A thief for all time
Stephen Gardiner
PABLO PICASSO 1881-1973, VOLUMES I & II edited by Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther Benedikt Taschen, £37.95, pp. 740 Picasso's picture on the box containing these two remarkable volumes sets the scene: the old magician looks out from under the brim of his hat and over the big collar of his coat as though on the point of telling us of another magnificent trick he's about to pull off. Well, if so, it's here in this latest coverage of his life's work, this renewed attempt to do the impossible — to unravel the mysteries of his genius.
Despite all that has been poured out about him before (most recently, John Richardson's excellent biography of the early years), this dazzling array of innova- tion, much of it reproduced in very good colour, brings back with a stunning fresh- ness my own first sight of his art shown at the V&A in December, 1945 (not at the National Gallery, as stated). That joint exhibition with Matisse (whose work, I remember, paled by comparison) caused a sensation, predictably perhaps. One news- paper, Carsten-Peter Warncke recalls, described Picasso as
a great artist, a poet, a genius whose creations were inspired by the profoundest of dreams, while another damned his art as the work of the devil, dismissed piggy-nosed portraits as the imaginings of a schizophrenic, and declared that such work should not be publicly exhibited in England.
Shades of Epstein's experiences as long before as 1908: one artist (my father) told me he was so moved by the Picassos that he came away in tears.
As the author points out, he was unique, and this is celebrated, for instance, by the fact that he is the only major artist of any time to have three museums wholly devot- ed to his work — in Barcelona, Antibes and Paris. But then he is, without question, the creator of the century, much as Leonar- do was of his, and, in this context, his only rival was Le Corbusier (with two museums devoted to his buildings, paintings and sculpture, one in Zurich, the other in Paris). Yet where Leonardo leant towards science and Le Corbusier towards architec- ture, Picasso leant towards a complete range of the visual arts. His output was colossal: at least 16,000 paintings, more than 600 sculptures, thousands of drawings and hundreds of ceramics. Inventor, carica- turist, he solved highly complex composi- tional problems that had baffled others with innate ease, while at the same time evoking the deepest emotions through the simplest study of a girl's head — in a paint- ing, say, or a paper cut-out, or a single-line drawing. His passion was ideas, and so astonishing were their originality and range that it is difficult to conceive of any artist of the future being able to compete. Like some wild human manifestation of a com- puter draughting machine rushing out one work after another with a singular combi- nation of logic and illogicality (but one which leads to an immaculate solution), he dashes between subjects, styles and medi- ums for most of his 91 years, trying out every possible permutation of each. If we need an explanation of that fashionable and somewhat mysterious term 'decon- struction', look at Picasso: he could take something apart and put it together in an entirely new form, yet in such a manner that the truth of it is exposed with an inexplicable suddenness.
If his influence — and it is his influence which emerges as the underlying message of these books — is, like Cezanne's, one of orientation, this is pinned down through a faith to continuity. On the one hand, he looked up to the classical traditions, on the other, his work reflected a century of dis- covery: hence his being an imprint of his times. Encapsulated here is the evolution of modem art: from the remarkable pre- cocity of his beginnings — 'Farmhouse' (aged 12), 'Beggar in a Cap' (aged 14), `First Communion' and the extraordinary portraits of his mother and father (aged 15) to name but a few — we move on with his high-speed development to Paris (where he finally settled in 1904) and the assimilation of influences among the art circle there with the moonlit Blue Period Do you ever have those dreams where you're walking down the high street with all your clothes on?' illuminating the underside of the city — the derelicts, the homeless, the prostitutes and the rest. Warncke writes:
The influence of Van Gogh's Provence work done late in life, and of the Pont-Aven school, is palpable.
And of the many other influences men- tioned by critics of the time — those of Delacroix, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, for example — he says that
the only thing wrong with this assessment is that it misses out an important name or two, such as that of Gauguin.
Another was Cezanne's: this was how he found a way of thinking that was his own. Picasso said himself: 'If there's something to be stolen, I steal it.'
With the arrival of the Rose Period, and the sun rising on his personal identity, came a new departure: sculpture. This led into, moreover, the sculptural forms in painting, the solidity of huge bodies in space, the emergence of Cubism with his marvellous 'Landscape with Two Figures', still lifes, buildings, portraits, of such com- plexities of form and geometry that it reached the edge of abstraction. Three dimensions dominated, whether he was working in collage, cardboard, painting his bronze objects or in pure sculpture such as the series on guitars — 'constructions such as these,' Warncke says, 'took Cubism to the furthest limit of its options.' The sculp- ture itself was fascinating, whether this was `Violin and Bottle on a Table' (in wood, string, nails, paint and charcoal) or simply as 'Head of a Woman' in bronze. Yet, sud- denly, in the middle of this panorama of invention, he would return to a beautiful, straight portrait, such as the painting of his son Paul in a round hat.
The bronze series of 'Head of a Woman', among his favourites and part of the collec- tion at the Muscle Picasso, Paris, demon- strated his absolute mastery of sculpture by the Thirties. Sculpture was a passion that never left him, that lay behind the dual angle of vision in his portraits (`The Weep- ing Woman' is a famous example) which Warncke labels the Picasso Style, and which developed into pottery, a combina- tion of painting and sculpture which was for use. Sculpture, moreover, never failed him: even when his painting began to go off, as it did in the middle Sixties, his works in paper or cardboard cut-outs, steel and mesh reinforcement (for hair) remained as brilliantly inventive as ever. 'The Bathers', exhibited in Battersea Park in the middle Fifties, made one laugh, so witty was this extraordinary contraption in wooden ele- ments, while the gigantic concrete profile of a girl in Manhattan's Washington Square East and the 'Head' for the Chica- go City Center in iron and sheet metal remain for me the most breathtaking exterior objects to be seen in those cities.
Stephen Gardiner's Epstein was published by Michael Joseph in the autumn.
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