The Success and Failure of Picasso

109 Picasso: Young Woman and Monkey, 3 January 1954

110 Picasso: Young Woman and Cupid with Mask, 5 January 1954

111 Picasso: Young Woman with Cupids, 5 January 1954

112 Picasso: Girl, Clown, Donkey, and Monkey, 10 January 1954

113 Picasso: Old Clown and Couple, 10 January 1954

114 Picasso: Couple with Masks, 24 January 1954

115 Picasso: Old Man and Young Woman with Masks, 25 January 1954

116 Picasso: Girl, Clown, Mask, and Monkey, 25 January 1954

117 Picasso: Painter and Model, 24 December 1953

118 Picasso: Painter and Model, 25 December 1953

119 Picasso: Woman, Apple, Monkey, Man, 26 January 1954

120 Picasso: Woman and Monkey Painting, 10 January 1954

121 Tintoretto: Woman with Bare Breasts (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

122 Giorgione: Old Woman, c. 1569 (Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice)

123 Titian: Vanity of the World, 1515 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

124 Picasso: Nu couché, 5 October 1972 (Musée Picasso, Paris)

PREFACE

I wrote this book more than twenty years ago. When it first came out, in 1965, it was attacked in many places, if not everywhere, as being insolent, insensitive, doctrinaire and perverse. In England, the land of Gentlemen, it was also dismissed as being in bad taste. Picasso was still alive and at the height of his fame. Hagiographic books and articles came out every year. The critical response to my book somewhat surprised me. I thought I had written an essay informed by sympathy for the artist and the man it concerned. Perhaps now, with the passing of the years, this sympathy for the protagonist of the story I tell is more evident.

For example, the essay begins by discussing Picasso’s wealth, a beginning which was, at the time, considered vulgar and tasteless. To translate the sums of money I mention into current currency, one should multiply by at least ten. Then Picasso died. Soon afterwards, the internecine litigations concerning his estate began. More recently, one has witnessed similarly sordid affairs following the deaths of other artists: Salvador Dali, for instance. So long as works of art are primarily objects of spectacular investment, such situations are bound to occur. The point, however, is that the alienation which this implies is usually first suffered as a solitude (the solitude of the bank vault) by the ageing artist. This solitude was the starting point of my essay, and as I re-read it, I find that time has also confirmed many other points I made.

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.