One of the January 19 Acrobat paintings—of a contortionist poking his nose up his own bottom—typifies this upside-down, downside-up look. In this book the painting is a vertical, whereas in Zervos it is a horizontal. When it was first published by Leiris straight off the easel in 1929,14 it appeared as a horizontal, and for a seemingly good reason: the wet paint in one corner of the canvas drips downward, not sideways. Far from indicating which way the painting should be hung, Picasso uses this dribble to belie its most obvious orientation. The viewer “must learn to see the familiar from an unfamiliar point of view,” as the artist later told Françoise Gilot.15 He also liked the idea of manipulating viewers into twisting their heads this way and that, and wondering whether they are dealing with a lie that tells the truth or a truth that appears to lie. Even when there is no doubt as to which way up a painting should be hung, Picasso took pleasure in giving different answers to anyone rash enough to question him.
The day after finishing this reversible painting, Picasso set his contortionists in motion, where they form a filmic backdrop—not unlike the group of writhing, resurrected nudes at the back of El Greco’s Apocalyptic Vision, which had played a part in the Demoiselles d’Avignon.1617 The artist, a minimal, easel-like presence on the right, and Marie-Thérèse, an attenuated figure with a colossal hand on the left—are in static contrast to the contortionists looping the loop in the background.18 Turn this painting upside down, as brushstrokes indicate Picasso did when working on it, and your perception of the subject will change. Instead of flying, the contortionists appear grounded. Fifty years later, Georg Baselitz would do something of the sort in his upside-down paintings, but to a very different end. Baselitz wants to focus our attention on the eloquence of his paint.
While working on the Swimmers and the contortionist paintings, Picasso embarked on the “bone” head series, from which this period derives its catchy name. Apart from the two great Bather paintings in MoMA,19 Bone-period paintings are mostly done on smallish wooden panels.20 Wood would be in keeping with the retablelike Crucifixion, for which these panels are studies; canvas could nor provide the unyielding hardness that Picasso hoped to attain.21 To explain this obsession with bones to Brassaï, the artist would later (1943) show him a prized object from his collection of curiosities, the skeleton of a bat:
I have an absolute passion for bones. I have a lot of others at Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, heads of dogs and sheep. … I even have a skull of a rhinoceros. Did you see them, out in the barn? Have you ever noticed that bones are always modeled, not just chipped out? One always has the impression that they have just been taken from a mold, after having been modeled originally in clay. No matter what kind of bone you look at, you will always discover the trace of fingers … sometimes enormous fingers, sometimes Lilliputian ones, like the ones that must have modeled the fragile little bones of this bat. On any piece of bone at all, I always find the fingerprints of the god who amused himself with shaping it. And have you noticed how the convex and concave forms of bones fit into each other—how artfully the vertebrae are “adjusted” to each other?22
Left: Andreas Vesalius. Plate 59: Kidneys, Bladder, and Seminal Organs, De humani corporis fabrica, 1543. Courtesy of New York Academy of Medicine Library Right: Picasso. Study for a Sculpture, 1928. India ink on sketchbook page, 38×31 cm. Collection Marina Picasso. Galerie Jan Krugier & Cie, Geneva.
On a later occasion, Picasso would draw Malraux’s attention to the wingspread of this same bat’s skeleton: “It’s very pretty, very delicate,” the artist said, but “I didn’t realize it was a crucifixion, a fantastic crucifixion.”23
This fascination with bones led Picasso back once again to the work of Andreas Vesalius, the sixteenth-century pioneer anatomical artist who pried open the human envelope and made the first accurate record of its contents.24 Picasso had first used one of Vesalius’s woodcuts in 1908 for his great Dryad in the Hermitage. As Picasso told Aragon at this time, anatomical plates constituted his “blueprints” (maquettes de tableaux).25 Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) is the source he had in mind. It is one of the most scientifically revelatory books of the sixteenth century, also one of the most beautiful. Vesalius’s gorgeous, grisly woodcuts enable us to follow the successive stages of his dissections: the removal of the skin and the flesh to show us the musculature, the flaying of the muscles to reveal the bones, and finally the dismantling of the skeleton to demonstrate the intricacy of its construction. Vesalius does the same with the brain, blood vessels, nervous system, digestive tract, and reproductive organs. In opening up his cadavers for artists as well as scientists, this pioneer of genius opened up—above all to Picasso, four centuries later—a new range of imagery and, as we shall see, a new set of blueprints.
Picasso was haunted by a traumatic experience he had had when he was seventeen, while recuperating from an illness in the remote alta terra on the borders of Aragón. As recounted in Volume I, he had been taken to watch the autopsy of a young girl and her grandmother, who had been struck by lightning. The sight of the local sheriff, puffing on a blood-spattered cigar while he sawed the girl’s head in half, so nauseated Picasso that he left before the old woman was chopped up. Memories of this experience seem to have reinforced the impact of Vesalius’s plates, particularly the sixth plate of the section on muscles, in which Vesalius has cracked the cadaver’s lower jawbone in two and wrenched the separate sections backward and outward to form protruding mandibles. This radical reordering of the face is a key source of the physiognomical distortions of Picasso’s “bone” period heads, also the source of even more radical ones to come. Picasso’s obsession with bones will live on in his imagery and reassert itself in 1931 in such paintings as Woman Throwing a Rock, and, above all, in his sculpture.
Above: Andreas Vesalius. Plate 29 detail: The Sixth Plate of the Muscles, De humani corporis fabrica, 1543. Courtesy of New York Academy of Medicine Library.
Right: Picasso. Seated Bather, Paris, 1930. Oil on canvas, 163.2×129.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The masterpiece of the Bone period is the MoMA’s monumental Seated Bather of January 1930—a portrayal of Olga, as Picasso made a point of confirming.2627 With its porcelain finish, sharp focus, eerie serenity, and cracked-open Vesalian head, this painting has come to be seen as a surrealist icon, despite Picasso’s denial of any surrealist involvement at this time. We should, however, remember that work on the Seated Bather followed closely on the succès de scandale of Salvador Dalí’s first one-man exhibition in Paris (November 20-December 5, 1929). The surrealist wonder works in this show—among them the Lugubrious Game, acquired by the Noailles, and the Great Masturbator28—apparently left Picasso feeling challenged to go one better than Dalí, and also demonstrate the difference between Apollinairean sur-realism and Breton’s surrealism: the difference between Picasso’s radical imagery and the glossy effluvium from Dalí’s subconscious.
Dalí revered Picasso; Picasso did not revere Dalí, but he was much amused by him and impressed by the technical virtuosity of this Catalan clown. He also praised him for painting the smell of shit better than anyone else. He meant this as a compliment. He saw Dalí’s set pieces of the 1930s as fata morganas—meticulously painted mirages. For all their “convulsive” qualities, Dalí’s visions deceive, much as the mirage of an oasis deceives someone dying of thirst in the desert. Up close, there is nothing palpable to grasp. Picasso was not interested in painting dreams; he wanted to paint smoke, he once said, as if you could drive a nail through it. There is nothing oneiric about his Seated Bather; it has the heft of the real thing. Thanks partly to Vesalius, Picasso has turned Olga’s body inside out and submitted it to a radical, sculptural deconstruction. Look, for instance, how the spinal column buttresses the back from the outside rather than the inside.
The head of this Seated Bather has often been likened to a praying mantis.29 Surrealist painters and poets had a collective male fantasy about these insects. Some even collected the
m in the hope of seeing the female bite the head off the male at the climax of their mating. As a result, this insect had become a surrealist cliché, not least in the work of Masson and Ernst. Picasso would have been at pains to avoid it. No, it was Vesalius who put him on the road to Golgotha, the place of bones where Christ is said to have been crucified. Golgotha would be the setting for his next great work.
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Golgotha (1930)
Central to Picasso’s “bone” period is his 1930 Crucifixion.1 The idea of addressing what he admitted to be “the greatest subject in art”2 goes back to his student days, but his first attempt at deconstructing the subject dates from 1917, when he did some worked-up cubist drawings of a picador as a centurion as if for a Crucifixion, but failed to follow them up. In 1926 and 1927, Picasso did some ironical drawings of this hallowed subject, but the arrival of Marie-Thérèse in his life put all such thoughts out of his mind. It was not until May-June 1929 that he came up with four more detailed studies for a Crucifixion composition cut off at the level of Christ’s loincloth.3 These include a detail missing from the final painting—an over-scaled hand, seemingly the artist’s and conceptually the viewer’s, gripping the rungs of a ladder overlooking the action on Golgotha, thus bringing it within reach.
Picasso, it is important to remember, had been trained as a religious artist. His father had apprenticed him to an Andalusian painter of sacred subjects, José Garnelo Alda, in the belief that the boy would make a fortune doing devotional genre scenes. Garnelo’s studio resembled a film set; props included a baroque altar for ceremonial subjects and a grotto where Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin could be reenacted. However, it was Garnelo’s knowledge of Catholic iconography, rather than his flashy academicism, that inspired his fifteen-year-old apprentice to fill sketchbooks with martyrdoms, mostly of female saints.4 Pablo Ruiz—he had yet to adopt his mother’s name—also specialized in scenes from the life of Christ: several Annunciations, the Education of Christ, the Supper at Emmaus, the Last Supper, the Taking of Christ, the Crucifixion, the Entombment, the Resurrection, and Veronica’s Veil. Icono-graphical knowledge of these images would enable Picasso, later in life, to blaspheme all he wanted and, on occasion, to give a faint hint of sanctity to a secular image, and also depict the ecstasies, torments, and martyrdoms of his women in the divine light of sainthood. When civil war broke out in Spain, Picasso would be uniquely equipped to use the black Catholicism of his forebears against Franco’s fascistic faith.
Despite insisting that he was an atheist, Picasso would never be able to disown his faith. It was too atavistic, too deeply ingrained. The prelates in his family included his paternal uncle, Canon Pablo, after whom he had been named: “almost a saint” (according to his nephew). “When he died, we found him wearing a hair shirt that caused him some very nasty wounds.”5 The “hair shirt” turned out to be a fakirish chain belt, which Picasso hung on a wall of his living room at La Californie. His great uncle Perico (Brother Pedro de Cristo) had done much to reform the Church, and then retired to live on alms as a hermit in the mountains of Córdoba. Centuries earlier, a forebear, the venerable Juan de Almoguera y Ramírez, had risen to the apex of spiritual and secular power as both archbishop of Lima and viceroy and captain-general of Peru.
Left: Picasso. Study for Crucifixion, May-June 1929. Pencil on sketchbook page, 23×30.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Right: Picasso. Detail of Crucifixion with soldiers throwing dice, February 7, 1930. Oil on plywood. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Such was young Pablo’s proficiency at religious painting that a Barcelona convent had commissioned a pair of altarpieces from him. The nuns wanted him to copy Murillo, but, as Picasso told Apollinaire, “the idea bored me so I copied them up to a point, then rearranged things according to my own ideas.”67 These altarpieces, which were destroyed during the Setmana Tràgica, the anticlerical riots in 1909, were never photographed. However, drawings and an oil study suggest that one depicted the Annunciation, the other Marguerite Marie Alacoque’s Vision of Christ, which launched the cult of the Sacred Heart. Picasso would later use the emblem of the Sacred Heart as a blasphemous metaphor for Marie-Thérèse’s sexual parts.
Picasso’s residual faith proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the saintlike whores and beggars of the Blue period—quintessentially Spanish images that recall the morbid piety of the sixteenth-century Luis de Morales’s lachrymose Pietà and the theatrical exaltation of El Greco. Later borrowings from ars sacra were more covert. Much as Picasso dismissed the idea of a fourth dimension, his addition of a subliminal flicker of spirituality—heavenly or hellish, as the case may be—to a still life would serve a similar purpose in that it would leave the viewer wondering how a seemingly matter-of-fact subject could suggest such heights and depths and such mystifying echoes.
As Picasso doubtless intended, his Crucifixion is an iconographical conundrum. Nobody in the field of Picasso studies agrees as to who is who. Is it even a Crucifixion?8 Some forty years ago, Anthony Blunt pronounced the painting a Deposition.9 And indeed, the death agony appears to be over; Christ’s body is about to be taken down off the cross, as have the bodies of the two thieves—the good Dismas and the bad Gestas—whose broken remains we see bottom left.10 To support his theory, Blunt claims that the little soldier on the ladder is pulling the nails out of the cross. He is not; he is hammering them in. Like medieval artists and modern cartoonists, Picasso chose to portray ongoing events simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Let us start with the lesser figures. In the drawings, Longinus, the Roman lancer who stabbed Christ’s side and was later canonized for catching the sacred blood, is seen as a major protagonist, on horseback, with helmet and sword; in the painting he has been downgraded into a minuscule, Mithraic picador. This time, Picasso pays no heed to the medieval artists who used variations in scale to denote degrees of sanctity and secular importance. Picasso manipulates scale solely in the interests of gigan-tism—an all-important element given the smallness of the Crucifixion panel and the amount of characters and action to be packed into it.
Towering over little Longinus is the huge, hollowed-out “bone” head of another of the bit players, Stephaton, the sponge bearer, who offered the dying Christ a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a stick. If this minor figure plays a major pictorial role, it is because Picasso has used a large green sponge as a symbol of the moon on Christ’s right side, a pendant to the sun on the left.11 Traditionally, the moon belongs on Christ’s left, his “bad” side, and the sun on his right, his “good” side. Perversely, Picasso has switched the sun and moon around so that the sponge bearer’s head doubles as a crescent moon, an emblem of the Virgin Mary.12 Immediately below the sponge is a V-shaped bird—possibly the pelican that symbolizes the shedding of Christ’s blood to redeem the world or, no less likely, the Raven (the messenger of Apollo in classical literature) who, according to Mithraic myth, transmits the sun’s order to Mithra to slaughter the sacrificial bull so that the faithful can drink its Eucharistic blood.
In front on the right, two small soldiers, each with a very large leg, are rolling dice for Christ’s seamless tunic. “Art dealers,” Picasso said. The drum they use as a table previously served a similar purpose in the Parade curtain, which is also the source of the horse in the preparatory drawings and the ladder in the Crucifixion painting. The Colosseum-like arches in the drawings give Golgotha a whiff of the blood and sand of the bullring in that they evoke the Roman arenas at Fréjus, Nîmes, and Arles, where Picasso regularly attended corridas.
So much for the lesser figures; now for the hierarchy In giving Christ a pinhead with two dots and a dash by way of features, Picasso implies that the image on the Sculpture of the Virgin contrived by Picasso’s father in the Vilatós’ Barcelona apartment, 1954. Inge Morath Foundation / Magnum. cross is as much of a blank as the tomb of the unknown soldier, and that it is up to us to identify this blank as Christ or Anti-Christ, Mithra or Dionysus, the artist, or even t
he viewer. Picasso’s close friend the Spanish sculptor Fenosa maintained that Picasso was obsessed by God. “God to him meant what accounted for Creation, what made man…. He was always talking about God.”13 As for the tunic, Saint John of the Cross—a poet Picasso revered— described Christ wearing a white tunic that “dazzles the eyes of all human understanding. When the soul travels in [this] vestment, the devil can neither see it nor harm it.”14 The Virgin Mary is similarly robed in white, which pentiments reveal to have started as black. Years later, when shown the photograph that Inge Morath had taken of the Vilató family’s apartment in Barcelona,15 Picasso was fascinated to see a figure of the Virgin, which his father had contrived,
Sculpture of the Virgin contrived by Picasso’s father in the Vilatos’ Barcelona apartment, 1954. Inge Morath Foundation / Magnum.
on a small eighteenth-century table, which had been painted black in Ripolin by his father and later white all over, both of which attempts to improve it were “bien laid,” and the Virgin herself had been made from a plaster cast of the head of a Greek goddess that his father had painted over with utmost realism, giving it eyelashes and a look of sorrow with golden tears stuck to her cheeks. The conventional scarf draping the Virgin’s head was made of cloth dipped in plaster and painted over so as to harmonise with the painted bust. The whole effect was convincing and troubling, the Greek features adapted to the Spanish drama of sorrow, the cloth and paint made a form of “collage” of borrowed elements. P[icasso] was delighted at this forerunner of “collage” and admired the way two round lamps had been placed where breasts might be, giving the Virgin a new form of illumination.16
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