Picasso

The return of the index to western painting ,
Picasso�s  Still Life with Chair Caning, May 1912.
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Slide 1.  Still Life With Chair Caning  May 1912
In this paper I will look closely at one particular and quite unique work of Pablo Picasso.  I have chosen it because it is the first case of such an application in main stream art practice since antiquity.  What is unique is his use of materials and objects from daily life, incorporated into the work, not for decorative or purely formal purposes but for the meaning they convey intrinsically or by virtue of association.  The work comes at the climax of a period of intensive investigation by Picasso and Braque between 1907 and 1912. I shall begin by describing this process and showing how essential it was to the one off experiment of Still Life with Chair Caning.  

Slide 2. Fruit Dish and Glass September 1912
This still life is the first significant example of cubist collage.  Although Braque had been making paper sculptures in 1911 (now lost).  It is believed that these were uniform in medium and not an assemblage of heterogeneous materials.  It is this conjunction of separate and discrete elements that distinguishes collage from papier coll�.  It was certainly Braque who initiated the papier coll� works, simply pasted paper, a natural extension of his use of sand texture and wood grain effects.  Picasso himself acknowledges the priority of Braque in these works which led to synthetic cubism and yet it is now well established that Still Life with Chair Caning was an isolated individual work which predates the papier coll� by several months.  Earlier arguments on this dating were based on a misunderstanding by William Rubin in an interview with Picasso ( reproduced in William Rubin Picasso Braque Pioneering Cubism 1989.) which Pierre Daix takes up in his paper, The Chronological confusion in the pasted papers revolution in the Gazette Des Beaux Arts Vol. 82 December. 1973.
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In any case the collage differs from papier coll� in one very important respect.  In the later pasted paper work the elements are harmonised in a unified pictorial surface.  Because the collaged elements in Picasso's work of May 1912 are allowed to retain their status as separate elements they can carry with them meanings and associations over and above their function in the compositional image.  The priority of the work is not an issue that bears directly on this paper but the date in relation to the change from analysis to synthesis is significant.

Synthetic Cubism has generally been identified as following the papier coll� of 1912-13 where signs begin to operate within the works free of any necessary residue of resemblance.  I shall describe aspects of the earlier Still Life with Chair Caning which provides an important precedent for this play of signs.  It is also an interesting work for the way it materialises the spatial ambiguities of the preceding analytic cubism.  Although the work has the high spirited feel of conceptual play it marks a fundamental change in the understanding of painting as a separate realm, a change which was to have momentous and far reaching consequences for the future of painting.  In a very short period of time 1907-1914 Picasso restructured the way in which marks on a surface are read in their relationship to that surface and to the object of representation.  He then moves on to the realisation that breaking the traditional understanding of that relationship opened the way for a new kind of signification.  This new use of signs and material substances may have had precedence in archaic art forms in various parts of the world but it was not an active constituent in modern European art before cubism.  The only exception to this would have been the frame and it�s significations, These are multiple and too complex to develop here ( see Derrida, Art and Illusion for a good discussion of the topic.) , suffice it to say the frame acted variously as; a marker of special value, the end of real space, the beginning of imaginary space, enclosure, fetishization and a limit for compositional development.  As we will see Picasso picks up on the frame as signifier in Still Life with Chair Caning. 

In order to appreciate the pivotal nature of Still Life....in Picasso�s work and it�s context in twentieth century art, we must examine the development of Analytic Cubism between 1907 and 1910 and the introduction of motif immediately prior to the papier coll� works in 1912. Picasso was searching for new and more complex ways to represent the experience of the material world and its structures. He was not eliminating the image of objects or simplifying as a reductive process but rather to achieve a more realistic form of representation than was possible in Renaissance Perspectival systems.  John Berger argues well for such an interpretation in the moment of Cubism pp. 22 and 23.

Berger also points out the significance of these years for all aspects of society particularly science and politics.  It was the moment before the tragedy of World War I when enlightenment foundered on the repressive social structures that remained in place despite the technological and philosophical advances of the first decade of the twentieth century.
Slide 3.  Accordionist 1911
If analytic cubism is to be seen as a phase in a process of increasingly complex representation and not one of abstraction or reduction from the real, it will be necessary to establish how this process functions in specific works.  In 1911 Picasso and Braque were at Ceret.  The works they made then were an extraordinary culmination of the analytic phase (William Rubin Picasso Braque The Cubist Years Catalogue 1989 p. 26), Accordionist painted by Picasso that summer is at first sight one of the most abstracted works.  In some earlier figure paintings the use of Cezanne's sphere, cube, cylinder and cone is little more than a stylistic distortion of a traditional representation, for example the head of Ambroise Vollard 1910. 
Slide 4.  Ambroise Vollard  1910
Accordionist has proceeded to give equal value to the structures of the object (the Musician) and the spaces around it.  Our awareness of the figure against the field lies in the formation of a structural composition of elements within that field which create a towering triangular movement among the multiplicity of closely related angles and curves.

An interest in the continuity of events in nature reflects contemporary knowledge of underlying structural properties revealed in early atomic physics.  It also reflects a popularisation of certain scientific possibilities by Max Weber, Pawlowski and even Metzinger.  The prevalence of ideas around the geometry of fourth dimensional space is set out at length in "The Fourth Dimensions and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art" by Linda Dalrymple Henderson.  Without attempting a causal connection between any given text and Picasso it is reasonable to assume that on the evidence discussion of the fourth dimension was in the air and had quasi scientific backing.  Einstein�s 1905 general theory of relativity was publicly discussed in 1908 even though it was not published till 1916.  Intelligent modernists could hardly have failed to get at least an inkling of what was going on.

It is clear that the discussion of multiple viewpoints in cubist painting complements such scientific and metaphysical speculations.  That is not to say however that it does not also suggest a continuation of Plato's critique of visual representation in the Republic in some ways it is this latter source which connects better with the semiological interests of synthetic cubism as we shall see when looking at signs in Picasso's painting.
Slide 5  Accordionist  1911
In "Accordionist" there is an extensive integration of structures in the figure and the field suggesting the closed view of objects isolated against field and within the frame that had pertained in past European painting.  Within the system of forms (cubes, cylinders, cones etc) however, there are many elements that refer back to objects but they double as indicators of multiple moments in time as well as space.  In addition it is clear that some forms have double meanings and associative readings.

At the base of the Triangle (cone) which contains the figural information there are scroll forms which suggest legs or the feet of a stool or some such piece of furniture.  They also hold the composition in a purely formal sense which otherwise would become unstable suggesting vertical movement rather than the desired bellows effect of an accordion.  These scrolls are also very reminiscent of base clefs in musical notation and not unlike the slits in a violin body.  All of these elements occur in Picasso's Still Life painting from analytic to synthetic phases.  In a literal representation of the stool these feet might be read in such a way but only by an educated viewer.  Freeing the form from it's literal descriptive role opens up the possibility of multiple significations.

The repetition of step like forms both inside the cone and in the field extends the idea of the accordion action as well as mimicking its actual shape.  It is in devices such as these that Picasso invites us to recreate with him the experience of listening to and watching the accordionist.  He has denied us a literal image of a moment such as a photograph might give us but he has given us access to a sequence of events and a sense of occasion (see Bergson�s discussion of the cinematographic character of knowledge in Creative Evolution).  The viewer then is asked to reconstruct these moments.  This change of emphasis from authorial omnipotence to a collaboration of viewer and artist in the text is as important for the future of visual art as the more formal and representational innovations Picasso has made.

Although I have made a case for Picasso's commitment to representation in the late analytical works it is evident that they come close in form to abstract compositions of simple geometric shapes.  This apparent reduction is a result of obsessive unpicking of the representational conventions, not a leap into the convention of abstract design that characterised constructivism.  It was at the point in the process where the image virtually disappeared into the field that visual symbols and motifs begin to appear in the work, introducing a totally different system of signification.  It is evident in the paintings of late 1910 and throughout 1911 that signs such as scrolls, musical notation, decorative motifs and eventually stencilled letters and words begin to function separately in the compositions.  These works prepared the way for Braque's invention of papier coll� in Fruit Dish and Glass September 1912, and through papier coll� to synthetic cubism. 
Slide 6. Fruit Dish and Glass September 1912
Picasso and Braque now knew that painting had its own laws, its own expressivity which owed nothing to traditional concepts.  But as soon as their painting became highly abstract, when the connection to external reality became tenuous, very distant, they discovered new potential in the introduction of lettering:  letters which, by suggesting words, modify the way the painting can be read; letters which furnish symbols which, in turn, contribute just as much as the concrete information to the creation of meaning.  Then we see how Picasso and Braque varied these indication by the effects of different substances, by optical modifications; how they discovered a type of painting which allied intellectual communication with visual pleasure.  (Pierre Daix & Rosselet Picasso the cubist years 1907-1916, Thames & Hudson).

In May 1912 however, Picasso created the extraordinary collage, Still Life with Chair Caning.  Not only does it predate papier coll�, it actually anticipates the semiotic complexity of synthetic cubism.  The mixing of found objects and painted planes on the pictorial surface further extend Picasso's revolutionary investigation of alternative readings of two dimensional representation.  It is also a unique object since it employs the collaged elements in such a way that they remain free to function as signs while doubling as elements in formal representations of space. In the winter of 1912 Picasso followed Braque into the use of papier coll� unlike Braque, however, Picasso uses this medium to undermine single interpretations of shapes (Rosalind Krauss In the Name of Picasso from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths).  However, he seldom returns to collage as such except in his relief constructions and his later sculptures.  These developments isolate this particular work thereby heightening its visibility and revealing its long term implications for visual representation.
Slide 7.  Still Life with Chair Caning  May 1912
Still Life with Chair Caning  May 1912,  depicts a glass and bottle on a table with a piece of fruit (lemon), serviette, a knife and a newspaper and according to R. Fry an oyster and a pipe. The table top is covered with a modern oil cloth simulation of chair caning.  The scene is set for a pleasant read in the cafe or even in the studio.  Picasso was notorious for reading little other than the works of friends and Le Journal, the newspaper represented here. (William Rubin, Picasso and Braque Pioneering Cubism, 1989). On the other hand he was very enthusiastic about art talk and often wrote to Braque when they were separated bemoaning the lapse in their regular talks (Laurens archives).  Before he met Braque he was close with Appollinaire, Andre Salmon and Ardengo Soffici.  Prior to 1909 when Picasso was still in his tiny studio apartment in the Bateau-Lavoir, his friends had visited him in the studio to talk art.  Once he moved to Boulevard de Clichy he established a proper Salon and visits to the studio became rarer, although he and Braque continued to exchange visits throughout the period under discussion. 

Although it is possible that the Still Life of bottles, glasses and newspapers on a table recurs for purely formal reasons it is more likely that it conjures for Picasso as it does for the viewer the pleasant hours spent talking, reading and drinking with friends around the table, in any case it is clear that the images in the paintings and collages were drawn from the clutter of everyday life in Paris.

The Butte de Montmartre can still show us the objects that gave rise to their harmonies:  ready-made ties in haberdasheries, imitation marble and imitation wood in the bars, Absinth and Bass beer advertisements, soot and wallpaper in houses under demolition, bits of chalk from a game of hopscotch, tobacconists signs naively painted with two Gambier pipes tied in a sky blue ribbon. Roger Fry Cubisme p. 164.
The table in question however is a specific one that is shown in photographs of the studio. It is circular and has a "false rope" motif around the rim.  [Photo in Picasso Braque Cubist Years 242 Blvd Raspail 1973].
Slide  8.  Studio shot
The first and perhaps most striking thing we notice about this composition is that the image of the table top has become the whole of the visual object frame and all. The collage is contained within an oval which has become a sign for a circle seen side on. While the elliptical distortion of traditional perspective is the source of the sign it has been removed from the normal spatial relationship to the field thereby denying its mimetic role and establishing it as a coded sign.  Immediately Picasso has set up a set of oppositions which will be continued in all of the components of the collage.  This sign of a rotated circular plane is hung flat on the wall where it functions as an oval frame for a representation of a scene.  It is the support upon which its own allusion to space is acted out.  Picasso and Braque both used oval compositions on a number of occasions between 1910 and the time of this work but its significance here is an addition to its normal meaning.  Among the reasons normally given for the choice of this unconventional shape are that it provides a useful foil for the growing austerity of cubist forms and underlined the weightlessness suggested as forms clustered in the centre of the composition.  It was also a deliberate rejection of the rectangular framing device which is so supportive of the traditional perspectival structure. 
It upsets the regular relationship of the rectangular frame to the wall or for that matter the  book  and In this way it accentuates the relative independence of the picture from its environment.. (Jean Clay de l'impressionisme a 'Art Moderne Hachette Realites Paris)

The oval frame was in use at the time but mostly for cameo portraits and photographs and in that context they carried a certain air of fetishism of the image as object or relic.  In hindsight it is tempting to read the choice here as underlining the independent status of the collaged object and emphasising the very real flatness of the picture plane.  Indeed Clement Greenberg rather overstates this case in his review of the exhibition Collage. 
Once able to appreciate collage, or papier coll�s, as practiced by the cubist masters, one is in the position to understand what painting has been about since Manet first laid his shapes in flat.

Or Pierre Daix in The Cubist Years 1907-1916 Thames & Hudson p. 119.
Here we have the final stage in the evolution initiated by Manet's pictorial silence:  The elimination of the subject.  Yet this is not abstract painting.  It is true that it can be read as abstract painting; but it maintains very obvious connections with the concrete.  Only these connections are contradictory.

It is these contradictions that I wish to examine here. The oval is framed by an endless mariners rope made to order for Picasso by a sail maker.  Since the rope is the edge of the sign for the table it is easy to connect it to the studio table which has the rope motif round its rim.  Here Picasso is using the original model of a decorative conceit to stand in for its copy; a curious inversion of the illusionism of painting.  As a framing device it simultaneously suggests the boundaries of the picture and the boundaries of the surface on which the objects rest.  It can also be seen as an ironic parody of the traditional picture frame.

The endless rope has very strong associations with the ancient symbolism of the serpent swallowing its tail in the wheel of life, death and rebirth absence and presence.  Picasso's use of the rope frame secures "a reality effect" within its boundary reifying the object while seeming to deny the right of that reality to be part of the external would, now you see it now you don't.  This effect however is undermined because the frame is also standing for the subject depicted, a table edge.  It would be pure speculation to suggest that this element in the image is a conscious metaphor for the processes involved in cubist deconstruction and the rebirth of allegory through the onset of synthesis.  Nonetheless the devices Picasso has employed in this collage prefigure fundamental new opportunities not only for formal meaning in the construction of an autonomous painted surface but also for complex layering of meaning through association with real objects and the painted image.

An oval of rope inevitably carries with it other associations from everyday use which are not subordinated to an abstract function.  It could be the rope belt of a sailor, a coil of rope seen in perspective on a ships deck or the hangman's noose. It is in fact a real object.  The only real thing in the whole composition and retains its meaning as such.  It is interesting to note that the motif of a rope had been recurrent in Picasso's analytic cubist paintings since 1910.  It was one of the signs that he introduced along with fragments of musical instruments and letters.  This may have been simply a visual attachment to the table edge in the studio but it had clearly had some time to work on his imagination so its rebirth as real rope in this work particularly in the form of a frame which paradoxically excludes "the real" could not be seen as an arbitrary choice.

There is a further layer of representational regression here that is given by the source of the rope motif in the first place. In Paris at the time when Picasso made this work,  oil cloths were commonly held in place upon the tables by the addition of a ring of rope. The carved table motif may well have been inspired by this practice, the apparently authentic wooden table top representing the device for framing the artifice of a printed oilcloth simulation. In this case the rope has not made such a transition after all. It originated as a frame, only to pass through a series of displacements to arrive back in it�s original role. The stretching of the rope to bind the table top now takes on  a kinaesthetic association with the optical stretch that is required when the circular table is rotated to the elliptical. This additional twist in the tail places this particular work amongst the most playful and intellectually stimulating in the modern period. It can be compared to the convoluted gambits of Duchamp.

Another use of found materials which has even more complex functions within the work is a patch of oilcloth which has been pasted over the lower left quadrant of the composition.  This oilcloth is overprinted with an illusionistic image of chair caning.  Like artificial wood grain and marble effects it was a typical design feature of the time.  Oilcloth is still used extensively on French tables in cafes and in the home.  In 1912 the photographic illusionism on oilcloth would have carried with it an air of modernity.  It was among the many effects of mass reproduction of images.  Picasso is quoted in John Goldings Cubism:  A History of art analysis 1966 as having a distaste for photographic illusionism in painting and felt it better to substitute a portion of the object itself rather than an exact copy of it. This introduces the notion of metonymy which certainly recurs in later works of papier coll�.  If that were the case here we would be encouraged to think that the Still Life was actually set up on a caned chair and not a table at all but since it is oilcloth and since we have already seen the direct reference to the table moulding we may simply accept the proximity of the chair by association enhanced by the painting of a horizontal batten which cuts across the bottom of the caning but could be taken as the front edge of the chair. 
The oilcloth has been inserted as another manufactured object into the composition which projects itself in the absence of that which it mimics thereby transforming cubism into a simulacra a process whose function was precisely to end simulacra.    ( Jean Clay de l� impressionisme a Mus�e de l� art Moderne.)
The snake swallows its tail again.

Picasso has painted the rest of the composition so that it overlaps the oilcloth. This creates the impression that it extends over the whole surface as if it were the table top on which the still life is then painted.  He includes a cubist version of a glass which is painted in the fourth dimension (multiple viewpoints) yet it casts a naturalistic shadow across the supposed table top.  In the case of this shadow it is possible to view it as if from above.  It is not foreshortened.  If we were to take the caning literally that would need to be conceived as viewed from directly above also.  It is an interesting conceit then that this horizontal image is transferred to the wall where it is seen as an elliptical foreshortening an obvious contradiction in traditional terms but in a cubist reading of space and the pictorial surface it becomes a natural conjunction of signs.

The caning is integrated into the abstract composition by the series of rhythms that are set up which echo it.  Starting with the shadow of the glass and following through with other diagonals and horizontals across the picture plane.  In particular, note the three horizontals centre right and the diagonals which intersect them by implicating the illusionary cane into this cubist structure of surface, it reinforces the contradiction of its application to a perspectival plane while assuring it of a harmonic integration in the art object as an independent entity.

One of the painted elements which in later papier coll� works might have been replaced by a portion of the real thing is the newspaper.  This is represented by a fragment, ie. the three letters JOU.  These letters appear to float over a transparent field, there is no attempt to represent the paper visually we are however in no doubt that the metonymic Jou is indeed standing in here for a copy of Le Journal. As a fragment however it spells out Jou , to play, and perhaps just a suggestion of jouissance  or sexual pleasure. Given the extraordinary play of meanings within this work it can only be read as Picasso�s invitation to the viewer to enter the game and spot the multiple twists and turns that he introduces. Play will always be an aspect of his art but it tends to revert to more visual play after this amazing excursion into conceptual art.

Taken together these multiple readings produce an effect similar to the cinematic effects of montage and flashback.  He forces us into an awareness of the codes of representation which he then breaks one by one but he pushes the possibilities for representation further than had previously been possible in two dimensions.  This simple Still Life not only exists in the multi-dimensional space of analytic cubism, it figures the chair which notionally provides the source for the tablecloth which turns the image of the table 90 degrees from its viewing position.  In so doing it allows the various signs it employs to float free of the abstract harmony of the work setting up other chains of association as we have seen.

Picasso's use of rope and oilcloth makes a useful introduction to the concept of the readymade.  The following year, quite independently Duchamp made his first readymade, The Bicycle Wheel on a stool.  Duchamp began his questioning of art at a deeper level without the years of research and procedure which led to "Still Life with chair caning".  For Duchamp in the beginning the readymade was a gesture to challenge the accepted status of art as a social activity and the function of naming.  By contrast Picasso's work has entailed a careful unpicking of the assumptions that had governed representation.  In the process he has created new possibilities for complexity in the form and structure of images and revealed the allegorical potential of objects detached from their conventional frame of reference. A bottle label in a papier coll� work may only have a metonymic function but the oilcloth in the work under discussion sets the scene for social discourse in Paris of the pre war period, multiplies the possible meaning of one form as chair, table top, compositional device and the key to a paradoxical plane.  The rope introduces conceptual questions about the role of the frame in visual representation while parodying conventions, allegorising appearance and disappearance, standing in for a copy of a simulation of itself and still conveying all the associations of real rope.

Allegory has always had an important role in visual art not least in the symbolist works of the late 19th and early twentieth century.  Within the post renaissance period however it was only active through the play of images as pictorial illustration.  In this case the material processes are withheld as signifying practices, they are not intended to be conceived as a part of the meaning of the work only as means to an end.  Prior to the renaissance there were many examples of material and objects and the process of their working becoming central to the meaning of the work.  An example in pre-history is the use of a seals shape in the fashioning of a spearhead out of the bone of a seal for the hunting of seals.  A cycle of birth, death, consumption, and an awareness of an interconnectedness of things was woven into the technology, it�s materials and its purpose. 

To some extent the use of Lapiz Lazuli and gold leaf is a survival of such practices into medieval and even Renaissance work.  Here the symbolism is more abstract but in the case of gold relates to the physical properties of the element from which its alchemical and allegorical meanings flow.  In freeing two dimensional images from the unified narrative of represented space Picasso opened the way for many forms of signification among them the liberation of materials and objects as signifiers not simply as means of production of the signifier.  He also allowed the material to survive as referent even while it functions as signifier thus multiplying the opportunities for complex patterns of meaning which more effectively mimic the nature of experience.  The world is not sensed by the mind in discrete packages, one proposition at a time.  All experience is contaminated or enriched by a mass of often contradictory data.  Yet out of this apparent chaos we are able to order some kind of behaviour or response.  The potential Picasso released in his collage is for the viewer to actively negotiate the meaning embedded in an art work in a process of discrimination and complex cross association which is a direct extension of perception and cognition in life.

It is in this sense that Picasso is a realist.  Arguments about the term realism when applied to Picasso are commonly based on a sense of realism that would apply to Nouveau Realisme while arguments against his role as realist set up realism  as an opposition to symbolist or even formalist.  Within the sense of realism I want to suggest in this paper no such opposition exists and this becomes clear when looking at Still Life with Chair Caning 1912. It re-opens a passage between icon and index which had been commonplace before the ascendancy of mimetic representation in the 13th century. Prior to that, medieval representations shuttled freely between icon and index. The concept of trans-substantiation must have helped accommodate this conceptual problem.  Take for example an icon that physically contains a part of that which it represents, a piece of the saint�s skull or a fragment of the true cross in the icon�s frame or even in an image of the same cross. The icon itself is quite capable of making the transition to an object of direct veneration. To touch the image is to touch the thing itself. The process also allows bread to be flesh and wine to be blood. It is all a matter of the angle of approach you take or the method you use to read the signs. It is analogous to the dual life of the electron which is always both particle and wave. In Picasso�s still life he allows opposite or apparently irreconcilable modes to coexist. In doing this he was re-introducing a conceptual mode of painting .  which was to dominate art in the late 20th century.

William Rubin   Picasso and Braque Pioneering Cubism, MOMA Catalogue 1989

Christopher Green   Cubism and its enemies, Yale 1987

Jean Clay    De l�impressionisme a Mus�e d�Art Moderne, Hachette Realities Paris

Jean Paulhan   La peinture Cubiste Les Sources de l'Art Moderne, Denoel Paris 1970

Clement Greenberg  The Pasted Paper Revolution Art News Volume 57 No. 5

Alfred Barr    Cubism and Abstract Art, MOMA Catalogue 1936

John Golding   Picasso, Braque and Gris 1912-14

Elgar & Mailland   Picasso, Thames & Hudson

Linda Dalrymple
Henderson    The Fourth Dimension and non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton University 1983

Joseph Kockelmas  Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl) Doubleday Anchor 1967

Appollinaire on Art:  Essays and reviews 1902-1918, ed. by Leroy C. Breunig.  Da Capo.

John Berger   The moment of Cubism and other essays, Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Rosalind E. Krauss  The originality of the Avant-Garde and other modernist myths, MIT Press

Edward Fry    Cubism

R. Rosenblum   Cubism and 20th Century Art, Thames & Hudson

R. Rosenblum   Picasso and the Typography of Cubism

Harriet Janus and
Rudi Blesh    Collages, personalities, concepts - techniques -Chilton Book Co.
R. Penrose and
John Golding   Picasso and Surrealism, Ed. J. Golding

Pierre Daix and
J. Rosselet    Picasso, the cubist years 1907-1916, Thames & Hudson

Pierre Daix    Picasso catalogue Raisson�e

Pierre Daix    The chronological confusion in the Pasted Papers Revolution 1912-1914
(Gazette des Beaux Arts Vol. 82, December. 1973)

Clement Greenberg  The Collected Essays Vol. 2

The return of the index to western painting ,
Picasso�s  Still Life with Chair Caning, May 1912.
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Left side Slide 1.  Still Life With Chair Caning  May 1912
In this talk I will look closely at one particular and quite unique work by Pablo Picasso.  It is unique because it is the first example of art incorporating materials and objects from daily life in main stream art practice since antiquity.

This is of particular importance because it does not include such objects for decorative or purely formal purposes but for the meaning they convey intrinsically or by virtue of association. 

Developing Analytic Cubism
The work comes at the climax of a period of intensive investigation by Picasso and Braque between 1907 and 1912.  In this short time they developed Analytic Cubism which subsequently evolved into a less rigorous but very creative period of Synthetic Cubism.  I shall begin by describing this experimental process and reveal how Still Life with Chair Caning.  Stands at the critical point between these two movements.

Modern science and primitivism
There is an interesting mix of modern ideology and primitivism in Picasso and indeed with much painting of the first decades of the Century.  Expressionism and Cubism borrowed from the expressive repetoire of tribal art but Picasso�s realisation was that the art of Africa was conceptual rather than mimetic.  This was a very critical discovery which constituted a turning point in modern art. 

Art was Conceptual because the artist could present an image of the idea of a thing rather than imitate its literal appearance.  This allowed Picasso to combine a Platonic ideal with certain modern scientific ideas and to enhance the expressive potential of the work

Right side  succession of slides showing gradual fragmentation of the image.

2.  Picasso  Farmer�s Wife  1908
3. Picasso  Three Women 1907
4.  Picasso Woman with Pears 1909
5. Picasso Woman Seated in a Chair 1910
6. Braque  Female figure  1910
7. Picasso  Woman with a Mandolin 1910
8. Braque  glasses and Bottles 1912

A new realism
Picasso was searching for new and more complex ways to represent the experience of the material world and its structures.  He was not eliminating the image of objects or simplifying as a formally reductive process.  His project was aiming to achieve a more realistic form of representation than was possible in Renaissance Perspectival systems. 

This idea of realism was in part a response to the rapid and exhilarating changes in scientific theory and in politics across Europe in the first decade of the century.

Right side Slide 9.  Accordionist 1911

I will attempt to demonstrate how this search for a new way of depicting reality functions in analytic Cubism by reference to specific works. 

In 1911 Picasso and Braque were at Ceret.  The works they made then were an extraordinary culmination of the analytic phase Accordionist painted by Picasso that summer is at first sight one of the most abstracted works. 

Left side Slide 10.  Ambroise Vollard  1910

Compare this with The Head of Ambroise Vollard 1910.  Where the modification of the human form is little more than a stylistic response to Cezanne's sphere, cube, cylinder and cone

Accordionist by contrast gives equal value to the structures of the object (the Musician) and the spaces around it.  Our awareness of the figure against the field lies in the formation of a structural composition of elements within that field which create a towering triangular movement among the multiplicity of closely related angles and curves.

Figure Field integration and the new science

Blurring the distinction between figure and field in Cubism can be related to an interest in the continuity of events in nature reflecting contemporary knowledge of underlying structural properties revealed in early atomic physics. Einstein�s 1905 general theory of relativity was publicly discussed in 1908 even though it was not published till 1916..

These discoveries and speculations about the fourth dimension were being popularised in journals by figures such as Max Weber, Pawlowski and Metzinger.  These texts were being actively circulated in the creative milieu of Paris at the time.

It is clear that the discussion of multiple viewpoints in cubist painting complements such scientific and metaphysical speculations. 

Platonic ideology
These scientific ideas existed side by side with an interest in Platonic ideals and Neo-Platonic influence on early Modernist metaphysics. 

Plato's critique of visual representation in the Republic describes the shadow of a shadow that is representation.  These Cubist works attempt to reveal the fourth dimension and in doing so unravelling the perspectival system of the Renaissance in order to find a �more realistic� way of representing the world.

Signs with multiple readings
In "Accordionist" there is an extensive integration of structures in the figure and the field which causes the image to fragment to the point of abstraction and yet there are many elements that refer back to familiar objects.  These signs are not simple descriptions of parts of the object, they double as indicators of multiple moments in time as well as space.  In addition it is clear that some forms have double meanings and associative readings.

It is important to realise that in modern forms of realism these readings should not be reliant upon codified cultural symbols but should arise from everyday objects that can be recognised and associated with meanings within our normal experience.  This can be contrasted with the books of emblems used by Dutch 17th C painters  - for example the grape vine which signified domestic virtue and constancy.

The stool�s feet/base clef.
At the base of the Triangle (cone) that contains the figural information in the Accordionist, there are scroll forms which suggest the feet of a stool or some such piece of furniture. 

They also hold the composition in a purely formal sense which otherwise would become unstable suggesting vertical movement rather than the desired bellows effect of an accordion. 

These scrolls are also very reminiscent of base clefs in musical notation and not unlike the slits in a violin body. 

All of these musical elements recur in Picasso's Still Life painting from analytic to synthetic phases.  It is interesting to think of this in the context of Kandinsky�s attempt to make painting function like music.

In a traditional representation of the stool these feet might possibly be read as having these associations but only by very sophisticated viewers.  Freeing the form from it's literal descriptive role opens up the possibility of multiple significations and the free play of the signs.

The squeeze box effect
The repetition of step like forms both inside the cone and in the field extends the idea of the accordion action as well as mimicking its actual shape.  It is in devices such as these that Picasso invites us to recreate with him the experience of listening to and watching the accordionist. 

He has denied us a literal image of a moment captured as in a photograph.   but he has given us access to a sequence of events and a sense of occasion (see Bergson�s discussion of the cinematographic character of knowledge in Creative Evolution). 

The viewer then is asked to reconstruct these moments.  This change of emphasis from authorial omnipotence in optical illusions of reality to a collaboration of viewer and artist in the text is enormously important for the future of visual art.  This sense of active engagement by the viewer is at the heart of 20th century realism.

Abstraction??
In spite of Picasso's commitment to representation in the late analytical works it is none the less clear that they look a lot like abstract compositions of simple geometric shapes.  This apparent reduction is a result of obsessive unpicking of the representational conventions, not a leap into the convention of abstract design that characterised constructivism or rejection of nature by Mondrian. 

It was a gradual process of pushing the boundary as far as possible.  Just as the artists had reached the point of total abstraction and the image virtually disappeared into the field - visual symbols and motifs begin to appear in the work, introducing a totally different system of signification.

Motifs signs and letters

Right side  Slide 11 Picasso Pedestal Table with Wine glass, Cup and Mandolin 1911

Left side  Slide 12 Picasso Guitar Sheet Music and Glass 1912
It is evident in the paintings of late 1910 and throughout 1911 that signs such as scrolls, musical notation, decorative motifs and eventually stencilled letters and words begin to function separately in the compositions.  These works prepared the way for Braque's invention of papier coll� in Fruit Dish and Glass September 1912.

Right side Slide 13 Braque. Fruit Dish and Glass September 1912
The introduction of lettering suggesting words, modified the way the painting could be read.  Letters and symbols contributing to the creation of meaning in this way introduced a type of painting which allied intellectual communication with visual pleasure.  The next step was to include pasted textures and samples onto the surface.  This was an innovation by Braque in late 1912 and yet in May of that year Picasso had made his first true collage, Still Life with Chair Caning

Papier Coll� and Collage
There is a clear distinction between papier coll� which was Braque�s discovery and collage.

Left side  Slide 14.  Still Life with Chair Caning  May 1912

This still life is the first significant example of cubist collage.  Although Braque had been making paper sculptures in 1911 (now lost).  It is believed that these were uniform in medium and not an assemblage of heterogeneous materials.  It is this conjunction of separate and discrete elements that distinguishes collage from papier coll�.  In the latter the elements are harmonised in a unified pictorial surface. 

As we will see this independance of the applied objects as signifiers in Still Life with Chair Caning allows them to carry with them meanings and associations over and above their function in the compositional image.

Spatial Ambiguity
Another revolutionary aspect of the work is its materialisation of the spatial ambiguities developed in analytic cubism.  Although the collage has the high spirited feel of conceptual play, it marks a fundamental change in the understanding of painting as a separate realm, a change which was to have momentous and far reaching consequences for the future of visual art.  In a very short period of time 1907-1912 Picasso restructured the way in which marks on a surface are read in their relationship to that surface and to the object of representation. 

The composition, subject matter and ambience

Still Life with Chair Caning  May 1912,  depicts a glass and bottle on a table with a piece of fruit (lemon), serviette, a knife and a newspaper and according to R. Fry an oyster and a pipe. The table top is covered with a modern oil cloth simulation of chair caning.  The scene is set for a pleasant read in the cafe or even in the studio.  Picasso was notorious for reading little other than the works of friends and Le Journal, the newspaper represented here. (William Rubin, Picasso and Braque Pioneering Cubism, 1989).

On the other hand he was very enthusiastic about art talk and often wrote to Braque when they were apart bemoaning the lapse in their regular talks (Laurens archives).  Before he met Braque he was close with Appollinaire, Andre Salmon and Ardengo Soffici.  Prior to 1909 when Picasso was still in his tiny studio apartment in the Bateau-Lavoir, his friends had visited him in the studio to talk art.  Once he moved to Boulevard de Clichy he established a proper Salon and visits to the studio became rarer, although he and Braque continued to exchange visits throughout the period under discussion. 

Although it is possible that the Still Life of bottles, glasses and newspapers on a table recurs for purely formal reasons it is more likely that it conjures for Picasso as it does for the viewer the pleasant hours spent talking, reading and drinking with friends around the table, in any case it is clear that the images in the paintings and collages were drawn from the clutter of everyday life in Paris.

The Table
The table in question however is a specific one that is shown in photographs of the studio. It is circular and has a "false rope" motif around the rim.  [Photo in Picasso Braque Cubist Years 242 Blvd Raspail 1973].

Right Side  Slide  15. Studio shot
Right side  Slide  16. Studio Shot

The first and perhaps most striking thing we notice about this composition is that the image of the table top has become the whole of the visual object frame and all.  The collage is contained within an oval which has become a sign for a circle (table top) seen side on. 

The perspectival figure has, however, been removed from the normal spatial relationship to the field ( that is a pictorial space within which it would operate and relate to other objects) thereby denying its mimetic role and establishing it as a coded sign.  Immediately Picasso has set up a set of oppositions which will be continued in all of the components of the collage. 

The ellipse as a sign
This sign of a rotated circular plane is hung flat on the wall where it functions as an oval frame for a representation of a scene.  It is the support upon which its own allusion to space is acted out. 

Right hand side Slide 17 La Pointe de la Cit�  1911.
Picasso and Braque both used oval compositions on a number of occasions between 1910 and the time of this work but its significance here is an addition to its normal meaning.  Among the reasons normally given for the choice of this unconventional shape are that it provides a useful foil for the growing austerity of cubist forms and underlined the weightlessness suggested as forms clustered in the centre of the composition.  It was also a deliberate rejection of the rectangular framing device which is so supportive of the traditional perspectival structure. 
It upsets the regular relationship of the rectangular frame to the wall or for that matter the  book  and In this way it accentuates the relative independence of the picture from its environment..

The frame as a signifier
The oval frame was in use at the time for more conventional purposes but mostly for cameo portraits and photographs and in that context they carried a certain air of fetishism of the image as object or relic.  In hindsight it is tempting to read the choice here as underlining the independent status of the collaged object and emphasising the very real flatness of the picture plane across which it is laid.

Pierre Daix in The Cubist Years 1907-1916 Thames & Hudson p. 119.
Here we have the final stage in the evolution initiated by Manet's pictorial silence:  The elimination of the subject.  Yet this is not abstract painting.  It is true that it can be read as abstract painting; but it maintains very obvious connections with the concrete.  Only these connections are contradictory.

The rope and its different readings
It is these contradictions that I wish to examine here. The oval is framed by an endless mariners rope made to order for Picasso by a sail maker.  Since the rope is the edge of the sign for the table it is easy to connect it to the studio table which has the rope motif round its rim.  Here Picasso is using the original model of a decorative conceit to stand in for its copy; a curious inversion of the illusionism of painting.  As a framing device it simultaneously suggests the boundaries of the picture and the boundaries of the surface on which the objects rest.  It can also be seen as an ironic parody of the traditional picture frame.

The endless rope has very strong associations with the ancient symbolism of the serpent swallowing its tail in the wheel of life, death and rebirth absence and presence.  Picasso's use of the rope frame secures "a reality effect" within its boundary reifying the object while seeming to deny the right of that reality to be part of the external would, now you see it now you don't. 

This reality effect is however undermined because the frame is also standing for the subject depicted, a table edge.  It would be pure speculation to suggest that this element in the image is a conscious metaphor for the processes involved in cubist deconstruction and the rebirth of allegory through the onset of synthesis.  Nonetheless the devices Picasso has employed in this collage prefigure fundamental new opportunities not only for formal meaning in the construction of an autonomous painted surface but also for complex layering of meaning through association with real objects and the painted image.

An oval of rope inevitably carries with it other associations from everyday use which are not subordinated to an abstract function.  It could be the rope belt of a sailor, a coil of rope seen in perspective on a ships deck or the hangman's noose. It is in fact a real object.  The only real thing in the whole composition and retains its meaning as such.  It is interesting to note that the motif of a rope had been recurrent in Picasso's analytic cubist paintings since 1910.  It was one of the signs that he introduced along with fragments of musical instruments and letters.  This may have been simply a visual attachment to the table edge in the studio but it had clearly had some time to work on his imagination so its rebirth as real rope in this work particularly in the form of a frame which paradoxically excludes "the real" could not be seen as an arbitrary choice.

There is a further layer of representational regression here that is given by the source of the rope motif in the first place. In Paris at the time when Picasso made this work,  oil cloths were commonly held in place upon the tables by the addition of a ring of rope. The carved table motif may well have been inspired by this practice, the apparently authentic wooden table top representing the device for framing the artifice of a printed oilcloth simulation. In this case the rope has not made such a transition after all. It originated as a frame, only to pass through a series of displacements to arrive back in it�s original role. The stretching of the rope to bind the table top now takes on  a kinaesthetic association with the optical stretch that is required when the circular table is rotated to the elliptical. This additional twist in the tail places this particular work amongst the most playful and intellectually stimulating in the modern period. It can be compared to the convoluted gambits of Duchamp.

The oilcloth chair caning motif

Another use of found materials which has even more complex functions within the work is a patch of oilcloth which has been pasted over the lower left quadrant of the composition.  This oilcloth is overprinted with an illusionistic image of chair caning.  Like artificial wood grain and marble effects it was a typical design feature of the time.  Oilcloth is still used extensively on French tables in cafes and in the home.  In 1912 the photographic illusionism on oilcloth would have carried with it an air of modernity.

Picasso is quoted in John Goldings Cubism:  A History of art analysis 1966 as having a distaste for photographic illusionism in painting and felt it better to substitute a portion of the object itself rather than an exact copy of it. This introduces the notion of metonymy which certainly recurs in later works of papier coll�.  If that were the case here we would be encouraged to think that the Still Life was actually set up on a caned chair and not a table at all but since it is oilcloth and since we have already seen the direct reference to the table moulding we may simply accept the proximity of the chair by association enhanced by the painting of a horizontal batten which cuts across the bottom of the caning but could be taken as the front edge of the chair. 
To quote Jean Clay de l� impressionisme a Mus�e de l� art Moderne.)
The oilcloth has been inserted as another manufactured object into the composition which projects itself in the absence of that which it mimics thereby transforming cubism into a simulacra a process whose function was precisely to end simulacra.
The snake swallows its tail again.

Compositional responses to the oilcloth
Picasso has painted the rest of the composition so that it overlaps the oilcloth. This creates the impression that it extends over the whole surface as if it were the table top on which the still life is then painted.  He includes a cubist version of a glass which is painted in the fourth dimension (multiple viewpoints) yet it casts a naturalistic shadow across the supposed table top.  In the case of this shadow it is possible to view it as if from above.  It is not foreshortened.  If we were to take the caning literally that would need to be conceived as viewed from directly above also. 

It is an interesting conceit then that this horizontal image is transferred to the wall where it is seen as an elliptical foreshortening an obvious contradiction in traditional terms but in a cubist reading of space and the pictorial surface it becomes a natural conjunction of signs.

The caning is integrated into the abstract composition by the series of rhythms that are set up which echo it.  Starting with the shadow of the glass and following through with other diagonals and horizontals across the picture plane.  In particular, note the three horizontals centre right and the diagonals which intersect them by implicating the illusionary cane into this cubist structure of surface, it reinforces the contradiction of its application to a perspectival plane while assuring it of a harmonic integration in the art object as an independent entity.

Journal or Jouissance
One of the painted elements which in later papier coll� works might have been replaced by a portion of the real thing is the newspaper.  This is represented by a fragment, ie. the three letters JOU.  These letters appear to float over a transparent field, there is no attempt to represent the paper visually we are however in no doubt that the metonymic Jou is indeed standing in here for a copy of Le Journal. As a fragment however it spells out Jou , to play, and perhaps just a suggestion of jouissance  or sexual pleasure. Given the extraordinary play of meanings within this work it can only be read as Picasso�s invitation to the viewer to enter the game and spot the multiple twists and turns that he introduces. Play will always be an aspect of his art but it tends to revert to more visual play after this amazing excursion into conceptual art.

Breaking the codes of representation
Taken together these multiple readings produce an effect similar to the cinematic effects of montage and flashback.  He forces us into an awareness of the codes of representation which he then breaks one by one but he pushes the possibilities for representation further than had previously been possible in two dimensions.  This simple Still Life not only exists in the multi-dimensional space of analytic cubism, it figures the chair which notionally provides the source for the tablecloth which turns the image of the table 90 degrees from its viewing position.  In so doing it allows the various signs it employs to float free of the abstract harmony of the work setting up other chains of association as we have seen.

The Readymade
Picasso's use of rope and oilcloth makes a useful introduction to the concept of the readymade.  The following year, quite independently Duchamp made his first readymade, The Bicycle Wheel on a stool.  Duchamp began his questioning of art at a deeper level without the years of research and procedure which led to "Still Life with chair caning". 

For Duchamp in the beginning the readymade was a gesture to challenge the accepted status of art as a social activity and the function of naming.  By contrast Picasso's work has entailed a careful unpicking of the assumptions that had governed representation.  In the process he has created new possibilities for complexity in the form and structure of images and revealed the allegorical potential of objects detached from their conventional frame of reference. A bottle label in a papier coll� work may only have a metonymic function but the oilcloth in the work under discussion sets the scene for social discourse in Paris of the pre war period, multiplies the possible meaning of one form as chair, table top, compositional device and the key to a paradoxical plane.  The rope introduces conceptual questions about the role of the frame in visual representation while parodying conventions, allegorising appearance and disappearance, standing in for a copy of a simulation of itself and still conveying all the associations of real rope.

The index in the icon
Still Life with Chair Caning 1912. re-opens a passage between icon and index which had been commonplace before the ascendancy of mimetic representation in the 13th century. Prior to that, medieval representations shuttled freely between icon and index. The concept of trans-substantiation must have helped accommodate this conceptual problem.  Take for example an icon that physically contains a part of that which it represents, a piece of the saint�s skull or a fragment of the true cross in the icon�s frame or even in an image of the same cross. The icon itself is quite capable of making the transition to an object of direct veneration. To touch the image is to touch the thing itself. The process also allows bread to be flesh and wine to be blood and either of them to be God. 

It is all a matter of the angle of approach you take or the method you use to read the signs. It is analogous to the dual life of the electron which is always both particle and wave. In Picasso�s still life he allows opposite or apparently irreconcilable modes to coexist. In doing this he was re-introducing a conceptual mode of painting .  which was to dominate art in the late 20th century.

Johannes Vermeer 1632 to 1675, The Love Letter 1669/70

Slide 1.  The Love Letter  1669/70  Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

The Love Letter  is one of a series of paintings by Vermeer dealing with love and in particular the love letter being received or written by a well to do young woman.  This composition is noted as marking the beginning of his late stylistic development in which simplified figures are shown in intensified colour and crisply defined light.

I will trace the development of the theme of love and the related topics of music and domesticity and the letter in the work of Vermeer placing it in the context of Dutch 17th Century painting and finally return to The Love Letter in the light of this background.

Johannes Vermeer was painting The Love Letter in Delft when Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in 1669.  His life coincided with the golden century of Dutch art although very little is known about his connections with other artists and thinkers. 

At the close of the 16th C. William (the silent) of Orange was successful in expelling the Spanish from the Netherlands heralding in a new period of optimism and prosperity.  Holland was a seafaring nation with a strong interest in the expansion of trade which placed them in direct competition with their Spanish masters.  Once they gained their independance affluence quickly followed.  William had chosen Delft as his home base during the war with Spain and the city remained associated with the prestige of the house of Orange and with the heroic struggle.

Slide 2.  View of Delft  1660/61 Mauritshaus the Hague

Delft was a medieval walled city surrounded by water which was why it appealed to William as a fortress.  This scene shows the water gate to the city and the brightly lit spire behind it is the New Church in which William was buried.  The tomb became a major tourist attraction even in the 17th C. along with the old buildings and many canals that characterised the town.

The wealth of the city continued to grow through trade and local industries including the famous Delftware, tapestry, weaving and brewing.  This was periodically interrupted by the endemic European wars of the 17th C Holland managed to be at loggerheads with England and France at the same time.

Break off to Describe the changes to the perspective and composition introduce the camera obscura debate and mention the texture of the paint. ( Rembrandt)

Reynier Jansz and Digna Baltens had their son Johannes baptised in the New Church, 31/10/1632.  Reynier was a weaver but also registered as an art dealer with the St Lukes Guild of Delft.  He carried on his business from a pub and by 1641 he had leased an inn in a prime site on the market square of Delft. 

In 1652 Reynier died leaving his successful business to Johannes who may have carried on the trade although not much is known about his practice.  On 29th December 1653 he registered himself as an artist with the Guild.  Presumably therefore he had been training since the mid 1640s however no record of his study has so far come to light.

It is not known if he travelled to Italy or even to other cities in Holland but it is probable that he did because Delft was not a great art centre.  There are remarkably few documents which might have given us a clue to his private or professional life.  This is strange in a society which drafted contracts for everything.  Rembrandt was always writing letters, being taken to court signing loan forms and otherwise leaving a trail of evidence.  Vermeer, by contrast, left a virtual silence.

Two artists Leonard Bramer and Gerard ter Borch co-signed Vermeer�s wedding certificate but no further record of contact with them survives.  Arnold Bon wrote a poem after the death of Fabritius in the great gunpowder explosion in which he cites Vermeer as rising from the ashes!  However there is no record of their having been master and pupil or ever having met.

Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch ( Hogh)were both active in Delft in the 1650s and there are several paintings by Vermeer and de Hooch which are very close to each other in design.  Experts have varied in their attribution of precedence but today the quality of Vermeer�s paintings appears outstanding for its psychological quality and its timelessness even if the composition is copied.

In 1653 Vermeer married Catherina Bolnes whose mother Maria Thins was a devout catholic closely associated with the Jesuit society.  He converted to the Catholic faith before the marriage and seems to have embraced it fervently.  Maria had a very substantial collection of art including works from the Utrecht school which was more influenced by the Italians and Flemish art than anything from Delft.  Some of these paintings found their way into Vermeer�s  compositions such as Dirk Van Baburen� s The Procuress in Vermeer�s A lady seated at a Virginal, 1675.

Slide 3. A Lady Seated at a Virginal, 1675. National Gallery London

In spite of this poor material record It is not entirely true that Vermeer was overlooked as an artist until modern times.  He did have a select band of admiring collectors throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries   It is true however that he was not generally accepted as the star he is today till late last century. 

There could be a number of reasons for this including a formal and iconographic innovation in Vermeer�s work that may have been out of step with his peers.  This will become apparent as we look through some key examples of his paintings.

In his life time however he was obviously recognised at least in his home town of Delft.  We do know that in 1662 he was elected as one of the heads of St Lukes Guild and was re-elected for a second term two years later.  Huygens the famous art adviser sent several important overseas collectors to look at Vermeer�s paintings which it seems were never in great supply. 

In 1672 Vermeer was invited to the Hague as a leading expert in Italian painting.  This could also suggest that he had been travelling.  But he could have acquired this knowledge as a dealer.

Vermeer�s financial affairs were not a great success it seems because he borrowed considerable sums of money to get through the French war with Louis 14th who invaded in 1672 with disastrous consequences for this trading city and for this art dealer in particular.  In spite of this he does not seem to have taken on commissions or to have painted the popular portraits which kept Rembrandt out of the courts most of the time.  When he died in 1675 he left behind 10 children of school age and considerable debt which had to be recovered by the sale of his stock including a number of his own paintings yet once again the paper work is sparse. 

One interesting thing that is known is that his executor was Anthony Van Leeuwenhoek ( Laywenhook) the Microscopist from Delft.  It is likely that Anthony was a friend of Johannes who also had an interest in optics and science which Anthony may have helped him with.  It is considered likely that the Geographer and the Astronomer are both modelled on Leeuwenhoek.

Slide 4.  The Geographer  1668/69 Stadel, Frankfurt
Slide 5  The Astronomer   1668  Louvre Paris

Vermeer�s interest in optics and in particular the camera obscura has had an important effect on his painting.  Not as has sometimes been speculated as a means of determining the perspective and outlines of objects since, we will see how Vermeer constantly adjusted compositions on the canvas and changed the lighting and perspective for psychological effect.  However the particular luminosity of Camera Obscura images and certain optical effects were important.  In Woman with a red hat for example the halation of highlights is typical of the effect of an unfocused camera obscura image and is not visible to the naked eye.

Slide 6.  The Girl with a Red Hat 1665  National Gallery Washington.

Vermeer�s interest in philosophy and science including, cartography, Optics, astronomy, music is not only technical it relates to a metaphysical system concerned with measuring the harmony of the universe and other neoplatonic ideas which were current at the time.

This metaphysics in conjunction with the Jesuit influence of Maria Thins may shed some light on the direction of Vermeer�s paintings and may also explain some of the ways in which he diverged from Dutch Protestant attitudes.

His interest in perspective will be seen to be partly about the technical illusionism popular in Holland at the time but we will see how Vermeer modified these illusions in order to privilege psychological and iconographic content.  

Vermeer made no surviving studies or sketches which added to the camera obscura theory however there is now concrete evidence of his use of traditional perspective systems and of a development in the sophistication of these methods over the years.

Slide 7.  Perspective diagrams

In the earlier works the distance points were closer to the vanishing point making the viewing angle rather wide.  This led to distortion of diagonally placed tiles as for example in The Girl With a Wineglass 1659/60.  Brunswick.

Slide 8.  The Girl With a Wineglass  1659/60 Brunswick.

Many of the paintings reveal evidence of his using a pin at the vanishing point and making perspective lines with a chalk line.  Eg. The love letter.

Slide 9.  The Love Letter
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Dutch Genre in the mid- 1650s
In 1650 the rather dull artistic traditions of Delft were enlivened by a dynamic new style of architecture painting.  Gerard Houckgeest, (Hookjjaist) Emannuel de Witte Hendrick Van Vleit and Fabritius all arrived in town around 1650.  In particular this can be seen in the paintings of the Old and New Churches.

Slide 10.  Gerald Houckgeest Interior of The New Church at Delft 1651.

Note the unusual vantage points and strong use of chiaroscuro and the presence of figures to emphasise scale and highten the emotional effect of the scene.

History painting held the highest status of all subjects for the Dutch in the 17th C and we will see how Vermeer began his career by painting such subjects influenced by the Italian and Flemish works found in his mother in Law�s collection but he quickly adopted the current vogue for local genre scenes however he transported his metaphysical concerns from religious subjects into the vernacular.  This merger may lie at the heart of Vermeer�s difference.

Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch arrived in Delft in the mid 1650s and clearly contributed to the move towards local realist topics.  Hooch and Vermeer often shared very similar compositions and perspectival structures.

Slide 11.  Pieter de Hooch  A Courtyard with a Servant Cleaning Fish  1655

This is typical of many De Hooch paintings of everyday life.  The textures of the pavement and brickwork are meticulously rendered providing local colour for the presentation of the figures.

Slide 12.  The Little Street  1657/58 Rijksmuseum

This is not as direct a presentation of the little street as it might appear.  The whitewash is a device to highlight the figures while separating the two textures of paving and brick.  The houses are cut off at the edges confirming that it is a setting for the human action rather than an architectural painting.

The vines are an emblem of love, fidelity and domestic virtue.  Emblems are much in use in Dutch painting at the time and there were manuals to guide artists in their use although there was some slippage in the language used.  Vermeer often used them as we will see.

In this painting he changes from the broad sweep of the history painting to the detailed brushmarks typical of his later works.  The overall message of the picture would seem to be diligent domestic virtue.

This move by some artists to realist subjects was criticised by some as moving from the general to the particular and therefore loosing the timeless quality art should aspire to.  Gerard de Lairesse was particularly scathing of realism for this reason although three hundred years later Vermeer looks totally timeless.

Van Meegeren�s forgeries of Vermeer look quite wrong today although they seemed all right to contemporaries of the forger in the 1930s.  This implies that every age sees things in its own image anyway and timelessness resides in more abstract qualities such as the rendering of light compositional devices and an empathic vision.

A particular target for criticism was the fashion of showing the wealthy young things of the day at play.  The Flappers of 17th C. Delft were known as Juffers and their dandies as Jonkers.  Jan Sysmus derided Vermeer for portraying Jonkers and Juffers in all his paintings

Slide 13.  The Officer and Laughing Girl 1658  Frick
Slide 14  The Glass of Wine  1658  Berlin

Slide 15  Pieter de Hooch  The favourite Parrot  1673 for comparison

It is noteworthy that Vermeer almost always painted young people and most often women.  Out of the 36 odd paintings surviving 16 have Juffers with or without servants and only one painting, The Procuress  shows an older person.  This is a transitional painting between the style of the history paintings and the domestic scenes.

Slide 16.  The Procuress  1656  Dresden

Vermeer hardly ever painted dogs or children which most of his peers always fitted in.  This might be particularly surprising given that he had 10 children at the time of his death.
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The history paintings are interesting for the Catholic orientation they convey.

Slide 17.  St Praxedis 1655

This was copied almost exactly from Felice Fichereli known as Riposo the original being painted in Italy in 1640/45.  The main difference from the Italian painting is the addition of the crucifix which symbolically combines the blood of the martyr with that of Christ.  It is painted two years after his conversion and is a very Catholic subject to chose.  It also reinforces the belief that Vermeer had access to Italian painting

Technically it is interesting because Vermeer has used a technique not common in Holland.  The soft luminosity of the red dress comes from a glaze of Madder over lead white.  Vermeer often used thin glazes to achieve surprisingly strong colours throughout his career.

Slide 18.  Christ in The House of Martha and Mary 1655  Edinburgh

In this story Christ favours the contemplative Mary over the outraged worker Martha.  This could be thought of as epitomising the different world views of Catholic and Protestant in 17th C. Holland.
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Domestic harmony

Slide 19  The Milk Maid 1658/60 Rijksmuseum

This is a picture of moral authority.  Notice the low eye level which casts the figure as heroic.  The sturdy maid is diligently performing her duties to sustain the household.  The composition was simplified during painting by removing a basket of laundry and replacing it with the small foot warmer.  The foot warmer signified a lovers desire for constancy and devotion. Which conforms exactly with the mood that surrounds the maid herself.  It also makes room for us to see the little frieze of cupids which often appear in Vermeer�s paintings.

A wall map was also removed along with other hanging objects to create a calm and dignified frame for the maid.  The play of light on the wall which was cleared for the purpose is not entirely logical it has been modified to oppose the light falling on the maid to give her additional presence.  There is also a white line drawn all the way down her back which strengthens the image further while giving her luminosity.

Slide 20.  The Lace Maker 1669/70  Louvre

This is another scene of absorption in the task at hand

Slide 21  Woman Holding a Balance 1664  Washington

Note the Last Judgment on the wall behind, Judging and weighing the scales must relate to the search for a moderate life in hope of salvation.

Her body is placed to bind her with the judgment her head associated with the Mandorla of Christ and her hand at the corner of the painting.  The mirror suggests self contemplation and assessment rather than vanity.

She could almost be taken for the Virgin Mary.

The following two images relate to the toilet of the Juffer. 

Slide 22.  Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace  1664  Berlin

This is an extraordinary animated image Vermeer removed a map from the wall and some furnishings to allow this electric spark to flash between the eye of the girl and the mirror.  There is no possibility of reading this as a vanitas since the innocence and purity of the gaze is undeniable.  The mirror can be vanitas but it also exists as a symbol of truth the clear and true mirror or Veritas.

Slide 23.  Young Woman with a Water Pitcher  1664/65 Metropolitan,  Hand washing and purity?
_____________________________________________
Music and love

Two other themes which relate directly to The Love Letter  are Music and the Letter.  In Dutch painting there is a strong link between them since the letter in the hands of a Juffer may usually be presumed to be a love letter  and music is associated with hearts beating in harmony and with solace.  Vermeer usually gives us an additional clue sometimes in the painting on the wall behind the protagonists.

Slide 24.  A Lady at The Virginal with a Gentleman  1662/63 The Queen
Otherwise The music lesson but this is a Jonker rather than a music teacher.  Their poses have been changed see her head in the mirror , he also used to lean inwards.  This statuesque pose seems to connote stability in the relationship rather than a dynamic.

Also not the easel in the mirror identifying the place of the artist

It is interesting to note how Vermeer has changed the shadow from the window so that the top shadow is removed to create a clear light space and the other shadows are at a different angle to allow a compositional link with the virginal.

The Latin text on the lid reads, Music is the companion of joy balm of sorrow

The Bass viol was added after the rest was finished and probably signifies two instruments reverberating in harmony, Ie two hearts.

Slide 25.  A Lady Standing at a Virginal 1670/72 National, London

Note the Cupid painting and the skirting board.

Slide 26  The Guitar Player  1670 Kenwood

There was a copy of this which was taken as the original for many years.  It was modernised by the copyist by removing the curls which were considered too unfashionable in the years after Vermeer painted it.

Slide 27.  Woman With a Lute  1664 Metropolitan

The Love Letter

Slide 28.  Woman in Blue Reading a Letter  1662/64  Rijksmuseum

This is a beautiful luminous painting which evokes a powerful empathic response from the viewer.  The woman is totally absorbed in the letter her elbows drawn up in anticipation and her mouth slightly open.

Vermeer made several adjustments to the composition to highten the emotional effect.  The rod which holds the map runs directly behind the hands clutching the letter.  The edge of the map was extended some distance after the wall had been finished to maximise this tension.  The back of the coat was trimmed down from an earlier flare at the back and the trim of fur was removed. 

It is probable that this indicates a change of colour scheme also because the fur trimmed jacket is either dark blue or yellow.  The clothes and furnishings shown in the paintings are all mentioned in the list of his effects.  The softly luminous blue of the jacket is actually achieved with hardly any ultramarine pigment at all.  The coat is modelled in ochre and black and then very thinly glazed in blue. 

The same transparent blue glaze is also used to make the shadows.of the chair and the map.  Transparency here imitates the effect of light and shadow. 

The nails on the chair are another example of the technique.  They were first painted a pale yellow and then modelled with a transparent dark glaze to give the shadow.  They were finished off with a blob of yellow paint as a highlight.  This reverses Rembrandt�s  technique where the shadow is established in the underpainting and often remains untouched throughout the rest of the process.

Note that she casts no shadow at all thereby singling her out from the material space.  At the same time the three rectangular blocks of white wall are harmoniously proportioned and relate top the figure in such a way as to lock her into a formal harmony giving the scene a tranquil stability and timelessness.

Vermeer differs from his contemporaries whose chief aim was to deceive the eye into thinking this was reality. Vermeer does not deny the two dimensional surface of the painting and furthermore manipulates reality for psychological effect. 

Slide 29.  A Lady Writing 1665 Washington

The painting on the wall behind the lady is a still life of musical instruments.  This also signifies that the letter is a love letter.  Unlike most of the single women in these paintings this one looks out at the artist/viewer with a tender smile   It is possible that this is Catherina Bolnes Vermeer�s wife.

Slide 30  A Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window 1657 Dresden

Note the reflection in the window.  Also the horizon line used to coincide with a painting of Cupid which he later removed to give more emphasis to the girl and the play of light.

Slide 31.  A Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid 1670/72  Dublin

The painting on the wall is The Finding of Moses In 17th C. Holland this old testament story would have also been associated with the coming of Christ and the guidance of divine providence.  It may suggest that the letter being written affords God�s protection of the loved one.

Slide 32.  Mistress and Maid 1667/68 Frick

This painting has a different mood from the light filled paintings we have been looking at.  The contemplative atmosphere has been interrupted by an element of anxiety.  The dark background focuses our attention entirely onto the exchange between the two women.

Slide 33.  The Love Letter 1669/70 Rijksmuseum.

This painting was first recorded in 1892 when it was sold as part of the Messchert Van Vollenhoven collection in Amsterdam.  It was acquired through the Rembrandt society for a fictitious sum of 41,000 guilders but in fact this was a show bid - it had been secured some days before at 15,000.  It was subsequently presented to the Rijksmuseum 1893.

In 1971 it was stolen after being cut out of its frame and later restored to the museum with the edges missing and some damage to one corner.

This composition is unusual in the use of a doorway to frame the figure.  De Hooch made a very similar painting ( A couple with Parrot) about a year earlier and they probably communicated about the problems of perspective and framing in the composition.  De Hooch also used the broom and curtain to reinforce the separation of the viewer from the tableau where the action is played out.

It is possible that familiarity with camera obscura may also have played a part in the construction of the two spaces.  It would be normal for a camera obscura to be built in a darkened room and to focus onto a brightly lit scene.  It is clear however that the composition was not created using the camera since this is one painting in which the perspective lines have been shown to be derived from a pin and chalk line by x-ray and spectrographic testing.

The paint technique corresponds with Vermeer�s normal combination of imprimatura and glaze.  The maids dress for example is modelled in white with a little blue then glazed with ultramarine.  This ultramarine extends under the lute as shadow where there was originally a napkin on her lap.

The vanishing point for the composition falls in the viewer�s space just above the finial of the chair.  This enhances the sense of separation between rooms.  In the de Hooch the doorway seems to be a play on perspective and a witty reference to the viewer�s coming across a scene unobserved, rather like the keyhole realism of Degas, Bonnard and Vuillard in the 19th and 20th C..  As we may have come to expect with Vermeer, however, the device has become more Psychological. 

The human interaction which is the core of the composition takes place in a bright room but the viewer is positioned in the dark anteroom.  There are signs of disorder and neglect in the darkened space and signs of severe damp on the wall below the map on the left.  This kind of gloomy detail is most unusual with Vermeer. 

The contrast is all the more severe since the wall behind the Juffer and her maid reveals great affluence.  The wall is tooled gilt over leather and the marble and wood mantelpiece are far more extravagant than the normal interior represented by Vermeer.  This part of the picture is detailed with firm clarity using several layers of paint - the anteroom, however, is loosely sketched in with a few lines and washes such as the scarf which is thrown over the back of the chair.

As with Mistress and Maid at the Frick there is an element of anxiety in the exchange between the mistress and the maid who interrupts her music to bring the love letter.  Playing the cittern as we have seen is usually associated with harmonious love in Vermeer�s paintings.  The Juffer must have been musing on her lovers constancy when the unexpected letter arrives, what could be the source of her obvious anxiety?

The trace of tasks left incomplete and the disorder of the anteroom may be a reflection on the contrast between the material wealth and security of the mistress and the internal insecurity she seems to experience regarding her lover.  The two rooms may therefore be thought of as a psychological model for the inner and outer worlds experienced by an individual. 

The maid however has a reassuring smile for her mistress.  To confirm the good news Vermeer has given us additional emblems.  The painting behind her depicts a ship in calm seas signifying a lover searching for a safe harbour and the idyllic landscape painting above reinforces the positive message so everything comes out all right in the end.

YVES KLEIN,  ANISH KAPOOR & the void
TONY BOND  16/10/02

Klein�s life and work was a passionate adventure in search of the immaterial and yet he often presented himself as a preposterous clown or worse still as an attention getting avant-garde poseur.

This dichotomy is not so unusual in the history of the avant garde, serious political intentions were often presented in the form of grotesque and parodic performance for example in Futurism, Russian avant-garde and Dada.  Laughter can be cathartic and as such it can be used therapeutically however in Klein�s case he was also testing the world. I think he was deliberately challenging our faith in art.  After all belief has no power when it is directed to what we can know through logic and reason it only acquires the force of faith when it is attached to the impossible.

The artist as showman is a familiar figure in post war art, Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol being well understood in this light.  Klein completes the team.  Like these others Klein made his life into his art and like Beuys and Duchamp his seriousness was accompanied by a sense of the ridiculous.

SLIDE 1.  Yves at 1 year old
By a curious and very poignant coincidence in the year when Malevich wrote: 
�The painter is no longer bound to canvas, but can transfer his composition to space�.  YVES KLEIN was born in Nice. He was baptised a catholic and dedicated to St Rita patron saint of lost causes.  Klein�s epic attempt to conquer the space of the void was to become his life�s work and his lost cause.

He spent his youth being shuttled back and forth between his aunt in Nice and his parents in Paris. It was in Nice in 1947 that he met Claude Pascal and Armand Fernandez who become his lifelong friends and collaborators.  Arman introduced him to Judo, which he continued to practice avidly all his life and which sometimes paid his way as an artist. 

In 1948 he discovered Max Heindel�s La Cosmgonie des Rose Croix.   And he, Arman and Pascal took up Rosicrucianism.  In 1949  he planned a trip to Ireland with Arman and Pascal to learn riding, they were to be like the three musketeers in the end only he and Pascal went. 

On the way to Ireland Klein saved some money by working at Savages in London where he learned framing and more importantly gilding techniques.  Fred Williams had worked in this framing shop and following in Fred�s steps Ian Burn also earned a sparse living there in the mid sixties.   Burn was taken with Klein�s history in the workshop where he was still a lively topic of conversation.
 
SLIDE 2.  Ian Burn Reflex Blue 1967
When Burn painted his own monochromes in 1967 he inverted Klein�s infinite blue void by giving his paintings highly reflective surfaces thereby turning the void back into the here and now. 

While in London Klein claims in his journal to have put on an exhibition of small monochromes in his flat to show friends.
In 1950 he arrived in Ireland and worked at Jockey Hall but stable life  did not work out quite as he expected and in 1951 he moved on to Spain where he studied Judo with Arman.

While in Spain he made journal notes about the possibility of making monochromes accompanied by appropriate musical composition, and fountains of fire and water, something he was to achieve several years later.
Note that this was the year when Robert Rauschenberg made his first white paintings at Black Mountain College and Cage was inspired to compose his silent Symphony 4�.33��.   It is improbable that Klein knew of these activities however there is often a synchronicity operating in avant-garde circles.  Less generous critics suggest that some avant-garde artists have been busy rewriting their chronologies, Joseph Kosuth is infamous for backdating some of his early conceptual inventions.

SLIDE 3.  Judo
In 1952 Klein persuaded his Aunt Rose to finance him to study Judo in Japan and in 1953 he was awarded 4th Dan black belt from the Kodokan Institute Tokyo.  In 1954 he returned to France where his qualification is not recognised so he headed off with Arman to Madrid where he was able to teach at the Judo academy.  While there he claims to have exhibited his monochromes in the Judo school.

SLIDE 4.  Page from Yves Peintures / Haguenault Peintures
In 1955 Klein self-published Yves Peintures in Madrid.  This fabricated retrospective catalogue announced his official career as an artist.  It is the first substantiated body of work that exists outside of his journals but it purports to document several years of activity as a painter of monochromes.  The preface by �Pascal Claude� consists only of rows of black lines.  The reproductions are merely coloured paper tipped in; dimensions are without denominations of measurement.

The coloured paper that replaces photographs of paintings may suggest that these are fraudulent ie not reproductions but at the same time they may be thought of as small monochromes in their own right.   Klein also speculated that a monochrome could be any size that in a sense they were all one work that could exist in different manifestations and photographic reproduction in a book would be less authentic than a smaller version of the thing.

In 1956 he held his first public exhibition at Colette Allende
Gallery with a catalogue by Pierre Restany who was then an up and
coming curator/critic who attached his career to this rising star.

In 1957 he held shows in Milan and in D�sseldorf and formed  lasting associations with Lucio Fontana in Italy and with The Zero group in Germany.  Fontana was already established as the artist of space with his monochrome series Attese Spatiale.

When Klein was working in and around D�sseldorf Beuys was practicing in the area although he was still recuperating from a disabling nervous breakdown following his war experiences but he would have been exposed to Klein who made quite an impression at the time.

In 1958 Klein wrote a revolutionary manifesto against capital as the glue of society arguing instead for a culture of individualism bonded to the surface of France by the clear binder of quality.  Klein argues that everyone is an artist and a specializer of sensibility, without knowing it.  This has certain affinities with Beuy�s proposals delivered at Documenta some 22 years later.  Like Beuys Klein gave many public lectures and performances but this aspect of his life never took off in quite the same way as it did for Beuys.  Perhaps the photos of Ute Klophaus helped in his case, Klein�s archives lack the quality of reliquary that her work imparted to Beuys� actions.

These exhibitions in 1957-8 marked Klein�s final emergence as an artist in the public domain. Over the next seven years before his death in 1962 he evolved a number of parallel bodies of work which we can take one by one.   These are not arranged chronologically because Klein moved back and forth between his various inventions.

MONOCHROMES
He is probably best remembered for his monochrome series
SLIDE 5.  1961 Gold Monochrome
Klein used the gold quite often throughout his life including the portrait relief we have in our collection.   He experimented with rose, orange and red but it was the blue that really marked him out.
SLIDE 6.  1957 Blue Monochrome  
In order to preserve the vivid luminosity of the pigment Klein often avoided the use of any binder and went to great lengths to find a medium that would have the least dulling effect on the colour.  This blue that he named IKB or International Klein Blue is very similar colour to the chroma key that is used as a background for transposing images in video.  It literally disappears in the process.  It is also the colour C�zanne used around forms to give them a feeling of space.  Bachelard the French scientist come philosopher also wrote about blue as the colour of the spiritual void.  Quite simply blue is the colour of the sky and creates the sensation of deep space.

In 1960 Klein patented IKB - he also founded the Nouveau Realistes group with Pascale, Arman, Rotraud, Marshal Raysse and his other close friend Tinguely.

By pigmenting the world relief maps he metaphorically dissolved political boundaries bringing everything in under his immaterial sensibility.
SLIDE 7.  1961 Relief Maps
SLIDE 8.  1961 Globe 

He originally used sponges to apply the pigment but then realised this material object sucked up the stuff of his immaterialising blue and made a great many works in which sponges showed how matter could absorb the immaterial.
SLIDE 9.  Blue sponges
SLIDE 10. 1958/59  Gelsenkirchen  Theatre foyer
At this time his relationship with Rotraud whom he had met in Nice the year before came to a head.   We have a maquette for this project on loan from Rotraud.
SLIDE 11.  1958  Forest of sponges at Iris Clert

Klein had many other ideas for colouring the world
SLIDE  12.  Blue Obelisk at Concorde not actually realised in 1958
In May 1958 Klein writes to President Eisenhower announcing the termination of the French Government and the initiation of the Blue revolution.  He also proposes that in future all atomic explosions be coloured blue.

WORKING WITH FIRE

Bachelard Psychoanalysis of Fire
Fire contains both heaven and hell, it is rapid change it is the centre of alchemy and transformation - out of the crucible comes pure gold-out of the fire the phoenix rises.
Fire is one of the basic elements that form the world; it represents the elemental forces of nature. 

Some of these works are sculptures crafted in fire while others are the traces of its energy.

SLIDE 13.  Fire wall Krefeld 1961  photographed with Werner Ruhnau the architect with whom he devised an architecture of the Air.  The first Fire wall however was installed at Iris Clert 1957
SLIDE 14.  1961  Fire Wall at Krefeld
SLIDE 15.  1961  Fire Fountain at Krefeld

SLIDE 16.  Klein painting with fire 1961
SLIDE 17.  Fire painting
SLIDE 18.  Fire painting

SLIDE 19. Jannis Kounellis performance
SLIDE 20. Jannis Kounellis Untitled from our collection

Jannis Kounellis was influenced by Klein�s use of fire and in the work from our collection he uses it as a metaphor for the passage of life.  Fire brings about the transformation of matter into energy, a metaphor for the passage of the spirit through the body.   The bed frame is always associated with the body.  It is the place where we spend half of our lives, dream, make love and eventually hope to die in.  The house beam, fragments of material possessions and bundles made from old army blankets all suggest the passing of a lifetime.  The black square refers to the utopian absolute of Malevich�s suprematism.  This is a manifestation of the void, the still space from which creation emerged and to which it must eventually return.  Beyond the transcendental aspiration of the void, we find rows of soot marked shelves, a reminder of the flames that keep alive the memory of souls in Greek cemeteries.

ANTHROPOMETRY and Cosmogeny

The Cosmogenies were an attempt to capture the energy of nature by holding his canvas up to the elements driving with a blue canvas on the roof of the car or in this case holding the painting up to grass waving in the wind..
The first �living Paintbrush� works were made in 1958 but the term Anthropometry was coined by Pierre Restany in 1960.  Klein concentrated on the middle areas of the torso where he said the energy was located.

SLIDE 21. Cosmogeny 1961
SLIDE 22.  1960  Anthropometry
SLIDE 23.  1960  Anthropometry

SLIDE 24  Performing the Anthropometry at Galerie International d�Art Contemporain
While Klein was serious about capturing the energy of the body he was also keen to distance himself from any association with gestural expressionism.  Many of the Anthropometries were executed as performances intended for photographic documentation.  His photographers designed the stage so that the documentation would most effectively show the performers, an orchestra playing Klein�s Monotone Symphony and the audience dressed as for a formal theatrical event.  Klein himself wore a tuxedo and white gloves.  The venue he chose was the gallery where the Informel artist, Mathieu, exhibited.  Mathieu had given public displays of gestural expressionism inspired by the Namuth film of  Jackson Pollock in his studio.  Klein�s performance was a deliberate parody of Abstract Expressionism. 
SLIDE 25.  Audience at above

A later variation was the manipulation of the images after the performance.
SLIDE 26.  Touching up with Spray gun.
SLIDE 27. Altered Anthropometry

IMMATERIAL WORKS

SLIDE 28.  1961 Immaterial Room Haus Lange Krefeld
In 1957 at Collette Allendy�s house he created a room of immaterial sensibility for the first time.  This may have been prompted by the knowledge that the room in question had been the Psychoanalyst Dr Allendy�s consulting room (Collette�s father) and it was here that he had once treated Antonin Artaud.  Klein told Tinguely that he felt the presence of Artaud and determined that it was possible to create a space impregnated with the artist�s sensibility.

AT Iris Clert�s gallery he staged a further Immaterial Room as a part of his Birthday celebration exhibition April 28 1958
Klein told his friend Tinguely prior to making the Immaterial  Room that this was to be his move beyond the veil of blue that disguised the void and his entry into the real void beyond matter.   He told his Aunt with whom he had spent much of his childhood that he was paying a visit to saint Rita, the patron saint of hopeless causes and Klein�s personal patron.  He was reportedly anxious, because he felt that entry into the void was a dangerous adventure.  

Klein makes it clear in notes after 1957   that he is beginning to replace his earlier belief in the literal aspects of Max Heindel�s transcendence, with metaphor.  This was partly under the new influence of Gaston Bachelard whose works he first read in 1957.  On the other hand there is considerable evidence in his own writing and in the reports of his friends   to suggest that he was in fact a very superstitious man.  It is entirely possible that he was having a bet each way, something that many of us do when it comes to games of the psyche.

His performance of the Void, at Iris Clert�s gallery was the opposite of Mathieu�s  explosive demonstrations of the creative muse at work.  Klein locked himself up for two days not only to paint the room a pure white, but also to meditate.  His stated intention was to highlight the universal qualities of the spiritual void and the need for discipline on the part of its would be explorers.     This was to be contrasted with the self-indulgent ravings of abstract expressionism and its French parallel, L�Informel. 

Having prepared for a meditative, spiritual, experience of great potential significance and possible psychic danger,   he deliberately arranged for the whole event to become a massive birthday party complete with practical jokes.  He ensured a big crowd by sending out exclusive invitations to everyone and announcing that those without an invitation would be required to pay for their entry.  The invitations were posted with a special issue of YKB stamps, the smallest of Klein�s monochromes.  Through such manipulations of the postal service he showed how his art could have repercussions in the real world not just within the closed sanctum of the gallery. 

In the event a large crowd turned up causing long ques for the void room.  Blue cocktails were given out that included methylene blue, a biological stain that caused all the revellers to pee blue for the next two weeks. This was to coincide with the duration of the exhibition.   While the romantic McEvilley calls it a sacrament of the blue void , Nan Rosenthal notes the lengths to which Klein would go to get into people�s systems.�   This abuse of the public, for it was a joke at their expense, seems to contradict the idea of purity that is the core concept for the void and the experience the public was supposed to share.  It is typical however of his vacillation or shuttling between the utopian dreamer and the dystopian clown . 

McEvilley builds a picture of a sensitive romantic who protects himself from possible ridicule by his clowning.  He hides behind A Dada facade while truly believing in the sublime potential of his work.    It is a credible enough scenario if we think of Klein as a child/man who never really grows up.  Playing the clown to mask emotional vulnerability is a common enough strategy amongst children and adults.   

SLIDE 29.  Certificate of exchange for zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility.  1959
Klein first proposed immaterial sales in 1957 to Iris Clert who was concerned about selling nothing unless there were receipts.  Initially Klein resisted the idea of a concrete manifestation as worthless and as destroying the nature of the transaction, however he came up with a system for satisfying his own needs and those of a buyer.
SLIDES 30-31  The Transactions

SLIDE 32.  1961 Ex-Voto to St Rita at Cascia Italy..
Klein�s gift when he and Rotraud travelled to pray to St Rita in Italy for the success of his Krefeld exhibition.

DREAMS OF TRANSCENDING THE MATERIAL AND PREMONITIONS OF DEATH.

SLIDE 33.  1960  Here Lies Space  Ci Git L�Espace
SLIDE 34.  1960 Leap into the Void
SLIDE 35.  Dimanche
SLIDE 36.  1962 Portrait Relief PR3  Claude Pascal
SLIDE 37.  Making the reliefs
SLIDE 38.  Arman
SLIDE 39.  January 1962  Marries Rotraud
May 1962  Cannes Festival premier of Mondo Carne  May have brought on Yves first heart attack.  Refuses to take doctor�s advice.  Rotraud receives condolences from Joan Miro mistaking YVES for FRANZ  Yves takes this as a very bad omen.

June 6th 1962.  Fatal attack

ANISH KAPOOR
The Materialisation of the void
Anish Kapoor is an Indian artist living in London.  He grew up in the state of Kerala but went to school in Bombay.  His background incorporates Hindu, Jewish and European traditions.  While doing postgraduate work at Chelsea in England he created pigmented forms that suggested the cycle of birth and death.  He adapted the shapes of seeds and fruits and human generative organs while the bright colouring was applied by sprinkling raw pigment over them.  This quasi-ritual installation invoked tribal festivals and celebrations of harvest and fecundity in India. 

The use of the unfixed pigment was also a conscious homage to Yves Klein. 
SLIDES 41- 45  early pigmented forms from 1982-84.
The forms are often suggestive of organic growth sometimes of Sufi ritual dance and as often as not they are erotically charged.  Kapoor is nervous about being read as too Indian these days but there is no doubt that the Tantric tendency to express spiritual truths through metaphors of sexuality is a constant in Kapoor�s work.  The Gallery�s recent acquisition of  a portfolio of prints entitled Darkness from the womb reinforces this continuing tendency as did the drawings included in BODY in 1997
SLIDE 46 Untitled 1988 series
SLIDES 47-48 acquatints Darkness from the womb series 2001
   

SLIDES 49-50 Anish Kapoor Void Field 1990
In 1989 Kapoor discovered a new way to imagine the infinite.  He created a portal onto the void within blocks of incredibly dense and ancient Cumbrian sandstone, possibly the oldest sedimentary rock on earth.  At first glance the spots on top of these great stones seem like applied black velvet but on closer inspection they are revealed as holes in the rock.  There are no apparent sides to the holes and there is no visible end to the space.  He has created the experience of a black hole within matter by hollowing out the stone leaving only a thin shell at the top at the brink of the void.  The hollow has been lined with a dark blue pigment to give spatial depth to the darkness.

The American critic Thomas McEvilley wrote for the catalogue in 1990 when this work was displayed in Venice.  He played upon Kapoor's Indian background to characterise these black holes as the womb of Kali. 

SLIDE 51.  Untitled 1992
More recent variations on the theme make it apparent however that this void is like Black Square 1915 by the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich.
SLIDE 52. Kasmir Malevich Black Square 1915

While it could be seen as a revolutionary gesture or a negation of representation it was also a kind of event horizon a portal onto the infinite and as such a space for contemplation of the void.   The parallel between the �clean slate� of a revolutionary manifesto and the idea of the plenitude of the void is a striking one.  It should also be noted that Malevich paid obsessive attention to the facture of his paintings the black is layered and intimately touched by the artist this is not only a conceptual statement it is intended as an experiential one.  It is also The Gnostic void the divine dark light that precedes creation and to which all returns.

SLIDE 53. Anish Kapoor At Uriowe 1991
None the less the sexual metaphors persist and in 1991 Kapoor and I had a chance to discover that he was not first to invest this form with metaphorical significance.

In 1990 Kapoor came to Australia to install Void field at The Art Gallery of NSW.  He & I subsequently visited Uriowe near Broken Hill.  We arrived at dusk and camped out but when we woke in the morning we were astonished to discover the most amazing rock carvings and in particular a black hole carved by the desert winds producing an eerie natural parallel with Kapoor's own voids. 

Aboriginal artists had selected this natural effect for attention.  Radiating lines have been engraved round the hole seeming to suggest energy flowing from the void.  They have also created a notch in the otherwise circular aperture that to Western eyes suggests a clitoris.  This discovery was disconcerting for Kapoor who has been ambivalent about gendering his works. 
SLIDE 54. Aboriginal engravings at Uriowe
Other markings at Uriowe also appear to represent female genitalia but this reading may also be an Indo-European projection. 

SLIDE 55 &56. Two other voids from 1990 that make the sexual reference more explicit

SLIDE 57 &58.  Two examples of the dished voids that lead to the recent mirrored voids.

SLDE 59. Angel simply a rock painted blue in homage to Klein�s immaterial found objects.

SLIDE 60. Void at Palazzo Velasquez 1991

SLIDE 61 &62.  Building for a void Documanta 1992

SLIDE 63 & 64 Building for a void 1992

SLIDE 65 Turning the world inside out II 1995-6

SLIDE 66 Anish Kapoor Dish 2002