Historian digs deep to get to the heart of Pablo Picasso’s success as an artist

Published by the National Gallery in Washington and written by Timothy James Clark, former professor of art history at Berkeley University, Picasso and Truth gives a new insight into the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

From his earliest forays as an artist in late 19th century Barcelona, when he emulated the Realist style of the celebrated — and now often overlooked — Catalan painters Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas, right through to his late paintings, Picasso always sought to attract attention, create controversy and to portray mankind and the psychology of men — but more particularly of women — in a visceral and immediate way.

Clark’s book is divided not into chapters but instead follows closely the sequence and content of a series of talks he gave in 2009 as part of the Mellon lecture series. Several of the chapters deal with individual works of art, such as the Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), The Three Dancers from the following year, and the 1927 The Painter and His Model. The succinct titles of the chapters, or lectures — Object, Room, Window, Monster, Monument and Mural — hint at Clark’s rapid-fire approach to his subject, telling the story of an artist who was once as famous for his personality and lifestyle as for his art, but who is now, with the passing of years, increasingly remembered through the powerful works of art he created.

The vast majority of visitors who see Picasso’s works in art museums around the world have grown up in a time of relative peace and plenty, and have little idea of the traumatic decades in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, or of the conditions under which he created some of his greatest masterpieces, such as Guernica, the subject of the final lecture.

Clark writes almost as a ‘concrete’ poet; the chapters are indeed lectures, the reader being addressed in familiar, conversational, terms. He dispenses occasionally with sentences that make sense, reducing them to a staccato sequence of words, then expands his discussion and draws the reader into a cogent argument that illuminates what Clark terms the twin poles of “substance” and “structure” in Picasso’s art. Using extracts from Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings and quotations from Nietzche, Clark probes for meaning within the tortured, anguished, powerful and often erotic images created by this most Spanish of artists, who spent most of his life in exile in France.

This is not art history for the faint-hearted. From page one, the reader is expected to be familiar with a wide range of literary and musical references, from Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet, to Ezra Pound and Philip Larkin, and to have a reasonable knowledge of the French language. Slower students will have to work hard to keep up.

Clark commences with a shotgun approach: “There must be a reason, I feel — a historical reason — for the abominable character of most writing on the artist.” Having thus scattered the crows of “second-rate celebrity literature”— with the exception of writer Michel Leiris — he then commences to feast on the heart of the artist, producing an overall analysis of Picasso’s art that is both scholarly and highly personal.

Clark is not interested in anecdote, or banal recollections. He looks closely at the actual paintings and describes the feelings they evoke and the thoughts they compel into being. He relates these works to the art of their time, and also the art of the past. He describes them with accuracy and vividness, and admires Leiris’s analysis of Picasso’s inner world, a world of strange yet familiar beings, recognisably human but also monsters of the imagination.

However, anecdotes do occasionally surface; the art dealer Kahnweiler recalling Picasso’s comment that he would love to paint like a blind man “who pictures an arse by the way it feels”. This crude, sexy, earthy metaphor is typical of the artist; both of the person he was and of the persona he sought to create.

Clark is as alive to the eroticism of Picasso’s art, as he is to the problems it presents in terms of Modernism, the development of abstraction, and the belief, oft-repeated in the first decades of the 20th century, that painting was somehow “dead” as an art form. Kahnweiler believed, and Clark concurs with this view, that Picasso managed to breath new life into painting, an art form that had reached an impasse. In scale, colour and subject-matter Picasso not only pitted himself against those painters who had gone before — Velasquez, Rubens, Titian — but also absorbed the magic and power of art from ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean and further afield.

As with any in-depth discussion of Picasso and his art, Clark’s series of lectures inevitably also explore the 20th century’s oscillations between war and peace, poverty and prosperity. He hinges his arguments on a belief that Picasso was charting, through his art, the death of bourgeois society.

Although the heavy European bourgeois society of Picasso’s childhood may have dissolved by the end of the First World War, its legacy still forms a potent catalyst for contemporary social aspirations and beliefs. The tension between technology as creator of wealth and a destroyer of jobs and lives, that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is as vibrant today as a century ago. At the outset of his career Picasso may have emulated the bourgeois art of Casas and Rusinol, but his family groups and circus figures are infinitely more moving. His sense of the intimate and fragile lives of people in the myriad of small apart- ments and rooms that constituted Bohemian Paris is for Clark one of the keys to Picasso’s art, where much significance is placed on tables and windows in the compositions.

Clark is also fascinated by the evolution of Picasso’s art, from the cool classicism of his early Cubist paintings to the monstrous images in his later work. It must be one of the most intimidating challenges for any art historian to come up with new insights into Picasso’s art, but Clark, through intuition and intellect, succeeds.

The key to this book’s success is that the author responds to the art in the way Picasso probably intended, with his head and his heart. He is able to read these paintings from an objective descriptive stance but also with real feeling and empathy for the subject, a rare combination in art history.

Peter Murray is director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork

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