The Success and Failure of Picasso

I almost forgot to tell you — or have I told you already? — that this man, whose tastes are not extravagant, has a weakness for black diamonds. He owns two superb ones and he will never part with them. They weigh a good hundred carats each. He wears them where other people have eyes. It’s as I tell you. And I assure you that those women on whom these diamonds turn their fire are utterly bowled over.

But before he had courtiers, those who wrote about Picasso found his eyes particularly remarkable. Fernande Olivier, describing how she first met him in 1904, wrote:

Small, black, thick-set, restless, disquieting, with eyes dark, profound, piercing, strange, almost staring.

His eyes [wrote Gertrude Stein, referring to about the same period] were more wonderful than even I remembered, so full and so brown, and his hands so dark and delicate and alert.

In 1920, when Maurice Raynal was disappointed with Picasso’s latest exhibition, he wrote: ‘Some of the stars in his eyes have gone out.’

The eyes in the head become a symbol for the whole man.

In the films about Picasso you can see his eyes for yourself. They reveal — or so it seems to me — the inordinate intensity of the man’s inner life and at the same time the solitariness of that life.

Little by little we are being forced to consider the general nature, the trend of Picasso’s subjective experience. How to define this spirit which he himself values more than his work, which charges his presence, and which burns in his eyes?

Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881. From Malaga you can see the Atlas mountains and, when the wind is in the south-east, you can smell the desert. Picasso’s ancestors, on both sides of his middle-class family, had belonged to Malaga for several generations. In 1900, when he was nineteen years old, Picasso left Spain for the first time in his life and spent a few months in Paris. In 1904 he settled in Paris permanently. Between 1904 and 1934 he returned to Spain about half a dozen times on holidays and painting trips. Since 1934, when Picasso was fifty-three, he has never been back. Picasso has spent most of his life in voluntary exile.

Exile is a state which, in its subjective effects, never stands still: you either feel increasingly exiled as time passes, or increasingly absorbed by your adopted country. Picasso certainly adopted France, and France him. His friends were French, he spoke in French, and he came to write in French. He was able to share in French patriotism. (Patriotism — as a result of the three German invasions of French territory in 1870, 1914, and 1940 — was a far more important element in French intellectual life than in English intellectual life during the same period.) France, on her side, recognized Picasso’s genius, and created his reputation for the world to take over in 1945. Nevertheless, and despite all this, I believe that Picasso has felt increasingly exiled.

His deepest needs have not been met in France. He has remained solitary. Loneliness is so common today in the metropolitan world of Western Europe and North America that the term has to cover a multitude of varieties. Old-age pensioners are lonely on park-seats. Old millionaires are said to be lonely as they look out at the world through their curtained windows. Some suffer loneliness in a crowd, others become lonely when there is not a soul in sight. We comfort ourselves by saying that it is also the privilege of great men to be lonely. But Picasso’s loneliness, if I am right, does not fit into any of these categories. He is lonely in the same way as a lunatic is lonely: because it seems to the lunatic that, since he never meets opposition, he can do anything. It is — by a paradox — the loneliness of self-sufficiency. This is not necessarily a loneliness that is suffered directly; more often it is a loneliness that provokes ceaseless activity and gives no rest. The worst thing in an asylum is that there is so little natural sleep. Perhaps it is foolish of me to use this image because it may confirm the philistine idea that Picasso is mad. He is not mad. Yet there is no other comparison which can illustrate so clearly what I mean. To explain why this should be so we must consider what Picasso has been exiled from: the Spain of his childhood and youth.

Picasso lived in Malaga until he was ten. Then the family moved to Corunna on the north Atlantic coast of Spain. When he was fourteen they moved again to Barcelona. Each of these cities is very different from the others — climatically, historically, and temperamentally. One of the difficulties of writing about Spain is that there are several Spains. Spain — in economic and social terms — has not yet achieved its unity. People speak of two Italies — north and south of Rome. One would have to speak of half a dozen Spains. This point is of crucial importance because it reminds us that Spain is historically behind the rest of Europe. Spain is separate.