Hidden
Images
Oct 9
021
Were
they saving on canvases?
Were
they concealing their mistakes?
Or
are all their paintings unfinished,
the
great works of art
we
admire and emulate
merely
rough drafts,
practice
pieces
from
apprentices' hands
waiting
to be painted over?
Beneath
my poems
there
are also hidden images
no
one will read
and
no technology recover.
All
the drafts
vanished
into the ether.
The
world
as
only I have seen it.
And
if not the life lived
then
the one I would have wished for.
What
a reader may not know
is
that a poem's never finished.
There's
the critical rereading,
tweaking
and tinkering,
second-guessing
regrets.
The
one I write later
that's
says the same
but
does it much better.
And
the fact it can't exist
until
it's been read.
Because
when a poem is put out into the world
you
must let it go,
like
a grown child
who
leaves the nest
and
begins a life of her own.
You
give it to the reader
and
it is transformed,
no
matter what you intended
or
might have hoped.
Who
will peer beneath its surface
and
scrape at its paint.
Who
will lift the canvas from its frame
and
see what's concealed.
Who
will expose it to light
and
scrutinize its phrases,
and
whose X ray mind
will
penetrate its layers.
Or
who will give it time
to
play in her head
as
she goes about her day,
unaware
of its presence.
Only
to re-emerge unexpectedly
in
a singular moment
of
clarity
meaning
delight.
This poem was inspired by this article
(see below). Treasures such as this, hidden beneath iconic paintings,
are being repeatedly discovered. And if they are not treasures
aesthetically, at least they may be as history and biography. But
this does not just occur in the visual arts . . .even though other
forms of art may not preserve them as well.
I think this phenomenon offers a
healthy insight into the artistic temperament and enterprise. That a
piece isn't conjured up out of nothing, but rests on a foundation of
previous work. That even though it's been sent out into the world, it
may still not fully satisfy the artist's eye or ear. That the
creation of art is an iterative process, so that what we regard as a
masterpiece was not necessarily finished, but rather part of an
ongoing work that was simply, for some reason, arrested in time. And,
of course, that a piece does not stand on its own: it must be seen,
read, heard, felt, consumed. Otherwise, like the tree that falls in
the forest unheard, it doesn't exist.
I'm no Picasso, however. And my rough
drafts are not preserved in long-dried paint. They are gone for good,
crumpled in a garbage bin or lost in cyberspace.
Picasso
exhibit at the AGO reveals what is hidden underneath his early
paintings
FRED
LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL/© PICASSO ESTATE/SOCAN (2021)
For
the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s
art, testing was done on three of his early paintings using X-rays,
paint analysis and digital ‘false colour’ images, revealing
compositions hidden beneath the final works.
New
exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario showcases the painter’s focus
on sex, poverty during his Blue Period
When
curators, conservators and scientists subjected an early nude by
Pablo Picasso to a battery of tests, they found another painting
underneath, featuring a pensive man in evening dress. With its
rumpled bedsheets and dawning light, Picasso’s scene of a naked
woman scrubbing her leg represents the morning after in a brothel,
but the artist had painted it over a scene from the night before. So,
an image of a vulnerable woman covers one of a privileged man, an
effect replacing a cause.
Picasso:
Painting the Blue Period, a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of
Ontario, proves that what is covered up on a canvas can be as
important as what is shown – and reveals a youth from Catholic
Barcelona negotiating his attitudes toward women in libertine Paris.
The
backbone of this exhibition, finally opening after a 15month pandemic
delay, is the testing that the AGO and its coorganizer, the Phillips
Collection in Washington, have done on three paintings from Picasso’s
early career when he was trying to establish himself in Paris. Using
X-rays, paint analysis and digital “false colour” images that
highlight certain areas, the tests reveal compositions hidden
underneath the final paintings.
Under
The Blue Room (the 1901 nude from the Phillips), it’s the man in
evening dress, his pose allowing curators to conclude he was also
painted by Picasso. Under the AGO’s Crouching Beggarwoman of 1902,
there’s a scene from a park in Barcelona – but Kenneth Brummel,
the AGO curator responsible for the show, argues that the landscape
is too conservative to match up with Picasso’s temporary return to
Barcelona in 1902. The impoverished artist was probably reusing
somebody else’s canvas, although he borrowed the contour of hills
to create the outline of the woman’s cloak.
Testing
The Soup, a small 1902 painting in the AGO collection showing a bowed
woman offering a bowl to a child, the researchers discovered how
Picasso gradually simplified the composition to these two timeless
figures. The painting may have originally featured a second child, or
people eating at a table, in a less stylized image of poverty.
These
revelations are the foundation for a large show – more than 100
works, 94 of them by Picasso himself – that explains the artist’s
sources and techniques in his Blue Period, named for the limited
palette of melancholy blues he favoured between 1901-1906.
The
exhibition begins before he went blue, however, with the portraits
and nudes heavily influenced by the artists he had now encountered in
Paris: Edgar Degas and Henri de ToulouseLautrec. The Blue Room is
prefaced by a gallery full of cruder nudes as Picasso (then a mere
19-year-old) searched about for the right tone to depict the
moreor-less joyous sex-trade workers, entertainers and models of
Montmartre. The powerful Jeanne is seen foreshortened as though the
viewer stood at the foot of her bed buttoning his trousers; the
repellant Nude with Cats crouches in a pose that mimics the animals.
Does
Picasso sympathize with these women, or lust after them? A bit of
both, since he also shows himself in a small self-portrait as another
gentleman in evening dress with a top hat – and surrounded by
bare-breasted ladies of the night.
But
in 1901, he was also introduced to the women of the SaintLazare
hospital prison, where he began mournful blue paintings such as Woman
Ironing or Melancholy Woman. Not surprisingly, despite their deep
humanity, these depressive figures didn’t sell well, and Picasso
was forced home again. As he transported his new style back to Spain
in 1902, its religiosity becomes apparent: Blue is the colour of the
Virgin’s cloak after all. Curators Brummel and his Phillips
colleague Susan Behrends Frank include a particularly melodramatic
Our Lady of Sorrows by the 16th-century Spanish Luis de Morales to
remind you of that.
Now,
Picasso’s paintings all feature clothed women, beggars and single
mothers, the downtrodden elevated through their visual association
with religious art. Even two sex-trade workers, seen from behind in
Two Women at a Bar, are clothed – and closed off to the viewer’s
consuming eye as they turn their backs.
Here,
the curators reveal how Picasso dignifies the woman by comparing that
painting to a small version of Augustin Rodin’s famed Thinker, with
its similar emphasis on the musculature of a turned back. The woman
and child in The Soup, meanwhile, are compared to Pierre Puvis de
Chavanne’s symbolic representations of the figure of Charity and
Honoré Daumier’s drawing of a famished couple at a table, the
woman baring a great breast to her baby while she devours her food.
The notion that feeding one’s own child represents an act of
charity is certainly the conceit of male artists, not nursing
mothers, but Picasso elevates Daumier’s grittier vision of hunger
to something classically respectful of its subjects.
The
curators don’t position their work this way, but viewers may be
forgiven if, by this point, they recognize Painting the Blue Period
as an exhibition of whores and madonnas: A few impoverished blue men
only begin to appear in the final room. (They include the
particularly fine Portrait of a Man, a person Picasso described as “a
sort of madman who was a well-known figure in Barcelona.”) The
young and socially engaged Picasso feels for the women of the street
and the tenement. Considering the notorious misogyny of the artist’s
later biography, it’s easy – with hindsight – to conclude that
the artist who would paint Guernica was one of those people who was
better at loving humanity than at loving individuals.
Not
coincidentally, as Fernande Olivier, his first live-in girlfriend,
appears on the scene, Picasso moves into the Pink Period in 1906 and
begins painting nudes once again. As a footnote, there’s a room
full of them here, many based on Olivier herself, their warm skin,
auburn hair and pink or beige backdrops celebrating love and life.
One, Nude Combing Her Hair, begins to show the reduction of the body
to geometric planes. A year later, Picasso would paint the
proto-cubist group portrait Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a
representation of the brothel’s workers as wild, exotic and
frightening. The rest is art history.
