The Success and Failure of Picasso
Page 10
60 Picasso. Bacchanale. 1944
61 Picasso. The Mirror. 1932
I am this one as she cries.
62 Picasso. Weeping Head. 1937
I am that woman as she turns to see me.
63 Picasso. Figure. 1939
Yet the condition of such identification is the rejection of all intellectual conventions and systems. The displacement of the parts of the body is the visual counterpart of this rejection. It is as though we are brought so close to the sensation portrayed that the minimum distance needed for self-consciousness is denied. This is why the question: What does this picture mean? is almost unanswerable. Or at least the answer will at first sound like nonsense: it means being it.
Picasso’s contribution to our culture through works like these is very considerable. He has made us aware of sensation as no other artist has done, and has extended the language of painting so that it may express this awareness. But such works depend for their significance on what they appear to undermine and destroy. Without Poussin, Picasso would not make sense. The distortions only count for us because, unlike children or animals, we can recognize and exactly measure them as such. Our awareness of physical sensation, as communicated by a work of art, is in fact dependent upon a very high level of self-consciousness. Picasso himself must have realized this creative dialectic: these works, apparently so free, are acts of homage to the European tradition of drawing. Every displacement is still startling. Each destruction is made for a specific creative purpose. One can feel the tension of the daring. Such work is like the boldest surgery.
After 1944 the tension began to go. The vertical invader became sentimental. The road by which he had invaded and conquered he now offered as an escape route. He issued invitations to Arcadia. Sensations are very near to pain. So sensations disappeared. Idealizations and jokes took their place. Picasso began to play Pan – as fathers play Father Christmas for their children. It wasn’t that he lost his integrity. It was simply that he no longer knew what to do, and those who might have helped him, failed him. He was left with the most human and, for a modern artist, a most dangerous wish – the wish to give pleasure. And so it was that Picasso became institutionalized:
64 Picasso. Triptych. 1946
65 Picasso. Joie de vivre. 1946
Picasso’s Arcadia is very unlike the traditional Arcadia in European painting. Compare Joie de vivre with, for example, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. The difference is not only one of style. The traditional Arcadia represents an idealization of the contemporary world. Bellini’s serving maids are not even country girls – let alone primeval creatures: they are sophisticated Venetian beauties. The men, in their expressions and attitudes, have all the sensibilities and weaknesses of rich courtiers. What Arcadia really means here is an ideal day in the country. Jean Renoir’s film of Une Partie de campagne is in the same Arcadian tradition – though it concerns modern Parisians. Picasso’s painting does not fit into this tradition. It makes no reference to the contemporary world, and ignores any development of knowledge or feelings. In the very broadest sense of the term it is unconcerned with culture. Its gaiety and vitality are of the kind which precede knowledge. Man and animal are still undifferentiated. And yet – and this is why it begins to be sentimental – the method of painting, the way of drawing is extremely schematic. It is a painting, not about sensations – which do indeed bring us very close to animals – but about an idea: the idea that we would all be happier if we had no ideas.
66 Giovanni Bellini. The Feast of the Gods. 1514
Other things could be said about this painting. As a kind of complement to its sentimentality, it also has wit. It works quite well as a decoration. But now more exaggeratedly and less consistently – Picasso chooses the primitive, the archaic.
He first made such a choice as a direct criticism of what he saw around him. An element of criticism still exists. In 1946 Joie de vivre affirmed life, even if of an excessively innocent kind, in the face of a terribly war-scarred Europe. But now, from the age of sixty-five onwards, Picasso’s imagination begins to gravitate naturally towards the archaic. An attitude, once consciously held, has become a cast of mind.
Thus, in 1951, when Picasso painted Massacre in Korea, the effect is almost the opposite of what he intended. The soldiers, despite their sten-guns, are so heraldic and archaic that either we lose the sense that this is a modern massacre, or else we consider the soldiers as symbols of an eternal, unchanging force of cruelty and evil. Either way our indignation, which the painting was meant to provoke, is blunted.
67 Picasso. Massacre in Korea. 1951
In 1952 Picasso painted one of his last major works on a theme of his own. Since then most of his paintings have been based on other artist’s pictures. The work consisted of two large panels: War and Peace.
68 Picasso. Peace. 1952
The panel Peace can well stand as a late testament of Picasso’s. He has always been an artist concerned with men. He has never been an aesthete. And so in this panel we can read his comments, as an old man, on the human condition.
He is profoundly humanist – that is to say he believes the highest good is the happiness of man. In this picture (unlike the Joie de vivre) he suggests that culture is one of the conditions of this happiness. Such culture implies social organization. A woman reads a book. A man writes. Another plays pipes. A boy drives a horse. Two women dance. The scene is idyllic.
Yet what is remarkable is that there is no hint of the twentieth century in this vision. The objects which are included – an hourglass, a fish-bowl, a bird-cage, a reed pipe, the fire which the man on the right is making, the harness for the horse like one used for a plough – most of these actually suggest an earlier, simpler civilization.
And as if to emphasize this, there is then the magical element. The horse, like Pegasus, has wings. The sun has an eye. Birds fly in the fish-bowl, and fish swim in the birdcage.
Of course one must not interpret such a picture literally. One must allow for inherited symbols, outlasting the civilization of their origin. One must grant poetic licence. My point is that the poetry of this painting is simple, fantastic, legendary, and, as it were, proverbial. It belongs to the tradition of folk stories and nursery rhymes:
I saw a fishpond all on fire
I saw a house bow to a squire
I saw a balloon made of lead
I saw a coffin drop down dead
I saw two sparrows run a race
I saw two horses making lace
I saw a girl just like a cat
I saw a kitten wear a hat
I saw a man who saw these too
And said though strange
They all were true.
It is a painting which, to make us imagine peace and happiness, encourages us to believe in innocence rather than experience. Let us look at Picasso’s Peace beside two other paintings.
Titian’s Shepherd and Nymph is also an old man’s vision of an idyllic world. It is also set in a kind of Arcadia with a shepherd and his pipes. Yet there is no question here of this couple belonging to a simpler civilization. Everything about them suggests sophistication (look at the woman’s hand and the quality of her skin) and experience: experience which, by its very nature, must include a sense of time passing, hence the way she turns and he leans, as though both recognize that they must soon move. It is a vision whose beauty and spell depend upon the acceptance of change. The change when she turns round. The change when he, a moment ago, stopped playing. The change when he, in a minute, will move towards her. The
change as the light fades. The change when she is dressed. It is a painting which, although it is nostalgic because Titian is old, affirms the maximum possible awareness of the world, the maximum possible experience of change.
69 Titian. Shepherd and Nymph. c. 1570
It is always difficult to compare works of art across the centuries: the degrees and growing points of hope and fear differ so much. The Titian is largely an affirmative picture. Among modern works it makes me think of a poem by Yeats which is far more melancholy but which deals with the poet’s consciousness of the same kind of experience. I quote it in contrast to the innocence of the nursery rhyme.
‘Love is all
Unsatisfied
That cannot take the whole
Body and Soul’;
And that is what Jane said.
‘Take the sour
If you take me
I can scoff and lour
And scold for an hour!’
‘That’s certainly the case,’ said he.
‘Naked I lay
The grass my bed;
Naked and hidden away
That black day’;
And that is what Jane said.
‘What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown
If Time were but gone.’
‘That’s certainly the case,’ said he.
By comparison with the Titian, the dancing figures in the Picasso, for all their violent movements, are quite static. And because they are static, and ‘Time is gone’, they are innocent.
The other painting which it may be useful to put beside Picasso’s Peace is a modern one: the Composition aux deux perroquets by Fernand Léger.
70 Léger. Composition aux deux perroquets. 1935–9
One of the main themes of Léger’s later work was Leisure. A day out in the country. This brought Léger quite close to the Renaissance idea of Arcadia. And for Léger, like the Renaissance artists but unlike Picasso, this Arcadia had to be modern, had to be an idealization of the present. The Renaissance Arcadia was a vision of the courtly life freed from the intrigues of the city. Léger’s Arcadia is a vision of the modern world granted plenty and a twenty-hour week.
And how naturally – even in an ‘unrealistic’ figure composition – Léger maintains contact with the modern, industrialized world! His figures never slip away out of history into timelessness like Picasso’s do. The man’s shirt is machine-made. The posts which reach up to touch the clouds are twentieth-century architectural units. The ropes might be made of nylon. The miracles are no longer mysterious (like the fish in the bird-cage) but the result of human control. For Picasso, acrobats have always been wandering players who belong nowhere and are never still. For Léger, acrobats were builders who made constructions of their bodies to transcend nature and gravity. For Picasso their appeal lay in their elusiveness. For Léger it lay in their collective skill. The implication of this painting is that everything ought to be able to be controlled and constructed for man’s pleasure – even the clouds in the sky.16
You may say this is naïve and only another form of innocence. But here we must make a distinction between innocence as an aim of experience, and innocence as a natural state of being. The former is a social idea which, like the concept of Utopia, is the result of men seeing the possibility of a future which could be better than the corrupt present. Innocence as a natural state of being is by definition changeless. No such thing exists. The theoretical possibility of such a state inspired Rousseau – but part of his greatness was that he never glossed over or hid the contradiction in his theory. In Picasso’s case his belief in a natural state of innocence is a dream in which he only half believes, but which allows him to retreat deeper and deeper back into himself and his strange isolation.
If we compare the relationship of the figures to one another in the two paintings, the two different interpretations of the meaning of innocence are confirmed. Léger’s is essentially a social attitude; Picasso’s essentially a private one. In the Léger, the four figures are so united that it is quite difficult for the eye to separate them. Each is not only aware of the others but is dependent upon them. Although their faces are calm, their hands express the utmost tenderness. In the Picasso, there is no relationship between any of the figures – even the mother, whilst feeding her baby at her breast, is reading. The two women dancing suggest a collision rather than a couple. The only possible connexion one can find anywhere is the boy in the bottom left corner touching the bird-cage, which is attached by a string to the stick of the boy doing a balancing act above. And this is only a trick of drawing and perspective; a purely formal connexion. Otherwise each person, like a sleep-walker, pursues his own dream.
I have tried to show you, on the evidence of paintings from 1900 to 1952, how Picasso’s imagination and intuitions have always presented him with an alternative to modern Europe: the alternative of a simpler, more primitive way of life. The Cubist period from 1907 to 1914 was the great exception to this. Then, the influence of friends and of other artists led him to believe for a short while in the opposite alternative: that of a more complex, more highly organized, more productive way of life. Except for this Cubist period, his genius has always owed allegiance to the comparatively primitive. It is this allegiance which underlay his self-identification with outcasts in the so-called Blue and Pink periods. It is this which inspired the rage of the Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is this which explains the fancy-dress and magic with which he protected himself after the First World War. It is this which was the secret of the physical intensity of his work in the thirties and early forties when he was painting autobiographically. It is this which is now the excuse for the sentimental pantheism of most of his original paintings (original as opposed to his variations on the themes of other artists) since 1944.
Reality, Lenin used to say, is slyer than any theory. What we have so far argued does not begin to explain everything about Picasso. But it can, I think, bring us nearer to understanding what at first seemed to be a mystery. What is the power of Picasso’s personality? What is the experience that lies behind the expression of his eyes which nobody can resist? What is the connexion, if any, between his temperament and his success? We are now at the point where we can at last suggest an answer. Although the answer, as you will see, leads to another and most unlikely question.
• • •
A few pages back I mentioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is he who can give us the terms of reference with which to place and define Picasso’s subjective experience.
It is a commonplace today that one reads history the better to understand the present. And one wants to understand the present so that one can mould the future. In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously. Those in revolt are usually inspired by a vision of the future. Occasionally – as with the Jacobites, or the Carlists in Spain – they are inspired by a vision of the past. Yet it is a constant truth that the past, if it could, would always overthrow the present. Every historical phase has the moral equipment with which to condemn the one that follows it. There are two reasons for this. First, because the moral code of a
period is specifically designed to maintain the status quo and to prevent a new social class gaining power; secondly, because a development in social organization from the comparatively simple to the comparatively complex is bound to be offensive to any morality, since the function of morality is to simplify.
Rousseau was the first to perceive this contradiction between progress and morality. Why, he asks, did Diogenes have to search everywhere looking for a man? Because Diogenes ‘sought among his contemporaries a man of an earlier period’.