Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) Details

Review "Shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year 2013, Apollo Magazine""Clark weaves his way through Picasso's process, nimbly leaps over the landmines of strict biographical interpretation, and arrives finally at a complex, challenging, but coherent concept of how Picasso found truth in a closed room and spent the rest of his life trying to find it again. . . . It's a major intellectual and emotional investment to follow Clark following Picasso's journey . . . but the payoff of seeing Guernica and Picasso through Clark's memory bank of interpretation is well worth the price. . . . Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, despite (and sometimes because of) the enormity of its subject matter, leaves you with more than enough to believe in at the end."---Bob Duggan, Big Think"[B]eautiful." (Tikkun)"His prose is abundant with tantalising aphorisms and observations. Some are sparkling asides but more often they act as spurs that encourage us to look more closely and less complacently at Picasso's work. . . . The book's lavish production values make for excellent reproductions of the paintings, and its copious illustrations include many cropped details as well as an imaginative range of image comparisons. . . . [Clark] is rare, among contemporary art historians."---Thomas Marks, Daily Telegraph"Clark is an electrifying lecturer in addition to being a superb writer on art, and the combination gives Picasso and Truth a cumulative force that is nothing short of remarkable. . . . [A] relentlessly original book."---Michael Fried, Common Knowledge"Clark is very good at pointing out in detail the complex and radical ways in which Picasso's paintings were conceived. He discusses a number of individual works . . . with admirable awareness of their complexity, and the book is full of acute observations."---Jack Flam, Times Literary Supplement"[C]hallenging but vastly rewarding." (Apollo Magazine)"[T]hrilling. . . . Thus space becomes an arena for truth-telling after all: a conclusion with optimistic implications for the legacies we can still seek in 20th-century art if we explore, as Clark does with supreme insight, the meeting ground between art and politics."---Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times"[C]ompelling."---Michael Prodger, Apollo"T.J. Clark's Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica marks a new summit in the mountain range of Picasso literature. . . . He walks the reader through analyses of paintings so searching and so mindful of overlapping intellectual frames of reference as to offer a new model of practice to critics and art historians. Its sophistication may make aspiring imitators despair. . . . Possibly only a reader who has tried to write about art will appreciate the achievement of thought and articulation in such a passage. The book contains many of them, along with sometimes inch-by-inch readings of pictures that startle by their ingenuity and aptness."---Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Read more Review "This is the Picasso book for which we have all been waiting. This work displaces biographical and psychological treatments of the artist from the past several decades, rendering them obsolete―and it forever changes art history in its present disposition."―Rosalind E. Krauss, Columbia University"No art historian in our time has had a greater impact both within the field and beyond it than T. J. Clark. Everything he writes matters in the most fundamental way. His latest book, Picasso and Truth, is no exception―superbly observed, beautifully argued, a tour de force of looking, thinking, and writing."―Michael Fried, author of The Moment of Caravaggio Read more See all Editorial Reviews