One of many mysteries attaching to Picasso and more importantly to his position as the defining figure of Modern Art involves his almost total rejection of the modern world as subject matter. Well, this might not be true of the Picasso of John Richardson’s second volume, covering 1907 – 1917, but it certainly seems to apply to the third, THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS 1917-1932. The terrible First World War - that ‘great’ war - was in full swing in 1917 and with it the European world discovered a fuller and more affecting modernism than the art world could offer. Dress fashions relaxed, aeroplanes and motorcars began buzzing all about the place, recorded music and industrial mass production took off, excessive pomp and ceremony associated with ‘royal’ European families went into mothballs. Meanwhile an increasingly influential press and radio spread information and disinformation far and wide.
Before the war Picasso, along with Braque and a few other artists, had seemed to suggest that there was more to the observed world, to time and space, than there might appear to be at first glance. As well their cubist compositions referenced the ubiquitous ‘modernist’ printed broadsheet page, plus that stencil serif type applied to cargo crates around the world. But, before the conflict ended Picasso was interchanging and playfully restating what had so quickly become the mannerisms of cubism. And soon was working on a reinvention of the kind of frozen classicism he’d been viewing while in Rome in 1917. Of course this style change was in part Ingres-revisited, but the gargantuan Greco-Romanism was very Picasso as the world would next come to know him. By 1921 these large nudes connected with those great late works of Auguste Renoir, much in the news at that point in time, as Richardson observes “given the recent auction of the contents of his studio”. Just as significant as new classicism was the artist’s determined rejection of pretty much all of his modern world as subject. Here was a man mad about cars, yet when he purchased his top-of-the-range Hispano Suiza he decided that driving it would be bad for his hands and so he had to employ a chauffer.
While the modern world might not have appealed as art’s subject, this period covered by Richardson released the artist from the tyranny of stylistic consistency. In the first of the 15 years he played around with pointillist technique, with direct – linear as opposed to painterly – representation, a flatter, more relaxed and wildly coloured kind of cubism and a great deal more including his the Disembowelled Horse drawing, which prefigures the central horse figure in the great 1937 composition, Guernica. Interestingly, as well, in his nudes he came to pay particular attention to the anus – was that interest ‘modern’ or ‘ancient’?
We open with Picasso's 1917 journey to Rome and his attentions diverted to the world of music and dance. At 35, rich and renowned, he turned his mind to working with Cocteau and Diaghilev on the Ballets Russes’s Parade, music by Erik Satie. Dance appears to have become everything for Picasso through the next ten years with, principally, the ballets Tricorne, Pulcinella and Mercure. Of course, those addicted to detail of the master’s love life will know he married Olga Khokhlova, the dancer, in 1918. A difficult marriage, possibly, with Olga enjoying social pretension even more than the image obsessed maestro did. Richardson doesn’t appear particularly fond of a ubiquitous Jean Cocteau, whom he types as ‘mercurial jack-of-all trades’. Yet Cocteau was a survivor in that heady Picasso world, right through, indeed they would be photographed attending bull fights together right up to the 1950s.
Always great with sociological detail - a biographer’s passion one might suppose - Richardson is at his very best dealing with that world of the new ballet – with the dancers, composers and of course the fabled impresario, Diaghilev. Ballet was a special interest of the author’s before, following the inclinations of his friend Douglas Cooper, he took up Picasso with a vengeance.
Alert readers who have perused Hilary Spurling on Henri Matisse might have understood the constraints placed upon biographers of the recent great. After death such subjects leave families behind nursing reputations while working the market. The van Gogh family are generally supposed to have stage-managed his posthumous career, and prices. Spurling’s Matisse leaves the reader yearning for an examination of other views, more contentious accounts of disagreements, gauche political and social decisions, etc. Hagiography may fit religious mysticism, but not a world as tough and nasty as the art world. With Richardson, okay, we get close to the magical days of the Ballets Russes, of Diaghilev and Massine bitching at one another, of our Spanish hero crowding the nightspots and brothels with Massine. We meet Marcel Proust arriving at parties on the stroke of midnight, James Joyce coming along, too, drunk as a fish of course, Jean Cocteau forever claiming centre stage, pulling strings. Each of the characters just so famous, always eying the others off. But, even with the thorough and extremely informative Richardson, do we get enough of the real Picasso? More importantly, do we get enough of his art, of what he was attempting to achieve on paper, canvas? With the fantastic Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired phallic head sculptures at the start of the 1930s, however, Richardson is very good indeed?
Richardson is excellent tracking Picasso’s interaction with the ever changing crowd, as well as the difficult relationships he had with the other two great France based visual artists of his time, Braque and Matisse. It’s lovely to cut away to Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda living it up – or down - in the south of France. And, of course there are the famous Picasso women and the gifts he gave them, one following the other, each an object of fascination for so many art historians.
Not infrequently, concentration on an era’s fashion and fads can lead a biographer astray. Regarding the powerful 1919 portrait, titled Olga Wearing a Wristwatch for the sumptuous colour reproduction section in the book’s middle, and in the text Woman Wearing a Wristwatch: “The wristwatch – until recently an accessory considered outré on women and effeminate on men - exorcises the taint of Ingres, a taint that had left his cubist followers in a state of resentful confusion. Picasso must have given Olga a wristwatch, just as some years later he would give one to Marie-Thérèse Walter. Lydia Gasman believes that wristwatches had a special significance for Picasso… According to Gasman the ominousness of wristwatches in Picasso’s imagery has to do with ‘time corroding love’”. Of course the reality is that wristwatches were modern, like the dresses Olga wears, she’s a right-up-to-the-minute woman. And, for men, having been used by soldiers in the trenches, they were a full-on masculine fashion statement. Unfortunately, what Richardson doesn’t attempt to grapple with here is the painting itself.
Our author knows a great art thought when he comes across it. He quotes one of Braque’s maxims: ‘A vase gives form to the void as music does to silence’. These utterances by Picasso’s brother in cubism were recorded by the poet, Pierre Reverdy, who was, in Braque’s opinion, the only poet with even the slightest notion of what the visual arts are about. Further, as though directing attention back to the ‘poetic’ of Giorgione, Richardson quotes Braque, “Poésie, the quality I value above all else in art.… It is to painting what life is to man…. It is something that each artist has to discover for himself through his intuition…. For me it is a matter of harmony of rapports, of rhythm… of metamorphosis.” And then comments, “Picasso’s preoccupation with metamorphosis would owe a great deal to ideas formulated by Braque.”
Richardson sets his subject above everything. When the crowd, and/or the women, intrude too much, the great Picasso is back to his art. Regarding the wonderful charcoal and pencil portrait drawings of Erik Sartie, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla Richardson writes, ‘Picasso adopted a style that has a van Gogh-like intensity and rigor. The three great composers that Picasso chose to portray were almost as short as he was, and nothing like as handsome. To remedy this, he gave them stature. He sat all three down in the same chair with their huge hands – only really true of Stravinsky – folded in front of them At the same time he suggests their gigantism, mental as well as physical.’ There the van Gogh comparison is far from the mark. Elsewhere, more usefully, quoting Pierre Reverdy on the portrait drawings: “Nobody wanted to say or see that the line in these drawings is cleaner, stronger, more precise and also more incisive than anyone else’s; and that Picasso achieves a likeness through a process of reconstitution, whereas others confine themselves to copying.”
Richardson, in his early 80s, still has a lot more work to do. A tireless researcher, he’s devoted to his subject. Early 80s, that’s nothing. Picasso made it through to 90. Indeed, at the end of this volume, in 1932 he’s in his fifties, and fifty was an apparently greater age back then than in our era of medically induced eternal youth. At fifty… “During the week he played Mars to Marie-Thérèse’s Venus. Weekends he played the role of an affable père de famille in a three-piece suit and spats, having fun with a much fussed over child and a very large dog.’ He began the sexual liaison with Marie-Thérèse Walter when she was 17 or thereabouts. Judging from the paintings he did of her it was indeed sexual. The always-predictable Karl Jung wrote of Picasso’s 1932 Zurich exhibition that the artist was clearly a schizophrenic “demoniacally attracted to ugliness and evil”. (But then cooperating with the Nazi regime, Jung said “times of mass movement, are times of leadership,” and that a triumphant leader is “an incarnation of the nation’s psyche and its mouthpiece, the spearhead of the phalanx of the whole people in motion.”) Richardson responds to Karl Jung with “Regrettably the psychiatrist had no inkling of Picasso’s shamanic nature or his conviction that art has a magic function.”
Art lovers and those interested in 20th century Europe’s social history will look forward to John Richardson’s next volume.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE
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