Griffin Oleynick and Anthony Domestico at Commonweal:
We’re publishing these exchanges just about every two weeks—a compressed timeline that somehow seems like an eternity amid this summer’s news cycles. Thankfully, art offers its own distinct time signature. When we look at a painting or read a poem, we don’t escape from time, but we do experience it differently. Time contracts and dilates; it folds in and out; mere sequence becomes pattern, shape, meaning. “You are the music / While the music lasts,” as T. S. Eliot puts it. This temporal re-shuffling is one of the gifts of art, and it’s one that I’m especially appreciating during this frenetic summer.
Françoise Gilot’s 1964 memoir Life with Picasso begins by locating us in time: “I met Pablo Picasso in May 1943, during the German Occupation of France. I was twenty-one and I felt already that painting was my whole life.” I enjoyed many things about this book, which recounts the tempestuous ten years that the young painter Gilot and the forty-years-older Picasso spent living and working and raising two children together in France. I loved the gossipy details: Picasso resents shopping for suits because it reminds him of his weirdly proportioned body (“You have a long, sturdy upper torso,” a tailor tactfully declares, “but you’re really a very small man”); Alice B. Toklas speaks “with an accent that sound[s] like a music-hall caricature of an American tourist reading from a French phrase book” and forces “rich and gooey” cakes upon Gilot so as to prevent her from talking too much with Toklas’s partner, Gertrude Stein.
more here.
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