<Archive Obituary> Picasso (April 8th 1973)
Bill Schenley
The Greatest Single Force In 70 Years Of Art
Photo: http://www.zip37.com/picasso.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (April 9th 1973) ~
By Alden Whitman
There was Picasso the neoclassicist; Picasso the
cubist; Picasso the surrealist; Picasso the modernist;
Picasso the ceramist; Picasso the lithographer; Picasso
the sculptor; Picasso the superb draftsman; Picasso the
effervescent and exuberant; Picasso the saturnine and
surly; Picasso the faithful and faithless lover; Picasso
the cunning financial man; Picasso the publicity seeker;
Picasso the smoldering Spaniard; Picasso the joker and
performer of charades; Picasso the generous; Picasso
the Scrooge; even Picasso the playwright.
A genius for the ages, a man who played wonderful
yet sometimes outrageous changes with art, Pablo
Picasso remains without doubt the most original, the
most protean and the most forceful personality in the
visual arts in the first three-quarters of this century. He
took a prodigious gift and with it transformed the
universe of art.
Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, two painters with
assured stature in modern art and both his close
friends, were also original; but both developed a style
and stuck pretty much to it, whereas Picasso, with a
feverish creativity and lavish talent lasting into old age,
was a man of many styles whose artistic life revealed a
continuous process of exploration. He created his own
universe, investing it with his own human beings and his
own forms of beasts and myths.
"For me, a picture is neither an end nor an achievement
but rather a lucky chance and art experience," he once
explained. "I try to represent what I have found, not
what I am seeking. I do not seek--I find."
'One Step on a Long Road'
On another occasion, however, he saw his work in
a different light. "Everything I do," he remarked at 76,
"is only one step on a long road. It is a preliminary
process that may be achieved much later. Therefore
my works must be seen in relation to one another,
keeping in mind what I have already done and what I
will do."
For all his guises, or disguises, Picasso had an amazing
fecundity of imagination that permitted him to
metamorphize a mood or an idea into a work of art
with bewildering quickness. He was, in Andre
Malraux's phrase, "the archwizard of modern art," a
man who, as a painter alone, produced well over 6,000
pictures. Some he splashed off in a few hours; others
took weeks.
In 1969, his 88th year, he produced out of his volcanic
energy a total of 165 paintings and 45 drawings, which
were exhibited at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon,
France. Crowding the walls of that venerable structure,
the Picasso array drew exclamatory throngs and moved
Emily Genauer, the critic, to say, "I think Picasso's new
pictures are the fire of heaven."
Explaining the source of this energy, Picasso said as he
neared 90, "Everyone is the age he has decided on,
and I have decided to remain 30."
The painter was so much known for works that blurred
or obliterated conventional distinctions between beauty
and ugliness and for depersonalized forms that he was
accused of being an antihumanist. That appraisal
disturbed him, for he regarded himself, with all his
vagaries, as having created new insights into a seen and
unseen world in which fragmentation of form was the
basis for a new synthesis.
A Bull From a Bicycle Seat
"What is art?" a visitor once asked him. "What is not?"
he replied. And he substantiated this point once by
combining a bicycle seat and a pair of handlebars to
make a bull's head.
"Whatever the source of the emotion that drives me to
create, I want to give it a form that has some
connection with the visible world, even if it is only to
wage war on that world," he explained to Francoise
Gilot, who was one of his mistresses and herself a
painter.
"Otherwise," he continued, " a painting is just an old
grab bag for everyone to reach into and pull out what
he himself has put in. I want my paintings to be able to
defend themselves, to resist the invader, just as though
there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could
touch them without cutting his hands. A painting isn't a
market basket or a woman's handbag, full of combs,
hairpins, lipstick, old love letters and keys to the garage.
"Valery [Paul Valery, the French poet] used to say,
'I write half the poem. The reader writes the other half.'
That's all right for him, maybe, but I don't want there to
be three or four thousand possibilities of interpreting my
canvas. I want there to be only one and in that one to
some extent the possibility of recognizing nature, even
distorted nature, which is, after all, a kind of struggle
between my interior life and the external world as it
exists for most people.
"As I've often said, I don't try to express nature;
rather, as the Chinese put it, to work like nature. And
I want that internal surge--my creative dynamism--to
propose itself to the viewer in the form of traditional
painting violated."
In the long course of upending traditionalism, Picasso
became a one-man history of modern art. In every
phase of its turbulent (and often violent) development
he was either a daring pioneer or a gifted practitioner.
The sheer variousness of his creations reflected his
probings of modern art for ways to communicate the
multiplicity of its expressions; and so Picasso could not
be categorized as belonging to this or that school, for he
opened and tried virtually all of them.
In his peripateticism he worked in oils, water-colors,
pastels, gouaches, pencil and ink drawings and
aquatints; he etched, made lithographs, sculptured,
fashioned ceramics, put together mosaics and
constructed murals.
One of his masterpieces was "Guernica," painted in 1937
and on loan for many years to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. An oil on canvas 11 1/4 feet high and
25 1/2 feet long, it is a majestic, stirring indictment of the
destructiveness of modern war. By contrast, another
masterpiece was a simply and perfectly drawn white
pigeon, "The Dove," which was disseminated around
the world as a symbol of peace. But masterpiece or
something not so exalted, virtually all Picasso were
interesting and provocative. Praised or reviled, his work
never evoked quiet judgments.
A Different View
The artist, however, held a different view. "There is no
such thing as a bad Picasso," he said, "some are less
good than others."
Exhibitions of his work, especially in his later years,
were sure-fire attractions. The mention of his name
was sufficient to lure thousands, many of them only
barely acquainted with any art, to museums and
galleries and benefits. Reproductions and prints were
nailed up in homes all over the Western world, a
certain mark of the owner's claim to culture. Originals
were widely dispersed, both in museums and in the
hands of collectors wealthy enough to meet Picasso's
prices. And they were steep. In 1965 he charged
London's Tate Gallery $168,000 for "Les Trois
Danseuses," a painting he did in 1925. For a current
painting, private collectors felt that $20,000 was a
steal and $35,000 not too much.
For the last 50 years there has been no such thing as
a cheap Picasso. Indeed, Leo and Gertrude Stein
and Ambrose Vollard, a Paris dealer, may have been
the last to get a Picasso for $30, and that was in
1906 and 1907.
Income Grew With Fame
As Picasso's fame grew, so did his income until it
got so that he could manufacture money by sketching
a few lines on a piece of paper and tacking on his
dramatic signature. He was probably the world's
highest paid pieceworker, and there were many years
in which he garnered more than $1-million.
"I am rich enough to throw away a thousand
dollars," he told a friend with some glee.
The artist, however, was canny about money, driving
hard bargains with his dealers and keeping the bulk
of his work off the market. He released for sale
about 40 of his paintings a year out of a production
of hundreds, so that the market for his work was never
glutted. What he did not sell (and he said that many of
these constituted the best from his palette) he squirreled
away in bank vaults, studios, in a castle not far from the
Riviera and in empty rooms in his villa near Cannes.
Picasso did not exactly hide his collection, for on
occasion he permitted special friends to see it, to
photograph it and to publish the results.
Toward the close of his life he donated 800 to 900
of his finest early works to a Barcelona museum.
Worth a multimillion-dollar fortune, his works
represented his Spanish period and were given in
memory of Jaime Sabartes, his long-time secretary.
In 1971 he gave an early constructed sculpture, "Guitar,"
to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Mostly, though, Picasso took a merchant's delight in
acquiring his money. "Art is a salable commodity," he
once observed. "If I want as much money as I can get
for my art, it is because I know what I want to do with
it." But just what that was only a few intimates knew.
He is said to have owned a great deal of real estate in
France and to have made some excellent stock
investments.
Contrary to Miss Gilot's suggestion that Picasso was
tightfisted, he gave large sums to the Republican side in
the Spanish Civil War and then to refugee groups that
cared for the defeated Republicans who had fled to
France.
"He was a very generous man," Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, his principal dealer since 1912, said of
him. "He supported for many years more than a dozen
indigent painters, most of whom would have been living
in poverty but for his help. And whenever he was asked
to help some charities, he always gave something."
He was, surprisingly, even open-handed in a quiet
fashion with women of his past. One of these was
Fernande Olivier, who was his mistress for a number of
years until 1912 and whose book about her experiences
with him was not flattering. However, when Picasso
heard that her funds were running low, he saw to it that
she was supplied with money.
Nonetheless, his generosity, like his temperament,
could be fitful. Once, when the faking of Picassos was
a small industry, a friend brought the painter a small
work belonging to a poor artist for authentication so
that it could be sold. "It's false," said Picasso.
>From a different source the friend brought another
Picasso, and then a third. "It's false," Picasso said each
time.
"Now listen, Pablo," the friend said of the third painting.
"I watched you paint this with my own eyes."
"I can paint false Picassos just as well as anybody,"
Picasso replied. And then he bought the first Picasso at
four times the amount the poor artist had hoped it would
fetch.
As for himself, Picasso, from the time he began to take
in appreciable sums until his death, lived like an Okie,
albeit one who never had to worry about where his next
meal or his next pair of trousers was coming from. "I
should like to live like a poor man with a lot of money,"
he had said in the days when he was desperately poor and
burning some of his paintings for heat.
Collector of Oddments
All his studios and homes--even the 18-room rambling
La Californie at Cannes--were crammed and cluttered
with junk--pebbles, rocks, pieces of glass, a hollow
elephant's foot, a bird cage, African drums, wooden
crocodiles, parts of old bicycles, ancient newspapers,
broken crockery, bullfight posters, old hats, weird
ceramics. Picasso was a compulsive collector of
oddments, and he never threw any of them away, or
permitted anyone to move any object once he had
dropped it, tossed it or placed it somewhere.
To compound the chaos inside La Californie, the
villa's lawn was home to clucking chickens, pigeons,
at least one goat, dogs and children. They all
disported among bronze owls, fountains and statuary
scattered about the grounds. Freedom for animals
and children was a cardinal belief.
In later years this villa became a weekend residence,
while his main home was Notre Dame de Vie in
nearby Mougins. He also owned two chateaus,
Vauvenargues, in Provence, and Boigeloup, in
Normandy.
Despite the disorganization with which he surrounded
himself, Picasso was a most methodical man. When
he drove to Cannes or to Arles he invariably
followed the same route; and when he lived in Paris
he walked or rode the same streets in a fixed order.
When his Paris studio was at 7 rue des
Grand-Augustins on the Left Bank, he almost always
dined at La Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard
Saint-Germain and then cross the street to the Cafe
Flore to join friends in a mineral water and
conversation before going home.
One Picasso day was, in outline, much like the next.
He arose late, usually around 10 or 11, devoted two
or three hours to friends, conversation, business, letters
and lunch; then, at 3 or 4, he would go to his studio to
work in Trappist silence, often for 12 hours at a stretch,
breaking off only for dinner around 10:30. Afterward,
he sometimes worked until 2 or 3 in the morning.
When Miss Gilot was living with Picasso in Paris, she
found that one of her most difficult tasks was to get
him started on his day. "He always woke up submerged
in pessimism, and there was a definite ritual to be
followed, a litany that had to be repeated every day,"
she recalled in her book, "Life With Picasso," published
in 1964 by McGraw-Hill.
The rigamarole, as Miss Gilot recounts it, had largely
to do with reassuring Picasso that his lamentations were
falsely based. "Well, I do despair," he would say in
Miss Gilot's reconstruction, "I'm pretty nearly desperate.
I wonder, really, why I bother to get up. Why should I
paint? Why should I continue to exist like this? A life like
mine is unbearable."
Eventually, of course, Picasso permitted himself to be
convinced that the world was not in conspiracy against
him. Part of his maledicent mood could perhaps be
traced to the physical aspects of his bedroom.
"At the far end was a high Louis XIII secretary,"
according to Miss Gilot, "and, along the left-hand wall,
a chest of the same period, both completely covered
with papers, books, magazines and mail that Pablo
hadn't answered and never would, drawings piled up
helter skelter, and packages of cigarettes. Above the
bed was a naked electric-light bulb. Behind the bed
were drawings Pablo was particularly fond of, attached
by clothespins to nails driven into the wall.
Letters Pinned on Wires
"The so-called more important letters, which he didn't
answer either but kept before him as a permanent
reminder and reproach, were pinned up, also with
clothespins, onto wires that stretched from the
electric-light wire to the stovepipe. There was almost
no other furniture, except a Swedish chair in laminated
wood."
By early afternoon, Picasso, amid the bustle of the
household and friends who came to pay him court,
was bubbly and sunny. He liked not so much to
converse as to talk, and his monologues were usually
. His agile mind leaped from subject to subject, and he
had almost total recall.
He always had several projects in hand at the same time,
and to each he seemed equally lavish with his talent.
"Painting is my hobby," he said. "When I am finished
painting, I paint again for relaxation."
"He used no palatte," Miss Gilot wrote of his working
habits. "At his right [as he addressed his easel] was a
small table covered with newspapers and three or four
large cans filled with brushes standing in turpentine.
"Every time he took a brush he wiped it off on the
newspapers, which were a jungle of colored smudges
and slashes. Whenever he wanted pure color, he
squeezed some from a tube onto the newspaper. At his
feet and around the base of the easel were cans--mostly
tomato cans of various sizes--that held gray and neutral
tones and other colors that he had previously mixed.
Stood for Several Hours
"He stood before the canvas for three or four hours at
a stretch. He made almost no superfluous gestures. I
asked him if it didn't tire him to stand so long in one
spot. He shook his head.
"'No,' he said. 'That is why painters live so long. While
I work I leave my body outside the door, the way
Moslems take off their shoes before entering the
mosque.'"
"Occasionally he walked to the other end of the atelier
and sat in a wicker armchair. He would cross his legs,
plant one elbow on his knee and, resting his chin on his
fist, would stay there studying the painting without
speaking for as long as an hour.
"After that he would generally go back to work on the
portrait. Sometimes he would say, 'I can't carry that
plastic idea any further today,' and then begin to work
on another painting. He always had several half-dry
unfinished canvases to choose from.
"There was total silence in the atelier, broken only
by Pablo's monologues or an occasional conversation;
never an interruption from the world outside. When
daylight began to fade from the canvas he switched on
two spotlights and everything but the picture surface
fell away into the shadows.
"'There must be darkness everywhere except on the
canvas, so that the painter becomes hypnotized by his
own work and paints almost as though he were in a
trance,' he said. 'He must stay as close as possible to
his own inner world if he wants to transcend the
limitations his reason is always trying to impose on
him.'"
Mood was a vital ingredient of Picasso. Everything
he saw, felt or did was for him an incomplete
experience until it had been released and recorded.
Once he was lunching on sole and happened to hold
up the skeleton so that it caught his glance. He got up
from the table and returned almost immediately with a
tray of clay in which he made an imprint of the skeleton.
After lunch he drew colorful designs around the filigree
of the bones, and the eventual result was one of his
most beautiful plates.
Here, as in other art areas, when the inspiration was
upon him he worked ceaselessly and with such
concentration that he could, for example, paint a
good-sized picture in three hours.
Just as intensely, Picasso loved to mime, to clown,
to play charades, to joke. To amuse his friends
(and himself) he would don a tuxedo, red socks and
funny hats; or he would put on Chaplinesque garb
and engage in horseplay.
Disguises for Visitors
"The moment when disguises are called for most
urgently is on the arrival of visitors, especially those
from abroad," Roland Penrose, a British friend, wrote
in his "Picasso: His Life and Work." "The less known
or the more intimidating the guest may be, the more
likely it is that he will find himself confronted by the
master not as he expected to find him but as a
burlesque little figure wearing perhaps a yachting cap
with horn-rimmed spectacles, a red nose and black
side-whiskers and brandishing a saber."
He put on disguises, too, to romp with children, and
they loved him for the ease with which he entered their
fantasy world.
Picasso was a short, squat man with broad, muscular
shoulders and arms. He was proud of his small hands
and feet and of his hairy chest. In old age his body was
firm and compact; and his cannon-ball head, which was
almost bald, gleamed like bronze. Set into it were deep
black eyes of such penetration and alertness that they
became his hallmark.
Photographs from his younger years showed him a
handsome man with jet-black hair. Apart from the
absence of hair, the description of him by Miss Olivier,
his first long-term mistress, could have applied to the
artist of later years.
"Small, dark, thickset, unquiet, disquieting, with
somber eyes, deep-set, piercing, strange, almost fixed,"
she wrote. "Awkward gestures, a woman's hands,
ill-dressed, careless. A thick lock of hair, black and
glossy, cut across his intelligent, obstinate forehead.
Half Bohemian, half workman in his clothes; his hair,
which was too long, brushing the collar of his worn-out
coat."
Although at various times in his life Picasso dressed
as a dandy, he was never comfortable in conventional
clothes. He preferred corduroy or heavy velvet jackets,
a T shirt and heavy trousers made of a blanket type of
wool. These, after he could afford them, were
custom-made in odd designs. Sometimes he varied his
get-up by wearing a striped jersey pull-over; and
sometimes he just walked around in shorts. It was all
a matter of whim.
Scores of Close Friends
Although whim at times governed whom he would see
and for how long, Picasso was generally a hospitable
host in the Spanish manner. He had scores of close
friends--Mr. Kahnweiler, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard
and Louis Aragon among many others.
However, as with most illustrious men, Picasso
attracted gushing admirers and sycophants. Some
called him "maestro" and fawned on him for the
subsidiary fame that came from standing in his light.
He was not above their company; and, indeed, he
seemed to have relished some who gave him favorable
publicity.
Women were one of Picasso's most persistent
preoccupations. Apart from fleeting affairs, there
were seven women significant in his personal and
artistic life. He married two of them, but his
relationships with the five others were well recognized
and generally respected. Two of his companions bore
three of his four children.
The artist's wives and mistresses served as his
models, organized the domestic aspects of his
household so far as that was possible, petted him,
suffered his mercurial moods and greeted his friends.
In Picasso's early days in Paris, his mistress was Miss
Olivier, a young painter and teacher, who lived, as he
did, in the Bateau-Lavoir--a Montmartre building
called that by the poet and painter Max Jacob because
it swayed like a creaky Seine laundry boat.
"I met Picasso as I was coming home one stormy
evening," Miss Olivier recalled. "He had a tiny kitten in
his arms, which he laughingly offered me, at the same
time blocking my path. I laughed with him. He invited
me to his studio."
Their liaison lasted until 1912, when Picasso met Marcelle
Humbert, the mistress of a sculptor friend. The two ran
off together, and there followed a series of superb
canvases expressing the artist's happiness. He called
Miss Humbert "Eva" and signed two of his works
"J'aime Eva." Miss Humbert died in 1914.
In Rome, early in 1917, he met Olga Khoklova, a
ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. He
painted her in a Spanish mantilla, and he and Olga were
married in 1918. Three years later a son, Paolo--Italian
for Pablo or Paul--was born.
Separated for 20 Years
The marriage broke up in 1935, and Olga died in
southern France 20 years later. The couple were never
divorced. One reason, it is said, was that they had been
married under a community property arrangement that
would have obliged Picasso to divide his fortune with
her.
At the time of the separation Picasso's mistress was
his blond model, Marie-Therese Walter. In 1935 she
bore him a daughter, Marie de la Concepcion.
A portrait of the girl, known as Maia, was one of
Picasso's most fetching naturalist studies. Dora Maar, a
young Yugoslav photographer, was the painter's next
mistress. Their companionship lasted until 1944.
The same year, when Picasso was 62, he began an
11-year liaison with Miss Gilot. Their children were
Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma, born in 1949. In
1970 Miss Gilot was married to Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the
polio-vaccine developer.
Picasso's final attachment was to Jacqueline Roque,
who became his mistress in 1955, and his wife in 1961,
when she was 35 and he was 79. Miss Roque had a
rather wry sense of her role in the painter's life. A
member of a movie crew that was making a picture at
their home asked her quite innocently who she was. "Me,
I'm the new Egeria," she replied; and from all accounts
she was happy in devoting her life to her husband's.
Amid the Bohemian clutter in which he lived and thrived,
despite the concomitant disarray of his personal affairs,
Picasso maintained a strong, consistent and lasting
emotional bond to the country of his birth. This bond
influenced his painting and, after 1936 and the Spanish
Civil War, propelled him for the first time into politics.
His attachment to Spain was romantic and passionate; and
the fact that he shunned Generalissimo Francisco Franco's
Spain yet kept his Spanish nationality was an expression of
his umbilical feeling for the country.
There were two principal consequences of this bond:
One was "Guernica" and the other was his membership
in the French Communist party, which he joined in 1944.
"Up to the time of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was
completely apolitical," Mr. Kahnweiler, his agent, recalled.
"He did not even know the names of the different parties.
The Civil War changed all that."
Previously, Picasso's insurgency had been that of every
artist against the constrictions of conventional life. But
with the outbreak of conflict in his homeland, Picasso
became instinctively an aroused partisan of the Republican
Government.
In January, 1937, he began etching the two large plates
of "Sueno y Mentira de Franco" (The Dream and Lie of
Franco). These showed the rebel leader as a perpetrator
of symbolic horrors--himself ultimately transformed into
a centaur and gored to death by a bull. Countless copies
of these etchings were dropped like propaganda leaflets
over Franco territory.
But it took the bombing of the Basque town of
Guernica y Luno on April 26, 1937, to drive Picasso
to the heights of his genius. At 4:30 on that cloudless
Monday afternoon, German airmen, who had been
provided to Franco by Adolf Hitler, descended on
Guernica, a town of no military importance, in a test of the
joint effect of explosive and incendiary bombs on civilians.
The carnage was enormous, and the news of it appalled
the civilized world.
At the time Picasso had been engaged by the Loyalist
Government to do a mural for its pavilion at a Paris fair
later that year. The outrage at Guernica gave him his
subject and in a month of furious and volcanic work he
completed his great and stunning painting.
In Trust for the Nation
The monochromatic mural, stark in black, gray and
white, was retained by the artist in trust for the Spanish
nation. It was to be given to the nation when it became
a republic again.
Assessing the picture's searing impact on viewers over
the years, Roland Penrose wrote:
"It is the simplicity of 'Guernica' that makes it a picture
which can be readily understood. The forms are
divested of all complications which would distract from
their meaning. The flames that rise from the burning
house and flicker on the dress of the fallen woman are
described by signs as unmistakable as those used by
primitive artists.
"The nail-studded hoof, the hand with deeply
furrowed palm and the sun illuminated with an
electric-light bulb are drawn with a childlike simplicity,
startling in its directness."
"Guernica" was responsible for one of Picasso's most
noteworthy ripostes. During the Nazi occupation of
France in World War II, a German officer visited the
artist's studio, where a large reproduction of the
mural was on display.
"Ah, so it was you who did that," the German said.
"No," snapped Picasso. "You did it!"
Picasso painted two other major historical pictures,
"The Korean Massacres" and "War and Peace." The
two large compositions are in an old chapel in Vallauris,
France. Both were intended to arouse the conscience of
mankind to the horrors of war.
Toward the close of World War II the artist joined the
Communist party, and L'Humanite, the party daily,
marked the occasion by publishing almost a full-page
photograph of him. Although his decision seemed clearly
motivated by the Spanish War and the ensuing World
War, there were many who thought at first that the
action was another of Picasso's caprices.
He responded to such charges with a statement published
in Les Lettres Francaises, which said in part:
"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has
only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if a musician,
or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if
he is merely a boxer, only his muscles?
"On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being,
constantly alert to the heart- rending, burning, or happy
events in the world, molding himself in their likeness.
"How could it be possible to feel no interest in other
people and, because of an ivory- tower indifference,
detach yourself from the life they bring with such open
hands?
"No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is
an instrument of war, for attack and defense against the
enemy."
Denounced by Soviet Critic
But Picasso's brand of Communism was not Moscow's,
at least in the Kremlin's Stalinist period. In 1948, his
works were denounced by Vladimir Kemenov, a Soviet
art critic, as an "apology for capitalistic esthetics that
provokes the indignation of the simple people, if not the
bourgeoisie."
"His pathology has created repugnant monstrosities,"
Mr. Kemenov went on. "In his 'Guernica' he portrayed not
the Spanish Republic but monsters. He treads the path of
cosmopolitanism, of empty geometric forms. His every
canvas deforms man--his body and his face."
Picasso was pained but unmoved by the attack. "I don't
try to advise the Russians on economics. Why should they
tell me how to paint?" he remarked to a friend.
About that time, according to one account, an orthodox
Soviet painter said to Picasso on being introduced, "I
have known of you for some time as a good Communist,
but I'm afraid I don't like your painting."
"I can say the same about you, comrade," Picasso shot
back.
After Mr. Kemenov's appraisal, Moscow's attitude to
the artist fluctuated. "The Dove" helped, quite
unintentionally, to create a thaw, and it came about this
way:
One day in 1949 Matisse came to visit Picasso, bringing
a white fantail pigeon for his friend's cote. Virtually on
the spot, Picasso made a naturalistic lithograph of the
newcomer; and Louis Aragon, the Communist poet and
novelist, who saw it shortly afterward, realized its
possibilities at once.
The lithograph, signed by the artist, was first used as a
poster at a World Peace Conference. And from that
introduction it flew around the world, reproduced in all
sizes and in all media as a peace symbol.
Picasso got into Communist hot water again, however,
in 1953. This time the attack came from his French
comrades. The occasion was Stalin's death and a crayon
portrait that the artist sketched. The imaginative likeness
of Stalin as a young man stirred up the working-class
members of the French party. Mr. Aragon, who had
published it, felt obliged to recant in public, and Picasso
was not amused.
"When you send a funeral wreath, the family customarily
doesn't criticize your choice of flowers," he said.
Nevertheless, in 1954 Moscow appeared to relent, for it
took out of hiding its 37 precious early Picassos (they had
never been shown to the Soviet public) and lent them to a
Paris exhibition. And two years later the Soviet Union
marked the painter's 75th birthday by showing a large
number of his pictures and ceramics to the public.
Picasso's distortions of reality, to which Mr. Kemenov
objected, also baffled less political critics who were
unaccustomed to the artist's private language and private
mythology or who did not appreciate the esthetics of
plane and solid geometry and of Mercator-like projections
of the human face and form.
Born on Spain's South Coast
The man who so largely created the special esthetic of
modern art was born on the night of Oct. 25, 1881, in
Malaga, on Spain's south coast.
Picasso's father was Jose Ruiz, an Andalusian who
taught for small pay in the local school of arts and crafts.
His mother was Maria Picasso, a Majorcan. Pablo could
draw as soon as he could grasp a pencil, but as a pupil in
the ordinary sense he preferred looking at the clock to
doing sums and reading. Save for art, he managed to
avoid all but the rudiments of formal schooling. He was
obstinate about this, as in other matters.
As a child, Picasso often accompanied his father to
the bullfights. These made an indelible impression, for
throughout his life bullring scenes and variations on
them were a significant part of his work, recurring more
persistently than any other single symbol. His first oil, at
the age of 9, was of the bullring.
In 1895 the family moved to Barcelona, where Pablo's
father taught at the School of Fine Arts. By that time the
youngster's talent was truly Mozartean, so obviously so
that his father solemnly presented him with his own
palette and brushes. This confidence was justified when
Pablo, at 15, competed for admission to the art school.
A month was ordinarily allowed, but he completed his
picture, a male nude, in a single day and was admitted to
classes in 1896.
He remained there for a year before going to Madrid
for further study. During an illness he lived among the
peasants of Catalonia, the poverty and barrenness of
whose lives appalled him. From them and from the c
ountryside, he said later, he learned "everything I know."
Dropped Father's Name
Late in 1898, the young artist dropped his father's
name from the signature "P. Ruiz Picasso" for reasons
that have never been made clear. (His full baptismal name
had been Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula
Nepomuceno Paria de los Remedios de la Santisima
Trinidad Ruiz Picasso.)
Picasso paid his first visit to Paris in 1900 and after
three more visits settled in Paris in 1904. On one of these
visits he met Max Jacob, who was, next to Pierre Reverdy,
his most appreciative friend until his death in a Nazi
concentration camp. Picasso also became acquainted with
Berthe Weill, the art dealer, who purchased some of his
paintings, and Petrus Manach, another dealer, who was to
support him briefly at the rate of $37.50 a month.
Meanwhile, Picasso's "blue" pictures had established
him as an artist with a personal voice. This period, ending
about 1904, was characterized by his use of the color blue
to depict fatalistically the haunting melancholy of dying
clowns, most of them in catatonic states, and agonized
acrobats. "La Mort d' Arlequin" is one of the most widely
known of these.
When the artist moved into the Bateau-Lavoir, his
rickety and drafty studio became an important meeting
and talking place for persons later to be famous in arts
and letters. In addition to Mr. Jacob there were
Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet; Andre Salmon, the
writer; Matisse; Braque: Le Douanier Rousseau; Juan
Gris, the Spanish painter; Cocteau, Dufy, Gertrude and
Leo Stein, Utrillo, Lipschitz and Marcoussis. Apollinaire,
Picasso's spiritual guide in those days, introduced him to
the public with a long article in a Paris review in 1905.
One of Picasso's lifelong habits, painting at night, started
during this time, and for the simple reason that his day
was frequently absorbed by friends and visitors. It was
also the time of his two-year "rose period," generally
dated from 1904 to 1906, so-called because hues of that
color dominated his pictures.
Near the rose period's close, he was taken up by the
Steins, American expatriates in Paris. Leo and Gertrude
did not so much discover the painter as popularize him.
He, in turn, did a portrait of Gertrude with a face far
from representational. When Miss Stein protested that
she didn't look like that, Picasso replied, "But you will,"
and, indeed, in her old age Miss Stein came to resemble
her picture.
The year 1907, the end of a very brief "Negroid" or
"African period," was a milestone for the painter, for it
marked the birth of cubism in an oil of five distorted
nudes called "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
With cubism, Picasso--along with Braque--rejected light
and perspective, painting not what he saw, but what he
represented to himself through analysis. (The name
"cubism" was coined afterward, and it was based on the
cube forms into which Picasso and Braque tended to
break up the external world.)
"When we painted as we did," Picasso said later, "we
had no intention of creating cubism, but only of
expressing what was inside us.
"Cubism is neither a seed nor a fetus, but an art which is
primarily concerned with form, and, once a form has
been created, then it exists and goes on living its own
life."
This was also the case when Picasso added a new
dimension to cubism in 1911 or 1912 by inventing the
collage by gluing a piece of imitation chair caning to a
still life. Later he went on to an even less academic cubism,
sometimes called rococo cubism.
Invention of the Collage
These expressions in the cubist manner were not
Picasso's total expression in the years from 1907 to
1917, for at the same time he was painting realistically.
His first substantial recognition came in this period
through an exhibition in New York in 1911 and one in
London in 1912. His pictures began to fetch high
prices--almost $3,000 for "Acrobats" in 1914.
With the war and his marriage to a ballerina, Picasso
was a costume designer and scenery painter for the
Ballet Russes up to about 1925, all the while painting
for himself, mostly in a neoclassic and romantic manner.
"The Woman in White" is among the best-known of
these naturalistic pictures.
With the advent of the surrealist movement in the middle
twenties, the artist's work turned to the grotesque. Some
of his figures were endowed with several heads,
displaced noses, mouths and eyes, overenlarged limbs.
Turbulence and violence seemed to be at the bottom of
his feelings.
Then, in 1929, Picasso returned somewhat abruptly to
sculpture, of which he had done little for 15 years. But
again it was not a full preoccupation, and he was soon
attacking his easel, this time with variations within a
distinctive generally surrealistic framework. One typical
picture was "Young Woman With a Looking-glass,"
painted in 1932.
With these and other pictures of a similar genre, the
artist's renown and income reached new heights. Life
was also quieter for him, especially after 1935 when Dora
Maar helped put routine into his daily existence. She was
also the model for a notable series of portraits in which the
Mercator projection principle was applied to the human
face.
Serenity, or as much of it as ever was possible for Picasso,
persisted until the fall of Paris in 1940. He rejected an
opportunity to escape to the United States, and, instead,
remained in Paris throughout the war, painting
industriously amid considerable personal hardship and the
prying of Nazi soldiers. It was forbidden to exhibit his
pictures or to print his name in the newspapers.
Lithography and Ceramics
After the war, Picasso became enchanted by lithography,
which he taught himself. In a short period he turned out
more than 200 lithographs. He was at the same time
painting, in Paris and in Antibes, and restlessly
investigating pottery. Ceramics entranced him, and his
work with clay created an industry for the town of
Vallauris, not far from the Riviera. In a single year he
made and decorated 600 figures and vessels, all different.
Even this concentration on one medium seemed not to
diminish the intensity with which he, at the time, painted,
sculptured and illustrated books.
His painting style, although it had moments of naturalism,
contained wild reinventions of anatomy but in such an
idiosyncratic way that surrealism or any other "ism" did
not appear to apply. Picasso had isolated an idiom for
himself.
Toward the close of his life he also produced a number
of seascapes and paintings as a composer would write
variations on another's theme. Among Picasso's more
notable variations were 10 on Cranach's "David and
Bathsheba," 15 on Delacroix's "Femmes d'Alger" and
44 on Velazquez's "Las Meninas."
He also painted scores of portraits of his wife in a variety
of poses--on a bed fondling a cat, seated nude in his
studio, reading. They were portraits only in the sense
that they were vaguely representational of Jacqueline
Roque, for the figure and the face were almost always
distorted.
Many of these pictures were published in "The Artist and
His Model." They gave the impression of a man of
unlimited vitality in a perpetual state of creation. As if in
confirmation of this, Picasso told a visitor who admired
the vigor of the works:
"A painter never finishes. There's never a moment when
you can say, 'I've worked well and tomorrow is Sunday.'
As soon as you stop, it's because you've started again.
You can put a picture aside and say you won't touch it
again. But you can never write The End."
Landscapes were another fascination. Some were of the
sunlit terrain near his villa at Notre Dame de Vie; others
were of countryside painted from an undimmed memory.
Although the bulk of his paintings were not placed on the
market, many were published in color reproduction by
Harry N. Abrams in New York, an art book house.
Acclaim Mounted With Age
Popular acclaim for Picasso seemed to mount with his age.
In 1967, when he was 86, "Homage to Picasso," an
exhibition of some of his works, drew throngs to museums
here and abroad. His sculpture was given a special
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
One example of his sculpture, "Bust of Sylvette," is a
60-ton, sand-blasted work that rests in University Plaza,
in downtown New York.
A Picasso play also attracted attention, not to say
notoriety. It was "Desire Caught by the Tail," which he
had written in three days on a sickbed in 1941. It was
produced privately in Paris three years later with a cast
that included the playwright, Simone de Beauvoir,
Valentine Hugo, Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau and
Jean-Paul Sartre. The main prop was a big black box that
served as a bed, bathtub and coffin for the two principal
characters, Fat Anxiety and Thin Anxiety. The play's
action was earthy.
When "Desire" was commercially staged in St. Tropez
in 1967, it aroused protests even in that resort town's
atmosphere of tolerance. The objection was that some
of the characters were expected to urinate on stage.
Although this did not take place, the play was thought
overly suggestive.
Picasso wrote a second play, "The Four Girls," in 1965,
but it was not produced.
The painter did not venture to St. Tropez for his play,
nor did he often leave his hilltop villa in his last years. He
seemed to feel the world slipping away from him,
especially when his old friends died one after another.
He shut himself up, refusing to answer the telephone, for
example, to mourn Ilya Ehrenburg in September, 1967.
But for the most part he painted. Rather than stand, he
sat down, bending almost in half over his canvas. Age
lines in his face underscored an intensity of purpose hardly
abated by time. And as he painted his nostrils flared, his
eyes widened, he frowned and all the while his hand was
never still.
He was, in the words of a friend, "like a sturdy old oaken
tub brimful of the wine of life."
"You would think," another friend said, "he is trying to do
a few more centuries of work in what he has left to live."
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Photo:
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Picasso--Symbol of a Conquest in Art
FROM: The New York Times (April 9th 1973) ~
By John Canaday
Whatever else he was, Pablo Picasso was the most
potent single force in the art of the 20th century.
Matisse and Kandinsky might rival him as second leaders
in the most violent revolution since the Renaissance. But
neither of their revolutions was quite as drastic, as far
reaching, as varied in manner of assault and foray against
tradition as Picasso's. And yet as soon as the word
"tradition" is mentioned, Picasso must be thought of as a
colleague of the masters of the past as well as the artist
who seemed most to reject them. It has always been
typical of Picasso that he could not be captured within a
single net. He was this, he was that, he was the other--at
one moment a poet, at the next an inspired buffoon;
tender and romantic to the point of sentimentality,
intellectual to the point of frigidity; now a cynic, now a
compassionate man; ebullient in one painting, despairing in
another; exquisitely refined, and deliberately brutal.
To think of Picasso as dead is next to impossible.
Two generations ago he was already, with Matisse, the
most commanding presence in art for an avant-garde
that at that time was still small and was still opposed by
the academic legions. But for a generation Picasso has
been the established symbol not only of the revolution of
modern art but also of its conquest of the intellectuals, the
collectors, the schools, and the last academic fortresses--
the museums. The conquest is so complete that there aer
schoolchildren who know Picasso's name but have never
hear of Giotto's. There are college students who can tell
you more about the cubist revolution than the Russian
Revolution. Picasso turned the avant-garde into a mass
audience.
The one thing that hold's Picasso's tremendous body
of work together in spite of its unparalleled variety of
styles is the sense it gives, in total retrospect, of
restlessness, of dissatisfaction with any achievement, of
constantly uncovering something new, of throwing it
away, picking it up again, inventing, recombining, always
searching. Picasso once said, "I do not seek--I find," but
nothing he found ever satisfied him for long.
In a critique, Hilton Kramer suggested that Picasso's
preoccupation during the last years of his life with playing
variations on masterpieces of the past was a way of
satisfying his hunger for the monumental themes that the
past offered its artists. This must be true. Our century has
somehow denied even its geniuses among painters themes
comparable to the great religious cycles and the
glorification of rulers that were once valid, and which
were extendable beyond their specific subjects into
explorations of the human spirit.
In a century when faith is questioned and government is
a matter of practical organization, we are accustomed
to saying that modern artists have rejected the world
and are content to deal with trivialities or with
ivory-tower esthetic problems. But the choice has not
been theirs.
Michelangelo surely could not find today within religion
and society the impulses that generated the Sistine Ceiling,
or any substitute for those impulses. It is significant that
Picasso, in his one great social statement, the greatest
social statement made in painting in this century--his
"Guernica"--does not celebrate a victory or an ideal but
elegizes a defeat. And now, with his death, the probability
that Picasso was defeated by his century becomes clear.
One can no longer wonder what Picasso is going to do
next: The line has been drawn. For 70 years his torrential
energy constantly burst through conventional boundaries
to discover new releases, but his genius, comparable to
that of the old masters, never found expressive
consummation comparable to theirs. He produced, in a
dozen manners, bodies of painting and sculpture that
could have been the impressive life work of a dozen artists.
He shifted, in his single life as a man, from one creative
life to another. We can say again and again that he
exhausted a field of experiment--that he exhausted the
poignant lyricism of the Blue and Rose periods,
exhausted the technical experiment of cubism, exhausted
even the nostalgic recall of ancient Greece, exhausted
his castigation of the violent and the monstrous, and
exhausted them simply because the inexhaustible themes
of the past had been shattered into individually
exhausted fragments.
But Picasso could not stop working. His creative energy
welled up incessantly and demanded incessant release.
He was left time and time again with no outlet for his
fantastic genius except wit, showmanship and legerdemain.
In wit, showmanship and legerdemain he was
unsurpassed, but the work that poured out seems
sometimes to have been poured out desperately, in the
double desperation of releasing intolerable creative
pressures and the desperate realization that this great
force must be spent trivially.
But the triviality is only comparative. Picasso is being
thought of here along with Giotto, Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Rubens, for he was a
gigantic figure in spite of everything. If he is also a
tragic figure, it is by the conventions of tragedy that
demand a kingly figure fatally vulnerable to a tragic flaw.
And in this case the flaw was not in the protagonist, but
in the relationship of this century to its artists.
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Photo: http://www.prodigyweb.net.mx/jokisch/Picasso%201.jpg