The Success and Failure of Picasso

When Picasso came to London in 1918 he stayed at the Savoy Hotel. He no longer saw couples at a café table beyond hope or redemption. And the place of acrobats or horse-thieves was taken by waiters and valets. It would be trivial to mention this, were it not typical of Picasso’s new life. Having ‘shocked’ the distinguished and the wealthy, he joined them.

His former friends, and especially Braque and Juan Gris, considered his new life a betrayal of what they had once striven for. Yet the problem was not simple. Braque and Gris, in order to continue as before, had to retreat within themselves. Picasso chose instead to go the way of the world. The private details involved need not concern us. What we need to know is how his spirit, his attitudes, were changed.

The change was dramatic, as you can see immediately in this portrait of his future wife in an arm-chair:

47 Picasso. Olga Picasso in an Armchair. 1917

According to Apollinaire’s distinction, Picasso has re-become an artist of the first type. He has re-acquired his prodigious skill, his uniqueness, and his ease. This particular portrait is so stuffy — an haute bourgeoise complete with fan in a glass case on the china cabinet — that distaste may blind us somewhat to the skill. The skill is more obvious in the drawing of Bathers.

48 Picasso. Bathers. 1921

The legend of Picasso as a magician now begins. It is said that he can do anything with a shape or a line. This legend is to culminate much later in the famous sequence of Picasso drawing with light from an electric torch in the film made by Clouzot and aptly called Le Mystère Picasso.

He did not of course revert to what he had been in 1906. He never forgot the experience of Cubism. The woman lying on her back in the Bathers is drawn in a way that would have been impossible before 1910. And soon Picasso was to re-apply the lessons of Cubism in a far more violent and original way. But, except on the very rare occasions when he has been deeply moved, the struggle and what Apollinaire called ‘the stammering’ has gone. The prodigy has been re-born.

Picasso was now not only successful, he was also exotic. The circle in which he moved could not have accepted him on any other terms except those of exoticism. Beneath his perfectly-made dinner-jacket he wore a bullfighter’s cummerbund. For a ball given by Comte Étienne de Beaumont he dressed as a matador. He designed three more ballets for Diaghilev. Compared with Parade they were conventional and romantic. One was set in Naples and the other two in ‘picturesque’ Spain.

The experience of being fěted and employed as an exotic magician, combined with the sense of isolation which has always accompanied Picasso’s awareness of himself as a prodigy, re-awoke the vertical invader. Perhaps the sense of loss he must have felt about his Cubist friends contributed to the awakening. Aware of being exiled from the one period in which he had been accepted by others as an equal, in which he felt at home, he now became more sharply conscious of his other exile from Spain.

49 Picasso as a matador. 1924

A frontal attack like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was out of the question; Picasso was still enjoying his success. All that the vertical invader claimed was recognition of his origins. He had conquered but he needed to fly his own standard.

It was at this time that Picasso first began to caricature European art, the art of the museums. At first, and very gently, he caricatured Ingres.

50 Ingres. Drawing. 1828

51 Picasso. Madame Wildenstein. 1918

Later and more obviously he caricatured the classic ideal, as found in Greek sculpture and in Poussin.

52 Picasso. Women at the Fountain. 1921

53 Poussin. Eliezer and Rebecca (detail). 1648

The word caricature may give the wrong impression. Perhaps these works of Picasso are more like a performance by an impersonator of genius. The performance is too skilful to be considered a mere joke. Yet there is certainly an element of mockery.

For the vertical invader these impersonations or caricatures serve two purposes. First they prove that he can do what the masters have done: that he — who has no terms of his own — can challenge them all on their own terms. Secondly they suggest that, if this is possible, the value and honour officially given to cultural traditions may be exaggerated. If a commoner can perform as a king, where is the justification for royalty? They are not made out of disrespect for the artists concerned, but out of contempt for the idea of a cultural hierarchy.