Pablo Picasso and his wall of myths

Major exhibition to open in Ateneum

print this

By Timo Valjakka
     
      The wall of myths that surrounded Spanish-born Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is so high that it is difficult to see over it. He helped build it himself by presenting himself as the king of modern art, by surrounding himself with wives and lovers who were always changing, and with poets, art dealers, and collectors who praised his art.
      When he died, Picasso was more famous and wealthier than any artist who preceded him. Even people who have never seen his works know his name.
      He rose above money in the 1940s by paying for one of his houses in the south of France with a small painting.
     
It is this Picasso that has always interested people.
      When the New York Museum of Modern Art arranged the biggest exhibition of his work in 1980, a million people came to see it.
      I suspect that many entered the museum as if they were walking into a temple, expecting to see relics and miracles.
     
They were not disappointed. The cavalcade of more than 1,000 works of Picasso’s art stunned stunned from the very outset.
      On display were some of Picasso’s main works, such as Women of Avingon (1907) and Guernica (1937).
      On display for the first time were works that he had kept to himself while he was alive. They were the same works which later formed the collection of the Picasso Museum in Paris, and which will soon fill the exhibition rooms of the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki.
      In her book Life with Picasso, the painter’s long-time companion Françoise Gilot quotes Picasso as saying that he paints in the same way that some people write their autobiographies; he saw paintings, both ready and unfinished as the pages of his diary, and are valid as such. “The future will choose the pages it likes. It is not for me to make the choice.”
     
Producing art was a process for Picasso, in which each painting contained the seed of the next one. He painted and drew constantly, made sculptures, and graphic art.
      His manic days at work often stretched late into the night. Picasso had good and bad days, but there were some unusually many good ones in his life. He painted his first paintings in the 1890s, and his last in November 1972. The total number is estimated at about 50,000.
      Picasso was the most important artist of the 20th century. He was a draftsman worthy of Raphael, and an amazingly inventive painter. Although his works transcended the boundaries of styles and definitions, they always look like they were made by him, and nobody else.
      He did not hide his trademark.
     
Although Picasso is often seen as the embodiment of modern art, he was, ultimately, anything but a modernist.
      Author John Berger puts forward an interesting claim in his book The Success and Failure of Picasso. In his view, contrary to the other modernists of the 20th century, Picasso never developed as an artist. He was a savage in the midst of high culture.
      Picasso’s art is divided clearly into easily definable periods. With the exception of the cubist years of 1909-1919, one does not rise above any other. His masterpieces were spread evenly over the decades.
      Picasso’s works show no sign that he would have become more refined or sensitive, as was the case with Rembrandt, for instance.
      His self-ironic neo-expressionism of the 1960s was no more profound than the melancholy of his blue period. However, it is bolder.
     
One explanation might come from his childhood. Picasso was a child prodigy, whose artist father gave up painting after recognising the talent of his young son.
      Perhaps Picasso never actually reached adulthood. He remained a child all his life - quite deliberately. Otherwise he would have jeopardised the source of his creativity, which he refers to when he speaks about the “pages of his diary”, and his often-repeated sentence “I do not seek. I find”.
      Picasso paid little heed to the modernists’ ideas of the spiritual nature of art, or of the new world that they were trying to express in their abstract paintings. He wanted to distinguish himself from them by being sensuous and close to the earthy - and by painting exactly as he wanted to.
     
Picasso did not distinguish between art and sexuality. He rarely depicted love, but brought out male passion all the more.
      But he was also a humanist, who painted a number of works on the horrors of war and human suffering - not just Guernica.
      When I look at the works of Picasso, I often feel that his incomparable skill was his personal demon. At the same time that the artist’s neo-classicism of the 1920s serves as evidence of his mastery of traditional forms of expression, the periods that came after it show that he rebelled furiously against his own talent. Sometimes he appears to have deliberately walked out on thin ice, as if to break with routine.
      In Gilot’s book Picasso says that it is the movement of painting that interests him - the dramatic movement from one effort to another.
      More important than individual works was the working process - painting in itself. He hurried forward instead of stopping to put finishing touches on his works, because it was the movement that kept his source from going dry.
     
Both as a person and as an artist, Picasso had a sharp duality. He was a destroyer and a builder.
      The age of cubism had made him an acrobat of ambiguities.
      Figures and backgrounds, forms and meanings, turn and twist in his works completely according to his capricious mind.
      Art as a diary-like project is also a mixture of art and life.
      Picasso is said to have created his mystical self and his society as a way of protecting himself and his art. Although he was interested in people, he was not a very social person. When he worked, he kept the door to his studio locked. And he worked almost all the time.
      Henri Matisse was the only artist that Picasso considered his equal, and Matisse’s death in 1954 came as a great shock. The 73-year-old master felt that he had been left alone, without a challenger.
      “There are many things that I can no longer talk about with anyone”, he said.
     
Masterpieces of art became his new challenges. Soon after Matisse’s death, Picasso did 17 variations of Algerian Women in their Apartment by Eugène Delacroix, and made even wilder interpretations of the works of Diego Velázquez and Édouard Manet, whom he admired greatly.
      Berger saw the change in direction as a symptom of declining creative strength, but I feel that he is quite wrong in this. He does not notice the significance of the subject as an “excuse” for a painting.
      Picasso said that it was more important to be a painter than an expert on the subject of painting.
      The thoroughly familiar subjects freed Picasso of his demons, and allowed him to concentrate on what had always been important for him.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.9.2009
     
     
A Picasso exhibition featuring "Masterpieces from the National Picasso Museum in Paris" opens at the Ateneum Museum of Art in Helsinki (Kaivokatu 2-4) on September 18th and runs through to January 2010. Details from the link below.


Links:
  Ateneum Art Museum September 18th through January 6th

Helsingin Sanomat