Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) (Bollingen Series, 35) - Hardcover

T. J. Clark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691157413 ISBN 13: 9780691157412

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"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

"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

"[B]rain-expanding but embracing, too. . . . T. J. Clark's Picasso and Truth [will] be with me for a good long time."---Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review

"Eloquent, confrontational and often disarmingly simple, Clark's writing moves quickly between levels, the metaphors heavy, the descriptions light."---Malcolm Bull, London Review of Books

"[M]asterful. . . . [E]xquisite prose. . . . This satisfyingly rigorous book is grounded in Picasso's paintings and drawings throughout."--Publishers Weekly

"At his best, he is, simply, brilliant. At his worst, he is also brilliant."---Kevin Jackson, Literary Review

"[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."---Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

"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."---Thomas Marks, Daily Telegraph

"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

"[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."---Alex Danchev, Times Higher Education

From the Back Cover:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0691157413
• ISBN 13: 9780691157412
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352