Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros
Gagosian Gallery
Pablo Picasso, Portait de l'homme à l'épée et à la fleur (1969)
Every few years, Pablo Picasso’s late period is ‘rediscovered’. The script is always the same. Old conventional wisdom: Picasso’s last paintings were the incoherent doodles of an aged freak. New conventional wisdom: the master was, and will forever be, a little more masterful than other artists – better to gawk at the man than to comprehend his limits. In neither case does anything of much significance get said. The gushing about ‘Mosqueteros’ at Gagosian, the massive, museum-quality show covering Picasso’s last decade, curated by scholar and biographer John Richardson, is no exception.
Étreinte (1972)
First off, it has been stated by Richardson and numerous critics that in his last paintings Picasso attempted to cannibalize the history of western painting. ‘People thought he had lost it’, Richardson says. ‘But this was actually an amazing burst of volcanic energy. He wanted to somehow assimilate the whole Western figurative tradition and Picassify it.’ This sounds very nice, and given Picasso’s well-documented appetite for art-historical competition, it seems at first to make some sense. But then one looks at the pictures. Are we really to believe that Picasso suddenly became a moron?
In previous years, he had made systematic variations on many of the more celebrated paintings in the western tradition (most notably Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862-3, Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, 1834, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, 1656 and Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women, 1637-8 and The Triumph of Pan, 1636). In these variations, he played with multiple stylistic modalities, deployed and reacted to sophisticated compositional arrangements, narratives, and spatial situations. He also demonstrated an incredible understanding of light, as some of the Velasquez variations make clear. His last paintings, however, usually feature lone figures, almost invariably arranged frontally, without spatial or narrative development, or any complex compositions. They are also all painted at the same even speed, with none of the variations in pace, scale and touch – and never the unearthly linear exactitude – that characterize his virtuoso drawings of the same last years. Also, the carnal excess of the late drawings and prints is almost wholly absent from the paintings (Le Baiser, 1969, is a rare exception). ‘I enjoy myself to no end inventing these stories’, Picasso said. ‘I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to.’ But his painted creatures are up to absolutely nothing: they sit or stand there like idiots, oblivious to us and to each other. Why?
Personnage (1971)
Secondly, one begins to notice that the paintings are actually rather specifically constructed. Each is built from crude though pre-determined signs: rows of circles for toes and fingers; spaces filled in with meaningless spots and stripes (as in Femme, 1972, and the abbreviated gestures of Personnage, 1971); repeated spirals for ears and nostrils (Tête d’homme du 17ème siècle de face, 1967). Picasso’s sketchbooks make very clear that many of these forms – especially the waves, spirals and loops – were derived from numbers and letters (nostrils from the figure eight turned on its side, for instance).
In his last paintings, Picasso was thinking about, or rather approximating, writing. One of the reasons that these paintings seemed insufficiently present, insufficiently pictorial, to people who had become accustomed to the astounding physical (or phenomenological) aspects of Picasso’s talent, is that they are much more like pictograms or hieroglyphs than traditional (or even cubist) paintings. But Picasso always considered poetry to be the model for his painting, and was always closer to poets than to painters; he had also been a poet and playwright himself, beginning in 1935 (not coincidentally when he briefly abandoned painting). The late paintings thus represent a surprisingly exacting experiment, or rivalry, with a mode of expression that Picasso had flirted with all along.
Tête d’homme du 17ème siècle de face (1967)
Why, though, did Picasso choose to employ this frantic hieroglyphic mode only in his last paintings, while allowing himself a far greater range of expression in drawings and prints? And why this mode exclusively? There are no easy answers. The more one knows about Picasso’s relationship with writing, however, the more it becomes apparent that writing was for him generally employed in times of crisis, more specifically as a stand-in for death. Between writing (which Picasso compared to a spider – and he was terrified of spiders) and painting (which was for him the father and the sun), the artist unfolded his final, frenzied meditation. Not that he was in control – not at all. That’s a good thing. It’s his strange, repetitive desperation that matters; it’s what makes these paintings, which are only occasionally beautiful, so affecting as a whole. There is a perfectly inverse relationship between their brightness (they are the most literally dazzling paintings he ever made) and their truth, which is permanent, ineradicable blindness – an inability, on the part of Picasso and his audiences, to make sense of death and disappearance.
For all the success of the show at Gagosian, and for all the recent critical acclamations, one cannot help but feel that we have been here before: audiences have wanted to hail late Picasso (like all Picasso) since the exhibition at the Palace of Popes in Avignon in 1973, and definitely since the first significant reappraisal, organized by Gert Schiff for the Guggenheim in 1984. And yet the paintings refuse to behave like masterpieces. That is their power. One thinks of the octogenarian Picasso in his chateau at Vauvenargues and recalls Hawthorne Abendsen, the title character from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle – written in 1962, the same year as the first paintings in the Gagosian show were made. Abendsen, like Picasso, is a revered creator (a novelist) – and, like Picasso, he is revealed at the end to be utterly uncomprehending, strangely empty, and, despite his achievements, utterly alone: he admits that he wrote his great novel blindly, mechanically, at the behest of the Chinese oracle the I Ching, which dictated every word. ‘Painting is stronger than me,’ Picasso wrote in 1963, ‘it makes me do what it wants.’ Like Abendsen, and like that other crucial modernist endgame Finnegans Wake (1939), these last paintings offer no consolation, but instead register the interaction of impersonal, riddling energies, which are beyond the power of any hero –even Picasso – to control or comprehend.
David Lewis
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