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Frascina, F. (1991) The Problem of Interpretation, Milton Keynes: Open University

The documentary, Picasso’s Collages 1912-14: The Problem of Interpretation, written and presented by Francis Frascina, follows a debate spanning numerous collages by Picasso, presenting the two polarising approaches against each other, offering different interpretations of the works shown. The collages shown include Violin [Figure 2], 1912, and Au Bon Marche [Figure 3], 1914. Arguing for the semiotic, Rosalind Krauss analyses the sign language in Picasso’s pasted papers and their formalist significations as free-floating signs, with particular focus on the playful use of individual words, phrases, and sentences. In her book, In the name of Picasso, Krauss argues that because Picasso was playing semiotic games with language in his pasted papers, they should be treated as non-referential signs. In this case his readers do not need to consider the entire articles from which these fragments were cut, let alone the newspapers in which they were located and the political and cultural context that the excerpts belong to and refer to. Critics of this methodology maintain that it offers a closed-minded presentation of the work. In her article The Con Artist produced for the New York Times, Sarah Boxer indicates that despite Krauss’s insistence that Picasso’s personal life should be ignored, Krauss still “Swallows the biographical poison” (Boxer, 1998: 1), referencing events in Picasso’s life and their impact on his work.

This methodology has been also chastised for its disregard of Picasso’s intellectualism and his engagement with the culturo-political conditions in which he lived.  Using this methodology to contextualize the selected collages historically, Patricia Leighten counters Krauss’s interpretations. This methodology entails identifying and researching the complete articles from which excerpts are taken and pasted into the collages and providing an in-depth study of the culturo-political context in which these works were made. While this approach clarifies the culturo-political context in which Picasso’s collages were produced and brings out a deeper meaning to the works, it has been criticised by Krauss for overcomplicating the works with too much detail, preventing the spectators from experiencing a more formalist aesthetic appreciation of the work. Krauss argues against a historically contextual study, believing it to remove the importance of the signified and signifiers present in a semiotic reading.

The narrator of this documentary, Frascina, presents a condensed summary and demonstration of these debates surrounding Picasso’s collages. He then introduces Krauss and invites her to present the audience with concise arguments for the semiotic, after which he introduces Leighten who provides valid arguments for the culturo-political contextual methodology. Whilst presenting the benefits of their own methodologies, Leighten and Krauss both present shortfalls in their assessments, as Krauss delves into the formalist context of Picasso’s Au Bon Marché, 1913 without taking into account the historical, cultural, and social significance of the aspect of the work she mentions. A negative aspect of Leighten’s method in this documentary is that she presumes that Picasso’s work was directly affected by his cultural politics and sexual relationships, a point which Krauss disagrees with, crediting Picasso as an artist capable of separating his work and his emotions. Although Krauss argues that Picasso’s stylistic changes and trends were not affected by his personal affairs, this statement relies on a large amount of coincidence.

While the advantages and disadvantages of both methodologies are revealed, Leighten’s approach appears more appropriate for interpreting artwork, especially the pasted papers. Leighten focuses on the need for contextualisation of the cultural and political conditions in which the works were created, considering the artist’s biographical information as well. The biographical information Leighten studies include not only the events of Picasso’s life, but also his political alignments, studying Picasso in his roles as painter, human, and anarcho-communist. In The Problem of Interpretation, Leighten includes an extract from an interview in 1944 with Pol Gaillard in which Picasso justifies his allegiance with the Parti Cummuniste Francais by stating that his joining of the PCF was “the logical outcome of my whole life, my whole work.” (Leighten, 1989: 97). Whilst Picasso speaks in the 1940’s, he refers to his entire body of work, significantly asserting that he has been highly political his whole life. A contextual approach does not necessarily prescribe qualities to an artist or their work, but rather includes every available piece of historical information in its interpretation of the work, including such highly significant artist’s statements, to offer a holistic understanding of the themes and signs presented.

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For a recent job interview, I was asked to perform a 2 minute prep time information pitch on this artwork: Fraises Fraiches by Gerdine Duijsens. This is an expanded version of what I was going for.

This large, bright canvas sits at 100cm x 100cm, and while it may be inherently comical as something of a lampoon and caricature, it conveys a thinly veiled quasi-Marxist Orwell’s Animal farm ‘Eat the Rich’ message. The large woman is emblematic of decadence, and the scene shown highlights the issues with the frivolousness of class hierarchy. The thick, carefully applied acrylic seems as messy and delirious as the woman herself in a calculated display of an individual presenting a perfect storm of greed, gluttony, lust, and pride. I’m glad Duijsens found a canvas large enough to fit the woman in.

Duijsens frequently exhibits her work in Amsterdam in a range of galleries that I am unfortunately unable to pronounce accurately, and has been in a successful partnership with Byard for a few years now. As an established artist who is gaining momentum with every work and every show, purchasing a Duijsens is essentially an investment, with this particular canvas only becoming more valuable as time goes on.

Also, as an Amsterdam artist, I think there’s something anthropological in here about the city’s tourism and the tendency for visitors to misjudge their capacity for intoxicants…

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As part of a recent job interview, I was required to deliver a sales pitch for an artwork. I was allocated Amber Bay by Paul Corfield, and this is what I got from the artwork.

Nostalgia. That’s the feeling this painting radiates. The muted foreground colours contrast and compliment the light work as the sun sets on an aged, distant fond memory of a country landscape. Corfield shares this blurred but treasured memory with the viewer and conveys this sense of whimsical optimism as he invites us to appreciate the pastoral elements of the Dorset landscape, but also the moments of tranquil joy that we all have in our pasts, however faint or small they might be. This little glimpse into Corfield’s reflections on the location that meant so much to him invite us to think about our own small, personal instances like this – a moment in your life that you can look back on happily. Even if you don’t remember all the exact details, like Corfield’s embellishment of the location shown, the feeling of nostalgia can do more for the viewer than any accuracy. 

You might not think of Corfield as a self-taught artist considering how well composed the painting is just on a technical level – with a good sense of space around each key element, and background details to add depth, the eye is drawn in a clear direction before being encouraged to explore, much like Corfield would have done as a youth in this setting. The winding path takes your eyes right to the red door of this cosy little cottage, and from that centre, you might want to visit the golden forest in the background, stop by the sheep in the field on the way, spend some time watching clouds roll away, see the sailboat drifting on the calm ocean, all the while close enough to this cosy little sanctuary in the dead centre of the canvas. As for brightness, this is a contrasted work, giving it the general advantage of fitting in with pretty much any surrounding. In a greyscale neutral coloured room, it’ll draw just the right amount of attention without too many loud colours, but in a busy colourful room, it’s a pleasant scene to draw you in. The sense of nostalgia that this painting offers is exactly the kind that will be remembered for the rest of your life. This is the kind of painting that kids will remember when they’re all grown up, giving them an anchor to their memories. This is Corfield’s goal, and he has succeeded.

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Drawing inspiration from your surroundings is a challenge when you find your surroundings stifling or mundane or aesthetically uninteresting. This is why it can be a useful exercise to search for the beauty in the non-beautiful, significance in the insignificant, or for meaning in the meaningless. 

For example, I work in an office. I spend my day looking at the computer, and when emails come in, I complete the tasks requested. I find this work uninteresting, and the office itself to be a bland habitat. Or that was until I looked at the carpet. Of course, I’d SEEN the carpet before, many times, but it wasn’t until I looked, and I mean really studied the carpet that I realised just how many hundreds of tiny aspects of it came together into an almost perfectly balanced colourscape. The range of greys and interjections of colour reminded me so strongly of my actual experience in the location that I found it to be one of the most appropriate floorings I have ever encountered. To me, the colourful stripes shout out through the rows of grey, capturing my attention and making me appreciate that without the range of dull and arguably uninteresting colours, the purple, yellow, red carpets would not be anywhere near as beautiful as if they were the sole colour. 

That’s why I’ve started to use the office supplies at my disposal to create things I enjoy, like this series of blue lines, as a sign of appreciation to the carpet at the office. 

Thanks, carpet.

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Abstract Armillary Assembly, 2019

This free standing sculpture is composed of 11 facets designed to be interchangeable. Presented in a similar manner to an IKEA flat pack table, it would ideally be displayed un-assembled to be fitted together by a viewer in their preferred configuration. The act of attaching and balancing these facets together makes for a tactile and interactive experience allowing the viewer or participant to make what they want out of what's given to them.

In theory, and I guess in practise, the work can be added to and increase in size exponentially, allowing several participants to contribute to a large abstract but loosely organised structure with a part of each person's individual direction buried within it. Am exercise that will hopefully have an optimistic impact on the viewers reflections on their place in the wider universe.

At least, ideally.

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Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Umberto Boccioni, 1913

 This bronze sculpture is a quintessential and emblematic Futurist piece, displaying some of the key aspects of the Italian movement. These aspects include fragmented form, the presentation of movement and dynamism in a static body, and a healthy dose of inspiration from Cubist works. The relationship between Cubism and Futurism isn’t exactly symbiotic, but more of an adoption of the Cubist aesthetic by the Futurists as a vehicle to convey a different message. This famous bronze cast, with it’s almost winged protrusions depicts the invisible and almost intangible air flow surrounding an advancing football player. While the Cubists painted everyday scenes with a politically charged agenda, the Futurists display the more industrial, scientific, and ‘new’ things emerging after the turn of the century.

Unique Forms is strikingly reminiscent of the Victory of the Samothrace, or Nike of Samothrace, a Hellenistic sculpture from ancient Greece. The Nike is a tremendously famous work, to the point that small reproductions can be purchased in souvenir shops in Cyprus. This visual connection is complemented by a contextual one, as Marinetti, the founder and loudest member of the Futurist movement declared in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909 that a ‘Speeding car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’, emphasising the Futurist attitude of disregarding the past as much as possible. The Unique Forms could, with this context, be seen as a reiteration of this sentiment, attempting to update the old, and develop an improved and more appropriate to the time rendition of the form.

The paradox seen within this sculpture revels itself in the large, square base supports of the sculpture, rooting it to the ground and weighing it down, halting the implication of forward movement, and instead providing a message of struggle and stagnation, which sounds like a Futurist’s worst nightmare. Two possible readings of this part of the sculpture are that a) the supports are included to display the weight of historical context that the Futurist is attempting to escape, being held back by the past, or b) that the supports are harbingers of the downfall of Futurism in the fact that history and context are unavoidable. In an attempting to remove themselves from history, and construct their own identity based around invention and development, the Futurist can sometimes swing and miss, encouraging comparison between their work, and the work before them. I doubt the Futurists would enjoy the fact that they are studied.

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The significance of context within Cubist collage can also be seen in Georges Braque’s La Mandoline, completed in 1914, at the height of the Synthetic period. This papier collé employs a number of techniques characteristic of Synthetic Cubism, including trompe l’oeil and the inclusion of musical instruments and newspaper articles. Some noticeable elements in the piece are the use of corrugated card to simulate the strings of the instrument, as well as the shading to represent the curvature of the instrument’s body. Using these techniques, Braque manages to capture some of the key defining characteristics of a mandolin, and display them in a recognisable manner, allowing the audience to understand the tactile aspects of the object that Braque highlights.

This artwork holds significant historical and political context, as the themes presented can be traced back to the country’s humiliating defeat during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which affected France for many years following. When Darwinism became a wide-spread discovery to the French people, there was a concern that just as in nature, the more powerful or fittest nations would outlast the supposed weaker ones. This caused a degree of paranoia in Jacques Bertillon, who was concerned that without a strong, plentiful, stable French population, the culture and nation of France would fall behind the other nations. Bertillon contracted a large number of doctors across the country to perform surveys on its married couples and their performance of acts that may be seen to weaken the family, including extramarital sex, or even a lack of intermarital sex. Bertillon discovered that many of these couples, across a range of social classes, were engaging in an act of mutual self-stimulation to retain a cost-effective number of children. This may have been beneficial to the family’s goals of providing adequate and comfortable support to their own but worked against Bertillon’s visions of a large and prosperous French people. The act of mutual self-stimulation was referred to as ‘hygiene du mariage’, and it is this very phrase that is featured in Braque’s papier collé La Mandoline in the form of an advertisement. Braque’s comments on the bio-political debate of whether it is better to have a larger population, or a more stable population can be inferred from this collage.

By including the phrase ‘hygiene du mariage’, Braque expresses solidarity with the sexual freedom couples expressed with these acts. Fay Brauer, in her Pasted Paper Devolution, identifies the phallic nature of the corrugated card in the collage, linking the work and Braque closer to the side of sexual freedom, over Bertillon’s encouragement of procreation. Brauer also draws a similarity between the sound hole of the instrument, which Braque has obscured and re-shaped with the corrugated card, and a common form of contraception in production at the time of the collage’s production. The cervical cap was an item that many would have familiarity with, as “large coloured lithographic posters were widely circulated in working-class arrondisments” (Brauer, 2017: 7), featuring diagrams of the contraceptive’s use.

Brauer, F. (2017) The Pasted Paper Devolution, Art Bulletin, In Press

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Study:

Little Harbour in Normandy, Georges Braque, 1909

 Painted in 1909 by Cubist pioneer Georges Braque, this work, also known as Le Port, depicts a number of boats resting in a harbour in Normandy, France. Regarded as the first realisation of Braque's Cubist style, the objects in the scene are fractured and layered over one another. The painting features a wider range of colours than a standard Cubist style, which Braque would go on to refine. This varied palette helps define the aspects of the painting and distinguish where the objects are. The pastel colours help enforce the idea that the scene is painted from Braque's memory of a trip to Normandy, shown through a hazy filter as the painter stitches together aspects of the scene from memory. The scene is of a few boats in a harbour with lighthouses framing the small cove. The sails blend in with the land making it difficult to determine exactly how many ships are shown - possibly due to the fact Braque cannot remember precisely how many ships were in the harbour at the moment he is recreating. The dark blues in the sky and choppy waters suggest the ships are seeking solace from a brewing storm, searching for a safer, calmer place. This could be interpreted as Braque revisiting the location through memory in search of a safe location, escaping hardship in this harbour. The inclusion of lighthouses enforces this concept. They symbolise safety and security, literal beacons of light to signify asylum and safety from stormy seas, as well as the end of a long journey. The scene depicted is consistent with Cubist trends of portraying common everyday items or scenes, and fragmenting them in the Cubist aesthetic. The reason for using recognisable images is not to alienate the audience once the fragmentation is created. The lighthouses are instantly recognisable as lighthouses, but blend into the other aspects of the scene, in the Cubist style. Braque creates a distorted sense of space in the picture by creating the objects out of small fragmented shapes, bringing forward elements of each object to the front of the painting and simultaneously sending fragments to the background through shading. The simplicity of the images adds to the effect of viewing the scene through a rose-tinted lens, making the scene less dense and more welcoming than it may have originally been.

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Nautilus Gears, 2019

These hand crafted mechanisms took a long time to get finished. The aim was to create a pair of gears that interlocked in an unconventional way, and present them in a style that highlights the material they are composed of, as well as the specifics of the mechanism. As an interactive piece, the viewer is encouraged to interact with the work in a physical and tangible sense, experiencing the tactile, audible, and visual aspects of the gear in motion. The gears are made of standard birch ply which has been stained with cheap burnt sienna acrylic and coffee that has been allowed to dry, and then has been scoured to allow some of the original colour to come through. A very thin layer of varnish has also been added to help bring the grain out. The central circles serve to break up the darker brown, as well as functioning as bearings to help the smooth rotation of the gears.

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Study:

Disks of Newton (Fugue in two colours), Frantisek Kupka, 1912

 In this abstract Orphist painting, Kupka composes the colours in a harmonic method, referring in the title to the musical technique of Fugue, in which a phrase is introduced and then replicated by other parts of the composition. Kupka captures and displays the Orphist method and belief that colour is able to be orchestrated on a canvas in the same way that individual musical notes can be orchestrated by a composer and formed into a melody. This method of composing ‘pure’ colour demonstrates the combination and fusion of the schools of Music and Art into one, offering insight into both fields of study. This painting also represents Newton’s discovery that white light is in fact composed of seven colours. Kupka paints the entire spectrum in a manner similar to a modern camera’s lens flare, allowing each colour to play its part in composing the picture. Referring in the title to ‘Disks’, Kupka draws inspiration from Newton’s method of proving his theory, by painting what was essentially a colour wheel, and spinning it rapidly to create an impression of white out of all the colours.

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Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass, Picasso, 1912

Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass, 1912 is an example of Picasso’s most contextually rich collages, including several elements that are characteristic of Cubist work, particularly papier collé. These elements include the representation of recognisable everyday objects distorted to present and highlight different aspects of the object. In this instance, the body of the guitar is represented with a painted pattern imitating wood. Anne Umland, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art describes this is as Picasso employing “a decorator’s technique to create the illusion of expensive wood panelling” (Umland, MOMA), in order to once more trick the audience and distort their perception. Picasso also uses a solid white circle of paper in place of the absence of space of the instrument’s sound hole, further distorting the collage’s depiction of space. The Sheet music featured in the piece is a song by Marcel Legay, with lyrics by Pierre Ronsard, a song about “fleeting love, passion, and death” (Umland, MOMA), published in 1892 which was popular across all of France, especially Paris. By including this piece of music, Picasso’s collage affects another of the viewer’s senses, evoking in them not only a visual scene, but a much more involved and atmospheric scene of the sounds, sights, and experiences of sitting in a café, listening to Legay’s song, and reading the newspaper. The Newspaper featured in the bottom left of the piece is an excerpt from Le Jouornal’s report on the outbreak of the First Balkan War, a campaign that Picasso refers to often in his work. It seems that Le Journal was the subject of significant criticism from Picasso, as it can be frequently seen fragmented in many of his collages. Being one of Paris’s leading newspapers at the time, it was a plentiful and recognisable source for Picasso to use to convey messages to the audience. In Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass, Picasso takes the title of the paper and removes a section of it, reconceptualising the meanings of the words and transforming ‘Le Journal’ into ‘Le Jou’, or ‘The Game’. This game Picasso refers to has been interpreted by as the one played by international munitions and arms companies that benefit from the outbreak of war, profiting at the expense of working class life. This political jesting and commentary is a prevalent theme in many Cubist collages including Glass and Bottle of Suze, a work which includes the same wallpaper, connecting the two collages aesthetically and thematically. Other interpretations of ‘The Game’ Picasso presents are that it is the careful yet playful nature in which Picasso introduces papier collé into his work.

Focussing on the newspaper featured in the piece, the article intends to shock the audience with an explosive statement of ‘La Bataille S’est Engage!’, or ‘The Battle Has Begun!’. As something of a sensationalist paper, the Journal also profits off of the loss of life by reporting on it, albeit in a less sinister manner. The reference to the battle could be taken in a literal sense, about the Balkan War, but another possible reading is that the battle refers to Picasso’s own personal battle with the processes of papier collé, and the struggles of integrating the methods into his own body of work and the Cubist movement. Bringing these themes together, the audience’s reading of the collage becomes much deeper. The piece becomes a snapshot of a moment and place in Picasso’s life as he conjures “not only an image, but practically the sound, the atmosphere of a café scene.” (Umland, MOMA Audio), listening to Legay with a glass of wine, reading the paper. The piece also gives us an insight into Picasso’s interests, or at least cultural awareness in his depiction of the sheet music and newspaper. Picasso carefully chose the piece of music and featured article to persuade the audience to consider the multiple meanings of these elements. Picasso enjoyed the multiple interpretations of his work, particularly the use of newspaper and the ways in which he would transform the newspaper from its “habitual meaning into another meaning” (Life with Picasso, P70), experimenting with the wordplay and verbal aspects of the individual words. It is intriguingly noted by Jeffrey Weiss in his book The Popular Culture of Modern Art that “Picasso’s French was little more than functional at the time” (Weiss, p11) of the piece’s production, yet the puns Picasso makes are predominantly in the French language. This could be an explanation for the artists frequent use of the Journal/Jou connection, as he gradually discovered more ways of manipulating the French language.

http://www.marcel-legay.com/marcel-pablo-pierre-les-autres/ (In French)

Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1994

Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso, Virago Press, London, 1990

https://www.moma.org/multimedia/audio/252/2474

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Study:

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla, 1912

 The Independent newspaper draws an interesting comparison between this painting and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, explaining that whilst the Vitruvian Man has four legs and four arms, he isn’t an abstract entity, but a diagram of the potential movements of the figure. It is accurate and true to life, yet still not an exact representation of the physical form. In this vein, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash is also a diagram, presenting the potential movements of the walker and the dog, layered on top of one another. This painting, as with numerous other Futurist works draws inspiration from scientific study, notably the work of Eadweard Muybridge and his work on Chrono-photography, used to capture and show the movements of animals in nature for scientific study. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash could be seen as a number of separate images of the dog being walked layered and placed over each other. The cartoonish, playful painting is also, in a way just as scientific and significant as Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, carefully measured and mathematically focused. I heard that Balla painted this intending it to be something of a pun, and I guess the jokes on me for spending ages staring at it.

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This freestanding, brightly coloured sculpture is built from 21 individually hand cut wooden discs, tightly slotted together to allow for security as well as malleability. Standing around 1 meter tall, the piece is an ode to the Orphic work of Sonia Delaunay. Orphist art treated colour in much the same way as individual musical notes, and sought to compose colourful abstract forms into ‘chords’, and from that, compositions. This sculpture is intended to be taken apart and reconfigured to allow the viewer to form their own ‘chord’ progression, experimenting with colour and form in a tangible three dimensional plane using the provided facets.

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Study:

Mercury Passing Before the Sun, Giacomo Balla, 1914

In Giacomo Balla's Mercury Passing before the Sun as Seen through a Telescope, a combination of futurist and cubist techniques are used to convey multiple perspectives of a single event. By overlapping interpretations of viewing Mercury passing the Sun through a smoke-glass telescope and the naked eye, Balla successfully displays spatial movement, as well as the sensation of experiencing the event in the same way he did. Balla was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, studying celestial movement and portraying Mercury passing the Sun as accurately and scientifically as a Futurist style could allow. Balla developed a number of versions of this piece, sketching out the arrangement of the shapes and lines and their relationships throughout at least twelve works, demonstrating great commitment to the final piece, and his great interest in cosmogony. The version considered Balla’s definitive piece is currently held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, a city Balla exhibited in many times in his career. Mercury Passing before the Sun as Seen through a Telescope was originally painted using a strong purple-red colour, but it has unfortunately faded in colour over time to a more peach tone. Employing some Cubist techniques, Balla is able to paint Mercury’s entire spatial journey across the sun in one image, overlapping a number of perspectives. Using a rather aggressive colour scheme, filling the painting with a now faded deep red, Balla conveys the heat of the sun, as well as the strain on the eyes when looking at it, even when through a smoke glass. Balla also paints light blue triangles at calculated intervals, representative of the clear sky, and offering the viewer a less aggressive area to the picture. A dark helix appears to emerge from the orange sun, spiralling through the picture to possibly suggest the rotation of planets, as well as the rays of the sun. Whilst not the leading focus, or most captivating element of the painting, a white star shape stretches from the top left of the work, extending points to the other corners. This is yet another depiction of the sun itself in the painting, complimenting and merging with the view of the sun through the telescope. The green elements suggest a conical shape emerging, heading upward to the representation of Mercury, to suggest either the telescope itself, or its effects bordering the view through it. It is not a stretch to interpret the varied triangular colour patches of greens and blues as representations of the effects of retinal overstimulation, which leads to imprints playing in the field of vision. Looking directly into the sun would cause such an effect, which would then appear to overlap Balla’s vision, leading to a combination of colours such as these. Because of this, whilst the colours may seem to be a purely aesthetic choice, there is a realistic element to the chosen shades. As the retinas are exposed to a higher degree of light than usual, they will begin to strain and attempt to compensate for this, allowing Balla to convey these sensation through a careful choice of colour, opaque and transparent planes, and blurred borders. Interestingly, it is possible to identify, within the margin of four and a half hours, the moment, or moments that Balla has represented in the painting. Mercury began its transition across the sun at 10:24 on November the 17th, 1914, and completed the journey at 13:50, inspiring Balla to produce this piece on the way.