T.J. Clark - A Room of One's Own: Reflections on Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust (1932)

A lecture by T.J. Clark hosted by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU on Thursday November 14, 2013 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a good judge, thought the two large-scale Nudes Picasso painted in 1932 "perhaps the greatest, most moving things he has produced." Was he right? They are the opening images in T.J. Clark's new book, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton University Press), but the second of them, Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, is not treated at length. This lecture makes up for the deficiency, in the belief that many of Picasso and Truth's main themes -- Picasso's unshakable commitment to the little world of "room-space," the thin line in his art between beauty and monstrosity, the peculiarity of his use of the first-person (always with Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" as his point of reference) -- come into focus if the picture is given its due. "Je est un autre" is aligned, in the lecture (as in the book), with Picasso's declaration to Genevieve Laporte: "Je suis une femme." About Picasso and Truth (from Princeton Univ Press): "Based on Clark's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Picasso and Truth argues that the way to take Picasso's true measure as an artist is to leave behind biography--the stale stories of lovers and hangers-on and suntans at the beach that presently constitute the 'Picasso literature'--and try to follow the steps of his pictorial argument. As always with Clark, specific works of art hold center stage. But finding words for them involves thinking constantly about modern culture in general. Here the book takes Nietzsche as guide." T.J. Clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of a series of books on the social character and formal dynamics of modern art: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (1973); Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984); and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); as well as Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (written with "Retort," 2005); The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006); Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013); and a book accompanying an exhibition at Tate Britain, co-authored with Anne M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (2013).