Picasso and Truth, T.J. Clark. The Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art

T.J. Clark; Picasso and Truth.

The Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art.

Gary Martin



In preparation for my visit to The Metropolitan Museum later this year to see the Lauder Cubist bequest, I have undertaken a study of cubism, building in the process a library of 15 or so books devoted exclusively to that subject, ranging from Kahnweiler to Karmel, and augmented by another 15 or so books already on my shelves ranging from Richardson to Arnheim. At the present time my Picasso library requires approximately five feet of shelf space.

My most recent acquisition is the book at hand, Mr. Clark’s Picasso and Truth. Some time back I had received notice from The National Gallery that these Mellon Lectures were available as audio lectures and after struggling with the first I gave them up as useless. In all of their audio lectures there is so much reference to specific art works that unless the works are viewable the lectures are practically meaningless. I don’t know why some enterprising young person at the museum doesn’t create a visual component timed to show the works as they are discussed in the recordings. (I am not young and I do not want the job.) More recent lectures have been made on video, or in a present format that the word video still defines. Good.

But I gave up on this specific lecture series not just for the lack of evidence but because I found the lecturer’s performance so off putting. Mr. Clark presents himself as a man who loves himself in art; he seems to relish the opportunity to strut and banter his hour upon the stage wowing his audience with his vast erudition. A former art historian at the University of California, Berkeley, this is his East Coast moment. I wish I could say that he rose to the occasion.

But wanting to understand the subject I relented, listened a second time, was less critical than I had been at first, or inured to what I knew was to come, I bought the book, just recently published, and slogged my way through it …three times. I have sat with the book and followed the audio for an hour through the Guernica discussion. In conclusion I can say that I think the excessive verbiage, the celebration of self, the meandering often because of a lack of focus, diminishes the argument. There is probably only about two hours worth of lecture here; one for Guernica, because of the interesting way it is presented through the Dora Maar photographs, and one for the other material.

From the subtitle, From Cubism to Guernica, one might assume that the lectures were a survey of Picasso’s development of cubism. But that is not the case. Little is said here regarding cubism as a style nor is there any elaboration on Clark’s part as to what its history and origins might have been. Many who write on cubism eventually confess that they do not understand it: Clark avoids the issue altogether. Whether he understands it or not remains a question. There is in the subtitle as well an implication that Guernica is not cubism. This is simply misleading. He does identify Guernica as a cubist work. Perhaps a better subtitle might have been: Cubism to Guernica as this is the author’s area of investigation. It is still bothersome, however as the works are never discussed as examples of what cubism is or might be. In the end I think a better subtitle, if one was really needed, might have been: Picasso: An Overview: 1921 to 1937.

It is Mr. Clarke’s premise that for Picasso picture space must be contained, a room. He further implies that the interior/exterior of so many of his works establishes a world view having to do with the twentieth century being the century of catastrophe. It’s a theory but I can’t say I buy it. There are so many contradictions in his presentation that I find the argument suspect.

In his explanation of cubism Kahnweiler tells us that rather than begin with a subject and create around it a setting within deep pictorial space, Braque and Picasso established an arbitrary shallow picture space and layered the planes forward to the picture plane. As most of these were still life paintings the sense of the far wall of a room is not so much a philosophical conceit as it is a pictorial device. Furthermore, based on what I know from the biographies, I would think the containment was necessary because of the incessant flow of Picasso’s tremendous creativity: as I understand it he could only get the work done, he could only focus, if he shut everything else out. He also worked at night within a pool of light surrounded by darkness.

But that implies biography. And in his prefatory remarks Mr. Clark lets us know that there will be no biography, or very little biography, in these talks especially of the celebrity kind: this is to be art considered strictly from the perspective of its historical socio/political relevance. And he does a good job of describing what he sees in the paintings. Yet whenever his interpretive suppositions run the risk of seeming possibly too subjective, he has no hesitation about bringing in Francoise Gilot with a tale or two or three to buttress his authority. So right away we’re in the realm of celebrity biography.

The value of that authority however might be questioned. While Clark cites her as having said that Picasso quoted this philosopher and that to her, he omits telling us that Gilot concluded, in her book, that in the years she spent with him she never once saw Picasso pick up or read a book and as to how he got that knowledge she did not know.

In Lecture/Chapter Three, Window, the work cited is The Three Dancers, and we all know who the dancer is. In Lecture/Chapter Four the work is The Artist and the Model, the model again Olga, the castrating female at that time in his life. I thought it was common knowledge that during the twenties the monster in Picasso’s work was always Olga. We might also recall that Picasso once described Demoiselles d’Avignon as “my first exorcism”. I believe it is generally accepted that the Olga paintings are subsequent exorcisms. When a group of paintings have such a very strong and widely accepted association it is an uphill battle to ask us to see them in a different light.

This so called lack of biography is continued in Lecture/Chapter Five, Monument, suggesting that the muse, Monumental as She is, represents Picasso’s fear of his reawakened sexuality. (This completely subjective inference is based on the biographical data that Pablo and Olga were by that time estranged and he had just taken up with Marie Therese…as we all know). Here he does tell us that this is Marie Therese, even showing us a pen and ink sketch of her in a representational style as if none of us would recognize someone Picasso had presented endlessly in a variety of styles in hundreds of paintings and drawings for over ten years. If so much biographical material, Khokhlova/Walter/Maar/Gilot, was in fact not going to be avoided, why then did he open the lectures with that disclaimer? And why choose works that are guaranteed to summon remembrance of the second rate celebrity biographies if that is what he wanted to avoid?

In Lecture/Chapter Six, the work is Guernica and although Mr. Clark names and identifies almost everything in the painting he does not identify a dying pigeon. This appears in the painting high up to the left of center. Originally the body of the bull filled that space. Then, from state six (state five is not shown) the body of the bull is twisted to the left of his head and in the blank space in the original position on the right there is either a house or a table added on which a pigeon lies dying. Knowing the biography we know immediately that “the pigeon” has to do with Picasso’s father. (We are likely to better infer a socio/political oedipal moment as the theme of the painting as well.) But without that biographical meaning, that passage is the weakest area of the painting: Picasso would not have left it had he felt it lacked significance. Did Clark not see the pigeon or is he finally avoiding biography?

If we consider for a moment that as an artist Picasso was working in this painting as in all of his paintings toward expressiveness Clark’s breathy hyperbole on his theme of interior/exterior space seems to spiral beyond the vital import of the painting. And in the concatenation of Picasso familiars …Masson, Malraux, Leris… it becomes a public recitation establishing the breadth of Clark’s scholarship, and his preference for the intellectual elite of the biographies rather than the gossips, more so than an interpretation.

The only painting in the lecture series that seemingly does not elicit the biographies overtly is Guitar and Mandolin on a Table, 1924, Lecture/Chapter 2 and I disagree with his understanding of it. I suggest this alternative view: Picasso was an avid photographer; he documented much of his work on film, as did Kahnweiler who photographed, dated, and filed everything that came into his gallery. Picasso made many paintings from photographs especially those with children. His paintings of his son Paul, also made in 1924-25, were made from his photographs.

A painting presents a dual perception: a perception of surface and a perception of depth created on the surface. In oriental perspective that at the bottom of the format is understood to be near, that at the top is understood to be far. In linear perspective, a shape is understood to be near if it is large and far if it is the same shape repeated smaller.

In the painting the open window with railing at the top of the format is repeated in miniature at the bottom. If that bottom image, made rectangular framed as it is by the space under the table, is understood as the viewfinder of a camera, (holding the camera at the waist and looking down into the viewfinder, the floor and the far window can be seen simultaneously), Picasso, using oriental perspective, is able to reverse the conventional wisdom of linear perspective: the large is far the small is near. The establishment of near and far creates the perception of depth on the surface and that is played off by the emphasis on surface. That, in its turn, creates a sense of vibrancy so common in the work of Cezanne. It locates the stage for the layering of planes between near and far. And through this device Picasso is able to create a trompe l’oeil painting sans verisimilitude, he creates a visual pun. Picasso said: I do not explore, I find. I think this is exactly what he meant.

This discovery, the viewfinder as a cubist device, must have given him tremendous pleasure …which carries over into the energy of the painting. More often than not the joy of a painting is the artist’s joy in making it, often it is the sheer arrogance of “I made it because I can and I can do it better than anyone else!” And in this case the other objects on the table, the child’s toys, should be read as another indication of Picasso’s endless love of play. To miss the sense of play in Picasso’s work, his humor, is to completely misunderstand his achievement.

As for the meaning of the open window I think it is merely an homage to Matisse who might have been living just down the street in Cannes that same summer.

Now: in regard to the verbosity of these lectures I did not need an hour to help you see this. But I did need biography in order to interpret the image. For the moment this interpretation satisfies me. But aware of Picasso’s superior intellect I am willing to admit that some time later I might yet find still more meaning in his work. In the meantime Clark’s interpretation doesn’t sit well with me, perhaps because at 75 I am wary of being told …The Truth! I am also allergic to absolutes having seen how, throughout history, their limited shelf life results in change from century to century.

Clark has built his Picasso premise on some lines from Nietzsche that he himself read one summer day while sunning on the beach. He applies this to the work, claims an understanding (which is fine), and to verify that influence on Picasso, tells us that as a young student/artist in Barcelona Picasso likely overheard many discussions regarding the works of Nietzsche at Quartre Gats. Perhaps he did. I recall that when I was young most of us in my crowd in the West Village praised Nietzsche as well. I encountered still more Nietzsche when I read the biographies and complete works of George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill. As evidence of influence, however, I find the possibly overheard barroom mutterings of young drunks and wannabes a rather flimsy scaffold on which to hang a major premise.

Nor do I think Picasso’s stature needs to be enhanced bracketed within quotations from Wittgenstein. As far as I am concerned he can stand on his own. It is a given that Picasso was a genius. It is a given that he had a superior intelligence despite his poor formal education. But having a superior intelligence and a genius does not imply that those have a correlative familiarity with or a comprehension of modern philosophy or modern physics either directly or through osmosis. Intelligence is manifest in many ways. The intelligence of a genius is a unique field of knowledge; a study of his achievement should be limited to that field.

When Frank Lloyd Wright is the subject of a monograph that study is limited exclusively to his use of the principles of architecture and the principles of design. Biography is included only when it elucidates the project under discussion. The Wright monograph by Robert McCarter, who has also written on Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, is an excellent example. Furthermore, to my recollection there is in none of the Wright literature that I have read any parallel drawn to the work of philosophers, physicists, or psychologists living or dead as a suggestion as to what has made his work relevant or modern.

Thus the question raised by the Clark lectures is this: What makes an artist’s work important? Is it just the work? Is it the influence of the work? Or is it that he has enunciated a truth that only a limited few are able to discern, his near parallel to the loftiest philosophical thought of the day? When we stand before his work do we marvel at what he has presented, do we gasp at the mastery of its presentation? Or do we shout: I’ve never seen Philosophy so boldly illustrated! Is there a bit of a something for everyone in an art work or must the proletariat await the pronouncements of an academic elite?

After the experience of the work I suspect that it has a lot to do with influence. As soon as the first cubist experiments were made public, through the courtesy of Kahnweiler, all of the artists in Paris who agreed with Picasso and Braque …and Matisse …that the academic tradition was decadent and completely dead, and who seem to have comprehended what those men were doing despite the art historians’ perplexity, leapt to their easels to adapt the insights into their own work. I think that had to do with empowering the artists and breathing fresh life into art more so than anything at all to do with a twentieth century that had not yet come into being. Thirty years later Pollock and others were still exploring cubism. That they and not the naysayers have survived can be understood by the fact that today one cannot find, even on Amazon dot com, books that claim cubism a fraud

That Picasso, as per Clark, anticipated the century is simply wishful thinking on Clark’s part. In enumerating Picasso’s many aptitudes prescience was not one of them: in fact none of us can “anticipate” the future with certainty. And Picasso was too devoted to his long term success to have gambled on that possibility. Instead, occultism as a valid philosophical worldview should be understood as simply a midcentury California phenomenon.

The period of cubism that I am most interested in understanding is analytical cubism. Mr. Clark does not use any of those works as an example of his thesis. In fact, in a book filled with a great many illustrations, over two hundred, only seven of them are from this period and they are only briefly cited. This raises questions: because it is so hermetic does the work from the analytical period not illustrate Clarke’s interior/exterior thesis? Does he, like so many other authorities, not understand it?

The other cubist periods are not so difficult. Proto-cubism, when Braque and Picasso realized they were on the same course, can be understood as directly under the influence of late Cezanne. Synthetic cubism can be understood by reading Moholy Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and Rudolph Arnheim: the dynamics of the plastic elements. Late cubism, the works studied here are from the 1920’s, as well as the work Braque did for the remainder of his life, can be understood from Kahnweiler’s comment that cubism is lyrical painting in that it deals with the lyricism of shape and form.

But none of these understandings, and very much so Clark’s, explains what makes Picasso’s works so fascinating, so iconic, so arresting. That missing element in all of this is expressiveness, Picasso’s passion. And that passion is the essence of his life and work. He is the most autobiographical of painters and to exclude his biography from the work is to miss the whole point however brilliant the analysis. Thus I think what Clark shows us here, contradicting his disclaimer, is that the biography cannot be excluded.

I came away from these lectures with the impression that Clark wanted to tell us as much as he could about himself in the six hours allotted more so than what he wanted to tell us about Picasso. So be it. And I suspect Clark is using Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, et al, to enhance Clark’s image, to suggest that through his superb analysis he stands as an equal, or near equal if his pose of modesty is at all sincere, with the master. If so, let us note: image is the bullshit we want others to accept as our truth.

Some of his self revelation is amusing.

One peculiar characteristic of this lecture/book is an odd, and silly, politically correct habit Clark has of speaking of the third person as feminine “…the reader with find, if she perseveres…” and it plays throughout like the pipes of Pan “…follow me, follow me, follow me, this way to liberation”.

Nor is he shy about letting us know the low opinion in which he views the work of others writing on Picasso. In fact he views most of the Picasso literature as irrelevant. He makes coded (and obvious) references to some writers and names others. I found that petty and professionally discourteous. (A national forum is not the proper arena for academic infighting. I hope the NGA was embarrassed by this. Apparently not; they published the remarks.) In defense of the other authors I can add that I find this work, far too long and scant on gist, almost as irrelevant as Clark views the rest of the literature. He is guilty of over intellectualizing a visual experience: Picasso does not need to be spared the celebrity gossip as much as he needs to be spared the intellectual crap.

On one occasion he is out and out wrong. He writes that in Picasso’s work the body is almost always female. This is a common misconception. And here the over-reliance on certain aspects of the biography is likely the fault. Picasso has given us a great many male bodies, both draped and nude. In fact I have often wondered why no one writes about this aspect of his work, why there have been no exhibitions specifically on this subject. My suspicion, as Clark notes in regard to Picasso’s attitude about the male figure in Guernica, is that this subject might have so much homoerotic content as to frighten most commentators away. I would think, however, in this era of same sex marriage that scholars would have moved beyond such concerns. However, the material would be found to be voluminous should the time be taken to bring it together. In analytical and synthetic cubism the male subject is plentiful and they are likely all of them, aside from the portraits, Georges Braque. Had these lectures been illustrated with the paintings of male subjects the lessened interference of Picasso’s biography likely would have permitted a clearer, and let’s hope more focused, exposition resulting in a newer or better understanding of Picasso’s achievement. Or perhaps they would have shown us yet another and a completely different way in which Picasso configured pictorial space.

Pablo Picasso was a master shape shifter; he was an artist capable of the most astounding inventions, transformations, distortions, playfulness, irony, sarcasm and wit. In every work he brought to our understanding his joy, his love, his hatred, his sadness, his pathos, his despond, his sense of shared brotherhood. Like Shakespeare he is an intensely human experience. The biographies, and especially the second rate celebrity biographies, humanize him, for many of us they are our entre into the deeper significance of the work. I grew up in 1950’s Kansas, in the smack middle of nowhere, and with only Life Magazine as a life line to the fine art culture. Life introduced me to Picasso in a barber shop when I was twelve. Shallow as that publication might have been, in my gratitude I am compelled to defend the superficial.

Attempting to limit a man’s protean achievement within a unifying theory is probably a mistake.

Mr. Clark tells us by the by that he is a socialist and an atheist. That’s perfectly fine with me. (But did we need to know that?) In his subsequent work, and whatever his politics or religion might then be, I would hope to find less author and more subject, more insight and less reference. A lecturer should always have the courage to speak in her own voice.



“A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.