Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929Here's something from an interview with Clark about the upcoming lectures (parts 1, 2):
If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.It would probably be a cliche to wax on about his sensitive eye, but it should also be mentioned that Clark is one of the few art historians who cuts through the packaging and gets right to the meat. By which I mean the relationship between form and meaning - what can we say about pictures, or what is it that pictures tell us? His answers are daring and problematic, but also stated with conviction and very evocative. They really inspire (me) to go beyond schematic, empiricist thinking. To push the relationship and squeeze out meanings that matter, not just ones that could be said, but don't change anything by having been said. Whether or not you're convinced by his argument, I think the lectures will be well worth it, not least because of his sensitive eye.
You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.
One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world. But I think there's a pre-history to Guernica, and one of the things I'm going to try to argue about the previous 10-15 years before 1937 is that Picasso is trying to find a way of re-imagining space, and making a space which is kind of much more insecure and open and porous to the outside. At some kind of deep, intuitive level this is his response to the coming to an end of a bourgeois form of life.
4 comments:
I wonder if he'll consider gender too—"interiority" before the 1920s being connected with femininity and feminine spaces—the bourgeois parlor and its welter of possessions, etc.
I see what you mean about intellectual community :).
CQ - you are absolutely right, though I fear that Clark has a real tin ear for gender and for race. I think I read somewhere that the first draft of his chapter on Manet's Olympia didn't deal with gender or race at all. Like a classic Marxian, his big deal issue is class. But he is also, to my mind, an amazing reader of images (see quote)...either way, he's a big big big deal for art historians.
kg - do you mean blogs in general or casva in particular? And if you're looking for some brainy blogs, you should check out CQ's ;)
I meant The Big Art Historian Heaven floating somewhere on the Mall.
And I've checked out news from Cheeseville in the past and found it fascinating and delightfully conveyed. Will take another gander. Or goose. Add that to the gote, and we got ourselves a menagerie-a-trois. Anything I should brie-ing along?
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