‘Picasso: Challenging the Past’ at the National Gallery

A Reflection by Elizabeth Adekunle

Picasso for the 21st-century

Pablo Picasso is regarded as the most prolific and arguably one of the greatest and most popular artists of the 20th-century. Born in Malaga in Spain, he lived in France for most of his life and died in 1973 aged 91. During his lifetime Picasso produced well over 30,000 works that have been accounted for (the total could be as many as 50,000). This remarkable feat and lengthy career has earned him this high status. Picasso’s depictions range from traditional paintings, to several different techniques and new ways of representing figures and form in space.

Picasso’s amazing visual memory and ability to evolve his art in this way became apparent when he was just a boy. Picasso began to learn to paint aged seven, tutored by his father. When he was thirteen years old, his father gave Picasso his own painting utensils and said he would never paint again, for his son had already surpassed him. In the first room of the exhibition, at aged sixteen, Picasso depicts himself as an 18^th-century dandy in a powdered wig. By this stage, he had already achieved the technical style of traditional masters such as Velasquez, Van Dyck and El Greco.

Picasso began to develop his many personal styles in his early twenties and the exhibition is themed in a way which teases out these styles and, by doing so, helps the viewer gain more understanding of the artist himself. Picasso never stayed with a style for long and his styles follow in quick succession, sometimes overlapping along the way; The Blue Period (1901-04), the Pink Period (1904-06), the Iberian Period (1904-07), the African Period (1907), Analytical Cubism (1907-12), Synthetic Cubism (1912-21), Neo-Classicism (1918-24). Picasso returned to a more decorative form of Cubism in 1924 for a year, before turning his attention to expressionistic Cubism and Surrealism in 1925, with which he remained up until his late eighties. The exhibition, though at around sixty works is relatively small in relation to Picasso’s portfolio, does manage to show all of these styles to varying degrees.

The title, ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past’, concentrates on the theme of Picasso as the master copier, taking on the old masters like Rembrandt, Velazquez, Delacroix, Ingres, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec and hinting at their work or reinventing it. For example Self Portrait with Palette 1906, in which he deliberately recorded Cezanne’s painting some twenty years before.

Picasso’s style is notably different when he is translating the paintings of other artists into his own language we see distorted bodies, exaggerated fingers and both eyes on the same side as the nose. The Velasquez painting Las Meninas 1956, for example, in which Picasso created over fifty variations. The largest of all the variations is on display in the gallery, in this depiction King Philip IV of Spain is replaced by a self portrait of Picasso. The painting appears to mirror images and play with reflection, the relationship between light and shade is an important feature and the open windows illuminate Picasso’s room. Picasso had a fascination and an admiration for Velazquez and although simplicity is often hardest to achieve, there is in Picasso what could be seen as a childish abandonment, a disregard perhaps for the artist's work, in painting such a deliberately inaccurate ‘copy’. Picasso is seen as a confident and competitive fighter, un-phased by convention and ready to take on anyone, even the old masters, and massacre them. Indeed, Picasso often portrays himself as the Minotaur (1958) in his work; strong and fearless. The old masters Picasso identified with and who inspired him, also bruised his ego, he was at the same time jealous of them and saw them as competitors.

The mastery of the past was undoubtedly built on traditional training and ‘good solid work’ and the ability to paint fine paintings from an early age is for many people part of Picasso’s appeal. Picasso could draw in this way with realistic precision and also parallel this with abstract art, yet there was always an object that provided his initial inspiration, his paintings were always based on a depiction and it was the interpretation of the depiction that changed continuously. For example, over the lines and cubism of Still Life with Glass and Lemon 1910, the painting becomes more difficult to decipher, but the depiction of the fruit is the continual theme which runs through the painting connecting it together as a finished piece.

Any one of Picasso’s many periods would have provided a stylistic frame of reference on which to build a reputation as a major modern artist. This makes Picasso a mighty contender in challenging the future. There are many artists who have drawn inspiration from Picasso the master, an exhibition of some of the work of the architect Le Corbusier’s is currently on display at the Barbican, this collection includes some of his paintings inspired by Picasso’s abstract work. At the newly reopened and expanded Whitechapel Gallery, there is a life size tapestry replica of Picasso’s Guernica by polish artist Goshka Macuga.

Picasso’s art and invention is closely linked to an emotional response to the world as he saw it.

Picasso’s women are major themes in his paintings, it seems that with almost every new style, there was a new woman and in the exhibition there is a section devoted to Picasso’s women. Throughout the gallery there are indications as to how he treated them, for example, The Kiss 1969, a painting inspired by two small portraits given to Picasso by his friend Henri Rousseau. Picasso combines the two figures in a violent embrace, painting them with distorted features. Here the man, depicted as Picasso, puts an arm around his second Wife Jacqueline Roque's neck, choking her as she gasps for air. In other depictions of Picasso’s women, Olga Khokhlova in neoclassicism, is brought to life by her clearly defined facial features and austere expression. In depictions of Dora Maar and Marie-Therese Walter, colour and full, rich, voluptuous shapes define the women. It would seem that Picasso had an emotional hold over the women who loved him. After his death Jacqueline Roque, unable to live without him, committed suicide.

Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said that Picasso “fed on those around him, like a vampire sucking life out of his victims”. The great Picasso was difficult to be around particularly for those who loved him, Richardson recalls that in a conversation about the fans, stalkers, dealers, collectors and paparazzi Picasso said, 'These people cut me up like a chicken on the dinner table. I nourish them, but who nourishes me?' Women and violence are dominant features in Picasso’s work and life and unblocking positive and negative emotion is how he functioned and was nourished.

Picasso’s painting Guernica 1937, which he painted in outrage over the bombing of civilians in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is one of Picasso’s most famous anti-war paintings. This masterpiece of expressionistic Cubism is above all a subjective response of emotional uproar to the Franco-Nazi brutality, not a political response to these events.

The Marxist Picasso critic John Berger in his book entitled ‘The Success and Failure of Picasso’ believed that Picasso was not open hearted. Berger believed that although Picasso painted political scenes such as Guernica, The Charnel House in 1945, a response to Hitler’s death camps, and Massacre in Korea in 1951, and joined the Communist Party in 1945, there is only a very personal “autobiographical” expression of terror. The anger comes from Picasso’s imagination of what the pain must have been like for those who experienced it.

Picasso was not interested in being a political advocate, since there is no reference to war in any of his work from 1914-1918 when Picasso was doing set and costume design for Ballet Russes. Similarly his work during the Second World War does not reflect anything to do with the war. In his book Berger says, “To find these subjects Picasso scarcely had to leave his own body. It is through the experience of his own body that he painted pictures of women and it is through his own physical imagination that he painted the war pictures (also mostly women). The choice of his subject was limited to what was happening to him at a very ‘basic level’.

Berger criticised Picasso for only using his genius subjectively, which ultimately ended with Picasso’s work in a state of personal despair; the fears and worries and anxieties of an old man desperately trying to relive his youth. In spite of the violence, lust and despair which finally led to the darker period of paintings towards the end of his life, Picasso was Picasso, a man flawed and broken and yet able to convey that brokenness, which was himself in his paintings. Picasso creating beautiful and challenging works, he had a God given talent intermingled with glistening brokenness.

Picasso is quoted as having said, “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things”. Not surprising perhaps that in Picasso’s philosophy of life he shares the same profession as God; “I am God” Picasso once told himself. Although Picasso was confirmed a catholic as a boy and he occasionally portrayed religious themes in his work (First Communion 1895-1896 of his sister Lola, Science and Charity 1897 and Crucifixion 1930) these depictions are remarkably devoid of human conviction. Picasso’s response to suffering was beauty, only beauty. For Picasso the hope is in the beauty of now and the rest is darkness. Whereas with many religious depictions of suffering, particularly in Romanesque art, the darkness is always controlled by the light of redemption, for Picasso it all ended after the emotional response.

It would be too easy to box Picasso in and say that Picasso who we know was a difficult man, who treated women badly, who felt misunderstood and whose ego and confidence were apparent, suffered with the inevitable ‘genius to madness’ syndrome. Or, to take the view that Picasso by abandoning God, sealed his own despair. Such genius and beauty must surely have been given to him by God, who does not abandon anyone he has created. Rather, there is glory to be found in our brokenness. God in his infinite wisdom gives the broken power of great measure to fulfil a wider purpose, perhaps to challenge and inspire those in the future.

Picasso says:

‘Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.’

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This exhibition is on at the National Gallery in the Sainsbury Wing until the 7^th June 2009. There is also a free exhibition of Picasso prints in Room 1 on the first floor of the main building.