than revealing themselves – their being – to the painter as he made the painting. (Braque did say
that he had his ideas about painting after making the paintings (Braque, 1952: 80).)
Such a reading of Braque echoes Jünger’s earlier writing and ideas: like Drieu, he had developed political and aesthetic ideas linked to a desire to strengthen Europe. Jünger is a ‘fascist modernist’ yearning for a new world.15 A Nouvelle Revue Française article (Drieu was the editor at that
time) enthusiastically explained Jünger’s ideas for its French readership in 1942:
Lorsque la guerre se déclenche, un processus cathartique s’accomplit. Un processus de purification qui
permet à l’esprit de redevenir fluide, en le débarrassant des formules surannées, qui, ayant avec le temps
perdu leur souplesse, se sont transformées en obstacles. C’est la vieillesse qui laisse le pas au nouveau qui
va naître … Lutte est processus de réalisation d’une idée, dont les hommes deviennent les instruments.
(Federici, 1942: 182)
Enlightenment arises from destruction and loss, cleansing and progress are brought by war. Such
ideas weave through many of Jünger’s writings, taking the form of elevation, transcendence and
new order. In his World War I memoir, for instance, a view of a battlefield brings with it the satisfactions of the narrator’s panoramic command of it.
On the lonely hill on the road to Ransart there was a ruin that once had been an estaminet. It was
called Bellevue because of the extensive view from there over the front. In spite of its danger it had
great attractions for me. The eye could travel for miles over the ruined landscape, whose dead villages
were connected by roads where no vehicle moved and no living being was to be seen … The face of
the earth was dark and fabulous, for the war had expunged the pleasant features of the countryside and
Pap
41
engraved there its own iron lines that in a lonely hour made the spectator shudder. (Jünger, 1929: 33,
emphasis added)
The ‘great attractions’ come from the eye’s freedom to see the entirety of the destruction. The
‘shudder’ of the viewer is not just one of horror but also of aesthetic pleasure, for the destruction
has been sublimated into a meaningful composition. War is the engraver, placing ‘iron lines’ that
organise, thus elevate, the reality of death.
Jünger also places the narrator of his 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs at an elevated vantage
point (the titular ‘Marble Cliffs’, in fact) from which he observes and classifies the world. The
moral frame for his vision of humanity is highly ordered: as one critic has said of this novel: ‘all
objects, people, and places in the novel appear to be located somewhere on a hierarchical value
scale’ (Neaman, 1999: 108). The narrator and his brother Otho devote their lives to cataloguing
botanical specimens. As if such careful typology were not enough to grasp the order of nature, the
brothers have invented a special ritual centred on the plants, grains of sand, or other elements of
nature that, in other ways, interested Braque.
We took pleasure … in forming images, which we called ‘models’, formed by writing on a piece of paper
four or five phrases in light metre. Through them we aimed to fix a fragment of this world’s mosaic like a
stone mounted in metal. For these models we had begun with plants, and continually returned to them.
Thus we described objects and their metamorphoses, from the grain of sand to the cliff of marble, and from
the fleeting second to the changing year. In the evening we would collect our scraps, and when we had read
them would burn them on the hearth. (Jünger, 1929: 23)
Nature’s metamorphoses fascinate the narrator, but no sooner does he observe them than he collects and ‘fix(es)’ them. The botanist brothers capture nature’s movement and give it form. Finally
when they burn their ‘models’ to ash in the evening, they bring one additional apotheosis to the
brilliant descriptions. This kind of creative work continually moves toward a truth that is at a
remove from the world. The narrator adds: ‘As we climb, we draw nearer to that secret whose final
mysteries are hidden in the dust’ (Jünger, 1929: 23–4).
The brothers’ retreat allows them to observe the conflicts of human society. They live in a time
of war when a ‘Chief Ranger’ threatens to take over the Marina, (the town above which they live).
Human communities in the book, and their strivings, appear at a distance to the narrator and his
brother who live a rarefied life of scholarship at the top of the cliffs. Even when war has engulfed
the Marina and destroyed it, the narrator climbs up to a vantage point and composes this warscape:
Now the extent of the destruction could be read in towering flames, and far and wide the old and lovely
towns along the Marina stood bright in ruin. They sparkled in fire like a chain of rubies, and from the dark
depths of the waters there rose their shimmering image. The villages and farms, too, burned throughout the
land, and from the proud castles and the cloisters in the valley the fires shot up. The flames towered
smokelessly like golden palms into the unstirred air, and from their crowns there fell a golden rain of fire.
(Jünger, 1929: 109)
The narrator and Brother Otho do not respond to the terror and world strife that affects the humans
around them. Their concern is aesthetic, not political.
Indeed, in a pattern consistent with what has been called ‘the fascist unconscious’, Jünger
repeatedly posited the purification and progress that could emerge from destruction. Simple objects
or material realities served to reveal meanings beyond and above. Remembering his World War I
service, he writes:
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French Cultural Studies 27(1)
The zinc oven I burned in the reed hut was made from shabby metal. The heat heightened its color into a
very beautiful transparent red. According to this model, things and life hide qualities undisclosed to us in
everyday life. (cited by Neaman, 1999: 141–2)16
Neaman writes that this example is ‘typical of how Jünger can turn a piece of junk into a metaphysical allegory of the world’s secrets’ (1999: 141) and also posits that this ‘stereoscopic’
vision – the term is Jünger’s – explains the writer’s detachment, as his diaries report it, from the
events of World War II:
In Paris he saw Jews being rounded up and noted his displeasure. Like many others, he also heard of
atrocities committed in the concentration camps. Though shaken by these events, his detachment is
evident. As much as the barbarism of the Nazis was repulsive, he could not help but interpret the persecution
of the Jews and others as part of a fated, cosmological scheme. Particularly in the last books of the war
diaries, where Jünger contemplates the issue of German guilt, his stereoscopic vision searched for a
metaphysical explanation. In the following example, Jünger invokes a biblical image, rendering literal the
meaning of ‘sacrificial’ in the term Holocaust: ‘Was our persecution the last birth pang before the
appearance of the Second Messiah, the Paraclet, with whom the epoch of the spirit shall begin? It is
impossible that such a sacrifice won’t bear fruit.’ (Neaman, 1999: 145)17
And now it seems that in the Braque passage, the double measure that Jünger draws from the paintings echoes his acceptance of historical violence. He goes to watch the execution, but sees it as a
meaningful sacrifice; he sees Braque explore material ambiguities, but subsumes them into fertile
ideas (‘crystalline’) for creation in a kingdom of pure air. The patterns of visual command in The
Marble Cliffs run parallel to the kind of viewing implicit in Jünger’s description of Braque’s art.
Delving into the turbulences and unordered realms of matter is a step towards creation of a higher
order and metaphysical meaning.
Conclusion: The painting made historical
Ponge and Paulhan followed Braque’s aesthetic lead, and recognised the challenge his painting
made to the spectator. They were encouraged by the paintings to conceive of human activity as
continuing and searching, when forms and meanings were in an uncertain flux. Paulhan recalls, in
La Peinture cubiste that while paintings in the past had offered reassuring spaces without emptiness, with ‘une gamme de valeurs’ (Paulhan, 1970: 22), modern painting has changed that.
Elle (la peinture) nous concerne, elle s’adresse à nous. Elle nous prend sur le fait, elle nous met en
accusation. Par un étrange renversement ce n’est plus le spectateur qui demande au tableau, c’est le tableau
qui semble demander au spectateur: que représentes-tu? (1970: 23)
He even goes on to contend, in terms that recall Braque’s freeing the painting from ideas, that it
was only the painters of the past that had started with thoughts to make their pictures:
ils se figuraient la Madone, ils avaient l’idée du Christ, de la mer et des forêts, et ils faisaient de leurs
tableaux un ensemble de signes qui figurât la forêt, la mer, le Christ ou la Madone. (1970: 23)
Paulhan points out that this reliance on the pre-set idea is now reversed. Painting now summons the
spectator to answer the question ‘who are you’? Thus paintings like Braque’s engage humanity – if
not politically, certainly existentially – in the questioning and building of its future. Ponge also
43
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instructs the spectator in his essay on Braque, pointing out that Braque’s painting demands that we
start thinking and being in new ways for which no pre-existing ideas have prepared us.
When Drieu, Jünger and Heller stood as spectators of Braque’s paintings during the years of
Occupation, they were disposed to understand his work as exemplary of progress and elevation.
It is especially telling that the matter and loosening of intellectual control that are so fundamental
to Braque’s work become a way-station or a point to pass over: Drieu ‘helps’ the uninitiated
viewer see beyond his first impression that the painting is a ‘greenish mush’ (une ‘bouillie verdâtre’) and points out the construction. Jünger acknowledges that the visionary must look at matter
but then rise to Andean heights to command the binary of high (form) and low (matter) – it is then
that the true birth comes. Heller used his father–teacher Paulhan to take him from non-recognition
of the paintings to a reasoned illumination. All of them climb to order as they look at and describe
the work of a painter who learned to open up objects to the flux of their being – both in the world
and on the canvas. Braque himself spoke of this work as dangerous – only to be undertaken by a
mature artist18– but these three readers seem to place limits on any dangerous recognition of ambiguities or dilemmas. They culminate their view of the paintings in clarity.
In answering the Cahiers d’art survey on the influence of history on painting, Braque acknowledged the importance of historical events in the lives of all – and thus implied that in some unmeasurable way they were present in the artwork. But he took more care to explain that painting had a
reality apart from the events of the moment, insisting that the influence of events could not be
measured, and could not overshadow the long-term process of artistic production that is integral to
any painting. His painting, strikingly silent on themes of war or Occupation, still became part of
the historical stories of his moment. Viewers were (and are) drawn to connect them to the world in
which they were made. The forms of spectatorship implied by Ponge and Paulhan, whom I have
called readers of flux, and by Drieu, Heller and Jünger, readers of progress, all re-situate the artwork in the public space that surrounds the painter’s studio. The paintings become part of that
context, not by the artist’s choice but because of the way they were viewed, understood and
described. Braque was able to paint as he wished to during the Occupation, and his studio and
subject matter may have seemed an oasis apart from the storm, but his spectators were writing history as they viewed his paintings.
Notes
1. Corpet and Paulhan (2009: 19) write:
The weekly Comœdia, which returned to publication in June 1941, was intent on being a channel for
the transmission of the new ‘European’ culture. In its pages one could find, side by side, Montherlant,
Arland, Valéry, Paulhan, Sartre, some in search of an alibi allowing them to pursue parallel activities,
others more vacillating in their ideology, still others acting out of sheer pragmatism, as though nothing
were at stake.
See also Hamer (2001) for a thorough and excellent study of the position of this journal in the Occupation.
2. Perry (2004) gives a fascinating account of this exhibit and the circumstances surrounding it.
3. For thorough and illuminating studies of the art world under Vichy, see Cone (1992b) and Dorléac
(2008). For the same topic with a particular focus on Braque, see Danchev (2005), particularly Chapter
9, ‘The Occupation’. Butler (2013) offers particularly sensitive readings of Braque’s paintings and of
contemporary critical response, readings which in combination illuminate the crossing of aesthetic and
political ideas.
4. Braque’s response in that issue was followed by responses from Laurens, Léger, Masson and Mirò.
5. Paulhan, for example, stopped the publication of the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1940 and instead
worked on the publication of the underground journal Les Lettres Françaises. Nazi sympathiser Drieu
la Rochelle took over directorship of the NRF. However, Paulhan retained influence at Drieu’s NRF,
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French Cultural Studies 27(1)
and Drieu obtained Paulhan’s release when he was arrested, along with other members of the Resistance
group of the Musée de l’homme, in May 1941. Thus Paulhan’s life in the world of letters was closely
entwined with his life in the Resistance and the contradictory alliances it sometimes entailed. Paulhan
would end his participation in the Comité national d’écrivains because of his disagreement about the
group’s ‘Black List’, and eventually write the ‘Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance’, continuing to
reflect on this issue, in 1952 (see Paulhan, 2003: 41–55). Ponge took extreme care when advancing any
historical comment in his writing. This care was inevitable, since his writing had long since been based
on an urgent need for language to reassess its way of approaching even simple things in the world. Met
(2000) discusses the equivocal nature of Ponge’s texts that refer to the Resistance.
6. Lottman, who cites an ‘Interview and correspondence’ with Heller among other sources (1998 [1982]:
299), points out the ambiguities of Heller’s situation but writes quite favourably of him. Heller’s book
came in for sympathetic reviews in the French press in the 1980s, but Loiseaux (1995) roundly denounces
it as a collection of self-serving and unproven stories of Heller’s good efforts and intentions, as Danchev
points out in a note (2005: 353).
7. According to Cone, this article was part of the reason he could continue to work peacefully in his Paris
studio. She writes: ‘Early on, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a French mouthpiece for the Nazis and Paulhan’s
new colleague at the NRF, had exceptionally exonerated Braque from the onus of decadence in the
cultural weekly Comœdia. “Your Braque piece in Comœdia is excellent”, was how Paulhan expressed
gratitude to the man who made it possible for Braque to work in peace’ (Cone, 2001: 102).
8. Other passages of the article deal with the problem of Vichy’s disfavour for Cubism and ‘decadent’ art:
‘Il ne faudrait pas venir nous dire que l’art “moderne”, ce qui veut tout simplement dire, récent (si on
retirait à ce mot sa prétention, peut-être que certaine prévention contre la chose tomberait d’elle-même)
est un art morbide, dégénéré, décadent’ (Drieu la Rochelle, 1941: 1); and ‘Vous pouvez ne pas aimer le
cubisme et reconnaître pourtant l’admirable conscience de certains peintres dits cubistes’ (1941 :2).
9. Zurcher writes of Braque’s turn away from Fauvist experiments carried out in the south of France in this
way: ‘The colors are paler. Greens and browns, until then banished from his palette, start to appear. They
show how he has opted for a mental approach to painting that, while guided by Cézanne, followed more
in the footsteps of Nicolas Poussin, Chardin, and Corot’ (Zurcher, 1998: 25).
10. Lucien Rebatet in Je suis partout (1941). Cited by Dorléac (2008: 52).
11. The author of this passage is Georges Hilaire, who replaced Hautecour as director of Fine Arts
Administration under Laval. Hilaire’s unpublished, undated document appeared in his 1945 trial.
12. Neaman (1999: 142–6), in a section of one chapter entitled ‘Dandy in black leather boots’, describes
Jünger’s wartime involvement in Paris cultural life. For example, he saw Braque and Paulhan at Florence
Gould’s salon (1999: 143–4).
13. The original diary entry is dated 4 October 1943, and may be found in Jünger (1960b: 171).
14. Cone (2001: 101) notes that ‘Although the subject of death and decay was unwelcome in a country
allegedly going through national renovation under Marshal Pétain, it frequently appeared in the work of
Paulhan’s favourites. And, at a moment when an expressive matière denoted decay, decadence, obscenity, and Jewishness in art, it continued to be used by the artists who interested Paulhan.’
15. Herf (1984) discusses Jünger’s political views as influenced by his World War I experience and as related
to his aesthetic ideas and practice. See Herf (1984: 12–13) for a discussion of fascist modernism.
16. The original diary entry is dated 7 April 1940 and may be found in Jünger (1960a: 126). Georges Braque
remembers the use of a barrel as a stove during the war, too, but lends an opposing significance to the
transformation:
No object can be tied to any one sort of reality; a stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal
weapon, a pebble on a beach, or anything else you like, just as this file in my hand can be metamorphosed
into a shoe-horn or a spoon, according to the way in which I use it. The first time this phenomenon struck
me was in the trenches during the First World War when my batman turned a bucket into a brazier by
poking a few holes in it with his bayonet and filling it with coke. Reported by John Richardson. (Cited
by Richardson, 1959: 27)
This conversation was originally published in The Observer, 1 December 1957.
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17. The original of the citation from Jünger is from the diary entry dated 17 April 1945 and may be found in
Jünger (1960b: 429).
18. Jacques Kleber recounts this 1946 interview with Braque:
Braque told me that you have always to start from sensations, seize hold of something, a material. I asked
him if he didn’t think it was a very special material since it was never inert, always contemporaneous, the
twin of the idea that was to shape it. Yes, Braque continued, but the idea is the mortal half of all this; the
idea must be left behind, disappear like the cradle that launches a ship … We said nothing for a moment
and then Braque added: but first you have to go into things, become them. If a young painter was doing
this picture, moving in the direction of this picture – and he pointed to one of his most recent works
– he would be a dead man … Braque said finally: What counts is the friction, the effort of going from
one thing to another, the moment of wrenching away from creation at the same time as you are creating.
(Zurcher, 1988: 185, 189)
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Author biography
Jennifer Pap is Associate Professor of French at the University of Denver. Her published articles are on
Apollinaire, Reverdy, Ponge and Dominique Fourcade. Her book-in-progress examines the writing of poets
as they respond to the visual arts and to wartime violence. She also collaborates with poet Julie Carr on translations of the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Leslie Kaplan.