Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Picasso was born in Málaga on the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, where his father was an art teacher and artist, specializing in birds but fascinated by bullfighting. The family moved first to La Coruña, in the northeast, then to Barcelona, capital of the most economically advanced and culturally enterprising province of Spain, Catalonia. His father continued to teach him until he was fourteen, and then he put in some time at La Lonja, Barcelona’s excellent fine arts school, before setting up on his own as a teenage artist.1 He was essentially self-taught, self-directed, self-promoted, emotionally educated in the teeming brothels of the city, a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism. He lacked the benefit—though also the inhibitions—of full academic training, and if his drawing is sometimes weak in consequence (one of the myths most consistently spread about Picasso is that he was a superb draftsman), he was exceptionally skillful, from an early age, at exploiting his many and ingenious artistic ideas. He always kept a sharp eye on the market and always knew what would sell. He disposed of drawings from the age of nine on; and though his output became and remained prodigious throughout his long life, he never had any difficulty in marketing.2

  Picasso seems to have grasped, quite early on, that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting from nature. In Barcelona the competition was severe. In particular, he was up against perhaps the greatest of modern Spanish painters, Ramon Casas i Carbo, fifteen years his senior and far more accomplished in traditional skills.3 Taught in Carolus-Duran’s atelier, Casas oscillated between Barcelona and Paris, sharing for a time the famous studio above the dance hall of the Moulin de la Galette. In 1890, following in the footsteps of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec but excelling both, he painted a superb, sombre picture of this hall. His most important pictures were striking pieces of social realism, such as The Garroting and a painting of a street riot, The Charge. At one time the young Picasso thought of entering this field, but Casas had preempted it. Casas was also a draftsman on the level of Ingres, and a portraitist of uncommon ability. He not only befriended Picasso but produced, in 1901, the most beautiful and accurate drawing of him.4 Casas’s superb full-length charcoal portraits of people in Barcelona inspired Picasso, at age eighteen, to do a similar series, which he exhibited in his first one-man show at the place where “advanced” artists, known as modernistas, gathered: El Quatro Gats. There were 135 other drawings and paintings in the show. But it was not a success.5 Indeed it was a foolish move, one of the few in Picasso’s career, for his portraits invited comparison with Casas’s and are manifestly inferior (both can be seen in Barcelona). Picasso had already been in Paris, and in 1900 he challenged Casas again by painting his own version of The Moulin de la Galette, a spectacular piece of updated Renoir but again inferior to Casas’s restrained study in light and gloom. It was, however, calculated to make a splash.6 Picasso visited Paris twice more and found that he had no difficulty in staging shows there or in selling his work. In 1904 he effectively left Spain for good, partly to escape conscription, but chiefly to get away from life under Casas’s shadow, and from endless disparaging comparisons with Casas. Picasso also saw that Paris, with its preoccupation with novelty and fashion, was the place where he could shine and rise to the top.

  Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived. But everything had to be done at top speed. He was incapable of lavishing care, time, or sustained effort on a work of art. By 1900 he was turning out a painting every morning, and doing other things in the afternoon. He tried sculpture, facial masks, and symbolism, among other forms of expression, and from then until his death, at age ninety-two, he remained a master of spectacular output, working on paper and canvas; in stone, ceramics, and metal; in every possible variety of mixed media. He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets and costumes, dresses, logos, and almost every kind of object from ashtrays to headdresses. The number of his creations exceeds 30,000, and although there is a thirty-three-volume catalogue raisonné (1932–1978), it is far from complete and has to be supplemented by ten other catalogs. The literature on Picasso is enormous and continually growing.7 It includes an ongoing, detailed multivolume biography by John Richardson, comprehensive and essential though hagiographic, and hundreds of specialist studies covering every aspect of his activities, as well as a few critical efforts, such as A. S. Huffington’s Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.8 In the twentieth century, more words, often contradictory, were written about Picasso than about any other artist. Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multimillionaire by the end of World War I; and his wealth continued to grow, so that by the time of his death he was by far the richest artist who had ever lived. He made a deal with the French government over inheritance taxes, and as a result, in 1985 the Musée Picasso opened in Paris. There, his work of all periods can be studied, supplemented by the Musée Picasso in Barcelona, which specializes in his earlier portraits and his drawings.9

  Picasso’s work can be divided into eight chronological periods. First was his early work up to the end of 1901. Then came the “blue period,” with a predominantly blue palette, figurative in style and focusing on stage characters, prostitutes, outcasts, prisoners, and beggars. This lasted until 1904 (autumn) and also included sculpture and etching.10 Then came the “rose period,” with much use of pink and flesh tints, again with figures (chiefly clowns) but dislocated from surrounding objects and space. In 1906 Picasso changed again: he was experimenting with primitive shapes and figures and moving away from representative art.11 By 1907 he was able to produce Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, perhaps the most important and influential of all his works, in which he disengaged from nature and representation and adopted linear analysis.12 This led directly to his fourth phase, cubism, in 1907–1908. He and Braque used the late work of Cézanne to dismantle objects and reassemble them in blocks and lines. The object was, or was said to be, to achieve greater solidity and thus greater realism than mere representation. Cubism in this original, so-called “analytical” phase was the most sensational of Picasso’s revolutions, since it broke the umbilical cord that linked art to the world of nature and the human body.13 This raises a logical problem about Picasso. If cubism was his greatest invention, since it sounded the death knell of representation in art (or so the majority of art historians claim), why do collectors, museums, and the art market place a much higher value on works from his earlier periods, especially the blue period, when he was still a representational artist? In 1912, Picasso reinvented an old trick of sticking bits of paper onto his canvases (especially bits of newspaper, to introduce an element of literary-political comment), and building on it by inserting solid objects, such as bits of guitars, wire, and metal. This work, known as synthetic cubism, was a further step in his fourth phase. It lasted until World War I, and it raises another logical problem. If cubism was a way of introducing a new degree of solidity and realism into the depiction of objects on a flat surface, surely the introduction of solid (three-dimensional) objects into the work of art defeated the whole purpose of the cubist method?14 This problem, like the earlier one, has never been satisfactorily answered by writers on Picasso. Indeed such writers refuse to recognize that they are problems, denouncing people who pose them as Philistines.

  After synthetic cubism, Picasso spent the war years and postwar years working in theater, designing costumes and sets and painting backdrops. But he also, in the 1920s, entered and left a fifth phase, classicism, using images from antiquity. In 1925–1935 he was in a sixth phase, surrealism, though he was never a surrealist as such. During the Spanish Civil War he took up political subjects, his seventh phase. At the request of the embattled Republican government, he painted a large canvas, Guernica, for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1937.15 This joined Les Demoiselles as his best-known picture. His later years constitute the eighth phase. His works now featured particular models; minotaurs; variations on the old masters, such as Velázquez and Goya; bullfights; and crucifixions. All
these themes overlapped and are difficult to distinguish. And each phase of Picasso’s two-dimensional work overlapped with sculpture, pottery, and constructions, as well as exercises in lithography, prints and etchings, book illustration, and costume design—and more work in theater. Even among his admirers there seems to be some agreement that his work deteriorated from the 1940s on, but this, like every other aspect of his professional career, is a matter of sharply differing opinions.

  The extraordinary success Picasso enjoyed from quite early in his career and then in growing measure until his death is explained by a number of factors. He took a long time even to become literate and was middle-aged before he could communicate in French. Very few of his letters survive, for the simple reason that to him writing a letter was more difficult, and took more time and effort, than doing a painting. Matisse wrote him many letters, which we have, but got only one in return, in which his name was misspelled (“Mattisse”). But if Picasso’s brain was not academic, it was nonetheless powerful, reinforcing his ability to think visually with sharp clarity and cunning. He was essentially a fashion designer (like two other Spaniards imported to Paris, Fortuny and Balenciaga), at his best working on costumes and drop curtains, designing logos and symbols, creating arresting images of women tortured out of shape into distortions that etch themselves into the mind like acid. In the first decade of the twentieth century, French painting finally moved from art to fashion, and, in a world tired of figurative skill, Picasso was a man whose time had come. He replaced fine art—that is, paintings composed 10 percent of novelty and 90 percent of skill—with fashion art: images where the proportions were reversed.16

  This was the new game in art. There was intense competition, but Picasso became the champion player, and held the title till his death, because he was extraordinarily judicious in getting the proportions of skill and fashion exactly right at any one time. He also had brilliant timing in guessing when the moment had arrived for pushing on to a new fashion. Although his own appetite for novelty was insatiable, he was uncannily adept at deciding exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take. This cunning was closely linked to an overwhelming personality and a peculiar sense of moral values. His ability to overawe and exploit both men and women—some of them highly intelligent and uneasily aware of what he was doing to them—was by far the most remarkable thing about him. His sexual appeal, when young, was mesmeric, both to women and to homosexuals. He later claimed to have first slept with a woman when he was ten, and he attracted women long before his fame and money became their object. His appeal to homosexuals, especially those who enjoyed the passive role, was even stronger; he seemed a small, fierce, thrusting tiger of virility. Picasso himself was overwhelmingly heterosexual by inclination. But in the culture from which he sprang there was no disgrace to his manhood in taking the active role to satisfy a needy “queen,” to use his expression. It was homosexuals who adored him—the dealer Pere Manyac; the publicist Max Jacob; and Jean Cocteau, the Andy Warhol of his day, who first made Picasso famous and reinforced his success.17 His most passionate admirers have always been homosexuals, such as the Australian collector and publicist Douglas Cooper, and Cooper’s lover John Richardson, who became Picasso’s biographer. Curiously enough, one homosexual who was not taken in by Picasso’s personality and who even pushed him around was Diaghilev. Diaghilev used to call Picasso by the contemptuous diminutive “Pica.” But most homosexuals in the art world did, and do, regard Picasso as almost beyond criticism—an opinion which, granted their power in that narrow enclave, was decisive. Picasso’s own attitude toward men was ambivalent, and he was shrewd at detecting passivity. He referred to Braque, with whom he created cubism, as “my wife” (a term of contempt) and said: “[He] is the woman who has loved me the most.” Picasso also appealed, aesthetically, to lesbians, and it is significant that he called the masculine Gertrude Stein “my only woman friend.”18

  In this game of exploitation Picasso benefited from a sort of moral blindness. He had gifts that the vast majority of human beings would give anything to possess. But apparently innately, he lacked two things that ordinary people take for granted: the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. This lack was one source of his power. At the center of his universe there was room only for Picasso—his needs, interests, and ambitions. Nobody else had to be considered. He began by exploiting his penurious father. He soon developed an imperious eye for wealthy women. Once he acquired a reputation, he proved a harder businessman than any of his dealers, whom he hired or fired on a strictly commercial basis. He boasted: “I do not give. I take.” To his harsh mind, kindness, generosity, and consideration for feelings were all weaknesses, to be taken advantage of by master figures like himself. Those who helped him, such as Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire, and countless others, were dropped, betrayed, or lashed by his venomous tongue. His ingratitude was compounded by jealousy, especially of other painters, which may have sprung from insecurity about the merits of his own work and a feeling it was all a con. It is curious that he always subscribed to a press-cutting agency and could be litigious with critics, especially those who quoted his periodic admission, “I am nothing but a clown.” He grew to hate Braque and put anyone who befriended Braque on his enemies list. He said odious things about Matisse, who thought him a friend. (“What is a Matisse? A balcony with a big red flower-pot falling over it.”)19 He was particularly vicious toward his fellow Spaniard, the modest and likable Juan Gris, persuading patrons to drop him, intriguing to prevent him from getting commissions, and then, when Gris died at age forty, pretending to be grief-stricken.20 By the end of World War I, in which Picasso evaded conscription while many of his contemporaries were killed or maimed, he was a major power in the Parisian art world, since he carefully controlled the release of his paintings and dealers groveled to do his bidding. He could effectively stop any painter he disliked, below the top rank, from getting a show: that is what happened to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, when she left him.21

  Gilot was one of the few who dared to tell the truth about Picasso while he was still alive, despite the tribe of lawyers he employed to get her book suppressed. Picasso’s attitude toward women was terrifying. He needed and of course used them for his work and pleasure, but one does not need to look long at his enormous iconography of women to realize that he despised, hated, and even feared them. He said that, for him, women were divided into “goddesses and doormats,” and that his object was to turn the goddess into the doormat. One of his long-term mistresses said of him: “He first raped the woman,…then he worked. Whether it was me, or someone else, it was always like that.” He was predatory—and intensely possessive. He discarded women at will, but for a woman to desert him was treason. He told one mistress: “Nobody leaves a man like me.” He would steal a friend’s wife, then tell the man that he was honoring him by sleeping with her. He told Gilot: “I would rather see a woman die than see her happy with someone else.” Was he a schizophrenic, as Jung, on the basis of his paintings, believed? At times he appeared a monomaniac. He told Giacometti: “I have reached a point when I don’t want any criticism from anyone.” He was overheard saying to himself, over and over: “I am God, I am God.” A pagan who regarded himself as an artistic deity, he believed he had an unfettered right to inflict injustice on those around him—family, friends, admirers. As he put it, “being unfair is god-like.”22

  His distorted paintings of women are closely linked to the pleasure he got from hurting them, both physically and in other ways. He abused them not only in rage but on purpose. Dora Maar, probably his most beautiful and gifted mistress, was beaten and left unconscious on the floor. Another mistress said: “You got hit on the head.” His favorite, almost his only, reading was de Sade. Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he seduced when she was seventeen, was persuaded by him to read Sade, and later initiated into Sade’s practices. Picasso loved to rule over a seraglio but avoided the risk o
f harem conspiracies by setting one woman against another. His delight was to see his victims turning their rage on each other instead of on himself. He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching. On one occasion Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter pounded each other with their fists while Picasso, having set up the fight, calmly went on painting. The canvas he was working on was Guernica.23 He was mean to his women, liking to keep them dependent on him. Most parted from him poorer than when they met. It is true that he sometimes gave them paintings or drawings. But he never signed these works. If, after a rupture, a woman attempted to sell such a gift, dealers would not handle it without Picasso’s authentication, which was refused. This, of course, raises another logical problem about Picasso’s art. Without both a signature and Picasso’s personal authentication, such works were commercially valueless. In short, they had no intrinsic value. Few leading painters have ever been so easy to copy or imitate. Because of his abuse of his power of authentication, and the fear in which dealers held him, some works rejected as forgeries are undoubtedly by him, and it is likely that many authenticated works are fraudulent. Indeed, despite the attention lavished on his oeuvre by hagiographers and scholars, it remains in some confusion.