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?