ARTS
Picasso's favourites
John McEwen
When Picasso died in 1973 his personal estate was valued at about £150 million. He left no will and eventually an agreement was reached between the French government and his heirs that the vast sum of duty owed should be paid in the form of artworks. The government had first pick, and the resulting selection of about a third of the 2,500 objects in the artist's keep will form the collection of the Picasso Museum to be opened in Paris in 1983; 673 items from this public horde were chosen for an appetiser of an exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1979. Now with Picasso's Picassos (Hayward Gallery till 11 October. Mon-Thur, 10-8; Fri-Sat, 10-6; Sun, 12-6) the same cherry is subjected to the bite of a predominantly English committee, this time to the slightly smaller extent of 453 items.
Picasso would have been 100 this year. He wasNtupendously famous to the end, but during his life it was fashionable to disparage the work of his last 25 years. Now these last pictures have stimulated a new interest in painting among artists of all ages, and the air reverberates with the sound oi academics making frantic U-turns to extricate themselves from critical dead-ends. Outside the art world, however, people have remained suspicious of much more than the post-War work. The very popularity of the Rose and Blue Period pictures considered of secondary importance art historically seems to tell against the distortions with which he is associated, from his celebrated invention of Cubism on. For the majority and surely no artist has been more widely known everything he did after 1906 is a perverse joke at their expense. Picasso, admittedly, nursed such suspicions by being quite joky himself. At the Hayward there are caricatures from an early sketchbook as well as some famous visual puns of his maturity the handlebars and saddle of a bicycle doubling for the horns and skull of a steer; a scrap-metal owl and all the books (a fair smattering also available at the gallery bookshop), photographs and general gossip testify to a similar irreverence and love of a jape in his daily life. Visitors, returning from an audience with their doubts hardened into convictions because the great man had personally told them he was a charlatan, would have been wise to reflect on how wittily he had exposed their own gullibility.
The crucial thing that is always forgotten by people who look upon post-Rose and Blue Period Picasso as a load of rubbish, is that he continued to make simple, clear, representational images for the rest of his life. The present show is punctuated with examples from first to last, some of them famous through exhibition and reproduction his son Paul dressed as Harlequin, the sexual revelries of the `Vollard Suite' of etchings and some exquisite surprises a 1923 coloured etching of the Three Graces, the little oil on wood of a 'Family by the sea' of the same date. None of these could possibly offend the sensibilities of the most bottle-nosed traditionalist, at least in terms of readability, and they act as a gentle corrective to his more shocking deviations from the norm. Equally, the profusion of small and intricate works, as well as the attention to finished detail in so many of the larger canvases, disprove the idea that Picasso was in any way slapdash. The number and excellence of the small paintings at the Hayward is a particular revelation, alone classifying him as a master miniaturist, and they help to illustrate more clearly than did the enormous retrospective last year in New York just what a master he also is of scale. Best proof of this is how well most of his big pictures look as postcards, and how surprisingly small in reality some of his most monumental images turn out to be. Such works in minuscule enforce the sense of concentration that is the most powerful characteristic of his art in general. He himself said that everything he had ever made contained a phial of his blood and one can well believe him. Accordingly the experience of looking at a lot of his work in a single stretch is strangely exhausting, and it is difficult to imagine anyone being able to take in more than half the present show on a first visit. This makes it a specialist survey, for re-viewers rather than viewers, but meticulous and revealing nonetheless in its selection.
Inevitably it demonstrates what Picasso liked best in his work and this, significantly enough, coincides very much with the present, revised, critical view. The interpretation of his career as a long decline from the invention of Cubism, petering out altogether after the Second War, is now reversed. Everything up to Cubism is played down and the attention focused on the work of his middle and, to a smaller extent, old age. His career accordingly is more justly represented as a sustained, gargantuan, achievement. Stylistically this means that the collages (sculpture as well as painting), the near-abstract refinements of the surrealist years, the heavy sensuality of the simultaneous neo-classic period and all the most painterly, the most independent of mimetic considerations, of his pictures, come into their own; with the graphic work acting as a source of solace and inspiration throughout.
The feeling that one comes away with from this great feast is that Picasso was the last, more than the beginning, of a line. True, he broke the representational mould of renaissance art something which, under growing pressure from photography and the cinema, had to happen; but while this opened the way for a visual vocabulary more suited to the proliferating emotional and intellectual demands of the new century, he himself remained wedded to the renaissance ideal of classic perfection and artistic omnipotence. He may have broken the mould, but he never chucked away the pieces in favour of the abstract, the pursuit of the invisible forces that more and more came to be the reality of technology and science. On the contrary, he clung to the visible, while abstraction remained for him the depiction of what could not be seen, a romantic aberration. Nor was he theoretical. He had an extraordinary critical understanding, but that is not the same. He was a maker, not a thinker; a revolutionary, rather than an evolutionary, artist his career a spiral gathering towards a vortex. As Timothy Hilton remarks in his limpid introduction to the excellent catalogue (a snip at £5), Picasso makes no reference to technological change. He is not interested in change, in the future. He delights in variety. It is almost as if he is intent on bringing art, at least in its renaissance form, to an end, by submitting the observable image to every foreseeable permutation.
His awesome influence lends weight to this assumption. So many artists our own Moore and Sutherland as conspicuously as any owe the better part of their reputations to the exploitation of one or other of his ideas; but then in his plundering, his sexual insistence, his glorification of the moment, what an archetype of our age he has proved to be. His brilliant ceramic decorations (regrettably unrepresented) seem to have released the frenzied invention of the superb and least known last phase, a meeting of experience, spontaneity and sexual impulse quite unprecedented in art. It is shown in cautious numbers at the Hayward but provides a fittingly spectacular end to such an historical culmination of a career.
Previous page
