Lover into elephant
Charles Saumarez Smith
PICASSO AND PORTRAITURE edited by William Rubin Thames & Hudson, £55, pp. 495
hose people who deplore the rise of the blockbuster and the extent to which the appreciation of painting is expected to be undertaken en masse, as part of a commer- cialised jamboree, sometimes forget that such blockbusters are often motivated as much by the scholarly desire to assemble the complete oeuvre of a painter and to assess the works together, as they are by populism and the need for museum direc- tors to increase visitor numbers and bal- ance their budget.
A good example is the exhibition, Picasso and Portraiture, which opened at the Muse- um of Modern Art in New York in late April and transfers to the Grand Palais in Paris in October (I tried to get it to come to the National Portrait Gallery, but was shrugged off with the difficulties of per- suading lenders to part with their works for any longer). Although superficially one might be inclined to dismiss it as just another Picasso exhibition under a new guise, it is conspicuously motivated by William Rubin's obsessive desire to under- stand all aspects of Picasso's work and his recognition that the idea of portraiture in his work — that is, the extent to which any of his works can be considered as portraits — would provide an intriguing and thought. provoking way of casting new light on his processes of artistic invention. With the blockbuster comes the block- book, of which Picasso and Portraiture is a remarkable example. Huge and nearly too heavy to read in an armchair, let alone lug around the exhibition, it is produced to incredibly high standards of book produc- tion by the Department of Publications at the Museum of Modern Art and is being distributed in this country by Thames & Hudson, to whom, had I not read the small print, I would have been inclined to give the credit for the exceptionally beautiful quality of reproduction, not only of paint- ings and drawings, but many contemporary Photographs as well.
William Rubin is master of ceremonies, Providing a meticulous introduction on the ways that Picasso's ideas of human form metamorphose through a multiplicity of rapid and often quite lifelike sketches into
a final painting which bears no resem- blance to the sitter, but is rather an expres- sion of mood and sometimes violent feeling, as is evident, for example, in a painting dated 1920 of a 'Woman in an Armchair', which turns out, on the basis of an infra-red scan, to have begun as a por- trait of his wife, or the picture of 'Bather with Beach Ball', which transmogrifies his young lover, Marie-Therese Walther, into the limbs of an elephant. It is fascinating to be able to observe this process, much helped by the inclusion of photographs, some of which were taken by Picasso him- self, although he wasn't much of a photog- rapher.
Anuingst the other essays, there is a fas- cinating one by Kirk Vannedoe, the Cura- tor of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, who investigates Picasso's relentless search for new identi- ties through his self-portraits, one minute the Spanish artisan and next the heir to Ingres; and there is a characteristically wide-ranging essay by Robert Rosenblum, which investigates in more detail the ways in which Picasso's attitudes towards Marie-Therese Walther fluctuated between delicate pencil sketches and wild responses to his emotions. Too many of the other essays read like catalogue fodder, required for reasons of cultural diplomacy because a particular author could not be left out.
What the catalogue never really tackles is the central issue of an exhibition on Picasso and Portraiture: that is, the extent to which a relatively conventional desire for likenesses of friends, lovers, dealers and himself remained a central attribute of Picasso's art, in spite of the fact that modernist critics throughout the century have regarded this as a reactionary attitude of mind. During Picasso's lifetime, his art was thought to evolve from style to style as a sequence of different periods. Anything outside this- evolution, any deviation towards classicism or portraiture, was regarded as an undesirable quirk. Now at last his art can be seen to have been much more pluralistic, always interested in representation and determined, not by the style of the time, but by who was his mistress.
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