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Pablo Picasso, 'Women of Algiers (After Delacroix)', 1955
The question we need to ask about the new touring Picasso show ('Picasso: Challenging the Past'), where Picasso is shown in an old master context (when it was in Paris the audience saw real old masters next to the Picassos; at the National Gallery in London the Picassos are downstairs and the old masters are upstairs) - the question we have to ask is, if it is true that modern art such as Picasso's is not a sort of punky despairing hollow sad laughter at classicism (as many people used to think), but an attempt to revive and perpetuate great artistic standards and ideals in the face of a sort of guardians-of-culture sector of society's forgetting of the ideals, and its interest instead in any old visual bullshit and kitsch, then how does that work?
I didn't see the Paris version of this show but I heard from a Picasso-fan friend who actually deals in Picasso's stuff that it was bad for Picasso; the comparisons didn't work in the sense that he came out looking sloppy. I didn't worry too much about this. (I think the show is a misguided exercise anyway, but I'm always glad to see those textures and patterns, all that energy of invention). But in a way, I thought, this is the appreciation-idea of Picasso for a broad middle class slightly-educated-in-art audience, not the negative idea: they secretly think his success is precisely in making lazy, hasty egotism and lack of seriousness culturally groovy, while they pay lip service to the idea that what he does is important as art.
Picasso is much more the figure for this kind of thought that Matisse, because Matisse designed his public profile to be a certain way, while Picasso designed his to be different; the first was hedonist but pure and the second was a crazy life-force genius. The second won but obviously there's nothing real about it, and the real interest, Picasso's creation of interesting and beautiful and amazingly stylish paintings, which have to be seen in a context of history because that's how anything artistic always has to be seen, is now being tested in a rather weird and lurid way by this new show.
Weird because it's a misunderstanding to think of continuation as replication; shallow, misguided attempts at replication of the past's greatness were what modern art, whether the beginning point is thought to be Courbet or David, or Cezanne or Goya, was attacking, that's why it invented itself, to stop art being academic. The new Picasso show is based on an academic idea of art, academic in the ordinary usage of the word -- kind of dead.
Modern-art painting of the Picasso and Matisse period is an X Ray version of old master painting. The old masters are profoundly abstract but modern art is explicitly abstract. The difficulty with simply accepting this, for a popular audience, is that such an audience isn't used to thinking of paintings from any historical period as being built, or slowly constructed -- made bit by bit by trial and error. Instead they simply bypass that process and see a Caravaggio, say, as a scene like a scene in a film: people in a dark space, their limbs looming out, highlights in their eyes, a bowl of fruit on the table, the depicted people's minds filled with thoughts and their invisible but inferred souls bursting with feeling. It's true this is happening on a certain plane, the poetic meaning of the painting really is there, but it's an imaginative leap that is only possible -- the scene only becomes so vivid and marvellous and capable of imaginative projection of such a rich and high order -- because of underlying abstract values, which Caravaggio and the workshop assistants have been toiling at for the year or so that the painting probably took to make. These values come from centuries of visual traditions.
'Reclining Nude', 1969
'Seated Woman', 1920
The narrative of the Caravaggio is supplied for us by art history and vague knowledge of Christianity and the vestiges of old morality, and so on, but the image, with all its sense of photographic reality, of the fleeting, the momentary, the miraculously captured, rides on powerful compositional structures, and these are what make the other things come alive instead of seeming a bit remote and distanced, and occurring on another planet. The poetry works because of something visual that it rides on.
Poetry in T.S.Eliot can be thought of as craft, as rhythm and structure and so on, but that would be odd, or at least it would be a reduced way of approaching meaning, which one might do in order to get at a certain truth about The Wasteland, say, but not the whole truth. We're used to thinking of the musical side of poetry being separable from the meaning but it would be an exercise to separate them, not an essential value of poetry that it comes in separate parts -- in fact, the opposite, we expect all the parts to be fused, otherwise we'd be getting an object from Ikea instead of The Wasteland. To some extent we do have to put the parts of The Wasteland together but probably to a much lesser extent than the tease of its fragmented form suggests: we gradually realise that it is simply what it is, and not a collection of clues about a lot of other different things.
The same with a painting by Picasso but also one by Caravaggio, and it's no accident that one should lead to the other, since Picasso's whole meaning is exactly that, continuity with the past. Picasso is always a lesson about reading the past. The lesson is that some visual traditions run out and become impossible but some remain powerful and modern art isolates and emphasises them. Because of modern art's rehabilitating of them the whole idea of Caravaggio gets refreshed. And now we couldn't see him as it were pre-Picasso even if we wanted. (Unless we're not really that interested in the first place.)
It's not an ear or a highlight or the side of a table that we see in a picture by Caravaggio of Jesus radiating wisdom etc to some humble peasant people (any more than in a painting of a joke neoclassical woman by Picasso from the 1920s). But a rendering of an aspect of such things to just the right precise level of readability that will allow the composition to resolve itself so that the picture is emotionally moving -- the ear doesn't make the Caravaggio moving or the Bible or the darkness or the fact that we're all going to die, but the invisible stuff that Caravaggio is working with every time he picks up his brush or sits in a chair in the evening frowning at that day's work and wondering how to correct it -- the invisible stuff to which we give the antiseptic-sounding name "abstract values."
The word for what a painting essentially is, as opposed to what is depicted, is "pictorial," and it's the pictorial realm that Picasso is the king of, not the sex realm or free-thinking law breaker realm. He is much more obedient and serious than people often assume. He sets up laws and obeys them, and seriously sees ideas through to their conclusion: the idea of a reduced set of shapes, the idea of modelling, the idea of spiky marks, exaggerated ideas of light and darkness, ideas of texture, of coloured lines that look like children's drawing. It's not a contradiction to say he sees things through to the logical conclusion but he's always breaking the logic, as breaking the logic is part of the visual law he works to.
The poetry of metamorphic transformations that happens in Picasso, bodies and spaces flipping, contours describing different things at the same time, becomes dignified by his sense of organisation, but on the other hand those metamorphoses are produced by that same spatial sense. It's more in the area of Francis Bacon (who has his own virtues) that we expect to see distorted humans that actually seem like monsters. Picasso's people seem like people but invented, as it were, spatially. He's more like Valezquez that Bacon, who's supposed to be like Velazquez, is. Bacon is great but his greatness is much more camp and punky than Picasso's. Bacon is a great hilarious decorator who tarts up and Picasso is an authenticist naturalist essentialist who strips down.
'Luncheon on the Grass (after Manet)', 1960
On the other hand a Picasso based on a Velazquez doesn't look anything like a Velazquez, but a cartoonish scheme, as Picasso intended, and in fact the least interesting aspect of the National Gallery show is any idea of literal connections to the past (or literalism at all about anything). It's the principles of old master painting -- or what Picasso most likely thought of as essentials -- that are the point. Conjuring up space. His transcriptions of Manet's 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe' are about repeating and inverting semi circles, circles and triangles as much as they're about Manet. (When he was young and first saw the 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe' he wrote on the back of an envelope: "Trouble for later!")
I doubt if it would ever occur to someone who didn't know the theme of the show but just stumbled into the gallery by accident that it was even anything to do with Picasso's often stated fascination and reverence for the old masters (a very nicely written, genial catalogue introduction by Picasso scholar Elizabeth Cowling lays out a lot of his conversational statements about the past and his sense of looking over his shoulder at old art as he worked in his studio.) The paintings just look like Picassos: they have that distinctive sense of furiously energetic metamorphosing of forms, scenes that are both emphatic but ambiguous, which he stands for, constantly breaking the logic, folding space, bringing out startling metaphors for light and shadow, people and objects.
Importance and seriousness from the past, like appearances in the present, are celebrated by modern art at one remove: roughness, ugliness, speed, impulsiveness must have their place. The old slow build-up of glazing and fancy blurring and sharpening and contemplation and preparatory sketches and studies, and hiring models and looking in the mirror, and taking a year to finish a painting, and so on, leads to a certain look that can never be repeated, because these means are connected to a bigger social cultural scene or world that is over now, so they can't have any urgency any more, in the sense that they simply aren't plugged in to any social or cultural electricity. And likewise historically the roughness of modern art becomes a mannerism eventually but when it's working there really is nothing like it.
Matthew Collings
Picasso: Challenging the Past
Until 7 June
National Gallery
London |
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Matthew Collings is an artist and writer who lives in London. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw School in the 1970s and at Goldsmith's in the early 1990s. He has written several books including 'Blimey!' and 'This Is Modern Art'. He has written and presented many TV programmes, including the series, 'This Is Modern Art,' which received several awards including a BAFTA. His most recent series, 'This Is Civilisation,' was on Channel 4 in November 2007. A book to accompany the series has been published by 21. Collaborative paintings by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs can be seen at the Fine Art Society, London.
To watch Matthew Collings discussing Picasso on his Channel 4 TV series, 'This Is Modern Art', click here. |
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| Published on 27-03-2009 |
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Invention and re-thinking away from the norm, a master of imagination and illusion, excellent review.(K)
Pablo Picasso - the vision of future art - brave in stepping away from the demands of society.
ElizabethBelhadj | |
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