PICTURE BUILDERS

  At the dawn of the twentieth century the builders of pictures were experiencing a quite extraordinary freedom and elan.  Relishing moments of total liberty they were bringing this into painting by using whatever materials took their fancy. They began sticking real materials onto their canvases in an experimental manner. Braque said “If we want to show a man reading a newspaper, why do we have to fake it up with brushes and oil paint when we could just as well get the newspaper itself and stick a bit of it on the canvas?” This somehow flouted the Puritan ethic of hard work and the trade-unionism of the trained artiste-peintre; but it made good sense. Picasso tried something of this sort in 1912. Braque went into a shop in Avignon, bought a length of artificially wood-grained wallpaper, and used it with perfect congruity to indicate the drawer and top of a wooden table on which were assembled the classic elements of Cubist still life: a glass, a fruit dish, a bunch of grapes, and the words BAR and ALE. Picasso’s first steps in collage were direct and overtly subversive, as he thickly over-painted part of the oilcloth in order to lock it down into the substance of the painting.  Braque by contrast introduced his strips of wood-grained paper in an exploratory way. Picasso’s textures were so dense as to force the observer almost to rub his nose in the picture to find out what was going on; Braque’s had plenty of air blowing  through them. They were free to change the identity of those materials, and to use them literally as themselves, or metaphorically, or in a purely formal compositional way and with no reference to their identity in the world from which they had been lifted.These were storehouses of allusions, not all of them easily deciphered. Picasso has alwawys been a master of the verbal joke that may or may not pass unnoticed, and those who can read the small print in “Guitar” will find once again a wealth of sly insinuation.  All of this brought into painting a new kind of physicality: one that was clear, open and lean. Not only the painting itself but the act of looking at it was restructured; and there was as much an increase in the pleasure given, and in the kinds of pleasure involved, as there was in the material possibilities which were henceforward at the painer’s disposal.  Picasso was not only exploring but also amusing himself as he parodied his own labors. These experiences were not only complete but also enriching.

December 31, 2009. Uncategorized.