Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) Hardcover – May 26, 2013

T.J. Clark, the author of "Picasso and Truth", is one of the foremost scholars of Modernism; he also wrote "Farewell to an Idea", a somewhat elegiac examination of Modernism. I find his ideas and his writing incredibly stimulating, and his knowledge of his subjects exhaustive.In "Picasso and Truth" he proposes (for one thing) that the great pre-WWI invention of Picasso and Braque, Analytical Cubism, involves the possibility of a new way of painting, but does not complete its own promise. More specifically: while it's commonly held that Analytical Cubism presents objects from multiple perspectives and possibly multiple times, the work of Picasso and Braque doesn't really do that. Their paintings from that period break objects into planes and angles, disjointing them and displaying them as fragments and representational signs. But, for instance, there is no clear view of the back of Daniel Kahnweiler's head in Picasso's cubist portrait of him. Objects in a still-life may be seen from somewhat splayed viewpoints -- as with Cezanne -- but for the most part the breaking is not of perspective but of form.Caveat: I hesitate, actually, to attempt to summarize Clark's ideas, because he so often adds second thoughts, admits to ambiguities, and examines ideas from different angles. His thoughts are complex. Not easily summarized. So take the above with many grains of sodium chloride.With respect to Picasso -- whose work he follows far past Analytical Cubism -- Clark is, I think, attempting to understand what artistic truth meant to the artist. And also, then, what we might see in Picasso's paintings that seems truthful to a viewer. Why did Picasso find the monolithic, distorted forms which he painted in the 1920s "truthful"? What truth did he hope to find in making the "Minotaur" lithographs?Clark purposely ignores nearly all anecdotes about Picasso's personal life. (For that, read Françoise Gilot's "Life With Picasso", a mostly sympathetic but clear-eyed memoir about the artist.) Clark's book is about Picasso's art, and Picasso was indeed a wellspring of for painters for over half a century. Put Picasso's paintings of Dora Maar beside a few Basquiat paintings, and watch the works take each other's measure. The great, arrogant old man is gone, but his artistic truth is still with us.

I bought this as a present for a painter friend who loves Picasso. He thinks it's wonderful!

interesting for art history buffs since this is a detailed study of part of Picasso, quality of repros is amazing

This impressively produced volume concentrates on Picasso's work from about 1920 to 1937. There are some comparisons with works from the classical Cubist period (1907-1916), but none at all with the products of the last few decades of the master's career, where Clark seems tacitly to endorse Clement Greenberg's view that that concluding phase reveals a significant falling-off in aesthetic quality.Clark's forte lies in his tenacious analysis of individual paintings, revealing a vein of wit and verbal acuity rarely found in the often stodgy world of art-historical writing. Somewhat summarily, the writer relegates the main run of Picasso criticism to the realm of gossip, a focus on Picasso's amorous exploits and public posture. His aim is to raise the level, and in the analysis of individual works he has done so with great panache. You will not be bored reading this book.Yet difficulties arise at the theoretical level, above all with the problematic notion of "truth." While he never states this commitment explicitly, Clark seems to adhere to the Correspondence Theory of Truth, the idea that it means adherence to empirical reality. In art this standard would appear to accord with the naturalism of Renaissance painting. Yet as earlier writers, notably Erwin Panofsky and E. H. Gombrich, have shown, Renaissance verisimilitude depends on a series of devices that trick the eye. The result is not truth but illusion.However defined, truth seems to rank as something of an idée fixe for Clark. On page 150 he mysteriously asserts of Cubism that "truth was still its god." The closest that Picasso seems to have come to this view was his praise of "exactitude," which is not the same thing. In this insistence on the criterion of truth, I sense a certain defensiveness, a response to the philistine view that art does not matter. "See," he seems to be saying, "art does matter. It reflects a quest for truth."Clark does not discuss the more ambitious (but murky) concepts of truth in painting advanced by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Instead, he relies on Friedrich Nietzsche, a fashionable guru these days, but a figure who does not turn out to be very helpful in this book. Perhaps the German thinker would served writer's purpose better had he immersed himself in today's lively Nietzsche scholarship, especially in the realm of aesthetics. Clearly he has not.

impeccable

Excellent! Thank you!