Picasso in winter
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
“Of all the misfortunes - hunger, misery, being misunderstood by the public - fame is by far the worst. This is how God chastises the artist." - Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is the artistic lion of the last century. He ranks at the very top of modernist innovators and his influence on artists, art and global culture remains pervasive. His work is the result of decades of unprecedented exploration of form in conflict with tradition and impulsive desire, across a variety of genres, the result of which produced art both modern and infused with the often dark archetypal power of Picasso's Andalusian humanism.
He was ultimately magical.
Guernica, Picasso's 1937 masterpiece, is arguably the icon of the 20th century. In form, content, technique, Picasso fuses gigantic monochromatic images of brutal despair, conjuring a century shattered with war and cultural displacement, both in terms of structural exploration of the canvas and emotional reaction to the assault of the modern. [1]
Art historian John Richardson, intermittent friend and notable Picasso biographer, takes on the artist's perplexing middle years in this third volume of his rambling biography, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. In this period before Guernica, Richardson traces Picasso's mid-life dramas as the artist explores liberated modernist forms and traditional influences in pursuit of new directions for his work and career. Picasso in this incarnation is the center of the drawing room world of Russian ballet, the idle wealthy, resort villas, kept women, London tailoring, and the seasonal touring cycles of the bourgeoisie.
Gone are the gritty days of poverty and communal inventiveness, the brilliant cacophony of the Le Bateau-Lavoir artists cooperative, the cubist nights of prostitutes with a hungry young Picasso burning his work, simply to keep warm against a freezing Paris winter. Richardson opens his amicable, if not quite riveting, narrative in 1917, in a Europe of crumbling tradition, exhausted by modern war and social collapse, where a wounded status quo, fueled by new war wealth and an emerging global America, finds itself in conflict with the arriving new and modern generation.
Modernist ballet, symphony and theater cause riots among the status quo literati of the day, as Richardson amusing reports. This is the 'Jazz Age', the real beginning of the 20th century, but we gain little or no perspective on the age itself in Richardson beyond drawing rooms and nuances of gossip. We discover instead a sort of fawning Picasso, adrift in his middle years, well established innovator of the new art, renowned (with Matisse and Braque) in the international commerce of art, balancing family, society, mistresses, travel and work with strategies for his own greatness. There is something vacuous in Picasso's famous gaze as captured in photographs of him with family during this period. The ebullient, intensely confident gaze of his later years is absent.
It appears Picasso was becoming a prototype for the post modern artist during this period. He was living the future of commercially successful artists not yet born. An artist with emerging world notoriety, on the edge of vast financial, social, and popular success, is also an artist on the cusp of personal compromise, an artist distracted from nature and, one senses in Richardson, Picasso was deeply conflicted by the crisis. He had money, fame and influence, an entourage of sycophants, like French poet Jean Cocteau, American millionaire Gerald Murphy, and British decadent Clive Bell. He also has enough public relations cachet to turn a sleepy winter resort - the French Riviera - into the prime vacation destination for generations of millionaires.
But his new dealer was second-rate and even his mother undermined his selling price by flooding the market with hundreds of works from his youth without his permission. In one of dozens of interesting tales Richardson skilfully weaves, Picasso relentlessly pressed law suits for years over this incident, until he recovered almost all the hundreds of works his mother had "leased" to art hustlers. This is a portrait of Picasso approaching mid-life at the height of his artistic powers, trapped in a constricting life style he had created around women and the illusion of success. Richardson gives us a man driven by impulse, guided by obsession, a force of nature in conflict with artistic tradition and social mores; a man conscious of his vast creative powers, relentless in pursuit of fame and self realization, but one also uneasy and restless with the "finality of success."
He pursues and weds the lovely Russian dancer Olga Kokhlova, whom he met while in Rome working with Stravinsky on the Ballet Russes production of the revolutionary ballet, Parade. He and Olga soon produce a son while Picasso locates a 17-year old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, to help him assuage the quandaries of his late forties. The conflict between these two women, and all they imply in the psychology of Picasso's past and future, sets in motion an internal dynamic which generates some of the greatest art of the era.
Richardson is adroit decoding the hidden imagery of wife and sexual muse in Picasso's thousands of paintings, drawings, and sculptures during these "triumphant" years. Picasso is driven throughout his life by women - the mother, dead sister, wife, daughter, mistress, the many serial lovers - his endless manipulations and reactions to women psychologically, sexually, and emotionally seem to define the arch of his growth as an artist and as a man. During this period, Picasso both captures and liberates virtually every aspect of "woman" in startling modernist images of traditional love, adoration, lust, despair, subservience, maternity, as well as the pornographic and misogynist.
Richardson guides the reader through the classically influenced portraits of Olga as the newlywed wife, representations of her as discrete lover, then Madonna and matriarch, which evolve in shifting style and technique; and further, as their marriage disintegrates, into darker, fractured, post-cubist images of anger, depression, ultimately hatred, rage and violence.
As if to maintain some internal sanity in his life, Picasso also generates throughout this period thousands of fecund, sun-worshiping, life-affirming images of the young mistress, Marie-Thérèse - images filled with intense joy, voyeurism, sexuality, and dominance, revealing Picasso’s conflicted obsessions with women, an internal psychology which propels modernism, while mirroring the darker history gathering on Europe's horizon in the late 1930s. As Richardson reports, even Jung reports this conflict in Picasso's works:
"Jung would pick up on Picasso's binary approach to night and day when he saw these paintings [Olga and Marie-Thérèse] on exhibit in Zurich: 'As the day is woman to [Picasso], so is the night; psychologically speaking, they are the light and the dark soul (anima).'" He said [p472]
Ultimately, the only valid solution for an artist conflicted by the process of living is found in his or her work. As we have seen in so many artists, before and since Picasso, the trappings of success either smother the artist in an inauthentic life filled with fake drama and artificial existence, or force a metamorphosis of consciousness, which results in transition toward both the new human being, and his or her new art. Many artists are weakened by success, but Picasso surely wasn't one of them.
Change, process, transition remain, after all, the primal addictions of the modernist; and Picasso, always more Andalusian peasant than philosopher, driven by ancient emotions and fears, refused to accept social constraints, particularly one so mundane as, "success." Out of these primordial conflicts, Picasso reshaped the nature of tradition to fit his personal emotional purposes. The world was rendered as he experienced it, and in the process, he came to dominate the art of the century. But Picasso was ultimately a Málaganian pragmatist at heart, a man who would keep a suitcase filled with cash under his bed, in the event his luck might some day run out.
Later, Picasso would break with bourgeois society, withdraw from public, take up with his mistress, refuse to divorce his wife or divide his fortune, and arm himself to conquer the century as well as his personal demons. A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, ends with the celebration of Picasso's 50th birthday, his widening fame, and suggestions of the approaching Spanish Civil War, the collapse of Europe, which would soon deepen Picasso's art and strengthen him as a weapon against fascism and totalitarianism. As he said:
“The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.” - Pablo Picasso [2]
Notes
1 "Guernica, the oldest town of the Basque provinces and the center of their cultural traditions, was almost completely destroyed by the rebels in an air attack yesterday afternoon. The bombing of the undefended town far behind the front line took exactly three quarters of an hour. During this time and without interruption a group of German aircraft - Junker and Heinkel bombers as well as Heinkel fighters - dropped bombs weighing up to 500 kilogrammes on the town. At the same time low-flying fighter planes fired machine-guns at the inhabitants who had taken refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was in flames in a very short time." - The Times, (London) April 27, 1937.
Between the wars
Images of Guernica, Google
Guernica, the Painting [Back]
2 Picasso Quotes, Olga's Gallery.by Yuri Mataev [Back]
