The Success and Failure of Picasso

We have already said that Picasso was an invader. This is what he was in relation to Europe. But within himself he was, at one and the same time, a ‘noble savage’ and a bourgeois ‘revolutionary’. And within himself the latter has idealized the former.

Why has he idealized himself? Or, to put it more accurately, why has he so carefully preserved the primitive bias of his genius that it can serve as the genius of a ‘noble savage’? It has not been the result of self-love or vanity. By idealizing his ‘noble savage’, he condemns, like Rousseau, the society around him. This is the source of his sincere conviction that he has been a revolutionary all his life. It is this which has made him feel a revolutionary — although in fact few Europeans of his generation have had less real contact with modern politics.

If he had returned to Spain, he would doubtless have developed differently. In Spain he would no longer have been aware of himself as a ‘savage’. This awareness was the result of the difference between himself and his foreign surroundings. For others this difference has made Picasso exotic, and to some degree he has encouraged this, for the more exotic he becomes the more of the ‘noble savage’ he can find within himself, and the more of the ‘noble savage’ he can find within himself the more forcefully he can condemn those who patronize him by considering him exotic. Such is the paradox in Picasso’s attitude to fame.

The fact that another part of Picasso is a bourgeois ‘revolutionary’ is equally plausible. He came from a middle class which had not yet achieved its revolution. As a student in Barcelona and Madrid he mixed with other middle-class intellectuals with anarchist ideas. Anarchism was the one political doctrine of the second half of the nineteenth century which continued the eighteenth-century tradition of Rousseau — believing in the essential goodness and simplicity of man before he was corrupted by institutions. After he left Spain, Picasso took no further part in politics for thirty years. At the same time his life was comparatively unaffected by political events. For many of his contemporaries the First World War was a terrible awakening to the realities of the twentieth century. Picasso was not in the war and appears to have given it no thought. His interest in politics was only re-awakened by what happened distantly in his own country during the Spanish Civil War. In so far as he belongs to politics, Picasso belongs to Spanish politics. And in Spain a bourgeois revolutionary is still a possibility.

We can now begin to understand why Picasso claims, like no other twentieth-century artist, that what he is is more important than what he does. It is the existence of the ‘noble savage’, not his products, that offers the challenge to society.

We can begin to understand something of the magnetism of his personality, of his power to attract allegiance. This is the result of his own self-confidence. Other twentieth-century artists have been victims of doubt, awaiting the judgement of history. Picasso, like Napoleon or Joan of Arc, believes that he is possessed by history — that he is the judgement for which others have been waiting.

We can begin to understand his ceaseless productivity. No other artist has had such an output. Although what he is is more important than what he does, it is only by working that his two selves can be maintained. In modern Europe art is the only activity in which the ‘noble savage’ can be himself. Thus the ‘noble savage’ has to paint in order to live. If he did not live, the ‘revolutionary’ would have nothing to live for. He does not go on painting to make his paintings better — indeed he resolutely denies the very idea of such ‘progress’; he goes on painting in order to prove that he is still what he was before.