Continuing with T.J.Clark’s recent piece in the LRB, he had some very perceptive things to say about Picasso’s skill at scaling an image to its support. Looking with the eyes of the present, Clark can’t help but see that today we don’t look into a picture, but at it, that the shape and size of the piece is vividly present to us: “At the root of modernism in painting lay the idea—or better, the conclusion arrived at in practice—that the truth of a depiction now depended on a deep obedience, or receptivity, to the whole shape and substance of the coloured thing…The literalness of the container is modernism’s truth-condition. In a culture saturated by false equivalents, short cuts to non-knowledge, pseudo-pictures, the truth of a pictorial proposal has to derive from the proposal’s overtness, its factuality. This is modernism’s core belief.” Though Clark is not known for writing about Frank Stella, or the monochrome, or Gego, or Richard Serra, or any other artist for whom “shape is form,” he is intellectually prepared, perhaps partly through his friendship with Michael Fried. But then talking about a Picasso still life he goes on to say “But literalness does not depend on ‘painting up to the edge’ or simple reiteration of the support. It has to do with the energy of the whole arrangement.” This formulation takes the productive awareness of shape back into the picture. The important thing is now an intangible—Picasso’s energy, or ability to give vividness to his images—not the formal necessity to break out of the frame and give the work a shape. This is a deeply conservative move, but then Clark may also be right.
Pablo Picasso, Still life with guitar, compote and grapes 1924
So far I’ve defined Picasso’s difference as decisiveness, or, following Clark, as “power of mind” (which Bloom would call “cognitive difficulty”), but now I can add vividness. All three may be aspects of the same skill—not a talent, but the product of will applied to practice. It may or may not be important that Picasso invented the shaped canvas, among so much else.
Shep, thanks for the comment. I want to go further into the question of scale in an upcoming post. Just for now, of course I have to agree with your assessment of Greenberg, Fried and Clark as three significant critics of modernism, and inventors of key tropes of modernist criticism. Your own work, as you say, moves beyond these tropes.
I’m not sure I agree with you that they are really confronting three problematics of cubism, although I wish I could. I have long believed that American criticism has prematurely claimed that American art, meaning above all abstraction, has overcome or surpassed cubism. Greenberg didn’t really believe it, but Fried makes that claim fundamental—to his loss, in my view. It might be conventional today to talk about cubism as an art of signs, but it is in fact true. I think cubism is about invention—invention of signs in a new realism. We have yet to catch up to that.
But “scale,” “shape” and “opticality,” in my view, are really something new. Maybe we have to bring these three tropes to cubist works and see how they do. I suspect, as implied in the post above, that Clark is reading back his understanding of post-war abstraction onto (late) cubism, but ultimately confusing that with a traditional, historical appreciation of scale, meaning the way that the image fills the surface. I might be drawing too fine a distinction, but we will see. In a way, I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m wrong and Clark is right, then there is the danger that we will lose some of the post-war American achievement. Stella will become a composer of pictures. Stella will have to be brought into this discussion, to defend the strong concept of shape and scale from Clark’s connoisseurial evaluations.
Robert your thoughts are always very provocative and productive; especially your thoughts here on Clark and his somewhat new insistence on shape, which as you suggest seems to be following in Fried’s footsteps, or extending his reading in a way that complicates the contribution of Stella, and may easily be construed as conservative, but which are not. Why Clark would first of all sidle up beside Fried on the issue of shape has confused me for a couple of weeks since you mentioned it, primarily because I think of Clark’s contribution hinging on scale, especially when it comes to Pollock. But these thoughts on cubism seem to include his previous thoughts on scale and packages them as something peculiar to shape and its relationship to scale in Picasso’s cubism—though I shouldn’t really say anything about Clark’s essay not having read it thoroughly. What I am tempted to say is that given Clark’s sketch of the cubist project, both Greenberg and Fried pick up on different aspects of it in their criticism depending on whose mid-century painting they are looking at. Moreover, and this intersects with things I am writing about, it seems that if we are to confront the work of Pollock, Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Olitski and Stella again that it will involve working both within and beyond what has emerged as the key tropes of modernist criticism: “opticality” (Greenberg), “shape” (Fried), and “scale” (Clark). For what if in their own encounters with these various artists Greenberg, Fried and Clark were only confronting cubist problematics and not problematics particular to the works themselves? In face of the impoverishment of contemporary art history’s attempts to come to grips with these practices through hermeneutic and non-dialectical avenues alone, its more and more clear that we need to recognize the indispensability of these critical tropes: that each offers more than a description of the object; that each provides precious mileage into as well as an analytic of our experience of objects, effectively building upon the viewer’s bodily responses to painting and sculpture in special ways—ways that variously admit modalities of aesthetic experience into the interpretative arena. Which is again not to say that these tropes of modernist criticism are the last word on painting but are only the tip of the iceberg. Only continuing to work at the threshold of philosophical aesthetics can push things further…