The Success and Failure of Picasso

The Minotaur represents the animal in the captivity of an almost human form; it also represents (like the fable of Beauty and the Beast) the suffering which is caused by aspiration and sensibility being rejected because they exist in an unattractive, that is to say untamed, uncivilized body. Either way, the Minotaur suggests a criticism of civilization, which inhibits him in the first case, and dismisses him in the second. Yet, unlike the Beast, the Minotaur is not a pathetic creature. He is a king. He has his own power — which is the result of his physical strength and the fact that he is familiar with his instincts and has no fear of them. His triumph is in sexual love, to which even the civilized ‘Beauty’ eagerly responds.

The emphasis of Picasso’s work did not change again until the end of the Second World War. Naturally, between 1930 and 1944 he painted many different subjects and employed different styles. But all the great works of this period — and in my view it is the period when, the Cubist years excepted, he produced his best paintings and sculpture — share the same preoccupation: a preoccupation with physical sensations so strong and deep that they destroy all objectivity and reassemble reality as a complement to pain or pleasure. Put like that, it may sound as though these works are Expressionist. They are not. Expressionism, as in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait, is concerned with distortions which reflect violent emotions — Angst, awe, pity, hatred, etc. Expressionism is produced by frustration.

57 Schiele. Seated Male Nude (self-portrait). 1910

The paintings we are considering by Picasso are concerned with distortions which reflect sensations — sexual desire, pain, claustrophobia, etc. They are the result of a kind of self-abandonment.

58 Picasso. Nude on a Black Couch. 1932

Perhaps the best way of making the point clear is by another comparison. In 1944, on the day Paris was liberated, Picasso painted a variation of Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan. It is not one of Picasso’s best paintings, and probably he simply painted it to fix his mind on something whilst he waited for news in his studio. But because the composition of the two pictures is so similar, we can distinguish all the more sharply the way Picasso’s imagination was used to working.

59 Poussin. The Triumph of Pan. 1638–9

The Poussin has been painted as a metaphor. The figures and the landscape, painted with considerable sensuous enjoyment of their particularity, nevertheless contribute and refer to a general idea: the idea of the social ease of pleasure; and this idea reveals a longing for a life freed from all restrictions because the interests of all are identical. The pleasure can be interpreted on a purely sexual level or more generally. Probably the two are linked. The desire to share sexual pleasure between more than two people, the orgy, has often been associated with plans for an ideal community. However, the important point is that the painting has been conceived as a unified metaphor.