9 February, 2003
BOOKS: PoMo Pablo
Picasso: Style and Meaning by Elizabeth Cowling
But where, in the immediate ancestry of modern art, shall we find the forebears of Picasso, Paul Klee, Max Ernst [...]? There seems to be a definited break in the historical developments of the artistic faculty.
— Herbert Read, 1948
I also often hear the word evolution. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all [...] When I hear people speak of the evolution of the artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they are all the same images in different planes. Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.
— Pablo Picasso, 1923
There is nothing particularly new in the observation that Pablo Picasso, the pre-eminent genius of modern art — and that is obviously what he was, whatever one thinks about modern art — spent much of his life engaged in conversation with the art of the past. Failure to notice this, especially in his later work, is tantamount to blindness, or at least (and perhaps more likely) complete ignorance of the canon of Western art coupled with innocence regarding the abundant literature on Picasso. But it has also long been clear that much of the earlier work is underpinned by a series of complicated, competitive yet often playful relationships with long-dead artists as well as with Picasso’s own contemporaries. Velasquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne — not to mention the anonymous artists of classical Greece and Rome, sub-Saharan Africa, the South Seas and medieval Catalunya — they were all there, to be plundered and echoed and teased and embraced, and finally internalised as part of Picasso’s own visual language.
Likewise, it is conventional to describe Picasso’s career not in terms of the development of a signature style — not, then, as one would talk about El Greco or Rembrandt or Ingres — but rather (and rather oddly when one comes to think of it) in terms of a succession of different styles — the Blue Period, the Rose Period, Cubism, etc., etc., realising of course as one does so that even this description is woefully flawed, since Picasso was more than capable of working in apparently divergent styles in the course of a single month or even day. Sometimes, indeed, he even seemed to change style within an individual work itself. Conventional wisdom tends to deny that painters ought to operate this way, using style expressively rather than instrumentally — using shifts in style to express meaning, rather than choosing a wider range of subject-matter — and indeed, this tendency of Picasso's has long been a target for criticism. The comments of one critic must stand for many. For Robert Delaunay, Picasso’s eclecticism was pure ‘pillage’, based on ‘superficiality’, ‘snobbery’ and ‘lack of seriousness’. So what did critics and fellow artists alike find so wounding about Picasso’s stylistic virtuosity? I suppose that part of the problem is the general feeling that style should provide intimate insights about the artist ‘as a person’ or about his time, as well as about what he is trying to paint; Picasso, however, insisted on keeping control of the game, resisting co-option into any stylistic school, demanding instead the right to direct our apprehensions and expectations according to his whim. At the same time, he was just that little bit too honest about the fact that art is art — artifice — and not ‘real’ at all. Picasso knew that this was the case, but some of his critics might have preferred a bit more tact, a bit less honesty and a bit more scope to believe that art offers a conduit towards spiritual truths, rather than a form of decoration, entertainment or communication.
But of course there is another problem with these two truisms about Picasso, that great iconic figure of modernism: the problem that neither of these truisms fits very well within the stock conventions of modernism itself. (By ‘conventions of modernism’ I mean the traditional rhetoric of modernism’s practitioners and enthusiasts, rather than what appears to me, at any rate, valedictory or retrospective consideration by writers such as T. J. Clark or Timothy Hilton.) In the first place, modernism was meant to signal a break with tradition, the creation of a new language for new times, a very conscious repudiation of what had gone before. Even that name, ‘modernism’, defined its adherents in terms of their distinctiveness from a time before modernism. Whether consciousness of artistic predecessors evoked bemused nostalgia, scientific curiosity or sub-Freudian fury was a matter of choice, but the sheer pastness of the past was not. So if Picasso showed no consciousness of such distinctions, competing with Velasquez and Hals just as seriously yet playfully as he did with Matisse or Derain, that spells out one sort of problem for the modernist narrative.
Meanwhile, the veering-about between styles presents an even worse quandary. For if art as an enterprise has to progress — if it is going somewhere, if it is a sort of programme of collective ‘research’ that can only move forwards towards greater knowledge and greater achievement — well, then there is something terribly wrong, for instance, with this business of regressing into an unabashedly figurative classicism after the achievements of Cubism, and something downright pathological about those last decades, in which Picasso (who had little time for abstraction and even less for conceptual art) withdrew from the contemporary art world into a happy cocoon of acquiescent women and bullfights and hangers-on, busily producing a huge corpus of work that was engaged with the seventeenth century but not at all with the twentieth, and about which the critical jury is still out, nearly thirty years after the fact. This, then, was the ‘tragedy’ of Picasso’s last years, at least if you believe the critics. Douglas Cooper referred to the later work as ‘incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death’ — and he was, allegedly, Picasso’s friend! — while John Berger typically blamed Picasso’s 'decline' after the First World War on the corrosive company of wealthy bourgeois patrons. And indeed, one could quote pages more in this vein, but the point is clear enough: there is such a pervasive note of anguish, betrayal and anger in such responses that one cannot help feeling that somehow, somewhere, some important rule was being transgressed — and because it was one of modernism’s rules, transgressing it was all but unforgivable, unacceptable except through a form of symbolic castration that insisted the painter was no longer who he had been, indeed was virtually dead already.
So it is one of the many triumphs of Elizabeth Cowling’s magnificent Picasso: Style and Meaning that, although her narrative ends in about 1940, she nonetheless points the way towards a richer understanding of Picasso’s last work, as well as transforming our understanding of the rest of the artist’s vast, unruly, much-discussed yet still-problematic oeuvre. Dr Cowling teaches in the Department of Fine Art of the University of Edinburgh; she was also one of the curators of last year’s successful Matisse Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. Anyone who saw her catalogue essay for that show will not be surprised to find that the account of Picasso presented in Picasso: Style and Meaning is informative, understated, sympathetic and supple; rarely in recent times has so much knowledge and so much looking been carried so lightly, or articulated in such clear, unpretentious, all but self-effacing prose. Having the benefit of complete hindsight over Picasso’s work (something that other fine critics and historians have, for obvious reasons of chronology, not enjoyed), she has been able to produce an book exposing the threads of consistency that link the Art Nouveau-loving, dandyish, adolescent habitué of Els Quatre Gats with the frail, frantically productive and world-famous denizen of Notre Dame de Vie.
What, then, are the threads? In part, they are simply aspects of character that remained consistent from start to finish: the self-confidence, the antic moments, the habitual irony about virtually everything, the surprising flashes of seriousness and their even more surprising targets, the competitiveness, the apolitical anarchic quality, the insatiable curiosity, the facility with theory cohabiting alongside a strangely shamanic understanding of the power of art. But first and foremost, she illuminates those two well-known aspects of Picasso’s practice to which I’ve already alluded — his fascination with the work of earlier artists, and his readiness to slip from one style to another as freely as an actor slips from one role to the next, so that his ‘development’ is always more kaleidoscopic than linear. By showing, meticulously and convincingly, that these two intertwined aspects were there from the start, her account of Picasso is, in aggregate, really quite different from what has gone before. Picasso: Style and Meaning is at once a brilliant introduction to a hugely significant artist, and a book from which virtually anyone, even people who think they know a lot about Picasso, would learn a good deal. Despite the eye-watering £75 price-tag (well, it does run to over 700 smartly-produced pages, with more than 600 illustrations, many of them in extremely accurate colour), it’s clear that everyone with any interest in modern art should do their utmost to acquire a copy of this vast, brilliant, strangely modest book.
Bored of all these superlatives? Well, Dr Cowling's work encourages a shocking number of them — not least by ERO’s standards — but in this context it is, perhaps, worth remembering just how hard it is to get the measure of Picasso.
In some ways, the worst obstacle is the sheer amount of information. Picasso lived for 92 years (he died in 1973) and was producing art for nearly 80 years — producing not only paintings, but drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, stage-sets, stray writings and miscellaneous essays in self-promotion — almost all of which are easily dateable and well-documented. His early fame and his historical proximity mean that we know infinitely more about his life — his friends and lovers, dealers and sale-contracts, inspirations and opinions, working practice and personality — than we can ever do about an artist like Manet or Van Gogh, let alone Rembrandt or El Greco or Titian, the latter of whom he may perhaps in some ways have resembled. He was monumentally, almost obsessively prolific. In the last three years of his life alone he completed something like 400 paintings, as well as drawings and prints numbering in the thousands; over the course of his career he must have completed many tens of thousands of works. He has also been written about well and frequently, not least by critics who have also been friends — one thinks here of Guillaume Apollinaire and John Richardson, to name but two who worked, as it were, at opposite ends of that long life. Finally, especially for those who knew him personally, one has the problem of Picasso himself. Sharp-witted, perceptive, manipulative, Picasso used everything from sexual magnetism to unsubtle bullying to promote his art as he wanted it to be promoted, and although it sounds too obvious to merit a mention, those superficially flippant apologia were every bit as much works of handcrafted art as anything else that emerged from Picasso’s studio, and hence to be approached with equal caution, cynicism and prophylactic critical rigour, since artists are really the last people one should trust on the subject of their own work.
Faced with all of this — the man, as well as the work — it is no surprise that so much Picasso-related writing — the best no less than the worst — could easily be re-classified as a specialised sub-genre of autobiography, which is really ultimately what most criticism boils down to anyway. John Richardson, for instance, has drawn attention the immense influence that each of Picasso’s successive (and occasionally overlapping) lovers had on Picasso’s life and work — Richardson’s sensitivities in this context perhaps sharpened by his experience of knowing Picasso during the younger man’s time as Douglas Cooper’s handsome, increasingly restive lover; having met Picasso in a context of conviviality and friendship as well as conversation about art, Richardson’s feline prose is as seductive as delicious, scandalous gossip conveyed over a very good lunch indeed; and, perhaps most importantly, as I think he tried to tell us in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — a book only slightly less underrated, incidentally, than Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters — the portly spectre of Douglas Cooper is always there at the table, providing the most exquisite counterpoint and concurrent complement both to the genius and to the occasional ghastliness of Picasso’s character, reminding us that no amount of glamour and genius really makes up for culpable moral failure.
Or to put it another way, we each end up with the Picasso we deserve, or at any rate, the only one we could possibly understand. Dr Cowling, in deftly extracting the artist’s actual practice from the thick carapace of modernist rhetoric that has grown up around him, ends up giving us a Picasso for our own times. I should probably make clear that this is by no means a criticism, either. Picasso, when he started painting that Cubist masterpiece, Ma Jolie, may well have been caught up in the first, intoxicating stages of physical desire for his pretty new lover; he may have been thinking about something else entirely; we can, however, be sure that he was not thinking of what Herbert Reid, Michael Fried, Roland Penrose or Rosalind Krauss would later write about him. He was surely right, in this sense, that a work of art exists only in the present. But in our present, Ma Jolie is also about modernism, and the types of Cubism it might have been but was not, and endless other issues that could never have crossed Picasso’s mind, and we had best be honest about that. Similarly, when it comes to the meaning of style, Dr Cowling is right to make reference to Meyer Schapiro and Ernst Gombrich, both of whom stress the strategic nature of style — but at the same time, since we can only really speculate on the strategy behind the stylistic choice, such answers as we are likely to find lie in the minutiae of everyday life, the little contingent factors and apparently random accidents, rather than in the high imperatives of zeitgeist or art-historical ‘progress’. And although, given modernism’s relationship with the world beyond the arts, there is doubtless a political point to be made here, it is typical of the tact and subtlety and measured force of this book that Dr Cowling does not feel the need to spell it out.
Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, Phaidon Press Limited, 2002.