The Success and Failure of Picasso

by John Berger

  To fill the vacuum left by reality, it is necessary to invent. His life is full of fantasies and specially created dramas. I do not speak of his subjective life, but the daily life in his household. There are invented characters, invented rituals, invented turns of phrase. Nothing, as it were, remains standing on the floor. Everything is lifted up and made ‘truer than life’ by his devotees, so that he shall never feel lost in emptiness. One is reminded of the last days of some old vaudeville star: everything, creaking now, is still invented as superlative. But there is one great difference: old vaudeville players go on performing till they drop. The tinsel is to keep them going, not to distract them.

  So complete is the loss of reality and so frenetic are the efforts of all those around him to keep him feeling and being great that Picasso himself is no longer believed. A man who has trusted his own sensations as he has done knows the extent to which things have gone. He is desperate. The last thing he says in Parmelin’s book is: ‘You live a poet’s life and I a convict’s.’ But she, in her usual state of euphoria induced by believing that she is the great man’s confidante, thinks that this is just Picasso being Picasso.

  At this point I may be accused of being too imaginative. I talk of pictures that Picasso might have painted in India. I describe to you Picasso’s inner state of mind without having met him and in the face of the evidence of those who write about him as friends. My justification is that what I have deduced is the result of trying to relate all the facts that can be publicly known about Picasso. So often important ones are hidden or ignored.

  Painters, unlike a certain kind of poet, need time to develop and slowly uncover their genius. There is not, I think, a single example of a great painter – or sculptor – whose work has not gained in profundity and originality as he grew older. Bellini, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Poussin, Rembrandt, Goya, Turner, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Braque, all produced some of their very-greatest works when they were over sixty-five. It is as though a lifetime is needed to master the medium, and only when that mastery has been achieved can an artist be simply himself, revealing the true nature of his imagination.

  102 Delacroix. Les Femmes d’Alger. 1834

  However favourably one judges Picasso’s work since 1945 it cannot be said to show any advance on what he created before. To me it represents a decline: a retreat, as I have tried to show, into an idealized and sentimental pantheism. But even if this judgement is mistaken, the extraordinary fact remains that the majority of Picasso’s important late works are variations on themes borrowed from other painters. However interesting they may be, they are no more than exercises in painting – such as one might expect a serious young man to carry out, but not an old man who has gained the freedom to be himself.

  103 Picasso. Les Femmes d’Alger. 1955

  104 Velazquez. Las Meninas. 1956

  105 Picasso. Las Meninas. 1957

  It is sometimes claimed that Picasso only takes Delacroix or Velazquez as a starting point. In formal terms this is true, for Picasso often reconstructs the whole picture. But in terms of content the original painting is even less than a starting point. Picasso empties it of its own content, and then is unable to find any of his own. It remains a technical exercise. If there is any fury or passion implied at all, it is that of the artist condemned to paint with nothing to say.

  Notice in his variation on the Velazquez how extreme the distortions and displacements are. The dwarf, the dog, the painter are wrenched out of Velazquez’s hands – but for what reason, to express what? One has only to compare any of these figures with the Bullfight, painted twenty years before, to be reminded of how intensely Picasso once used distortions to communicate experience.

  106 Picasso. Bullfight. 1934

  The violence, it seems, is only to rob Velazquez: to honour him perhaps at the same time as robbing him; even – and again like a child – thus to ask for his protection. In his own painting Velazquez is so effortlessly himself, and in Picasso’s painting he is so overwhelmingly large, that he might be a father. It may be that as an old man Picasso here returns as a prodigal to give back the palette and brushes he had acquired too easily at the age of fourteen. Perhaps this last large painting of Picasso’s is a comprehensive admission of failure. Perhaps this is only a minute part of the truth, or none of it at all. But what is certain is that neither Picasso’s Las Meninas nor any of his late paintings are the mature work of an old painter, at last able to be himself. What is certain is that Picasso is a startling exception to the rule about old painters.

  Why has nobody pointed this out? Why has nobody considered Picasso’s likely desperation? Apparently it is not only in his own household that nobody dares to mention the word failure. Apparently we need to believe in Picasso’s success more than he does himself.

  Towards the end of 1953 Picasso began a series of drawings. At the end of two months there were 180 of them. Drawn with great intensity, they are autobiographical; they are about Picasso’s own fate.

  When they were first exhibited and published, their general character was recognized. Besides praising the ‘exquisite use of line’, people talked of an ‘emotional disturbance’, etc. But then, in order not to understand what the drawings confessed, everyone pretended that their meaning was so complex and mysterious and personal that it would be impertinent to try to put it into words. Enough to declaim once more: Picasso! And after having admired the brilliance, to forget everything but his ‘greatness’. (The greatness that had ground him to a standstill.)

  It is true of course that for Picasso each of the drawings must have had several levels of meaning and hundreds of stray associations. But it is equally true that the theme of the confession as a whole is quite unambiguous.

  In nearly every drawing there is a young woman. Not necessarily the same one. Usually she is naked. Always she is desirable. Sometimes she is being painted. But when this happens, one scarcely feels that she is posing. She is there – just as she is there in the other drawings; her function is to be. She is nature and sex. She is life. And if that sounds a little ponderous, remember that it is for the same elemental reason that all drawing classes from the nude model in all art schools are called Life Classes.

  Beside her Picasso is old, ugly, small, and – above all – absurd. She looks at him not unkindly, but with an effort – as though her concerns were so different from his that he is almost incredible to her.

  He struts around like a vaudeville comedian. (The comparison I made a few pages back is one that has occurred to Picasso too.) She waits for him to stop.

  107 Picasso. Nude and Old Clown. 21 December 1953

  To hide himself and at the same time to mock himself he puts on a mask. The mask emphasizes that whereas all her pleasure in physical being and in sex is natural, his, because he is old, has become obscene. Next to the young woman is an old one. In another drawing the young and the old women sit side by side. Picasso is confessing his horror at the fact that the body ages and the imagination does not. When the whole energy of life has been found in the form of resilience of a body – how is it possible to endure the continuing need for that consoling energy when the form begins to collapse?

  108 Picasso. Young Woman and Old Man with Mask. 23 December 1953

  He begins to envy the monkey – the monkey who so early in Picasso’s work was a symbol of freedom. He envies it because the young woman plays with it. But, more profoundly, he envies it because, unselfconscious, it pursues its desires without any sense of absurdity: on the contrary, with a complete sense of absorption which then, despite the ugliness of its body, compels the young woman to delight in it.

  109 Picasso. Young Woman and Monkey. 3 January 1954

  He returns to the idea of the mask, this time seeking comfort from the conceit that it is his old age which is the mask: and that behind it he is as young as ever. A young Cupid holds the mask in front of him. It represents both the old man’s face and his genitals: a pun which Goya used in some of his etchings and w
hich Picasso surely remembered, but also a lonely, nostalgic variation on the theme of that composite lover’s head whose sweet smile was once all sexual pleasure.

  110 Picasso. Young Woman and Cupid with Mask. 5 January 1954

  The Cupid, with the old man’s face and organ, courts her.

  The race, the panting begins. Again the absurdity, the slavery of the situation haunts Picasso.

  111 Picasso. Young Woman with Cupids. 5 January 1954

  He draws a monkey, like a jockey, riding a horse. Then a woman, like Godiva, riding a toy horse. Later, in a world where everything is soiled, the monkey jerks himself up and down on a donkey’s back whilst a clown and a girl acrobat gaze as though sadly accepting as a truth such pointless slavery to sex.

  112 Picasso. Girl, Clown, Donkey, and Monkey. 10 January 1954

  To escape from the slavery Picasso thinks again of the pleasures. Summoning up the acrobats of his youth, he turns their ease into a metaphor of free enjoyment.

  The memory of such happiness rides him on remorselessly.

  113 Picasso. Old Clown and Couple. 10 January 1954

  Now he grasps at that shared subjectivity which is unique to sex and to which he had dedicated so many paintings. By the logic of this sharing she will wear his mask – the old man’s crumpled one – and he will wear her mask, eye open and fringed with lashes. Here, if the picture could become reality (and metaphorically it could), is true happiness. The horror is that the monkey remains. He sits there behind them and looks away because such sentimental illusions are of no interest to him. They have no substance and no weight.

  114 Picasso. Couple with Masks. 24 January 1954

  On the next day, the 25th of January, 1954, Picasso, all his imagination now roused, dismisses the monkey and pursues the logic of his fantasy further. As the masks are swapped, they can also be transformed. He wears the mask of the young girl representing her almost as she is. She wears his mask, but instead of representing him as an obscene old man, it has become the mask of a virile young god. And so they play a charade (a charade that is played in many hotel bedrooms every night). Yet at the same time the prodigy in Picasso, the duende that possesses him, insists upon his telling the truth. He draws himself playing the charade so earnestly that he looks absurd. And he draws her kneeling indulgently so as to be on his level, playing as with a child to keep him happy.

  115 Picasso. Old Man and Young Woman with Masks. 25 January 1954

  116 Picasso. Girl, Clown, Mask, and Monkey. 25 January 1954

  Finally, one of the last drawings of the series shows the vanity of any attempt at escape from the absurdity of the situation. The mask – a symbol now for all that imagination can construct and subjectivity enjoy – is shown to the triumphant monkey. The monkey gazes at it blankly. The mask is held by a sad clown, whose own face is made up as though it too were a mask. But the monkey sits on its haunches beside the legs of the young woman, ready at any moment to jump into her lap and there be welcome.

  Thus far one might consider this series of drawings as a very poignant and bitter lament for lost youth, and a protest against the savage sexual deprivation of old age. I think often, as I look at them, of Yeats. (Somehow, in a way that I have not yet fully understood, many connexions suggest themselves between Picasso and Yeats: the paintings of the one frequently evoke the poems of the other.)

                 ‘Because I am mad about women

                 I am mad about the hills,’

                 Said that wild old wicked man

                 Who travels where God wills.

                 ‘Not to die on the straw at home,

                 Those hands to close these eyes,

                 That is all I ask, my dear,

                 From the old man in the skies.

  Daybreak and a candle-end

                 ‘Kind are all your words, my dear,

                 Do not the rest withhold.

                 Who can know the year, my dear,

                 When an old man’s blood grows cold?

                 I have what no young man can have

                 Because he loves too much.

                 Words I have that can pierce the heart,

                 But what can he do but touch?’

  Daybreak and a candle-end

  But Picasso’s confession is even more comprehensive and more tragic. For, apart from the directly sexual theme, there is another, parallel to it, but with different implications. Throughout the whole series of drawings Picasso turns from one to the other, as though they were different aspects of the same reality. The second theme is that of the artist and his model.

  117 Picasso. Painter and Model. 24 December 1953

  The model is the same young woman – in so far as she too is sex, nature, life. And the painter, though sometimes he is depicted as old and sometimes young, sometimes thin and sometimes fat, is the same man in so far as he is absurd and helpless. The complaint is different. It is no longer that an old man’s desires are obscene and absurd despite himself: it is that to paint in front of such a young woman, to put marks on canvas and to peer at her proportions, instead of making love to her, is also absurd, and absurd in such a dry, pedantic way that it too becomes obscene.

  118 Picasso. Painter and Model. 25 December 1953

  Thus the role of the young woman remains very similar. Her youth, her beauty, her natural appetites, her tenderness and all that makes her desirable are there to mock all men who cannot or will not take her on her own terms: and those terms are both as perfect and as ruthless as nature. For her, old age is a debility and a hindrance, an act of imagination is a transitory game, art is an incomprehensible – at best harmless – way of passing the time. Her true companion is the monkey. Finally she chooses him instead of the man, or at least in proxy for the man who is eternally incapacitated.

  119 Picasso. Woman, Apple, Monkey, Man. 26 January 1954

  Perhaps the bitterest drawing of the whole series is that in which the monkey pretends to paint, and where, for the first time, the young woman, instead of looking indifferent whilst being painted, responds to him and smiles. The degree to which that response mocks us is shown by Picasso in the pun that he has drawn between her breast and his muzzle. Many have called this witty. It is witty, but it is a wit born out of much suffering.

  120 Picasso. Woman and Monkey Painting. 10 January 1954

  In his old man’s confession, Picasso confesses to despair. It is not the social despair of Goya; it is a despair confined and belonging to his own life. The drawings are like a retrospective exhibition of that life. The despair is to some extent qualified by the fact that he can express it. But it remains.

  It is the despair of the idealized ‘noble savage’ who, alone, abstracted from history and insulated from any social reality, is forced back and back until finally he is left with all his imagination unaccounted for by the pure nature which he must worship. The monkey who was once his companion in freedom, a dumb critic of society by the side of a more articulate one, becomes in the end his rival and humiliator. His gifts become his absurdity. Nor is it that he simply considers his own work a failure. It is the very idea of art which is attacked – attacked by Nature, with which now as an old man, without a unique people and so without any true followers, he has been left utterly alone. He himself now believes in this attack and actually sides with Nature against art because civilization, as he has found it, has given him only one thing: acclaim.

  The gifts
of an imaginative artist are often the outriders of the gifts of his period. Frequently the new abilities and attitudes become recognizable in art and are given a name before their existence in life has been appreciated. This is why a love of art which accompanies a fear or rejection of life is so inadequate. It is also why ideally there should always be a road open to art even for those to whom the medium, the talent, the activity involved mean nothing. Art is the nearest to an oracle that our position as modern scientific men can allow us.

  What happens to an artist’s gifts may well reveal, in a coded or cyphered way, what is happening to his contemporaries. The fate of Van Gogh was the partial fate of millions. Rembrandt’s constant sense of isolation represented a new intimation of loneliness experienced, at least momentarily, by hundreds in seventeenth-century Holland.

  And so it is with Picasso. The waste of his genius, or the frustration of his gifts, should be a fact of great significance for us. Our debt to him and to his failures, if we understand them properly, should be enormous.

  Picasso has remained a living example, and this involves far more than not dying. He has not stopped working. He has not lied. He has not allowed his personal desperation to destroy his vitality or his delight in energy. He has not become politically – and therefore humanly – cynical. He has never, in any field, become a renegade. We cannot write him off. He has achieved enough to show us what he might have achieved. Because he is undefeated, he remains a living reproach. But a reproach against what?