Page 24 - Studio International - March 1967

congruent with our tastes nowadays, half a century after
they were made.
As John Berger has recently emphasized, Picasso has
never been averse to expressing clearly his delight in
sexual experience; and it is, perhaps, not unduly flippant
to point out that one of the simplest ways to get an idea
of what this combination of multiple view-points and
tactile space amounted to in practice is to 'feel' your way
round the bottoms of the nudes on this page. In the
drawing of 1910, we see the left buttock and thigh in a
three-quarter rear view, while the right buttock is almost
in profile; but then, on the right hand side of the axis
of the figure, we see the left thigh again, with the pelvis
above it, and the knee bent sharply so as to lift the
heel back behind the right leg, and this time from a view-
point somewhat to the front, which shows up a swelling
mons veneris. In the Standing figure of 1911-12, we again
have shifting viewpoints; one buttock in profile, with
superimposed on it a rear view of the whole bottom in a
sitting position, forming a double curve which seems to
be attached to a plane, dark at its lower edge and sloping
upward and inwards with various modulations, till it
comes to two breasts, seen both from in front and in
three-quarter view, which combine to give a doubly-
curved shape echoing that of the behind. This later
figure illustrates, more clearly than the earlier one, the
Picasso concept of 'tactile space' by which the various features of
Nude 1910 the whole figure are related to one another and to their
Drawing
surroundings. The back, on the left, and the belly, on the
right, are both given in the form of two or three more or
Standing figure 1911-12
Ink less vertical planes, drawn as if they were transparent and
12 x 7 3/4 in. intersecting, so that the eye alone cannot place them in
Coll.: Mrs Bertram Smith,
New York any definite relation to one another, though the finger-
tips might, if you could feel your way round.
Serious attempts to realize the ambition of an all-round
view did not last very long. Analytical Cubism was
succeeded by Synthetic Cubism, and that by many other
developments. The relativistic, multiple view-point,
scheme survived only in the licence which later painters
took to incorporate one or two different angles of vision
in a single picture, as in the standard trick of superposing
a profile and a full face view of a head.
What is perhaps not so generally known outside scien-
tific circles is that the technology of optics has learnt to
achieve almost exactly what the Cubists set as their goal.
We can now produce an image which incorporates every-
thing we could see of a scene as we move past it or around
it, and while we change our spatial relation to it by
focusing either on the near or the farther parts. Such
images, known as 'holograms', truly achieve the intellec-
tual aims which the Cubists professed (or Apollinaire on
their behalf) ; but they do not look at all like Cubist
pictures.
The production of holograms basically depends on the
phenomenon of 'moire' patterns, a visual effect with
which, of course, many Op painters have concerned
themselves. If two systems of lines intersect at an angle
they seem to give rise to new shapes. The diagrams on
page 124 show two of the moire patterns which can be pro-
duced by superimposing two systems of concentric circles
on each other. The other drawing shows a rather more
interesting example. In this the background is an all-over