Cubist painting

This program belongs to INA’s new series on art, REGARD ENTENDUS (which corresponds to “Modes of seeing recalled”), whose purpose is the confrontation of works of art (a painter, a school, a site) with outstanding texts they inspired to writers (critics, pets), with the exclusion of any other commentary. “Cubist Painting” is based on “La Peinture Cubiste”, a book written by Jean Paulhan (one of the greatest French critics of modern art) between 1945 and 1959. In this book, Paulhan relates a “Mid-night adventure”: returning to his home late in the night he walks across his study in the dark (so as not to awake his wife) and feeling his way as if he were blindfold, he finds the forms, the bulk, the very substance of familiar objects turned topsy-turvy. When he finally reaches his bed, he feels he had the sudden revelation of what cubist space is about and is thus able to relate the subversion introduced into painting by Braque, Picasso or Juan Gris at the beginning of this century. This art program shows no canvases: it relies on the alternation of film and video, on the possibilities of decomposing and recomposing images to make the viewer share Paulhan’s curious feeling of having walked across the space of a cubist painting”. Indeed, Paulhan’s text allows this perfectly novel approach: instead of filming cubist painting, to reconstitute its movement and its genesis, Cubism constituted itself upon the breakdown or classical painting, of its perspective and of analogical image. This formidable breach corresponds to the opposition between film and video, between the chemical image an the electronic image.