Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning, 1912

Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (Musée Picasso)

(music) ("Sex Partners for
Kindergartners" by Scalding Lucy)

Beth: Let's talk about
Picasso's great painting

"Still Life With Chair Caning" from 1912.

Voiceover: It's barely
a painting at all ...

makes it great. (laughs)

Steven: I think in many ways, it at least

looks at least like a disaster.

What's great about it is the ideas that

he's thrown into this painting.

Beth: Since it's not so
beautiful to look at,

I guess we have to talk about the ideas.

Steven: Why isn't it beautiful?

What do you want from a painting

for it to be beautiful?

Beth: My big problem with why this is

not beautiful is that
it's all grey and brown.

It's my big problem with
analytic Cubist in general.

I like color.

Steven: This is why people
walk by these paintings

in a museum and they say,

"I know that's important,
but do I have to look at it?"

Beth: Also, all of these
analytic Cubist paintings

tend to look the same.

Voiceover: So how does one then enter into

the painting and stop and pay attention?

What's the entree into this painting?

Steven: Well, it's pretty arresting.

If you were seeing this in the museum

as opposed to on a computer screen,

the first thing you would notice is that

only the top and the
right side of the canvas,

that is only area here and this area here,

are really paint.

The entire bottom left
part of the canvas is

this other material which
is called "oil cloth".

Beth: Has anyone ever
introduced oil cloth,

put oil cloth on a painting before?

Steven: [Brock] had, but just recently.

Before that, of course not.

The reason for "of course not", is because

oil cloth was the cheapest material ...

Beth: Right, you buy it like roller.

Steven: It's like contact paper.

It's the stuff you line
your shelves with or

use on a cheap table so
you can wipe up spills.

Beth: Hardly high art material.

Steven: So what does that mean?

What is that suggesting
Picasso is doing here?

Beth: He's making art into garbage.

Steven: Into trash, that's right.

Voicemail: Or visa versa.

Beth: Or trash into art, absolutely.

Voiceover: But again, how does one enter

into this without understanding
all of those things

which are keen to the common viewer?

Beth: I don't think one does.

I think this painting
only becomes great when

one understands its place
in the history of art.

Steven: I don't think that Picasso

actually expected many people to

look at this painting in the first place.

If they did, I think that he was speaking

to a very small audience.

Beth: How big is this painting?

Steven: It's less than two feet across.

Beth: So is it about the size of a table?

Steven: It's about the size of a table.

That's exactly what it is, in fact.

We're really looking at a breakfast table.

We're putting up on the screen now ...

What you're seeing is, on the upper right,

a detail of this "Still
Life With Chair Caning."

But let's just stop and even just say what

this chair caning is, and
this oil cloth business.

On the left, you can see some rolls of

oil cloth that are for sale.

You'll notice that there's
a printed pattern on them.

Below, oil cloth being
used as a tablecloth.

The printed pattern that Picasso bought

in a hardware store as if he had gone to

Home Depot or something
and bought this material.

Had printed on it a photograph of,

well, it really wasn't a photograph, but

a drawing of chair caning, so this

sort of repetitive pattern.

He takes it and he
literally just glues it down

onto a canvas and then
just paints over it.

Beth: What's interesting to me is that the

chair caning in the painting is incredibly

illusionistic and looks really looks like

the chair caning on this chair.

Steven: So let me ask you
then, is Picasso cheating?

Historically we've
always tied the notion of

the conceptual and the
great artist to his ability

his ability to render,
her ability to render

illusionistically and
so is Picasso cheating

by going out and buying this factory-made,

reproduced material and
sticking it into the

painting and saying, "I don't
have to paint this anymore."

Beth: Not only that, but
the idea of skill and

greatness being calculated by how well

one renders reality becomes sort of moot

because machines can print reality on

cheap stuff and you can
buy it at Home Depot.

Why wouldn't artists?

Male voiceover: Obviously
this is a discussion

that we wouldn't have today because

we would never consider that cheating,

taking found objects.

Was that a discussion when
this painting appeared?

Steven: It was. In fact, I
think it's a discussion that

not only begins to really sort of

very consciously break those taboos

but it also sends out
what will eventually,

in about 50 years, become
known as "pop art".

This idea of actually looking to our

new industrial culture, or
visual industrial culture

and saying, "What is
the place of that world

in the realm of fine art?"

Voiceover: Didn't [DuSchoen]
do that before pop art?

Steven: He did. Absolutely.

Beth: He was [unintelligible].

Voiceover: What is the JOU?

What do you think that's all about?

Steven: Well, the JOU had a couple of

different meanings as I understand it.

One is a reference to the
French word for "game".

Voiceover: [JOUA], that's what I thought.

Beth: That's right.

Voiceover: That's exactly what I thought.

Steven: And the second is, those are the

first three letters of the
French word "newspaper".

Voiceover: Journal.

Steven: Precisely.

So if you read this, the
JOU, you can actually

read it in a very literal sense as a

rolled up newspaper on a table.

It also has that double entente and

suggests that the entire painting is

a type of play.

Voiceover: [French word]

Steven: Yes.

Beth: So what we're
looking at is a table top,

but if we look at the
pictures on the left of

cafe tables with chairs with chair caning,

those tables are round so ...

Steven: So what's the problem?

Male voiceover: That this is an ellipse as

opposed to ...

Beth: How do you get an ellipse?

You get an ellipse by looking at a circle

from an oblique viewpoint.

Steven: Go to the next image, one forward,

now you know the table
you're seeing on the right

is in fact, a perfectly round table,

but we're looking at it obliquely,

we're looking at it at
an angle and so we're

actually seeing it as
a kind of ellipse that

Picasso's offering us.

So is it possible that
we're actually looking at

a glass-topped table and in fact,

what we're seeing as chair caning is

the chair flipped underneath it.

Voiceover: What a neat way
to look at the painting.

That's really cool.

Beth: Why take apart all
the forms that are on top?

We're looking through the table,

we're thinking about the idea of

looking through the table
and the table is glass,

also suggests an idea,
an important idea of

western art of the painting being a window

into a world that looks very real.

But on the other hand, Picasso's making it

really clear that he's
not looking at things

illusionistically, he's
looking at the objects

on the table from lots of
different places [unintelligible].

Voiceover: You're seeing
everything simultaneously

without any kind of distinction.

Everything's been flattened so they all

share the same plane almost.

That's an interesting, disconcerting
way of looking at things.

Steven: I think you're
both right on target where

he wants to show us his
entire visual understanding

of this sort of place, this event.

He's not just giving us the table top,

he's giving us the table
top with the chair,

and all of the objects
really deconstructed so

that they include not
what he would see from

a single perspective, as you said,

but what he would see in his
full visual understanding

of each of these forms over
time with his visual memory.

Beth: So what we have on the
table apparently is a clay pipe.

Steven: You can see that right below here.

Here's the bowl of the
pipe and here's its stem

down here which is obviously leaning

right up over the newspaper almost

intersecting that newspaper.

Beth: And then over here, that's
a little bit more obvious.

We've got a detail over here on the right.

Steven: You can see the segmentations of

some citrus; we put a
lemon up as an example,

but it's being cut through by the knife.

Can you see the blade of the knife?

Beth: Where's the blade of the knife?

Steven: That's right, more
like a cleaver than a knife.

This would be the blade
and this here, the handle.

Beth: Oh.

Steven: In between, of
course the newspaper,

the pipe on the left and, I'm sorry ...

The newspaper and the pipe on the left,

and the knife and the
lemon on the right is

well, can you make it out?

Voiceover: Where?

Steven: This and everything above it.

Beth: A bottle of wine?

Steven: A glass.

Beth: A glass.

Steven: A piece of stemware.

Beth: A little bit like
what we had on the table.

Steven: That's right. If you
look at the glass of red wine,

you'll see not only this kind of wonderful

reflectivity in it, but you can see
the lip of the top of the glass,

you can see the plane
of the top of the wine,

and then of course, the stem
and the base of the glass.

If you go back over to,
lets see if we can zoom in

on the central glass.

Maybe by going forward.

Beth: I think if we go
back to the painting

that we had in the
beginning you'll see it.

Steven: Okay, so now if
we look at this carefully,

you can see here down at the bottom,

this kind of wonderful
ring and can you just

imagine that now as the base of the glass

that it's resting on?

Look at it. We're looking down at it and

then look at this line
that's more horizontal.

Is it possible that Picasso's taken

a second viewpoint and
we're looking across

this sort of thick object, the stem,

the base of the stem, the bowl from

several different angles and then

looking at the top, looking across the top

and then looking down at the top here.

Voiceover: So basically
what we're looking at

is a painting within
which there are multiple

viewpoints of different objects and

they're all fused together.

But I have a couple
questions about the rope.

Is the rope literally a rope?

Steven: It's a real rope
that Picasso actually

went to a ropemaker and had specifically

custom made for this canvas.

Voiceover: It's funny
that you have the rope

containing something, it's
the one literal container

of something that seems
so uncontained in a way.

Everything inside of it seems,

you don't know what's holding it together

and it's the rope itself functions as

some glue to keep it all together.

Steven: It really bundles this mess.

Voiceover: It does bundle
it and then adds a little,

when you show this painting
next to the table top,

it's the one literal
reference to the table ...

to that, I guess it was a
silver edge to the table.

Steven: I think we've seen a sort of theme

restaurant, seafoodie places.

Voiceover: Right.

Steven: Tables with ropes around them.

I think the rope really is a problem.

I think it's a question as to why ...

Voiceover: It seems like it doesn't fit.

Steven: Yeah.

Voiceover: It seems like an attempt to

domesticate something
that's not domesticatable.

Steven: But does it point out some of the

conflicts that exist between the oil cloth

and the chair caning inside,

and the little rendering through paint in

a sort of Cubist portion
of the painting at the top?

By showing this sort of contrast between

the evidentiality of the rope and the

space of the view within it,

sort of very consciously setting up

something that's clearly
actual and tactile,

like something that is truly visual.

Beth: We have a lot of levels of reality

We think Plato would have
had a lot of fun with this

because we have the real rope,

we have the real chair caning,

oil cloth with the chair caning ...

Steven: Which has an illusion.

Beth: Which has an
illusion of chair caning,

and then we have the
painting which creates

a kind of, in a way,
probably a higher level of

reality by showing all viewpoints at once

instead of a single
viewpoint to a greater or

almost divine reality.

Voiceover: Wouldn't this be wonderful as

an actual table top?
(Beth giggles)

Voiceover: As opposed to a painting?

Voiceover: You might put just a pane of

oval glass on it, it'd be fabulous.

Beth: It would be fabulous. (laughs)

Voiceover: And I think you'd pay a lot

more attention to it.

(music) ("In The Sky With
Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)