Early Cubism, Tactility, and Existential Spatiality

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to draw important parallels between the way in which configured pictorial practices of early Cubism interpreted the idea of tactile space and the phenomenological concept of existential spatiality. It is argued that in dispensing with the “illusion of perspectival space” and deconstructing geometrical perspective, several Cubist artists developed a position of multi-perspectival realism with respect to what remains ungraspable in the three-dimensional visual rendering of space. Tactile space is the main theme of early Cubist painting. Tactility remains concealed by linear perspective and three-dimensional space, and existentially primordial tactile space turns out to be the ungraspable which Cubist experiments has to disclose. At the same time, these artists succeeded in avoiding any kind of a reification of space as something that statically embraces what is situated in it. The paper is also preoccupied with Cubist “geometrical experimentation”. The claim is defended that it is precisely this experimentation that most essentially anticipates Heidegger’s analyses of the spatiality of the ready-to-hand and the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Parallels are also drawn with Merleau-Ponty’s spatiality of the perceiving-tactile body which was chiefly focused on the presupposition that the visibility attained through visual perception is imbued with invisibility stemming from the immediate tactility relating the perceiving body and the perceived entities – a presupposition shared by the early Cubists and the French phenomenologist.