A groundbreaking reassessment of Picasso by one of today's preeminent art historians
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 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, naïve and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.
T. J. Clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Art History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton), The Sight of Death, and Farewell to an Idea, and the coauthor of (with "Retort") Afflicted Powers.
"No art historian in our time has had a greater impact both within the field and beyond it than T. J. Clark. Everything he writes matters in the most fundamental way. His latest book, Picasso and Truth, is no exception—superbly observed, beautifully argued, a tour de force of looking, thinking, and writing."—Michael Fried, author of The Moment of Caravaggio"This is the Picasso book for which we have all been waiting. This work displaces biographical and psychological treatments of the artist from the past several decades, rendering them obsolete—and it forever changes art history in its present disposition."—Rosalind E. Krauss, Columbia University
