Aragon: Politics and Picasso

Impossible to separate Aragon, art critic, from the historical movements of his century, from an understanding he shared with Stendhal that history makes sense, that there is meaning in history. That seems to be the easiest Marxist point of departure. Where things begin to be interesting rests in the principle of metissage that is, of artistic perceptions and commentaries where the work in itself constitutes a political statement, is observed through bifocal lenses at once political, let's say ethical, and aesthetical. Aragon is not the first to have suggested this cross-over. Without going back as far as Plato, Diderot, Apollinaire, or Andre Breton's bivalent study, Le Surrealisme et la Peinture, the viewing of art, the understanding of art, the theorizing of art has never forsaken the political even when ideological concerns have apparently been excluded in order to propose a strictly formal understanding of the thing in question. I would then suggest the obvious: a dialectical model pertains where formalism is by definition an ideological position even as it desires to consider the thing in itself apart from its historical context. By historical context a mean the social, economic, and artistic milieux which, unavoidably, find their expression in the work of art under consideration. Jacques Leenhardt writes: "Or l'activite du critique d'art Aragon releve pleinement de ces deux ordres de reference, l'urgence politique et les choix esthetiques." (1) What makes Aragon a significant critic of twentieth-century art is, on the other hand, his ability (much like Ponge's) to "see" "mais vraiment voir" the work before him or, put another-way, to succeed as an art critic of the avant-garde all the while maintaining his fidelity to an ideological position as if ... one could separate these two concerns! In that, he occupies a significant place in a direction established by Marxist theoreticians such as the futurist poet and translator of Brecht's work, Serge Tretiakov. In the 1920's Tretiakov is an exemplary figure in this matter since, friend of the Futurists, he insists that the Futurism of this period is a revolutionary antibourgeois vision having nothing to do with its 1913 version; friend, too, of the formalists (Eikhenbaum, Chklovski and Tynianov) as well as being a collaborator on Mayakovsky's magazine Lef (1923-1925) and then again on his "New Lef" (1927-1928) where, in favor of "factual realism" (his term), he condemns subjectivism, romanesque and psychological literature and ... "rotten bourgeois art." (2) Aragon, Dada and surrealist poet, playwright, novelist, translator too, and ideologue, resembles Tretiakov in his multiple and industrious participation in the redefinition of art criticism as well as according painters a place of honor in his fiction and criticism. A short list is indicative of Aragon's commitment to art and artists. In 1930 La Peinture au defi, in 1943, Matisse-en-France, in 1946 Apologie du luxe (Matisse), in 1952, L'Exemple de Courbet, in 1957, with Jean Cocteau, Entretiens sur le musee de Dresde, in his 1958 novel La Semaine sainte, Gericault occupies a significant place, followed by the 1965 Les Collages, and once again in 1971, Henri Matisse, Roman. In each instance Aragon's viewing passes through a political/poetic grid, that is, he sees in the other, in the collagist work of Max Ernst in 1926, for instance, or in his ground-breaking 1918 essay on cinematic decor, an objective correlative: a parallel form of breaking down traditional and classical modes of expression that is, a negative form of realism, one wholly dependent on a mimetic duplication of reality rather than on a (surrealist) reaffirmation of the existence of a "real" reality, more troubling, more efficient, in breaking down barriers artificially promulgated by a bourgeois establishment. One should never forget that Surrealism, however maligned these days, was, in the great tradition of nineteenth-century utopists and writers, profoundly against the visible, that is, the utilitarian visibility of a bourgeois ethos. …