The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study (view source)

Revision as of 19:34, 25 September 2020

No change in size , 25 September 2020

m

citation error

Eswilliams

15

edits

@@ Line 58: / Line 58: @@
 It is surely significant that in this essay,widely recognized as a key to Mailer’s thinking (even by Poirier, who allows that it “is one of three pieces that are probably indispensable to any understanding of Mailer’s oeuvre”,{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=15}}) Picasso is the only artist mentioned. His special significance is further highlighted in that the citation appears not only in the essay’s final paragraph, but is also one of the very few references to the book’s title throughout ''Cannibals and Christians'': “Cannibals are Christians. And forms which look alike are alike. In some mysterious way. Or at least they are alike until the souls which create them become the spirit of treachery. So says Picasso, I suspect.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=375}}
-Mailer’s lifelong concern with the necessary probity of form finds in Picasso the perfect artist. Far from being obtuse, the preamble to “The Political Economy of Time” has admirable clarity: “a future to life depends on creating forms of an intensity which will capture the complexity of modern experience and dignify it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=311}} The image of “capture” recalls the earlier essay, “An Eye on Picasso,” in which the painter is hailed as a victorious commander who has achieved a “conquest of form so complete that all modern painting including the relative emancipation from form of such artists as Hofmann and Pollock derive from his Napoleonic marches”{{efn|Mailer also applies the personification to Monroe:“She is a female Napoleon.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p==210, 226}}}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959b|p=461}} Mailer’s Picasso is all of that as well as a demiurge,{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}} subordinate only to God but invested with His supreme power. This is made even clearer in the biography, wherein the artist and the deity are shown to be in deep collaboration:
+Mailer’s lifelong concern with the necessary probity of form finds in Picasso the perfect artist. Far from being obtuse, the preamble to “The Political Economy of Time” has admirable clarity: “a future to life depends on creating forms of an intensity which will capture the complexity of modern experience and dignify it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=311}} The image of “capture” recalls the earlier essay, “An Eye on Picasso,” in which the painter is hailed as a victorious commander who has achieved a “conquest of form so complete that all modern painting including the relative emancipation from form of such artists as Hofmann and Pollock derive from his Napoleonic marches”{{efn|Mailer also applies the personification to Monroe:“She is a female Napoleon.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p==210, 226}}}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959a|p=461}} Mailer’s Picasso is all of that as well as a demiurge,{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}} subordinate only to God but invested with His supreme power. This is made even clearer in the biography, wherein the artist and the deity are shown to be in deep collaboration:
 <blockquote>We have to assume that he is not only God-driven in his ambitions ... but that he feels an uncomfortable intimacy with the Deity ... When Picasso draws,the line that delineates a limb seems to spring up out of some graceful collaboration between his hand and the power that conceived the design of that limb-God may be as amorphous as a cloud, but God is also as clear as a well defined form.... The key is to be found in form. Form is the language that God has decided to share with a few painters, the very best painters. They are apostles serving the mystery of form.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=205-206}}</blockquote>