{"id":11406,"date":"2014-01-14T12:59:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T16:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11406"},"modified":"2014-01-14T12:59:42","modified_gmt":"2014-01-14T16:59:42","slug":"t-j-clarks-picasso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/t-j-clarks-picasso\/","title":{"rendered":"T.J. Clark’s Picasso"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Guernica\"<\/a>From: Retort \/\u00a0Via: PB<\/p>\n

[John Banville,\u00a0Irish master stylist and crusader against vivisection, reviews TJ Clark<\/a>\u2018s\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica<\/strong><\/a> (Princeton UP, 2013).\u00a0Banville grasps why this book should be read alongside Franco [Moretti]\u2019s <\/i>The Bourgeois<\/strong><\/a> (Verso, 2013). Between them they anatomize the quietus of the class and its comforts \u2013 the burgers and Bohemians \u2013 who made the 19th century their home.<\/i> IB]<\/p>\n

A True Picture of Picasso<\/b><\/h2>\n

John Banville
\n<\/strong><\/em>Irish Times\u00a0<\/i>4. i. 14<\/p>\n

At the heart of this wonderful book there is a telling passage in which the author quotes Picasso remarking to a friend that he preferred his painting The Three Dancers<\/i> of 1925 to the later and more publicly ambitious Guernica<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt [the Dancers]<\/i> was painted as a picture, without ulterior motive,\u201d Picasso said. Clark finds this puzzling, and wonders if the painter meant that \u201cthe work happened essentially without him\u201d, and calls to his aid Rimbaud on alienation from the self. Surely, however, the matter is simple. The Three Dancers<\/i> is a fearsome, indeed a savage, work, but it is pure painting; Guernica<\/i>, for all its violence and power, was intended as a political statement as well as a work of art, and for that reason it is, essentially, kitsch.<\/p>\n

One does not lightly lay such a charge against one of the modern world\u2019s most revered cultural artefacts. However, artists of Picasso\u2019s type, few though they be, are always in danger of imagining that because they have achieved critical success and earned much money and fame, they must have profound things to say about the public life of their times. The inevitable result is either fatuity or bombast, or both. Georges Braque, co-deliverer with Picasso of the coup de gr\u00e2ce to traditional European painting, summed up the matter when he was asked in old age for his opinion of his friend and said, \u201cPablo? Oh, Pablo used to be a good painter; now he\u2019s just a genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is spiteful and unfair, of course, but there is a certain truth to it as well. As the critic Cyril Connolly said, the only business of the artist is to make masterpieces. Putting one\u2019s genius \u2013 whatever that may be \u2013 at the service of Stalin, for instance, as Picasso did in his bumbling way, is always going to be a mistake, to say the least.<\/p>\n

TJ Clark is that odd combination, a Marxist and a Nietzschean; he is also a great critic. His love for and understanding of Picasso\u2019s work is evident in every line of this book, which is based on the text of the Mellon Lectures delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He is an incomparably close reader of paintings, and the acuity of his thought, allied to a sweeping breadth of reference, makes him the ideal interrogator of Picasso and his achievement.<\/p>\n

Clark opens his introduction with a blistering assault on \u201cthe abominable character of most writing on [Picasso],\u201d its \u201cprurience, its pedantry,\u201d and the \u201cwild swings\u201d it makes between \u201cfawning adulation and false refusal-to-be-impressed\u201d. No doubt John Richardson, author of an ongoing, multi-volume biography of Picasso, felt his ears burning when Clark took the podium in Washington and spoke those words. Yet even the most assiduous student of Picasso\u2019s art must surely crave the odd helping of cakes and ale.<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s thesis in these wide-ranging lectures is clearly stated in his introduction. The turn of the twentieth century, he contends, saw \u201cthe end of something called bourgeois society\u201d. We might expect a left-wing critic to mark and approve the evidence of this closure in the work of an iconoclastic and radical artist. Clark insists, however, that Picasso \u201cprofoundly belonged, for all his living as a young man on the margins of society, to the nineteenth-century civilization in which he was brought up\u201d. Picasso\u2019s lifelong harking back to that vanished world, which he himself had worked so tirelessly to destroy, is apparent, according to Clark, in the importance he attaches to the room<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot avoid the conviction that somewhere at the heart of Picasso\u2019s understanding of life . . . lay an unshakeable commitment to the space of a small or middle-sized room and the little possessions laid out on its table. His world was of property arranged in an interior: maybe erotic property . . . but always with bodies imagined in terms that equate them with, or transpose them into, familiar instruments and treasures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Profound reading
\n<\/b>This may seem a simple, even a homely, insight, nevertheless it allows of a profound reading of Picasso\u2019s aesthetic and opens up a broad critical approach to his paintings, certainly in the period covered by these lectures. That period is only about half of the artist\u2019s working life; much more was to come, especially the various serie sof etchings, such as the Vollard Suite, which some, including this reviewer, consider to be among his finest achievements.<\/p>\n

In the second lecture, Room<\/i>, Clark offers a reading of Cubism, its sources and aims, that to many will seem paradoxical. The movement came, he says, out of Bohemia, and was, indeed: \u201cBohemia\u2019s last hurrah, its summa; and in this last flaring it laid out before us \u2013 lovingly, ironically \u2013 the claim that the life of art had made to the pleasures of the middle-class [that is, the nineteenth] century. The pleasures, the decencies, the self-possession \u2013 above all, the sense of being fully and solely a body in a material world, and of this as the form of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cubism, therefore, is at once laying waste to a world \u2013 the nineteenth-century bourgeois world \u2013 and at the same time celebrating it and mourning its passing. The result is \u201cthis proximity, this tactility, this coziness<\/i>\u201d, which is \u201cthe condition of endless mad inventiveness\u201d. Indeed, one of the notable features of Clark\u2019s book is the pleasure it takes in the gaiety, energy and abundance of the world according to the Cubists. This certainly is a welcome and refreshing change from the usual po-faced treatment of the subject. Here is one critic who never loses sight of the fact that what art, even the darkest art, offers us first and foremost is delight.<\/p>\n

But then there is Nietzsche, somewhat aided and abetted by Wittgenstein \u2013 yes, we are in the high places, here. Clark fixes on a typically overwrought, knotty passage from Nietzsche\u2019s Genealogy of Morals<\/i> in which the philosopher mocks \u201cthese hard, strict, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists\u201d \u2013 some may think this a fair description of the genus to which Nietzsche himself belonged \u2013 who imagine they have freed themselves from the shackles of \u201cthe ascetic ideal\u201d but who \u201care by no means free spirits, for they still believe in truth\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is at this point that a certain confusion seems to enter into Clark\u2019s argument. Nietzsche says that by becoming conscious of it we moderns have made a problem of the \u201cwill to truth\u201d, and \u201cit is from the will to truth\u2019s becoming conscious of itself that from now on . . . morality will gradually perish . . .\u201d Clark seems to read these admittedly opaque passages as some kind of denial of truth itself. He quotes a note he made when he first read the Genealogy<\/i>: \u201cSo what will Art be . . . without a test of truth for its findings, its assertions; without even a will to truth?\u201d But surely Nietzsche is saying the opposite, that art \u2013 and, not incidentally, morality \u2013 will be challenged not by a withering away of truth but precisely by our having become conscious of the will to truth in ourselves and thereby making a problem of it?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the point is not so important as it seems. Clark has a profound and sympathetic understanding of art, yet he wants the artist, despite his \u201cblithe self-absorption\u201d, to be a force in the world of commonplace experience and action, so that out of his work \u201ccan come, in times of catastrophe, [one might ask, when has there been a time that was not a time of catastrophe?] the fullest recognition of what catastrophe is \u2013 how it enters and structures everyday life.\u201d Hence Guernica<\/i>. The picture, Clark contends, \u201cmakes its giant size . . . work to confirm a wholly earthbound, and essentially modest, view of life.\u201d Picasso does this by domesticating the picture\u2019s gigantism; we are back in the room<\/i>. Tracing the making of Guernica<\/i> through a series of photographs taken of it by Picasso\u2019s lover Dora Maar at various stages of its execution, Clark in his utterly fascinating final lecture shows how the artist returned inexorably to the necessary confines of a certain space.<\/p>\n

At first the action of Guernica<\/i> seems intended to take place outdoors, but as the work progresses the scene, such as it is, gradually retreats indoors, a process which is completed, only hours before the completion of the painting, when Picasso grounds his screaming women and tormented beasts on, of all things, a tiled floor, thus \u201cmaking an imaginatively habitable three dimensions, one having a specific character, offering itself as a surrounding whose shape and extent we can enter into. In Picasso\u2019s case, \u2018imaginatively habitable\u2019 equals making an interior of sorts.\u2019<\/p>\n

Does this grounding of the picture neutralise the high rhetoric of its political intentions? Does it, in other words, authenticate it as a work of art and banish the element of kitsch? Each viewer will have to decide that question for himself or herself; in doing so, there could be no sounder counsel and guide than Picasso and Truth<\/i>. And whatever the answer you arrive at, be assured that after reading this book you will not look at Picasso\u2019s paintings, not just Guernica<\/i> but all his paintings, in quite the same way ever again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: Retort \/\u00a0Via: PB [John Banville,\u00a0Irish master stylist and crusader against vivisection, reviews TJ Clark\u2018s\u00a0Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton UP, 2013).\u00a0Banville grasps why this book should be read alongside Franco [Moretti]\u2019s...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,36],"tags":[585,1470],"class_list":["post-11406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-criticism","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-t-j-clark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11406"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11446,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11406\/revisions\/11446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}