T. J. Clark : PICASSO AND TRUTH From Cubism to Guernica
reviewed by JACK FLAM
Picasso: Wizard of the real
Because Picasso’s works of these years departed so radically from accepted norms, they were often greeted with hostility or puzzlement. In 1932, the psychologist Carl G. Jung famously compared Picasso’s paintings to the pictures made by schizophrenics, and called him an “underworld” personality who followed “the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil” rather than “the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty”.
reviewed by JACK FLAM
Picasso: Wizard of the real
Because Picasso’s works of these years departed so radically from accepted norms, they were often greeted with hostility or puzzlement. In 1932, the psychologist Carl G. Jung famously compared Picasso’s paintings to the pictures made by schizophrenics, and called him an “underworld” personality who followed “the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil” rather than “the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty”.
o artist has reinvented the visible world in a more radical way than Picasso. In his stringent early Cubist paintings, composed with fragmentary geometric planes rendered in earth colours, the differences between figure and ground are hardly distinguishable, testing the limits of representation. After the First World War, he developed a very different kind of painting, paradoxically both flat and suggestive of intangible depth, hard-edged and often brightly coloured. The flexible space in these paintings permitted new kinds of interaction between emptiness and objects, and a broader range of subject matter, much of it erotic or violent, or both.
T. J. Clark focuses on those paintings of the 1920s and 30s in his ambitious but sometimes exasperating new book, Picasso and Truth, which is based on the six A. W. Mellon lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 2009. Picasso’s works from this period have now become so familiar that their complexity and radical strangeness are often taken for granted, even overlooked. Clark’s book sets out to explore just how radical and how strange these paintings are, and the new kind of moral universe that they embody.
Because Picasso’s works of these years departed so radically from accepted norms, they were often greeted with hostility or puzzlement. In 1932, the psychologist Carl G. Jung famously compared Picasso’s paintings to the pictures made by schizophrenics, and called him an “underworld” personality who followed “the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil” rather than “the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty”. Although Clark does not mention Jung in this context, he casts his own similar position in a positive light, celebrating rather than damning the chthonic power of Picasso’s paintings. Clark acknowledges that Picasso’s art contains pathological elements, but he sees them as reflections of the pathology of an age rather than of an individual. For him, Picasso’s art is a judgement on a century that was rife with disaster... read more:
