Well, good evening, everyone. This weekend, talking about the tough election, the unbossed Jewish Becci and Tocumwal.
And this document ran for two years, 1929, 1930.
Inside this plane, yellow cover with its banner heading.
And these for a physiological labels Dufrene Archaeology Boso ethnography was an explosive visual mix of heterogeneous things.
Ethnographic objects, archaeological remains.
Cycladic figures, Chinese bronzes, sculpture, contemporary painting, photography, popular icons, film crime,
detective novels together with articles by the foremost ethnographic and anthropological specialists in France and Germany.
Articles by dissidents, realist writers and poets. And Articles by Joel Shabtai.
It was described by the foremost realist and future ethnographer Michelle Davis as a war machine against accepted ideas.
It occupies an important position in the intellectual and cultural history of the 20th century.
It was not the voice of a specific group like the surrealist journals such as Herbalism Salvationist,
but it was rather the crossroads of ideas about art, civilisation, material culture, the primitive and the sacred.
And it was the inspiration for James Griffitts very important and influential concept of ethnographic surrealism.
It also carried on an aggressive dialogue with Bluto and the Orthodox Surrealists,
who were in the pages of doctoral, routinely characterised as evasive and utopian idealists.
The list on the cover. Which was firstly, as I said, doctrine, that theme.
Exactly what that meant is, is something of an interesting question. Archaeology Bouzar.
I think if he was changed from the fourth issue, doctrine disappears from the top of the list and is replaced at the bottom by value.
Okay. And value, it seems Ticketek covered shows spectacles and of various different kinds of of popular pursuits.
Now you'll see on the left hand screen, which is actually upside down.
Sorry about that. The cover of an exhibition that we organised.
Here we are in 2006 called Undercover Surrealism.
And what I was to about day is the problem of how you can translate something like a magazine like document into an exhibition.
The kinds of problems that arise,
the with the origins of this idea of making an exhibition around the she goes back to is that actually 30 years to an exhibition
called Dada and Surrealism reviewed that I was involved in the also Hayward Gallery in 1978 and that that exhibition,
Surrealist Works of Art Objects, shows not it's quite well organised in relation to a specific review magazine.
So there was a rule of Larousse until at least a room of Minitel.
And so we weren't sure whether to include Documenta or not.
And so we went to see Michelle Levis in Paris who said, well, what about this?
It's not really, you know, that I was on the fringes, but also the enemy of Sweden should be included.
Oh, yes, absolutely. You should certainly include it.
And I thought that that was actually the last final sort of push against Britain in the service, because after that exhibition,
which included document and after document that were beginning to rub off with Henry, the shift was really very notable of interest from time to time.
And in a way,
the story of citizens receiving told in terms of a kind of battle between Bettye usually winning that is in a sense sort of contemporary take on it.
Now, I'm not going to go up from and I just wanted to give that background.
But ever since then, ever since that exhibition where the role of document stood out and it was quite extraordinary.
It is very strong, very unusual, didn't belong anywhere.
And I've always wanted since then to do an exhibition.
But so the surrealism finally took place in 2006 at the Hayward Gallery.
And everything in the in the exhibition was something reproduced in the pages of documents.
And it was an extraordinary chase and the search to try and track all these things down.
Now, what I want to do. Just to show you one thing that one artist dominates in document, and that is Picasso.
And there's a whole issue devoted to the CSA, including this painting.
And I should come back to this particular painting at the end.
But what I want to do now is to mimic, in a way, what we tried to do in the catalogue of undercover surrealism.
And that is still half with a kind of taster of what the magazine looks like.
So I'm just going to run through an extraordinarily heterogeneous set of pictures.
Obviously, it's very selective, but it's an attempt to show you the range of things that Bettye included.
They're so modern artists.
And this is Picasso's painting painter model, sort of pin up photographs of boxy ladies and also put up profiles of actors who's
sort of ludicrous appearance was something that that document took great interest in.
A juxtaposition of these of these actual pages long document, that's for sure.
Two paintings by Salvador Dali, bathers on the bottom left and the female baby on the bottom right below, an anamorphic painting,
an anonymous animal painting of Saint Anthony of Padua, an infant Christ,
which you can actually see if you put your face right at the far side of the screen.
And in that sense, it's a distorted image and it only begins to make sense when you see it from the side.
Now, I never how to find that picture. It turned up by chance.
Sort of is a few months before the exhibition. So we've included we've been through that.
But the idea that I think was true was picking up on the distortion that Darla operates on his on the body,
suggesting this of the animal fit the kind of distorted perspective in the value of photographs commissioned.
Usually, I think, by Bettye from the photographer Wafaa, this is one of the big toes that he did to accompany an article by Becci for loopholes.
Also pay the big. Which I should be coming back to.
And it's a full page photograph. In other words, larger than life. Quite a lot of images of Fox Follies and Hollywood movies.
And I just want to draw your attention to something else very striking about the kind of visual,
the visual language of Dockum all the way things are organised and put together.
But there are quite often very striking visual analogies across the pages,
some of which seem to make some sort of deliberate sense and some of which are just confusing.
So just notice those legs cut off by the curtain at the bottom.
And it's faced a couple of pages before this photograph by any star which accompanied an article on the slaughterhouse.
By that, I and there are others like that. So it's a half legs.
What is going on here? So it's a document. It's working.
It's working its visual images very, very hard. And they're often extremely colourful.
So as well as the heterogeneity of the material, there is a as a visual organic thing on that Volkova of a snow that I see over the top,
the neighbour and another of the Hollywood scenes.
And that little scene there is from a film that we included in the first room of the exhibition, which I hope to be able to show you later on.
Again, you know, deliberately,
not that that that is a striking similarity between this group of Chinese bronzes from the vile collection parents and the Jeff Amitay sculptures.
It's not actually made explicit, but you become accustomed to to the kind of, you know,
a set of parallels that are being you'll be invited to meet and you be invited to think about
invited to wonder about a great deal of ethnographic material as well as archaeological material.
This is a photograph which I was unable to track down, sadly, of of a child,
a girl sitting on the city, one of the heads of a north west coast Indian carving school.
Ordinary photograph, quite, quite a number of photographs of the northwest coast from the polls kakapos that often brought into connexion,
you know, money beside these sort of parallels. I was talking about that contrasts.
Some things you do simply completely disconnected.
So a page of frontman's covers decided a coin mask and then other masks, masks of a contemporary kind.
This is one of the illustrations again by by for an article by Limbaugh called Aeschylus and the Carnival Mask.
And I think that also actually funny, you know, that there was a there was a kind of slightly hysterical quality to what you do.
If you do turn the pages of documents,
you will find it has a bursting out laughing every now and again because of the the the some shopping and something nature, some of these things.
And the important article by Bettye on what he thought were Gnostic gems.
This one, which is blown not here very large, is actually a couple of centimetres.
The tiny little the sculptures from Afghanistan, from the Kabul Museum.
I don't know if it's still the straight pages of comic pages like like this one sort of collage priess
realist collage from a book called What Is Like a group from the Ivory Coast with wearing masks.
These. This was a particular people that was visited in the course of the Dakar Djibouti mission.
That was a very major and logical if ethnographic expedition.
Several of the document contributors went home and was really I mean,
really sort of was the source for so much of the ethnographic material that is now in Paris.
And the final issue, the number eight, 1930, is entirely dedicated to heads, but none of them are straightforward.
Hence, they are truncated heads or their souls or that they're kind of divine heads.
And this particular one is one of the mortuary chapels in Rome, which is the months getting fed up with the sort of many,
many, many bones lie about their deceased colleagues decided to turn them into decoration.
So all those decorations, the ceiling decorations are bones, tibia and cells and so on.
And the final image of this is the correct way out. In other words, she's inverted again by both of very, very beautiful photograph.
And that's the last image in the in the in the whole magazine.
And I think there is a sense that it is it is a.
As a whole, it has a beginning, an edge. And this is.
So in a way, trying to make an exception around it could take that as a sort of starting point that I didn't organise the ones by issue.
I organised them by ideas born from betters writings.
OK, so this is the page again.
And you can see that I just wanted to name some of the people who were on the editorial committee because the background to this magazine,
how it started is is really very interesting.
There were several people from the from the property or the old ethnographic was in the property area, but basically they and drove RV live.
Yeah, very important call. Einstein was a German critic who was brought in by my building sign, and there was one himself.
Their daughter and son was the financial backer, the document.
And he was also the director of the Gazette blows up and I'll come back and say that is named as the secretary general.
The I think in the course of document, in the course of the of the magazine, the apparently distinct categories on the cover become kind of blurred.
As Professor Reavie said, he was an ethnographer specialising in Precambrian America and the founder of the museum along in the 1930s.
And he read from the third is to document the study.
So the boundaries between these sciences, ethnography, archaeology, prehistory are absolutely artificial.
All are geared towards the study of man. His approach was evolutionary and diffusion is his ideal of his ideal music.
Long Museum of Mankind actually belongs to the era of the Popular Front,
1936 to seven and survived baptised pessimistic view of humankind, which is straight through the pages of document.
Not document. This is the first article that that I contributed to document of the academic horse.
Bill chemos split from the start, as Charles Miller writes in his essay on archaeology in the catalogue of the undercover surrealism exhibition.
It was split in terms of Betty's own proclivities. On the one hand, the transfer effort and the transgressive, erotic and excessive.
And on the other, the scholarly and scientific as a new.
He worked in the cabinet may die at the Bibby Technics.
You know where at the time of document he wrote some of his most aggressive anti idealist texts,
such as the language of flowers or the human face on the backs of tickets.
And I think that some of the pages, a story the I've also written on the cabinet may die.
A stationary document was also split between the academic contributors and the unclassifiable writers,
many of them former surrealists such as Hobel Business Misher Livy's, who,
like beti, were pushing at the margins of art, sociology,
philosophy and anthropology so that I was probably recommended to build Stein because of a recent very much admired scholar.
The article he wrote on coins through Central Asia, the promotional pamphlet for the new magazine,
announced that in document the most irritating as it unclassified works of art and certain heterogeneous,
hitherto neglected productions will be the object of studies as rigorous, as scientific as those of archaeologists.
Now, it's still just possible to see that description from those Einsteins point of view as a scholarly enterprise,
addressing rare and unfamiliar works of primitive art with possibly some folk art thrown in.
After his first article, the Suomi academic course immediately shattered the illusion that in the course on the classical Greek representation
of the course and its degeneration on the coins of the goals sets a tone at odds with academic objectivity.
You notice the illustrations here. There's the the very fine and ideally proportioned horse on the left hand side,
and then it begins to disappear as it's repeatedly copied and ends up as a kind of spider or monster on the right hand side.
So drawing attention to what he describes as the debased forms on the Gallic coins like spiders or monsters,
that's highballs a comparison between the so-called barbaric and civilised peoples in which the veil is attached to each or inverted.
And I quote, the absurdities of barbaric peoples existing contradiction with arrogant academic certainties,
nightmares and contradiction geometries the monster horse with the academic course.
And we see here the origins, the baptised notion of the of the form or the form this.
I will just read this because it's such it's such an important short text from the critical
dictionary in document addiction begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words,
but their tasks. Thus, fondness is not only an adjective having a given meaning,
but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form.
What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or a worm.
In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe has to take shape.
All of philosophy has no other goal. It is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is a mathematical Fox-Pitt.
On the other hand, a affirm that the universe resembles nothing is only formless amounts to saying that
the universe is something like a spider or sit so against order and against authority.
And I'll come back to that in a minute.
Now, a member of the editorial board also from the cabinet in today objected to Satie's article on the academic course,
and he wrote in the title you've chosen for this review is justified only in the sense that it gives us documents.
And your state of mind is essential to return to the spirit, which is Fata's in the first project for the review.
When you and I talked about it with me. So it doesn't stand now that I was determined that document should not become as building signed.
Probably hoped it would. I guess it goes up for me teeth.
It's also clear that he and the ethnographies associated with the review wanted to distance
themselves from the primitive ising tastes of the time of the lure of the exotic.
And this, I think, takes two forms and document.
On the one hand, the rigorous analysis of different civilisations separated in space and time, and on the other by bringing your own culture.
Hollywood, for instance, in juxtaposition with each other to render them unfamiliar and to provoke the unexpected.
It wasn't the only job in the twenties that offered a mixture of contemporary long Western art, architecture, film, music.
One of them, which is actually quite clifftop one way, was with jazz.
This was founded by the woman explorer Tyner and the two magazines advertised each other and had some of the same contributors.
However, I think that Jazz subscribe to a stereotype view of the primitive.
For example, it published a special issue on the exotic. It filled with examples of so-called primitive sculpture.
Just before document began, this is a I just have to choose who she is.
She's seems to be completely slipped out of the history of the 20th century journals to Diana, who is a woman explorer.
And she's that this is a leather jacket. She's to go off on her jaunts around Asia and America.
And this is a page which advertises it from jazz that advertises doctrinal doctrine, Fauji Bouzar ethnography.
And it says that it's the Encyclopaedia of the 20th Century presented according to new methods.
And it's the sum of all past and current research in all the fields of the mind.
I think it might be a slight parody there, but it's that's what it's suggesting.
Document was the deputy director of the top Dero Museum, Jovel, who archive the year,
asked in the first issue of documents what the new Trocadero, the new museum of Ethnography which was planned,
what it should be one direction was offered by the elite taste for the so-called primitive, and I quote, In the wake of our latest poets,
artists, musicians, the favour of the elite is turning towards the art of peoples reputed to be primitive and savage and imperious.
That versatile taste awards beauty certificates to the money on a mannequin to a Congo Ivory Vancouver mask,
while the stone capitals of Bisley and Greek marbles are relegated to the admiration of old fogeys.
The troubled era could therefore have built itself on this country's non-profit and become a Museum of Fine Art Museum of Bouzar Plumy teeth,
where the objects will be raised according to a single aesthetic.
This would, he argues, is a very core principle as it would reveal very limited aspects of the object in question.
Yeah. As for LBB, the collection is needed research and explanation and should include European folk art and craft.
Oh, yeah, also did contribute an essay to jazz called The Folklore of Ethnography,
and this is about the end of the old Soviet era museum, which he was overseeing.
He was he was overseeing the modernisation of the museum. And this is a kind of a very curious meditation on the old museum.
The museum has dusted dusty and deserted rooms. Picasso and Devout had discovered African sculpture.
The exotic Riviere writes that he wants to record before it goes forever is that of a certain type of ethnographic museum
about to be swept away in the great modernising programme that lit the wax figures of different physical and racial types,
shrouded or dilapidated, eaten by moth and rust. The old Soviet era offered as picturesque and exotic a sight as anything.
The programme islands goodbar. He writes, The Pyrenees is of the dark.
The old proper dero should have been kept as an historic monument. The last witness of an ancient John.
The folklore of ethnography. And I think building on that particular article, the notion this dust cover museum that I chose to reproduce,
photographs of these mannequins stacked up and now useless,
unwanted, the ones that used to show different costumes of tribes and so on in the museum together with the article on dust.
And it's very interesting how often that tie is actually responding to something that happened in one of the other magazines,
such as Cadeau or Jazz in the disputed area of art and the graphic object.
The question of authenticity was a major cause of disagreement,
both with regard to aesthetic response and to the issue of an object untouched by the colonial culture.
Stein, who wrote the important book, quite puzzling book Nager Plastique in 1915,
mourned the loss of an intact sculptural vision in African art because of the colonial invasion invasions.
Now, due to his did he attempt to speak purely of sculptural form so that some thought a study of sculpture as such?
Not of African sculpture. He also was wholly uninterested in the kinds of enquiry pursued by ethnographies.
And I quote, We will bracket out subject matter and the contextual associations related to it and instead analyse these objects as formal constructs.
However, in Tocumwal, he did write about an equal ritual dance smiles.
That's this one. In fact, it's a genius Janus faced mask, which he said are of a terrifying naturalism.
But he he was completely detached from the side of DR moments, interested in the.
And in contemporary culture, except for painting.
Muscle View, on the other hand, criticises purists and collectors of primitive art for denying the large,
primitive public the right to employ the new objects imported by the colonialists.
Apparently, there was an objection to the wooden sign from the Ivory Coast, which I assure you would detail here,
because it represented a gun, anything that showed any sort of contamination from from the culture.
The West was, according to some of us, were purists and collectors in Paris.
Absolutely unacceptable. It is grotesque.
Real says to call it impure because it represents this European artefact and grill protests by turning the situation around.
If a black artist cannot, without demeaning himself, use an exotic element, a European that he knows.
What should we think about our blind borrowings? For a world exotic to us, which in our own defence we insist we know nothing about?
From every quarter in document, the conventions and values underpinning Western culture are called into question within the graphic context.
This took the form of turning the critical gaze onto their own world.
The juxtaposition of modern popular culture, film and art with the objects of African, oceanic and other civilisations operated,
as James Clifford has argued, like surrealist collage, ethnographic surrealist practise in his words.
And he was taking documents. His model attacks the familiar, provoking the erupt from otherness of the unexpected.
This is to turn the myth of illogical assumptions or ethnography on their head
while rendering the different exotic familiar by the processes of naming,
classifying, describing and interpreting according to well-meaning criteria derived from a
known document provoked unsettling studies of the West's own issues and habits,
suggesting we know less than we think about our civilisation and human nature in general.
This is a page celebrating the arrival of lunacies blackbirds in Paris, which Bedtime's levees were absolutely enchanted by.
It's also a very loaded pair of images.
On the right hand side, we've got the arrival of the of the backboards troop of the bottom on a ship called
the France and the Gharazi of a penitentiary penitentiary in New Caledonia.
Above it. And you're invited to sort of think about why these two are put in juxtaposition with each other.
What what what is going on? Why is this the case? And I think although I'm not trying to suggest that document is is is tremendous
ahead of its time in terms of an anti colonialist state of state of mind,
I think there is something there about contrasting it.
What is exported. That is the sort of penitentiary and a certain kind of justice, if you like, to the colonies.
But what is important is, is this art and music?
The very concept of civilisation, which is constantly put to work in the use of the terms primitive or primitive lives,
is in question is there is wrote in his text civilisation.
Civilisation could be compared to the land of green scum that settles on still waters.
All our moral habits like customs, all that brightly coloured clip fails the crudity of our dangerous instincts.
All these lovely forms of cultures have proud of it.
Thanks to this that we call ourselves civilised convention at the slightest Tobins break up at the slightest shock revealing cracks,
terrifying savagery. In this article civilisation.
Livy's then sets about undermining pride in European civilisation from another perspective.
Not only is the veneer thin, but the capacity of the European imagination is feeble and sclerotic.
So writing about the Blackbird's, he says what is beautiful about support is not just exotic aspect, nor even its highly modern content.
This modernism is simply coincidental, but the fact that it doesn't really constitute an art at all.
Reviews like that, that those take us to a point.
On the other side of art, to a point of development which sent bust of some of the illegitimate love of magic.
And Freeplay has not yet been hypertrophied, implying that art, as it were, which we've still retained magic and Freeplay has atrophied in the West,
that it has not patrica there as it's a notion that it's something on the other side of art, not what we necessarily think automatically is art for.
That is a concept that is under the question.
Now, I'm going to look very briefly at a sequence of articles by Becci addressing
particular ideas for or images which are then used as a basis for the exhibition.
This here on the right hand side is a patient document showing the tiny little
glass figures which were put inside Paschen bottles from knocking them down.
Yes, these passione bore holes. It's passion in the sense of religion, not in the sense of erotic passion, contained holy water.
And they were collector's items as well. I managed to find some of these in the museum that Riviere had founded in Paris.
Music is Arkless and popular, though he's very glass bottles that are reproduced in document.
And they could fit these tiny little glass things that represent because of fiction or Judas or Christ or angels.
And they rise up and down according to the temperature of the water.
But that's that's another another point that I and very is went to Rotterdam
Delius to investigate what they call the senseor piece of these central pieces,
the church in Paris, which produces most sort of most objects associated with devotion in the Catholic faith.
And they get to write an article about this as a pilgrimage site,
that it was censored by Wildenstein who found it to set religious so that we never know what they going say about it.
But Bettye compares this as a site of pilgrimage with Hollywood and says that Hollywood really is not all true.
Place of pilgrimage is the place where we throw money at the goddesses and, you know, it's similarly decked out in tinsel and.
And then Jones, another article by Bettye is called The Language of Flowers.
And this is illustrated with these extraordinary photographs by Karl Belt, which are close ups, enormously magnified photographs of parts of flowers,
stamens, pistols and so on, which was intended as a ticket aid for his students, but also obviously of scientific interest.
And that's had to source the purpose of these photographs.
And he talks about them as the title of their essay is The Language of Flowers.
And he say, What is the language of flowers? Well, red roses for love, for example.
And then he says, well, it's very appropriate that the rose should be chosen.
The flower should be chosen as the symbol of human love and devotion because roses fade so fast and turn very quickly into tatters of Ariel Nual.
So it's his way of turning turning the notion about the flowers around so that rather than being this ideal symbol, because it.
Because the symbol, as it were, is symbolising something, it is not ideal.
Then the substitution of this of his herry inside of the flower that I felt was appropriate.
I'm thinking that there's a flavour of the sort of of the sort of really unclassifiable essay's that that that I contributed to documents.
The language of Telles is one of them. The big toe. I've shown you one of these three illustrations from this article already in the big toe again.
That's right. Sets out to really undermine our fixed categories of high and low base and ideal.
And so on. And he says that the big toe is that part of the human anatomy that distinguishes us most clearly from the anthropoid ape,
our nearest relative otherwise. And this is the thing that is anchored and goodness firmly in the mouth.
So you get the idea that he's that that it insofar if he's trying to suggest that something that that mankind is not necessarily,
as it were, entirely dedicated to the to the navel and the ideal.
Another of his essay is a little critical dictionary entry on the slaughterhouse.
This photograph accompanies this is the part of the one I showed you earlier on with the very neatly stacked up calls legs.
So the contrast between the high gene appearance and swept clean appearance of the slaughterhouse on the outside.
You got that proportioned you and the complete chaos that the repellent miss of the inside of the slaughterhouse.
And his argument in his dictionary entry picture is that slaughterhouses are not is tucked away in in in remote parts of a town that nobody knows.
Really, where they are hidden is where their food comes from. Heaven is where the abattoirs are.
And that's because we can't face the sort of of all of the blood that still supports that supports our cities and our civilisation.
And he says that there was a time, though, when so when temples with those slaughterhouses and places of worship.
And so he's he's got a very interesting looking at what has happened to the slaughterhouse in in modern culture based on terrorism.
Gnosticism, a different kind of article this time because it purports to be addressing a proposal with archaeological area.
These very, very strange Gnostic ends. What he's interested in here is the fact that they seem to him to be representing not an eye,
an ideal God of the goodness and light, but gods of darkness and evil.
This is not necessarily how we think of not. Is that help? Help. I was thinking about.
So for that, I should not offer the illusion of harmony and comfort in his final essay in the last issue of document.
While it was under his control, there was a bit of interesting continuation,
the early 1930s, the ethical, the modern spirit and the game of transpositions.
He explores his twin theme of the Kraven human policies,
of the work of art to complement of illustrations of the skull decorated Mauceri chapels in Rome because that's civili the fly and fly paper,
which this is. This is one and I quote what one truly loves, one loves in shame.
And I defy any number of painting to love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a
shoe for painting and bedtime's views beyond the level of the human condition.
It has to be stupefyingly ugly, incoherent or bombed.
And this this painting by mirro. I'm not I'm not saying this is how I feel.
These paintings should be locked. I'm simply giving you an example of how they were looked at by Betar.
This is a very Sulkin painting. I mean, it is extraordinarily minimal.
Well, it is. But you could see it just it that pure painting.
It's very powerful. It's quite large. But I wrote that these that mirror begins with the representation of objects.
Senator Arculus, that at a certain point this is the text. Then you hear a certain point, they turn reality sort thus to sort of some dust.
Subsequently, these tiny objects individually liberate themselves from all reality and disappear as a throng of decomposed elements,
which are also not more agitated.
Finally, as Mary himself professed to want to kill painting, the decompositions pushed to such a point that nothing else remained.
But a few formless stains to few formless stains on the lid or the tombstone, if you prefer, of the box of tricks.
The little angry alienage elements proceeded to a new eruption before once more, disappearing today into these paintings, leaving only the traces.
Who knows what disaster? So I'm just going to look at three artists in relation to two, Bettye Miro and Dulli.
This painting we've already seen very briefly, it's cool. A group is game visually group.
This is Mitt. So Hoffs through 1929 Done is the hottest property in Paris and everybody really wants him on their side.
But I want to adopt him. Even the first group to write about Sholder Lou in the pages of document.
But Dulli has decided that that really his best interests will be served by signing up with
Britain and the surrealists because they really can command more Mausam gallery space.
Basically, I think.
And so when I asked Danny if he could reproduce, should rule the magazine, but he said no because nobody could collaborate on both magazines.
You couldn't you couldn't be a member of the serious group and also a member of the document circle.
So instead of reproducing the painting,
that's how reproduced a sketch that he made of it in which he interprets the painting in very strictly and psychoanalytical terms.
He sees it. He talks about the the degraded appearance of the couple on the bottom right hand side,
the torn body in the centre, which is which is in fragments, in pieces which sweep up through the canvas.
His own head is in the centre with the nose pointing downwards and above it as it was at the heads opened up.
Things are floating out of it now that I sees it as a painting about castration, about violence, about fear.
And he's deliberately pitting himself against the way that Tom wrote about this painting in that in the preface to the capital of the 1929 exhibition.
Again, this guy who wrote that with this painting, with these paintings of done the the windows of the mind open wide for the first time,
there's a freedom and depth that Britain's is a completely different way as a form of liberation.
What's actually quite interesting from the point of view of of something that we talk about later on in the lectures,
is that both of them miss the fact that there is considerable gender ambiguity in this painting.
The figure of the deception, for example,
who has ossified piece that addressed this in a robe and the torn figure is actually not know probably, but FEMA.
So so there are I mean, this is actually a painting of great complexity.
And when I'll come back to that, the point really is that. But I made a great point of insisting on its ugliness.
And he said, without any preamble, I will say that Picasso's paintings are hideous and those by Delhi are of a terrifying otherness.
Well, I'm going to end, though, I hope not peak end, because I hope we didn't go to see the foot of the film,
the exhibition I with this painting by Picasso, which was reproduced in the document.
Now, missionary's writing about Picasso in document. There's a special issue devoted to insist on the opposition between Picasso and through realisms.
So poetic evasions its belief in the reconciliation contradictory states like Primo
Waking lives must as a materialist critique of his paintings because his paintings,
which is a good if not compete position from which to look at some of those in the special issue on Picasso as what is the phrase down to earth.
Livy's contrasts because there's new objects, new combinations of forms which are the most concrete,
the most dense, the most living with Fentons monsters and the Lucille Selema Picasso,
by contrast with the surrealists, he says, stands on the ground since my sends things on the ground,
sets them apart, knows the exact weight of things, then materiality.
This painting, which is now known as Woman in an Armchair, was reproduced in Stockholm without a title like the vast majority of his recent works,
identifications by a date, size and occasionally medium inscribed on the stretched from the back of this painting is the word metamorphosis.
And this was the title because his first markets for the monument to Apollinaire of 1927, 228 to Continent, had died in 1918.
The immediate impression this painting is a front talenti, an upright figure, solid, severe,
a monumental construction of precision with keen lines, reduced palette so long one looks less secure.
This response because all that repeatedly shatters and returns the figures into one of the least human.
Picasso's women appears poised on the edge of something other than a chair, apparently a hollow, grey box.
The two strong red curves of the chair frame, but do not embrace the woman,
which, although there is a shadow behind the ball, joined the stomach here of.
Which is the softness in the whole painting. And if it is not that hard, even surface,
the right hand sweep of paint elegantly matches the arm of the chair and is thus angled away from the viewer.
And it's a shriller and lighter red than that on the left. This is flat and then indicates a chair of a different scale to the body.
The upper edge of the left red band exactly meets the junction here.
The junction of the background, the white face and grey torso sneak sneaky, summarising the oval impression of interlocking canes.
But how these four planes red, black, white and grey here actually are oriented spatially in relation to each other is highly ambiguous.
You take the white shape that I referred to as a face.
The arrest starts with the central figure. This sort of phallic woman emphasised by the Dunwood pointing which shape inclines thumbs read.
This is vertical with the holes one above, one above another, because of often frequent his sex eyes vertically in an upright profile face.
So this doesn't seem too old. However, it also reads as a face or mask turn sideways and upwards.
The iPhone is therefore not anatomically correct, so the face is turned on its side.
Read at this angle, the great are rising from the red chair to me.
One of the angles of white face. Could be the woman's left arm raised over in supporting her head.
As in so many of the women in lawn chair seen either way the two of perforations, that's the preferred.
His eyes are quite unlike the dots.
Lines, almond shapes or black smudges that usually signify in Picasso's paintings.
While the shift at this period and because his work between Línea and Volumetric,
even within a single sketchbook, a well-known, these holes are unusual with other monumental figures.
Eyes born on the surface or integrated into the form itself as if eroded.
Here they reveal the white facemask was hollow with a thick skin surface through which they'd been punched.
Although the absence of eyes, as in the skull, the blackness within and behind the bones is painted as separate brush strokes,
which contrasts with the other black areas on the canvas and cannot leave is identical with the background or with a shadow chamber.
If the whole thing you see through the local would in fact give onto the red chair, it has to be anterior to the form.
That's Pumpkin's to see it as a skull wanted as this and other works by Picasso at the time of the problem,
the a monument, the demand memory of the poet who's probably his greatest friend.
The face of death seems to reside here. The curve of the flat white faces five to ten light and dark grey triangular shape.
This momentarily appears to read either as concave. That's this with this concave or convex, but it's abruptly fixed.
The bottom here as a pointed wench with a low, sharp end.
Any doubt about this is sculpture, by the way. It overlaps the hollow ball from which it rests.
There's no resolution. There's Robert. An indecisive reunion.
A conjunction of incompatible shapes. Inexhaustibly. Fascinating.
Keep on looking. In a manner reminiscent of the great Cubas pictures where the surface constantly intrudes and impinges on attempts.
Patient to construct consistent forms.
Here it is, as though the metamorphosis that might be the pitcher's subtitle is visibly performed through the paint.
This is another level of metamorphosis. Shapeshifting over and above the past.
Success and transformation of men into slime or driven bulls, into gods, into bulls or swans,
a form visible shifts and alters under one's eyes and contradicts itself.
The alterations in the way we read the great things, all the white woman in an armchair are not clear alternatives.
They hover between indecisions.
There is such a very strikingly confident when in a thoroughly paradoxical manner, destroying any fixative, meaning and by time.
Put this. I think what I tried to to see in this painting.
He put this in its larger context. And I quote, when because it paints the dislocation of forms.
France with the dislocation thought.
This is to say that the immediate intellectual movement, which in other cases leads to ideas, aborts the idea for Bhattarai in his document texts.
And he became anti philosophy is restrictive, authoritarian, abstract, and its abortion was thus a kind of freedom.
OK. I was hoping to be able to show you one section from the exhibition on the cover surrealism.
Whose rooms were arranged. As I said, according to some of the governing ideas of excise.
And in relation to some of the artists that appear in and got him off a room, Picasso.
There was Dali Miro. And the first film was called Places of Pilgrimage.
And there was to show a different that museum objects in relation to other kind of ritual objects.
And contemporary paintings like Picasso's dancers. So I think you're welcome to leave.
But you also say, well, we'll play it and there's music with it.
Because the exhibition included music, jazz, Stravinsky and contemporary music and also film.
So at the very end of this sequence, you see a film of from The Hollywood Review, it's this little piece is about some six minutes long.
It's a bit long. So you. So it was the first person to think of the exhibition and the films,
you see what they do when you came in and at the end of the film, you, Buster Keaton appears.
It's that it's that. It's that he was the comic. So it's trying to, you know, try to somehow play with humour,
with Wooden Soldier Advance that they will take and visit you in this story, heterogeneous collection of things.
This is quite difficult.
I think many people in the world, the puzzle for the first film that gradually it made it made sense as you get around, it can take tennis to again.
Thank you.