"But during the 1920s, in paintings such as “Three Dancers”, Picasso began to seek something similar to what Nietzsche characterized as Untruth: a post-moral, post-Christian confrontation with reality in all its monstrous, unfiltered forms."

Picasso: Wizard of the real

JACK FLAM

T. J. Clark
PICASSO AND TRUTH
From Cubism to Guernica
352pp. Princeton University Press. £25.95 (US $45). 
978 0 691 15 741 2

His argument about Picasso’s relation to Nietzsche is more convincing. Picasso’s earlier Cubism, Clark argues, was bound to ideas of visual truth; that is, to a fairly direct relationship between the artist’s imagery and what he could see with his eyes. (I don’t agree with this, but I’m willing to concede the point for the sake of argument.) But during the 1920s, in paintings such as “Three Dancers”, Picasso began to seek something similar to what Nietzsche characterized as Untruth: a post-moral, post-Christian confrontation with reality in all its monstrous, unfiltered forms. In “Three Dancers”, as Clark puts it, Picasso wrestles with the question of how to make Untruth come into the room.

Although Clark takes a rather long and circuitous route to conclude that Picasso is a monist whose art is amoral – not from indifference, but from a reality principle (the world itself being amoral) – his discussion of parallels between Nietzsche and Picasso contributes to a better understanding of Picasso’s uniqueness as a thinker as well as a painter. It also provides an implicit rebuke to Jung’s expectation that great art be “good” as well as beautiful. Following Nietzsche, Clark maintains that the way monstrosity collapses normal terms of identity and difference can be a substitute for truth: “Monstrosity is the Untruth – the strangeness and extremity – inherent in everyday life”.