PICASSO

1. ARTIST OF THE CENTURY

"No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. And it is quite possible that none ever will be again, now that the mandate to set forth social meaning, to articulate myth and generate widely memorable images has been so largely transferred from painting and sculpture to other media: photography, movies, television.... Picasso was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees. And he was the first artist to enjoy the obsessive attention of the mass media. He stood at the intersection of these two worlds.

"His work expanded fractally, one image breeding new clusters of others, right up to his death. Moreover, he was the artist whom virtually every other artist had to reckon with, and there is scarcely a twentieth-century movement that he didn't inspire, contribute to or beget. Much of the story of modern sculpture is bound up with welding and assembling images from sheet metal, rather than modeling in clay, casting in bronze, or carving in wood; and this tradition of the open constructed form rather than solid mass arose from one small guitar that Picasso snipped and joined out of tin in 1912. If collage–the gluing of previously unrelated things and images on a flat surface–became a basic mode of modern art, this too was due to Picasso's Cubist collaboration with Braque. He was never a member of the Surrealist group, but in the 1920s and 30s he produced some of the scariest distortions of the human body and the most violently irrational erotic images of Eros and Thanatos ever committed to canvas. He was not a realist painter/reporter, still less anyone's official muralist, and yet Guernica remains the most powerful political image in modern art, rivaled only by Diego Rivera.

"The so-called Blue and rose periods, with their wistful etiolated figures of beggars and circus folks, are not, despite their great popularity, much more than pendants to late 19th-century Symbolism. But in Paris mass production and reproduction had come to the forefront of ordinary life: newspapers, printed labels, the overlay of posters on walls–the dizzy intense public life of signs, simultaneous, high-speed and layered. This was the cityscape of Cubism.... Picasso was not a pholosopher or a mathematician (there is no 'geometry' in Cubism), but the work he and Braque did between 1911 and 1918 was intuitively bound to the perceptions of Einstein and Whitehead: reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interdependent events. Long before any Pop artists were born, Picasso latched on to the magnetism of mass culture and how high art could refresh itself through common vernaculars. Cubism was hard to read, willfully ambiguous, and yet demotic too." (Robert Hughes, Time, 8 June 1998)

2. BARCELONA TO PARIS

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, and his father was a professor of drawing. The family moved to Barcelona in 1895, where Pablo entered the local art academy. In 1897 he moved to the capital, Madrid, and entered the Royal Academy. but by now academic training bored him: he was more interested in the life of the streets (and brothels) and the great masters in the Prado: Velazquez, El Greco, Murillo, Goya. By 1899 he was back in Barcelona in a circle of Catalan artists whose eyes were turned toward Paris. Picasso made his first pilgrimage to Paris in 1900, the year of a world's fair. Here he discovered color–not the rather drab colors, the ochres and browns, of the traditional Spanish palette, but the brilliant colors of Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. The suicide of a friend, his studio-mate Carles Casagemas, triggered his melancholy Blue Period (1901-1904), during which he moved back and forth between Barcelona and Paris.

In 1904 he decided to move permanently to Paris, and soon found a mistress in Fernande Olivier. The traveling circus and players (saltimbanques) became a subject he shared with his new friend Apollinaire: for both the rootless wandering performer suggested the position of the artist in modern society. In "Family of Saltimbanques" (1905) Picasso is the Harlequin figure and Apollinaire the strongman. From 1904 to 1906 (the Rose Period) Picasso's work was increasingly "sculptural" (see for example his "Portrait of Gertrude Stein"), as the ascetically skeletal figures of the Blue Period gave way to more robust forms. And in 1906 he began work on a large composition that came to be called "Les Demoiselles d'Avigon." In painting it was arguably the first great event of the twentieth century, and paradoxically it was influenced by his encounters with premodern art, with medieval Iberian carvings and African masks. Those masks, he once said, "served a sacred purpose, a magic purpose... Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires."

3. THE PHILOSOPHICAL BROTHEL

Picasso was influenced by Cezanne, who died in 1906 and whose last great works ("Bathers") took the female form as their theme. But Picasso's women are clearly prostitutes rather than "bathers." The women beckon, stare, and lift their skirts. "Demoiselles" is a synonym for prostitute, and the Avignon was a brothel in Barcelona. The painting depicts the "parade," the moment when the prostitutes of the house display themselves to the client and he picks one. By leaving out the client, Picasso turns the viewer into a voyeur: we are implied as the visiting clientele. It's an insolent painting, intended to shock.

The bodies of the standing nudes are contorted like figures in El Greco. The neighboring figures do not communicate or interact with each other; they relate singly and directly to the spectator. "He would, in this picture, project sexuality divested of all accretions of culture–without appeal to privacy, tenderness, gallantry, or that appreciation of beauty which presupposes detachment and distance. His women's faces were to be orgiastic masks of impersonal passion with no interference of personality. No idyllic primeval state, no celebration of unsoiled innocence, like Matisse's Joie de vivre of the previous year, but the hothouse effect of a caged jungle whose graceless inmates, both frightened and frightening, sublime and comical, start up like jerked puppets" (Leo Steinberg).

The work was revolutionary in other ways as well: "Picasso resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. Overnight, the continued coherences of representational art–the feigned unities of time and place, the stylistic consistencies–all were declared to be fictional. In this one work, Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; by elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the web of connecting space; by abrupt changes of vantage; and by a sudden stylistic shift at the climax. The insistent staccato of presentation intensifies the picture's address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomful of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides" Steinberg).

4. THE MOMENT OF CUBISM

Picasso consolidated his revolution by teaming with Georges Braque to create Cubism, the movement that broke with the conventions of perspective and of illusionist three-dimensional space dominant in Western art since the Renaissance. Painting becomes a schematic rather than a representational art. "Analytical" Cubism fractures objects and space, according to Apollinaire, as a surgeon dissects a cadaver. In his portraits and paintings of seated figures playing musical instruments, Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. He and Braque showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas: a sense of multiplicity becomes the dominant element of the movement. The viewing-point of Renaissance perspective, fixed and outside the picture, has become a field of vision in which the spectator participates.

"The paintings of Braque and Picasso moved rapidly towards abstraction–or rather, to that point where only enough signs of the real world remianed to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame. There is no way of reassembling a view from these paintings. Solid, apprehensible reality has vanished. There are metaphors of relativity and connection in them, the world is imagined as a network of fleeting events, a twitching skin of nuances. Fragments of lettering and clues to real things materialize briefly in this flux, the way the backs of carp seen in a brown pond, flicking away from the surface, shimmer in the water.... As a description of fixed form, they are useless. but as a report on multiple meanings, on process, they are exquisite and inexhaustibel: the world is set forth as a field of shifting relationships that include the onlooker" (Robert Hughes).

The metaphorical model is the diagram: a visible, symbolic summary of invisible processes, forces, or structures. "A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.... To appreciate this art we must abandon a habit of centuries: the habit of looking at every object or body as though it were complete in itself, its completeness making it separate. The cubists were concerned with the interaction between objects. They reduced forms to a combination of cubes, cones, cyinders–or, later, to arrangements of flatly articulated facets or planes with sharp edges–so that the elements of any one form were interchangeable with another, whether a hill, a woman, a violin, a carafe, a table or a hand. Space becomes an event, not a container" (John Berger).

It's an abstract language, but it's also the language of the modern city and of everyday life. "The objects that go into my paintings," he told Francoise Gilot, "they're common objects from anywhere, a pitcher, a mug of beer, a pipe, a package of tobacco, a bowl, a kitchen chair with a cane seat, a plain common table–the object at its most ordinary." To these ordinary objects the Cubist added, in collage, bits of newsprint, product packaging, and department store wallpaper–emblems of modernity based on industrial mass production. We are in Apollinaire's Paris: "You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud. Here's this morning's poetry, and for prose you've got the newspapers. Sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories. Biographies of big shots, a thousand different titles. Lettering on billboards and walls. Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots" ("Zone").

5. CUBISM AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

"As revolutionary as the discoveries of Einstein or Freud, the discoveries of Cubism controverted principles that had prevailed for centuries. For the traditional distinction between solid form and the space around it, Cubism substituted a radically new fusion of mass and void. In place of earlier perspective systems that determined the precise location of discrete objects in illusory depth, Cubism offered an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminate spatial positions. Instead of assuming that the work of art was an illusion of a reality that lay beyond it, Cubism proposed that the work of art was itself a reality that represented the very process by which nature is transformed into art.

"In the new world of Cubism, no fact of vision remained absolute. A dense, opaque shape could suddenly become a weightless transparency; a sharp, firm outline could abruptly dissolve into a vibrant texture; a plane that defined the remoteness of the background could be perceived simultaneously in the immediate foreground. Even the identity of objects was not exempt from visual contradictions. In a cubist work, a book could be metamorphosed into a table, a hand into a musical instrument. For a century that questioned the very concept of absolute truth or value, Cubism created an artistic language of intentional ambiguity. In front of a Cubist work of art, the spectator was to realize that no single interpretation of the fluctuating shapes, textures, spaces, and objects could be complete in itself. And, in expressing this awareness of the paradoxical nature of reality and the need for describing it in multiple and even contradictory ways, Cubism offered a visual equivalent of a fundamental aspect of twentieth-century experience" (Robert Rosenblum).

RECOMMENDED:

Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (Princeton, 1960).

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981).

John Berger, The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1969).

Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel," Artnews (September/October 1972).