JF Ptak Science Books Post 1765
“Suddenly I had entered a new world, a universe of ugliness”.–Gelett Burgess, on entering the Salon des Independents Exhibition, 1910
One of the earliest recognitions of the great early masterpiece of Cubism, Picasso’s Les Demoisselles d’Avignon, makes its appearance in the Architectural Record1, and by a most-unanticipated critic: Gelett Burgess (1866-1951). Burgess glides through an unexpectedly wide terrain of The Modern, and has quite a lot of interesting observations, including George Braque and Czobel, Friesz, Harbin, Metzinger, Derain, Chibaud, Matisse and–perhaps most significantly–Pablo Picasso. Burgess found his way to Les Demoisselles, and presents a photograph of what would become perhaps the great masterpiece of Cubism, the caption announcing it as a “study” rather than with any real title for the work. As is well known Picasso worked for some years on the painting (generally the work is assigned a date of 1907 though he worked on it for some years afterwards), spending time alternatively in great loneliness and also in the midst of crowds of the interested/supporters/friends/the curious, sometimes hoping for feedback of his major work from the visitors, sometimes not.
Burgess was known as an accomplished illustrator with a distinctive and distinguished style, as well as a humorist-poet, a poet whose best-remembered (and longest-surviving) lines run as follows:
“I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!”
And I think that it is in this style that Burgess concedes his opinion of Picasso’s work, complete with a short bit of a poem at the end:
“And now for Picasso, of whom, here and there, one has heard so much. Picasso will not exhibit his paintings. He is too proud and too scornful of the opinions of the canaille. But he sells his work, nevertheless. That’s the astonishing thing about all of them. Who buys? God knows! Germans, I suppose.”