Picasso's Guernica and the Shadow of Incandescence
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Picasso’s Guernica and the Shadow of Incandescence E. Luanne McKinnon San Francisco, California BA, University of Dallas, 1977 MFA (Painting), Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 1983 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Art History McIntire Department of Art and Art History University of Virginia, 2015 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1) Abstract iii-iv 2) Dedication v 3) Acknowledgements vi-x 4) Introduction 11-17 5) Chapter 1: Dark Paradises of Incandescence 18-58 Illustrations 59-90 6) Chapter 2: Illuminating War: Black Sun, Electric Sun 91-130 Illustrations 131-148 7) Chapter 3: Light Becoming Avant-Garde Part 1: A Short History of Electric Light in Early Modernism 149-173 Illustrations 174-192 Part 2: Picasso’s 1912 and 1914 Ampoules Électriques 193-208 Illustrations 209-222 8) Chapter 4: Problems of an Elevated Conception: The Sun, 1930-1937 Part 1: Beyond the Profanation of Light, Crucifixion, 1930 223-249 Illustrations 250-259 Part 2: Electric Seraphim in the Bullring, 1934-1935 260-280 Illustrations 281-294 9) Chapter 5: Guernica in the Conflict of Radiance Part 1: Candles of War 295-312 Illustrations 313-322 Part 2: Making the Sun in Twenty-Five Days 323-337 Illustrations 338-346 10) Bibliography and Sources Cited 347-359 ii ABSTRACT This thesis is an analysis of electric light and depictions of the light bulb in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre beginning with two cubist works from 1912 and 1914, and recurring with great significance in 1935, reaching a symbolic apogee in the masterpiece, Guernica, 1937, and thereafter granting its continued importance in war-time and post-war still lifes. The overlooked importance of the light bulb—the only technological element in a vast repertoire of figures founded upon Antiquity, Alchemy, various mythologies and everyday items that took highly symbolic form in his portraiture, still lifes, and other genre scenes—is considered for the diachronic mode of its dispersal with respect to the specific contexts in which it is seen. The filament light bulb conjoins other important themes in Picasso’s work, but it is distinguished in all circumstances through a conception of malevolence and evil and the breakdown of the natural order of the world as he saw it; that is, as a devolution of the domain of light as the common Good, as a waning life force. Electric light is taken along side Picasso’s “candles of war” that evolve from his adept and keen awareness of the symbolic power of light as a progeny in Barcelona in 1895. Written in five illustrated chapters, the dissertation begins with an overview of the impact that electric light had had upon late nineteenth and early twentieth century life, in Paris in particular, as a scientific advancement, par excellence, and as a new cultural icon. Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the Marxist notion of the phantasmagoria is considered apropos the exceptional electric lighting campaigns of the Paris World Expositions of 1881 and 1900 in which various advancements in the technology of the light bulb contributed to the sense of overall “blinding” as a pacification of the masses. This prologue builds to an analysis of Guernica that premiered at the Spanish Republic Pavilion in the Paris Exposition Universelle iv of 1937 amidst an incandescent extravaganza that was adroitly organized for sociopolitical, capitalist, and fascist agendas, especially by the Third Reich who utilized lighting programs as a tool of propaganda. In that the light in Guernica is a panoptical eye powered by a single, dangling bulb, Picasso countered the prevailing excessive theatrical incandescent culture with an image that has become one of the most potent anti-war icons of the warring twentieth century: the electric sun. The thesis takes into account alterations of the sun as a degraded, inverted, and mocked signifier of sacred light. I demonstrate that from 1930 to the conclusion of Guernica in June of ‘37 how images of the sun were central to Picasso’s ongoing ire against the war in Spain and the burgeoning realities of fascist aggression in pre-World War II France. Given the extraordinary lambency of incandescence and its symbolic impact, beyond the real ways in which it reshaped perception in early modern life, expressed in every epoch of modernism, including cubism, futurism, rayonism, surrealism, constructivism, and vorticism, and in the literary arts, heterogeneous types of electric light and light bulbs may be claimed as the most singularly potent emblems of new utopias and tomorrows borne from the catastrophic strain caused by the Great War and the interwar years leading up to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In that Picasso’s light bulbs are taken for their explicit correspondence to acts of violence, scenes of death and sacrifice, and as a penultimate signifier of darkness-in-the-light, the dissertation identifies the “seraphim light bulbs” of bullfight scenes from 1934-35 that have not been recognized and are indisputable precursors to the electric sun in Guernica. Furthermore, attention has been paid to the morphology of the wire filament both in 1914, identified as the “Filament-Harlequin,” and in 1937, in which I identify the filament in the electric sun as an approximation of the Luftwaffe flight patterns for the aerial bombing scheme in the destruction of the Basque village, Gernika. iv v For my husband, Daniel Reeves v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In memory of my three muses: Geraldine Badgley McKinnon, my beloved mother Barbara Friedman Rakoover, my dearest friend Lydia Csató Gasman, my exceptional teacher This dissertation was begun during my graduate studies with the late Lydia Gasman from 1992-1999. It was in the realm of her authority as the scholar who had decoded the deepest implications of Picasso’s surrealist period writings and iconography, applying aplomb of genius to the stratum of conflicts inherent to that work that I was initiated in the depths of his protean art. Under Lydia’s particular beam, I benefited from her tempestuous magic, and mystery, in ways that are still coming into form. As her final doctoral student at Virginia, she did not oversee my late-in-coming dissertation that owes so very much to her life’s work. As Dr. Gasman had said of Meyer Schapiro, whom she studied with at Columbia, I am also very fortunate for the “unforgettable experience” of studying with her. During the years in which I was ABD, I was Instructor in Modern Art at the Edinburgh College of Art (Scotland); and, served as a two-time museum director at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College (Florida) and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. During my tenures in those institutions (2005-2012) my work as an art historian included the authoring, co-authoring or editing of over ten publications including, Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 (Yale Press 2010) and Corps Exquis: Fragments from a History of the Human Form, 1585-2006 (Rollins 2008); curating or organizing over twenty-nine exhibitions; and, overseeing ancillary projects including the creation of the Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program at the UNM Art Museum, Albuquerque. vi vii Resuming the dissertation in 2012 was made wholly possible due to the unflagging support and friendship of David Summers, William R. Kenan Professor of Art History, and Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Art History who encouraged the work to completion. I remain grateful for their brilliance in the art of writing and their expertise in the long history of image making. I learned of ekphrasis from Paul and the beauty of the intertwined voices of poetry and art that herald the soul which he so eloquently spoke about in seminar. From David Summers, I developed a mind for the linkage between works of art to larger concerns, of the ways in which philosophical thought girds enquiries that are otherwise purely visual, and that expansive approach has in itself been enormously rewarding under his tutelage. It was he who sparked my imagination with the phrase, “drawing as if to possess,” said by Picasso, which David applied in his explication of a drawing by Rembrandt. If possession was a factor in an artist’s realization of his subject, in such a way that the occurrence of signature styles and the reasons for modes of expression materialized, just how that might mean drove my curiousity. Such were those rich times in Charlottesville. At this later hour in my relationship to the University I would like to express my thanks and sincere gratitude to University Professor in Art History, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, and Jessica Feldman, Professor of English who served on the thesis committee as essential readers of the dissertation in its final form and contributed their expertises to the defense conversation. With many years invested in this labor of love, the long overdue list of thanks also goes to: At the University of Virginia, an appreciation for the beneficence of various funds from the McIntire Department of Art and the University Art Museum that assisted in research at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée Picasso, Paris; and, the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid. Within the Department, I thank Lawrence vii viii Goedde, Chair; Daniel Ehnbom, Director of Graduate Students; my former professors now affiliated with different institutions, Howard Singerman, Matthew Affron, and, Gretchen Umholtz; and appreciation of professor emeritus of Byzantine Art, John Yiannis; Larry Bouchard, Department of Religious Studies; and, memories of the late Richard Rorty; thanks and gratitude also to Sylvia New Strawn, former staff administrator in the McIntire Department of Art. My friendships with UVa graduate colleagues, Dominique Surh, Abigail Christenson, Creston C.