The Success and Failure of Picasso

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions.

This view of himself as an artist — the artist as receptacle — incidentally confirms how Picasso fits again into Apollinaire’s first category. It also stresses the difference between his unified world of magic and the life around him in a class society. ‘Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions’ would make no sense to an antique-dealer — for him the very opposite is true. But it is a prerequisite for magic.

The primitive, magical bias of Picasso’s genius is not only evident in his statements about art: he performs quasimagical ceremonies as well. Here is an account by Roland Penrose of Picasso making pottery.

Taking a vase which had just been thrown by Aga, their chief potter, Picasso began to mould it in his fingers. He first pinched the neck so that the body of the vase was resistant to his touch like a balloon, then with a few dexterous twists and squeezes he transformed the utilitarian object into a dove, light, fragile, and breathing life. ‘You see,’ he would say, ‘to make a dove you must first wring its neck.’¹⁴

Of course this is a game. But play and magic are perfectly reconcilable. (All young children live!through a phase of believing that the world is governed by desire or will.) And what is remarkable is how we feel Penrose, who is by no means an unsophisticated man, falling under the spell of this magic. He is induced to say that the dove breathes life! He has seen the dead turned into the living.

Picasso began to play with such transmutations in the early thirties and spasmodically he has continued up to the present. He takes an object and turns it into a being. He has turned a bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars into a bull’s head. He has turned a toy car into a monkey’s face, some wooden planks into men and women, etc.

54 Picasso. Bull’s Head. 1943

In the case of the Bull’s Head, Picasso has not changed the form of the saddle and handlebars at all. He has scarcely touched them. What he has done is to see their possibility of becoming an image of a bull’s head. Having seen this, he has placed them together. The seeing of this possibility was a kind of naming. ‘Let this be a bull’s head,’ Picasso might have said to himself. And this is very close to African magic. Janheinz Jahn, in Muntu,¹⁵ his study of African culture, writes:

It is the word, Nommo, that creates the image. Before that there is Kintu, a ‘thing’, which is no image, but just the thing itself. But in the moment when the thing is invoked, appealed to, conjured up through Nommo, the word — in that moment Nommo, the procreative force, transforms the thing into an image … the poet speaks and transforms thing-forces into forces of meaning, symbols, images.

Picasso is an intricately complex character. There is a part of him, cunning as any Rasputin, which exploits ‘magic’ in response to his success as a ‘magician’. There is another part of him which uses it to procure himself licence as a public figure and to defend his independence. Yet another part is governed by sympathies and needs which are unusually close to the point where art really did emerge from magic.

We traced the influence of the vertical invader in Picasso’s choice and treatment of subjects in the period before Cubism, before he became open to the influence of friends. We can see the same influence in his later work, when he was once again isolated.

In the late twenties Picasso became disillusioned with the beau monde. He retreated into himself. During the thirties his work was mostly introspective. (Guernica, as we shall see later, is a highly introspective work and only the political uses to which it was rightly put have confused people about this.) The imagery of this period is Spanish, mythological, and ritualistic. Its symbols are the bull, the horse, the woman, and the Minotaur.

At this time Picasso was involved in a passionate love-affair, and many of his best works were sexual in inspiration and content. In some of these he clearly identifies himself with the Minotaur.

55 Picasso. Bull, Horse, and Female Matador. 1934

56 Picasso. Sitting Girl and Sleeping Minotaur. 1933