In this week’s TLS – a note from the Deputy Editor

For much of his life and ever since his death, Picasso has been universally
accepted as one of the greatest artists ever known. But his works of the
1920s and 30s still sometimes met with puzzlement or hostility – Carl Jung,
for example, called him an “underworld” personality who followed “the
demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil”. It is just these “pathological”
aspects of Picasso’s vision that interest T. J. Clark in his new study –
“ambitious but exasperating”, according
to our reviewer Jack Flam – of the artist who sought “something similar
to what Nietzsche characterized as Untruth: a post-moral, post-Christian
confrontation with reality in all its monstrous, unfiltered forms”. From a
new edition of Paul Cézanne’s letters, Gabriel Josipovici forms a very
different picture, “a group of happy, highly educated friends, steeped in
Virgil and Horace, enjoying a life of long hikes, picnics and swims in the
rivers”: hardly the Cézanne of popular legend, a solitary seeker after
truth, sacrificing all for his art – though such qualifications are lost “on
a public hungry for modern saints now the religious variety has gone for
good”.

Ireland, Yeats’s land of plaster saints, becomes “a land of shame, a land of
murder and a land of strange sacrificial women” in the stories of Edna
O’Brien. Joyce
Carol Oates enjoys the passion, lyricism and humour with which O’Brien
animates a world of “emotional extravagance and emotional starvation”. The
American poet James Dickey was no stranger to emotional extravagance, as
recorded by Jules Smith who reviews Dickey’s 960-page Complete Poems,
in which among much else “Despair and exultation / Lie down together and
thrash / In the hot grass”. Dickey’s editor considers that he was
“transformed into a poet by World War II”. Some of his compatriots were
transformed into conservationists: the “monuments men” who were charged with
rescuing the incomparable artistic heritage of an Italy under bombardment.
John Foot reviews a second instalment of their story, soon to be a major
motion picture.

Alan Jenkins