The Success and Failure of Picasso

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.