Henry Tonks, Head of the Slade The painting I want to talk about is this one: Guitar and Mandolin. Having invented Cubism, Picasso was probably the first artist to lose faith in it. For years he and George Braque had been a double act. Following the breakup came an odd shuttling back and forth of different styles across the next decade, of feints and impostures. But what precisely do these differences in style-type represent?
Do they represent different prospective audiences? Different social attitudes to taste? But perhaps they represent some deeper change or retrogression within the artist. The similarities are intriguing when one considers the famous rivalry between Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. But is it true that Guitar and Mandolin was intended as a kind of avantgarde diss track? Admittedly I am not at all very interested in the veracity of this claim.
But at the same time, it establishes an interesting line of inquiry. After all, if Guitar and Mandolin is a caricature of Matissean Cubism the question becomes whether the mockery of the mockery holds any kind of actual authentic status.
Who in the end is actually being subverted? Is it Matisse or is it Picasso himself? Tenderness and monstrosity tend to coexist alongside primitivism and classicism. Picasso relishes pitting these extremes against one another and aggravating the especially hard-to-settle disputes of taste, competence and artistic failure. Many critics have seen fit to retrospectively announce Cubism as the final great achievement of 19th century bohemia, a swansong for the century that effectively belonged to middle class life.
La Boheme was a particular kind of middle class lifestyle β of structured instability and precarity. It was a provisional margin-space, a fake utopia for young people and artists who dreamed of life outside the warm safety net of bourgeois society. The rooms typically inhabited by bohemians were often dilapidated and in need of renovation. Bedrooms doubled as studios.
