Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by T. J. Clark (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by T. J. Clark
In the spring of 2009, I was a member of the standing-room-only audience for four of Tim Clark’s six A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts on “Picasso and Truth,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and I can testify that the present volume, closely based on those lectures, conveys much of the experience of being in his presence on such an occasion. Clark is an electrifying lecturer in addition to being a superb writer on art, and the combination gives Picasso and Truth a cumulative force that is nothing short of remarkable. Naturally, I cannot summarize his argument here. Suffice it to say, though, that he approaches Picasso (not all of him; the story really gets under way in the wake of the initial Cubist revolution, which Clark earlier treated in a memorable chapter in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [1998]) from a Nietzschean perspective, posing a question extrapolated from the Genealogy of Morals: “What will art be, … without a test of truth for its findings, its assertions; without even a will to truth?” Clark’s relentlessly original book offers one answer—or rather, considering its intense and detailed encounters with a wide range of paintings from the master’s oeuvre, many answers—to this unexpected question.
Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Art and Objecthood; Absorption and Theatricality; The Moment of Caravaggio; Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before; Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon; Realism, Writing, Disfiguration; Manet’s Modernism; and, most recently, Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On “Madame Bovary” and “Salammbô.”
