Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

T. J. Clark's Picasso

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8365.12119

1467-8365

Christopher Green,

Historical Art and Architecture Studies

Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by T. J. Clark, Washington, DC and Princeton, NJ: National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 2013, 329 pp., 172 col. and 41 b. & w. illus., $45.00 T. J. Clark is a great figure, and, like all monsters of the intelligentsia, he is vulnerable to the rivalrous ambition of the emergent young and to the jealous carping of the established. I am from his generation, but hope to avoid such carping. For me, Clark is a figure who opened up real alternatives to the connoisseurial formalism that dominated Anglo-American art-historical writing in the 1960s and 1970s; someone to whom I am deeply indebted. Picasso and Truth retains the format of the lectures on which it is based. Its voice is that of the charismatic lecturer, where the ‘I’ is strong and the ‘we’ is complicit, assuming we are there as audience to go along with him; in response, the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ have to be strong too. As always, Clark stands apart. He refuses to write as merely another contributor to the ongoing Picasso debates. Explicitly this is done as a refusal of ‘most of the writing on Picasso’, which he scorns for its failure to do justice to ‘the structure and substance’ of the artist's work (4–5). Not all writing on the artist, however, can be dismissed as ‘celebrity literature’ obsessed with biography. Can one say that of the writing on Picasso of Rosalind Krauss or Yve-Alain Bois or Pepe Karmel, or Elizabeth Cowling, or even, to go back deep into the last century, John Golding?1 I think Clark would agree not; it is the need to stand apart that makes it imperative for him to make so pungent a dismissal of the Picasso literature. What he does not mention is that he is standing apart most significantly from the ways of thinking especially about Picasso's cubism that have taken over debate since Krauss's essay ‘In the name of Picasso’ in 1986; the semiological route, which has replaced biography and formalism with language. In this, the book is a welcome sequel to his riveting but sometimes infuriating chapter on ‘Cubism and collectivity’ in Farewell to an Idea.2 Clark's book is not just about Picasso; it is about Picasso and ‘Truth’. It has transcendent ambitions. What ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ is for him, however, can be considered only after sketching his approach to Picasso's work. The emphasis on its ‘structure and substance’ is fundamental. Everything in the book is generated by Clark standing in front of the paintings he chooses to concentrate on; and he has stood in front of each of them, including the darkly disquieting Painter and Model of 1927 now far away from most Western gazes in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (plate 1). He is absolutely scrupulous about giving us the actual size of almost every work he discusses, however small, and some of his most compelling passages come when scale as a factor is at issue in his and our interaction with a work. This is most memorably so in his response to the height of the enormous canvas of Guernica (1937) that reaches above any other viewer, whether the diminutive Picasso himself or the rather taller Clark (272–3). So intensely does he try to re-live in words his response to the presence of the work that there are many instances where the work itself starts asking questions of the viewer, as if it is a creature with doubts and needs. It is there that Rimbaud's ‘Je est un autre’, quoted by Picasso, is made most manifest: for Clark, Picasso's ‘autre’ is painting.3 Thus, the spot lit apertures that puncture the picture plane in the Tehran Painter and Model ask us, ‘What would painting be without transparency’? (159) And a ‘need’ all Picassos have, we are told, is for a ‘sense of containment’ (246).4 One point to stress is that Clark is not a formalist, even though there are echoes of Roger Fry's way of engaging his readers in his own experiment in looking; his subject is not merely pictorial relationships, it is the lived experience generated by each work. He is a phenomenological writer, a successor to Leo Steinberg on cubism, not to the Greenbergian formalism of William Rubin.5 The other driver behind Clark's response to the work has nothing to do with Steinberg; it is a bitter sense of disappointment in the face of a twentieth century that scarred Europe with horrors, in a world whose logic produced the bombing of civilians and now the globalized ‘War on Terror’, and in which Communism became Stalinism; a world which, with the shouting down of socialism, has been taken over by an acquiescent technocratic neo-liberalism. He sees in Picasso's work the face of a ‘worldview’ that rejects progress and so stands aside from modernity understood in any simple way: a worldview that is actually retrogressive, still in touch with the bourgeois nineteenth century. As such, for him it is a response to the life-denying realities of the twentieth century with which he can connect.6 Both these drivers behind his writing come together in what for him is Picasso's ‘Truth’. It is a ‘Truth’ that is not fundamentally disconnected from what ‘Truth’ was to Courbet or Manet in the nineteenth century. His philosopher-guides for taking on the topic of ‘Truth’ are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche, not an obviously compatible pair. He uses Wittgenstein to focus attention in Picasso on what he sees as essential to Picasso's Truth: ‘substance’ and ‘structure’.7 He uses Nietzsche, above all the Nietzsche of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), to sustain his distaste for the self-denial of the ascetic, and to set up ‘Untruth’ as the necessary counterpart of ‘Truth’.8 For him, Picasso's Truth, like Wittgenstein on ‘substance’, requires exactitude in finding painting's ways of giving us things and bodies as presences we can hold on to. Just as Truth for Manet was ‘the truth of seeing’, so for Picasso as the original cubist, Truth was to be searched for by paying ‘comprehensive attention to the form of the world in the eye’ (149–50). Picasso's cubist truth was not, however, Manet's; it was ‘proximity’, the ‘touchable, usable, possessable, playable’ (150). The affective force of the work Clark focuses on from The Three Dancers (1925) onwards is intensified whenever proximity is denied by the lack of a clear sense of location: the ‘Untruth’ of ‘un-Space or non-Space’.9 The book ends on the brink of the Second World War, when Bretonian surrealism and the proto-anti-humanism of figures like Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris have had time to soak into Picasso's consciousness, but it is cubism that is Clark's key to re-thinking the Truth of Picasso's work through to Guernica. The coming together of his notion of Picasso's Truth and cubism is where I take issue most strongly with him. As an experiment in looking which brings Picasso together with a large view of twentieth-century history, Clark the lecturer continually asks us (his audience) whether we agree. What follows is where one of his audience does not. As I noted, Clark insists Picasso's paintings within and beyond cubism ‘need’ a ‘sense of containment’. They need it because the exactitude (conviction) with which they can give us the substance and structure of things and bodies depends on giving us pictorially a space that contains them; they need to keep inside, more particularly, to keep inside the room. And the room in cubist painting is the bohemian remains of the bourgeois domestic interior in which all can be touched and all possessed. The little picture in the Phillips Collection in Washington, The Blue Room of late 1901, becomes a kind of hinge between painting that sustains a nineteenth-century worldview and that holding to a twentieth-century one (26–7). The huge 1924 Mandolin and Guitar in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where we are still in a room but where the blue sky of an open window intrudes from outside, hints at what will happen with the monsters of the late 1920s and ultimately with Guernica. It exposes the cubist bohemia as a ‘last hurrah’ for the bourgeois nineteenth century before monsters and death enter (74–9). Space is the key issue for Clark: whether we are inside the room, whether the outside intrudes, what the coming together of inside and outside can do to the things and bodies in the spaces Picasso paints. In the case of the Guggenheim still life, he prefers the title it was given in 1932, Nature-morte devant une fenêtre, to the object-centred translation Mandolin and Guitar on a Table (66). In the case of The Three Dancers he prefers the title it was given when it was illustrated in La Révolution Surréáliste, which was Jeune filles dansant devant une fenêtre.10 The ‘devant une fenêtre’ in both titles allow what is behind, outside the window, to put at issue the proximity of what is in front. The first disagreement I have chosen to highlight here follows from the strong inference throughout the book that Picasso's cubism as Clark responds to it is to be thought of as cubism altogether, and that essentially cubism is homogeneous. There are echoes of that nineteenth-century wish to find underlying laws and principles in Clark's extraction of substance, structure and room space as the essence not merely of Picasso's cubism but of cubism overall. Yet, if Picasso's cubist work is followed through in detail (leaving aside his various realisms), in his case certainly it is its heterogeneity that becomes insistent; his refusal of style as a frozen, static category. Clark brings the 1908 Bread and Fruit-Dish that is in Basel together with the 1924 Guggenheim still life and discovers a fundamental sameness, even though the differences shout to be seen.11 For contemporaries close to Picasso – D.-H. Kahnweiler and Juan Gris above all – those differences were what mattered.12 It was the openness and heterogeneity of cubist ‘style’ that made it so difficult for contemporaries to accept and so thrillingly full of possibility for artists responsive to its early development in Paris. Is Georges Braque, for whom landscape was the way into cubism, to be thought of as confined to room space before 1910, or Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1913–14 painting railway tracks and demolished buildings? When cubist open windows and the interaction of inside and outside space are thought of, is only Picasso's comparatively constrained opening of the window relevant, where no place outside enters in, only sky? Juan Gris's windows open onto places – the Place Ravignan, the Canigou mountain seen from Céret, the view from Bandol across the bay.13 Diego Rivera imagined a Cubist still life, Zapatista Landscape, up in the thin air of Mexico City.14 Is Picasso's 1917 The Columbus Monument, painted outside on the balcony of Olga Koklova's room in the Pensión Ranzini, to be thought of as merely an aberration?15 Are these all exceptions that prove the rule (I ask Clark from the audience) or is, rather, his room space as defining principle of cubism simply too confining to help think through a response to them on its terms? Where Truth and cubism as room space are concerned, there are other questions to ask our lecturer. The one I choose here is raised in Lecture 4 where Clark acknowledges the theatricality of the tabletop in the 1924 Guggenheim still life and the anthropomorphism of the objects that perform on it. Does not theatricality become repeatedly a characteristic of Picasso's cubist spaces after his involvement with Diaghilev in 1917? And is Truth in such a space – a space in which deception is a given – to be thought of in the same way as Truth in a space where people and things are everyday realities? A take on Nietzsche, more in line with Francis Picabia, where Truth is always subverted, even ridiculed, threatens to come to the fore. The question, however, that most persistently demands an answer is one that does not merely introduce exceptions and complications but goes to the root of Clark's way of looking at Picasso. The central role Clark gives to room space comes of his decision, where cubism is concerned, to give primacy to space.16 So the question is: does space come first in Picasso from cubism to Guernica? If one thinks about perception in the classically phenomenological terms set out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty less than a decade after Guernica, yes, it is clear that we cannot grasp a world in which we can live and move unless what is in it is situated in a space where there is an up and a down.17 But perception gives us things and bodies that we know as things and bodies. With recognition they come into being, inseparable from their spaces. Neither they nor space comes first. Once they are ‘seen’, it is surely they at least as much as their ‘reaching out to space’ that fix our attention.18 Picasso's sketchbooks show him very rarely working to make spaces first, and almost always working with figures and groupings of objects in their spaces, very much as Clark argues with substance and structure in mind, but not as stable essences.19 He works to see them remade by his ‘autre’, painting, each time he tries. Much follows once the threshold of recognition is crossed (which can happen slowly or instantly),20 and much of the work Picasso produced between 1910 and the mid-1920s is to do with testing out that threshold and opening up multiple possible recognitions, so that one thing is increasingly often another – those objects (or are they actors?) on the table in the Guggenheim still life come persistently to mind. So there is a final question: is space in Picasso the surest lead we have from which to intuit a worldview from the work? And supplementary to that, if Picasso's work is retrogressive, is its retrogression to be isolated in the bohemian remnants of the bourgeois domestic interior? In Lectures 5 and 6, the ‘monsters’ Clark finds in Picasso's space and ‘non-Space’ have begun to come to the fore in such a way that Clark, struck by the sculptural presence of Picasso's monsters and by the monstrous in the infantile self-image, can seem to raise that question himself. Despite these questions, Picasso and Truth demands to be read. It will not please those exclusively committed to building specific social and political contexts around modernism (one of the outcomes of Clark's early work). Driven as it is, however, by decades of real engagement in the biggest historical questions, and by a rare ability to mould prose to exploratory spectatorship, it mounts a challenge that anyone seriously looking at cubism and Picasso again will have to meet.