Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  ‘Art and sexuality are the same thing,’ Picasso said to Jean Leymarie and, on another occasion, he pointed out that ‘there is no such thing as chaste art’. Perhaps such remarks might not be true for all artists, but they are quite clearly appropriate for him. Why, then, did Picasso himself help to hide for quite a long time this aspect of his artistic production, that is a constant in his work, even though at times he chose to keep it a secret? For ideological and commercial reasons, says Jean-Jacques Lebel in an interesting interview with Geneviève Breerette. During his Stalinist period, when he painted the portrait of Stalin and denounced the ‘massacres in Korea’, eroticism would have been a source of conflict between Picasso and the Communist Party, to which he was affiliated, which espoused the aesthetic orthodoxy of socialist realism, in which there was no room for the ‘decadent’ celebration of sexual pleasure. And late, following the advice of his marchands, he admitted that he kept this aspect of his work hidden for fear of offending the puritanism of US collectors, thus cutting off this lucrative market. These are human weaknesses that geniuses are not exempt from, as we know.

  In any event, it is now possible to consider every facet of Picasso’s work, a universe with so many constellations that it makes us giddy. How could one hand, the imagination of a single mortal, produce such extraordinary creativity? There is no reply to this question; Picasso leaves us speechless, as do Rubens, Mozart or Balzac. The development of his work, with its distinctive stages, themes, forms and motifs, is a journey through all the schools and artistic movements of the twentieth century, which he learned from and to which he contributed in his own completely distinctive way. Then he looked to the past, bringing that past back into the present in a number of very finely observed re-creations, caricatures and rereadings that showed just how contemporary and fresh the Old Masters were. But sex is never absent, in all the periods that critics have divided and organised Picasso’s work, even in the Cubist years. Sometimes it is a discreet, symbolic reference, working through allusion. At other times it is insolently open and crude, in images that seem to challenge the conventions of eroticism, refinement and the chaste ways that art has traditionally described physical love, to make it compatible with established morality.

  The sex that Picasso reveals in most of these works, especially in the years of his youth in Barcelona, is elemental, not sublimated by the rituals and baroque ceremonies of a culture that disguises, civilises and turns animal instinct into works of art, a sex that wants desire immediately satisfied, without delay, subterfuge, fuss or distractions. Sex for the hungry and the orthodox, not sex for dreamers or refined people. That is why it is a completely macho sexual outlook, where there is no male homosexuality and where lesbianism is just there for the pleasure of the male onlooker. Sex for men, primitive, rough, where the phallus is king. Women are there to serve, to not have pleasure themselves, but to give pleasure, to open their legs and submit to the whims of the fornicating male. They are often depicted kneeling, engaged in fellatio, which could be seen as an archetypal image of this sexual order: the woman gives pleasure but also yields to and adores the all-powerful macho. The phallus, these images proclaim, is above all else power.

  It is natural that the privileged location for this sort of pleasure is the brothel. There are no sentimental distractions in the way of this drive that looks to sate an urgent need and then forget about it and go on to something else. In the brothel, where sex is bought and sold, where there are no entanglements and no excuses or alibis are necessary, sex is revealed in all its naked truth, as pure present, as an intense and shameless spectacle which does not linger in the memory, pure and fleeting copulation, immune to remorse and nostalgia.

  The repeated images of this brothel sex, its vulgarity and lack of imagination, that fill so many notebooks, cards and canvases, would be monotonous without the cheerful touches that we find, jokes and exaggerations that show a state of mind brimming over with enthusiasm and happiness. A humanised fish – a mackerel! – is licking a young woman who is compliant but bored to death. And in all this work, even the rapid sketches he did in the middle of some party, on serviettes, menus and newspaper cuttings, to please a friend or to record a meeting, there is evidence of his extraordinary craft, that piercing gaze that can set down in a few essential brushstrokes the mad vortex of reality. The apotheosis of the brothel in Picasso’s work is, of course, Les demoiselles d’Avignon, which is not in this exhibition, although many of the first sketches and drafts of this masterpiece are here.

  With the passing of the years, the rough sexual edges of youth were smoothed out, and desire began to be expressed in mythological characters. All the Minotaurs painted in the thirties gleam with vigorous sensuality, with a sexual power that displays its bestiality with grace and shamelessness, as a proof of life and artistic creativity. By contrast, in the beautiful series of prints dedicated to Rafael and Fornarina from the late sixties, the loving interaction between the painter and his model under the lascivious gaze of an old pontiff who is resting his flaccid limbs on a chamber pot, is imbued with a deep sadness. What is represented here is not just the joyful physical love of the young people, the voluptuousness that is part of artistic endeavour. There is also the melancholy of the observer, who, with the passing of the years, is no longer competing in the jousts of love, an ex-combatant who must resign himself to enjoy looking at other people’s enjoyment, while he feels life slipping away. And that the death of his sexual drive will soon be followed by the other, the definitive death. This theme is recurrent in the final years of Picasso’s life, and the exhibition in the Jeu de Paume has a number of pictures in which this inconsolable nostalgia for a lost virility appears with a wrenching insistence, the bitterness of knowing that the fateful wheel of time no longer allows one to bathe in the source of life, to experience that explosion of pure pleasure in which human beings glimpse immortality and which the French ironically call ‘the little death’. Figurative death and real death, orgasm and physical extinction, are the protagonists of the dramatic painting that Picasso kept on producing almost until the final death rattle.

  Paris, March 2001

  When Paris Was a Fiesta

  It is not an exaggeration to say that I spent the whole of my adolescence dreaming of Paris. I lived then in the claustrophobic world of Lima in the fifties, convinced that it was impossible to become a writer or an artist without knowing Paris, because the capital of France was also the universal capital of thought and the arts, the centre that conveyed to the rest of the world new ideas, new forms and styles, the experiments and issues that would do away with the past and lay the foundations of what would become the culture of the future.

  Given the poverty of literature and the arts in present-day France, those beliefs might now seem rather stupid, the naïveté of a provincial and underdeveloped young man, seduced at a distance by the romantic myth of Paris. But the truth is that the myth was still very close to the reality in 1959, when, in a trance, I finally began my stay in Paris, which would last for almost seven years. The great intellectual figures whose ideas and works reverberate throughout almost the entire world were still alive, and many of them at the height of their creativity, from Sartre to Camus, from Malraux to Céline, from Breton to Aragon, from Mauriac to Raymond Aron, from Foucault to Goldmann, and from Bataille to Ionesco and Beckett. The list is a long one. It is true that the nouveau roman of Claude Simon, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and company that was in vogue at the time, passed like a will-o’-the-wisp, without leaving many traces, but that movement was just one among many, like the Tel Quel group, organised under the influence of the brilliant sophist Roland Barthes, one of whose university courses I took at the Sorbonne, with a mixture of fascination and irritation. Barthes listened to himself talking, as spellbound by his own words as we, his audience, were, and his lectures were a mixture of massive erudition and intellectual frivolity.

  I don’t know whether in the sixties Paris was still the capital of culture. But
to judge by the magnificent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London entitled ‘Paris, Capital of the Arts 1900–1968’, it certainly was, at least in this sense: no other capital in the world had the same ability to attract and assimilate so much artistic talent from all parts of the world. Along with the Romanians Cioran and Ionesco, the Greek Castoriadis, or the Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, innumerable musicians, filmmakers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, painters and writers left their own countries, of necessity or by their own free will, and took up residence in Paris. Why? For the same reasons as those expressed by the Chilean Acario Copota, who considered that for any writer in the making, it was essential to take ‘a breather in Paris’. Because, apart from the stimulating atmosphere of creativity and freedom, Paris was, culturally speaking, an open city, hospitable to foreigners, where talent and originality were welcomed and adopted with enthusiasm, regardless of origin.

  One of the most instructive aspects of the Royal Academy exhibition is to see how, throughout the twentieth century, the most fertile and novel tendencies in art in Europe and many parts of the Western world – above all in the United States and Japan – passed through Paris or found in France the recognition and encouragement to establish themselves on the world stage. This happened with Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris; with Mondrian and Giorgio di Chirico; with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Stravinsky; with Brancusi, Beckmann and Max Ernst; with Giacometti, Henry Miller and César Vallejo; with Huidobro, Gino Severini and Isadora Duncan; with Chagal, Lipchitz, Calder and Foujita; with Van Dougen, Diego Rivera, Kupka and Natalia Goncharova; with Lam, Matta and Josephine Baker; with Modigliani and Man Ray; with Julio González, Torres García, Naum Gabo and hundreds, thousands, more. Perhaps it would be fanciful to say that all this extraordinary burgeoning of talent was the creation of what another lover of Paris, Rubén Darío, called the ‘face of Lutetia’. But that is not to say that the atmosphere and cultural dynamism of the City of Light itself did not contribute decisively to the full development of their creative potential.

  In Paris one felt at home, because Paris was a home for all. And French culture was what it was because it did not belong only to Paris, but to the whole world; or rather it belonged to those who, seduced by its richness, generosity, variety and universality, made it their own, as I did as an adolescent in Lima, when I rushed to the Alliance Française to read in the original the authors that had dazzled me. And, in turn, one could see in the galleries of the Royal Academy that the open-door policy towards ‘foreigners’ had the very positive result of incorporating their inventiveness, daring, insolence and radicalism into French culture. From post-Impressionism to ‘happenings’, including Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and all the avant-garde movements, in the field of art Paris is a Borgesian aleph, a microcosm that reflects the whole cosmos, the place that attracted or initiated the most influential cultural and artistic practices of the century.

  How could it have happened that this international capital of the arts, the land that was open to the world and attracted artists from all over the world, could have declined so rapidly, and succumbed to a ridiculous, chauvinist provincialism, that, in a picturesque alliance between the far right and the far left, frenetically reclaims ‘cultural exceptionalism’ as a way of preventing foreign (for foreign read American) artistic products from staining the sacrosanct ‘cultural identity’ of France?

  I read the answer to this question that had been plaguing me ever since I left the Royal Academy in low spirits, in a luminous article entitled ‘Cultural Extinction’ written by Jean-François Revel. The text, written with his usual sparkling irony and devastating intelligence, demolishes the arguments in favour of cultural protectionism with irrefutable examples. To defend oneself against foreign influences, he says, is not the best way to preserve one’s own culture; it is, rather, the best way to kill it. And he compares the example of Athens, an open city, where arts, letters, philosophy and mathematics circulated freely, with that of Sparta, which jealously guarded its exceptionalism and which achieved ‘the feat of being the only Greek city not to produce a single poet, orator, thinker or architect’. Sparta defended its culture so successfully that that culture became extinct.

  Revel also reminds us that cultural nationalism, a thesis normally propounded by ignorant people who see culture simply as an instrument of power and political propaganda, is profoundly anti-democratic, a grotesque scenario characteristic of totalitarian regimes. These regimes have always put fences around cultural life and subjected it to the control and the beneficence of the state. For that reason, cultural nationalism is inapplicable to an open society, which means that, despite all the noise and periodic campaigns in support, it will find it difficult to prosper in France so long as French society continues to be democratic, which it will doubtless remain for the foreseeable future. Because the only way in which cultural protectionism can translate into an effective policy is through a rigorous system of discrimination and censure against cultural products, something that would be intolerable for an adult, modern and free society.

  What would have happened, asks Revel, if, instead of inviting Italian painters to Paris, the French kings in the sixteenth century had thrown them out, in defence of ‘national identity’? And what of the enormously fertile influence of Spanish literature in France in the sixteenth century, even when the two countries were at war?

  If France had not traditionally opened its borders to ‘foreign products’, there could never have been an exhibition like this in the Royal Academy, which is an involuntary manifesto in favour of the free circulation of art and artists throughout the entire world, with no barriers in place. And without this openness, France would never have managed to excite so many young people the world over, like me in Lima in the fifties, with the idea that there, in that splendid, distant land, beauty and genius were cultivated in greater measure than in other parts, as was demonstrated by those poets and writers who spoke to us with a voice so clear and strong that it reached even the furthest corners where we felt isolated, and those artists, filmmakers and musicians whose works seemed to be pitched exactly to satisfy our most demanding desires and dreams.

  One of the reasons put forward by the avid defenders of cultural protectionism – greedy, of course, for state subsidies – is that without this nationalist policy towards culture in France, it would go into irremediable decline. My impression is precisely the reverse. It is only because French culture is barely a shadow of what it used to be that, in France, the aberrant idea that culture needs customs houses, borders and stipends – a bureaucratic hothouse – to survive, has managed to gain credence.

  London, March 2002

  Botero at the Bullfight

  The premiere of Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the mid-fifties, was a major event in my life. I saw the film seven times, in the morning and matinée screenings in the Acha Cinema, and from that moment on, for many years I dreamed of becoming a bullfighter. This desire had surfaced in my imagination ever since my uncle had taken me to my first bullfight, in the small ring in Cochabamba, yet it was not the real bullfight, but rather the one imagined by Blasco Ibáñez and Hollywood that turned this desire into a desperate need.

  Was this childhood bullfighting obsession part of a generational epidemic spreading throughout Latin America? Because at the time when I was fighting Bolivian tricycles, a few thousand kilometres away, in another provincial city in the Andes, the green and winding Medellín, Fernando Botero enrolled in a bullfighting school and, for two years, took classes to train as a matador. His uncle Joaquín, a fanatical bullfighting aficionado, took him to the school, just as he had taken him along to see many fights with mature and novice bulls in the brand-new Macarena bullring and in the surrounding mountain towns, at a time when he had not even begun to dream about becoming a painter. The spectacle, the excitement, the colour, the indescribable blend of primitive savagery and exquisite refinement of these bullfights would become firmly lodged in his memory
from that time on.

  This is why it is not surprising that the first drawings Botero produced in the Jesuit College in Medellín were sketches of bulls. And it is perhaps a premonition that his first more or less personal work is a watercolour of a bull. We will never know, of course, if his defection from the bloody ceremonies of the bullfight in favour of the more gentle ceremonies of brush and easel, was a tragedy or a fortunate escape for the art of Manolete and Belmonte. But there is no doubt that it was a happy moment for the art of Goya and Velázquez. Furthermore, over the years, the skilled brushes of this artist would provide the most enthusiastic and complete homage to bullfighting of any modern painter (and I am not forgetting all the marvellous work that Picasso produced).

  Although it was a central experience of his childhood and a significant presence in his early artistic expression, this theme – the bullfight – seems largely to disappear from his painting until the eighties. Botero remained a fan and went to all the fights he could, but bulls and bullfighters are not the subjects he treats in the difficult years of his childhood, when the Mexican muralists were his models, or in later years, when he carefully studied the classics in Spain, France and, above all, Italy. They crop up on occasion, but as furtive shadows, after that providential afternoon in 1956, in a park in Mexico, when, while he was doodling, he inflated the mandolin that he was drawing and suddenly discovered, miraculously, the sumptuous secret world of opulence in this object, and also his painting method. In 1982 or 1983, already famous and with a vast œuvre recognised worldwide, he went back one afternoon to see a bullfight in the Macarena bullring, in the city of his birth. And, he says, he immediately felt that here was a familiar and stimulating world to explore: ‘From then I started one painting after another, to the point where I became very taken with the subject, and for three years I just painted bulls. Then I began to paint other topics, but also bulls.’40 In fact, they became his obsessive and almost exclusive passion to this day. The twenty-five paintings on bullfighting themes exhibited in the Malborough Gallery, New York, in 1985, would grow to eighty-six works (drawings, watercolours and oils) on the same topic, exhibited in Milan in 1987 and in the Hospital de los Venerables Sacerdotes in Seville in 1992. This sequence will reach a sort of apotheosis this autumn in 1992, when the hundreds of his works on the reality and the myth of bullfighting will fill the Grand Palais in Paris (while, at the same time, his monumental sculptures will line the Champs-Elysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Rond-Point).