The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  For Western art, cubism was a way station in new directions, but for Picasso it was only a temporary stopping point in unpredictable directions. While Picasso was a prophet of cubism and its occasional practitioner, he still disliked identification with “movements.” Once later he did allow others to identify him with an artist group. This time he was not creator of the new style but was adopted as one of its unconscious creators. After World War I, some European artists yearned for the security of tradition. “Back to Raphael, Poussin, Ingres!” Picasso seemed to respond, not by ceasing to paint cubist pictures but by a prodigious neoclassical output, which still satisfies conventional Western tastes. The early 1920s produced some of his most impressive and durable work of both kinds.

  The next movement that dominated adventurous Western artists and Picasso’s friends would be called “surrealism,” a name invented in 1917 by Apollinaire especially for the works of Marc Chagall. The French poet André Breton (1896–1966) defined the movement in 1924 as “Pure psychic automatism … Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” “I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality.” Surrealists resolved “to render powerless that hatred of the marvelous.… The marvelous is always beautiful, anything that is marvelous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.” The “marvelous” works of Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró, along with surrealist poetry and films, had wide appeal. Picasso had inspired Max Ernst (1891–1976) as a young man of twenty to turn to painting. Other surrealists, too, adopted Picasso as their godfather.

  Picasso never joined the group, but he did allow them to reproduce his work in their Revolution Surréaliste. He admired their poetry more than their painting, but he suppressed his distaste for group exhibition when he permitted his paintings to be shown in the first surrealist exhibition in 1925. Picasso found ways to prove his independence. He braved their censure of ballet as the art of “the international aristocracy” when he designed for the ballet, and he encouraged Ernst and Miro to do the same. When Breton, the philosopher of surrealism, declared that “beauty must be convulsive or cease to be,” they found their ideal in Picasso’s Three Dancers (1925) and his inexhaustible capacity to invent new convulsions. Unwilling to be confined in anybody else’s “dream-world,” Picasso remained interested but aloof.

  The next fifty years of Picasso’s life, until his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-two, were prodigiously productive. They were an encyclopedia of arts in the twentieth century. “Each new picture by Picasso,” observed his first dealer, Ambroise Vollard, “is met by the public with indignation, and then their amazement changes into admiration.” But Picasso repeatedly insisted that there were no “stages” in his own development, only the fireworks of an ebullient self, a Picasso. From time to time he returned to his harlequins and his neoclassical style. And besides painting on canvas and murals, he also did copious works of collage, sculpture (in metal, wood—and bicycle handles!), etchings and lithographs (on all subjects from the Minotaur to Buffon’s Natural History), ceramics (some two thousand pieces in 1947–48), stage and costume design for ballet (Parade, Mercure), and poetry.

  While Picasso was convivial, he was anything but political. Ironically, the most famous work of his middle years became a political totem for millions who were not admirers of his art. In January 1937 Picasso, as an outspoken partisan of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, agreed to paint a mural for the pavilion of their Republican government at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. The project was out of character, for he disliked commissions or anything that seemed to channel his imagination. He first thought of the theme “Painter and Studio,” which might have celebrated the creator-artist. Then on April 29, 1937, Picasso in Paris heard of the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by German bombing planes flying for General Franco. Two days later, on May 1, with a new focus, he began work on the mural. Making sketches, within ten days he set up in his Paris studio a canvas eleven and a half feet high and nearly twenty-six feet long, which he fitted into the room by sloping it backward. The top could be painted only by a long brush from a ladder.

  The photographic record of his work (by Dora Maar, his mistress at the moment) Picasso found interesting, to show “not the successive stages of a painting but its successive changes … to the embodiment of the artist’s dream.” Less than two months from the day he began, Guernica was ready to be mounted in the Spanish Pavilion. The puzzled critics reacted according to their politics. Though meant to be a comment on the news, it still arrests viewers a half century later. After Paris, Guernica went to New York, to the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso insisted that it not go to Spain until the end of Fascism there. Finally in 1981 it went to the Prado in Madrid, where it was both a national symbol and a Spanish reminder, in the Quixotic tradition, of the power of people to destroy themselves.

  In black, white, and gray, Guernica is a gross caricature of horror and terror. Flat figures of almost no modeling and only the faintest hint of perspective are spread out in a spectacle that could not meet any conventional standard of Beauty. Parts of four horrified women, one holding the drooping corpse of a baby, the carnage of one soldier on the ground still holding a broken sword, and pieces of other bodies, the head of a tooth-gnashing horse and of a satanic bull, lambent flames, a figure holding a lamp out a window, and a light bulb in the sun—all in unforgettable disarray. Some noticed the irony that what purported to be a plea for the common man could speak only “within a limited range to those whose ears are attuned by previous experience to the language it uses—an intellectual, sophisticated idiom, removed by historical events from the understanding of the common man.” Picasso, though “honestly and poignantly,” spoke “a language unintelligible to popular ears.” He seemed not to care, perhaps thinking what he said was obvious. In 1940, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, he would hand out photographs of his Guernica to German officers. “Did you do this?” one of them asked. “No,” he replied, “you did.”

  Picasso’s art might have been easier to understand if he had committed himself to some religious or political faith or to an institution or to a nation (Spain or France?). But he remained a restless vagrant spirit. During World War II and the German occupation of Paris he had admired the courage of French Communists in the Resistance and he was horrified by the barbarism of the Germans. His friends and admirers were puzzled and troubled by the fact that the Germans, though keeping him confined and forbidding him to exhibit, had not treated him with their customary brutality. Perhaps, because of his Spanish nationality, they hoped to enlist him or at least to commit him as a collaborator. In 1944, soon after the liberation of Paris, Picasso made news when he joined the Communist Party. Parisians chose sides in a clash of demonstrations on the Place de l’Opéra, one crowd shouting “A nous Picassou!” the other “A bas Picasso!” Admirers of his art were troubled, for the Soviets had been as brutal as the Nazis in suppressing modern movements in art and the freedom of the artist for which Picasso was a symbol. The Nazis labeled his work Kulturbolschevismus, the Soviets called it bourgeois-decadent. Would the Party be converted, or would Picasso be enslaved?

  But Picasso was no ideologue, and not to be tamed. His joining the Party was a sentimental personal act, not a political statement. He had not been able to compensate for his artistic independence and loneliness by love for one woman or by a family of his own. Perhaps, as he said, the Party would give him a “family.”

  I was so anxious to find a homeland again, I have always been an exile, now I am no longer; until Spain can at last welcome me back, the French Communist Party has opened its arms to me, I have found there all those whom I esteem most, the greatest scientists, the greatest poets and all those faces, so beautiful, of the Parisians in arms which I saw during those days in August, I am once more among my brothe
rs.

  His art did not change toward the orthodox nor show the slightest taint of “social realism.” Even after he joined the Party, the Soviets still did not approve his work. “From past experience,” he observed, “I would have been suspicious if I had found they did appreciate my work.”

  For the Party he did a few public relations chores, joining their “Peace” Congress in Wroclaw, Poland, in Paris, and in Sheffield. He designed the “Dove” lithograph, a bizarre resurrection of his father’s favorite pigeons, which became familiar worldwide. When Stalin died in 1953, the Party urgently asked him for a memorial portrait. He had never seen Stalin, whom he remembered only as a man in a uniform with big buttons down the front, a military cap, and a large mustache. What he produced turned out to be an imaginary portrait of the father of Françoise Gilot, his latest companion. The Party condemned him for it. Refusing to confute the Communist politicians he simply said he was “not technically proficient in such matters.” But in 1956, when the Soviets suppressed the rising in Hungary, Picasso joined with nine others in a public letter of protest, which the Party condemned as “illicit.” Still they did not dare lose their world-famous partisan.

  In the search for lifelong themes and continuities Picasso’s biographers have seized on his relations with women. They played prominent, if sporadic, roles in his life. He was outspoken about their roles and his attitude toward them. “For me,” he told Françoise Gilot, “there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.” After their years together, she began “to have the feeling that if I looked into a closet, I would find a half-dozen ex-wives hanging by their necks.” But he gave her fair warning. When he kept reminiscing about his earlier mistresses, she discovered his “Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum.” “You won’t last as long as I will,” he said. She lasted only from 1943 to 1952. “Every time I change wives,” he explained, “I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence. Maybe that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”

  The full catalog will probably never be made. We do know of Fernande Olivier (c.1904–11) of the green eyes and auburn hair, who charmed him when he was only twenty-three, who would never marry him but refused to explain it was because she was already married. Then the mistress of a painter friend, Marcelle Humbert (1911–17), who had persuaded him to try doing a ballet for Diaghilev, and whose sudden death depressed him. And the ballet dancer Olga Koklova (married 1918; divorced 1935) whose highflying tastes led him into his “duchess period.” She gave way to the blond Marie-Thérèse Walter (who bore him his daughter Maia in 1935), but was displaced by the ravishing Yugoslav Dora Maar (1936–43), with whom he was living at the time of Guernica, until he met the talented and articulate Françoise Gilot (1943–53). She yielded intermittently to the wife of a painter friend. “Helene Parmelin,” until he met Jacqueline Roque, of the heavenly profile, whom he married in 1958. The incomplete chronicle gives intimate meaning to his aphorism that “in art there is no past or future.” Can these amorous experiments provide clues to Picasso’s “development”? His shifting passions seem only symptoms of Picasso’s restless, ruthless repetitive efforts to re-create himself.

  And what a self! The “present” for Picasso stretched to superhuman dimensions. Between the ages of eighty-five and ninety he produced more than four hundred drawings and engravings, among his best, still trying new mythological subjects but occasionally reviving his beloved harlequins. In his late years he gave new evidence of muscular restlessness, trying his hand at versions of Old Masters—Velasquez, El Greco, and Poussin. On his ninetieth birthday in October 1971 Paris celebrated the artist of the century by showing eight Picassos in the Louvre in the place of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Assuming he was immortal, the world was surprised to learn of his death on April 8, 1973.

  “When I die,” he had told Françoise Gilot, “it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.” He himself had been a victim as well as a beneficiary of his peculiarly modern celebrity. He was unlike other great and famous Western artists of preceding centuries, for while his face and his foibles and his loves were widely known, many for whom his name was a household word could not recognize even one of his works. The Sistine Chapel was Michelangelo’s monument, but it was appropriate in an age of the exploring self that Picasso should have become his own monument. He was notorious as the painter genius, the millionaire Communist who could trade a painting for a country estate, the octogenarian who could still attract young women, the artist of worldwide fame whose work only a select few could enjoy or understand. Although he aimed to conquer mortality with his art, it was his mortal person that engaged the popular imagination. In his late years, in what might have been a complaint or a boast, he observed, “People don’t buy my pictures, they buy my signature.” “He had no need of style,” André Malraux explained of his last bitter years, “because his rage would become a prime factor in the style of our time.”

  His death brought horrors even Picasso’s imagination could not have conceived. When his grandson Pablito asked his father, Paulo, to let him be present at his grandfather’s funeral, Paulo, drunk at the time, refused. Then Pablito drank a container of potassium chloride bleach, which, despite the doctors’ efforts, ate away his digestive organs. Three months later he died of starvation. Marie-Thérèse, who also had not been allowed to join the family at the burial at Vauvenargues, a few years later hanged herself in the garage of her house at Juan-les-Pins.

  The last news made by Picasso was the notorious family quarrel over his estate, exacerbated by Picasso’s earlier efforts and those of Jacqueline Roque to exclude the illegitimate children. But a recent change in French law had preserved their rights. The estate was finally shared by his children—Claude, Paloma, Maia, Paulo, and their heirs—and of course the lawyers. The many Picasso works in the estate produced a large tax problem, settled only by giving to the state enough of his works to cover the death duties. These works became the nucleus of the Picasso Museum in Paris, a permanently dazzling panorama of Picasso’s achievements. The $260 million estimate of his estate for tax purposes (September 1977) was a gross underestimate. The assessors photographed some 50,000 works—including 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 2,880 ceramics, 18,095 engravings, 6,112 lithographs, 3,181 linocuts, 7,089 drawings, and an additional 4,659 drawings and sketches in 149 notebooks, 11 tapestries and 8 rugs. And the assessor’s inventory provided only a clue to the proportions of this prodigy.

  Epilogue: Mysteries of a Public Art

  WHILE writers went inward, creating and probing the self, there developed in the twentieth century a surprising new public art focused on the outward visible shape of the world in motion. It, too, had the power to re-create the world, to conjure with time and space. And soon it was to have the power to bring the world into everyone’s living room. The film artist, newly freed from the bondage of nature, was in thrall to a vast audience. A painter or sculptor could create at will in the studio or out of doors, the writer in his study, the composer at his piano. Even the architect could do great work for a private patron or a Medici pope. And a stage for theater could be improvised anywhere. But this art of film was on a grand scale that dwarfed the imperial extravagance of opera and served patrons across the world.

  Emerging and flourishing in America, land of conquest of space and time, film art was newly democratic and popular in the very age when literature was newly arcane. Within the first century, the art of film showed a novelty appropriate to the democratic New World, a reach and a versatility unlike any art before. No earlier art was so widely and so complexly collaborative, so dependent on the marriage of art and technology, or on the pleasure of the community.

  Other arts—architecture since ancient Egypt and drama since classic Greece—have been communal, focu
sing the energies, hopes, and beliefs of many. But the art of film would be vastly public, and have the public as its patron. Its future was full of mystery and of promise suggested in the early twentieth century, when it suddenly became the most popular American art. The “movies” (which entered our written language about 1912) re-created all the world’s dimensions with bold abandon. Giving a new immortality to life in all times and places, its medium was the very antithesis of stone, the static material in which man from the beginning of history had tried to make his work immortal. Light, the unlikely medium of man’s newly created immortality, was the most elusive, most transient, most ephemeral of all phenomena. Recently revealed as “the pencil of nature” with the power to create durable images, light—when properly managed, captured, and focused in a camera and then in the human eye—had the power to make moving images that could be mistaken for the real world. The movies, it was said, had the power of “making us walk more confidently on the precarious ground of imagination.”

  The novelties and mysteries of the new art were numerous—in its process of creation, in its audience, in its powers to re-create the world, and to probe, create, and reveal the self.

  The “motion” picture phenomenon was a discovery of a versatile and ingenious English doctor, Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), best remembered for his still-useful Thesaurus (1852). One day as he looked out through the Venetian blinds in his study, he noticed that the cart moving through the street seemed to be proceeding by jerks. He suspected that it was a series of stationary impressions joined together that gave the eye the impression of a cart in motion. In 1824 he offered the Royal Society his paper on “Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects.” So casually he had noted what would make possible the motion pictures. Sir John Herschel had observed it too when spinning a coin on a table he found it “possible to see both sides of the coin at once.” Inventors applied this phenomenon to toys. With pretentious names—Thaumatrope, Fantoscope, etc.—these gadgets viewed a series of still drawings of an object in motion placed on a disk and seen through a slit in another disk on the same axis. Thus the animated “moving picture” preceded photography.