Q&A with 2009 Mellon Lecturer TJ Clark, part two

Continued from this morning with art historian and 2009 Mellon Lecturer TJ Clark...

MAN: In your six Mellon Lectures, will you be making a case that these five paintings are the guideposts that you're creating for Picasso in the '20s -- plus Guernica -- or will you be arguing that Picasso planned these paintings as guideposts for us/you to find?

TJC: A little more the latter. With possibly one exception, these are major, large-scale works. The 1924 Guggenheim still-life is one of the biggest pictures he ever did, and certainly it's the biggest still-life. The Three Dancers from the Tate, which we know from the record that Picasso regarded as maybe his greatest work -- Penrose once said to Picasso, 'Maybe Guernica was as good as it gets,' and Picasso said, 'Maybe -- but Three Dancers is better.'

The Tehran picture just hasn't been seen as much as it ought to be, but it's major, and was meant to be. It's one of these self-conscious, large-scale, stretched-out masterpieces that he did from time-to-time. And then the fourth one is perhaps just a little less obvious a keystone. It's the wonderful, smaller picture in the Met, Nude Standing by the Sea, from 1929. That one was a very important picture in its own moment, this kind of late '20s moment.  

Another part of the story, as you no doubt know, is that [the '20s] is a really good moment for writing about Picasso, which is saying something because in his own lifetime he didn't get written about very well. It's the moment of surrealist enthusiasm for him and of [Andre] Breton writing about him. It's a mixed bag. But the best writing he gets at this moment is just about as good as it comes -- Carl Einstein's extraordinary stuff and a fabulous essay by Leiris in 1929 -- so partly this woman standing by the sea has selected itself for me because it was one of the works that the writers, the poets at the time seized on and made much of.

Number five is Guernica, 'nuff said. I know it's a trap, Guernica is, but you'll see. I hope that the lecture about Guernica is not just a trudge through over-familiar ground. I'm going to try to talk about Guernica very much within the frame of questions that have risen in the previous five lectures.

MAN: In your best-known work you go beyond the relationship of art to art to dig deeply into how art and artists respond to their time, to what's going on around them. I'm thinking about how you wrote about the relationship between the impressionists and the industrialization of rapidly suburbanizing Paris and so on. Will you be connecting Picasso-in-the-'20s to that kind of thought or will you mostly burrow into Picasso for Picasso's sake?

TJC: Of course Guernica is the example that proves the rule. You can't talk about Guernica without talking about its special purposes and circumstances and I shall.

But by and large I shall not be talking about... that is, I'm interested in the conditions of exhibition and I show installation photos and I try to think of Picasso as a part of the art market situation, but you won't get linkages between sort of specific social developments - 'the new woman' or 'the flapper' or whatever, right? -- and Picasso. This has been tried and actually it's not empty, either. There are possibilities of those kinds of connections. But for me, I think, these lectures are about Picasso's belonging to a longer historical moment than that.

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.

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.

MAN: It sounds like that in jumping, if you will, from 1929 to 1937 you're going to exclude a lot of the Marie-Therese years, and along with them, her.

TJC: Well, yes, though in 1929 of course Marie-Therese is already there. [Ed.: Walter and Picasso met in 1927.] I think those paintings are absolutely astonishing, and '31-'32 is a great moment. I shall address it.

Let me put it this way: One has to make choices when talking about Picasso, putting it mildly, and the choice I've made is to think about the development, that is to think about Picasso's sense of space and the way in which his sense of space, the way in which he's experimenting to conceive space after cubism.

I think that the early '30s are part of the story and to sort of put it in a nutshell -- and I will speak about this briefly in lecture six -- I think they're a moment of marking time, you know, with the pictures of bull rings and the pictures of mythological landscapes in which portentous characters are relating to one another.

I think they're fascinating but, I think.. OK, let me not mince words. I think they're aesthetically lesser things. And actually we know by 1936 he's confronting as close to a sort of overall crisis of confidence about his work as he ever did. This can be exaggerated, but there were long months in 1936 where he makes just rather spasmodic graphic work, a lot of this crazy, weird poetry. So this is about as big a moment of kind of non-production in his work as we have. So it's very typical of Picasso that he comes out of it not just by painting again, but by painting the painting of the century.

Related: Part one.