In this episode, Tom and Tim start with Henry Darger- the kind of artist you’re supposed to not want to be, and get to Picasso, the kind you’re supposed to want to be! We unpack it a little, and might come back to this.
Ends with a reading from John Berger’s The Success and Failure of Picasso
Thanks for listening!
00:00 - Henry Darger
01:28 - Mythic Henry Darger is not who you want to be
3:00 - The Vivian Girls and the mythos
3:45 - Tom's connection to Darger and the discovery of the Darger work
6:00 - "Henry would just scurry" + his life
9:14 - William Blake, rejected and "crazy". Mad and bitter
11:30 - Creative impulses and art school
12:00 - "You want to be Picasso"
13:00 - John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso
14:00 - Late era drawings no one talks about the work
15:55 - Joseph Campbell on Picasso, how do you keep going, when you were so accomplished at 13 and 14 years old?
17:00 - Darger's full life
17:50 - We create our own experience to develop from
19:00 - "He's just one of those people"
20:00 - William Blake, unaccepted
20:30 - Blake's nemesis
21:30 - Blake's isolation
23:45 - Darger had no centering principle
24:45 - Darger, impenetrable, Blake not so much
26:00 - Donald Ault, Blake scholar and Uncle Scrooge scholar
27:00 - Tom's reading corner: The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger
33:21 - Portrait of Ms. HP and Nude Dressing Her Hair
35:40 - Sees self in women, can only be known via sex, he returns sex to nature
38:40 - Last great works, he has only ever expressed sensations through his own body
41:45 - Picasso, communist
44:20 - Picasso, King of Californie
49:20 - The final 180 drawings. The body ages and the imagination does not. He envies the monkey. The very idea of art attacked by nature.
