The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Her impatience with any one way of viewing the self prevented her writing a monumental book. Never so confident of the mainstream of consciousness as was Proust or Joyce, she sought the many possible streams.

  … a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible … imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance … a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience … that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream.… Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness.

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  Vistas from a Restless Self

  FOR centuries Western vision had been confined by two ways of looking. The first was the Window—the perspective view from a single point, which the artist invited the viewer to share. The second was the ancient ideal of Beauty—the quality that “pleasurably exalts the mind or senses,” and included the pretty, which pleased by grace or delicacy. A modern revolution would free our vision from these conventions.

  While many artists played roles in this revolution, the heroic figure was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who was peculiarly qualified for such a work of liberation. Like Joyce, he was self-exiled. The son of a teacher of painting in Málaga, he never ceased to be Spanish. “The character, the vision of Picasso is like himself, it is Spanish,” his close friend Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) insisted in her very own prose, “and he does not see reality as all the world sees it, so that he alone amongst the painters did not have the problem of expressing the truths that all the world can see but the truths that he alone can see and that is not the world the world recognizes as the world.” After 1904 Picasso made France his home and divided his life between Paris and the South.

  He created his own reasons for believing that he was exempt from the rules that governed artists. The legend that he was a child prodigy in the arts was of his own (and his adoring secretary-biographer Jaime Sabartès’) making. None of the few surviving works of his childhood confirms the legend, and their scarcity even suggests that others may have been destroyed. Perhaps the fact that he was not a child prodigy encouraged him early in habits of hard work. Part of the legend was the story that at fourteen, when he applied to the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts (La Llotja) he finished on the first day the examination drawings on which other candidates spent a month. But it appears that one day was not unusual for finishing the required work, and the examiners had allowed only two days. Picasso later boasted that he was so precocious that he could not have taken part in an exhibition of children’s drawings. “When I was their age,” he romanticized, “I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” Perhaps such fantasies were ways of saying that he saw painting not as an acquired skill but as an aspect of himself. “In my opinion to search means nothing in painting, to find is the thing.” And, when at seventy-four he was being filmed at work, he admitted that he found his creative powers “un mystère totale.”

  His father, with a passion for painting pigeons, “would cut off the claws of a dead pigeon and pin them to a board in the position he wanted; then I would have to copy them very carefully until the result satisfied him.” Characteristically, he liked to say that one day in 1894 his father was thoroughly satisfied with Pablo’s work, “so he handed me his paint and his brush and he never painted again.” But this was only another episode in his rich self-serving imagination.

  Picasso painted more than enough for them both in unending variety, a rich miscellany. The range of his styles is staccato, full of interruptions, switchbacks, and even repetitions. “I don’t develop,” Picasso protested, “I am.” His works reveal a volatile and restless self in fantastic discontinuity. His career might have shown more coherence and the succession of his styles might have been more intelligible if he had committed himself to please a particular patron, or to affirm a faith, or to sell his product or promote a program, or glorify a nation or city. But none of these was his way.

  “The painter,” he observed, “goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk to the forest of Fontainebleau. I get ‘green’ indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.” He was a man, as Gertrude Stein observed, “who always has need of emptying himself, of completely emptying himself.” His copious work is a product of this prodigious, unpredictable capacity for continual refilling and emptying.

  By the time he reached twenty-five, in 1906, he had produced what could have been a solid lifework of more than two hundred paintings and hundreds of drawings. These included brilliant portraits (like that of Gertrude Stein) and his Blue Period, which would remain the favorite of a public put off by his later experiments. “To know all, without having learned it,” said Molière, “was one of the characteristics of great artists.” By now Picasso had definitively settled in Paris, enjoying the convivial artists’ life in a hive of studios (affectionately christened the Bateau Lavoir [Floating Laundry]) on the slopes of Montmartre. He had already shown a peculiar indifference to the public, and he regretted being parted from a work by the need to exhibit or sell it. Perhaps he had been soured by the reception of his early exhibitions. In one of his earliest self-portraits, after Velasquez, he had written three times on his brow “I the King” (Yo el rey), and he would never divide this sovereignty over himself, or await approval of what he was doing. He liked to choose those who shared his work, and it was said that he gave away more than he sold. Not till later would he enjoy tilting with dealers, playing them against one another to raise their offers. By 1901 he luckily had come to the attention of Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who had sponsored Cézanne and was a familiar of Degas, Renoir, Redon, Gauguin, and Rodin. And Vollard respected Picasso’s pride by not showing his work to strangers.

  In late 1906 and early 1907 Picasso made a sudden turn from the nostalgic blues and pinks and sentimental charms of acrobats and harlequins to the shocking and puzzling visions of cubism. With this movement he first lent his prodigious powers to denying the Western tradition and prepared to leave his impact on the century. But still this was only an episode in his kaleidoscopic career. For Picasso, who disliked joining groups or collaborating, even being a cubist was out of character. Though unstinting in praise of painters or poets he admired, he repeatedly said that all he could learn was how to be himself.

  The great twentieth-century revolution against linear perspective, cubism was a product of many influences—trends in science and mathematics, African sculpture, the personal experiments of Cézanne, Henri Rousseau, Seurat and others, the enthusiasms of poet-critics like Appollinaire and dealers like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Though emphatically not a “joiner,” when Picasso caught the new vision he went headlong. And his collaboration with Georges Braque (1882–1963) in creating cubism became so intimate that sometimes each could not distinguish his own work from that of the other. The fruitful but unlikely partnership came to an abrupt end when Braque went off to war in 1914.

  “Cubism,” like names for other schools of modern painting, began in derision. In 1908, when Braque’s paintings were being hung for exhibition, a critic exclaimed, “Still more cubes! Enough of cubism!” (Encore des cubes! Assez de c
ubisme!). What really distinguished the cubists was not the use of “cubes” but the rejection of the traditional Western single-point-of-view perspective. Instead they offered ways of showing simultaneously in two dimensions varied planes of the same subject. For the familiar linear perspective they substituted a many-viewpoint perspective. For the illusion of space they substituted a subjective geometry. For the tradition of God’s mathematics in diffusing his truth that the artist could only imitate, the cubist substituted varied forms and complexes of planes that the artist created from what was seen. From capturing space it was a movement toward capturing time—not a single-point, but a single-moment perspective. How many aspects could be visible in a moment?

  Before 1912, in “analytical cubism,” Picasso luxuriated in complexes of planes, in works like his Woman with a Book (1909) or Girl with a Mandolin (1910). Then “synthetic cubism” showed flat, abstract colored shapes, familiar in his Still Life with Guitar (1913) and his Card Player (1913–14), and moved into collages and constructions of metal, wire, paper, and wood. Now liberated from the need to deceive by capturing the illusion of three-dimensional space, the artist turned inward. Whatever shapes and planes were suggested to him by the object out there, he now shared with a viewer of his painting. Linear perspective had offered a prescription for everybody, but Cubism was a unique prescription for each artist and each subject.

  Why Picasso at this moment came to Cubism would remain as much a mystery as all his other experiments. But we have some clues to the how. In 1905 a group of young painters—Vlaminck, Derain, and others, led by Matisse—exhibited in the Autumn Salon in Paris using bright pure colors in whimsical outlines and flat patterns, suggested by nature but not following nature. Entranced by color and form, they did not worry over congruence with what everybody saw out there. Because of their disregard for natural forms and their taste for bold colors, they were derisively christened the Fauves (French for “wild beasts,” or “savages”). Encouraged and inspired by African and other exotic sculpture, they too declared independence from nature, and from the Western perspective tradition. Picasso met Matisse (1869–1954) in late 1906, and would remain a close admirer and competitor until Matisse’s death. In 1906 the Fauves offered another exhibition, again led by Matisse. While Picasso did not join the Fauves he seemed stirred to newly independent experiments of his own. In 1906 Matisse had begun a large canvas of nudes in a landscape that he called Le Bonheur de Vivre, exhibited in 1907. Some critics would call this the first “major masterpiece” of painting in the twentieth century. And in the same year there was a great memorial exhibit of fifty-six of the paintings of Cézanne (1839–1906).

  The competitive Picasso seems to have taken these as a challenge. By now he had produced a torrent of paintings that might have been the work of a half-dozen quite different artists. The sculptural archaic solidity of his Two Nudes (1906), unlike the paintings of his Blue and Pink periods, had begun to show his defiance of the traditions of pictorial prettiness. Vollard had bought most of his Pink pictures and for the first time relieved him of the pressures of poverty. As recently as 1902 he had confined his energies to drawing because he did not have the money to buy canvas. Now he could more comfortably experiment in new directions without having to stint.

  Picasso’s next large work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), would mark an epoch in Western painting. In an art that had long served Western culture as an alternative to literacy, carrying a plainer message than words, this painting produced in the untutored viewer a response of shock, dismay, and puzzlement. It revealed a revolution from the art of the common experience seen through a window to the art of the artist’s unique self. Hardly reminiscent of other great paintings, it was not pretty. Originally called The Brothel of Avignon, after the street of brothels in Barcelona near the shops where Picasso bought his paper and watercolors, it shocked his friends by the resemblance of one of these figures to a grandmother of his friend Max Jacob, who came from Avignon, while another resembled his current mistress, Fernande Olivier. A less puzzling title would have been inappropriate.

  In Picasso’s months of reflection and experiment and in a score of his composition sketches and dozens of figure studies, critics have found clues to the influences of El Greco and Cézanne, of ancient Egypt, of African Negro masks from the French Congo, among others. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted mostly in the spring of 1907. Picasso continued painting “postscripts” to these figures long after the painting was finished and exhibited.

  What had emerged after these months of experiment was a canvas in oil about eight feet square of five static female figures, four standing and one seated. Unlike his recent archaic heavy nudes, here were no natural curves but straight lines and flat planes. The work was startling rather than pleasing. There were archaic features—profile noses on frontal faces and frontal eyes on profile faces. The two figures on the right, one squat and awkward, differed from the others in their sharper angles and planes. With touches of blue background the work as a whole was predominantly in light brown, pinks, terra cottas, and orange.

  The response even from friends was almost unanimously hostile. Artist friends were offended by what seemed an unpleasant practical joke, but simply laughed. Some saw an effort to ridicule their modern movement. The outraged Matisse swore he would find some way to get back at Picasso. “It is as though we were supposed to exchange our usual diet for one of tow and paraffin,” exploded Braque. “What a loss to French Art!” an influential Russian collector agreed. His friend and patron Leo Stein called it “Godalmighty rubbish!” When one critic said it showed that Picasso should devote himself to caricature, Picasso agreed that all good portraits were somehow caricatures. One sympathetic voice was the young Kahnweiler, who had just given up a promising financial career for the volatile Paris art market. He greeted Les Demoiselles with enthusiasm:

  This is the beginning of Cubism, the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once. These problems were the basic tasks of painting: to represent three dimensions and color on a flat surface, and to comprehend them in the unity of that surface.… Not the simulation of form by chiaroscuro, but the depiction of the three dimensional through drawing on a flat surface. No pleasant “composition” but uncompromising, organically articulated structure.… His innermost being creates the beauty; the external appearance of the work of art, however, is the product of the time in which it is created.

  Kahnweiler became Picasso’s dealer. Perhaps the Demoiselles explained Henri Rousseau’s cryptic compliment in November 1908, “Picasso, you and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the Modern!”

  This painting, Picasso’s most influential single work, shocked less by its “Egyptian” mannerism than by its refusal to be bound into a tradition, even into any clear course of personal “development.” “In the old days,” Picasso said, “pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions.” The poet Apollinaire (1880–1918) had already admired Picasso, as the artist whom “everything enchants,” with an “undeniable talent … to serve an imagination in which the delightful and the horrible, the low and the delicate, are proportionately mingled.” Now the Demoiselles helped Apollinaire define the two kinds of artists—those whose works were somehow “prolongations of nature, and their works do not pass through the intellect” and those like Picasso who “must draw everything from within themselves … (and) live in solitude.” The Demoiselles revealed Picasso’s struggle within himself and his fantastic metamorphosis into an artist of the inner self.

  His friends worried over the loneliness that Picasso had created for himself. Derain feared that “one day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.” But Picasso had created a realm where the self reigned comfortably supreme. The larger outside world was not his concern. Memory played a
new, more intimate role in the painter’s work—not the academic or public memory that recalled noble or historic or literary or mythical or religious events. Now any object in the studio or café acquired dignity by digestion in the painter’s self. So he exploited the objects in his studio—pipes, bowls, bottles, guitars, fruit, pieces of newspaper, along with an occasional human figure. This “fourth dimension,” Apollinaire explained, was vaguely related to new scientific ideas springing “from the three known dimensions … the immensity of space eternalizing itself in all directions at any given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite; the fourth dimension endows objects with plasticity.” All power to the painter’s self! “When we invented Cubism,” Picasso recalled in 1935, “we had no intention of inventing Cubism. We wanted simply to express what was in us.” The shrewd Gertrude Stein saw sources of Picasso’s cubism in the landscape and architecture of his Spain, where architecture always cuts the lines of landscape, “and that is the basis of Cubism.”

  What emerged was nothing anyone had seen before. It was not out there to see, but in here. Apollinaire, the first known to use “cubism” to name the movement in print, and one of their most intimate critics in 1912, described this “art of painting original arrangements composed of elements borrowed from conceived reality rather than from the reality of the vision. Everyone has a sense of this interior reality.” And he explained, “Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it aims, not at an art of imitation, but at an art of conception, which tends to rise to the height of creation. In representing conceptualized reality or creative reality, the painter can give the effect of three dimensions.”