Braque

 I am a rainy day in Paris. Anywhere you like. But Paris will do. The clouds are the same. Edged with grey. Shaped roundly shading from grey to white. When they aren’t the deluge before us. Crowds of rain and a sudden hundred umbrellas. White is so much of grey in the rain. I am a woman. Don’t be fooled by appearances. The caption is explicit. I am straight as an easel. From top to toe my form is all front. Front, sides and back and all front. A portrait that is a still life, no mean feat. A still life that could be a cityscape of rain slowing and ceasing. When the light enlarges, you might gaze upon hillsides of white houses, square and glistening. My adjusted lean into space could bear a large canvas. Signed by someone or other in a corner. One foot seems to be for a chest of drawers. Shapely assuredly. My other foot resembles a plinth, sturdy for the task, or a catafalque. It’s something to do with the fall of shadows. I am a sounding board for a revolution. My guitar has a strong back story. Things they say about me fill books. Their words remind us of bygone years in upstairs salons and barndoor ateliers and sculptural wine-bars. Print nowadays, their words that were scintillating, capital letters and outdated fonts in faded newspapers cut up and pieced together. Enigmatic in its silence. Like the eruption of the guitar, its breezes and snaps. Its eloquence and melancholy. Silent now and huddled against newsprint, the context lost. I am more or less what Georges had in mind. His mind was vivid with ideas. Him and Pablo, they talked for years every day. What language. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. That’s Georges. Or he would say: In a painting, what counts is the unexpected. Decades pass, each pursuing their own lines of enquiry, he his and he his. Vivid ideas using a neutral palette, for Georges. The wars did something to his mind. I am listening with my eyes half-closed. To all the generations of comments made by those pleased to be fooled by appearances. To the rain desisting, resting in downlines of gutters and rhombuses of roofs and puddles of grey sky. To the Frenchman and the Spaniard enthusing in the half light for hours over effects. My eyes face on and side on and listening. To the fragments of guitar that humans will contrive. I am waiting out my time inside my frame. It’s the deal I’ve been dealt. If not for photography I would not exist. Which is a start. A ticket to fame is my role, you could say, depending on your angle. A ticket at right-angles to experience or perspective, copied and pasted. You arrive in your orderly queue, let someone in to have a squizz, at me. Silence is a common comment. Occasionally someone like you enthuses. Some read out my caption, have another look, then move on.  

Two photographs: ‘Femme à la guitare’ (‘Woman with a guitar’) by Georges Braque, autumn 1913, oil and charcoal on canvas. Centre Pompidou via the National Gallery of Victoria.

Picasso

 

Visitors line up for selfies in front of ‘The Weeping Woman’. Young children interpret the Dali with curiosity according to their own experience, innocent of surreal preconditions. Adults rest on benches before context films, Paris aflutter with light and hope in 1910. Grand Final Day was the ideal time to go to the Picasso show at the National Gallery; foot traffic was light, few mobs in front of classics. Overload, as always with this artist, was the norm and how you view with satisfaction hundreds of works in the scarce allotted hours, anyone’s guess. My approach is to size up the rooms relaxed initially, then return to the favourite impressions at length. We played the game of which painting would you take home. Carol thought about Gris’ cubist still-life with book, but finally left with Picasso’s ‘The Reader’, pictured, a portrait of Olga reading a letter lost in the words, a sign of this the shoe having slipped from her foot. I thought the garment hanging on the chairback was angel’s wings. This painting though has a sadness, she says, when we consider it is a letter from Olga’s separated family living in Russia. Seriously did I covet Bonnard’s self-portrait in the bathroom mirror but it was Braque’s ‘Woman with a Guitar’ that ended up on our wall, in order that a poem can be written about it, forthcoming. Cubism is the crunch, isn’t it? Picasso is still playing with its lessons sixty years later at his death, it’s the one constant as he moves from one moving movement to the next, exploring and exploiting the possibilities of each. His collaborations are exposed in the show as a combination of conversation, creative extension, and copying. The lines between discovery, sharing, and ripping off are never clear, but then is he ripping anyone off or just making things to see how they look, using his immense natural gifts? We see in turn Braque Picasso, Léger Picasso, Giacometti Picasso, Matisse Picasso, as the decades pass, each pursuing their own lines of enquiry, and he his. Found this time that I am so over surrealism and think it now a symptom of 30s Europe, the social illnesses and multiple neuroses come into the light through surrealism’s own unquestioned violence and misogyny. Wartime Paris paintings come as some sort of relief, artists once more living on little, nowhere they can go, all day with the brushes, in search of a possible world that is quietly governed. Overload effect soon separates our viewing into the so-so Picassos, the properly picked Picassos, the out-there Picassos, reserve-our-judgement Picassos, fabulous Picassos, and then the OMG Picassos. These last are the ones where, whatever the style and subject and other factors, his line and colour and form and daring are happening, seemingly effortless, all contributing to the subject itself, which speaks to us directly, anew, as though innocent of any preconditions.

Framed

 

Watched ‘Framed’. Disconcerting, to watch a documentary where there are so many people I know, or half-know. One degree of separation. Half-knowing something is a leitmotif of the whole work. Half-knowing people. Everyone knows something, no one knows everything. Whoever stole ‘The Weeping Woman’ from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, the fallout of their crime caused much harm to many individual lives. Unexpectedly, I found Quigley, the detective inspector since retired to Phillip Island, the most sympathetic main character. He knows his role and never does role-playing, plays it by the book and, to his credit, he understands the cultural value of the Picasso. ‘Framed’ brings out the amateur sleuth in Melburnians. I question the film’s settled view that the thief took the painting out the front door. Having worked with Philip Hunter in the adjoining art college at that time, it seems perfectly plausible to me they took the Picasso out the back door, via the VCA. Trioli laughs at the outrageous wording of the letters sent to Mathews by the Australian Cultural Terrorists (ACT), but no literary analysis is pursued to narrow the authors to insiders driven by contempt. The reverse side of such comedy is anger. The wording is unorthodox but the layout mimics official bureaucratic memos; the author is familiar with such style concerns. Crawford can never be properly objective while his smug smiles, softly wreathed in cigarette smoke, say he has secrets he’s not going to tell, just yet. His performance reminds me of Quigley’s view that people just can’t help themselves, they are going to tell you things. Just not everything. McCaughey plays the sleight of hand. Two strong memories I have of 1986 are the Leunig or Tandberg cartoon ‘Weeping Director’, in which Dora Maar has morphed into someone with a flamboyant bowtie; and the news item reporting how McCaughey had visited someone in a North Melbourne studio. ‘Framed’ adds extra to the second memory, but is unforthcoming about whatever c-c-c-con-conversation actually transpired. His is not the only main role that refuses to deliver any more lines to the drama. Dixon, the conservator, is thoughtful and practical. It is a critical moment when he says his judgement of the authenticity of the recovered painting, one way or the other, put his career on the line. He is not the only actor where that was the case. Dixon reminds the amateur sleuths of another vital matter: security. All the time we think, why isn’t there footage of Locker 227 at Spencer Street Station? Because there wasn’t even CCTV in the Gallery, never mind railway stations. Unnervingly, I probably know who it was, and half-know any number of people who do know.

      

Picasso (July)

Pablo Picasso, there’s only one way around him and that’s straight ahead. Take this folio, handed randomly to a visiting Australian last July by a great-niece. Was he bonkers? A superlative drawing starts as simple outlines one side, turns into ornate effusions of roofing and foliage the other: Como House. Washes of varying quality approximate Blue Dandenongs. Human figures are always close to hand with Picasso. Lithographs of sporty Greeks become more disjointed as afternoon wears on. Sometimes they throw off their clothes or turn into a bull. Spain boycotted the Melbourne Olympics, which dates this folio to within days.