T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #3

This is the third post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb Picasso and Truth (2013). It’s a description of Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding on to the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is failing. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.

I’ve chosen this passage to make a point. The word “imagination” in the first line is key. Clark is an imaginative responder to painting. He feels and thinks imaginatively. I relish his definition of “touch” – “the imagination of contact and softness and curvature.” Nude on Black Armchair is not a painting that invites your imagination to touch it, he says. Touch is “consumed by something else” – “a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property.” He sees the nude’s hand holding the white flower. He describes the flower as “clawlike.” This is imaginative description. Not everyone would see it like that. But Clark does. He’s trying to imagine his way into Picasso’s imagination. He calls the “clawlike white flower” an “emblem” of the nude’s sexual unavailability. She will “never be anyone’s property.” Fingers and petals appear “predatory.” Her body’s pale mauve is “otherworldly,” “unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone.” “The blue wall to the left is icy cold.” The woman’s blonde hair is “sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast.” Wow! Clark’s imagination is on a heater. He’s not done. “Blacks encase her as if for eternity.” And then this – the clinching line, the most inspired of all – “The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.” That line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s true, too. Look at the rubber plant. Clark says it’s a rubber plant. I believe him. Look at it. It does appear to be escaping through the window – escaping from the sleeping naked monster. It’s a strange interpretation of a strange painting. I love it. 

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932).