Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  The name itself was soon to come. Autumn brought the painters back to Paris, and Braque and Picasso found that their independent summer’s work had converged. There was no remaining hint of Fauvism in the landscapes and still-lives Braque had painted at L’Estaque; on the contrary, the seven pictures he submitted to the Salon d’Automne of 1908 had entirely abandoned the unrestrained and lawless brilliance of his earlier phase; they were severely disciplined, “geometrical,” subdued in color. Now, long after all passion and personal antagonisms have died away, it is said that Fauvism, with its disregard for perspective and modeling, its deliberate distortion, and its use of flat surfaces, was in some respects quite close to Cubism, particularly in Matisse’s later work. Be that as it may, Matisse himself, a member of the committee, was shocked and displeased by the pictures Braque had sent; it is said that he made some disparaging remark about “little cubes.” Five were rejected, and in his anger Braque withdrew all seven. In November of the same year Kahnweiler exhibited them at his gallery, together with twenty more, and Apollinaire wrote the preface to the catalog. Louis Vauxcelles, the same critic who had given the Fauves, the Wild Beasts, their label, said, “M. Braque is a very daring young man. The misleading example of Picasso and Derain has made him bolder still. And perhaps he is more obsessed than he ought to be by the style of Cézanne and by distant memories of the Egyptians’ static art. He builds up distorted, metallic, shockingly simplified little figures. He despises form and reduces everything—views, places, people, houses—to geometrical diagrams, to cubes.” The word caught on, particularly after the paintings Picasso brought back with him from his holiday at Horta in the summer of 1909, and presently Picasso and Braque, to say nothing of Gleizes, Herbin, Le Fauconnier, Léger, Metzinger, Picabia, and somewhat later Gris, Delaunay, and many more, were universally known as Cubists.

  *It is given in the Appendix.

  Chapter VIII

  FOR Leo Stein Cubism was “Godalmighty rubbish”; for Vauxcelles it was “pretentious impotence and self-complacent ignorance”; for Apollinaire it was a polemic into which he flung himself on the side of his friends, soon getting out of his depth but keeping more or less afloat by means of rhetoric; for Gleizes and Metzinger it was an elaborate intellectual theory; and for many other writers it has been the subject of muddle-headed, vehement explanations in which the word “truth” continually recurs. It meant different things to the various painters and sculptors who practiced it, and no doubt some of the theories put forward do suit some of the artists; but what really matters for the purpose of this book is what Cubism meant to Picasso.

  In the first place it had nothing whatsoever to do with any theory, nor with absolute truth. Although on many subjects his reliably quoted words are often contradictory, seeing that they depended on his mood and on the person he was talking to, yet his contempt for theory and for the verbal explanation of art remains constant from his earliest recorded remarks to the last. As for truth, he maintained that it did not exist; and that if it did exist, then at best a painting was only an approximation to a certain aspect of it, a symbolic reflection of a single facet; observing that if a painting could encompass the whole truth it would be impossible to paint a hundred canvases on the same theme. “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that it is given us to understand,” he said; and after all, the doctrine of Nietzsche, so much admired at the Quatre Gats, was that “we have art in order not to perish from the truth.”

  For Picasso Cubism was a way of saying what he wanted to say in the language that he felt was right, a language neither better nor worse than others, but different. When Felipe Cossio del Pomar asked him what had been his aim when he launched into this new phase he replied, “To paint and nothing more. And to paint seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought—without enslaving myself or associating myself with objective reality. Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless. It is my will that takes form outside of all extrinsic schemes, without considering what the public or the critics will say.”

  To Marius de Zayas he said, “Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is neither a seed nor a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form. But if we are to apply the law of evolution and transformation to art, then we have to admit that all art is transitory. If Cubism is an art of transition I am sure that the only thing that will come out of it is another form of Cubism.

  “Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and whatnot have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories.” This does not sound in the least like the Picasso who talked to Malraux, and it is probable that Zayas, who carried on the conversation in Spanish and who afterwards translated it, having written it down from memory, gave Picasso’s words a far more literary form in English than ever they had when they were first uttered; but I do not believe that he deformed their general sense, particularly as the same idea is repeated and amplified in Picasso’s statement to Florent Fels, “Cubism has been explained by mathematics, geometry, psychoanalysis. All that is mere literature. The aims of Cubism are plastic. We only saw it as a means of expressing what we saw with our eyes and minds, expressing it with all the potentiality that drawing and color possess in their own right.”

  And to Zervos he said, “When we invented Cubism we had no intention whatsoever of inventing Cubism. We simply wanted to express what was in us. Not one of us drew up a plan of campaign; and our friends the poets followed our efforts attentively, but they never dictated to us.”

  “When we invented Cubism”: and certainly what is called by that name is the child of Picasso and Braque. Yet Cubism was already implicit in Picasso’s work as early as some of the harlequins, where the pattern of the traditional costume breaks Harlequin’s body into angular planes: this is particularly evident in the “Mort d’Arlequin” of 1905/6, in which three isolated lozenges are of capital importance. And of course other men before him had approached the problems of volume, space, and the re-creation of a structure by means of geometrical forms: it may seem strange to speak of Uccello, who so delighted in that linear perspective which the Cubists rejected, as one of Picasso’s precursors; but he too used broad schematic planes to build up his marvelous, dreamlike horses in the “Rout of San Romano”; and Picasso deeply admired his work. Like Uccello, Piero delta Francesca was fascinated by the geometry of the mazzochio, the thirty-two sided hat worn by the Florentines—fascinated by it as a piece of pure form, form in itself; and he also used the cube and the cylinder for the fortified town in his “Invention of the True Cross.” Georges de La Tour would have been lost without his great geometrical planes; and Poussin, whom Picasso esteemed so very highly, was at one with the Cubists (and with Leonardo da Vinci) in stating that painting was cosa mentale—that the painter’s eye must see deep, and that it must know the essence of what it sees. He said, “You have to understand that there are two ways of seeing things, the one by just looking at them and the other by gazing at them with real attention. Just looking is merely the eye’s natural reception of the shape and likeness of the thing seen. Gazing with real attention is not only that but also an intense study of the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the object. So it might be said that what I call just looking is a physical operation and what I call gazing is an operation of the mind.”

  This brings us straight to Picasso and to his unparalleled concentration of eye and spirit. It was a quality that he valued as highly as Poussin and for the same reasons; and it was one that he admired in others. Speaking to Sabartés he said, “Peopl
e never concentrate enough.… The reason why Cézanne was Cézanne is that he did concentrate: when he was confronted with a tree he looked hard at what was there before his eyes; he looked at it as hard as a man with a gun aiming at his quarry. If he fixed his eye on a leaf, he never let it go. And since he had the leaf, he had the branch. And the tree could never get away. Even if he only had the leaf, that was worth while. Often enough painting is no more than that.… You have to put all your concentration into it.… Oh, if only everyone could do just that!”

  And to Liberman he said, “Painting is a thing of intelligence. One can see the intelligence in each of Manet’s brushstrokes, and the action of intelligence is made visible in the film on Matisse when one watches Matisse draw, hesitate, then begin to express his thought with a sure stroke.”

  This emphasis on intelligence may seem to imply an intellectualism, a theoretical approach, that Picasso utterly denied; but it was with a painter’s intelligence that he and Poussin were concerned, an intelligence whose realm is neither scientific nor verbal but solely plastic.

  The word beauty, like the word love, has been so bandied about that it now defies all definition; yet still it has a meaning, and although some of those who should know have asserted that Picasso never knew love, at least not for women, he had an immense awareness of beauty—of a beauty—an awareness so catholic that it embraced many things from which the common sensibility recoils. And for him beauty was not to be ranked: from the aesthetic point of view the blue of a Gauloise packet had the same value as the beauty of a girl. And he may not have been entirely joking when he proposed sticking dog’s droppings on to a canvas and framing them.

  This sense of the beauty and significance of an object in itself is said to be quite general among the very young; and there can be few who do not remember being entranced by wet pebbles on the strand, sea-worn glass, or oil on puddles.

  In most people the vision dwindles or even perishes as the process of growing up, receiving accepted social, moral, and aesthetic notions grinds them down to size; but it certainly never did so in Picasso, who from his nature and from his status as an outsider was not to be ground down. In him it grew steadily more intense, and often he was able to persuade those who were still open to persuasion that other values, often very ancient, were still available to them. There is his magnificent, disreputable goat, for example, that defies all established, academic canons of beauty, and that has given innumerable beholders the joy of seeing the quintessence of the creature.

  Others he never could persuade; his attempts to do so angered them, producing a flood of vituperation and acrimonious mockery. A witty Italian summed it up in a burlesque interview with Picasso, who is here supposed to be speaking: “In art, the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation… but whatever is new, odd, original, extravagant, or scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and even before, have satisfied these masters and critics with whatever bizarre extravagances passed through my head, and the less they understood the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, rebuses, and arabesques I became famous, famous very quickly. And for a painter fame means selling, making money, making a fortune, growing wealthy. So today, as you know, I am famous and I am rich. But when I am quite alone I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the ancient, splendid sense of the word. Giotto and Titian, Rembrandt and Goya, were true painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and to the utmost of his powers has exploited the silliness, the vanity, and the stupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may seem; but it has the merit of being sincere.” Picasso’s enemies seized upon the alleged interview with delight and at once pronounced it to be genuine. It has been translated, with variations, into many languages, and it keeps reappearing, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: only the other day I was sent an English version from a parish magazine in which it illustrated the text “Be ye perfect.”

  Although the malevolence is surprising, a certain amount of initial incomprehension is not, since for the adult Picasso painting was not the imitation of some given body, house, or tree, but the creation of an object for itself—of a statement valid per se and at the same time valid in relation to the subject. In this conceptual re-presentation the original starting-point, “reality” in the common sense, was never lost to sight—indeed new aspects of it were revealed—but Picasso was using a difficult language: difficult, that is to say, for those of his contemporaries who still saw painting if not as anecdote, direct illustration, then at least as something with a literary and perhaps an ethical or a social content; or as something to do with light, if not with sweetness. And even now, when Cézanne’s “For a painter light does not exist” has been well digested, and when sweetness has been banished to Disneyland, Picasso’s language is still difficult for those who try to translate it into another idiom, to “understand” it in words.

  Gómez de la Serna illustrates this with a dialogue between a critic and a sage:

  Critic: It is true that these pictures do not displease my eye; but since I do not understand them, I cannot like them.

  Sage: What did you have for lunch?

  Critic: Oysters.

  Sage: Do you like oysters?

  Critic: Passionately.

  Sage: Do you understand oysters?

  A more open, or a less conditioned mind goes straight to the point without these detours: Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Vollard was the object of a good deal of merriment among the dealer’s friends—“What is it meant to represent? Which way up is it supposed to be?”—but a child, still young enough to speak imperfectly, looked at it and instantly observed, “That’s Monsieur Voyard.”

  If Picasso’s language was difficult in Paris and La Rue-des-Bois it became even more so in 1909, when he and Femande traveled down to Barcelona in the early summer. There he spent some time with his family (as little as possible, says Fernande) and saw all his friends again, particularly Pallarès, who at once wrote off to his uncle to arrange for the couple’s holiday at Horta. During these short pauses in Barcelona the pace of entertainment was usually too great for even Picasso to do any work, and this time he was exceptionally busy with arrangements for resuscitating Arte Joven (Soler had died in the intervening years); nevertheless he did make time to paint a magnificent portrait of his old friend. And in accordance with the painters’ custom of exchanging pictures Pallarès gave him a landscape showing the mountain of Santa Barbara at Horta, which they had climbed together so many years before.

  A little later Picasso saw the mountain with his own eyes. Fernande gives no account of their journey, merely observing that they were “somewhere in Aragón”; but as she traveled with a cooking stove it is probable that they went the longer way about, through Gandesa and Bot, by cart. In some ways she was a remarkably uncomplaining woman: there is a photograph of her, standing on the scorched grass, holding a little Pallarès by the hand, and looking placid; yet the rigors of Spanish roads and Spanish inns were even greater in her day than they are in ours. Nor, though she thought little of Cubism, did she make the least objection to her lover’s filling the place with Cubist landscapes.

  These pictures show what he had been aiming at: by now he had thoroughly worked out his problems, and the powerful but tentative experiments of the Negro Period and what might be called the Cézannian Cubism of La Rue-des-Bois and even of Pallarès’ portrait were laid aside. He could see his way clearly at last, and the line ran straight from the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” on into full analytic Cubism. Immensely stimulated by this and by his surroundings, the countryside, the heat, and the smells he loved, happy to be among old friends for whom he was still En Pau, full of health and good food, he worked with even more than his usual energy.

  He began with landscapes: the conical mountain of Santa Barbara, several views of the village, including the reservoir (it is now a swimming-pool, blue-tiled alas). One of the best known of all these Horta pictures
is one in which a factory chimney, square in section, rises among palm-trees, their fronds bursting like rockets among the severe straight-edged planes: it has puzzled many plodding observers, including the present writer, because Horta is too high for palms and it possesses no factory. The answer is that Picasso invented the palms entirely, and that a small brick-kiln may have given him the idea for the valuable truncated pyramid, the towering chimney shape.

  The colors are mostly the bleached ocher, silvery-gray, and tawny of Catalonia, and the already-Cubist village required little more than simplification to coincide with Picasso’s mind; but in his wilder scenes the superficially amorphous rock is analysed, broken down into geometrical planes, often prismatic (in shape, not color), and so reconstructed, the tilted planes sometimes sliding over one another and sometimes meeting in a ridge: in some cases the geometrization is carried into the sky, whose faintly shimmering crystalline facets bind the whole into a rigorous composition with a depth that owes nothing to traditional perspective.

  In the heads this analysis is far more evident, since the starting-point is naturally more obvious than an unknown mountainside: in one of the long series Fernande’s face is broken down into curved planes, while her forehead and the vase of flowers in what is just the background are strictly angular; in another (which was recently sold in London for £340,000, or $790,000) the entirety is made up of rectilinear forms; and in a bronze which he modeled as soon as he got back to Paris and González’ studio, the two are combined in one of the most striking sculptures Picasso ever produced: that is to say they are combined as far as it is possible to combine a two-dimensional surface with a three-dimensional form.