What demi-god bath come so near creation?
Bryan Robertson
A LIFE OF PICASSO: VOLUME I, 18881-1906 by John Richardson Cape, £25, pp. 548 The most beautiful museum in Europe is the Château Grimaldi at Antibes, which houses all the paintings, drawings, sculpt- ures and ceramics made by Picasso during his residence at the château through the long winter of 1947 and shortly after pre- sented by the artist in their entirety to the municipality of Antibes. A massive pale- grey stone fortification confronts the blue Mediterranean from the sea walls; the interior is simple and spacious. To extend the sensation of cool space, each stone- floored whitewashed room contains only two or three paintings. An occasional group of drawings, one or two sculptures and a few pots are placed here and there, almost casually. Everything is defined by clear Mediterranean light, slightly softened and diffused by pure white muslin gauzes stretched over each window.
The tall, vertical painting in black, white and grey of a goat is there, the craggy beast reaching up to nibble some leaves on the bough of a tree — and so is the disquieting, nocturnal vision of 'Night Fishing at Antibes', starry sky, moon counterpointing a lantern's glow, rocking boat, figure swooping down to lift a net, clutter of fishes, nets and hooks, set in a fractured design to convey a tense balance between the calm mystery of night on the water and the sporadic outbursts of intently focused activity that go with fishing. In an upper room are one or two of those sculptures of ancient-looking, surreal heads with slightly dislocated features and mad, huge noses that go right down to the floor.
Part of the beauty of this first Musee Picasso is in the specially apt convergence of light-drenched Mediterranean site, calmly austere building and Mediter- ranean-inspired contents, a notably serene phase of Picasso's output. The works of art in themselves are filled with the celebration of pagan life: men and women, nymphs, satyrs, birds, animals, rocks, sea, trees and flowers: a kind of mid-20th-century pastorale touching on the ancient world with an undercurrent of relief — blinking at the dazzling Provençal light, as it were, after the darkly claustrophobic war years.
This is the world of a man passionately in love with life, close to nature, at ease with antiquity, with a nervously, sensuously direct approach to the realisation of each image vehemently expressed in clay, paint, stone or pencil. The evident speed of the way in which every image, the owl, the faun playing the flute, the girl's head, comes to life through the most exact fusion of poetic impulse with technical virtuosity seems to bring you very close to the act of creation. And this is what John Richardson man- ages to do in the first volume of his life of Picasso, projected in four volumes. In his thinking and writing, through the whole of his finely orchestrated approach to one of the great subjects of our century, Mr Richardson has matched the powerful, fresh directness of Picasso's handling of imagery — his brisk scrutiny of any given theme from successive angles — with the clarity and objectivity of his exposition. At all times, you feel close to the artist at work in his studio, strictly circumstantial though the unfolding story may be, and this is a great achievement. Art criticism and art history are notoriously murky realms, but readers who fear the arrival of yet another damned heavy art book with the usual turgid prose can cheer up. This is the best biography to appear for the past quarter of a century, even given the tough competi- tion from Painter, Edel, Gitting, Holroyd, Ellman, Holmes, Spurling, Judd, Boyle, Marr and Co.
I write with special feeling because I have spent my life avoiding the debased genre of art monographs. For me, the writ- ten accounts of even the most reputable art historians are hard to stomach; with the shining exception of Kenneth Clark, they do not offer much pleasure. But Mr Richardson brings us the biography of a man, as well as an artist, passing through childhood to youth in the pursuit of a personal vision — and the cultural and technical vocabulary — with which to express his relationship with the world. He sees Picasso consistently within the context of the society around him: in his birthplace, Barcelona, in Madrid and at last in Paris. The way in which he describes Picasso's battles with family, the pressures of conventional religion and the disciplines of the academy, the friendships with poets, writers and other artists and the appear- ance of sympathetic critics, dealers and patrons takes on the narrative fascination in motive and density in action of a novel by Galdos. One of the most enjoyable aspects of Mr Richardson's text is its avoid- ance of pietistic cliché and its freedom from that faintly subservient tone that rather undermined Roland Penrose's otherwise decent and useful biography, written when the artist was still alive and clearly anxious, as an old friend, not to cause offence. John Richardson seems even-handed: quick to spot the occasional betrayal of friendship, or the deep-seated reasons for Picasso's ruthless attitude to women, he also brings to wholly convincing life the way in which Picasso's art, however abstrusely, slowly began to reflect and comment on his life, even if in a distorting mirror.
The crucial importance of Picasso's friendship with the homosexual poet, Max Jacob, is well conveyed. Jacob taught Picasso how to speak French and intro- duced him to the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine as well as astrology, the tarot pack and the cabbala. Picasso was embarrassed by Jacob's adoration but Jacob, later to be killed by the Nazis, was a good poet with a good mind who opened up some of the themes and atmospherics of symbolism for Picasso and seems to have set the pace for Picasso's lifelong friendship with poets, from Apollinaire to Cocteau. The Stein family as troubled individuals as well as cultivated patrons with specific needs in art are brilliantly described, Leo and Michael being perhaps more fairly judged here than Gertrude. It seems difficult for any writer to assess her character and contribution to literature in terms other than the extremes of extravagant praise or outright contempt. She was, of course, quite often absurd in her egotism and dodgy metaphors for the creative act, but she was also capable of extraordinary insights and generosities of spirit as well as substance, of enlightened patronage. The Making of Americans, writ- ten in 1906, as this volume ends, still seems a trail-blazing, innovative masterpiece in its new arrangements of language for the ear as well as the eye, pre-dating Joyce. I was lucky enough to know Alice Toklas quite well, from 1947 until her death in the Fifties, and sat talking with her often in the apartment in Rue Christine that she had shared with Gertrude Stein, with the rows of unframed canvases, masterworks all of them, by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris on every wall. It was plain to see, at the sim- plest level, that Gertrude Stein loved paint- ing with real passion and intelligence and had, as they say, a great eye. That is all one would like to see recorded.
Mr Richardson's detailed account of Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein is a pivotal element in his narrative, embodying as it does some of the first elements of change taking place in Picasso's art in 1906, just before the cubist phase. And this first volume of Mr Richardson's great venture ends in 1906, with Picasso beginning work on 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', which arrived in the art world with all the seem- ingly abrasive force detonated by `Le Sacre du Printemps' in the concert hall seven years later. But we shall have to wait for Volume II for Mr Richardson's analysis of this painting and its extraordinary roots in the modern world.
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