John Berger - The Success and Failure of Picasso

The last paintings of Rembrandt — particularly the self-portraits — are proverbial for their questioning of everything the artist had done or painted before. Everything is seen in another light. Titian, who lived to be almost as old as Picasso, painted towards the end of his life the Flaying of Marsyas and the Pietà in Venice: two extraordinary last paintings in which the paint as flesh turns cold. For both Rembrandt and Titian the contrast between late and earlier works is very marked. Yet there also is a continuity, the basis of which is difficult to define briefly. A continuity of pictorial language, of cultural reference, of religion, and of the role of art in social life. This continuity qualified and reconciled — to some degree — the despair of the old painters; the desolation they felt became a sad wisdom or an entreaty.

With Picasso this did not happen, perhaps because, for many reasons, there was no such continuity. In art, he himself had done much to destroy it. Not because he was an iconoclast, nor because he was impatient with the past, but because he hated the inherited half-truths of the cultured classes. He broke in the name of truth. But what he broke did not have the time before his death to be reintegrated into tradition. His copying, during the last period, of old masters like Velázquez, Poussin, or Delacroix was an attempt to find company, to re-establish a broken continuity. And they allowed him to join them. But they could not join him.

And so, he was alone — like the old always are. But he was unmitigatedly alone because he was cut off from the contemporary world as a historical person, and from a continuing pictorial tradition as a painter. Nothing spoke back to him, nothing constrained him, and so his obsession became a frenzy: the opposite of wisdom.

An old man’s frenzy about the beauty of what he can no longer do. A farce. A fury. And how does the frenzy express itself? (If he had not been able to draw or paint every day he would have gone mad or died — he needed the painter’s gesture to prove to himself he was still a living man.) The frenzy expresses itself by going directly back to the mysterious link between pigment and flesh and the signs they share.

It is the frenzy of paint as a boundless erogenous zone. Yet the shared signs, instead of indicating mutual desire, now display the sexual mechanism. Crudely. With anger. With blasphemy. This is painting swearing at its own power and at its own mother. Painting insulting what it had once celebrated as sacred. Nobody before imagined how painting could be obscene about its own origin, as distinct from illustrating obscenities. Picasso discovered how it could be.

How to judge these late works? It is too soon. Those who pretend that they are the summit of Picasso’s art are as absurd as the hagiographers around him have always been. Those who dismiss them as the repetitive rantings of an old man understand little about either love or the human plight.

Spaniards are proverbially proud of the way they can swear. They admire the ingenuity of their oaths, and they know that swearing can be an attribute, even a proof, of dignity.

Nobody ever swore in paint before.

124 Picasso. Nu couché. 1972

Abstract art, freedom and

Apollinaire, Guillaume:

and Cubism, 1.1, 1.2

death of, 1.1, 1.2

and electricity

and the new poetry, 1.1, 1.2

and Parade , 1.1, 1.2

and Picasso’s genius

Aragon, Louis

Arcadia:

Bellini’s

Léger’s

Picasso’s

Titian’s

Art:

boom in

intrusion of politics in

as an oracle

Bakunin, Mikhail

Barcelona, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

Bellini, Giovanni

Besson, Georges, 1.1, 1.2

Bohr, Niels

Bourgeoisie:

attitude of to art, 1.1, 1.2

attitude of to poverty

and the modern artist, 1.1, 2.1

success, in eyes of

unreality of

utilitarianism of

worthlessness of honours offered by

Brancusi, Constantin

Braque, Georges, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4

Brenan, Gerald

Césaire, Aimé, 2.1, 2.2

Cézanne, Paul, 1.1, 1.2

Chaplin, Charles

Clouzot, Henri-Georges, his film on Picasso

Cocteau, Jean, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

Communism, 1.1, 2.1

Communist Party of France, 2.1, 2.2

Courbet, Gustave

Cubism:

as art of interaction

and film

importance of

materials used

and modern physics

and monopoly capitalism

preparations for

revolutionary nature of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

sexuality of

simultaneity of viewpoints

starting-point of

subject-matter

Darwin, Charles

Delacroix, Eugéne

de la Serna, Ramon Gomez

Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les

di Cosimo, Piero

Duende, see Spain

Europe, modern:

outcasts from

Picasso’s attitude to, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1

poverty of

unreality of, 2.1, 2.2

Expressionism

Fascism

Fra Angelico

France:

attitude to art

German occupation of, and

Nude with a Musician , 2.1, 2.2

Frazer, Sir James

Futurists

Gauguin, Paul

Giorgione

Gris, Juan, 1.1, 1.2

Guernica , 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2

Heisenberg, Werner

History, effects of on character

Impressionism, 1.1, 1.2

Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 1.1, 2.1

Jacob, Max, 1.1, 1.2

Jahn, Janheinz

Kafka, Franz, 1.1, 1.2

Keats, John

Léger, Fernand

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1.1, 1.2

Lerroux, Alezandro, 1.1, 1.2

Lorca, Federico García

Magic:

illusions of

and the Spanish duende

Malaga, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

Manet, Edouard

Manolo

Marx, Karl, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

Millais, Sir John

Millet, Jean François

Monopoly capitalism, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1

Olivier, Fernande

Ortega y Gasset, José

Parade

Paris, 1.1, 1.2

Parmelin, Hélène

Pastiche

Penrose, Roland, 1.1, 2.1

Picasso, Pablo:

and anarchism, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

attitude to own genius, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

birth of

as a bourgeois revolutionary

a child prodigy, 1.1, 1.2

becomes a communist

confessions of, in autobiographical drawings

conflict with father, 1.1, 2.1

crisis of his subject-matter, 2.1, 2.2

devotion to his own creativity, 1.1, 1.2

discontinuity of his work

end of his isolation

example of

his exile, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4

fear of blindness, 1.1, 1.2

historical ambiguity of

humanism of

as an impersonator

influence of African masks on

influence of archaic Spanish sculpture on

intensity of his art, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1

his irrationalism, 1.1, 1.2

the legend

loneliness of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1

as a magician, 1.1, 1.2

market prices

as the Minotaur

as a national monument

nature of his genius, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 2.2

as Pan

and the portrayal of pain, 2.1, 2.2

on research in painting

and sensation in art

sexuality of his art

unchanged vision of

work since 1945

and world communist movement

Pottery

Poussin, Nicholas:

Triumph of Pan

Prodigies in art

Quantum mechanics

Raynal, Maurice

Rembrandt, 2.1, 3.1

Revolutionary thought:

bourgeois, 1.1, 2.1

proletarian, 1.1, 2.1

Richardson, John

Romanticism:

attitude of to work

Rousseau, father of

vision of the future