art

The beginnings of Cubism
In late 1906, Picasso started to paint in a truly revolutionary manner. Inspired by Cézanne's flattened depiction of space, and working alongside his friend Georges Braque, he began to express space in strongly geometrical terms. These initial efforts at developing this almost sculptural sense of space in painting are the beginnings of Cubism.
The famous "Demoiselles d'Avignon" is often represented as the seminal Cubist work. Although its impact on later Modernism cannot be denied, William Rubin has proven that it was actually a false start of sorts that did not lead directly into the Cubist work. You can tell this from the 1907 date of the Demoiselles, while the truly proto-Cubist works begin to appear later, in 1908-09.
Pablo Picasso
Text from Thomas Hoving, "Art For Dummies®"
"Yet Cubism and Modern art weren't either scientific or intellectual; they were visual and came from the eye and mind of one of the greatest geniuses in art history. Pablo Picasso, born in Spain, was a child prodigy who was recognized as such by his art-teacher father, who ably led him along. The small Museo de Picasso in Barcelona is devoted primarily to his early works, which include strikingly realistic renderings of casts of ancient sculpture.
"He was a rebel from the start and, as a teenager, began to frequent the Barcelona cafes where intellectuals gathered. He soon went to Paris, the capital of art, and soaked up the works of Manet, Gustave Courbet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sketchy style impressed him greatly. Then it was back to Spain, a return to France, and again back to Spain - all in the years 1899 to 1904.
"Before he struck upon Cubism, Picasso went through a prodigious number of styles - realism, caricature, the Blue Period, and the Rose Period. The Blue Period dates from 1901 to 1904 and is characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes. This was when he also produced his first sculptures. The most poignant work of the style is in Cleveland's Museum of Art, La Vie (1903), which was created in memory of a great childhood friend, the Spanish poet Casagemas, who had committed suicide. The painting started as a self-portrait, but Picasso's features became those of his lost friend. The composition is stilted, the space compressed, the gestures stiff, and the tones predominantly blue. Another outstanding Blue Period work, of 1903, is in the Metropolitan, The Blind Man's Meal. Yet another example, perhaps the most lyrical and mysterious ever, is in the Toledo Museum of Art, the haunting Woman with a Crow (1903).
"The Rose Period began around 1904 when Picasso's palette brightened, the paintings dominated by pinks and beiges, light blues, and roses. His subjects are saltimbanques (circus people), harlequins, and clowns, all of whom seem to be mute and strangely inactive. One of the premier works of this period is in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery's large and extremely beautiful Family of Saltimbanques dating to 1905, which portrays a group of circus workers who appear alienated and incapable of communicating with each other, set in a one-dimensional space.
"In 1905, Picasso went briefly to Holland, and on his return to Paris, his works took on a classical aura with large male and fernale figures seen frontally or in distinct profile, almost like early Greek art. One of the best of these of 1906 is in the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, La Toilette. Several pieces in this new style were purchased by Gertrude (the art patron and writer) and her brother, Leo Stein. The other major artist promoted by the Steins during this period was Henri Matisse, who had made a sensation in an exhibition of 1905 for works of a most shocking new style, employing garish and dissonant colors. These pieces would be derided by the critics as "Fauvism," a French word for "wild beasts." Picasso was profoundly influenced by Matisse. He was also captivated by the almost cartoon-like works of the self-taught "primitive" French painter Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau, whom he affectionately called "the last ancient Egyptian painter" because his works have a passing similarity to the flat ancient Egyptian paintings.
"A masterpiece by Rousseau is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his world-famous Sleeping Gypsy, with an incredible tiger gazing at the dormant figure with laser-like eyes.
"Picasso discovered ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain, African art (for he haunted the African collections in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris), and Gauguin's sculptures. Slowly, he incorporated the simplified forms he found in these sources into a striking portrait of Gertrude Stein, finished in 1906 and given by her in her will to the Metropolitan Museum. She has a severe masklike face made up of emphatically hewn forms compressed inside a restricted space. (Stein is supposed to have complained, "I don't look at all like that," with Picasso replying, "You will, Gertrude, you will.") This unique portrait comes as a crucial shift from what Picasso saw to what he was thinking and paves the way to Cubism.
"Then came the awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures. Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque, and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. The two were so close for several years that Picasso took to calling Braque, "ma femme" or "my wife," described the relationship as one of two mountaineers roped together, and in some correspondence they refer to each other as "Orville and Wilbur" for they knew how profound their invention of Cubism was.
"Every progressive painter, whether French, German, Belgian, or American, soon took up Cubism, and the style became the dominant one of at least the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, in New York, the new style was introduced at an exhibition at the midtown armory - the famous Armory Show - which caused a sensation. Picasso would create a host of Cubist styles throughout his long career. After painting still-lifes that employed lettering, trompe l'oeil effects, color, and textured paint surfaces, in 1912 Picasso produced Still-Life with Chair-Caning, in the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is an oval picture that is, in effect, a cafe table in perspective surrounded by a rope frame - the first collage, or a work of art that incorporates preexisting materials or objects as part of the ensemble. Elements glued to the surface contrasting with painted versions of the same material provided a sort of sophisticated double take on the part of the observer. A good example of this, dubbed Synthetic Cubism, is in the Picasso Museum, Paris, the witty Geometric Composition: The Guitar (1913). The most accomplished pictures of the fully developed Synthetic Cubist style are two complex and highly colorful works representing musicians (in Philadelphia and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). He produced fascinating theatrical sets and costumes for the Ballet Russe from 1914 on, turned, in the 1920s, to a rich classical style, creating some breathtaking line drawings, dabbled with Surrealism between 1925 and 1935, and returned to Classicism.
"At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was appointed the director of the Prado. In January, 1937, the Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris. Spurred on by a war atrocity, the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country, he painted the renowned oil Guernica in monochrome (now in Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.) Something of an enigma in details, there's no doubt that the giant picture (which until the death of Franco was in New York's Museum of Modern Art) expresses a Goyaesque revulsion over the horrors man can wreak upon fellow man. The center is dominated by a grieving woman and a wounded, screaming horse illuminated, like Goya's Third of May, 1808 by a harsh light.
"Picasso lived in Paris through the war, producing gloomy paintings in semi-abstract styles, many depicting skulls or flayed animals or a horrifying charnel house. He joined the Communist party after the war and painted two large paintings condemning the United States for its involvement in the Korean War (two frightfully bad paintings about events that never happened - like American participation in germ warfare). [In fact, research has determined that the event depicted by Picasso in "Massacre in Korea" did occur. See this newspaper article written in 1999, after Hoving wrote this piece...although the claim of germ warfare is still unsubstantiated. - ed.]. He turned enthusiastically to sculpture, pottery, and print-making, and, in his later years, preoccupied himself with a series of mistresses and girlfriends, changing his style to express his love for each one, and, finally, making superb evocations of the works of old masters like Diego Velazquez. Whatever Picasso had a hand in turned out to have an unquenchable spark of utter genius."
BOOKS ON PICASSO
Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (Studies in Modern Art, No 3)William Rubin, et al
Everything you EVER wanted to know about Picasso's proto-Cubist masterwork. The graphics are of high quality and include every preparatory drawing or sketch as well as related works by other artists that influenced or were influenced by the "Demoiselles". Rubin is one of the clearest writers on art, and offers an accessible, yet thorough work.



A Life of Picasso: Volume I, 1881-1906John Richardson, Marilyn McCully
The definitive multi-volume biography of the 20th century's most fascinating artist. Volume I covers the early years, through the Blue and Rose Periods. This paperback version is the smarter buy. Also available: A Life of Picasso: Volume II, 1907-1917, which covers the critical Cubist Period.



Picasso : The Early Years 1892-1906
This is the catalog to the blockbuster show of 1997, featuring the Blue and Rose Periods. The graphics are of exceptional quality, and the accompanying essays are enlightening, focusing on less well-known aspects of this period of Picasso's career.



Picasso and Portraiture : Representation and TransformationWilliam Rubin (Editor), Anne Baldassari, Pierre Daix
This is the catalog to the blockbuster show of 1996, featuring portraits from the beginning to end of Picasso's long career. The graphics are again of exceptional quality. Rubin's essay in particular is critical in art historical writing on the Spanish master.



Picasso's Variations on the Masters : Confrontations With the PastSusan Grace Galassi
This is an extremely interesting look at Picasso's series paintings based on masterworks from the past, from Velazquez to Delacroix to Manet. It was as if he could not find sufficient competition among contemporary artists, and looked to outdo the masters of the past in their own works.

Editorial Reviews
From Library JournalPublished as part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Studies in Modern Art" series, this volume offers, in essence, a detailed biography of Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon." This painting, a key icon in the history of Cubism, is often deemed the "first" painting of the 20th century. Noted art historian Rubin carefully narrates the origins, genesis, and execution of the painting. Documenting his essay with numerous illustrations from Picasso's notebooks, oil sketches and completed works, Rubin presents a careful synthesis of past criticism as well as providing new insights into the work's creation, its thematic claims, and its impact on the Cubist aesthetic. A detailed chronology tracks the painting from 1907 (when it was begun) through 1939, when MoMA, which had acquired the painting in 1937, displayed in a major Picasso exhibition. A brief essay by Etienne Alain Hubert discusses the possibility of a previously unknown exhibition of the painting in 1918. Recommended for large collections on modern art.Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
CLICK THE IMAGE TO ENLARGEPablo Picasso, The Blind Man's Meal, 1903. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.This painting g l o w s from certain view angles - if you have a chance to see it, be sure to explore the viewing possibilities. I also love it for its ultimate humane attitude - poor and disabled, this human being is portrayed with such a monumental dignity. The works of the Blue and Rose periods were Picasso's ultimate achievements, as far as I'm concerned. What about his cubist breakthrough you may ask? Well, that's where it gets tricky. I believe cubism is THE artistic development of the 20th century that re-defined the art, as well as the ways we look at it (for it was through the cubist perspectives that many "older" masters were reconsidered, especially Cezanne). However, in Picasso's personal oeuvre the cubist works are not the strongest - Blue & Rose are. Yet in the larger Modernist context it is Cubism that counts, not Picasso's melancholic beggars and acrobats. Universal vs. particular. A major trend vs. a specific period in the artist's oeuvre. Such dichotomy is the key to Picasso's genius - both universal and particular, he first defined himself as an artist (Blue and Rose), and later defined the ART of his era in itself (Cubism). We love to bitch about his weaker works (of which there are plenty), but in my opinion Picasso was, and still is in many ways, a major driving force of the artistic modernity.
Editorial Reviews
Product DescriptionThis volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates a wide range of artistic styles? In his first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences. In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important radical innovations in science and art of the early 20th century: Einstein's 1905 Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade. Schapiro uses the assumed relationship between the two to analyse the classic themes of space, time and movement in art, celebrating the innovations of both Relativity and Cubism as models of the searching, questioning mind, in short, of freedom of thought. In the final essay, Schapiro shows that Guernica, although the greatest political work of art of the 20th century, nevertheless embodied many of Picasso's artistic and personal obessions. This book offers comprehensive analysis of the 20th century's most prolific artist - Pablo Picasso. It will appeal to all those who have followed Picasso's career and to those intrigued by the multi-faceted connections between art and social changes. About the AuthorMeyer Schapiro (1904-1996) was University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he was a student and teacher for over fifty years. His previous publications include five volumes of Selected Papers, including Modern Art (vol. 2), which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award (1978) and the Mitchell Prize for Art History (1979).
The Unity of Picasso's Art
by Meyer Schapiro
About this title: This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates a wide range of artistic styles? In his first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences. In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important ... read more
The Unity of Picasso's Art
by Meyer Schapiro
About this title: This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates a wide range of artistic styles? In his first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences. In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important radical innovations in science and art of the early 20th century: Einstein's 1905 Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade. Schapiro uses the assumed relationship between the two to analyse the classic themes of space, time and movement in art, celebrating the innovations of both Relativity and Cubism as models of the searching, questioning mind, in short, of freedom of thought.In the final essay, Schapiro shows that Guernica, although the greatest political work of art of the 20th century, nevertheless embodied many of Picasso's artistic and personal obessions. This book offers comprehensive analysis of the 20th century's most prolific artist - Pablo Picasso. It will appeal to all those who have followed Picasso's career and to those intrigued by the multi-faceted connections between art and social changes.

The Unity of Picasso's Art
by Meyer Schapiro
About this title: This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates a wide range of artistic styles? In his first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences. In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important radical innovations in science and art of the early 20th century: Einstein's 1905 Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade. Schapiro uses the assumed relationship between the two to analyse the classic themes of space, time and movement in art, celebrating the innovations of both Relativity and Cubism as models of the searching, questioning mind, in short, of freedom of thought.In the final essay, Schapiro shows that Guernica, although the greatest political work of art of the 20th century, nevertheless embodied many of Picasso's artistic and personal obessions. This book offers comprehensive analysis of the 20th century's most prolific artist - Pablo Picasso. It will appeal to all those who have followed Picasso's career and to those intrigued by the multi-faceted connections between art and social changes.


Journal Article Excerpt


The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste

by David Carrier
Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, eds. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1998. 204 pp., b/w ills. $34.50, $ 18.95 paper.
The subtitle of Oskar Batschmann's new book, "A Conflict between Market and Self-Expression," is surely misleading. He implies that treating artworks as commodities is somehow at odds with seeking self-expression. Instead, what the massive evidence gathered in this book shows is that the modernist art market has been driven by a fascination with such self-expression. The reason some few artists have achieved fame, and appropriate financial rewards, is precisely that they have identified original forms of self-expression. In that way, great painters are like famous pop musicians or successful filmmakers. Some of Batschmann's materials - his account of the modernist avant-garde in Paris, for example - are familiar. But his discussion of such figures as Asmus Jakob Carstens, Rosa Bonheur, and Anselm Feuerbach was new to me. It is important that this book deals with the German as well as the French side of the nineteenth century. I was a little surprised to find the Abstract Expressionists called "the storm troops of freedom in the Cold War" (203-5), a phrase which in translation from the original German has infelicitous implications; and I was curious about what the author, a professor in Bern, meant in speaki...
A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences
£16.95 £6.99

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Publisher: Princeton University PressISBN-10: 0691003483Author: Marilyn McCully (Editor)Binding: PaperbackPages: 288Size: 160x240 mm
A collection of 124 personal and critical contemporary reactions to Picasso and his art at every stage of his career. Includes passages by close friends like Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Roland Penrose; an important body of Catalan and Spanish criticism; a collection of Russian criticism of his cubist work; and Czech, Danish, and Italian articles, as well as the mainstream texts from France and Germany. The hundred or so brief documents collected here, dating back to 1900, are a kind of Richter-scale recording of Picasso's impact on this century. The New Yorker Sheds light not only on Picasso, but also on those others--Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dali--who interpreted and influenced the master's art. The Wilson Quarterly



Picasso RulesSo what if he was a creep?
By Michael LewisPosted Thursday, June 12, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET
At some point during John Richardson's superb biography of Picasso you begin to feel grateful to Art, not for the pleasure it affords the consumer, but for the outlet it offers the psychopath. Picasso once explained that "in art one must kill one's father," and his life as told by Richardson plays out as a series of these little metaphorical murders. Artists whose work Picasso is unable to dismiss (not many: he once described the Sistine ceiling as "a vast sketch by Daumier") he cannibalizes. He sketches one of Gauguin's Tahitian women and signs the portrait "Paul Picasso." He copies the signatures of Steinlen and Forain over and again like some angry shaman. A friend describing Picasso racing back and forth between the Greek and Roman rooms in the Louvre says he "paces around and around like a hound in search of game."
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In the current exhibit of Picasso's early work on display in the National Gallery in Washington (which is pegged to Richardson's first volume), the walls wreak havoc with art history: Picasso consuming Symbolism; Picasso eating Impressionism; Picasso devouring Fauvism. One of the myths of the modern artist is that he could never have been anything other than what he was. But if you take Picasso's character and transport it to late 20th century America, it is easier to imagine it doing almost anything except painting pictures. People with the predatory instincts that led Picasso to become an artist in late 19th century Spain become takeover specialists or basketball players or filmmakers in our culture.
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The life and the work are bound together by this single character trait: not so much the instinct to create as the compulsion to erase. Richardson's Picasso is unable to abide even his own tradition. As soon as he settles into a new style of painting (or a new home, or a new mistress), he is contriving to destroy it (or her). Richardson's account does not so much excuse the bad behavior of the artist as use it to explain the career: The art was great at least in part because the artist was flawed.
This makes all the more puzzling a strain in the critical response not only to Richardson but also to Picasso: a tendency to dismiss his art because of his life. So far as I can tell, the trend was set in motion a decade or so ago when Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington published her sexual history of Picasso. You can see it gathering steam in Surviving Picasso, the 1996 Merchant-Ivory film that views Picasso pathetically, through the unsympathetic eyes of his lover Françoise Gilot. But it reached a new level of respectability last December, when The New Yorker's art critic, Adam Gopnik, reviewed the second volume of Richardson's life of Picasso.
Gopnik turns Richardson on his head: If Picasso's art is bad, he argues, it is so at least in part because Picasso was a bad man. This is not exactly a new line of art criticism, but it's rare to find it taking root at such altitudes. (The piece recently won a National Magazine Award.) And, given the violently mixed reaction to the National Gallery exhibition (Michael Kimmelman writing in the New York Times, "I think, from the show, that if he had died in 1906, before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he would be remembered as a second tier Symbolist."), you can't help but wonder if Gopnik has finally figured out the way to dull the enthusiasm Americans feel for Picasso--by playing to their self-righteousness. After a long passage detailing the artist's crimes against women, Gopnik rolls up his sleeves:
So Picasso was a creep with women, and Richardson gives him, out of a rather touching and, in this day, uncommon biographer's loyalty, too large a benefit of the doubt on the question. ... Who cares? Does it affect Picasso's art, or the way we see it? Here the reviewer needs to drop all pretense of magisterial loft, jump down from the bench, and start testifying. Last spring I went for a walk in William Rubin's vast show, at the Museum of Modern Art, devoted to Picasso's portraits.
A single visit to an exhibition! All becomes suddenly clear! "Picasso's misogyny was in evidence on every wall," Gopnik writes. "And, along with misogyny, there was its Siamese twin, an oversweetened vision of family life in which the children's implied vacancy is really Dad's."
It was only a matter of time before family values entered art criticism. But who would have thought it would be imported by The New Yorker? It's hard to think of a clearer sign that old-fashioned Comstockian attitudes are once again in vogue, this time with a new twist. The modern moralist lacks the courage of his convictions. He is reluctant to attack the artist's morality directly. Instead, he attacks his morality in the guise of attacking his art. The critic is using the life as a weapon against the work.
One sign of what Gopnik is up to is his tendency, when he is on the subject of Picasso's character, to err on the side of the prosecution. In making the case against Picasso you might think there would be no need to exaggerate the artist's crimes against his fellow man. But Gopnik does, describing Picasso as "a coward, who sat out two world wars while his friends were suffering and dying," adding that "he may have been right to do this in the First War, but he did it again, in the same way, in the second." ("Picasso was born in 1881," notes James Fenton in the New York Review of Books. "To accuse a man of cowardice for not having joined up in 1939 when he was in his late fifties strikes me as a complete novelty, and it would have been a novelty to those Allied soldiers who, on the liberation of Paris, flocked to Picasso's studio as a place of pilgrimage.")
Gopnik's bad faith extends to Richardson's biography, which he faults (unbelievably) for treating Picasso too kindly. Early in his article--which he has called "Escaping Picasso: The Great Master That Never Was"--the author reminds us that there was a time when he devoted himself to Picasso studies, how the most trivial academic revelation once caused him to run off "to a nearby bar to drink my very first vodka on the rocks. ... I passed out and had to be carried home." But he is older now. He has put his academic past behind him. He is able to see the world as it is. He is able to see that scholars have been covering up the crimes of the artist to protect him from justice. "Richardson's need to make Picasso into a serious artist and an honorable man (instead of the inspired poetic rascal he actually was) deforms, above all, his account of Picasso's relations with women," he writes.
What is peculiar about this is that much of what Gopnik knows about Picasso he knows from Richardson. It would be more true to say that Gopnik's need to see Picasso as a rascal deforms his view of Picasso's art. Both men are working with the same set of facts and accusations. The difference is that Richardson pleads for understanding while Gopnik brays for outrage.
Gopnik dismisses the cult of Picasso as "just another kind of celebrity worship." His piece proves this point nicely. His is exactly the approach of every celebrity journalist to his subject. Why bother with the art on its terms when you can have it on your own?
Pablo Picasso's Art
Summary: A short essay on the effects of Pablo Picasso's work on 20th century art.
When Picasso died at the age of 91 in April 1973, he had become one of the most famous and successful artists of his time. He greatly affected the twentieth century's art.
Picasso's long and prolific career had a major effect on art in the twentieth century. He mastered many different styles and media, but often painted the same subjects over and over; he comnined his ability to self-promote and re-invent himself with a strong biographical element in his work. His live and work continue to invite interpretation and his exhibitions attract thousands of visitors.
An artist's life is not always seen as integral to his or her work: we feel that great work can stand alone. Picasso's painting reflected his surroundings and environments, his changing domestic circumstances and.....
Catcher in the Rye: the Naivety of Childhood
Summary: Discusses J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." Describes main character Holden Caulfield's fixation on childhood. Details how he struggles through teenage life because he cannot accept the responsibilities that come with growing up.
In the novel, "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D Salinger, the main character, Holden, is a teenager who refuses to grow up because he is naively fixated on childhood. Throughout the novel, Holden struggles through teenage life because he cannot accept the given responsibilities that come with growing up. Holden is obsessed with childhood because he chooses to be wedged between a world of the innocence of children and the complex world of adulthood. Holden deities his two younger siblings as if they're candidates for sainthood because of his fixation.
Holden is a teenager who refuses to grow up because he is afraid of gaining the responsibilities that come with it. So, Holden struggles hard to stay childish. For example, throughout the book, he does not want to take responsibility to communicate with others that may want to help him. He refuses to go home and confront his parents and face the consequences. Along with this, he also pulls the childish silent treatment toward his parents; because that's the only knife he has to hurt them: ."..she wouldn't've been the ones that answered the phone. My parents would be the ones. So that was out." (pg. 59) He is afraid to talk to people close to him because they'll be critical to him. This would also explain his lack of interaction with Jane Gallagher: ."..I kept standing there, of giving old Jane a buzz- I mean calling her long distance at B.M... The only reason I didn't call him was because I wasn't in the mood." (pg. 63) Since he is afraid of interaction with people close to him, he tries to get strangers to talk to, so the conservations he has with them won't go too into depth. He does not want to face the world of reality. For example, in chapter nine, Holden asks his cab driver, who is a complete stranger to him, for a cocktail once he's done driving Holden to the Edmont Hotel: "Would you care to stop on the way and join me for a cocktail"" (pg. 60) Therefore, Holden will try to get some random stranger for a beer, as they won't criticize him.
Among other responsibilities, Holden tries to set rules up for himself like an adult, but ends up breaking them right away: "Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it though, the same week I made it- the same night, as a matter of fact." (pg. 63) Holden cannot maintain his rules, and ends up acting like a child, who needs someone else to set the rules up for him.
However, Holden does show some transition toward adulthood. For example, he has a sexual temptation toward things he also considers perverted. When he stays at Edmont, he admits: "It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes." (pg. 12) In some aspects, he does show that he is growing up into an adult, even if he doesn't want to. Holden's strong focus of the ducks in the lagoon is also symbolic to his life. He is constantly concerned about where the ducks will go when the lake freezes: "I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away." (pg. 13) Just like the ducks, Holden is wondering where he's going to go in life. He wonders if someone will guide him to the right direction, or if he'll guide himself through it by instinct. In addition, the lake itself is also somewhat symbolic to Holden's life. When Holden visits Central Park to see if there were any ducks still around, he mentions: "Then, I finally found it. What it was, it was partly frozen and partly not frozen." The lake is transitioning into two different states, frozen and not frozen, while Holden is transitioning between childhood and adulthood. Since Holden chooses to be frozen between the transitions, Holden hates change. When Holden goes to visit the Museum of Natural History, he states that he likes the museum because it will always be the same each time he visits:
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deer would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket." (pg. 121)
Therefore, Holden would love to live in a world where everything stays frozen, where nothing changes. This way, Holden can never grow up to be an adult.
Holden is a growing teenager who chooses to be frozen between a world of the innocence of children and complex world of adulthood. He is wedged between these two worlds because he possesses a fixation with childhood. Throughout the novel, Holden sounds like he is some grumpy old man who's angry about everything in the world as he narrates his story. However, when Holden constantly shows his curiosity for the ducks in the lagoon at Central Park, we see his genuine, more youthful side: .".. I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go." (pg. 13) This shows that Holden does have thoughts and concerns that others would consider being childish. At the moment, he is fastened between the world of innocence and the adult world.
Holden finds the adult world very repulsive. In chapter ten, when he is in the lavender room of Edmont, he makes several comments that support this. For example, he finds the band, which consists of adults, as putrid: "The band was putrid." (pg. 69) Among this, he also states that the older guys in the lavender room were old and show-offy: "They were mostly old and show-offy looking guys" (pg. 69) He looks around the room, and sees these adults around home, and all he could state, is negativity toward them.
Since Holden has a strong attraction to the innocence of childhood, Holden struggles to stay as a kid, and ends up doing childish things. For example, in chapter ten, in the lavender room, he looks like a kid trying to act grown up when he tries to impress the three thirty year old at the table: "I started giving the three witches at the next table the eye again. That is, the blond one... I just gave all three of them this very cool glance and all." (pg. 70) To try and impress the ladies, he tries to create a cool façade of himself by trying to act older. However, even if Holden thinks he knows what's going on around him, he ends up knowing nothing, which shows innocence in his character. Throughout his time in the lavender room with the three girls, he says the trio is of lower intelligence than him: "You could hardly tell which one is the stupidest of them." (pg. 73) However, at the end of the chapter, they leave him to pay for their drinks, which actually is pretty witty: "I think they should've at least offered to pay their drinks they had before I joined them..." (pg. 75) So, in the end, due to his innocence, Holden is left as the dumb one, with a bill to pay.
Holden wants to be the "catcher in the rye." In chapter twenty-two, Phoebe asks Holden what he's going to do in his life. Holden then states:
"Anyways, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around- nobody big, I mean- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy." (pg. 173)
Metaphorically, Holden wants to be the person to save the children before they fall out of their innocent knowledge into the repulsive world of adults.
Throughout the book, Holden constantly praises his two siblings, Allie and Phoebe, as if they were candidates for sainthood. This is a very big example of Holden's attraction for childhood. In chapter 5, Holden is writing a composition for Stradlater, and states many wondrous things about Allie: "He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He never got mad at anybody." (pg. 38) Holden exaggerates that Allie is fifty more times as Holden is, but, how smart can one kid really be? Also, he says that he never got mad at anyone, but, every kid has been mad at least once to their friends and family, unless they're not human. When Holden was up in his hotel room, she explains for the first time in the book, what Phoebe is like: "You should see her. You never saw a little kid so pretty and smart in your life. She's really smart." (pg. 67) Similar to Allie's description, Holden deities his sister as if she's a child prodigy. Seven if she was smart for her age, it really doesn't say much. Again, how smart can a ten year old really be? Holden overrates his two siblings considerably, which is because of his fixation of childhood.
However, Phoebe is the only person alive that he seems to actually love throughout the novel. Phoebe is the family connection to Holden, and becomes the catalyst for Holden's metamorphosis to adulthood. She is the only one throughout the book that is actually critical toward Holden and tries to push him to do better by agitating him: "You don't like any schools. You don't like a million things." (pg. 169) When Holden hears this, he becomes very upset: "'I do! That's where you're wrong-that's exactly where you're wrong! Why the hell do you have to say that"' I said. Boy, was she depressing me." When Holden's only connection of comfort is lost, he becomes knocked back into reality, and ends up saying that he's going to apply himself better at the end of the novel:
."..this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going to apply myself with I go back to school next September. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is you don't. I think I am, but how do I know"" (pg. 213)
Holden cannot accept the responsibilities and consequences that come with growing up, so to avoid the painfulness of maturing, Holden struggles to remain childish. He finds the adult world perverted and repulsive, but does not realize that he is slowly growing into the world. Due to his struggle to remain immature to society, he is fixated on the incorruption that children possess. He wants to be the 'catcher in the rye', which is a person who will catch kids that unintentionally run off a cliff covered in rye. Metaphorically, he wants to save the kids before they fall into the corruption that the adult world will entrap them in. Since Holden has a strong attraction to the innocence of childhood, he then worships his two younger siblings as if they were mini gods. When he finally gets to talk to the only close person he has, he is rudely awakened back into reality, by his kid sister, and is pushed to succeed.
Work Cited:
Salinger, J.D. "Catcher in the Rye"
This is the complete article, containing 2,047 words (approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Art Journal , Spring, 1997 by William S. Wilson
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The history of the 20th century now securely includes Pablo Picasso's private world as part of our worlds; the history of Picasso has included the history of the Museum of Modern Art since at least 1939; and the history of the Museum of Modern Art has included William Rubin since he wrote Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art twenty-five years ago. Rubin has now curated a show and edited its catalogue: Picasso and Portraiture.
The paintings in Picasso and Portraiture represent Picasso from his early academic work through to his portraits of Jacqueline Roche in the 1950s, ending with the scalding self-portraits the artist made in his tenth decade, his late period. The choices of the paintings and this interpretation of them represent William Rubin in his late period as an active curator. Rubin's sly connoisseurship makes what could have been a show of paintings in a minor genre into a will and a testament.
Late-period Rubin, with a few economical, rather understated gestures, employs indirection to direct the course of curatorship, the history of art, and criticism. So far from attempting to write the last word on Picasso, the director emeritus of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of MoMA has composed his two essays and edited the others in such a cooperative tone that this catalogue says and does nothing that would end the conversation about Picasso's life and work. In fact, because many of the categories that once seemed to have been closed are reopened, Rubin has provided the conditions for a continuing friendly conversation about Picasso's pictures.
Until the publication of this catalogue, MoMA's most recent publication on Picasso was Picasso and Braque: A Symposium.(1) At the time of the exhibition Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, the museum invited scholarly critics and historians to view the works privately, and seven of them delivered papers that were discussed within a larger group. The papers and discussion were prepared for publication together with the revised chronology of Picasso's art that the show made both possible and necessary.
The symposium, which was not open to the public, was almost a secret. And when transcriptions were published, after a delay of a few years, it became apparent that the secret might well have been better kept. Many valuable statements had been made by brilliant and trustworthy scholars, but too many comments were on the level of an art lover's talk-radio program. In spite of moments of excellence, the total effect was discouraging. One result is that not one of the seven writers in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium has an essay in Picasso and Portraiture.
In the symposium, one of the scholars said that semiotics is illuminating as a method applied to Picasso, but that a semiotic analysis would not illuminate the art of Henri Matisse. Rubin responded, puzzled that a method of interpreting visual art might be used to describe the work of one painter, yet not another. He wondered if semiotics and/or structuralism were not problematic when contrasted with theories that have been useful in descriptive analysis of many kinds of art. In his words at the symposium: "Other models that have been used in art history - the Wolfflinian model, the Rieglian model, or whatever - have been very elastic" (p. 302).
Rubin has such little use for graceless theoretical models that he devised the exhibition Picasso and Portraiture to circumvent such problems. In the exhibition he provided conditions more favorable to connoisseurship and delectation than to academic scholarship working with nonvisual theories. He wanted the spectators of the exhibition, including scholars, to see the works of art as directly as Picasso saw the people whose portraits he painted: case by case, one or two at a time, with less in the theories and more in the eyes.
The quality Rubin mentioned in the theories of Wolfflin and Riegl - "very elastic" - fortunately is one of the qualities that governed Picasso's life and art. The artist seems to have been born preferring qualities in existence that simultaneously made him an anti-idealist, and made his art a model of qualities that would be sought by many people in the 20th century. The elasticity that he experienced as the most primal quality in existence could induce joy but also anxiety: "When I was a child, I often had a dream that used to frighten me greatly. I dreamed that my legs and arms grew to an enormous size and then shrank back just as much in the other direction. . . . I felt terribly anguished every time I dreamed about that."(2) Thus in a happy match Rubin sought to bring an elasticity of thought and of response to bear upon the artist whose thoughts and emotions were animated by a criterion of elasticity.
Rubin's hanging of the show, and the tone of his essay, encourage closed categories to open their contours. When scholars have categorized Picasso's art chronologically, they have been able to say that a period effectively ended when other artists took up questions like abstraction in painting and Constructivism in sculpture, and made more of them than Picasso did. In one such theory of the history of art, Cubism was not viable after the pure abstraction of Malevich or of Mondrian took over. But sculptural modeling and carving did not stop because of Constructivism, and Constructivism did not stop because Duchamp did something else. Rubin is trying to make such theories answerable to an accumulation of evidence that they cannot account for, and may not even have investigated.
Rubin did most of his theoretical work simply by hanging the portraits in the show nonchronologically. He arranged the paintings in a loose overall chronology within which, when a particular person was first portrayed, he gathered other portraits of that person then and there regardless of chronology. This arrangement of paintings according to specific persons encouraged an experience of painting as an activity carried out in life, within the milieu of friends, lovers, and several separate families.
The catalogue accompanying the show includes essays by nine writers, with opening and closing essays by Rubin. It proceeds in units that overlap: one category is self-portraits, another category is photography, so that the existence of photographic self-portraits bridges the two essays without making either redundant. The styles and the various periods are shown to overlap, especially when one painting is discussed by two writers from two or more perspectives in two or more contexts.
As one approaches a show or a catalogue of Picasso's work, one brings to it an outline of periods conditioned by the conventional scholarly compartmentalizations: Blue Period; Rose Period; Cubism both Analytic and Synthetic. I have seen a painting dated to the Blue Period because it is very blue. But in Rubin's show, the Blue Period mercifully is lost in the shuffle when he arranges the portraits according to the person portrayed. In this show, a spectator was coaxed into seeing individual paintings without the usual historical or critical schemes, and was encouraged to feel in unmediated connection with the paintings as visual solutions to visual problems.
When the conceptual schemes of the history of art are subordinated to paintings as a part of life, one result is a gain in visual lyricism - focus on thinking with visual images. Rubin describes the images in the portraits as open-ended images that have associations that cannot be sharply defined within closed contours:
These open-ended images set off a series of associational reverberations, enhanced by the viewer's own imagination and experience and also by his or her familiarity with Picasso's other works. It is an animated, phantasmagorical and erotic world in which the lips of pitchers and bowls approach each other, plants converse, and teapots kiss their faience neighbors (p. 68).
The suggestiveness of one image thus overlaps the suggestiveness of other images, and with so many strong but undecidable implications that a fixed interpretation is impossible.
Rubin shows how images of people, animals, and physical objects blend into each other, so that a portrait of Olga Khokhlova can also resemble Sara Murphy, a woman can be mixed with a dog, and a portrait of a child can be tinged with self-portraiture by the child's father. In a similar doubling, a pitcher in a still life can be used to point to the identity of a person suggested by the pitcher. Rubin sees the yellow pitcher in Still Life on a Pedestal Table first as the breasts and torso of Marie-Therese Walter, and then adds that "the pitcher's hue and particularly its elegant golden handle may also be read as an intimation of Marie-Therese's blond hair" (p. 68). These two interpretations of the pitcher as torso or as hair peacefully co-exist with a different reading by Robert Rosenblum: "Picasso, lord and master, may be present in the form of the sun-drenched yellow pitcher . . . " (p. 360). Thus the discourse is civil, but also, because of such multiple readings, a more abstract analysis of how to read Picasso's codes would help.
Several of the book's contributors refer to the distinction between an Analytic and a Synthetic Cubism. Because Synthetic Cubism and Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) have been dated to within a few years of each other, each has been brought to bear upon the other. Rubin does not quarrel with such customary usages that some of the other writers use even in this book, and unfortunately he neither explicitly argues with nor refutes past attempts at semiotic or structuralist interpretations. What he does do is describe so much variety in such multiple Cubisms that the familiar binary distinction between Analytic and Synthetic seems misleading and simplistic.
Changes like these may seem minor, but since they undercut the assumptions of much impressive scholarship, they are not. Historians have argued that in post-World War I France, Cubism was so identified with Germanic sensibilities that French patriotism entailed rejecting Cubism for a Mediterranean neoclassicism. Hence Picasso's neoclassic works show him as he sought to save himself from accusations of being alien to French painting. But not even carefully tailored arguments to prove Picasso's evasiveness quite fit the facts of the case after neoclassic works of 1914 were discovered in his private collection.
A larger effect derives from Rubin's craft in preventing a reading of successive styles as an evolution of styles - as an "evolving language." Picasso emerges as an artist of many styles, but not of sharply successive styles. He is seen not to paint toward a discovery in which he would find his one inevitable style. Rubin emphasizes Picasso's use of two styles - roughly, Cubism and neo-classicism - on the same day or on the same canvas.
In an imaginative insight, Rubin suggests that when the dialogue with Braque ended, Picasso began a dialogue with himself, and worked in two styles in order to have one other - the other Picasso - in the conversation. Thus Picasso invented or devised two Picassos who were opposites, with reciprocal modifications between the two as each tried to transpose the other into himself. He became a co-laborer, with Picasso as both his Cubist self and his neoclassic other.
Rubin's strongest point is that the historical-scholarly ordering of Picasso's works has obliterated the actual concrete relations among pictures in the whole body of work. He uses two images that are a little wild for critical discourse: salami and mincemeat: "The illusoriness of Cubism's periodicity, even as modified by the introduction of these salami-slicing, sub-stylistic terms [such as Early Cubism, High Cubism, Analytic Cubism], became painfully clear in the Picasso and Braque exhibition" (p. 452). The image of salami conveys something of the pain and anger Rubin seems to feel at the violence done to the "continuous if complex fabric of ideas" by theories not derived from the works but imposed upon them. The show - his show - made mincemeat of salami-slicing classifications:
But the absolute mince-meat made of even the most developed periodicity for Cubism by the evidence of the Picasso and Braque show suggested that, while we probably must continue to use "period" terminology for reasons of convenience, we must constantly remind ourselves of the ultimate erroneousness of this sort of schema as regards the shape of Picasso's career in general and his Cubism in particular (p. 454).
The keystone that holds Rubin's various thoughts together is his choice of Leonardo as the apt comparison for Picasso. To appreciate the intensity of the use of Leonardo as a parallel to Picasso, note that this volume frequently mentions Iberian sculptures as influential on Picasso, yet reproduces not one of them. Meanwhile Rubin's text is illustrated with thirteen works by Leonardo. Rubin shows drawings of turbulences by Leonardo: A Deluge, A Cloudburst, Study of Swirling Water, Deluge, and a sketch of a woman's coiffure, a hairdo with much tourbillons. The sketches depict events in which energetic self-moving entities like deluges, and even self-activating hair, are brought into well-defined forms. Rubin wants to encourage respect for the intense turbulences that are the initial conditions of Picasso's art. In an autobiographical passage, he recalls a moment of turbulence in Picasso himself, mentioning a "volcanic outburst" (p. 63), Yet his point is to show just how the turbulences get subordinated to the coherent order that can subsume the turmoil.
As one perceives the antic paintings individually and freshly, a brilliant discovery by Anne Baldessari offers a touchstone for reading Picasso's images and his methods of constructing thoughts with visual images. Baldessari, curator of archives and photography, Musee Picasso, discovered a photograph that Picasso constructed by printing a full-length photograph of himself over a picture of a studio wall. Because of the overprinting, he looks like he is walking through the wall. He wrote on the back of the photograph, "This photograph should be titled 'The strongest walls open at my passing, so behold'" ("Esta fotografia puede titularse 'Los muros mas fuertes se abren a mi paso. Mira!'") (p. 176 n. 13).
To use this example, a problem with criticism and scholarship is that people think they know what a wall is. They may know what a wall is to them, yet not see what a wall is for Picasso, who took pictures off walls, and who regarded the picture hook as the enemy of painting. Picasso painted as an activity among other activities in his rather free-form life - his life as an open, but also as a rather stable, system. Impersonal walls, like walls of objectivity, interfered with the freedom of form within forms that he wanted for himself. Long ago he said to Roland Penrose: "I would like to make houses from inside - like a human body, not just walls with no thought of what they enclose."(3)
No writer in this catalogue does more than assume a generalized wall or a door, as though we agree upon what a door means. To Picasso, he is a door in the sense that he is an opening in a wall, and openings in walls are desirable in the way that paintings are desirable. Primal questions such as "What is a wall?" will bring us closer to Picasso if critics do not assume that they know what a wall is in his life-world rather than their own. Picasso hated standard walls, which are usually so difficult to find in photographs of his interior spaces. He preferred doors, and associated his penis with a doorknob, his body with a door. Sometimes a doorway is curtained, and scholar-critics will have to ask themselves what a curtain is to Picasso if they are to do justice to his visual thoughts. He preferred the indeterminate immediacies of curtains, and the contingencies of windows and of doors - structures that participated in the events of a moment - to the objectivity and indifference of long-standing, inelastic walls.
But the absolute mince-meat made of even the most developed periodicity for Cubism by the evidence of the Picasso and Braque show suggested that, while we probably must continue to use "period" terminology for reasons of convenience, we must constantly remind ourselves of the ultimate erroneousness of this sort of schema as regards the shape of Picasso's career in general and his Cubism in particular (p. 454).
The keystone that holds Rubin's various thoughts together is his choice of Leonardo as the apt comparison for Picasso. To appreciate the intensity of the use of Leonardo as a parallel to Picasso, note that this volume frequently mentions Iberian sculptures as influential on Picasso, yet reproduces not one of them. Meanwhile Rubin's text is illustrated with thirteen works by Leonardo. Rubin shows drawings of turbulences by Leonardo: A Deluge, A Cloudburst, Study of Swirling Water, Deluge, and a sketch of a woman's coiffure, a hairdo with much tourbillons. The sketches depict events in which energetic self-moving entities like deluges, and even self-activating hair, are brought into well-defined forms. Rubin wants to encourage respect for the intense turbulences that are the initial conditions of Picasso's art. In an autobiographical passage, he recalls a moment of turbulence in Picasso himself, mentioning a "volcanic outburst" (p. 63), Yet his point is to show just how the turbulences get subordinated to the coherent order that can subsume the turmoil.
As one perceives the antic paintings individually and freshly, a brilliant discovery by Anne Baldessari offers a touchstone for reading Picasso's images and his methods of constructing thoughts with visual images. Baldessari, curator of archives and photography, Musee Picasso, discovered a photograph that Picasso constructed by printing a full-length photograph of himself over a picture of a studio wall. Because of the overprinting, he looks like he is walking through the wall. He wrote on the back of the photograph, "This photograph should be titled 'The strongest walls open at my passing, so behold'" ("Esta fotografia puede titularse 'Los muros mas fuertes se abren a mi paso. Mira!'") (p. 176 n. 13).
To use this example, a problem with criticism and scholarship is that people think they know what a wall is. They may know what a wall is to them, yet not see what a wall is for Picasso, who took pictures off walls, and who regarded the picture hook as the enemy of painting. Picasso painted as an activity among other activities in his rather free-form life - his life as an open, but also as a rather stable, system. Impersonal walls, like walls of objectivity, interfered with the freedom of form within forms that he wanted for himself. Long ago he said to Roland Penrose: "I would like to make houses from inside - like a human body, not just walls with no thought of what they enclose."(3)
No writer in this catalogue does more than assume a generalized wall or a door, as though we agree upon what a door means. To Picasso, he is a door in the sense that he is an opening in a wall, and openings in walls are desirable in the way that paintings are desirable. Primal questions such as "What is a wall?" will bring us closer to Picasso if critics do not assume that they know what a wall is in his life-world rather than their own. Picasso hated standard walls, which are usually so difficult to find in photographs of his interior spaces. He preferred doors, and associated his penis with a doorknob, his body with a door. Sometimes a doorway is curtained, and scholar-critics will have to ask themselves what a curtain is to Picasso if they are to do justice to his visual thoughts. He preferred the indeterminate immediacies of curtains, and the contingencies of windows and of doors - structures that participated in the events of a moment - to the objectivity and indifference of long-standing, inelastic walls.
Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Art Journal , Spring, 1997 by William S. Wilson
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One could make a long list of topics that this book fails to address, but another list of the perspectives that it opens up. If these perspectives are the achievement of late-period Rubin, then one must now hope that this period in his work will stretch extensively, because what is really going on in this book suggests that he has much else to show and tell after he puts away his curatorial gloves.
Notes
1. Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992).
2. Quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 119.
3. Quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Flews (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 32.
4. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 15.
5. Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Elizabeth Emmet (New York: Harper Collins. 1993), 320.
WILLIAM S. WILSON, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, has recently published essays on Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, and Ray Johnson.
COPYRIGHT 1997 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Art Journal , Spring, 1997 by William S. Wilson
Email
Print
One could make a long list of topics that this book fails to address, but another list of the perspectives that it opens up. If these perspectives are the achievement of late-period Rubin, then one must now hope that this period in his work will stretch extensively, because what is really going on in this book suggests that he has much else to show and tell after he puts away his curatorial gloves.
Notes
1. Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992).
2. Quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 119.
3. Quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Flews (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 32.
4. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 15.
5. Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Elizabeth Emmet (New York: Harper Collins. 1993), 320.
WILLIAM S. WILSON, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, has recently published essays on Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, and Ray Johnson.
COPYRIGHT 1997 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Art Journal , Spring, 1997 by William S. Wilson
Email
Print
One could make a long list of topics that this book fails to address, but another list of the perspectives that it opens up. If these perspectives are the achievement of late-period Rubin, then one must now hope that this period in his work will stretch extensively, because what is really going on in this book suggests that he has much else to show and tell after he puts away his curatorial gloves.
Notes
1. Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992).
These four books and two exhibitions with their accompanying catalogues present an intricate picture of Surrealism. Each text interprets different aspects of the movement, resulting in an inclusive but still incomplete view. Mark Polizzotti, a translator of French avant-garde texts and editorial director of the Boston publisher David R. Godine, and Martica Sawin, former professor of art history at Parsons School of Design, offer similar methodologies in their respective studies, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton and Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Both authors develop extended narratives from numerous documents and interviews to blend popular appeal with academic method. These books are highly intelligent, readable, and informative publications, with tremendous value as source books for the study of Surrealism. Polizzotti's biography is largely literary in tone and sources. For those wishing to infuse their studies with a literary dimension it is useful, providing many parallels for analogies with visual art. In a dizzying review of texts he integrates the correspondence, poetry, fiction, and essays of Andre Breton and other Surrealists with anecdote to give a nuanced picture of Breton and Surrealism. Sawin examines artworks, photographs, letters, press materials, and interviews, relying on this array of sources to provide a narrative of her subject. In these books art as life comes alive, filled with the antic and serious intentions of the Surrealists and their circles. And as Polizzotti's biography also functions as a study of Surrealist origins and motives, it supplies the necessary prelude to Sawin's history of late Surrealism.
Whereas Polizzotti's work is both a Breton biography redux and a history of Surrealism that builds on the groundwork of many previous authors,(1) Surrealism in Exile fills in the missing history of the movement during its exile in America from the time just prior to the German invasion of France to the immediate postwar period. Sawin recovers both lost and untold histories and attempts to establish rather than to expand upon a pre-existing narrative. Even though this subject has been broached before, most notably in the interviews of Sidney Simon and in recent exhibition catalogues produced in Europe and America,(2) it has never been explored in more than a fragmentary way, or else the accounts have been rendered as individual stories without enough context, or from a more purely thematic and formal point of view. So Sawin's chronicle lays a foundation upon which subsequent examinations of late Surrealism will need to build.
Robert J. Belton, professor of art history at Okanagan University College, Kelowra, Canada, has produced a comprehensive and complex examination of Surrealist imagery in The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, employing psychoanalytic, linguistic, and gender theory to dissect the motives of male misogyny.(3) The author's thoroughness in reviewing the literature produced over the past two decades is both the strength and the weakness of his study. Unlike many of the authors of that literature, Belton writes clearly, giving access to those with the desire and/or patience to deal with this material. While treating difficult technical and abstract concepts his study does not degenerate into the incomprehensible and convoluted language all too typical of studies of those genres. And, unlike many of those studies, his book is more in tune with European sensibility - including European literature that is often neglected. Of all the studies under review, it is the only one to try to come to terms with Surrealism's advanced philosophical treatment of art. It could thus be considered of significant didactic value, an excellent summary of these discourses as applied to Surrealist art. Yet, for all of its entirely correct acknowledgment and processing of sources, this book pays too much homage to its precursors and comes a bit too late in the game to result in a fresh contribution to the field. Still, Belton's survey acts as a counterpoint and corrective to the lack of theory or the limited critical perspective in both Polizzotti's and Sawin's studies, substantially broadening the view. Even if Belton's Beribboned Bomb analyzes Surrealist misogyny to an extreme, it fills in much of what the more narrative approach used by the previous two authors leaves out. While building upon an already established theoretical canon of feminist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic literature, Belton adds a structural interpretation that exposes the mechanics of Surrealist visual construction and, presumably, its underlying motives.
Clark V. Poling, professor of art history at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue for Surrealist Vision and Technique, showing works from the national collections in Paris. Like the exhibition choices made evident in the handsomely produced volume itself. Poling provides an economic and judicious overview of the literature and presents a discerning view of Surrealist theory and drawing practice appropriate to its mission and audience. His essay makes a case (though less ambitiously) for the importance of drawing and its spontaneity to Surrealist theory in the way that Dawn Ades, Rosalind Krauss, and Jane Livingston made a case for photography.(4) Thankfully, it lacks the heavy handedness of some of those essays.

2. Quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 119.
3. Quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Flews (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 32.
4. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 15.
5. Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Elizabeth Emmet (New York: Harper Collins. 1993), 320.
WILLIAM S. WILSON, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, has recently published essays on Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, and Ray Johnson.
COPYRIGHT 1997 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
These four books and two exhibitions with their accompanying catalogues present an intricate picture of Surrealism. Each text interprets different aspects of the movement, resulting in an inclusive but still incomplete view. Mark Polizzotti, a translator of French avant-garde texts and editorial director of the Boston publisher David R. Godine, and Martica Sawin, former professor of art history at Parsons School of Design, offer similar methodologies in their respective studies, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton and Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Both authors develop extended narratives from numerous documents and interviews to blend popular appeal with academic method. These books are highly intelligent, readable, and informative publications, with tremendous value as source books for the study of Surrealism. Polizzotti's biography is largely literary in tone and sources. For those wishing to infuse their studies with a literary dimension it is useful, providing many parallels for analogies with visual art. In a dizzying review of texts he integrates the correspondence, poetry, fiction, and essays of Andre Breton and other Surrealists with anecdote to give a nuanced picture of Breton and Surrealism. Sawin examines artworks, photographs, letters, press materials, and interviews, relying on this array of sources to provide a narrative of her subject. In these books art as life comes alive, filled with the antic and serious intentions of the Surrealists and their circles. And as Polizzotti's biography also functions as a study of Surrealist origins and motives, it supplies the necessary prelude to Sawin's history of late Surrealism.
Whereas Polizzotti's work is both a Breton biography redux and a history of Surrealism that builds on the groundwork of many previous authors,(1) Surrealism in Exile fills in the missing history of the movement during its exile in America from the time just prior to the German invasion of France to the immediate postwar period. Sawin recovers both lost and untold histories and attempts to establish rather than to expand upon a pre-existing narrative. Even though this subject has been broached before, most notably in the interviews of Sidney Simon and in recent exhibition catalogues produced in Europe and America,(2) it has never been explored in more than a fragmentary way, or else the accounts have been rendered as individual stories without enough context, or from a more purely thematic and formal point of view. So Sawin's chronicle lays a foundation upon which subsequent examinations of late Surrealism will need to build.
Robert J. Belton, professor of art history at Okanagan University College, Kelowra, Canada, has produced a comprehensive and complex examination of Surrealist imagery in The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, employing psychoanalytic, linguistic, and gender theory to dissect the motives of male misogyny.(3) The author's thoroughness in reviewing the literature produced over the past two decades is both the strength and the weakness of his study. Unlike many of the authors of that literature, Belton writes clearly, giving access to those with the desire and/or patience to deal with this material. While treating difficult technical and abstract concepts his study does not degenerate into the incomprehensible and convoluted language all too typical of studies of those genres. And, unlike many of those studies, his book is more in tune with European sensibility - including European literature that is often neglected. Of all the studies under review, it is the only one to try to come to terms with Surrealism's advanced philosophical treatment of art. It could thus be considered of significant didactic value, an excellent summary of these discourses as applied to Surrealist art. Yet, for all of its entirely correct acknowledgment and processing of sources, this book pays too much homage to its precursors and comes a bit too late in the game to result in a fresh contribution to the field. Still, Belton's survey acts as a counterpoint and corrective to the lack of theory or the limited critical perspective in both Polizzotti's and Sawin's studies, substantially broadening the view. Even if Belton's Beribboned Bomb analyzes Surrealist misogyny to an extreme, it fills in much of what the more narrative approach used by the previous two authors leaves out. While building upon an already established theoretical canon of feminist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic literature, Belton adds a structural interpretation that exposes the mechanics of Surrealist visual construction and, presumably, its underlying motives.
Clark V. Poling, professor of art history at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue for Surrealist Vision and Technique, showing works from the national collections in Paris. Like the exhibition choices made evident in the handsomely produced volume itself. Poling provides an economic and judicious overview of the literature and presents a discerning view of Surrealist theory and drawing practice appropriate to its mission and audience. His essay makes a case (though less ambitiously) for the importance of drawing and its spontaneity to Surrealist theory in the way that Dawn Ades, Rosalind Krauss, and Jane Livingston made a case for photography.(4) Thankfully, it lacks the heavy handedness of some of those essays.
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