In the steps of the master
Philip Hensher
PICASSO: STYLE AND MEANING by Elizabeth Cowling Phaidon, £75, pp. 703, ISBN 0714829501 This is quite a good book, but perhaps not a very necessary one. For over a decade now, works of Picasso scholarship have been scurrying like white mice round the feet of a periodically awakening lion, in the shape of the slowly issuing volumes of John Richardson's magisterial biography of the artist. The first volume came out in 1991; the second, which takes the story up to 1917, in 1996; and the third volume is eagerly awaited.
The quality, depth and novelty of the two volumes of Richardson's work are such that it is a brave scholar who embarks on any study of Picasso now. In a year or two, your elegant monograph may be completely eclipsed by a volume of `Richardson's Picasso', a book everyone will read and which will be much more informative than anything you have to say. In its command of a social and artistic milieu, its depth of research, its worldliness and entertainment value, the biography is practically unprecedented among works of art history, and, to be blunt, nobody is going to make his reputation as a Picasso scholar for at least a generation apart from those who have directly contributed to Richardson's work.
Elizabeth Cowling — brave woman — has produced what in other circumstances would be considered a very big book, but I don't think we need trouble with it. It is perfectly OK; it is thoughtful, it is readable, it goes down some of the conventional routes of influence and imagery while registering some useful scepticism on the very basis of these terms of discussion. If I had the thankless task, like Dr Cowling, of interesting the youth of Edinburgh University in Picasso, this is much more the sort of book that I would recommend than Richardson's. Adults will greatly prefer Richardson, which is full of fascinating material about Harry Kessler and the Mona Lisa theft and what-the-pianistsaid-to-Stravinsky-about-the-policeman. Children of Edinburgh University, you are not going to be examined upon any of that.
The general thinness of Dr Cowling's book comes home when you reach the passages about the Diaghilev collaborations. Although, unlike some art historians, she does acknowledge that ballets had composers, and there is a certain nodding towards the Diaghilev stable of Satie and Stravinsky and the whole lot, her research stops fairly quickly. I'm not surprised that she was entranced and amused by Stravinsky's published conversations with Robert Craft about the whole period, they are extremely funny books. Someone should have told her what a complete pack of lies they are, however.
But Picasso, what about him? One of the reasons he has established himself as the central figure of 20th-century art is that, as the century went on, we grew less and less convinced of the idea of the coherent, unified human personality. A human being, in Freud, seems like Hamlet with his inescapable dilemmas; one in Lacan, 50 years later, seems like a troupe of commedia dell'arte players, taking on roles according to whim and convention. Picasso alarmed observers from the beginning of his career with his apparently low boredom threshold and ability to be Ingres at one moment, a seat-slashing Apache the next. Painters subsequently, such as Gerhard Richter, have made a conscious effort to deny the idea that le style, c'est l'homme and made mannered attempts to move from one style to another inconsistently. Picasso is alarming because his astonishing
technical proficiency, it seemed, allowed him to do anything at all, and we don't see an end to what he might have chosen to do. Though all his paintings have something intangibly Ticassoesque' about them, it is hard to identify that quality in any randomly chosen group of paintings.
There have been other painters who underwent drastic changes of style — Fragonard, for instance — but none so many as Picasso. The changes between the turn-ofthe-century saltimbanques paintings, to the African-flavoured Demoiselles, to high cubism, to the weighty classicism of the 1920s, are bewilderingly fast. Moreover. Picasso often painted in different manners at the same time, and even, as in the 'Demoiselles d'Avignon', included quite different styles in the same painting — in this case, the apparent incoherence is such that many commentators have regarded it as unfinished.
That protean ability was apparent from the first. Perhaps it comes from the bizarre training he had, which was a matter of teaching students formulae and tricks rather than interesting them in ways of seeing. Certainly, his lifelong obsession with reworkings, allusions, and his habit of conducting arguments with any images which happened to be at hand — my personal favourite are the blissfully funny graffiti he added to a Vogue fashion shoot in the era of the 'New Look' — is a secondary sort of argument, and not an engagement with the world. At that level, you can move very rapidly between very different modes. Matisse, who was always much more interested in, say, the curious electric red of shadows in a Mediterranean interior, seems a far more uniform artist.
Picasso, moreover, very often saw art as a politically engaged medium, and had no problem in subjugating any patient response to light and colour to an argument. The two great pillars of his career, 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' and `Guernica' are both in their different ways manifestos. He saw, and said he saw, painting as an affront, an argument, a confrontation: 'Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and a defensive weapon against the enemy.' The attitude was struck, in part, against Matisse, who famously said that he wanted to make art to please businessmen, like an armchair. In the end, of course, even Picasso's paintings did end up as exactly that, as decoration in apartments; no painting is proof against that.
Given the absolutely glacial progress of the Richardson biography, a smart art historian proposing a book on the subject might have nipped in and told the story in reverse order, concentrating on what one still thinks are the underrated and masterly distillations of the last 30 years and moving backwards. That might have found a market. This one goes over very well-covered ground, and stops dead at 1940, not long after Guernica'. The readings are perfectly good; the criticism solid; there is nothing really wrong with it. The book just feels like an exercise in typing with the great catalogue raisonne to the left, Richardson to the right. In the current nervously sub-Richardson climate, you do have to feel slightly sorry for her, given the impossibility of establishing any kind of authority, and many readers, seeing this book, will turn to the acknowledgments of the Richardson biography to see who Dr Cowling is — she make an entrance, but in the middle of a long list. And for most artists, it would do very well to say, as this blurb does, that 'she has been a specialist in Picasso since the mid-1980s'. In this case there is only one thing to say. I've got socks older than that. many people say, 'I am a non-religious Jew'?) But back to Alex. One morning, he wakes up after a turbulent hallucinogenic drugs trip to discover Kitty Alexander's autograph pinned to the door. How did it get there? Is it a fake? Perhaps he wrote it himself in a chemically modified moment. Dazed and confused, he flies off to New York to attend an autograph trade fair. Here he meets Autograph Woman, a former prostitute called Honey Smith. Honey is herself a reluctant celebrity whose claim to fame rests on a Divine Brown-Hugh Grant escapade which hit the tabloids some months ago. Together, and with remarkable ease, they track down Kitty Alexander. The thousands of letters Alex has sent over the years have been squirrelled away by Kitty's agent, Max Krauser. Max turns out to be Kitty's Norma Desmond-style creepy ex-husband. In a gush of spontaneity, Alex whisks the 77-year-old movie star to London. Inevitably, he begins to find her presence irritating. The result of this irritation is one of fiction's most enjoyable descriptions of a drunken spree. In the closing scene, Alex-Li says Kaddish for his father, on the anniversary of his death. We see him Blu-Tacking his father's signature in an elevated position above the rest of his valuable autograph collection. Alex has finally learnt that 'some part of himself cannot be signed, celebrated or sold'.
What marks Zadie out as a good novelist is the polygamous marriage in her work between intelligence, wit, beauty of expression and a profound sense of fun. Some of her fanciful phrases have an almost Wodehousean ring: `(Rabbi) Green frowned. The left side of his face hiked up as if some god, fishing for rabbis had just hooked himself a juicy one.'
But Zadie is no Bertie Wooster. She is, possibly, more akin to Jeeves, her mind being a bottomless pit of classical quotations and erudite aphorisms. She has an actor's ear for dialogue. This book is a classic. If President Bush behaves sensibly, your great-grandchildren will be reading it in 100 years' time.
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