The Success and Failure of Picasso (8 page)

There may be a possible explanation here. But if you can accept neither it nor the psycho-analytic premises on which it is based, it is of little importance. The important point for our main argument is that for one reason or another, and as a corollary of his awareness of his prodigious gifts, Picasso has remained sceptical or suspicious of reasons, explanations, learning.

To emphasize this by contrast, I want to quote another painter.
Juan Gris was of the same generation as Picasso and was also a Spaniard. He was a great painter – and his contribution to Cubism was as important as Picasso’s – but he was in no way a prodigy. This is how he wrote in 1919:

I would like to continue the tradition of painting with plastic means while bringing to it a new aesthetic based on the intellect .… For some time I have been rather pleased with my own work, because I think that at last I am entering on a period of realization. What’s more I’ve been able to test my progress: formerly when I started a picture I was satisfied at the beginning and dissatisfied at the end. Now the beginning
is always rotten and I loathe it, but the end, as a rule, is a pleasant surprise.
⁵

Compare this with Picasso:

It would be very interesting to preserve photographically not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing – to notice that basically a picture doesn’t change, that the first vision remains almost intact, in spite of appearances.

Juan Gris has to travel and arrive – and believes in the intellect. Picasso is visited, denies progress – the picture does not go through stages but suffers metamorphoses – and thinks of the brain, not in terms of the intellect, but in terms of dream sequences. Gris’s paintings develop from beginning to end. Picasso’s paintings, however much they may appear to change, remain essentially what they were at their beginning.

Everything interesting in art happens right at the start. Once past the beginning you’re already at the end.

Picasso is again talking here about a single painting, but what he says could apply to his whole life’s work:, a life’s work made up not of stages, because that implies a desired destination, evolution, logical purpose, but made up of metamorphoses – sudden inexplicable transformations: a life’s work which, despite appearances, has left unchanged and intact its first vision – that is to say the vision of the young Picasso in Spain.

The only period in which Picasso consistently developed as an artist was the period of Cubism between 1907 and 1914. And this period, as we shall see later, is the great exception in Picasso’s life. Otherwise he has not developed. In whatever way one applied the coordinates, it would be impossible to make a graph with a steady ascending curve applicable to Picasso’s career. Yet this would be possible in the case of almost every other great painter from Michelangelo to Braque. The only exceptions would be those painters who lost their vigour as they grew older. But this is not true of Picasso. So Picasso is unique. In the life
work of no other artist is each group of works so independent of those which have just gone before, or so irrelevant to those which are to follow.

You can get some idea of this discontinuity in Picasso’s work by looking at three paintings – painted within two years – and then comparing them with two typical Braques, painted at the same time.

13
Picasso. The Coiffure. 1954

14
Picasso. Jacqueline with Black Scarf. 1954

15
Picasso. Seated Woman. 1955

16
Braque. Studio, VIII. 1954–5

17
Braque. The Bird and its Nest. 1955–6

Picasso’s discontinuity is often cited as a proof of his vitality, of the amazing way in which he has stayed young. This begs the question of why he has stayed young and avoids all the tragic implications of his restlessness, but the observation is true enough. Picasso has stayed young. He has stayed young because he has not developed consistently. He has not developed consistently because (apart from the
brief Cubist interlude) he has not been open to explanations, suggestions, or arguments. Instead he has had to rely more and more exclusively upon the mystery of his own prodigious creativity.

I hope that I have now made it clear how Picasso’s being
a child prodigy has increased and prolonged the effect and influence of his early years. The power of his genius, in which he had to trust, became a barrier against outside influences, and even a barrier against any conscious plans of his own. He submitted to its will – in an eternal present. He stayed young.

But there is also another reason why the prodigious nature of his gifts ties him closely to Spain. The mystery of his powers is of a kind that Spain recognizes. In Spain Picasso’s spirit – as opposed to his art – would become immediately comprehensible.

Lorca, who was born near Granada eight years after Picasso, wrote an essay on the subject of the creatively possessed. It is called ‘Theory and Function of the
Duende’.
⁶
The
duende
is a kind of undiabolic demon. Lorca quotes an Andalusian singer as saying ‘All that has dark sounds has
duende’.
Then Lorca goes on:

These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art.

As Lorca goes on defining the
duende,
he hints at why historically the concept is peculiarly Spanish. He makes a distinction between the
duende
and a muse,
and the
duende
and an angel. For him a muse represents the spirit of classicism leading on to enlightenment – as, say, in Poussin. An angel represents lucidity leading to Renaissance humanism – as, say, in Antonello da Messina. Both, he claims, are despised in Spain, because neither challenges death.

The
duende,
on the other hand, does not appear if it sees no possibility of death … in idea, in sound, or in gesture, the
duende
likes a straight fight with the creator on the edge of the well. While angel and muse are content with violin or measured rhythm, the
duende
wounds, and in the healing of this wound which never closes is the prodigious, the original in the work of man.

The
duende
is born of hope:

The appearance of the
duende
always presupposes a radical change of all forms based on old structures. It gives a sensation of freshness wholly unknown, having the quality of a newly created rose, of miracle, and produces in the end an almost religious enthusiasm.

Yet it has to lead to fatality. Its most spectacular appearance is in the bullring, where death is certain.

In every country death has finality. It arrives and blinds are drawn. Not in Spain. In Spain they are lifted. Many Spaniards live between walls until the day they die, when they are taken out to the sun. A dead person in Spain is more alive when dead than is the case anywhere else…

The
duende
is the inspired cry of defiance of those on the rack. It is the impatience to have done, to break free from all material beginnings which appear never to develop: it is the attempt to transcend those beginnings by abandoning everything to the moment. And in certain circumstances the
duende
guarantees art.

At that moment La Niña de los Peines got up like a woman possessed, broken as a medieval mourner, drank without pause a large glass of
cazalla,
a fire-water brandy, and sat down to sing without voice, breathless, without subtlety, her throat burning, but … with
duende.
She succeeded in getting rid of the scaffolding of the song, to make way for a furious and fiery
duende
, companion of sand-laden winds, that made those who were listening tear their clothes rhythmically, like Caribbean Negroes clustered before the image of St Barbara.

La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice, because she knew that she was being listened to by an élite not asking for forms but for the marrow of forms, for music exalted into purest essence. She had to impoverish her skills and aids; that is, she had to drive away her muse and remain alone so that the
duende
might come and join in a hand-to-hand fight. And how she sang!

In 1904 Picasso arrived to settle in
Paris. What did he notice? How did it strike him? Or, more important, what did the impingement of all that was now around him, make him feel that he was? All definitions involve an investigation of relationships. How did Picasso have to define
himself, his inner self possessed by the
duende
, in relation to Paris? What did Europe make Picasso become?