The Success and Failure of Picasso

Picasso’s Arcadia is very unlike the traditional Arcadia in European painting. Compare Joie de vivre with, for example, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. The difference is not only one of style. The traditional Arcadia represents an idealization of the contemporary world. Bellini’s serving maids are not even country girls — let alone primeval creatures: they are sophisticated Venetian beauties. The men, in their expressions and attitudes, have all the sensibilities and weaknesses of rich courtiers. What Arcadia really means here is an ideal day in the country. Jean Renoir’s film of Une Partie de campagne is in the same Arcadian tradition — though it concerns modern Parisians. Picasso’s painting does not fit into this tradition. It makes no reference to the contemporary world, and ignores any development of knowledge or feelings. In the very broadest sense of the term it is unconcerned with culture. Its gaiety and vitality are of the kind which precede knowledge. Man and animal are still undifferentiated. And yet — and this is why it begins to be sentimental — the method of painting, the way of drawing is extremely schematic. It is a painting, not about sensations — which do indeed bring us very close to animals — but about an idea: the idea that we would all be happier if we had no ideas.

66 Giovanni Bellini. The Feast of the Gods. 1514

Other things could be said about this painting. As a kind of complement to its sentimentality, it also has wit. It works quite well as a decoration. But now more exaggeratedly and less consistently — Picasso chooses the primitive, the archaic.

He first made such a choice as a direct criticism of what he saw around him. An element of criticism still exists. In 1946 Joie de vivre affirmed life, even if of an excessively innocent kind, in the face of a terribly war-scarred Europe. But now, from the age of sixty-five onwards, Picasso’s imagination begins to gravitate naturally towards the archaic. An attitude, once consciously held, has become a cast of mind.

Thus, in 1951, when Picasso painted Massacre in Korea, the effect is almost the opposite of what he intended. The soldiers, despite their sten-guns, are so heraldic and archaic that either we lose the sense that this is a modern massacre, or else we consider the soldiers as symbols of an eternal, unchanging force of cruelty and evil. Either way our indignation, which the painting was meant to provoke, is blunted.

67 Picasso. Massacre in Korea. 1951

In 1952 Picasso painted one of his last major works on a theme of his own. Since then most of his paintings have been based on other artist’s pictures. The work consisted of two large panels: War and Peace.

68 Picasso. Peace. 1952

The panel Peace can well stand as a late testament of Picasso’s. He has always been an artist concerned with men. He has never been an aesthete. And so in this panel we can read his comments, as an old man, on the human condition.

He is profoundly humanist — that is to say he believes the highest good is the happiness of man. In this picture (unlike the Joie de vivre) he suggests that culture is one of the conditions of this happiness. Such culture implies social organization. A woman reads a book. A man writes. Another plays pipes. A boy drives a horse. Two women dance. The scene is idyllic.

Yet what is remarkable is that there is no hint of the twentieth century in this vision. The objects which are included — an hourglass, a fish-bowl, a bird-cage, a reed pipe, the fire which the man on the right is making, the harness for the horse like one used for a plough — most of these actually suggest an earlier, simpler civilization.

And as if to emphasize this, there is then the magical element. The horse, like Pegasus, has wings. The sun has an eye. Birds fly in the fish-bowl, and fish swim in the birdcage.

Of course one must not interpret such a picture literally. One must allow for inherited symbols, outlasting the civilization of their origin. One must grant poetic licence. My point is that the poetry of this painting is simple, fantastic, legendary, and, as it were, proverbial. It belongs to the tradition of folk stories and nursery rhymes:

               I saw a fishpond all on fire

               I saw a house bow to a squire

               I saw a balloon made of lead

               I saw a coffin drop down dead

               I saw two sparrows run a race

               I saw two horses making lace

               I saw a girl just like a cat

               I saw a kitten wear a hat

               I saw a man who saw these too

               And said though strange

                    They all were true.

It is a painting which, to make us imagine peace and happiness, encourages us to believe in innocence rather than experience. Let us look at Picasso’s Peace beside two other paintings.