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Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era. From Pablo Picasso's early The Blue Room to the later Guernica, eminent art historian T.J. Clark offers a striking reassessment of the artist's paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. Why was the space of a room so basic to Picasso's worldview? And what happened to his art when he began to feel that room-space become too confined--too little exposed to the catastrophes of the twentieth century? Clark explores the role of space and the interior, and the battle between intimacy and monstrosity, in Picasso's art. Based on the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, this lavishly illustrated volume remedies the biographical and idolatrous tendencies of most studies on Picasso, reasserting the structure and substance of the artist's work. With compelling insight, Clark focuses on three central works--the large-scale Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), The Three Dancers (1925), and The Painter and His Model (1927)--and explores Picasso's answer to Nietzsche's belief that the age-old commitment to truth was imploding in modern European culture. Masterful in its historical contextualization, Picasso and Truth rescues Picasso from the celebrity culture that trivializes his accomplishments and returns us to the tragic vision of his art--humane and appalling, nai?ve and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.… (plus d'informations)
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The great irony in this monumental and superlative effort of TJ Clark's is that Picasso was adamant his work should not be subject to multiple interpretations. "Only fools" would think that what he (and Braque) did was abstract. Instead, Picasso called it "exactitude". "There is no painting or drawing of mine that does not respond exactly to a view of the world." And yet, here we have a six part lecture examining the possibilities in interpreting Picasso, and defending premises and conclusions as if they were scientific theories, with all the attendant proofs. It's ironic that exactitude requires so much speculation. Picasso would not approve.
The book prints the 58th annual AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (2009). Clark has collected his lectures, fully illustrated with the works he examines. He reprints them as he talks about them, which makes flipping back and forth much less onerous. He zooms in to portions of paintings as needed. And his lectures are nicely divided and largely independent.
Clark seems to have lived to present these lectures. He made notes over decades. He is totally comfortable with his subject. He can say things like "I think the work of art is the product of calculations, but calculations often unknown by the artist himself," and it is completely believable. Or "Every age has the atheism it deserves" and you read on. Or "Cubism was the last of the nineteenth century's historical revivals," and you wonder. So the journey is both challenging and fascinating.
The six lectures are: Object (Blue Room, Composition) Room (Guitar and Mandolin) Window (Young Girls Dancing In Front of a Window) Monsters (Painter & His Model) Monument (Women by the sea) Mural (Guernica)
There is an entire lecture on the painting, Painter and His Model (1927), where Clark demonstrates unfathomable effort and research. He examines every element of the painting; even its dimensions are significant. He relates it to philosophers and psychoanalysts, quotes Picasso's friends and acquaintances for clues, and poses endless possibilities, questions and charges regarding this one painting of a room with a painter and model. They are typically cubistically grotesque, which leads Clark into all kinds of theorizing about sexuality and violence. The painting is overlain by two large yellow transparent cubist shapes that cause him no end of almost frustrated speculation. Clark goes on about them for pages, regarding their color, shape, placement and raison d'etre. The amount of thought and consideration that went into this analysis is staggering. It's intimidating when I consider that I spend less than two minutes in front of masterpieces in museums.
But when I look at Painter and His Model I see a room which at some point earlier had been occupied by a painter and a model. That's why they alone are simply black outlines (including the easel, canvas and palette). They're not there now. The yellow shapes are our eyes, our glasses, allowing us to see the empty room occupied in the past. This is a cinematic flashback scene. Really simple to understand. It's a perfect example of the exactitude Picasso described. To me.
I also found the Guernica discussion misleading. Picasso clearly put the disaster indoors. You can see the joint where the walls meet the ceiling, and there is a ceiling fixture with a bare bulb shining. It says Guernica happened in private and no one knew about it. It was denied. It also says the inhabitants were trapped there. Clark prefers to deny what he sees. He explains it as a conundrum of Cubism, with exterior being unacceptable, with the ceiling also being rooftop, and several other such theories. But it is what Picasso painted.
I did not know that Picasso denied viewers of his work any interpretation. But now that I do know, it suddenly became clear to me that his work is directly related to the other great innovative art of the day - atonal classical music. Mahler, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg - all created music for musicians, as firmly, rigidly and arrogantly as classical music could be. They didn't write it for the public. They didn't want interpretation; they made statements. (See my review of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century)
Picasso was the visual counterpart of modern classical. He expressed exactly the same arrogance in talking about his work. For all the self-declared exactitude of his art, the viewing public faced an infinite number of choices/interpretations, because the work didn't communicate clearly. Instead, Picasso stated it. So at that level, he failed. In a sense, this whole book examines that failure.
He was trying to find himself as a unique artist at a time when music was taking off into uncharted waters, and he caught that wave. When it proved less than he had hoped, he dropped it and moved on, consolidating his newfound trademarked style. For all of Clark's attempts to associate him with the Germanic philosophers of the day - Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche - I think Picasso probably related more to trailblazing musical artists. So I disagree that "Cubism was the last of the nineteenth century's historical revivals." It was an experiment, a land grab, and a power play.
Clark's own choice of words - arrogance, belligerence, monsters, absolute, infantile - points to this conclusion, but he sticks with his multi-faceted, patchwork approach to Picasso, leaving nothing answered decisively. Which is fine, valid, and enlightening.
Clearly, I am no art historian. Some semi-profound expert must have come to this same conclusion 80 years ago - and was probably debunked 79 years ago. But it seems clear to me, and answers a lifetime of questions. And it does not detract one daub from my thrill of reading this book. I thank TJ Clark for forcing me to think it through.
In the end, Picasso and Truth is not so much a trip into the extraordinary mind of Picasso as discovering the extraordinary mind of TJ Clark. Definitely worth the trip.
Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era. From Pablo Picasso's early The Blue Room to the later Guernica, eminent art historian T.J. Clark offers a striking reassessment of the artist's paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. Why was the space of a room so basic to Picasso's worldview? And what happened to his art when he began to feel that room-space become too confined--too little exposed to the catastrophes of the twentieth century? Clark explores the role of space and the interior, and the battle between intimacy and monstrosity, in Picasso's art. Based on the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, this lavishly illustrated volume remedies the biographical and idolatrous tendencies of most studies on Picasso, reasserting the structure and substance of the artist's work. With compelling insight, Clark focuses on three central works--the large-scale Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), The Three Dancers (1925), and The Painter and His Model (1927)--and explores Picasso's answer to Nietzsche's belief that the age-old commitment to truth was imploding in modern European culture. Masterful in its historical contextualization, Picasso and Truth rescues Picasso from the celebrity culture that trivializes his accomplishments and returns us to the tragic vision of his art--humane and appalling, nai?ve and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.
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The book prints the 58th annual AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (2009). Clark has collected his lectures, fully illustrated with the works he examines. He reprints them as he talks about them, which makes flipping back and forth much less onerous. He zooms in to portions of paintings as needed. And his lectures are nicely divided and largely independent.
Clark seems to have lived to present these lectures. He made notes over decades. He is totally comfortable with his subject. He can say things like "I think the work of art is the product of calculations, but calculations often unknown by the artist himself," and it is completely believable. Or "Every age has the atheism it deserves" and you read on. Or "Cubism was the last of the nineteenth century's historical revivals," and you wonder. So the journey is both challenging and fascinating.
The six lectures are:
Object (Blue Room, Composition)
Room (Guitar and Mandolin)
Window (Young Girls Dancing In Front of a Window)
Monsters (Painter & His Model)
Monument (Women by the sea)
Mural (Guernica)
There is an entire lecture on the painting, Painter and His Model (1927), where Clark demonstrates unfathomable effort and research. He examines every element of the painting; even its dimensions are significant. He relates it to philosophers and psychoanalysts, quotes Picasso's friends and acquaintances for clues, and poses endless possibilities, questions and charges regarding this one painting of a room with a painter and model. They are typically cubistically grotesque, which leads Clark into all kinds of theorizing about sexuality and violence. The painting is overlain by two large yellow transparent cubist shapes that cause him no end of almost frustrated speculation. Clark goes on about them for pages, regarding their color, shape, placement and raison d'etre. The amount of thought and consideration that went into this analysis is staggering. It's intimidating when I consider that I spend less than two minutes in front of masterpieces in museums.
But when I look at Painter and His Model I see a room which at some point earlier had been occupied by a painter and a model. That's why they alone are simply black outlines (including the easel, canvas and palette). They're not there now. The yellow shapes are our eyes, our glasses, allowing us to see the empty room occupied in the past. This is a cinematic flashback scene. Really simple to understand. It's a perfect example of the exactitude Picasso described. To me.
I also found the Guernica discussion misleading. Picasso clearly put the disaster indoors. You can see the joint where the walls meet the ceiling, and there is a ceiling fixture with a bare bulb shining. It says Guernica happened in private and no one knew about it. It was denied. It also says the inhabitants were trapped there. Clark prefers to deny what he sees. He explains it as a conundrum of Cubism, with exterior being unacceptable, with the ceiling also being rooftop, and several other such theories. But it is what Picasso painted.
I did not know that Picasso denied viewers of his work any interpretation. But now that I do know, it suddenly became clear to me that his work is directly related to the other great innovative art of the day - atonal classical music. Mahler, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg - all created music for musicians, as firmly, rigidly and arrogantly as classical music could be. They didn't write it for the public. They didn't want interpretation; they made statements. (See my review of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century)
Picasso was the visual counterpart of modern classical. He expressed exactly the same arrogance in talking about his work. For all the self-declared exactitude of his art, the viewing public faced an infinite number of choices/interpretations, because the work didn't communicate clearly. Instead, Picasso stated it. So at that level, he failed. In a sense, this whole book examines that failure.
He was trying to find himself as a unique artist at a time when music was taking off into uncharted waters, and he caught that wave. When it proved less than he had hoped, he dropped it and moved on, consolidating his newfound trademarked style. For all of Clark's attempts to associate him with the Germanic philosophers of the day - Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche - I think Picasso probably related more to trailblazing musical artists. So I disagree that "Cubism was the last of the nineteenth century's historical revivals." It was an experiment, a land grab, and a power play.
Clark's own choice of words - arrogance, belligerence, monsters, absolute, infantile - points to this conclusion, but he sticks with his multi-faceted, patchwork approach to Picasso, leaving nothing answered decisively. Which is fine, valid, and enlightening.
Clearly, I am no art historian. Some semi-profound expert must have come to this same conclusion 80 years ago - and was probably debunked 79 years ago. But it seems clear to me, and answers a lifetime of questions. And it does not detract one daub from my thrill of reading this book. I thank TJ Clark for forcing me to think it through.
In the end, Picasso and Truth is not so much a trip into the extraordinary mind of Picasso as discovering the extraordinary mind of TJ Clark. Definitely worth the trip.
David Wineberg (