by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2009 | Modern
Modern Art Notes interviews TJ Clark, who is presenting this year’s National Gallery of Art Mellon Lectures, focusing on 1920s Picasso as well as Guernica:
These lectures are an attempt to extract Pablo Picasso from a biographic equation: ‘Picture C equals Lover Y,’ and that’s what you need to know … Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that’s intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions. You won’t be surprised to hear that from me, as I’m someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I’m very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That’s under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it’s under threat.) Massively under-threat. One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world.
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