ART REVIEW : Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger and a Consummate Collector

There is Cubism, and then there are Cubisms. “Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger: Douglas Cooper Collecting Cubism” is a small but riveting exhibition at the County Museum of Art that pays close attention to both.

Cubism, of course, was the style of painting that opened up artistic perception, beginning around 1907 and continuing to the end of World War I, to accommodate multiple perspectives and points of view. And with the introduction of collage, it further upped the ante by insinuating actual bits of the world into the fictive space of art. Modern art was irrevocably altered.

And what about Cubisms? Well, Cubisms are what we could call all those modes of painting that, during the next several decades, were profoundly affected simply by the inescapable precedent of the Cubist watershed.

The Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr made the point explicit when he drew a diagram of Cubism’s influences on the catalogue cover for his famous 1936 exhibition, “Cubism and Abstract Art.” With a strained complexity since matched only by conventional maps of the Los Angeles freeway system, Barr’s knotted diagram offered Cubism as the wellspring for Futurism, Orphism, Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl and Neo-Plasticism, Purism, Dadaism, Surrealism, the Bauhaus, Modern Architecture and both Geometrical and Non-Geometrical Abstraction.

Which is to say, for just about everything.

“Douglas Cooper Collecting Cubism,” which opened Thursday, doesn’t go anywhere near as far afield as Barr’s diagram. Cooper decided early on that he would focus his acquisitions on the four artists he correctly felt were central to the genre: its initiators, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and their two greatest followers, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger.

The “true Cubists,” Cooper called them. All four went their separate ways as artists as their careers progressed, but all had worked in a plainly Cubist idiom before 1920.

Cooper had very definite ideas about Cubism. They were sketched out in his youth and diligently refined through decades of study, acquisition and acquaintance. (Apart from Gris, who had been dead for almost five years when Cooper started to buy art, he knew the principal artists well.) He authored important books on Picasso, Gris and Leger, organized four influential museum shows on Braque and, at LACMA in 1970, assembled the groundbreaking survey of the period, “The Cubist Epoch.”

By the time of his death in 1984, it was doubtful anyone knew more about Cubism than he. As an art historian, Cooper had possessed three things for which most others in his field would quickly trade university tenure: an excellent eye, formidable brain power, and considerable quantities of cash.

Cooper came into a substantial inheritance in 1932, the year he turned 21, and he resolved to spend a third of it establishing a decisive collection of Cubist art. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Immune to restraints imposed by the global depression, he was able to take advantage of severely slumping prices for paintings and drawings by the already long-since established artists he was after. The core of his collection was acquired in a scant seven years, before World War II brought things to a temporary halt.

The exhibition is shining evidence of the young man’s skill in the endeavor, while the catalogue that accompanies it should be required reading for anyone with aspirations--and even achievement--as a collector. It lays out the story in great and enlightening detail, including a discussion of prices Cooper paid: Between 1932 and 1939, he spent less than 10,000 for a formidable group of 117 works of art; adjusted, that would amount today to about 265,000, or just over $500,000. This last is not offered for reasons of crass voyeurism, but simply to bolster a significant conclusion: Cooper’s collecting was phenomenal, but it was a phenomenon unique to the 1930s.

Organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and insightfully installed by LACMA curator Victor Carlson, the show reassembles 85 paintings and works on paper that the late British art historian acquired, mostly in those early years. It marks subtle distinctions between Cubism and what I’m calling Cubisms. The dividing line set by the show is World War I. Its four galleries begin with one devoted to prewar Picasso, which--as this drop-dead assembly of paintings and drawings makes plain--was the long suit of Cooper’s collection. They continue with a gallery for similarly prewar Braque, Gris and Leger, and with another for aspects of the varied postwar developments of all four. The final room is a mixed array of typically later works, often dating from the 1950s and 1960s, when the Cubist idiom isn’t necessarily evident.

Individual works of great power will be found here, chief among them the astounding “Three Figures Under a Tree,” which Picasso painted in the winter of 1907. Its obvious relationship to the landmark “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is self-evident, but a wholly different surface richness is concocted by a rigorous drawing style, a remarkably light-filled range of dark color and a liberal use of thin, runny washes of pigment in the lower regions.

There are also terrific drawings, from a blunt “Head of a Man” (1908) through a deceptively simple “Still Life With Dish of Pears” (1912) all the way to three wildly orgiastic odes to Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass,” drawn in 1962.

At the other end of the scale from “Three Figures Under a Tree,” in terms of size and initial impact, is a small Leger drawing from 1916. Only upon close inspection do the splintered forms common to Leger’s early Cubist style--beautifully articulated in three nearby black-and-white gouaches--reveal themselves here as the broken limbs and torsos of dead soldiers in a muddy trench at Verdun.

Picasso and Leger are in fact the centerpieces of the show, both in terms of number of works (35 and 26, respectively) and of sustained level of individual quality. The reason, I think, is that these two artists conceived of their work as operating within a social nexus--Leger’s typically a public and political one, Picasso’s more often intimate and sexual. The work of Gris and Braque, more formal and intrinsically decorative, feels more closed off.

Ironically, Braque fares least well in the show, despite Cooper’s abiding commitment to his art. The upward, revisionist assessment of Braque’s post-Cubist career, which has been afoot for a decade now, is one Cooper would have regarded as long overdue. But it remains flatly unconvincing, even in the face of the large, early 1950s painting “Studio VIII,” which this otherwise brilliant collector inexplicably regarded as Braque’s magnum opus .

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, to April 21. Closed Mondays.