30 January 05

Catching the Moment

Last night we watched Le Mystre Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Picasso created 20 images—paintings and drawings in ink on a transparent surface—that were captured on film on the reverse side. It was an extraordinary performance. Picasso’s gestural faces, for instance, are breathtaking, as are the calves of middle-aged men and pointy toes of bullfighters. He worked very quickly but would just as quickly rework something that he called “trs mauvais”—a complex beach scene complete with water-skier and couple in moonlight which still had the original strong compositional lines he started with. Most of the works were destroyed after the making of the film.

I first saw Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late seventies. It is a huge, impressive painting, and it was given appropriate attention and weight and pomp. Franco had already died by then and you knew this painting was heading back to Madrid; through who knows what legal wrangles, it finally did get its own entire gallery (the Thyssen-Bornemisa, now housed in much larger digs across the Paseo del Prado), shown along with sketches displayed in a darkened antechamber, people whispering about it, the forbidden suddenly in their midst.

Numenius and I saw it in December 2003 at the new Reina Sofa museum in Madrid, across the boulevard from the Prado. It seems to need more elbow room than it has. There was a huge crowd around it. For all this, the painting has lost none of its searing power. These gestures: he must have painted them thousands if not millions of times, the eye with tears, the fat four fingers, the pointed howling tongue. They return again and again in his work.

Guernica speaks against the horrors of war. Against Franco’s, against Hitler’s, against all war. Against the senseless brutality that is the result, always, of war.

Who will paint the horrors of this one? Who will write the book? Who will compose the music? Or do the din of it all and the fatigue make such a painting, now, an impossibility?

Posted by at 06:26 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. I saw Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in the ‘70s, too … and it was something to behold, especially as one came upon it the way it was exhibited.

    Good question you ask, Pica. I don’t have the answer, but I do have a feeling that rather than fatigue, the tide of all this constant flow of information (and yes, even blogging, too) somehow dilutes the force and energy that would otherwise go into the creation of something on the scale of Guernica in the arts. I am hoping that I am completely wrong in this take on the ‘state’ of the arts.

    — maria    30. January 2005, 19:33    Link
  2. Do you find that Guernica looks very much like photographs of it? Much more so than, say, an impressionist paiting looks like photographs of itself? Guernica has always seemed to me a painting that relies on striking choices of image rather than on any subtlety of technique that could only be seen in person.

    But then, I haven’t been to Madrid, so I wonder that based on photographs of it.


    — Jarrett    30. January 2005, 21:09    Link
  3. Jarrett: I’m not sure. What has struck me about it always in the three places I’ve seen it is just how MASSIVE it is—and long. When you’re standing say 30 ft in front of it your peripheral vision sees almost nothing else. It’s very total like that: it will not be ignored.

    I think the photographs are definitely good for studying the details, which is what your eye searches for incessantly while looking at it—trying to make sense, trying, trying. But in the end there is no sense, just chaos and senseless violence. Which is of course the point.

    What I’d love to do now having seen the film of Picasso’s process is to go back and look at all the preparatory sketches…

    — Pica    31. January 2005, 04:26    Link
  4. There will always be another Picasso – although perhaps not a Van Gogh ;^) – in film, in book form, or even in paint. But whether the world listen today, tomorrow, or a hundred years after the din has died down remains to be seen.

    perhaps the greatest paintings are the ones we will never see…

    late night rambling.
    — J.Pohl    27. June 2005, 22:03    Link

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