Rather than being deceived, the eye is puzzled;
instead of seeing objects in space, it sees nothing more than -- a picture.

Through 1911 and 1912, as the Cubist facet-plane's tendency to adhere to the literal surface became harder and harder to deny, the task of keeping the surface at arm's length fell all the more to eye-undeceiving contrivances.
To reinforce, and sometimes to replace, the simulated typography, Braque and Picasso began to mix sand and other foreign substances with their paint;
the granular texture thus created likewise called attention to the reality of the surface and was effective over much larger areas.
In certain other pictures, however, Braque began to paint areas in exact simulation of wood graining or marbleizing.
These areas, by virtue of their abrupt density of pattern, stated the literal surface with such new and superior force that the resulting contrast drove the simulated printing into a depth from which it could be rescued -- and set to shuttling again -- only by conventional perspective;
that is, by being placed in such relation to the forms depicted within the illusion that these forms left no room for the typography except near the surface.

The accumulation of such devices, however, soon had the effect of telescoping, even while separating, surface and depth.
The process of flattening seemed inexorable, and it became necessary to emphasize the surface still further in order to prevent it from fusing with the illusion.
It was for this reason, and no other that I can see, that in September 1912, Braque took the radical and revolutionary step of pasting actual pieces of imitation-woodgrain wallpaper to a drawing on paper, instead of trying to simulate its texture in paint.
Picasso says that he himself had already made his first collage toward the end of 1911, when he glued a piece of imitation-caning oilcloth to a painting on canvas.
It is true that his first collage looks more Analytical than Braque's, which would confirm the date he assigns it.
But it is also true that Braque was the consistent pioneer in the use of simulated textures as well as of typography;
and moreover, he had already begun to broaden and simplify the facet-planes of Analytical Cubism as far back as the end of 1910.

When we examine what each master says was his first collage we see that much the same thing happens in each.
(It makes no real difference that Braque's collage is on paper and eked out in charcoal, while Picasso's is on canvas and eked out in oil.
) By its greater corporeal presence and its greater extraneousness, the affixed paper or cloth serves for a seeming moment to push everything else into a more vivid idea of depth than the simulated printing or simulated textures had ever done.
But here again, the surface-declaring device both overshoots and falls short of its aim.
For the illusion of depth created by the contrast between the affixed material and everything else gives way immediately to an illusion of forms in bas-relief, which gives way in turn, and with equal immediacy, to an illusion that seems to contain both -- or neither.

Because of the size of the areas it covers, the pasted paper establishes undepicted flatness bodily, as more than an indication or sign.
Literal flatness now tends to assert itself as the main event of the picture, and the device boomerangs: the illusion of depth is rendered even more precarious than before.
Instead of isolating the literal flatness by specifying and circumscribing it, the pasted paper or cloth releases and spreads it, and the artist seems to have nothing left but this undepicted flatness with which to finish as well as start his picture.
The actual surface becomes both ground and background, and it turns out -- suddenly and paradoxically -- that the only place left for a three-dimensional illusion is in front of, upon, the surface.
In their very first collages, Braque and Picasso draw or paint over and on the affixed paper or cloth, so that certain of the principal features of their subjects as depicted seem to thrust out into real, bas-relief space -- or to be about to do so -- while the rest of the subject remains imbedded in, or flat upon, the surface.
And the surface is driven back, in its very surfaceness, only by this contrast.

In the upper center of Braque's first collage, Fruit Dish (in Douglas Cooper's collection), a bunch of grapes is rendered with such conventionally vivid sculptural effect as to lift it practically off the picture plane.
The trompe-l'oeil illusion here is no longer enclosed between parallel flatnesses, but seems to thrust through the surface of the drawing paper and establish depth on top of it.
Yet the violent immediacy of the wallpaper strips pasted to the paper, and the only lesser immediacy of block capitals that simulate window lettering, manage somehow to push the grape cluster back into place on the picture plane so that it does not "jump".
At the same time, the wallpaper strips themselves seem to be pushed into depth by the lines and patches of shading charcoaled upon them, and by their placing in relation to the block capitals;
and these capitals seem in turn to be pushed back by their placing, and by contrast with the corporeality of the woodgraining.
Thus every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place in relative depth with every other part and plane;
and it is as if the only stable relation left among the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one that each has with the surface.
And the same thing, more or less, can be said of the contents of Picasso's first collage.

In later collages of both masters, a variety of extraneous materials are used, sometimes in the same work, and almost always in conjunction with every other eye-deceiving and eye-undeceiving device they can think of.
The area adjacent to one edge of a piece of affixed material -- or simply of a painted-in form -- will be shaded to pry that edge away from the surface, while something will be drawn, painted or even pasted over another part of the same shape to drive it back into depth.
Planes defined as parallel to the surface also cut through it into real space, and a depth is suggested optically which is greater than that established pictorially.
All this expands the oscillation between surface and depth so as to encompass fictive space in front of the surface as well as behind it.
Flatness may now monopolize everything, but it is a flatness become so ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself -- at least an optical if not, properly speaking, a pictorial illusion.
Depicted, Cubist flatness is now almost completely assimilated to the literal, undepicted kind, but at the same time it reacts upon and largely transforms the undepicted kind -- and it does so, moreover, without depriving the latter of its literalness;
rather, it underpins and reinforces that literalness, re-creates it.

Out of this re-created literalness, the Cubist subject reemerged.
For it had turned out, by a further paradox of Cubism, that the means to an illusion of depth and plasticity had now become widely divergent from the means of representation or imaging.
In the Analytical phase of their Cubism, Braque and Picasso had not only had to minimize three-dimensionality simply in order to preserve it;
they had also had to generalize it -- to the point, finally, where the illusion of depth and relief became abstracted from specific three-dimensional entities and was rendered largely as the illusion of depth and relief as such: as a disembodied attribute and expropriated property detached from everything not itself.
In order to be saved, plasticity had had to be isolated;
and as the aspect of the subject was transposed into those clusters of more or less interchangeable and contour-obliterating facet-planes by which plasticity was isolated under the Cubist method, the subject itself became largely unrecognizable.
Cubism, in its 1911-1912 phase (which the French, with justice, call "hermetic") was on the verge of abstract art.

It was then that Picasso and Braque were confronted with a unique dilemma: they had to choose between illusion and representation.
If they opted for illusion, it could only be illusion per se -- an illusion of depth, and of relief, so general and abstracted as to exclude the representation of individual objects.
If, on the other hand, they opted for representation, it had to be representation per se -- representation as image pure and simple, without connotations (at least, without more than schematic ones) of the three-dimensional space in which the objects represented originally existed.
It was the collage that made the terms of this dilemma clear: the representational could be restored and preserved only on the flat and literal surface now that illusion and representation had become, for the first time, mutually exclusive alternatives.

In the end, Picasso and Braque plumped for the representational, and it would seem they did so deliberately.
(This provides whatever real justification there is for the talk about "reality".
) But the inner, formal logic of Cubism, as it worked itself out through the collage, had just as much to do with shaping their decision.
When the smaller facet-planes of Analytical Cubism were placed upon or juxtaposed with the large, dense shapes formed by the affixed materials of the collage, they had to coalesce -- become "synthesized" -- into larger planar shapes themselves simply in order to maintain the integrity of the picture plane.
Left in their previous atom-like smallness, they would have cut away too abruptly into depth;
and the broad, opaque shapes of pasted paper would have been isolated in such a way as to make them jump out of plane.
Large planes juxtaposed with other large planes tend to assert themselves as independent shapes, and to the extent that they are flat, they also assert themselves as silhouettes;
and independent silhouettes are apt to coincide with the recognizable contours of the subject from which a picture starts (if it does start from a subject).
It was because of this chain-reaction as much as for any other reason -- that is, because of the growing independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape -- that the identity of depicted objects, or at least parts of them, re-emerged in Braque's and Picasso's papiers colles and continued to remain more conspicuous there -- but only as flattened silhouettes -- than in any of their paintings done wholly in oil before the end of 1913.

Analytical Cubism came to an end in the collage, but not conclusively;
nor did Synthetic Cubism fully begin there.
Only when the collage had been exhaustively translated into oil, and transformed by this translation, did Cubism become an affair of positive color and flat, interlocking silhouettes whose legibility and placement created allusions to, if not the illusion of, unmistakable three-dimensional identities.

Synthetic Cubism began with Picasso alone, late in 1913 or early in 1914;
this was the point at which he finally took the lead in Cubist innovation away from Braque, never again to relinquish it.
But even before that, Picasso had glimpsed and entered, for a moment, a certain revolutionary path in which no one had preceded him.
It was as though, in that instant, he had felt the flatness of collage as too constricting and had suddenly tried to escape all the way back -- or forward -- to literal three-dimensionality.
This he did by using utterly literal means to carry the forward push of the collage (and of Cubism in general) literally into the literal space in front of the picture plane.

Some time in 1912, Picasso cut out and folded a piece of paper in the shape of a guitar;
to this he glued and fitted other pieces of paper and four taut strings, thus creating a sequence of flat surfaces in real and sculptural space to which there clung only the vestige of a picture plane.
The affixed elements of collage were extruded, as it were, and cut off from the literal pictorial surface to form a bas-relief.