Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica

by T. J. Clark

Overview

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 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, 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691157412
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2013
Series:	The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts , #35
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Lecture 1 Object 23

Lecture 2 Room 59

Lecture 3 Window 111

Lecture 4 Monster 147

Lecture 5 Monument 191

Lecture 6 Mural 235

Acknowledgments 285

Notes 289

Photography and Copyright Credits 311

Index 319

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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

Editorial Reviews

This masterful volume reproduces six lectures that U.C. Berkeley emeritus art historian Clark (Farewell to an Idea) gave at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2009 as part of the prestigious Mellon Lecture series. The renowned scholar (and member of Retort, a Bay-area-based collective of radical leftist writers and thinkers) tracks Picasso’s work from the 1920s through the ’30s with gusto and precision, culminating in a close look at the 1937 masterpiece, Guernica. Clark entertainingly derides the bulk of writing about Picasso as “second-rate celebrity literature” that slavishly recounts the titillating parts of the painter’s biography while largely ignoring his monumentally important work. Distinguishing himself from that pack by discussing drawings and paintings, both famous and obscure, Clark argues that a ubiquitous “grimness” underlies the exuberant sex and violence Picasso portrayed during these years—years that saw the rise of all manner of real-life “monsters” in Europe. Clark argues that Picasso’s flight from Cubism and Nietzschean spirit allowed the artist to express Europe’s suffering between WWI and WWII, while later monsters, bathers, and Guernica allowed him to grasp an inner truth about life and existence. In making the case, Clark details a number of stages in Picasso’s work, always in exquisite prose. These include the painter’s early 1920s nudes; Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924); Three Dancers (1925); and Painter and Model (1927). This satisfyingly rigorous book is grounded in Picasso’s paintings and drawings throughout. 208 illus. Agent: Wendy Weil Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Clark's study marks a new summit in the mountain range of Picasso literature."

San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] close pictorial reading through detailed and painstaking descriptions of pictorial elements elusively combined with primary sources. Lavishly illustrated, both in terms of artworks and photographic archival material his narrative becomes easier to follow, considering the elegant descriptions of colour and structure elements in Picasso's work."

Art History Supplement

"This six-essay volume offers an intellectually rigorous, novel approach to the well-studied oeuvre of Picasso. Eschewing the historiographer's inclination to focus on biography, Clark's lectures rely on a primarily a pictorial framework to analyze Picasso's work. . . . Unparalleled scholarship."

Choice

"Few living art historians have T. J. Clark's ability to make us look afresh at canonical artists and rethink the intellectual content and context of their works. In this study, Clark approaches Picasso taking Nietzsche as his guide; eschewing biographical criticism, he offers bold close readings of the paintings from the 1920s and '30s, and plots their trajectory from the optimism of Cubism to a style that is knowingly dark and monstrous."

Apollo

"Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era."

World Book Industry

"Beautiful."

Tikkun

"One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Art Books of 2013"

Shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year 2013, Apollo Magazine

From the Publisher

"Few living art historians have T.J. Clark's ability to make us look afresh at canonical artists and rethink the intellectual content and context of their works. In this study, Clark approaches Picasso taking Nietzsche as his guide; eschewing biographical criticism, he offers bold close readings of the paintings from the 1920s and '30s, and plots their trajectory from the optimism of Cubism to a style that is knowingly dark and monstrous."

Apollo Magazine

"Clark's study marks a new summit in the mountain range of Picasso literature."

San Francisco Chronicle

[A]n intellectual high-wire act, commanding, compelling, thought-provoking . . . thrilling. . . . Picasso and Truth is a magisterial work: in many ways a summation. It retains its character as a spoken text; it is full of marvellous obiter dicta.

Times Higher Education - Alex Danchev

His prose is abundant with tantalising aphorisms and observations. Some are sparkling asides but more often they act as spurs that encourage us to look more closely and less complacently at Picasso's work. . . . The book's lavish production values make for excellent reproductions of the paintings, and its copious illustrations include many cropped details as well as an imaginative range of image comparisons. . . . [Clark] is rare, among contemporary art historians.

Daily Telegraph - Thomas Marks

[T]hrilling. . . . Thus space becomes an arena for truth-telling after all: a conclusion with optimistic implications for the legacies we can still seek in 20th-century art if we explore, as Clark does with supreme insight, the meeting ground between art and politics.

Financial Times - Jackie Wullschlager

At his best, he is, simply, brilliant. At his worst, he is also brilliant.

Literary Review - Kevin Jackson