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During the spring of 1913, Pablo Picasso produced a series of papiers collés in which we find, in addition to the pasted papers that are the works’ principal component, something even more unconventional: metal straight pins, each of them passing beneath the surface of the paper, only to re-emerge a short distance away. The series includes three compositions of heads (see Figure 14.1 ), all of them apparently male, and a lone landscape, the Paysage de Céret , now in the Musée Picasso in Paris (see Figure 14.2 ). However, the other seven works from the
between late-Victorian forgery fiascos and emerging conceptions of modern art. Montmartre, known in the art community as the birthplace of modern art, was home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to figures like Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Gertrude Stein, and more artists across a range of media. A page in a September 1905 issue of The
de dés was a recasting of Igitur , in a chain of influences and references that project modernism into a post-Second World War timeline. The final chapter of this section, Lisa Florman’s ‘Behind Picasso’s pins’, turns to Picasso’s use of pins in his papiers collés to illustrate some of the tensions and divisions that not only structure the pasted paper works themselves, but also characterize the field of the visual arts as it existed in France in 1913. By bringing mass-produced industrial objects, the pins, into the representational space, Florman argues
startled musicologist honestly stated a certain dismay, adding even that this music destroyed his psychological balance! Nevertheless, he ended up stating that he could be persuaded to like it. Typically, Huneker resorts to terms such as ‘ugly’ or ‘hideous’ to record the truly new. These were adjectives he also used to report on new paintings by Picasso. Unlike Guillaume Apollinaire, who applauded the new no matter what or by whom, Huneker could be guarded. His cultural taste having been formed in the second half of the nineteenth century, he had a hard time accepting
, Picasso and Sappho, ‘are not characters in the physical sense that we know them on the street or perhaps even in our own lives. They are consciousnesses.’72 This description of the characters as sheer ‘consciousnesses’ existing only in an ‘interior’ world situates Art & Lies on a par with Modernist experiments in stream-ofconsciousness fiction such as the ‘Penelope’ chapter of Ulysses, which is narrated in direct interior monologue. This association, supported by the novel’s subtitle, A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd, was ratified by Peter Kemp when he wrote that Art
time (the Dantean rose, as opposed to the train, in Art & Lies and Gut Symmetries). Further, while in Oranges and Written on the Body the narrative role relies on a single character, in the later novels this role is shared by two or more characters whose lives are interdependent: by Henri and Villanelle in The Passion; by the Dog Woman, Jordan and their alter egos, the nameless ecologist and Nicolas Jordan in Sexing the Cherry; by Handel, Picasso and Sappho in Art & Lies; by Alice, Stella and Jove in Gut Symmetries; by Ali/x and Tulip in The.PowerBook; and by Silver
ce qui vivant partout et pour tous nous change un peu de l’inquiétude moderne de l’épiderme à toi r d). 22 There were, obviously, great elective affinities in 1913, but also a return of nationalism. From sharing art to suspicious nationalism Since the nineteenth century, a certain number of artists cultivated a profound interest in primitivism and popular art, becoming somewhat like anthropologists dedicated to renewing culture and the arts. This engagement was extremely fertile for such artists as Matisse, 23 Derain, Picasso and others. The Russian painter
herself (p. ). By contrast with Zeuxis, then, the sum of the parts, the five photos and their four reinterpretations, do not make up the perfect whole, the ‘perfect whole’ being Max’s specific idea of Telma. Picasso, an icon of art’s diversity,9 appears to him in a dream (connoting Max’s subconscious), and explains that Telma’s identity is eternalised not through someone else’s unavoidably subjective interpretation, but through Max’s own personal idea of her: Qui mieux que vous pourrait faire ce portrait? Car vous l’avez aimée cette femme, n’est-ce pas? Les photos, c
Atget’s photography is modern because it is political. Can we consider Atget modern in the same sense, say, as Picasso, Braque or the Italian futurists? What distinguishes Atget from such quintessential artists of modernity is the desire to be, or the consciousness of being, part of the avant-garde without having to inform the public of his allegiance. In a famous episode cited by Man Ray, when Man Ray asked Atget’s permission to publish his images in La Révolution surréaliste , the latter replied: ‘Do not mention my name. These are simple documents that I make.’ 22
work was among the most important of the time and a Cubist masterpiece.3 Although the art critic Louis Vauxcelles preferred the term ‘tubiste’ to characterise Léger’s style from this period, because it promoted (Cézannian) volume over (Cubist) planar surfaces, its rhythmic interplay of figurative and non-figurative elements and its spatial ambiguities are indeed characteristic of the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. For example, the smokelike or cloudlike forms are part of the wedding procession (the white bridal gown in the central lower section), while simultaneously