One way to cope with the provocations of novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid standards. The standards are set by the critic's long-practiced taste and by his conviction that only those innovations will be significant which promote the established direction of advanced art. All else is irrelevant. Judged for "quality" and for an "advancedness" measurable by given criteria, each work is then graded on a comparative scale.
A second way is more yielding. The critic interested in a novel manifestation holds his criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today. While he seeks to comprehend the objectives behind the new art produced, nothing is a priori excluded or judged irrelevant. Since he is not passing out grades, he suspends judgment until the work's intention has come into focus and his response to it is - in the literal sense of the word - sym-pathetic; not necessarily to approve, but to feel along with it as with a thing that is like no other.
I am aware that this second mode tends to be expatiating and slow. It offers neither certitude nor precise quality ratings. But I believe that both ways - the will to empathize and the will to appraise - have their use. There must be an ideal combination of them, and perhaps most critics strive to achieve it. But that achievement lies beyond individual sensibility; the capacity to experience all works in accord with their inward objectives and at the same time against external standards belongs rather to the collective judgment of a generation, a judgment within which many kinds of critical insights have been absorbed.
Since mine is the second mode, I find myself constantly in opposition to what is called formalism; not because I doubt the necessity of formal analysis, or the positive value of work done by serious formalist critics. But because I mistrust their certainties, their apparatus of quantification, their self-righteous indifference to that part of artistic utterance which their tools do not measure. I dislike above all their interdictory stance - the attitude that tells an artist what he ought not to do, and the spectator what he ought not to see.
Skull and Pitcher, painted on March 10, 1945. A rectangular table having five, six, maybe seven sides (counting is not encouraged ). It stands at a window or porch, an ambiguous outside-in station, an interior that inhales the outdoors. The reticulate backdrop may be a tiled wall, or a plaid hanging, or coincident grids out of register. On the table, skull faces pitcher; between them - a spread of white light, either cast by the window or the negative of a shadow thrown by the skull. The glazed earthenware jug shows five facets; that means every aspect accounted for, to say nothing of lip, handle, and corrugated inside. The orientation of its lighted and shaded planes is reversed. The slender segments facing the incoming yellow light do not brighten up, but show sunless violet, so that we recognize them despite their precession for what they are - averted planes, tokens of other aspects. The light's character is consistently altered, as in the bar of white light standing up under the table. And above board, the light enters not softly, like the spiritual substance it ought to be, but like a sharpened ax-blade whose contact causes instantaneous recoil. The situation is tense; skull and pitcher in confrontation.
...the skull is mean and hard as a bullet. The thrust of its cranium reverberates at the pitcher's throat. And the curvaceous vessel, as befits the responsive sex, reels. Shrinking back, timorous, yielding, belonging - its caving gorge, you remember, attuned to the death's head - it plays the receiving role in a Satanic annunciation.
Like the pitcher, the skull too enrolls all its facets - top, occiput, profile, and hollowface. Its impending mass sits flat and full against the sunlight. No tenuous fragility here of human bone, no openwork hinging of jaws; it is all solid matter, obdurate substance, a fossil in its absolute prime. "One way to master the fear of death is to become its embodiment," reports a psychiatrist. And since this picture is laden with passionate metaphor, I cannot unthink the possibility that Picasso, who during the 1930's had projected himself into the Minotaur monster, is self-projecting again.
The pressure of emphasis contained in this sentient skull accords with its density. Despite the flat planes of the painter's idiom, it is made to seem indestructibly solid - but by what means? Of course, the heavy black boundary holds the parts down like a steel hoop, and such secure casing must be assumed to enclose an incumbent mass - the more so since the border thins out against the light and thickens below as on any three-dimensional object properly rendered. Then again, the segmental shapes at top and back suggest partial views in perspective. And the suggested planes, changing color from dark tones to light - from violet to a heightened turquoise - tend to read as tonal gradations on a spherical body. Furthermore, the skull lies in the path of an entering light, whence its bulk emerges by implication; it has to be volumetric to block all that light. Then there is the effect of the larger stark-staring eye which looks straight out and at the same time to left so that it rivets front-face and profile together. More important, the wedged-in triangular centerpiece: though it tips on one corner, it maintains the most rigid of geometric forms - a right triangle, its hypotenuse running from ten o'clock to five on the dial. And finally, the sides of this interned triangle - three chords of a circle - discharge (with refracted break of direction) into the surrounding field. Reading centerward, these fielded lines impinge from without to form planar ridges. Thus every internal division of the cranial orb claims its remote anchorage far afield; each side of its face is steered into place and held fast. It is the most redoubtable skull he ever painted.
When you ask Johns why he did this or that in a painting, he answers so as to clear himself of responsibility. A given decision was made for him by the way things are, or was suggested by an accident he never invited.
Regarding the four casts of faces he placed in four oblong boxes over one of the targets:
Q: Why did you cut them off just under the eyes?
A: They wouldn't have fitted into the boxes if I'd left them whole.
He was asked why his bronze sculpture of an electric bulb was broken up into bulb, socket, and cord:
A: Because, when the parts came back from the foundry, the bulb wouldn't screw into the socket.
Q: Could you have had it done over?
A: I could have.
Q: Then you liked it in fragments and you chose to leave it that way?
A: Of course.
The distinction I try to make between necessity and subjective preference seems unintelligible to Johns. I asked him about the type of numbers and letters he uses - coarse, standardized, unartistic - the type you associate with packing cases and grocery signs.
Q: You nearly always use this same type. Any particular reason?
A: That's how the stencils come.
Q: But if you preferred another typeface, would you think it improper to cut your own stencils?
A: Of course not.
Q: Then you really do like these best?
A: Yes.
This answer is so self-evident that I wonder why I asked the question at all; ah yes - because Johns would not see the obvious distinction between free choice and external necessity. Let me try again:
Q: Do you use these letter types because you like them or because that's how the stencils come?
A: But that's what I like about them, that they come that way.
Does this mean that it is Johns's choice to prefer given conditions - the shape of commercial stencils, inaccurate workmanship at the foundry, boxes too low to contain plaster masks, etc.? that he so wills what occurs that what comes from without becomes indistinguishable from what he chooses? The theoretic distinction I tried to impose had been fetched from elsewhere; hence its irrelevance.
I had tried to distinguish between designed lettering subject to expressive inflection, i.e. Ietters that exist in the world of art, and those functional letters that come in mass-produced stencils to spell THIS END UP on a crate. Proceeding by rote from this distinction between life and art, I asked whether the painter entertained an esthetic preference for these crude stenciled forms. Johns answers that he will not recognize the distinction. He knows that letters of more striking design do exist or can be made to exist. But they would be Art. And what he likes about those stencils is that they are Art not quite yet. He is the realist for whom preformed subject matter is a condition of painting.
(The beginning section is from William Rubin's recent study, summarizing Steinberg's analyses.)
Steinberg was the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles. He was the first to deal closely with the studies for the picture and, indeed, the first to deal at all with its many preparatory drawings in which the bordello subject is most evident. Steinberg was convinced that in the final work Picasso "did not abandon" his initial idea but discovered "more potent means for its realization." Thus, Steinberg viewed the Demoiselles essentially as "a sexual metaphor," whose figures "personify sheer sexual energy as the image of a life force." The stylistic differences between individual personages in the final work constitute Picasso's challenge "to the notion that the coherence of the work of art demands a stylistic consistency among the things represented," and the artist's decision to introduce these differences was characterized as "purposeful." Steinberg saw this stylistic multiplicity as paralleled by a methodological variety in Picasso's means of indicating space, the whole of which was compressed not only from back to front but from its sides: "no terms taken from other art - whether from antecedent paintings or from Picasso's own subsequent Cubism - describe the drama of so much depth under stress." This is not a flattened form of Renaissance space, not a Cubist space, but one "peculiar to Picasso's imagination." Beginning with the raised, pointed edge of the foreground table, "a visual metaphor of penetration," the space and the figures and objects in it were seen by Steinberg as expressively and symbolically in the service of the sexual content of the picture. The space was "not a visual continuum," but "an interior apprehended on the model of touch and stretch, a nest known by palpation, or by reaching and rolling, by extending oneself within it. Though presented symbolically to the mere sense of sight, Picasso's space insinuates total initiation, like entering a disordered bed." The picture's "inconsistencies" and "discontinuities" were subsumed in a higher expressive and psychological unity that "resides above all in the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees himself seen."
Seven years later Steinberg himself would summarize his many aperçus about the "explosive debut" in the Demoiselles of what he called Picasso's "discontinuity principle":
The picture crowds five disconnected figures - not as one group, nor in one ambience, but each singly encapsulated: the lone curtain raiser at left, separated even from her own lifted hand by an unmediated space jump; the second figure stretched forth in reclining position seen from on top - she arrives on the picture plane like a Murphy bed hitting the wall; the straight middle figure adjacent, but with no spatial ties to her sister, seen from below again. Then those curtain folds like packed ice to quarantine the intruding savage at upper right - treated in a menacing "African" mode; and lastly "crouched for employment" an exotic jade realized like no other, dorsal and frontal at once.
Comparison with the numerous studies for the
There's a small Picasso painting of 1913 which is here titled Hat Decorated with Grapes. I bring it up because in it Picasso paints a very beautiful, conventional Kewpie doll, but the woman's mouth is upside down. It's all oil, no mixture of materials, neither Ripolin nor papier colle, but the mark is upside down. Is there meaning in this?
I'm trying to suggest that, in a picture like this, the body of the text isn't meant to be read because, as reading matter, it doesn't function pictorially; the scale is wrong. So, we might want to distinguish between blocks of reading matter and, on the other hand, headings and headlines.
Steinberg: Is there a figure there?
Martin: There is a figure. You can see a profile of a caricatural face, with a funny cap on his head. He has buck teeth and a moustache. The shoulder is visible, as are the muscles of the arm and, at the lower center, what obviously looks like a guitar.
Steinberg: I still don't understand where the notion of Braque as the more poetic, lyrical, spatial, atmospheric, comes from when I look at this painting. And does this picture show a Bugs Bunny-type figure with two shoulders standing forward? Is that how we are to read and to teach Braque?
... Steinberg: All I can say is that if I am to see this Braque as a Bugs Bunny profile - if that is the reading of the picture - I'd be perfectly happy never to look at it again.
