Pies & Picasso

graphite, putty eraser & digital collage/815x1200px, drawing 20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 04/08

This attraction of this particular newspaper photograph as suitable source material for transcription in the form of drawing first suggested itself through the presence of the chequered tiled floor, which, in colour, is red & pale yellow, bringing to mind very much such a work of art as Carl Andre's floor piece 'Copper Magnesium Plain' (see this post for a previous reminder of & reference to Andre & a similar work).


Carl Andre 'Copper Magnesium Plain' 1969

And then I noticed the pie: of course, it features, courtesy of its latticed pastry topping, our dearly beloved Modernist grid, but, more than this, the rim of its crust suggested a very close affinity with the rope edging Picasso applied as the finishing touch to his oval format 'Still Life with Chair Caning' - as perhaps noted previously, if one looks at enough art (which, of course, can never be achieved), visual achoes occur almost everywhere.


Pablo Picasso 'Still Life with Chair Caning' 1912
oil & pasted oilcloth on canvas, & rope/27x35cm

Having processed the drawing with this in mind, the inclusion of Picasso's object-painting within the picture came to seem imperative. By a combination of digital processes - including resizing, slight distortion of shape (narrowed to the right), conversion from colour to monochrome & then collaging onto/into the scanned image of the original drawing, with shadow drawn with a digital 'pencil' tool as a final touch - an image of 'Still Life with Chair Caning' was thus incorporated into the drawing, as 'hanging' on the rear wall, establishing a visual analogue with the pie.

Picasso's painting is a fascinating example of the ground-breaking artform of so-called 'Synthetic' Cubism (actually existing on the cusp of the 'Analytic' & 'Synthetic'), whereby actual fragments of matter from the real world & everyday life are incorporated, synthesized, into the picture: in this case, Picasso uses a piece of oilcloth onto which a pattern (grid-like!) resembling textured chair caning has been printed - a mass-produced item co-existing with, within, a unique artefact - & also frames his painting with a length of rope that is perceived both as itself, a real thing, whilst also suggesting the carved edge of a wooden table top which, of course, the viewer 'reads' when apprehending the still life collection of represented objects (or 'significant' fragments of) - including a newspaper, pipe & glass - on the picture plane.

Further to the 'game' that Picasso is playing with representation, levels of, & the various means by which it/they might be achieved in such an instance - the 'jou' of the 'journal' title of the newspaper could also suggest the French 'joue(r)' - the inclusion of the rope as a framing device might also be a little in-joke, alluding to Braque & Picasso's notion of themselves being 'mountaineers roped together', scaling new heights of pictorial exploration through Cubism, particularly the development into the realm of papiers colles & collage, where art & life meet through the inclusion of actual materials along with pictorial representations of, that serve to both exist in & as themselves or otherwise symbolically suggest something else.


In similar manner to this drawing, Bernardo Bertolucci's film 'The Dreamers' quotes from cinematic history, inserting clips from e.g. Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich & such examples from the French nouvelle vague as Jean-Luc Godard into the course of its narrative of the lives - in the context of the social & political upheaval of May 1968 Paris - of its three young cinephile protagonists. A gorgeous-looking piece of cinema (not least in the form of the central triumvirate of its cast), ravishingly photographed, richly sensual & decadent. The DVD also includes an excellent, extensive 'making-of' feature, among the very best of its kind, fascinating in the manner in which it describes the temporal & cultural context of the film & insightfully explains the process of its creation.

Soundtrack:


Lambchop 'Is a Woman'/'Is a Bonus'
Tunng 'Good Arrows'