One Painting by Picasso, to start
I am reading T.J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth, based on the Mellon lectures he gave at the
National Gallery of Art in 2009. Clark wants to move his audience away from the “abominable
character of most writing on [Picasso] .... this second-rate celebrity
literature” based on a kind of “prurience” (Picasso
and Truth, Princeton University Press, 2013, p.4). Clark continues to say that, if we did look at the work
itself with any care, if we did, we
would know that...
Fixing
on a Picasso painting at all directly -- not swiveling away to this or that
fact of the love life or cult of personality -- and asking the question ‘What
understanding of the person and situation depicted seems to be at stake here?’
most often leads to places we would rather not go (5).
So let’s go there. Clark begins by analyzing Picasso’s “The Blue Room” (also
known as “The Tub”) from 1901:
There
are few paintings, I feel, more full of care and regret. The blue here is
dominant without being portentous. Likewise the scale of the body in relation
to the room -- small enough for a
hint of fragility -- and its placement quietly off center. And there is the
inimitable drawing of the young woman .... Few painters have had more of a
sense ... of how easily the human body might be destroyed .... Tenderness is
everywhere .... [and surely, Clark continues then] the tenderness and
definitiveness in Picasso has to do with a vision of space .... Space is
intimate. The rug heads off abruptly into infinity, but the sheet on the unmade
bed laps over it and leaps toward us and asks to be touched. Nothing important
is far away. Space, if I can put it like this, is belonging ... something
desired, vulnerable, patiently constructed, easily lost. (26-7)
How perfect a discussion of a painting is this? and what a
poetic description of the idea of space!
And Clark cautions that this isn’t really a full analysis; it is
merely an introduction to his idea of Picasso and the space(s) he paints. We
look back at the painting with a new sense of discovery. So, I say, let’s go
with the idea of space, and tenderness. Let’s take Clark at his word, and look
at a contemporary painter -- using his approach.
Turning To Michael Rich, at Adler&Co.Gallery (San
Francisco)
When we walked into Art Market San Francisco, we fell immediately
into the paintings of Michael Rich. Jim Adler spoke to us about the artist, who
had been painting landscapes on a grand scale, the perspective my husband often
calls “views from an airplane.”
The artist wrote that, in those works,
Spaces
of color and light akin to the mountains and seas of my travels open up between
tectonic plates of color and form .... the broad sweeping vistas of the Italian
countryside or the New England shore ... [but now, Rich has changed focus to a
much smaller patch of land,] my own backyard and garden ... [I am] looking more
closely at the intimate forms of leaves, branches and lines in nature ....
drawn lines of remembered and invented forms find their way from direct drawing
observations to the abstract world of paint on canvas (www.michael-rich.com)
There is something about these paintings that feels like a
discovery, as if we are heading towards a small garden doorway into a mass of
color, flowers blowing scent on the breeze. Here is “Untitled, 2012” (all
photos courtesy of Adler&Co):
This is moving in the direction of the small, the
personal. The scratches and drips and layering of the pinks, oranges, greens,
blues are alive because the painter’s touch is so very evident. Look at the
soft, deep horizontal green marks (near the deep gray horizontal brush mark) in
the upper left. These greens could be stems, but, because this is an abstract
painting, they also can function like the shadows one sees passing over a
flowering bush on a summer day. The fact that this work is abstract means that
there is room for the viewer to enter and see ... as much as we can, for as
long as we remain in front of the work.
Rich handles color with great ease and depth. I often find
that white paint can function as a dead layer, so opaque, so stifling, that it
can nearly kill a corner of a painting. And yet here, the white lifts the
painting, is light as air, actually seems to bring more space into the
work. Look at this close-up of the “busiest” part of this canvas:
Rich still paints immense works (this painting is 54” x 50”).
Let’s go back to Clark’s question, the one that few have bothered to ask about
Picasso, “What understanding of the person and situation depicted seems to be
at stake here?”
I would say the understanding is that this painter is familiar
with this space, and happy within it, and the situation is fresh: these paintings offer the
calming, yet uplifting, feel of an interior dream life. Clark had written about Picasso that “Space,
if I can put it like this, is belonging ... something desired, vulnerable,
patiently constructed, easily lost.”
And I’d like to think about that, here. The other large work on show was
“Canyons of Rain,” (68” x 62”):
This painting seems to have taken the direction of “Untitled,
2012,” even further. There are fewer small marks and more overall transparent
layers, which, again, amazingly give the painting air. It is a space of “belonging.” I often think that all we want, really,
is to belong in the space that surrounds us.
Thanks to T.J. Clark, Jim Adler and, of course, Michael
Rich. There is news about "The Blue Room"; a painting has been discovered underneath by the curators at the Phillips Collection: http://news.artnet.com/art-world/hidden-portrait-discovered-beneath-the-surface-of-picasso-painting
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