Picasso: Wizard of the real
by JACK FLAM
“Nude Woman in a Red Armchair” (1932) by Pablo Picasso at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Scotland. PHOTO/James Glossop
T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (352pp. Princeton University Press. £25.95 US $45).
No artist has reinvented the visible world in a more radical way than Picasso. In his stringent early Cubist paintings, composed with fragmentary geometric planes rendered in earth colours, the differences between figure and ground are hardly distinguishable, testing the limits of representation. After the First World War, he developed a very different kind of painting, paradoxically both flat and suggestive of intangible depth, hard-edged and often brightly coloured. The flexible space in these paintings permitted new kinds of interaction between emptiness and objects, and a broader range of subject matter, much of it erotic or violent, or both.
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Because Picasso’s works of these years departed so radically from accepted norms, they were often greeted with hostility or puzzlement. In 1932, the psychologist Carl G. Jung famously compared Picasso’s paintings to the pictures made by schizophrenics, and called him an “underworld” personality who followed “the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil” rather than “the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty”. Although Clark does not mention Jung in this context, he casts his own similar position in a positive light, celebrating rather than damning the chthonic power of Picasso’s paintings. Clark acknowledges that Picasso’s art contains pathological elements, but he sees them as reflections of the pathology of an age rather than of an individual. For him, Picasso’s art is a judgement on a century that was rife with disaster.
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Choices and struggles
by B. SURENDRA RAO
K.N. Panikkar, History as a site of struggle: Essays on History, Culture and Politics
This idea of “history as a site of struggle” pervades this book of that name, which has put together Professor K.N. Panikkar’s various lectures at public meetings and his writings in the popular media over the past three decades in what the editor rightly calls “a kind of Omnibus of his ‘activistic’ writings”.
The book is a hefty kit of 77 articles and lectures grouped under five heads: History and Historiography (15), National Politics (21), Communal Politics (20), Education (9) and Culture (12). Though written at different times and addressed to different audiences, some definite strands of conviction and logic run through them, which not only give them a discernible unity but show their author as the one who has made his choice as to where he should stand in the site of struggle.
One such strand is that free India is not really free since it has not been able to divest itself of some of the insidious inheritance of colonialism. The national movement was conscious of its deleterious effects but was itself in some ways infected by it, so much so that the boundary between the national and the communal got frustratingly blurred and produced Partition and the endless recriminations thereon as its denouement. The wise makers of the Constitution and the Nehruvian leadership had tried their best to keep the communal virus out, but after a spell of incubation it has come back to become a major threat to inclusive nation-building. Panikkar’s vision of the nation is integrative, which honours the rich plurality of the country and has no place for the domination of the majority, a fear that was politically harnessed under British rule, and in the national movement. But communal ideology in free India is propped up by the proclaimed fear of the minorities among Hindus and the fear of the majority among the minorities.
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