"I was a weird example of art": 'My Amputations' as Cubist confession.

If you were to cut away the frame from Clarence Major's My Amputations - lopping off the memoirs (whether real or imagined), the slapstick crime story, the fantasies borrowed from pom movies and spy novels - you would be left with the story of a writer on a lecture tour. Mason Ellis, who bounces from city to city across three continents, spends most of his fictional life encountering new forms of food and drink, new landscapes and traffic patterns, new audiences and colleagues and policemen before whom he must explain himself. Under the circumstances, even a character more self-assured than Mason might begin to feel disoriented. Try it yourself.

The text of My Amputations is broken into discontinuous fragments, much as a traveling lecturer's time and space are fractured, so that you pick your way through the pieces - some as short as one-third of a page, none longer than eight pages - with a feeling that reality has become unreliable. At any moment, the people you were so busy with might disappear, as you find yourself plunged without transition into a new setting.

Your experience as a reader of My Amputations mimics the protagonist's experience; but at the same time, you also stand apart from Mason, playing the role of audience - puzzled, entertained, appalled - during his improbable performances. If you think of the various sections of the book as lectures, then it's also fair to say that the novel provides accompanying slide illustrations. As Mason careens from place to place, appropriate descriptions of works of art pop up in the background. While he is in France, images by Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh flash before you. When Mason moves on to Germany, the images change - you see pictures by George Grosz and Edvard Munch, and perhaps a few stills from a Fritz Lang film. The Italian leg of the tour comes illustrated by Modigliani and the Venetian masters; the trip through Greece involves much wandering through archeological sites and the halls of museums. When last seen, Mason has aU but merged with a work of visual art. He sits in a Liberian village, hidden behind a wooden mask.

Considering this abundance of references, it is risky to give precedence to any one artist or style of art in My Amputations. Because there is little m of hierarchy, the reader can't easily decide which details might be thematic and which are merely local color. Then again, that sense of undecidability might itself be one of the book's themes. My Amputations has as its subject a narrator, an "I" presumably the contemporary African-American author Clarence Major). The book's object, or "ME," is its protagonist, a contemporary African-American madman named Mason Ellis. It is Mason's principal delusion that he is the author; his place, he believes, has been by a contemporary African American with the initials C.M. So much for the certainties of My Amputations. Beyond them, we get onto slippery footing. Is the book's "ME" trying to supplant its "I"? Or is the book's "I" (a respectable fellow, with academic credentials) trying to separate himself from the disreputable, low-life "ME"? Why is the biography of the former so teasingly similar to that of the latter? And who is this poor stiff C.M., other than an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire between "I" and "ME"? These shifting, undecidable relationships among "I," "ME," and C.M. are of a piece with the shifting fragmented world of My Amputations. Withing that world, with its many cultural citations, there is only one type of art that provides a counterpart to such willful uncertainty: Cubism.

I don't say that Cubism is of any use in explaining the book. Cubism has never been much good for explaining anything. But if we abandon the notion that there might be a code to My Amputations - the false hope that we might somehow translate the book into a straightforward set of propositions - then we might also see that Cubism is at work in the novel, encouraging just such an abandonment. Cubism serves as a model an incitement, and a justification for My Amputations. It also acts as a thematic spur, digging into the aggravated nerve that throbs aU the way through the novel - the anger and anxiety of one African-American artist at being attracted to the avant-garde and simultaneously shoved away by it:

He jus' grew. Chicago, 1955: there's

Mason along the lakeshore: gulls cry.

... He claims he swallowed the lake.

Art Institute's lions roared at traffic.

Ashtrays and pink salmon. Calendars

without dates. A private collage: he

was reborm constantly in it: to the gills

he muled in this stuff.... He came to

realize he wanted it all flat or upright

and permanent like cubism - like

W: surfaces. (2-3) From 1952 through 1954, Clarence Major studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We may assume he was as impressionable as any other teenager and similarly ready for novelty and rebellion. So the Art Institute in that period was probably a good place for him. While the school provided a staid-enough academic training the museum next door would have given him a vivid example of avant-garde agitation through the work of its curator for modem art, Katharine Kuh.

Chicagoans with long memories will recall that Kuh got her start in the 1930s running a pioneering gallery of modem art on North Michigan Avenue (see Klawans). The works she exhibited aroused such outrage that several wives of Art Institute trustees - members of a group called Sanity in Art - made a habit of disrupting her business. (On one occasion through clumsiness, they even smashed a window.) But Kuh also had supporters, among them the director of the Art Institute, Daniel Catton Rich. In 1943 he hired her, slipping her past the trustees by first putting her into non-curatorial jobs.

By the time young Clarence Major began frequenting the Institute, Kuh had revolutionized the museum's annual surveys of contemporary art - which before had been chock full of the provincial and the pallid - and had begun an aggressive program of acquiting modem art for the museum. For example, in the year before Major began his studies, she contrived to buy Willem de Kooning's painting Excavation after exhibiting it in the annual survey of American art. The passage of forty years has confirmed Kuh's judgment; but at the time, the response of a highly attentive public ranged from mockery to fury. "Kuh-Kuh Must Go" ran the headline in one of the daily newspapers.

So Clarence Major got his earliest formal introduction to the visual arts in a time when and in a place where modernism still had its fun power to shock. Excavation would not have caused a public fuss in New York at that point; while Cincinnati, say, or St. Louis might not have shown the picture at all. Chicago was both cosmopolitan enough to notice the painting and conservative enough to loathe it.

We must distinguish, though between the response de Kooning got in Chicago in the 1950s and the response toward artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Karen Finley in the 1980s. In the latter cases, the shock came in reaction to an explicit sexual religious, or political content in the art. The shock at de Kooning's Abstract Expressionism was more a reaction to the work's form. Abstract Expressionist pictures looked crude, unstructured, meaningless. There was "nothing in them" - that is, no representations of identifiable objects. As it happened, Excavation did include fragmented images of the human figure - but to a casual observer, "a five-year-old kid could have made them.'

Still, a young man with a lively intelligence and a love of art might have wondered what the ruckus was about. Excavation and other up-to-the-minute paintings were highly abstract and made with little apparent skill. But why should such formal traits make people angry? Was there some implicit provocation - perhaps an outrageous subject matter - hidden behind the weird style? An inquiry would have led Clarence Major, sooner or later, to the resoundingly ambiguous answer. The stylistic experiments of Abstract Expressionism had their origins half a century earlier in Cubism; and Cubism either did or did not have roots in Africa. In a sense, the offensive subject matter - if it existed - would have been Clarence Major himself. Perhaps he, or one of his cousins, was concealed in abstract art, and that was part of the reason why so many people didn't like it.

We broach the vexing topic of "primitivism." If I have introduced it in the subjunctive, that is because art historians today are still debating the nature and degree of influence that African objects had on Pablo Picasso during the crucial years 1907-1912. When Clarence Major first learned about Cubism, the topic was even more confused. There was only one reliable book on the subject. Robert Goldwater's 1938 Primitivism in Modem Painting. Discussions of "primitivism" in more general texts tended to be superficial - often including, however inadvertently, a measure of misinformation. From this relatively small body of literature, one quickly passed to the ideas that were "in the air" - or on the top of the head of some self-appointed critic.

Between the First and Second World Wars, popular notions about "primitivism" were being formed by writers such as Marius de Zayas. De Zayas helped to organize a major exhibition of African art at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery in New York in 1914 and also wrote a book, published in 1916, titled African Art: Its Influence on Modern Art. We may note two features of de Zayas's theorizing: He overestimated the role that African art played in the development of Cubism, and he grossly undervalued the intelligence of

De Zayas claimed that modernist abstraction as a whole was the offspring" of African art, which was in particular the "point of departure" for the "complete evolution" of Picasso's work. But de Zayas's howlers went beyond the aesthetic to the anthropological:

... the cerebral condition of the Negro

savage is particularly primitive, and

... his brain keeps the conditional state

of the first state of the evolution of the

human race.... Though the eye of the

Negro sees form in its natural aspect,

the state of his brain is unable to understand

it and retain it in his memory

under that aspect. . . . He does not

reason; and does not make comparisons

to obtain relative values, because

he does not possess the faculty

of analysis. (qtd. in Rubin 260, n60,

n61)

Now, such attitudes were a long way off from Picasso's thoughts about Africans. Picasso praised Africans' masks and sculptures precisely because the image-making in them was "raisonnable" - that is, conceptual. For example, Picasso had learned as an art student how to model the human figure in clay, making holes for the eyes. So it was a moment of illumination for him when he saw how an African mask-maker had represented the eyes in exactly the opposite way - not as holes in the surface, but as protruding cylinders. Instead of mimicking the appearance of eyes (as in naturalistic art) the African artist had felt free to invent an idea about eyes (Rubin 18-19).

Some scholars have adopted the shorthand term intellectual Primitivism to refer to this aspect of Picasso's admiration for tribal art. But, while marveling at the conceptual process of African image-makers, Picasso also recognized the spiritual and emotional function of their objects. The shorthand term for this related intuition is magical Primitivism - a name that should not bother us, so long as we understand that Picasso was riot necessarily imagining tribal people as a savage, superstitious Other. In fact, in his first celebrated encounter with African and Oceanic art, he seems to have felt that the objects were speaking directly to his emotions and his spiritual state.

In June 1907, Picasso visited the ethnological museum in Paris's Palais du Trocadero, where the African and Oceanic objects on display affected him profoundly. At various times, he spoke of their "shock," "revelation," "charge," and "force." "For me the [tribal] masks were not just sculptures," he told Andre Malraux. "They were magical objects ... intercessors.... They were weapons - to keep people from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves" (qtd. in Rubin 255). Evidently, Picasso at that moment felt in need of exorcism. Using the experience in the Palais du Trocadero both as an inspiration and as confirmation of his existing impulses, he at last completed his breakthrough painting, a spirit-chasing image meant to free him from the demons of sex and death:Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (see Fig. 1, p. 79).

At the moment of Picasso's breakthrough, "magical Primitivism" was therefore more important to him than "intellectual Primitivism.' The next year, though, Picasso and George, Braque began inching their way into Cubism, producing a much different " of art. The Demoiselles was a large-scale, horrifically ugly, garishly colored, Expressionistic image of a brothel.Picasso's Cubist pictures, from 1908 to 1912, were smaller in scale; muted in their colors and effects of light; moody, delicate, and cerebral in tone. Also, instead of representing a disturbing subject, they relied on traditional, inoffensive studio subjects such as the still life and the portrait. If Picasso in 1907 had been exorcising the demons of sex and death, he now was wrestling with the spirits of his ancestors - the Old Masters of European high art.

So from 1908 through 1912-the years of Analytic Cubism - the influence of African art became less directly apparent Or rather, the conceptual aspect of tribal image-making became quietly pervasive, as Picasso and Braque emphasized the invention of forms over and against the representation of objects. Intellectual Primitivism" had taken the lead. Then, in 1912, Picasso and Braque moved into a second phase of their long experiment, called Synthetic Cubism. They began to make collages, which were brighter in color and jazzier in mood. Here, too, we may discern the influence of intellectual Primitivism," which now was coupled once again with some of the emotional tenor of tribal art. It still would have been difficult to point to any particular visual element and say that it came from Africa, but a sensitive viewer might have recognized in Synthetic Cubism a kinship with the playful, satiric side of tribal art.

Of course, the account I have just given would not have been heard by Clarence Major in the 1950s - let alone by Mason Ellis, given his haphazard education. Back then, Cubism was commonly said to have begun with the Demoiselles, which had become the best known of aU Cubist pictures, even though it wasn't Cubist. Moreover, the African influence in the Demoiselles was often said to be direct, the faces of the two figures on the right side of the painting were believed to have been based on specific tribal masks, even though Picasso could not have seen any comparable masks in 1907 Paris.

Picasso himself further confused the issue. Disgusted at the ignorant speculations that were circulating about Ids work, he struck back by fudging the chronology." . . . from World War II onward," William Rubin has written, "Picasso consistently claimed not only to have seen no tribal art prior to painting the Demoiselles, but that his celebrated visit to the Trocadero had followed rather than preceded the painting's execution" (260).

All H& made it seem as if "primitivism" of the magical variety bad played a big role in the development of Cubism, and not just of the Demoisello. And that led to a further misunderstanding. People expected to see visible evidence of something "African" - meaning grotesque and savage -in Analytic Cubism. Failing to find it, the more thoughtful viewers could then consult Picasso's phoney chronology and confirm their skepticism. Evidently, the Cubist project had been based on Cezaane after all, and the African influence was incidental. So there existed a strange situation: Nobody doubted that African art lay behind Cubism, and yet nobody could say how or why it was there.

All that was needed to complete the conundrum was a bit of racism. As Rubin notes, "The Cubist artist's notion that there was something important to be learned from the sculpture of tribal peoples - an art whose appearance and assumptions were dramatically opposed to prevailing aesthetic canons - could only be taken by bourgeois culture as an attack upon its values' (7). Or, in the even more frank language of Robert Rosenblum: "Looked at in the context of the Western artistic tradition of the nude, ... African sculpture. .. is unbearably ugly" (25).

In other words, Cubism deliberately offended the aesthetic assumptions of the European bourgeois public - assumptions that easily slipped from the aesthetic to the racial, as the above-cited quotations from Marius de Zayas make dear. Does this mean that modem artists and their supporters were necessarily bigots? No. In fact, many of them had a profound respect for African image-makers and felt a great affinity for their work. It is also important to note that certain artists of color - Wifredo Lam, for example - rejoiced that Europeans had begun to appreciate the artwork of tribal people. For Lam -and perhaps for the young Clarence Major - the European emulation of African art was a source of pride, and a good reason for signing up with the avant-garde.

But aesthetic movements, Mm political ones, are never entirely progressive. By professing to like tribal sculptures, the modernists were turning accepted values upside-down, asserting that African carvers were more admirable fl= European academicians. This was an insult - and for it to sting properly, the majority of Europeans had to keep believing that Africans were inferior. For some artists, such as Picasso, the excitement of discovering African art far outweighed this fun of razzing Europe's middle class. Still, there was an inherent contradiction in the relationship between modem art as a movement and the primitive' art it admired. Modernism could retain its full power only so long as the mainstream of white society remained racist.

The very term for tribal art adopted by artists and critics before the First World War - art negre - tells us something about the nature of the insult to Europeans. "The usual translation of |art negre' as 'Negre Art,' loses something of the pejorative flavor of the French |negre,'" Rubin notes, with considerable delicacy (74). Let's be more open about it: These people were boasting that they liked Nigger Art. As Arthur Rimbaud had written forty years earlier, condemning the society around him in A Season in Hell": "I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You're aU fake niggers.... Merchant, you're a nigger; magistrate, you're a nigger; general you're a nigger ...."(1)

How would a young African American have felt when he that the most adventurous, most revolutionary art movement of his time derived part of its appeal from calling him a "nigger"? How would he have felt when he learned that the century's most exciting art had borrowed something from African sculpture, but nobody could say what? Was there room for the likes of Clarence Major in Cubism? If so, would he be the unrecognized hero of this artistic movement, or its buffoon - the "I," or the "ME"?

So far, I have tried to suggest the ambiguities of feeling that might have formed around the subject of Cubism when Clarence Major first learned about it in the 1950s. Now it is time to talk about the 1980s, when Major wrote My Amputations.

To begin again, My Amputations is the story of a writer on a lecture tour. Or perhaps it is about an impostor who is posing as a writer on a lecture tour. Mason Ellis, a petty criminal and half-mad autodidact, is apparently pretending to be a certain African-American author, whose initials are C.M. The book's narrator professes to find this imposture pitiable. And yet, the longer Mason keeps up the impersonation, the more he comes to resemble a jumpy, self-doubting real-life writer - which makes him a more convincing character than any imperturbable, omniscient Author. Is Mason a projection of Clarence Major's internal sense of self, and therefore more substantial than "I," the book's see-through persona? Or is the "I" authentic and internal, while Mason is the mask that cannot be removed - the outward image of the Ghetto Black, which adheres to the narrator no matter how many foundation grants he wins?

While we let those questions hang unanswered in the air, let us think about an exceptionally suggestive passage in the novel. Mason has recently obtained a fake passport that "proves" his identity as the Author. To make sure that this identity will not be challenged, he has put the unfortunate C.M. on a freight train bound west. So much for the Author - or, as Mason sees him, the Impostor. Now Mason must accomplish only one more task in order to take the place of C.M. He must figure out what the hell the critics mean when they call C.M. postmodern:

Maybe The Impostor believed the text represented nothing outside itself. I don't, thought Mason. . . . Text as permanent property - free of outside clut. Okay. Like Cubism: a peeled conceptual orange oozing C[e]zanne's blood and sperm: synthetic, analytical, geometric. . . . Hay, shouldn't he cut out this shit and call a speakers' bureau? After all, he was a well-known author in need of some immediate action (54)

At the moment when he impulsively decides to sign up for a lecture tour, thus setting off the main action of the novel Mason is thinking about Cubism. We should note that "primitivism" plays no role in his thoughts at this point. Concentrating entirely on questions of form, rather fl= of context or subject matter, he focuses on an imputed sense of permanence in Cubism and in the works of Cubism's main forebear, Paul Cezanne.

In this' Mason is consistent with the art history that would have been available to Clarence Major in the 1950s. To quote Herbert Read, writing in 1959: Cezanne hoped that the confused sensations of the artist might crystallize into their own lucid order" (20). With Cubism, Picasso and Braque at last achieved "the liberation for which the artistic spirit of the world had been waiting.' They passed beyond a structure which interpreted the seen object to the creation of a structure which though suggested by the seen object existed by virtue of its own monumental coherence and power" (Read 95-96).

In this view of the subject, Cubist pictures do not refer to any significant degree to the material world. They are complete in themselves, turning the chaos of experience into the stability of art. But Mason intuits that worldly experience won't go away so easily. Cezanne's oranges might be ideal constructions, but Mason imagines them dripping with the real blood and sperm of a real painter.

Similarly, postmodernists claim that literary texts do not refer to the world but only to themselves and other texts. Individual lived experience plays a minor role at best in the making of these texts; therefore, the Author ought to be banished from literary discussions as an unnecessary fiction. Mason, too, banishes the Author. In his literal-minded way, he actually dumps C.M. into a boxcar, sending him on a one-way ride. Even so, Mason does not accept the idea that texts might exist apart from flesh-and-blood writers. As he insists before a puzzled audience at Sarah Lawrence:" 'The text is not just a pretext. I stand before you. I am riot the object of the text. . .'" (65).

This is not the first time that a fictional character has claimed the right to an independent existence. This is, however, the most troubled relationship I've seen between a writer and his fictional double. The invented "ME" wants to supplant C.M, but he's also the one trying to rescue the writer's very sense of existence. It's Mason who bears the writer's blood and sperm. As if ungrateful, the writer goes on bitting Mason with a nonstop barrage of custard pies. Mason is subjected to the narrator's derision ("I strain to find something good to say" [151]); told by a pickup that the real author has a bigger penis (70); made to take the blame for the Author's relative lack of success ("|If you're so terrific how come I never heard of you?' "[59]); and run through an obstacle course of terrorist attacks (passim). How fortunate for Mason that he is wrong about his own existence - he is the object of the text, and so he can't really be harmed. How unfortunate for Clarence Major that he should stand in harm's way outside of the text, while sharing so many details of Mason's biography.

Perhaps any writer of the postmodern era might have played such a duplicitous game with himself (and so with his readers). In the pre-postmodern era, Vladimir Nabokov got as far as being quadruplicitous. We need not ask whether Claverence Major (or any other living writer) can match Nabokov's verbal dexterity and sinister architectonics. Those books have been written; there's no need to write them again. The question, rather, is whether Clarence Major brings a meaning of his own to the game, with his own emotional force. How is it fitting how is it urgent, for such a fiction to be written by an African American?

Let Mason speak; he's dying to: "I needn't tell you I'm not the Invisible Man, yet race - or its absence - remains part of my identity . . ." (64). So, too, is race (or its absence) part of the identity of modem art in general and of Cubism in particular. That's the connection (not a forced one, I hope) animating the novel the link between all the themes: tribal/modern; African American/citizen of the world, flesh-and-blood writer/fictional character. Like a shred of something real (a scrap of newspaper, say) inserted into the unreal, impossible space of a Cubist collage, Mason is "a weird example of Art" (66) - "primitive," contradictory, on the loose in the modern (European) world but destined to wind up in Liberia behind a tribal mask.

He is trying to take the place of C.M., who in turn seems to want to take the place of Claude McKay - "a forgotten Jamaican writer," as a sneering character puts it, who thought of himself as international" (22). Can Mason become international? In Florence, "he look[s] into the facade of the city: workers in stone had made it a towering monument to something he reluctantly understood" (135-36). He pays that something his respects, wandering through the Uffizi Gallery and the Medici Chapel kneeling in front of Dante's house. But win European culture respect him back? In Athens, at the National Museum, he tries to elicit a sign of recognition from a Cycladic figure:" From her stem place as mother goddess and model for modern sculpture she refused to respond. Mason was unworthy? Insulted he rushed on. Goddess Hygieia? She would not heal him" (153-54).

And so it goes. Europe gives Mason the come-on and then the get-lost; but Africa proves to be no more comfortable for him. "|Welcome home, Brother,'" someone says in Ghana. Mason responds with "But did Mason feel at home? How black was Blackface Hermes" (182)? We find out at the end of the novel. Mason discovers, despite his earlier protestations, that he is the Invisible Man - or someone awfully damn close.

So far, I've talked about Mason as if he were exclusively a double for Clarence Major. But he also bears traces of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, of Richard Wright's Cross Damon in The Outsider, of Herman Melville's Confidence Man, even of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. He is a figure drawn from life but also from art. He is shifting and multiple. In short, he really is like a work of Cubism.

Though Cezanne may indeed have wanted to transform the chaos of experience into an art that was stable and monumental the Cubists wanted to transform unstable experience into unstable art. In Analytic Cubism, the highlights and shadows are blatantly contradictory; Picasso and Braque make light fall on objects in impossible ways. The space is an insoluble puzzle. You can rarely be sure that a plane is in front of another plane, rather than behind it; the background might be the foreground, and vice versa. Sometimes a patch of brushwork will seem to describe an object; but at other times, the brushwork will go off on its own, independent of any hint of an object. There's no consistency. You might say that an Analytic Cubist picture mimics experience, evoking the subject as if through memories and fleeting glances. Me reality of a Cubist picture, Picasso said, is Mm the reality of a whiff of perfume - it's nowhere in particular but everywhere at once, surrounding you.) But the subject being evoked is not just Picasso's experience of this arrangement of other, or of that lover. The experience also encompasses other still lifes and other portraits, as they have been painted by everyone from Velazquez and Rembrandt to Corot and Cezanne.

By this point, I should not have to spell out the similarities between such paintings and My Amputations - a book made up of jagged, discontinuous, paradoxical fragments, which evoke or suggest (but never flat-out represent) someone who is both a figure drawn from life and a recollection of other fictional characters. Nor should I have to go into much detail when I note that Synthetic Cubist collages make use of all sorts of homely materials culled from popular culture - materials as homely as the detective stones and spy stories and pornmovie couplings that get glued into My Amputations. The connections are there", for readers who want to find them. What matters is the experience of reading - that, and the character who is revealed to us in the book, as if we were meeting him face to face.

On the cover of My Amputations is a self-portrait by Clarence Major - not Cubist, but unmistakably modern all the same. The figure stands front-and-center in the sheet, facing outward, in a pose that's unusual for self-portraits. (Why is it unusual? Because it's an awkward way to work. You're almost guaranteed to come up with an expression of unease.) The mouth is pouting and seems to frown. The brow is furrowed. The almond-shaped eyes stare straight ahead - making you, as the viewer, acutely aware that you're in the mirror's place.

Is this figure copying his image from the mirror? Or does he see himself when he looks at you? Is be drawing the self-portrait you're now studying? Or is some other image taking shape on that unwieldy sheet of paper he's cradling in his arm? You can't tell - any more than you can tell whether the rectangle over his right shoulder is a painting hanging on the wall or a window opening onto a scene beyond. The left hand, supporting the sheet of paper, seems isolated against that white field. Cut off from its relationship with the rest of the body, the hand might be signaling - through the meaning of its gesture is unreadable. As for the other hand, you can't see it at all. Maybe it's at work behind that white expanse. Then again, maybe it's been amputated.

Klawana, Stuart. Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago: An Informal History. Chicago: Dept. of Public Information, Art Institute of Chicago, n.d. Major, Clarence. My Amputations. New York: Fiction Collective, 1986. Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. Rev. ed. New York: Praiger, 1968. Rimbaud, Arthur. Poesies Completes. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Rosenblum, Robert. Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Abrams, 1976. Rubin, William, ed. "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Moedern. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

Note

(1.) Personal translation of Rimbaud 82.