From Kitsch to Cool: Picasso and Modern Art
July/August 2013
"Clark can riff endlessly on Picasso's shattered forms. "The idea of ‘in front of' especially interests me. How far in front? Gaining what from the proximity? Inside or out? These are the painting's questions." Perhaps what interests him most about Picasso is the ambiguity in the pictures, because it leaves so much space for riffing. All this riffing confuses Clark's arguments, and he tends to lose his aim just as he comes to his point. For example, one of Picasso's paintings "challenges us to resist its inventiveness, but does it not at the same time admit its own forced quality — its theatricality, its framed and concocted stunts?" It may do, I suppose. But then this could easily be asserted about any other painting ever. Strangely, it is often in his most emphatic moments that Clark is least precise. When he escapes from his tangle of concepts and conceits, he sometimes stumbles into extraordinarily banal conclusions. At the end he declares that "there is one thing painting finds indispensable: namely, space". Did that need to be argued?
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