As time goes by, perspective gets refreshed. We can look at Tony Tuckson anew.
After all these years, we’re still trying to digest Picasso.
You have to get through Picasso to map out a different place.
You can’t go hiding in a pre-Cezanne world and pretend Picasso was an aberration.
Artists get through Picasso in different ways. They think they get through him, but you really have to get him to go through him.
Did Tony Tuckson really get through Picasso?
He got the look of it, the raw energy of it. He got the new space. He got past Picasso the same way as De Kooning. He got through, over, with the assistance of all those people. Mark Toby, Motherwell.
In the end you probably get past Picasso and lose ‘drawing’ in the process. Everyone who got past Picasso lost the capacity to steer form with subject.p
Without subject you are left with gesture (Pollock, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, all the Americans really.)
We didn’t notice much at the time. The farewell to drawing seemed like a fair exchange for the new pictorial inventions and opportunities.
Fifty years later though, or a hundred years later we do miss the pleasure of the arrangement of form that drawing brings.
For those of us who didn’t know better, who grew up in a post-cubist world, the making of art could not be made outside the context of Picasso.
Picasso wasn’t just inventing something. He was describing how we perceived a new world. His success was in providing the shape the new world took.
Nothing would ever be just one view again. We would forever look at something from every orientation and from every cultural perspective at once.
Just as it’s hard to get around Picasso, it’s hard to identify that you have got around him from what an artwork might look like.
Tuckson was aided in his Picasso crossing by the indigenous world.
Pollock might have shown us that you can steer the flow of paint more successfully with a stick than a brush.
Tuckson noticed that an ochre smeared hand could leave a mark on a body that was no less precise. Tuckson learnt that roughness was the new refinery. You could tune a painting precisely by building the whole picture ‘at once’.
Fairweather was assisted by Chinese art to bring about his Picasso cure.
To achieve the purity of form desired both Fairweather and Tuckson relinquished drawing in the same way.
Ultimately, you cannot steer a line that is convulsing. At the time we all thought we had to convulse to get to the essence, the core, the substance.
We were attempting to integrate an unconscious process as directed by Freud, However, having a virtual nervous breakdown provided no access to surpassing Picasso.
If we have failed to surpass Picasso, we should not be too concerned. Picasso had failed to surpass Cezanne, who was the purest Cubist.
Compared to Cezanne, Picasso was a show pony, fodder for the fame machine that twentieth century printing and publication provided.
This new project that seemed exhausted mostly, by the mid twentieth century is still in its infancy so we can relax.