Even if you don’t care greatly about Picasso, I recommend the Charlie Rose interview with Françoise Gilot, who lived ten years with the man. A talented artist herself, and very independent-minded, Gilot frequently discussed art with Picasso. Much of what he said about how he worked has come to us through her. For example, regarding the rather complex, high cubist paintings, he said than in the “early stages” there were almost no “references to natural forms…I painted them in afterwards.” Braque had a similar working procedure. Rather than abstract from an initial representation of a scene, these cubists–at least for a time as their approach evolved–roughly laid out their abstract, faceted spaces and forms, then filled in enough clues to suggest the subject. Those clues could appear in rather disconnected spots. I believe it was the dealer Kahnweiler who said they had developed a way to free objects, showing that they existed without showing where they were located.

Picasso was first introduced to Gilot in 1943, when he begged an introduction from an actor friend, who was sitting nearby at a restaurant with Gilot and another painter. I’ve seen it told several places that Picasso approached their table carrying a bowl of cherries, but Gilot mentions that he also left with them! After they began living together in 1946, Picasso painted a series of portraits of Gilot entitled Femme-fleur (loosely, Flower woman), shown here in order. With their hair transformed into a leaf canopy, they have an intriguing relationship to a well-known 1948 Robert Capa photo of the two at the beach.

Elsewhere on the Picasso front, I’ve started listening to TJ Clark’s Mellon Lectures as podcast from the National Gallery of Art (thanks to Namaste Nancy for the reminder). He’s a wonderful and detailed reader of paintings. But in an odd moment near the beginning, he appeared needlessly and overly scornful of those interested in the artist’s biography. No doubt, in the case of Picasso, there’s much third-hand gossip, and I suspect a good deal of what’s been written about his life would be worth reading. Nevertheless, he’s a fascinating and powerful character, fun to learn about even if I didn’t feel I was gaining some insight into his art.

I see the importance of being able to deal with an artwork in its own terms. But it seems not only limiting, but self-deceptive to claim that external knowledge is irrelevant. (I hasten to say that Clark himself does not make such an extreme claim, though he appears to have some distaste for personal history, despite frequently citing Gilot as a source.) Could we learn from art anything about ourselves, others, and the world, if those things were not involved in the work?

Do you have an interest in the personal histories of artists you care about? Or do you prefer to experience the art from a more “purist” perspective?

Recently artist and blogger Laurie Fendrich, on residency in France, claims to have found a source for cubism in the jumbled roof planes of hill-clinging villages. This visually appealing view is supported by the Braques of L’Estaque and Picassos of Horta:

Along these lines, there’s a cute analysis posted on YouTube on Picasso’s La Grenade, reproduced below:

Of a more analytical bent, the art critic Walter Darby Bannard, writing in a 1968 essay, says that the essence of cubism is that a painting be composed of small elements whose positions and relations reconstitute the subject. The classic elements for Picasso and Braque were the facets that broke up the surfaces they depicted. Bannard credits Cezanne with having taken the color spots of the Impressionists and “flattened out the ‘pieces’ and organized them spatially.” He goes on to apply his definition to the sculptor David Smith.

Pierre Daix, writer and friend of Picasso, brings science into the mix:

Cubism was not only a revolution in pictorial space, but a revolution in our understanding of pictorial space. This was in all probability linked to the fact that physics was simultaneously destroying our three-dimensional space-time perception.

As a scientist myself, I’m skeptical of any substantive relevance, but that’s not the point. Ideas of revolution were in the air, and took on cultural significance independent of their original meaning.

David Hockney, as reported by Lawrence Weschler in True to Life (where I also found the Daix quote in a note), considers that cubism is not so much about the structure of the object, but about the process of perception.

If there are three noses, this is not because the face has three noses, or the nose has three aspects, but rather because it has been seen three times, and that is what seeing is like.

Of course, that’s much what Hockney himself was attempting to do with his photocollages. Insofar as that was the goal, I think Hockney did it in a more convincing way.

And then there’s the aesthetic-historical Pepe Karmel, whose book Picasso and the Invention of Cubism was made known to us by Jay (I picked it up used on Amazon).

To understand Cubism, it is necessary to examine three key ideas associated with earlier avant-garde movements. One is the “empiricist” theory of perception… Another is the Symbolist idea that the work of art should not imitate reality but should offer an “equivalent” for experience… The third is the idea of “decorative” design, whose influence on modernism…

Hopefully that will make more sense as I get further into the book.

These bits of study are beginning to coalesce into what, inevitably, can only be called a cubist picture of cubism. But I’m not sure how far I can get without attempting a cubist painting a la June (results here)—rather problematic as I don’t paint.

Please add your own facet to the picture. What comes to your mind when I say, “Cubism?” Do you still believe the creation myth, the story of its origin, that you were first told? Did the cubists have a goal, and if so was the endeavor a success or a failure?

Recently on the blog I adminster, the Ragged Cloth Cafe, one of the regulars posted a blog on Ansel Adams. My response to her comments was a bit jaded, or maybe even irritated. Another of the regular posters on the blog called me on it: “June, you do sound a bit cranky and a bit unfair to modern landscape photographers. Or is it like seeing drip painting and only being able to think of Pollack?”

As I reread what I had written I realized that indeed I was sounding more than bit cranky (and even a bit incoherent). After a few further comments I sorted out what my head was thumping around with, dissing Adams. Here’s something of what I wrote:

You may have hit on why I am currently in a state of irk-dom about Adams — it’s because I’m trying to find my own way with landscape and his images loom altogether too large in my mind. I have to wrangle and fight with him a bit (Jacob and the angel?) to make my way to my own vision.

I often find this is the case for me — at various times in doing my art, I find myself fighting my way through to my own style, arguing (if only with myself) about the too-much-with-us-giants who block my view.

I think this is yet another version of Karl’s posts here and here) “Why is making art so hard?” I had the same difficulty with the Cubists (see the two homemade oils that flank this post) with whom I spent the last 10 days harrassing and wrestling. Oddly enough, though, I don’t have the same issues with Cezanne. It may be that he is just far enough out of the old masters/coffee-cup loop to give me fresh insights rather than making me strain and struggle to see afresh.

It’s not that I blame the artists for being so outstandingly good (even I admit that that’s a bit over the top); it’s that to see afresh is such a struggle that I want to fling a paint-loaded brush onto my memory book of Adams’ photos and smear them thoroughly so I’m not seeing them while I’m working. It’s a kind of internal thrashing about, trying to break through to the other side.

Here’s an Adams that was relatively fresh for me.

Death Valley, Zabriski Point, California, 1942

And here’s one that isn’t fresh:

Yosemite, Entrance from the South, 1935

Does anyone else have to mentally engage in wrangling and arguing and fighting with famous art and artists in order to clear the way to achieve his/her own vision? Or do you all work serenely, happy with the imaginative way your mind works, seeing new and new again?

[The paintings that front and back this post are an early and late version of one of my late 10 day engaged battle with the Cubists. Obviously, the old guys won.]

In a small art group that Jer and I belong to, we were given a challenge: for the next meeting, we were each to create some form of art based on “biscuits.” That meeting will be next week. I have to make some art. Using “biscuits” I came up with an anagram: “is Cubist.” I will make a Cubist-style painting, containing biscuits.

I thought the exercise would be simple. I would look at some Cubist works, get a couple books from the library and raid my bookshelves to see what others had to say, decide on motifs beyond the biscuits, and do a few sketches. Then, I would be ready to paint.

I turned to the internet to see what “making a Cubist painting” would turn up. ArtLex’s definition of Cubism is as good as any although none cover the full range of possible elements. Lots of middle-school curricula appear on the internet, it turns out, with detailed descriptions of assignments, most of them focusing on fragmentation and monochromism. Good for vocabulary, I thought, but not so useful for actually making the painting. Also a description of how to mock up a Cubist work on Photoshop, print it out, and then paint it. I’m reserving that one for when all else fails.

My pencil-sketches and sketch-paintings now number 20 and are still so rough that I shudder to look at them. The books had bits and pieces of useful information but tend to be dense and hard to wade through to get to the helpful stuff. Finding the most appropriate motifs turn out to have its own difficulties. I have settled on the biscuits, strawberries for color, and a vase or jug to give verticality. For its shape, I added the Betty Crocker (Bisquick) spoon to the motifs. I will be doing a still life, of course.

Assembling these items into something a casual on-looker would look at as cubist is yet to be accomplished.

Here’s some of what I have to think about: the interplay of a mulitiplicity of fragmented elements, pulled together across the picture plane, fitting into one another while retaining integrity, playing with motifs while transmuting them, – space, shading, monochromes, taut geometries somehow both beneath the primary forms but strongly influencing them, all elements that are not necessarily part of the fragmentation of the image but are necessary to carry out the picture plane.

And that doesn’t begin to deal with the real questions of art — what is it I am trying to evoke, to communicate, to unveil, to show?

“Where/how to begin?” How to make the translucencies, the transparencies, that pierce and interplay. According to Lucia Salemme (in her excellent book of exercises called Composition,) a light source is essential. That much I can manage.
Geometries — the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, the cube. A contemporary of the Cubists, Andre Salmon, called cubism “painting as algebra.” I have not been good at math since 10th grade. My feeling for math is very like my feeling for Cubism. I respect but don’t love either.
I was relieved, however, to find that the Cubists permitted recognizable tables, and even used table legs and chairs as part of their still life compositions. It seemed important to them that bits of objects be recognizable (an eye, a breast, guitar frets, a pear, a table leg). Other bits seem to be fillers, negative space, carefully considered no doubt, but not just another jigsawed fragment. And collage, something any self-respecting quilt artist can do in her sleep, became one of the aspects of later Cubist art.

I have to find a focus — “the means of organizing a canvas in terms of interacting and transparent facets or planes, which could be made to suggest movement and depth while preserving the unity of the picture plane.” (John Golding, Cubism). This focus will, of course, be integrated with all the other elements of translucency, interpenetration, angularity, volume, and fragmentation.

So I am embarked this week on the journey. I have an itinerary and a final station, but the details of the passing landscape are yet to be discovered. I have photographs of vases and jugs. I have made and sketched biscuits to my satisfaction. I have tried out angularities and volumic spaces. I have a big bowl of strawberries. I’m ready to roll.