The Success and Failure of Picasso (3 page)

There is, however, an omission. When writing this book I failed to give enough importance to certain typical works which Picasso painted between 1902 and 1907. To put it simply, I was too impatient to arrive at the moment of Cubism. In failing to give enough attention to this early period, I missed, I think, a clue about Picasso’s essential nature as an artist. I felt the nature of his genius, I talked around it, but I failed to formulate it well enough. Perhaps I can make good this omission.

a.
Picasso. Self-Portrait. 1906

Painting is the art which reminds us that time and the visible come into being together, as a pair. The place of their coming into being is the human mind, which can coordinate events into a time sequence and appearances into a world seen. With this coming into being of time and the visible, a dialogue between presence and absence begins. We all live this dialogue.

Consider Picasso’s
Self-Portrait
, of 1906. What is happening in this painting? Why can this apparently uneventful image move us so deeply?

The young man’s expression – not untypical for a man of twenty-five – is solitary, attentive, and searching. It is an expression in which loss and waiting combine. Yet, this is at the level of literature.

What is happening plastically? The head and body are pressing towards the visible, are searching for a perceptible form, and have not fully found it. They are just at the point of finding it, of alighting on it – like a bird on a roof. The image is moving because it represents a presence striving to become seen.

Metaphorically speaking, this is a fairly common experience. What is extraordinary is that Picasso here finds (stumbles upon but somehow recognises) the painterly means necessary to express this tentative but almost desperately urgent coming-into-visibility. Between 1902 and 1907, the years leading up to the
Demoiselles d’Avignon
and including the first proto-Cubist works, he painted and drew numerous images which express the first hope of a settlement with the visible: a settlement which offers an assurance – an assurance which just before seemed impossible – of
being seen.

In the self-portrait, there are pictorial devices which aid the expression of this just-coming-into-visibility: the way that the flesh-coloured pigment spills over the outlines; the minimal, unfinished painting of the shadows; the lines of the facial features, painted
on
rather than
into
the face – like figures painted on a vase. (‘He is like Adam the instant after he was created and before he drew his first breath.’)

In other paintings of the same period he used other devices. I doubt whether his use of them was conscious. The means used were engendered by a profound intuitive conviction, a conviction which lay at the heart of Picasso’s activity as a painter. Picasso did not accept visual reality as innate and inevitable. On the contrary, he was always aware that anything he saw might have taken a different form, that behind what is visible lie a hundred other unchosen visible possibilities.

Chosen or unchosen by whom? Not, of course, by the artist, nor by the presence seeking visual form, nor, in fact, by God during the days of creation. The question has to remain unanswered, but it was in the hope of coming closer to some answer that Picasso, in face of the visible, was always to go on playing with the
possibly visible
, before the visible, as we know it, has been assured. His demonic drive for invention, sometimes profound and sometimes superficial, derived from this fundamental conviction that, in origin, the visible is arbitrary.

Intuitively he separated the energy of growth from the existent. And this separation allowed him to play with the enigma of the preexistent. Another way of describing the poignancy of the 1906 self-portrait would be to say that it is an image of preexistence, a portrait which is about to give birth to its subject.

I try to make clear in words what can only be said or questioned clearly by the pictorial. Picasso’s questioning or quest did not, however, simply depend upon the experience of art. It was grounded in other, much wider human experiences, especially those in which the energy of the body surpasses the normal dispositions of the physical. This is why Picasso was so haunted by, and was so capable of creating, images of passion and of pain: images in which energy surpasses the existent, images which reveal how the existent, and its dispositions, which we take for granted, is never complete or finished.

He was the master of the unfinished – not of the unfinished oeuvre, but of the experience of the unfinished. If all painting is concerned with a dialogue about presence and absence, Picasso’s art, at its most profound, situates itself on the threshold between the two, at the doorway of coming-into-existence, of the just begun, of the unfinished.

OCTOBER 1987
QUINCY, MIEUSSY
FRANCE

1
PICASSO

is now wealthier and more famous than any other artist who has ever lived. His wealth is incalculable. I will mention only one of his assets. He has a collection of several hundred of his own oil paintings, kept from all periods of his life. This collection – on the basis of current prices – must be worth anything between five and twenty-five million pounds.

Last year one of his gouache paintings (normally worth less than an oil), measuring about two feet by three feet, was re-sold at an auction for £80,000. Admittedly this picture was painted in 1905 during the so-called Blue Period, and this period, because it deals pathetically with the poor, has always been the favourite amongst the rich. However, a small, very average still-life painted in 1936 recently fetched over £10,000. Since Picasso’s collection of his own work includes at least five hundred canvases, many of them much larger and more important than the still-life, this gives us the absolute minimum of five million. The works would, of course, have to be sold
tactfully
– so as not to flood the market too abruptly.

Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas. Whatever Midas touched, turned into gold. Whatever Picasso puts a line round, can become his. But the fable
was a comic-tragic one; Midas nearly starved because he couldn’t eat gold.

It was in the early 1950s that Picasso’s earning power and wealth became fabulous to this degree. The decisions which so radically affected his status were taken by men who had nothing to do with Picasso. The American government passed a law which allowed income-tax relief to any citizen giving a work of art to an American museum: the relief was immediate, but the work of art did not have to go to the museum till the owner’s death. The purpose of this measure was to encourage the import of European works of art. (There is still the residue of the magical belief that to own art confirms power.) In England the law was changed – in order to discourage the export of art – so that it became possible to pay death duties with works of art instead of money. Both pieces of legislation increased prices in salerooms throughout the art-loving world.

There was another reason for the rise in prices. By the early 1950s the amount of money available for investment had increased to an unprecedented degree. The reconstruction after the war, the stimulus of rearmament, the consolidation of the developed economies at the expense of the underdeveloped ones, had all led to a situation where there was capital to spare. This in itself would have stimulated art investments, but there was an additional – one might almost say more human – motive involved.

The possibilities of foreign and colonial investment had changed since pre-war days. The sums involved were now too vast for the average private investor to take private decisions: now he simply handed his capital over to a highly-organized investing group.
Monopoly capitalism becomes anonymous in character for the average investor no less than for the average employee. Consequently there were investors who were looking – as a sideline – for a field of investment which offered a chance of personal interest and excitement, whilst still remaining comparatively safe. Some of them found art. And so art, at about this time, took in certain lives the place that was once occupied by South American railways, Bolivian tin, or tea plantations in Ceylon.

Within ten years the prices in the art salerooms increased at least tenfold.

Yet even before the 1950s Picasso was rich. Dealers began to buy his work in 1906. By 1909 he employed a maid with apron and cap to wait at table. In 1912, when he painted a picture on a whitewashed wall in Provence, his dealer thought it was worthwhile demolishing the wall and sending the whole painted piece intact to Paris to be remounted by experts on a wooden panel. In 1919 Picasso moved into a large flat in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris. In 1930 he bought the seventeenth-century Château de Boisgeloup as an alternative residence.

1
Château de Boisgeloup, Normandy

From the age of twenty-eight Picasso was free from money worries. From the age of thirty-eight he was wealthy. From the age of sixty-five he has been a millionaire.

His reputation has increased in step with his wealth. Originally of course it preceded it: it was Picasso’s reputation amongst his friends and fellow painters which first brought him to the attention of the dealers. Today it is his wealth that helps to increase his reputation.

His name is known to those who could not name their own Prime Minister. He is as famous in England as Raphael is in Italy. He is as famous in France as Robespierre. One of his friends, the critic
Georges Besson, goes much further.
‘Nothing’, he says, ‘is riskier than trying to define Picasso the man, more famous than Buddha or the Virgin Mary, more mercurial than a crowd.’ This, as so often with Picasso’s friends today, is an exaggeration. But certainly no painter has ever been known to so many people.

The mass media are the technical explanation of this. When once a man has, for some reason or another, been selected, it is they who transform his public from thousands into millions. In the case of Picasso this transformation has also changed the emphasis of his fame. Picasso is not famous as Millet in France or Millais in England were famous eighty years ago. They were famous because two or three of their paintings were made popular and reproductions of these pictures hung in millions of homes. The titles of the paintings –
Cherry Ripe or The Angelus
– were far better known than the name of the painter. Today, if you take a world view, not more than one out of every hundred who know the name of Picasso would be able to recognize a single picture by him.

The only other artist the extent of whose fame is comparable with Picasso’s is Charlie Chaplin. But Chaplin, like the nineteenth-century painter, became famous because of the popularity of his work. Indeed there are many stories of how his public were disappointed when they saw the real Chaplin because they expected to see Charlie, complete with moustache and walking stick. In Chaplin’s case, the artist – or rather his art – has counted far more than the man. In Picasso’s case the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade. It is too early to explain why this has happened. But it is a point we shall come back to again and again.

You may say that to recognize a name doesn’t amount to recognizing a personality. But everything remembered trails and attracts associations. The associations around Picasso’s name create the legend of the personality. Picasso is an old man who can still get himself young wives. Picasso is a genius. Picasso is mad. Picasso is the greatest living artist. Picasso is a multi-millionaire. Picasso is a communist. Picasso’s work is nonsense: a child could do better. Picasso is tricking us. If Picasso can get away with it all, good luck to him! Such is an average combination of the associations of the name in Europe. The apparent contradictions are possible – even necessary – because daily logic need not and should not apply to mythological characters.