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Picasso: Challenging The Past

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National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN

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Description: Sixty paintings from the gallery's permanent collection examining the influences that shaped Picasso's practice.

Phone: 0207747 2885
Website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk
Email: information@ng-london.org.uk

Trains: Tube: Leicester Square; Rail: Charing Cross , Tube / Bus: 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 23, 24, 29, 53, 77A, 88

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Poor Picasso

 

Suck it and see: Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone of 1938. And which great master did he challenge here — an Australian aborigine?

Destructive mockery: Infanta Margarita, 1957, based on Velázquez’s Las Meninas — one of 44 unsympathetic caricatures of a 17th-century masterpiece

Sublime: Portrait of Olga, 1923, is one of the greatest portraits of the 20th century

Old for his years: at the age of 16 Picasso painted himself with wig and cravat, deliberately left unfinished in imitation of the private portraiture of the 18th century

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Picasso was a painter. At 14, he was a precocious brat to scare the wits out of the Zarzuela world of fin-de-siècle Barcelona. At 19, he was in Paris, gulping down Gauguin and Van Gogh. At 20 — yes, at 20 — his Blue Period began, the tender ethereal palette complementing his compassion for the pathos of love and death, all the developments from Impressionism firmly rejected in favour of plastic form and emotional subject matter. At 25, already and always the brilliant thief of ideas, he grasped the twin inspirations of crude Iberian sculpture and African masks and totems, and painted the great Demoiselles d’Avignon, the outrage that even his friends Matisse and Braque found difficult to stomach. With this one picture, unevenly finished and quite certainly unresolved, he outstripped the slow history of art and stormed into the unknown of the 20th century; Congo barbarism became Cubism, the conventions of perspective were abandoned and, as the mannerisms of the movement developed through their several phases, forms were shattered into crystal facets and set into a plane, and the presence of the subject faded in these new fields of low-toned paint.

Picasso invested too much in Cubism. When, after the brief decade of its life, 1908-1918, it proved to be a cul-de-sac, he could only escape its barren end by reverting to motifs of his Pink and Blue Periods and by turning to the classicism of antique Rome. It was for him the end of logical or progressive development and his career became a thing of fits and starts. Guernica of 1937, in which the horrors of war were reflected in the deliberate distortion and corruption of subjects and dismantled forms, was the only other forward leap to match the importance of the Demoiselles but even this new vocabulary lost its energy and, debased in repetition and subject, became an instrument of intellectual frivolity. He lived too long, and at the end, still covering as many as two canvases a day, was condemned to painting as a therapy, his mind empty of original ideas.

In this he was no match for Titian, whose trembling octogenarian hand could still fumble into being great masterpieces informed with tenebrous melancholy — witness the Diana and Actaeon bought two months ago by the National Gallery, a painting that some see as a lurking ghost in the composition of the Demoiselles. In 1907 that may have been an honest borrowing; half a century later Picasso would have dismantled it in puerile caricature — the fate of masterpieces by Poussin, Velázquez, Delacroix and Manet.

We must never forget, however, that Picasso, throughout his life, drew heavily on his own work, borrowing directly from his own repertoire of images, often leaving them virtually unaltered or, in rejigging them, changing their style, form and meaning. The older he grew, the greater was his accumulated wealth of visual assets and ideas to use, as he put it in 1945, as “an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy”. In so challenging the past — the title of the National Gallery’s new exhibition of his work — is it possible to see the best of him? I think not. The best lies in the Demoiselles and Guernica, in both of which Picasso painted with aggression: the first a salvo fired against other painters, other styles, other mannerisms and perhaps even against himself as the painter of discreet beauty in the later Saltimbanques painted the year before; and the second not a protest against any of these things but against the fascist politics of Hitler, Mussolini and France and their determination to undo the legitimate Left-wing republican democracy of Spain. Neither of these paintings is in the exhibition and without them — without, too, the paintings by Velázquez and others on which Picasso’s variations are based — it seems an almost too demure and genteel exploration of the subject and far too defensive of Picasso’s reputation.

That it rehearses the familiar — detailed study of Picasso’s sources and references was underway in earnest more than half a century ago — is not to be deplored, for he is far too important and influential an artist not to have frequent retrospective exhibitions in this country. He spanned the greater part of the last century, enquiring, responding, inventing, experimenting, generating, challenging, and even now lies behind much immediately contemporary art, touching it at a remove when it poses the question that he asked: “What is painting? We cling to old-fashioned ideas and outworn definitions as if it were not precisely the role of the artist to provide new ones …” Alas, in seeking new definitions, Picasso’s crude pathology destroyed old paintings, sullied and subverted them. Can anyone really support the view that his 44 variations on the theme of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (maids in waiting), painted in the autumn of 1957, should be studied and enjoyed for their insight and humanity — a demand made by Roland Penrose, Picasso’s adoring apologist, when he brought them to London in 1960? Do we understand the Velázquez better for Picasso’s destructive mockery? Perhaps, in a way, we do, for Picasso has all too evidently misunderstood Velázquez’s use of a vertical setting for his figures, misunderstood the fundamental abstract nature of the composition and its clarity, misunderstood the subtle recessions so delicately implied in the shifts from light to shadow. Instead, eschewing colour and tone for the bleak monochrome range from white to black, Picasso condensed the lofty space of the original into a horizontal rectangle, cluttered it with detail from top to bottom on the left and emptied it of detail on the right (providing a blank but urgent repoussoir that destroys the slow pace of the original), exchanged Velázquez’s evident sympathy with court dwarfs for a gross caricature and swapped the great dozing mastiff for a cardboard sausage dog. This is insight? This is enchantment? This is virtuosity? So it may be for Penrose and the rest of what Augustus John damned as “the greatest snob following of our time”, but to the sane man it is arrant nonsense; these variations are worse than anything painted by John Bratby in his 1957 heyday.

When the old Tate gave us Late Picasso in 1988, I wrote that “I would like to hang these late pictures interspersed with the earlier works from which they are derived; the greatness of the earlier paintings would then be apparent even to the most sceptical, and the decadence of the later would be clear even to the most uncritically enthusiastic”. This is partly what I hoped this new exhibition might be; the other part, the presence of Velázquez’s greatest painting, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women and Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, seemed too much to hope for. It is what the catalogue suggests but not one old master is to be seen in the flesh, nor even the earlier paintings of Picasso himself from which in subject, drawing, style and painterliness (or otherwise) the later are derivatives. Without them, the exhibition depends on the visitor’s experience and memory, on his grasp of style and nationality and period, if he is to make anything of what he sees — in other words, it is an exhibition addressed by art historians to other art historians — for otherwise he must spend half his time shuffling the pages of a catalogue that is not in the same order as the paintings.

These, grouped thematically as Variations, Models, Muses, Characters and so on, tend to teach the same lesson in every case; I am inclined to think the visitor better served by only one such lesson in a plain chronological hang in which Picasso’s development, stylistic changes and self-references gain coherence and seem less violently inconsistent in quality and purpose. To see, for example, his boldly painted Self Portrait of 1897 as a dix-huitième gentleman far older than his 16 years, in company with his portrait of Gustave Coquiot and his Absinthe Drinker, both of 1901, would demonstrate how much further he had come in colour and the dramatically bold handling of impastose paint, as well as how various he already was. To see his Man with a Straw Hat of 1938 within spitting distance of his portrait of Jaime Sabartès as a Nobleman of 1939 is to emphasise that within a year he could paint with the facture of an Australian aborigine and the slimy surface of Dalí already in decline.

There are just enough thrilling Picassos in this exhibition to make crossing the road to it worthwhile — Fernande with a Mantilla is the Pink and Blue idiom revised for tragic portraiture in black; Combing the Hair looks back to Degas and forward to Rego; the Large Bather forms a bridge between antiquity and fascist Italy; and the sublime Portrait of Olga is one of the greatest portraits of the 20th century. Much of the rest is expensive rubbish — “incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death”, as Picasso’s friend and critic, Douglas Cooper, wisely put it — and the worst picture of all is the Cubist Seated Nude, bought by the Tate in 1949 that, discursive and irrational, has for 60 years been an embarrassment to the cause of Cubism as an intellectual pursuit. Were we to ask of this confused and ragged image the simple question “Did Cubism work?” the answer must be that it did not. Visitors will not be much helped by the labels, most of which are what an American authority on Picasso has dubbed “widely projective over-interpretation” — that is art jargon for silly nonsense. Having seen the exhibition, they are expected to go upstairs to the National Gallery’s permanent collection and hunt for pictures there that may have had some relevance for Picasso; offhand I can think of none (the newly acquired Titian is now in Edinburgh), but Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus could just about be brought into the argument, and in Room One, Rembrandt’s large etching, Ecce Homo, hangs with Picasso’s variant. Rembrandt’s print — enough in itself with its seven, eight or nine states (revisions) to make an exhibition — is a thing of such beauty and astonishing invention (consider the architecture and the sculptured figures as well as the event) that I advise visitors to see it first. I saw it last and it eclipsed all that I had seen before.

Picasso: Challenging the Past is at the National Gallery (020 7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk) until
7 June. Daily 10am-5.15pm (Friday until 8.15pm; Saturday until 7.15pm). Admission £12, concs available.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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