T.J. Clark on Picasso’s ‘Guernica’

thank you so much Nicholas and I want to thank you and Mary Kay and everyone from the LRB who's been involved both for the invitation and for you know your extraordinary kindness steering me through and my thanks to all of you who've come from someone graham entertainment on send out the st. Valentine's Eve though euros will you know put in an occasional appearance this is a lecture about jenika about a history painting an anachronism really that refuses to die I start on the left with a photo of the then US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte mugging for the camera in early 2001 behind him the now notorious tapestry version of Guernica hung in the anteroom to the security council Negroponte was fresh in 2001 from service as ambassador to Honduras that is as commander-in-chief of the Contra war against the Sandinistas next door and it seems there was no perceived dissonance at this point between Picasso's picture of terrorized civilians and the fresh faces of those arranging their death things as you know were to change Guernica came down from the war on the right is a participant snapshot of a demonstration in London in 2004 it is one of hundreds maybe thousands of reappearances of painting over the past six years I'm going to show you two more extraordinary one at the top taken in 2008 in Calcutta just at the start of a demonstration against state violence in Nandi Ram and down below Madrid I'm not going to talk directly about the role of Picasso's painting since the US UK invasion of the Middle East but in a sense everything I go on to say is shadowed by it for how did it happen this is my lectures basic question that a painting of the Spanish Civil War came to emblematic state violence in the way these photographs suggest what was it about Guernica that went on and goes on providing a usable seemingly even a necessary form for total war already in 1937 the size and materials and ambition of a history painting like Guernica were anachronistic the idea that the whole shape and temper of a new historical moment could or ought to be epitomized monumental iist in oil-on-canvas was increasingly hard to believe in the general surroundings of Guernica in the Spanish pavilion spelt that out the outside there on the left with one of a whole round series of big photomontage decorations and inside a rather brilliant strange mural photo photo of mural by your zebra now form and photo montage ruled in sense the painting in the ante room was only there as a token of Picasso's support because of stature Picasso's belonging to the great tradition we shall see how deeply conscious the artist was of the vastness the pathos of the task he'd been sent but the pastner's seems to have been what turned and goes on turning the painting toward the future that's what needs explaining my approach will be limited and I shall pretend to give an account of the painting and its circumstances as a whole a single lecture can't hope to do that but rather to think again about the mural formerly with questions of pictorial structure in mind questions concerning the picture space above all its treatment of outside and inside distance and proximity grounding and groundlessness these aspects of Guernica demand our attention I'm going to argue because in them and through them Picasso worked his way toward a sense of the truth of what he was depicting space was the form truth took for him as a painter my reasons for saying this I can't defend at length here but in essence the case is simple because there was a destroyer it's obvious that his art dispensed with many of the tests of visual resemblance previous picturing had taken for granted but this work of doubting and undoing left him I think with one ineluctable test of adequacy in art the truth of a depiction its ability to present a certain aspect of the world in a way that would strike the viewer as apposite and faithful productive of real knowledge the truth was inseparable from its speciality if a scenes distinctive spatial character could be given form of canvas and the distortions and emissions of particulars in the painting be seen to derive from or contribute to that character then the depiction would have made its claim not just to be ingenious or persuasive or even beautiful but to have told the truth in the sense of bed and from dish for example here it seems that the picture is feeling its way toward a sense that sometimes maybe splendidly maybe ominously the world of familiar things can take on the look of absolute permanence our possessions look back at us with an ancient Egyptian implacability symmetry and rigidity rule of course this is only one among many possible modes in which space can be totalized by human subjects but a picture this is the point should drive toward the mode button here's in the object world it sees or imagines it should end with the mode in its grasp because of Fermi is a history painter my assumption about him is the one most of us share surely that the last hundred years in their horror and dislocation shaped and informed his whole worldview but for the most part they did so I think on a structural level the epoch appeared in Picasso in the guise of a form of life a shape of understanding coming to an end my phrase for all this in the wider field of Picasso's painting is the end of room space this is guitar and mandolin usually called this from 1924 in the Guggenheim now the end of room space the end of room space is what this art is about by room space I mean simply a feeling for and a confidence in a world defined by four walls was laid out before us a nearby common place manipulable world of things in the background maybe a window and a balcony but here up front where we are a floor a table a guitar a fireplace wallpaper this is a large topic and I can't explore it here but in order to understand the true difficulty of the task because of took on in Guernica I have to say just a little or I want to insist here at the start on Cuba's ohms commitment to room space to a space of limits and corners and familiarity let me show you two of the triumphs of 1914 and 1916 toward the end of high cubism Picasso's wonderful portrait of a young girl on the left and man in front of fireplace and let me ask you to look past if you can the spellbinding painterly detail to the pictures structure their view of how the world presents itself to us and acquires humanity I believe that these paintings wish above all to convince us as Western painting has done so often and so persuasively but the world is material through and through and that that materiality is more than enough it is what makes for the human comedy for a painter like Picasso that comedies organizing principle is space and space is only made real in a painting only truly materialized if it is contained and solidified that means that the world in cubism is usually not far away and most often smaller than us or maybe just the same size the young girl in her green room is cozy her world is a set of instruments toys utensils asking us to reach out and take them it is property Bohemians and for a while of course because there was a bohemian but tend to live in places where the property is deteriorating the wallpaper is old-fashioned and peeling the armchair broken the music nostalgic the frame on the mirror a faint but it doesn't matter the world for the bourgeois is a room rooms interiors furnishings covers chemicals are the individual made flesh and no style besides cubism has ever dwelt so profoundly in the space of possession and manipulation the room was its premise its model of beauty and the subjectivity what happens then when room space dies in the sense that was always cubism x' questions I'm not meant to suggest that because the style in my view lived instinctively in the 19th century it didn't realize that that centuries shaping structures were in the process of becoming extinct cubism is full of a sense of an ending even the playfulness of portrait of a young girl is inseparable from a sense of loss but what happens when loss and dying are no longer implications metaphors but plain fact jenika is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 139 inches by 307 25 feet 25 and a half feet long that is and more than eleven and a half feet high it was first shown this is a wonderful photograph from the time taken by the architect first shown in July 1937 in the entrance hall of the Spanish Republic civilian at the Paris World's Fair I passed the steel pillars of the inner courtyard and you see see the painting there under the in the sort of transparent open anteroom out past the steel pillars of the inner courtyard was a cinema under a flimsy ceiling showing films of the civil war louis boudoir was in charge it is a picture of an air raid on the 26th of April 1937 in the tenth month of the Spanish Civil War the ancient town of Guernica for centuries the focus of Basque national identity had been attacked by a squadron of Luftwaffe bombers supplemented by handful of planes provided by Mussolini the aim was to bomb and burn the city center in its entirety it was the Luftwaffe chance to see what the new incendiary explosives were capable of and to judge how long it would take to turn a town into an ash heap and what the effect of so doing would be on civilian morale that last euphemism becomes the currency of cabinet rooms in this sense jenika was inaugural it assured in the last centuries and centuries war of terror terror largely administered by the state in which tens of millions would die Picasso made his first sketches towards a picture of the bombing on may day in Paris five days after the raid he appears to have begun work on the canvas itself about ten days later Ram made the tenth the first photograph that his companion Dora Maar took of the work-in-progress is dated 11th of May we can be fairly sure from internal evidence that the painting reached its final form on the 4th of June or very soon after from first sketch to finished painting then because I took just over five weeks from the moment he began work on the full-size canvas perhaps 26 days the days were some of the worst of the century Franco's forces moved north and east on a broad front and the Republic began to devour his own entrails from the 3rd to the 8th of May in Barcelona the communist party struck militarily against the supporters of poom the independent Marxist party and CNT the anarchist trade union 500 people died in house-to-house fighting poom was outlawed by the Republic on the 16th of June the parties in prison leader under his name was murdered by Stalinist agents five days later Largo Caballero was forced from the Premiership naturally because of circle friends was split by this moment of agony son like El Worth and Aragon shrugged off the Moscow trials whose theater of lies had poisoned the opening months of 1937 others like Gretel took the trials for a new Inquisition and would never forgive Picasso for his later groveling to the great leader this is him in 56 57 I think in Italy Dora Mars politics were a leftist and anti-stalinist one of her previous lovers Marie sovereign lives in history as the first of Stalin's real meaning nauseated biographers we know that because her was in contact with left-wing and Annika's friends in Catalonia news reached him almost certainly of what had happened on the Barcelona streets Batali seems to have been one main conduit the great of a room in which Guernica was stretched and painted took up the top floor of her building which so he seems to have believed in which sorry him so he seems to have believed the action of ball sacks great story Lucia d'oeuvre and canoe took place it was a residence that Picasso treasured I'm it's not true actually but still however who found the place for him because it had been used as a meeting place for a attack of which he had been a member whose attack was the one to be countered is a question that preoccupied the group but I saw as usual was ready with an answer our aim he told you a few gavel was to maintain the revolutionary activity that had been betrayed by Moscow do not imagine that any of this and of course I could have told the story much greater links don't imagine that any of this this familiar farce and tragedy of the left was lost on Picasso as he brought his painting into being but the dates I've given you put context in perspective jenika was planned and painted in the space of five weeks it wasn't an astounding feat of concentration well it's politics all its response to fascism and Stalinism and the new face of war was in the picture yo Nika this further yeah to state it again is twenty five and a half feet long and a little over eleven and a half feet high this is immensely bigger than any painting designed for a wall that Picasso had done previously I think that from Picasso's point of view the sheer height of the painting it could just be wedged perhaps slightly tilted forward under the beams of the court attack assembly room the height may have been even more of a challenge to his established way of looking than the panoramic width painters of morals are obliged to be pragmatic about the kind of selling together of part and whole that is possible in a painting twenty-five feet long some viewers will find that pragmatism the casual hierarchy of episodes in Guernica unsatisfying Guernica has always had its critics if I don't go along with them it's because I think that Picasso so completely solved the problem that for him was much more important that of the paintings height and ground plane this is him perched in one corner right working on working on this enormous back foot of the lurching one eleven and a half feet is a true change of world for Picasso it puts the top of the painting as you can see from the photograph the ceiling the skyline the foot ability of the depiction to contain space even where it threatens to slide off into infinity it puts all that out of reach and this is dangerous if the painting even a large painting loses hold of its upper edge if the top boundary of the depiction is not every bit as present and determinant effect of viewing as the line along the depictions floor for Picasso it loses hold of everything space slips through its grasp and therefore here's my core proposition really so may a set of felt equivalents for the things the bodies the Agony's that the space contains I think as I say that essentially Picasso solve the problem he found ways to make the paintings height work for him jenika to put my overall argument boldly is a picture that finally manages to make its giant sighs a giant being always essentially tall well with other dimensions following from that were to confirm a holy earthbound and essentially modest view of life my finally manages isn't a flourish true solutions I hope to show you came late we know that when Picasa was visited by the Republican delegates early in 1937 he told them but he didn't know whether he was capable of the sort of picture they wanted for a while in the spring he seems to have been in denial half wishing the Commission would go away but when the subject of young Myka the bombing raid seized him he knew this is my intuition but surely a common sense one that it came with political imperatives attached firstly and most deeply the bombing would have to be pictured as happening in public it would have to be shown to distort and in a sense to isolate specific individuals isolating him in the way that terror is many - but nonetheless to do so in the space that was somehow shared among a citizenry held in common privacy had been torn apart the room must give way to the street and second whatever terrible damage was done to the women and animals in the picture and the damage would have to be great they were not to be robbed of their ordinary materiality the damage should confirm their creatureliness however much the new time of death might disperse and mackan them they had to be present on the ground or in the window actually falling and staring and screaming these are simple nope Noble imperatives and going eventual ability to respond to them is I believe what gives it continuing life but here again is the nub of my argument they are profoundly difficult self instructions for the painter of bread and fruit dish they lead him away from the space he naturally lives in public and political so Picasso's first attempts at imagining the scene suggest and show you a study done in pencil of Jessel dated the first of May public and political must mean running outside but is the outside a space Picasso can truly think pictorially jovi Avila paused once asked him why he never painted landscapes I never saw any he replied Jamaica ah see I've always lived inside myself so is the outside the question follows a place Picasso can people fill with suffering creatures that is as opposed to whimsical players in a dreamscape he tries again the following day using the same old master medium pencil on Jessel he's trying to be serious of course he is but the questions persist I think the best way to come to an understanding of these strange first attempts is to look back for a moment to the three years immediately preceding Guernica 1933 to 36 there are complex and in many ways an unhappy time for him they seem to end for much of 1936 in as much of a crisis of confidence as Picasso was ever capable of particularly a crisis of confidence in painting he paints almost nothing for months on end in graves spasmodically I mean there are one or two wonderful engravings but they're few and He pours his energies into a weird and to my mind I mean fast it seemed enormous admirers across but anyway I will say to my mind bad poetry jenika among other things is a convulsive awakening from this previous trance there are many facets to the unhappiness but I seized on one that connects with my story in the mid-1930s because I began to make the outside world his own sometimes it was the open space of the boring and sometimes as here at era of a bag of myth the beasts are provided with a landscape setting they walk the seashore or circle the walls of Troy and all of this I should declare my hand as critic is accompanied by a massive drop in the aesthetic temperature if what Picasso is trying for again here is a kind of classicism then the new version only goes to confirm the true seriousness a massive ambition of the classicism of the twenties which had gone on fighting for an epic space made out of cubist materials this as the pipes of pan of 23 the fight is over in the 1930s a token exterior as one things are more complicated in this of course I mean Picasso is never dismissible there are real achievements in these years real imaginings of space even but the question to ask with Guernica in mind is achievements of what kind king of em is a painting I take to be one of the best Picasso did at this moment dated March 1936 it is in pen watercolor and a single strip of pasted newsprint across the middle and it is small just over 13 inches by 20 therefore on one level the comparison with Guernica I'm gonna make is factitious but all the same I'm gonna make it because structure especially it is so interesting commentators on Guernica often make the point sometimes disapprovingly but the great mural makes use of many of Picasso's properties that it's smells of the bullring and that it's women and bits and pieces of warriors have migrated from the beach and the studio the point is obvious and the little watercolor confirms it so many of the elements of Guernica are already there in the watercolor the resemblances are uncanny a dark house to the right with Sun or fire glowing through its windows a chopped off head of a man little difficult to spot but can you see it there big bearded warrior a bearded hero maybe a giant on the ground nestling in the grass what appears to be a source of light in the sky seemingly held by hand here with long streaks of ink tracing its beans across the picture plane and an agonized figure at the center half human but with the head of a mejor s-- or a monster may be crucified may be hung in a noose from the tree branch the point is not just to enumerate the features this little painting shares with Guernica but to suggest how ordinary these features became for a while in Picasso's art and above all in what kind of outside they exist they existed a little watercolor like many other pictures Picasso did in 36 35 and 36 he is a landscape and the landscape is essentially weightless the light shines through it's ruined structures the main figure is ghostly the tree mimes horror the latter leans whimsically against a wall it is a space of fantasy of free association a surrealist lantern slide so the question follows if this is the kind of exterior that seems to go naturally in Picasso's case with fire and agony and dismemberment then how on earth could these modes of experience be put back into the world given weight made ordinary and substantial isn't the outside for Picasso I'll show you the may 2nd study again isn't the outside always going to be a dreamscape for Picasso the imperative to make the pain public it follows if that is taken to mean situating it in an outside of sorts it was for Picasso deeply at war with the imperative to make pain incarnate this is the problem that preoccupation for the next five weeks the manufacture of Guernica turns I think on the devising of a space to contain the action that would not be this fairy tale edge of the city Madame in the piece isn't in the mural is hard to characterize that's the point for it cannot be room space exactly I'm not going to tell you the story of an artist returning to the little world he knows and making his final masterpiece out of it certainly the space of Guernica has some of the character of a room it is paved maybe with tiles it appears to open out left and right into an openness beyond it but at the two top corners there seem to be lines in perspective fixing rooms top edge and sides there's something like a light bulb in the ceiling or where a ceiling could be even a few tentative beam lines it would just spot the minions Bachmann more detail images later and baldessari has suggested that as the painting proceed proceeded under the rafters and as picasso digested the evidence of doramas tremendous photographs of it he would have been seeing them you see sort of day by day week by week as she developed the oil painting intragenic it as it were certain features of its actual surroundings it became more like the space it was made in well yes and no it may have taken on certain features of room space but I don't think this means particularly at actual size when the top of the picture is almost out reached visually but the space ended up looking contained or intimate it's not a space into which the outside comes as light does through a window in the way of Picasso's great still lifes from the nineteen twenties the outside is there all right but as in eruption instantaneity horror somehow or other the outside has to be made present in the picture as a proximity that is absolutely foreign to us absolutely non-human this is a huge reversal of the Cubist intuition no wonder it was such a struggle i leap forward on the 9th of May Picasso made his first attempt to sketch out the main lines of the mural to come using roughly the format dictated by the wall in the pavilion is still not quite long enough of course it's very small but the four months getting there the sheet teens with ideas but specially it hasn't come far from the pencil and gesso studies done a week before the bone stands a little docilely in front of a shattered townscape with twinned tiled roofs framing him right and left the lamp bears house to the right is a doll's house miniature and the town in general burns in a kind of middle distance behind a deep foreground chock-a-block with corpses it wasn't till two days later the 11th of May that the first real breach with this edge of the city exterior occurred and it happened typically for Picasso when the question of scale was faced head-on the canvas was stretched the Attic teared work began no more than a day or so later Dora Maar took the first photo it's stupendous this first state of things Clement Greenberg later went on record as thinking it much more successful so far as one can tell from photographs than any of the later stages it went through he meant to provoke as so often but you see what he means I think I look at state 1 of Guernica and immediately think of the wonderful pen and watercolour drawing by a self-portrait of the artist at work on his Romulus into a study multi here are the two images on the same screen and the comparison operates at several levels both documents were looking at exult in the actual physical enormity of the task called history painting and both record the moment the essential shamanistic moment in the history painting tradition as French men conceived it at which after the planting and painstaking of preliminary studies the first linear form of the whole thing appeared out of thin air in the vast empty rectangle it's hugely important I think this decision of Picasso's to recapitulate the procedures of airing and daveed and Chirico above all to go back to the moment of pure line deathless line at the beginning of things line you will immediately see by contrast with the sketch of two days before puts the image up front on the picture plane and all but collapses the crowded middle ground the lamp Bearer leans out of the window now and comes straight past the women underneath the ball spreads out laterally and loses his somewhat quarry shading one figure from among the tangle of Silla warriors reaches up this extraordinary figure of course reaches up maybe rigid in a last spasm and lays out his chest his torso his penis both his legs in strict parallel to the picture plane it is as if the wild hindquarters of the horse in the study here and migrated to the hyrum line drawing of this kind brings everything to the surface that would be one way of putting it it was ability to go on discovering and relishing this is what made him one of Picasso's main gods but of course the photograph shows it line is also transparency space flows through it unobstructed it cannot make space materialize as the heavy closed thing because the most deeply felt it to be the further making of Guernica I was a sequence of attempts to solve this riddle could one have a space in painting that was full as opposed to empty felt as a heavy breathable confining reality without a picture of Guernica size becoming all obstruction well detail or brilliant bits and pieces that was the question and not a rhetorical one this lecture to say it again can't do its subject justice there are first art now known to be at least nine photos taken by dorama of Guernica in progress plus a close-up of the horse's head early on and three or four shots I've shown you two of them of Picasso at work with the paintings shown obliquely or in part any one of these deserves more attention that it is so far being given in the literature a full account of state one to return to it momentarily would certainly have to go further with the AG comparison that's the great Romulus the painting done in treated a multi up above and this in turn since usually appears in Picasso when sexuality is in question would lead to the uniqueness in Picasso's work of this moment of homoerotic male beauty seems to me strange actually that this uniqueness has not been recognized or dwelt upon much the turn of the hero's nakedness into the picture plane is charged I would say naive in its equation of resistance with phallic perfection of form again the comparison with the drawing from two days earlier is telling it is one of Guernica signal achievements I want to suggest to have death acted out by women and animals without the actions partaking of the erotics of the bullring women just are the activists mostly in Picasso's world it may go on being the problem for us that what they perform a great deal of the time is sex and death women are machine of Sufi we can take that aphorism it's Picasso's as compassionate or goating according to our preference is part of a longer and deeper debate with Francois Zulu about the actual state of the war of the sexes but for our purposes what matters is how machine asou for the year plays out in Guernica I think compassion rules and because of news so well I think that in order for it to do so he must diffuse throw into reverse gear his habitual association of violence with the sexual act the way the mother would the dead baby is treated in the May 9th study she's the central figure in the drawings right half is typical logically of course the mother must be back in an undefined middle ground on the far side of the horses wild splayed hindquarters but visually when part of us surely registers the horses haunches as belonging to her and this kind of conflation of horse and woman is Picasso's normal imagining so to speak state one of Guernica itself two days later seems to me a first attempt as I said a naive attempt at expunging the normality by simply reversing the sexual signs if the male hero could concentrate the erotic energy in his system chess then be even the woman in flames to the right typical and brilliant of course captivating that's the problem because I admit maybe even the woman in flames to the right could agonize without her agony being desirable its simple-minded with all the simplicity of repression but it goes to show the erotic stakes of Guernica and a full account at the pictures making would have to trace the way this first homoeroticism this borrowing whole from david in theater was gradually worked out of the system one great thing that had to go of course was the clenched fist it grew bigger it gathered itself a phallic hello of sunlight and harvest festival it blew away francis machinae has argued that one main reason it vanished was the state of things in barcelona at the very moment picasso was working the blood of anarchists in the streets and the triumph of the party the clenched fists remember was more and more specifically a Stalinist symbol francis may well be right and of course as Arnheim long ago argued so eloquently there are complex structural reasons why a picture space why the picture space couldn't go on hanging so decisively from a central unbroken spine but part of the painting out I'm suggesting is best understood as a kind of embarrassment on Picasso's part state one had been too beautiful to male to Greek it was transparent about too much theoretics of Guernica then is one among several stories worth telling and still as largely to be told but my story is space and I return to it and even here I'm going to be selective I'll jump to a moment quite close to the end by the time because I was working on the picture as we see it here probably two weeks or more into the process maybe into the first days of June the basic terminal and spatial structure of the picture had been long decided the painting was going to be organized around a repeated diagonal pattern of polarized lights and darks a triangulation we might say look for instance this is clearer in the finished painting at the gray and white geometry emanating from the lamp or even better as a sort of epitome the deep black slashing across your frame underneath the lamp Bearer or the flames the window the straining is a sealing line top right Jenni cos critics have always loathed this geometry its triangles are academic they say I'm sure they're right but the answer to them I think it's the answer because it was struggling for through the last week's was to engineer a kind of heavy palpable activity in and around the geometry on the surface in the nearness of the foreground that would count away the crispness of the lights and darks I think he did but I think it was hard a lot depends on real size jenika suffers hugely it's the price of fame from being continually miniaturized and disembodied in the world of mechanical reproduction you should try to build into your judgment of what I now say about its speciality an awareness a memory or imagining of what it's like to being for to the picture itself remember that one sense of physical location in regard to the scene and I mean by this no one's measured height against it but one's imaginative projection into its space is that it is hugely bigger than oneself but at most a viewer comes up to the horse's chest and this gigantism is again of a new kind for Picasso we are to borrow a phrase from Mishler he's talking about Picasso's monsters of a few years before we are tear a tear with the Giants in Guernica or level with them looking up into a world that is flimsy and vulnerable the pinned paper feel of the horse's body is notorious but at the same time heavy ordinary standing on the same ground as ourselves and of course the artifact of the slide or JPEG actually travestis' this physical relation the best I can do is offer a photograph like this which is already taken from quite far away you notice in no sense is it creating a false proximity to wage war with the textbooks false distance I think it registers at least the kind the conditions of seeing that Guernica intense it's also my way of saying thank you to Andrew mozi who took this picture of the path and also many of these fabulous digital images of detail that you're seeing what can I say then about the kind of seeing Guernica in temps well at least this first we are certainly back in a world of nearness with everything pressed close to where we are but this does not turn in the end on the making of an overall container for the action it doesn't turn on the inside-outside distinction it sufficiently obvious but Picasso decided finally to offer us bits and pieces of both the skyline up top changes constantly from ceiling to roof escape this might be irritating a sign of the painters inappropriate cubist cleverness if it mattered but in situated vision I don't think it does the upper part of the picture is accompaniment it is not where space vitally is in kanika space is here lower down closer to us in the waited grounded bottom-heavy world of the giants space is a matter of silhouettes and painted cutouts jockeying for attention with quite other kinds of extension in space horse's neck and jaws for example or a wonderful slight billow of the curtain just the geometry just sort of broken by the floating of the curtain over the arm as the lab bearer pushes it aside or the push the flow almost as if she squeezed from a tube of the lamp bearers face towards somewhere right over our heads it took some doing this let me go back to the moment I promised to end with our best guess is that we're a week from the end one thing that's always fascinated commentators about these two states of the painting is that in them Picasso appears to have stopped pieces of patterned presumably colored paper on to Gannicus blacks whites and grays it was more than a momentary whim both pieces of paper this one piece of paper in state six are applied to the woman stumbling across the foreground from the doorway at right one of them is a loose patch of wallpaper the other has been carefully cut to the shape of the woman's headscarf there is a moment seemingly O'Dare so when the pieces disappear we have another photograph and then they are stuck on again place just slightly differently and two more pieces are added a world paper strip over the grieving mothers dress and a bizarre cutout again of what looks like wallpaper trimmed to the shape of the falling woman's lower regions we're back in the world of cuba's it is as if Picasso suddenly felt that Guernica had to be put to the test of Kosh and clearly the pendulum papers though in the end because have discarded them were what provoked the most obviously cubist feature of the final work the lines of black stippling that all at once in June they are spread over more and more of the horse's body turning it partly into a kind of newsprint image of itself I interpret the pinned papers like this even so late in the day with the ebb and flow of monochrome long established as the paintings matrix because oh looks to be uncertain about whether the light-dark geometry really made the picture happen on the surface or enough on the surface or whether it was beginning to open the illusion backward in perspective into too much space it is the problem of picturing as far as Picasso is concerned the problem of surface and death and particularly the priority modern painting gives to the one surface and the distrust it has of the other the collage pieces are surface neutralized materialized I don't believe because I've ever seriously considered changing the pictures whole economy the 11th hour or even of interjecting here and there a note of color into it he was thinking this is my interpretation thinking about what in painting kept surface present above all about how much differentiation of surface texture surface incident was needed to interrupt a flattened out the light-dark machine he wanted proximity but not intimacy the look of things come out of the dark with the dark still clinging to them in the end he saw commerce of horsehair or enough but this was because in the meantime he'd found a solution for the pictures most unresolved aspect its ground level the nature of the contact between its activists and objects and the surface they stood on ground level is still radically under determined you'll notice in state eight just before the end really the broken shards of the warrior alright this broke now turned into notoriously of course into a broken shattered statue the holes of the horse and the but I asked big toes of the woman lurching in through the door they all fall into the bottom edge of the picture like so many weightless located floaters may be Picasso had the idea at this stage that groundlessness vertigo was the beaver paintings predominant note maybe the falling woman would dictate the whole plot in the end she didn't the change when it comes happens fast this to remind you is the ninth of doramas photos taken a matter of hours before because of decides the painting is finished and as soon as the surface the surface --mess rediscovered in the collage pieces begins to be put into the painting coma by coma spreading across the horse's back and belly the whole balance of space and ground in the foreground begins to shift the horses whose have legs to attach to the broken statue becomes 3-dimensional cutout surface is answered by hard ground level a grid of tiling springs up anchoring the paintings whole speciality but what it does for instance a little bit hard to illustrate this but I'll try to the long hard edged diagonal this one like the bottom of a wall maybe or even an offending door that pushes back into space behind the stumbling woman the horses for hoof and the Warriors broken sword that line as a basic structuring idea had been there for days maybe weeks it seems to arrive at the same time as the first painted pasted papers you can send but it doesn't really operate on their Nikas foreground it doesn't carve out sufficient space for the foreground actress to stand on until the grid is painted in then everything seems to harden and clarify the curving grey shadow Midway across the wall this one here snaps into visibility the horse kneels heavily on the tiles I liked the photo Dora Maar took of Picasso squatting on the studio floor by his painting towards the end and pondering of course this is me wildly reading in pondering just what it would take to materialize the still abstract last inches of the illusion in the end the creatureliness came easily almost naively but only because he saw finally how surface Ness and groundedness could coexist form spread out along the nearest possible front edge of the floor plain as if no more than a few inches from us up above bodies switched to and fro between paper thinness and stamping solidity and the squares of the tiling are pushed back beyond the bodies making them seem closer still this is proximity in a word but reinvented it is flatness finding its feet I began this lecture by saying that questions of space and habitation for Picasso home are bound up with questions of truth not persuasiveness or brilliance or beauty in my view but good old-fashioned validity here at the end I'll return to that obviously truth in Picasso doesn't equal life likeness or verisimilitude his aren't paintings that wish to persuade us that the world on show is continuous with hours or even exactly equivalent to it and yet the idea of world process and therefore I argue there is one thing that Picasso finds indispensable to any painting that counts namely space the making of an imaginative ly habitable three dimensions one having a specific character offering itself as a surrounding of course is the great three ounces of 25 entombed in a dark dismal room at the Tate Modern one way of describing this constant in Picasso is to say that picturing for him is unthinkable if it does not aim at providing a space for being in providing a room and maybe even by adding a simple substantive to room here is wrong because providing room the scene a quinone of the human just is for Picasso providing a room a specific and familiar floor wall wainscot window being for human beings has as its very precondition being in reaching out really or imaginative Lee and feeling the shape and pressure of a place I hope that saying this helps to bring the achievement of Guernica into focus for suppose modernity were to come upon an instant this is a terribly innocent watercolour by Picasso from 1919 window with airplane suppose modernity were to come upon an instant in which the whole imaginative structure of habitation of being in of shaping the world around an implicit model of room and window of containing and belonging of being inside or out suppose it looked the death of all that in the face suppose the airplane banked in the sky and headed in under action North by Northwest light and suppose this were more than a local occurrence suppose that in the bombing of Guernica modernity in some sense encountered its future and saw in little a whole form of life collapsing ceasing to exist as the determinant dependable form of the human how on earth was painting to represent such an ending without falling itself into a spatial rubble of spatial nothing may be propped up or distracted from us by our conjurer's misdirection of attention by foreground melodrama that was the problem there well I think always be disagreement about whether because I've found a solution but what this lecture has meant to suggest above all is the nature of the task and how much the task for Picasso meant reinventing everything that I can even claim he rose to the challenge that he found a way rather at the last moment to put his humans and animals on a ground and one that was neither outside more in but truly the one becoming the other a world in which women and beasts still fought for a footing just as everything dissolved that I can claim this at all this enormity and hope to persuade you is more than enough this is Western about it's a question about the way the paintings display today in the museum Reina Sofia of Madrid you talk about rooms and space you know how are you happy with the way this painter is shown in this museum today you show that yes way or is it do you have any idea so how should it be shown here to people how to be presented yeah it's a killer you know to know how to have to display it and you you saw the briefly right that very typical slide of it surrounded by people it has to be surrounded by people of course right and and the people I suppose for all the obvious reasons have to be kept with a certain distance I mean look as in this world in which you know so many so many peerless things are essentially unavailable right you know I would think of I mean I'll never be able to see the arena Chapel again I'm not going in for 15 minutes you know that means it's kind of right you know so in a world in the world you know where mass tourism has changed the fabric of everything it's not doing all that badly if you actually if you queue up at 9:00 and you get in a 10:00 and you walk straight there you've got three quarters of an hour before it's you're overwhelmed you know yeah but these things sort of compromises yes please I want you at the theater at one point I think you called it Davidian or something is there anything to say about the space being anything like a stage anything no I think there's but I think there's a lot to be said about it being like a stage yes you know it is look it's it's theatrical the lighting you know it's often been described as foot lighting and you know and actually sometimes it's you you you will realize that in the background of this talk is is a dialogue with you know criticism of Guernica some of which is pretty facile and some of it is just very serious and and you know the the charge of theater of us of a kind of dispel a dramatic theatricality stage likeness stage craft has sometimes to be made very seriously against it you know and you you gather that the sort of structure of my argument is to almost shrug my shoulders at that right all of these charges are right or have some flaws ability to them but it seems to me then we're left with the question so so why does Guernica survive being so obviously episodic so obviously innocence sort of over pinched right you know and and kind of coercive of our sympathy and attention you know and so that was the things that can be said against it seem to me to be many of them most of them quite reasonable but it survives it all to again that phrase please yes a question about your conception of space and also the project of history painting yeah and it's kind of a two-part question one is whether you to some extent for you Guernica represents the end of a tradition of history painting whether in fact the kind of ambition of this kind of painting is possible today and also your conception of space and I'm thinking of a lot of the writing of the late 80s and particularly someone like Jamison and the notion of postmodern space yeah and whether the kind of things you're saying about this are about a modernist space which we can no longer inhabit or discuss in the same kind of way and how that have impacts upon the notion of history painting today yeah it's a very good question and you know look we'd be here all night if we were really discussing it through and through okay a couple of things I mean I think that I don't think you see I didn't think the word modernism gets us very far with Guernica you know I think he was as I said I think he's very very aware of the anachronism and the pastner's of what he's doing sort of engaging so naively but deeply right with the French I mean you know just think of him actually going out and he must have he just dined on these paintings in the Louvre as he was you know preparing so in a sense look I associate modernism with I don't associate modernism with the heroic the massive the monumental the grounded public all right and and and as and as those seem to me tremendously dangerous for him dementia Slee difficult but in the in the in the end what he managed I think he sort of managed to make so typical of him right after this token crisis of confidence painting maybe dead I can't do it that his way of sort of oh well I'll do it again and I will do the painting but epitomizes the twentieth century I will you know I will not only make a painting again I will make the painting right which is the history painting of our century I mean a typical crazy but he gets away with it you know and I just think it's so important that all around him in the Spanish pavilion oh we know tremendously serious efforts by renowned than well and burn wells to team of documentaries and opposite Guernica is a fabulous wonderful photo montage of Lorca and Loras assassination it's it's it's so important that this picture is the thing of the past and knows itself as a thing of the past right you know now and then just one in this briefly he does try it again you know he tries to make history paintings again massacre in Korea which is terrible and something that more and more interest me and I have to go back into Paris now and really really look at it is the the big mural he does of the fall of Icarus for UNESCO and this is a sort of somewhat glib stab at it which I'm a utterly changed my mind about but this almost as if the fall of is kind of a sort of parody and annihilation of of history painting you know I mean it's it is I think absolutely bizarre and incomprehensible you know and I love the picture of him standing next to Thomas though he still is you know in front of it until I as sort of brightly approving of right the PAF's star cultural property but behind them is this monstrosity in which you know in which the absolute in any notion right of historicity and of representations capacity to grasp historicity I think he's sort of being done to death yes my first impression when I saw reproduction in the Whitehall gallery Whitechapel Gallery a couple of years ago and incidentally it was shown there many many years ago the original yeah but was of as a prime of era but jelly and the blowing and flora and flowers and birds first spring as it means and the antithesis of that would be that with maybes Mars got it blowing on the beasts man as the best best reality seems to be the opposite of time nevere well that's just an observation yeah no that's great it's maybe an a sort of nice point to end on actually there I mean I think that I had would never dare to suggest that Picasso is reaching that far back into you know into the monumental past but who knows who knows thank you you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 11,455

Keywords: Pablo Picasso (Visual Artist), Guernica (Artwork), T. J. Clark (Academic), Visual Arts (Field Of Study)

Id: lEG1pBjABrM

Length: 74min 11sec (4451 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 24 2015