The Success and Failure of Picasso

The example of Picasso is not only relevant to artists. It is because he is an artist that we can observe his experience more easily. His experience proves that success and honour, as offered by bourgeois society, should no longer tempt anyone. It is no longer a question of refusing on principle, but of refusing for the sake of self-preservation. The time when the bourgeoisie could offer true privileges has passed. What they offer now is not worth having.

The example of Picasso is also an example of a failure of revolutionary nerve — on his part in 1917, on the part of the French Communist Party in 1945. To sustain such nerve one must be convinced that there will be another kind of success: a success which will operate in a field connecting, for the first time ever, the most complex imaginative constructions of the human mind and the liberation of all those peoples of the world who until now have been forced to be simple, and of whom Picasso has always wished to be the representative.

¹ Seeker & Warburg, 1963.

3. A LAST TRIBUTE

The paintings which Picasso made as an old man, between the ages of seventy and ninety, were for the most part only shown in public after his death, and after this book was written. The majority of them show women or couples observed or imagined as sexual beings. I have already pointed out a parallel with the late poems of W. B. Yeats:

               You think it horrible that lust and rage

               Should dance attention upon my old age;

               They were not such a plague when I was young;

               What else have I to spur me into song?

Why does such an obsession so suit the medium of painting? Why does painting make it so eloquent?

Once more, Picasso forces us to question the nature of art and, for this, one must again be grateful to the ferocious, untameable, and unflinching old man.

Before attempting an answer to the question, let us clear the ground a little. Freudian analysis, whatever else it may offer in other circumstances, is of no great help here, because it is concerned primarily with symbolism and the unconscious. Whereas the question I’m asking addresses the immediately physical and the evidently conscious.

Nor, I think, do philosophers of the obscene — like the eminent Bataille — help a great deal because again, but in a different way, they tend to be too literary and psychological for the question. We have to think quite simply, about pigment and the look of bodies.

The first image ever painted displayed the bodies of animals. Since then, most paintings in the world have shown bodies of one kind or another. This is not to belittle landscape or other later genres, nor is it to establish a hierarchy. Yet if one remembers that the first, the basic, purpose of painting is to conjure up the presence of something which is not there, it is not surprising that what is usually conjured up are bodies. It is their presence which we need in our collective or individual solitude to console, strengthen, encourage, or inspire us. Paintings keep our eyes company. And company usually involves bodies.

Let us now — at the risk of colossal simplification — consider the different arts. Narrative stories involve action: they have a beginning and an end in time. Poetry addresses the heart, the wound, the dead — everything which has its being within the realm of our inter-subjectivities. Music is about what is behind the given: the wordless, the invisible, the unconstrained. Theatre re-enacts the past. Painting is about the physical, the palpable, and the immediate. (The insurmountable problem facing abstract art was to overcome this.) The art closest to painting is dance. Both derive from the body, both evoke the body, both in the first sense of the word are physical. The important difference is that dance, like narration and theatre, has a beginning and an end and so exists in time, whereas painting is instantaneous. (Sculpture is in a category by itself: it is more obviously static than painting, often lacks colour, and is usually without a frame and therefore less intimate — all of which demands another essay.)

Painting, then, offers palpable, instantaneous, unswerving, continuous, physical presence. It is the most immediately sensuous of the arts. Body to body. One of them being the spectator’s. This is not to say that the aim of every painting is sensuous; the aim of many paintings is ascetic. Messages deriving from the sensuous change from century to century, according to ideology. Equally, the role of gender changes. For example, paintings can present women as a passive sex object, as an active sexual partner, as somebody to be feared, as a goddess, as a loved human being. Yet, however the art of painting is used, its use begins with a deep sensuous charge which is then transmitted in one direction or another. Think of a painted skull, a painted lily, a carpet, a red curtain, a corpse — and in every case, whatever the conclusion may be, the beginning (if the painting is alive) is a sensuous shock.