Blurring of objects with space quotes

Hockney, in True to Life

“…quantum physics is something way outside my ordinary understanding or involvement, but I quickly found incredible connections with the sorts of things I was concerned about. For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics, it’s as if the world exists outside of us. Its over there, out there, it works mechanically (like a camera), and it will do so with or without us. In short, were really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown how it cannot be. Mr. Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer; the supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated. There can be no measurement without the measurer. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you wont be able its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, science believed that given enough technical advancement, it would eventually be able to measure anything, but Heisenberg that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices but that the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific enquiry had gone on as though we could measure the world as if we weren’t in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing, so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur, just as they do in cubism.   
page 68

Gayford thinks relativity may explain why Picasso painted females as monuments; because of his height compared to theirs:


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‘Picasso was a very small man, but finely proportioned so that he looked good. He was no more than 5 feet of 5’1”. I remember him talking about London, where he stayed after the First World War, in 1919. He complained that in London the men’s trousers were up to here, and he gestured at his chin level, and they might have been, just about. I was aware of how much his attitude to life was affected by his being so small. He would mention, for example, when talking about women, how big they were’.                                                                                                                                                      In fact, this does illuminate aspects of Picasso’s art: the looming female nudes, for example, and naked giantesses – massive and desirable.

Page 149 –

Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970), Shunryu Suzuki, Edited by Trudy Dixon, Weatherhill, New York & Tokyo

We are at the centre of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent. If you have this kind of experience, this kind of existence, you have absolute independence; you will not be bothered by anything.

Page 31

 John Richardson - A Life of Picasso

Female Nude, 1909, Oil on Canvas, 35 x 28 inches

As the series of Santa Barbara – Fernande’s progresses, Picasso switches backwards and forwards between long shots and close ups. He bifurcates and crenellates Fernande’s forehead like the spurs of the peak. And just as he merges the faceted head with the faceted mountain, he merges the faceted mountain with the faceted sky. As a result, sky, mountain, drapery, woman, cohere into a single organism…

Robert Irwin on Figure / Ground in Cubism

“What you’re saying in cubism is that the figure, this thing of value, is no longer isolated or dissociated from ground by meaning, but that it’s interlocked and interwarped with this ground, that they’re interdependent.”

            “If you take the cubist idea and really press it, though, what you have is what I was now being forced to deal with, at least in my reading of it. In other words, the marriage of figure and ground – which is how they always term the cubist achievement – of necessity leads to the marriage between painting and environment; essentially they are the same thing, just taking it one step further. When I married the painting to the environment, suddenly it had to deal with the environment around it as being equal to the figure and having as much meaning”.

( Good links with some stuff Merleau-Ponty ahs said about consciousness being part of the environment (Maybe??))

page 109

Martin Gayford on Freauds portraits in Man With a Blus Scarf.

The idea the sitter has to be there while the painter fills in empty space around them might seem crazy, but it has a considerable amount of pedigree in the history of art. The late nineteenth-century sculptor Medardo Ross, for example – an artist very different from LF – though exactly the same. ‘In nature’, he wrote to a friend, ‘there are no limits, and there cannot be in a work of art. It should capture the atmosphere that surrounds the figures, the colour that animates it…When I do a portrait I cannot limit myself to the lines of the head since this head belongs to a body and exists in an environment that influences it: it is part of a whole that I cannot suppress.’

Medardo Rosso in a letter to Edmond Claris, quoted in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 27

Braque’s head wound [WWI] initiated a metaphysical process which would lead him to a state of néant (non-existence). “I have made a great discovery,” he said many years later. “I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them, and between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one sort of reaches an intellectual néant – what I can only describe as a state of peace – which makes everything possible and right”. Page 429