ART REVIEW (NYT) - Picasso: Life and Politics During Occupied Paris
MrMojoMan
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
By now, nothing about Picasso's life or work is still unexamined. Several
generations of biographers, autobiographers, historians, novelists,
filmmakers, Spanish nationalists, Basque nationalists, communists,
psychologists, feminists and just about everyone else with some stake in the
art and culture of the 20th century have hashed over his career.
Fortunately, Picasso has been an elastic subject, an artist of quixotic
style and mesmeric narcissism, suited to the modern industry of
reinterpretation, which, in turn, has supported the equally fertile and even
more profitable business of the blockbuster show.
I wouldn't be surprised, when the history of 20th-century art is written in
another hundred years, to discover that Picasso's work is no longer valued
as highly as it is now, taste being fickle. But I would wager that he
remains the prime example of modern art's folie a deux with mass taste and
its peculiar version of the cult of the genius, which during this era has
become virtually synonymous with fame. It is fame that fuels the public's
seemingly unquenchable desire for more Picasso exhibitions -- fame and sheer
admiration, which, we should note, do not necessarily have anything to do
with the public's esthetic sensibility.
All of this is simply to state at the start why, inevitably, the latest
Picasso exhibition, "Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945," organized by the
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and opening Friday at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York, does not come as a revelation, notwithstanding its
hopeful claim to examine an "understudied period" of Picasso's career. The
landmark work of the period is maybe the most famous painting of the
century, "Guernica," so how understudied can this period be? "Guernica" is
not in the show, but a good number of studies for it and other pictures
related to it, including several of the familiar "Weeping Women," are here.
Much of the art on view at the Guggenheim is therefore familiar. But the
exhibition and its accompanying catalog are nonetheless not to be dismissed,
because at their core is a fascinating subject that, like all complex issues
of private morality, cannot be exhausted and will probably never be resolved
to everyone's satisfaction. That subject is the character of Picasso's life
and politics in occupied Paris.
We are dealing in this case with an issue of moral relativism faced by
nearly everyone who survived the Nazi period in Europe. Picasso, in a sense,
was merely a conspicuous case. We know this about him: He had not been
politically engaged until the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s caused him,
among other things, to make the "Dream and Lie of Franco," an etching that
he sold to support the Republican government. "Guernica," his response to
the Nazi bombing of a Basque town that he had never seen, was painted for
the Spanish Republican pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.
It's useful, nevertheless, to remember that when Picasso was first
commissioned to do the work for the pavilion, he chose a nonpolitical
theme -- an artist and model -- only transforming it at a late date into the
subject of the bombing. The final result disappointed some Republicans and
their allies anyway. They thought it should have been even more explicit.
When World War II began, Picasso chose to stick it out in his studio on the
Rue des Grands-Augustins. He was not allowed to exhibit, but he managed to
have paintings sold, some of which were bought by Germans, and he lived far
more comfortably than most people did. Hitler had declared him to be a
"degenerate" artist, and, according to one document, the German authorities
ordered Picasso to report for a physical examination, a prelude to
deportation to a labor camp. He evaded this order, perhaps through the
intervention of Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor.
Questions have been raised ever since. Why did he stay when he had the
chance to emigrate? Was he secretly helping the Resistance? Conversely, did
he get special treatment from the Germans? Whom did his presence in Paris
benefit more, the occupiers (in terms of their credibility) or the occupied
(in terms of solace)? Or did it somehow benefit both?
After the war he declared himself a communist. Stalin hated modern art as
much as Hitler did, but the communists had been enemies of the fascists, and
many of Picasso's friends in Paris were members of the French Communist
Party. So now the world's most prominent modern artist was suddenly Stalin's
ally -- or at the least, he lent his enormous prestige to the communist side
at the start of the Cold War. What was the true nature of his political
conviction?
At the heart of all these questions is the most obvious one: how much can
any of this -- his Spanish Republicanism, his sentiments about the
occupation, his communist conversion -- be detected in his art? This is the
real subject of the present exhibition.
It is a handsome, tendentious display of roughly 80 paintings, drawings,
prints and sculptures (including "Man With a Lamb") from among the hundreds
of works Picasso turned out during the war. We may tend to imagine the art
of these years in black, white and gray, the "Guernica" palette, but many of
the works are orange, yellow, red, purple and blue: Picasso was a more vivid
and original colorist than people think.
His paint was applied in fast, free, sometimes whimsical dashes and scrawls.
A good example, "Woman in a Gray Hat Seated in an Armchair," with its
scribbled line, pink flesh, scarlet lips and goggle-eyed, split-view face,
looks like the prime source for de Kooning's blowsy "Women": jaunty,
cartoonish and fresh. The overall effect is of an immediacy and a total,
almost arrogant linear command.
A new (for Picasso) kind of distortion affects many of his wartime figures,
their abstracted faces twisted like slabs of hard, flat rubber into knots or
made to look like blocks of jagged crystal. The expressions (those of the
"Weeping Women" aside) tend to be wide-eyed but impassive. These are mute
monsters, occupying confined, hermetic spaces. Figure and room are often
knitted together by an obsessive tangle of spiky lines.
A few motifs -- skulls, candles, pitchers, food -- dominate the many still
lifes he painted. Food, of course, was scarce (although Picasso had his
sources), and so was heat. One of the better pictures is a view from the
inside of his studio through a window. In the foreground is a big radiator.
The colors are brown and ice-blue and, as with his paintings of figures, the
impression is of a solid mass, a kind of frozen sculptural form, not an
open, airy space.
The organizers of the show, echoing what writers have noticed before, see
these pictures as having been strongly affected by the occupation: the still
lifes, for instance, are memento mori, the figure studies reflect his own
solitude.
To a degree this is simply undeniable. After the liberation in 1944, Picasso
told an American journalist that he had not explicitly painted the war
"because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for
something to depict." (He said this before he had painted "The Charnel
House" or "Monument to the Spanish Who Died for France," the two big
polemical works that end the show.)
"But," Picasso went on, "I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings
I have done. Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my
style has changed under the war's influence."
And of course that's exactly what has happened. Everyone has detected the
war, at least implicitly, in many of these pictures.
But it is not in some of them, too. With Picasso, more than with most
artists, the tendency has been to interpret his works as if each object had
a specific symbolic meaning to be decoded. Art historians have become like
oracles delivering the word from Montparnasse. We have been told that the
"Weeping Women" are portraits of Dora Maar and victims of the Spanish Civil
War and Medusa and Mary Magdalene. You can take your pick.
I am exaggerating, and the organizers of this exhibition (principally Steven
Nash of the San Francisco museums, with Robert Rosenblum at the Guggenheim),
to their credit, have wisely left themselves interpretative wiggle room. The
interesting catalog is written by art historians of sometimes contradictory
views, which seems a prudent approach because with Picasso the key word
remains ambiguity.
The best wartime paintings are good precisely because they are not
specifically about anything. "Guernica" may be famous and virtuous, but it
is a hodgepodge of Cubist design enlarged to the scale of a billboard and
uneasily hitched to a program of political dissent. Picasso probably wasn't
very comfortable grafting a political agenda onto his art because in the end
his art was, like everything else in his life, about him.
He survived the war, as did countless people, imperfectly but with dignity.
Picasso understood what he was (a painter), and what he was not, better than
his hagiographers or detractors. About his decision to remain in Paris
rather than emigrate, as many other prominent artists did when the Nazis
invaded France, he told Francoise Gilot in 1943: "I'm not looking for risks
to take, but in a sort of passive way I don't care to yield to either force
or terror. I want to stay because I'm here. The only kind of force that
could make me leave would be the desire to leave. Staying on isn't really a
manifestation of courage; it's just a form of inertia."
As one of the writers, Brigitte Baer, asks in the catalog: "Why should he be
a hero? An artist is an artist; it is not the same profession." Exactly.
"Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945" remains on view at the Guggenheim
Museum, Fifth Avenue at 88th Street, through May 9. It is sponsored by Delta
Air Lines.
PBridge130
I thought the Picasso article was thought-provoking and enjoyable. As I read
it, I was struck that "understanding" art is precisely like "understanding"
religion. A critic or interpreter claiming to "understand", or to know, to
intellectually own, a piece of someone else's art is no different than the
religious fanatic who wishes to assert his own understanding of God on others.
On the other hand, the sharing of interpretations and questions and experiences
offers an opportunity for minds and hearts to expand and open, rather than to
contract and close and harden.
Peter