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Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica
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, naive and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.
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, naive and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2013
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About the author
T.J. Clark
34 books61 followersTimothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 16, 2014
Does Gustav Klimt suck as much as T.J. Clark says he does, as expressed in a March 2010 letter to the London Review of Books?
"At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously... the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks."
I don't even know where to begin with this book, a huge falling off. The younger Clark, the historian of his earlier work, is completely absent. There's the relentless Euro-centric focus on what is surely art's first international figure. "Nietzsche's discussion of truth and truthfulness," he relates to Picasso, "is part of a grand attempt to understand what happens to culture as Christianity loses power." Isn't that what the artists from 1848-1914 had to come to terms with and Picasso had already moved beyond? But Clark needs to equate great figures with epochal shifts in history so that he can say things like, with the West's loss of grip on what "reality" means for all, men like Picasso were at the forefront challenging that order. Therefore Picasso equals genius. Never mind the beginnings of universal primary school education for the first time during the years Picasso lived, women earning the right to vote, technological advances like the moving picture bringing us worlds we had never seen before, nothing says global change to Clark like one man standing alone before a canvas. "We shall see in lectures to come that Picasso sometimes believed there was a world elsewhere." No shit?
The voice of the people Clark included in The Painting of Modern Life has been replaced by canonical figures only. So that on p. 88 we get Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Bartok, Schoenberg, Mondrian and Kandinsky in one paragraph alone whereas the silenced multitudes remain silenced. I miss the historian. Outside of these safe bets and the tedious abstract discussions of "constructedness" and "faced-ness" when describing the spatial features of Picasso's work up through Guernica, we get thoughts like this one on p. 223, "Sex is central to Picasso's metaphysics." Him and about 5 billion other human beings.
Much of the theoretical basis relies on Wittgenstein. But does Clark fully understand him? There is the Wittgenstein you can describe (which most of us fail at describing) and the Wittgenstein you can only visualize, the one the poets recognize. For instance, if you really understood Wittgenstein you wouldn't need to pose a question like this one, you'd simply get on with your work: "Does Wittgenstein think we necessarily mean by objects things - bodies of some sort, or parts of bodies; subsistences; matters that stand in the way of our making up truths about the world out of propositions alone?" But that just may be me: I have a very low tolerance for writers doing their thinking out on the page.
"Speaking as a socialist atheist I would say that the worldview of Grünewald and Velázquez are as uncongenial to me as anything I intuit Picasso to be proposing." What an odd moment to be announcing full horns one's allegiance. If you thought the line about Picasso, sex and metaphysics was bizarre wait until you get a load of this one: "Give me a sentence of Clement Greenberg's for any five hundred from Pierre Daix or Arianna Huffington." Arianna Huffington!?!!? Who in God's name would even put that up for question??
Getting back to Klimt the Kitschmeister. Why is his art kitsch and Picasso's not? I suspect we all know the answer. Had Clark spelled out on historical grounds why portraits and representative art like Singer Sargent's pale in comparison to the poetry of Picasso's Nude in a Black Armchair 1932 (above), for example, which is something his younger self would've attempted, it would've made this an infinitely more valuable book - as it is, it feels like reading a man betraying his own best talent. Very very frustrating.
But we all have our failed projects. A great art critic eventually needs to take on Picasso to see what he's made of - that Picasso still looks unfazed by commentary may be Clark's main point after all. I was led to his books by an enlightening lecture available on YouTube called "Capitalism without Images." The sole comment to date so far simply states, "The way he's lit!" In light of these two books on Manet and Picasso that comment is equally hilarious and profound, allowing for the pun on "lit". A love of imagery is our magic, our enchantment, our new religion: the selfies, the status updates, our imitations of celebrities, which we like and approve of when we do, we as indistinguishable from those we model ourselves on. Like all religions the magic that unifies the tribe eventually turns against itself. "Every time we look at an image of ancient Egypt we should remember the tomb robbers." What comes next? Clark's guesses as to what, in this lecture, are worth keeping in mind.
"At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously... the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks."
I don't even know where to begin with this book, a huge falling off. The younger Clark, the historian of his earlier work, is completely absent. There's the relentless Euro-centric focus on what is surely art's first international figure. "Nietzsche's discussion of truth and truthfulness," he relates to Picasso, "is part of a grand attempt to understand what happens to culture as Christianity loses power." Isn't that what the artists from 1848-1914 had to come to terms with and Picasso had already moved beyond? But Clark needs to equate great figures with epochal shifts in history so that he can say things like, with the West's loss of grip on what "reality" means for all, men like Picasso were at the forefront challenging that order. Therefore Picasso equals genius. Never mind the beginnings of universal primary school education for the first time during the years Picasso lived, women earning the right to vote, technological advances like the moving picture bringing us worlds we had never seen before, nothing says global change to Clark like one man standing alone before a canvas. "We shall see in lectures to come that Picasso sometimes believed there was a world elsewhere." No shit?
The voice of the people Clark included in The Painting of Modern Life has been replaced by canonical figures only. So that on p. 88 we get Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Bartok, Schoenberg, Mondrian and Kandinsky in one paragraph alone whereas the silenced multitudes remain silenced. I miss the historian. Outside of these safe bets and the tedious abstract discussions of "constructedness" and "faced-ness" when describing the spatial features of Picasso's work up through Guernica, we get thoughts like this one on p. 223, "Sex is central to Picasso's metaphysics." Him and about 5 billion other human beings.
Much of the theoretical basis relies on Wittgenstein. But does Clark fully understand him? There is the Wittgenstein you can describe (which most of us fail at describing) and the Wittgenstein you can only visualize, the one the poets recognize. For instance, if you really understood Wittgenstein you wouldn't need to pose a question like this one, you'd simply get on with your work: "Does Wittgenstein think we necessarily mean by objects things - bodies of some sort, or parts of bodies; subsistences; matters that stand in the way of our making up truths about the world out of propositions alone?" But that just may be me: I have a very low tolerance for writers doing their thinking out on the page.
"Speaking as a socialist atheist I would say that the worldview of Grünewald and Velázquez are as uncongenial to me as anything I intuit Picasso to be proposing." What an odd moment to be announcing full horns one's allegiance. If you thought the line about Picasso, sex and metaphysics was bizarre wait until you get a load of this one: "Give me a sentence of Clement Greenberg's for any five hundred from Pierre Daix or Arianna Huffington." Arianna Huffington!?!!? Who in God's name would even put that up for question??
Getting back to Klimt the Kitschmeister. Why is his art kitsch and Picasso's not? I suspect we all know the answer. Had Clark spelled out on historical grounds why portraits and representative art like Singer Sargent's pale in comparison to the poetry of Picasso's Nude in a Black Armchair 1932 (above), for example, which is something his younger self would've attempted, it would've made this an infinitely more valuable book - as it is, it feels like reading a man betraying his own best talent. Very very frustrating.
But we all have our failed projects. A great art critic eventually needs to take on Picasso to see what he's made of - that Picasso still looks unfazed by commentary may be Clark's main point after all. I was led to his books by an enlightening lecture available on YouTube called "Capitalism without Images." The sole comment to date so far simply states, "The way he's lit!" In light of these two books on Manet and Picasso that comment is equally hilarious and profound, allowing for the pun on "lit". A love of imagery is our magic, our enchantment, our new religion: the selfies, the status updates, our imitations of celebrities, which we like and approve of when we do, we as indistinguishable from those we model ourselves on. Like all religions the magic that unifies the tribe eventually turns against itself. "Every time we look at an image of ancient Egypt we should remember the tomb robbers." What comes next? Clark's guesses as to what, in this lecture, are worth keeping in mind.
September 14, 2015
a controversial theory and dense, or at least not brisk, text, but with beautiful colored pics and plates, lots of bibliography, index. author tries to use biography to analyses the paintings, and vice versa. not sure how well this works though. good ideas though.
September 6, 2015
Every other book written on Picasso, analyzing his work, stumbles between his art as biography and as oeuvre. Are his paintings a diary of Picasso, the historical moment, art for herself or some mixture of all three? There is truth to all three, yet his art cannot be reduced to his daily life (no artist, not even Picasso, lead such an extraordinary life that there would be a straight, linear correlation between his love/life and his paintings).
"Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica" starts from the latter position, that Picasso painted something else, not just his biography, not about his woes -- though these show up because an artist, a man, cannot elude his surroundings and his relationships. Picasso's life does show up in his paintings but they are not reducible to his daily life. Picasso himself admitted as much; that when he painted a woman it was just a woman. The path to the universal is very concrete, very specific, individual. However, the unique, the individual has to touch multitudes, transform multitudes, transform itself, to become a slice of the universal.
Picasso reshaped space and how we see space. There is a power of animation and three-dimensionality in his work. He distorts the human body because capitalism distorts the human body. And it is Picasso himself who shows us how to see the distortion in all it's beauty and monstrosity.
"Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica" starts from the latter position, that Picasso painted something else, not just his biography, not about his woes -- though these show up because an artist, a man, cannot elude his surroundings and his relationships. Picasso's life does show up in his paintings but they are not reducible to his daily life. Picasso himself admitted as much; that when he painted a woman it was just a woman. The path to the universal is very concrete, very specific, individual. However, the unique, the individual has to touch multitudes, transform multitudes, transform itself, to become a slice of the universal.
Picasso reshaped space and how we see space. There is a power of animation and three-dimensionality in his work. He distorts the human body because capitalism distorts the human body. And it is Picasso himself who shows us how to see the distortion in all it's beauty and monstrosity.
August 19, 2013
Has T.J. Clark ossified into a caricature of himself? There is too much unbearable pathos, and the intensity is diluted with overblown vagueness. Perhaps it is accounted for by specificity of the subject: Picasso after his betrayal of Cubism. If only the sentiment did not vitiate the otherwise truly remarkable analyses and a cogent line of argument!
October 30, 2021
Clark's books are astonishing. His range of reference points -- social and political happenings, biographical information, the canon of visual art, and in this book, a sincere engagement with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein -- allow him to situate paintings within a context, and articulate each works essential contribution to its time, to the history of art. I plunge into the grandiose headfirst, but this work deserves it! This is "art-writing" full of the abstractions and imaginative leaps that so often lead to criticism of art writing's flimsiness, yet it coheres, has an argumentative structure, and continually testifies to the depths paintings can offer. I am not going to lay out Clark's thesis in too much detail: it is an exposition of how Picasso moved from his truth oriented cubist phase to a Nietzschean embrace of destabilized "truth," which culminates in Guernica. And I promise, Clark makes that thesis -- so extravagant in one-sentence summary form -- fully convincing.
May 26, 2017
Skimmed through the intro and back to the library it went. TJ Clark is full of it. God I hate this shit.
February 22, 2024
99 stars for TJ Clark
January 24, 2014
I wouldn't have believed I could enjoy reading anything about Picasso ever again, or even spend time looking at the paintings, but this is done with an admirable devotion and amazing amount of looking and thinking and written in relaxed but intensely insightful way.There still are some absurd things in it such as Picasso's belief that "pederasts", as he called gay men, couldn't be artists and artists are in fact "lesbian" women, which I think says more about Picasso's terror at the thought of anal penetration than anything else. You just have to laugh out loud at the silliness of it.
September 28, 2014
My in-depth notes in pursuit of the truth:
T. J. Clark's analysis of Nietzsche concludes pursuit of Truth forbids belief in God.
If cubism is impatient with appearance, and is searching for an underlying truth, does that put it and Christianity (or just religion) in the same middle ground?
He's bullshitting.
He (Clark) stubbornly goes on with his intuitions and argument, ascribing to Picasso feelings and thoughts that have no connection to the once breathing man. But interesting reading.
T. J. Clark's analysis of Nietzsche concludes pursuit of Truth forbids belief in God.
If cubism is impatient with appearance, and is searching for an underlying truth, does that put it and Christianity (or just religion) in the same middle ground?
He's bullshitting.
He (Clark) stubbornly goes on with his intuitions and argument, ascribing to Picasso feelings and thoughts that have no connection to the once breathing man. But interesting reading.
August 2, 2013
An excellent analysis of Picasso's art. This book avoid the biographical and the sweeping overviews and instead looks closely at a number of particular works. It is the best explanation I have read of why Picasso is so good.
March 3, 2014
Pretentious, sloppy and vague.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews