T.J. Clark: Picasso in England

Picasso, ‘The Source’ (1921); Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’ (1936).

Again the question is distance and literalness. At the root of modernism in painting lay the idea – or better, the conclusion arrived at in practice – that the truth of a depiction now depended on deep obedience, or receptivity, to the whole shape and substance of the coloured thing. The hold of a picture on the world, as well as its internal organisation (the kind of depth it offered, the degree of surface incident, its notion of orderliness or free improvisation), were inseparable from the size and format of the canvas used, or the particular liquidity of the mixed paint. (Of course painting has many other parameters. I am singling out those that were most on Picasso’s and Nicholson’s minds.) Let me take an example from Impressionism. Round the corner from the show at the Courtauld is a flawless Pissarro of the railway station at Lordship Lane. The painting has a strange shape, 17 and a half inches by 28 and a half. And getting the unique reserve and slight greyness of South London light, as Pissarro does here to a T, is entirely a matter – I can’t say how, but the fact presents itself – of making each touch of green and white, each slight stretching-out of perspective, respond to (come out of) the canvas’s beautiful unsettling horizontality. The literalness of the container is modernism’s truth-condition. In a culture saturated by false equivalents, short cuts to non-knowledge, pseudo-pictures, the truth of a pictorial proposal has to derive from the proposal’s overtness, its factuality. This is modernism’s core belief.

I do not think that Nicholson ever quite saw this, or saw how to put it into practice. A friend who knows his work much better than I do cautioned me the other day against trotting out the cliché that Nicholson’s problem as an artist was essentially his ‘good taste’. Agreed. (In any case good taste is not necessarily a handicap, even for a modernist. It never stood in Bonnard’s way.) I think Nicholson’s limitation lay in the fact that he became such a master of aesthetic distance, but stayed so irresolute when it came to making the painting all one thing – all one finite fact. Or to put it another way: he did not allow the encounter with Picasso and Mondrian to disturb a basic certainty he had, I think deriving from his being so at home in English culture, about what the realm of art was, and where it began and ended. A painting’s separate firm standing in the world – its self-fulfilling tone-poem completeness – was for him an article of faith. Art was always art, for Nicholson, by virtue of its internal arrangement. His pictures are always fundamentally – in their formal logic – pictures within pictures. They unfold from a centre, and they depend on the presence within the painted rectangle of another roughly rectangular shape, finished and floating, internally rich in quiet relations, balanced and finite, and unrelated to the actual physical object pinned to the wall – free of that object’s contingency. The case is even clearer when Nicholson goes abstract (the contrast with Mondrian is cruel). And this is what I meant by art in England being essentially in hiding.

Think of Three Dancers again. A Picasso or a Mondrian always exists as a problem for the space around it. The pictures somehow indict their surroundings. Genteel modernism suffers – this is the litmus test – from being on good terms with its world: it cannot see why a painting shouldn’t come to rest quietly in its own art-realm. Again, this has nothing to do with attitude or attitudinising, of the Bacon kind. A Bonnard late bath scene is as sweet and dumbfounding – as homeless and unearthly – as any Picasso monster on the beach.