Pablo Picasso’s Innermost Self, Clark’s Room-Space, and Jacqueline’s Eye
In the end there is only love. However it may be. And they ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches, in order that they can sing better. ~Pablo Picasso, 1933
T. J. Clark’s recent encomium, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica [1], is based on the six A. W. Mellon lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 2009. Clark is a close reader of artworks; the acuity of his thought, his philosophical reasoning, and his breadth of references, makes him the ideal cross-examiner of Picasso. He began his 329 page volume with an assault on “the abominable character of most writing”, the “second-rate celebrity literature” notable for its “determination to say nothing, or nothing in particular, about the structure and substance of the work Picasso devoted his life to;” it tends to “gossip or hero-worship.” xxxxxx
However, this kind of “gossip or hero-worship” is usually biographical, especially in the case of Picasso, whose art is full of references to lovers, offspring, friends, pets, and self-portraits from adolescence to old age [the 347 Series with its self-deprecatory humor], right, not to mention his allusions to literature, mythology, contemporary events, traditional iconography, art of different periods and cultures, etc. To deny this is to deny that artists are human beings and that they do “human being” things [was Ma Jolie in Cubist paintings really Picasso’s evaluation of his own work?].
Nevertheless, Clark introduces an important new concept he calls “room-space”; he postulates that Picasso’s work after World War I was a biographical portrait of the regressive nature of the 20th century and the demise of bourgeois culture and society. Room-space was a “relatively steady concept, beginning with Cubism”, he asserts, a secure laboratory in which its geometric experiments were worked out. “I cannot avoid the conviction that somewhere at the heart of Picasso’s understanding of life … lay an unshakable commitment to the [bourgeois] space of a small or middle-sized room and the little possessions laid out on its table” he clarified. “His world was of property arranged in an interior: maybe erotic property … but always with bodies imagined in terms that equate them with, or transpose them into, familiar instruments and treasures.”[2]
Clark considers this room-space as self-contained, intimate, and able to provide expression of powerful feelings, to be a basic premise of how Picasso treats beauty and subjectivity – what he calls the artist’s “truth-condition.” Clark writes that Picasso’s commitment to room-space is the heart of Picasso’s concept of existence. Room-space, as staged indoors, in homes, (bed)rooms, apartments, or in studios with everything nearby, is the importance Clark attaches to Picasso’s innermost self, his “understanding of life.”
In 1955, when The Studio was painted, Picasso and Jacqueline Roque had just moved into La Californie, a florid 1920s Art Nouveau style villa outside Cannes, at the foot of Sainte Victoire mountain. Picasso used the large main salon on the ground floor as his studio, as well as the place where he received and entertained friends and dealers. He painted a dozen Studios (the studio, rarely a primary subject, was the sine qua non of the human being for Picasso). Studios had been a favorite subject for Matisse, and Picasso very probably adopted it as a response and homage to his close friend’s death the previous year; Picasso was very much a human being in that respect (one of the afflictions of advancing age is loss of friends and colleagues). The decorativeness, bold colors, and exotic palms, recall the opulent Studios and graceful Odalisques of Matisse. When Picasso’s cluttered ateliers do appear in his pictures, they, here at least, might possibly have been painted by Matisse – but of Picasso’s studio.
The verdant landscape beyond the studio doors is resonant with Matisse’s Mediterraneanized Studios. Yet this is very much Picasso’s studio, with his many possessions: artworks, tools, sculpted head (thick impasto for importance) on a modeling stand, guitar on the wall, empty canvas on an easel, etc. Objects were not just objects for Picasso, they were the creative process; perhaps that dazzling and vital force we call “consciousness” was Picasso’s “symbol of the innermost self” or his “understanding of life”. The studio is otherwise empty, but Picasso’s presence is strongly felt as the atelier becomes the main protagonist of the painting. Studios were always in Picasso’s head; “I’ve always lived inside myself,” he said [3].
In Woman by a Window, Jacqueline Roque sits in her bentwood rocking chair before a small canvas and a tall French window in the studio, or room-space, of his villa. Beyond the window is a balcony, railing, palm tree, and a view of Cannes Bay. The landscape is a lightly brushed chlorophyll-green and a subdued palette of blacks, pale olive-greens and soft browns, the colors of plant life we associate with food-bearing vegetation, quiescence and lush nourishment.
Right: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, MoMA)
Left: Self Portrait [Národní Galerie, Prague. Zervos, II.8, Daix, 25]
The figure of Jacqueline counters the verticality of the painting, with the peripheral exterior palm tree a simple environmental note unlike Matisse’s Mediterraneanized verdant landscape in The Studio. Enclosed within Jacqueline’s firm head, with its characteristic straight forehead-nose profile on a compotier-shaped neck, rests her large frontal penetrating eye, not unlike the eyes in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, MoMA), or his all-seeing eyes in the Self Portrait, of the same year, that focuses on us, and on Picasso who was painting her. (In his 1928 Studio and Painter and Model, both in MoMA, heads have triple eyes). The other eye, the examining profile eye, looks toward the canvas, and beyond to the “simple environmental note”.
Physiologically the eye, a sender and a receiving agent, has a double purpose: it looks and it sees; or as Goethe wrote: “the eye both perceives and speaks.” The open eye, as the organ of aesthetic appreciation, is a symbol of life and intelligence, an emblem of an artist’s introspection and insight; the closed eye represents sleep – and sometimes death (the first act after death in some cultures is to close the eyes of the deceased).
Right: Studio (1928), MoMA
In an earlier and very powerful notebook sketch of 7 June 1956, left, Picasso magnifies Jacqueline’s examining eye (here it becomes the symbol of Picasso’s introspection and insight; the “seer” as prophet) so that it meets the projection or protrusion from the canvas as though the two are attached and united as they become a bonded entity. The eye is Picasso’s steadfast and lasting instinctive vision within the “room-space.”
The publication of Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso in 1964, a tell-all book including stories about the artist’s sexual exploits and affairs, when such books were almost unheard of, infuriated Picasso. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize the children she had by Picasso; she divorced her then-husband (at Picasso’s urging), to marry Picasso in order to secure her children’s rights. He quickly and secretly married Jacqueline Roque to exact his revenge for Gilot’s publishing Life with Picasso, and above all for leaving him in 1953 (he, in retaliation and closure, was being very much a human being at that time). Jacqueline [Roque] Picasso was the main beneficiary of Picasso’s estate when she became his widow in 1973. Under the law of community of property, she inherited everything and had to pay no inheritance taxes on her legacy[4].
By Martin Ries, Contributing Writer
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NOTES
[1] T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton University Press, 2013.
[2] Clark, p.17
[3] Cited in Clark, p.89
[4] Olivier Widmaier Picasso, Picasso: The Real Family Story. Prestel Publishing, 2004, p.256.
Martin Ries, emeritus professor of art and art history at Long Island University, is an artist who studied at the Corcoran Art School, and American University in Washington, D.C. with Jack Tworkov, William Calfee, and Leo Steppat. In New York he studied art history at Hunter College with Leo Steinberg, Ad Reinhardt, William Rubin, and E.C. Goossen. He has exhibited his artwork in this country and abroad. This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University.
Peace Love & Info
Carol
June 9, 2014 @ 1:20 pm
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