The Success and Failure of Picasso

On a more objective plane the phenomenon of his success becomes more understandable. His success, as we saw, has little to do with his work. It is the result of the idea of genius which he provokes. This is acceptable because it is familiar, because it belongs to the early nineteenth century, to Romanticism, and to the revolutions which, safely over, are now universally admired. The image of his genius is wild, iconoclastic, extreme, insatiable, free. In this respect he is comparable with Berlioz or Garibaldi or Victor Hugo. In the guise of such genius he has already appeared in hundreds of books and stories for a century or more. Even the fact that he or his work is outrageous or shocking, is part of the legend and therefore part of what makes him acceptable. It would be wrong to suggest that each century has its exclusive type of genius. But the typical genius of the twentieth century, whether you think of Lenin or Brecht or Bartok, is a very different kind of man. He needs to be almost anonymous: he is quiet, consistent, controlled, and very conscious of the power of the forces outside himself. He is almost the exact opposite of Picasso.

Finally, we can begin to understand Picasso’s fundamental difficulty: a difficulty that has been so disguised that scarcely anybody has recognized it. Imagine an artist who is exiled from his own country; who belongs to another century, who idealizes the primitive nature of his own genius in order to condemn the corrupt society in which he finds himself, who becomes therefore self-sufficient, but who has to work ceaselessly in order to prove himself to himself. What is his difficulty likely to be? Humanly he is bound to be very lonely. But what will this loneliness mean in terms of his art? It will mean that he does not know what to paint. It will mean that he will run out of subjects. He will not run out of emotion or feelings or sensations; but he will run out of subjects to contain them. And this has been Picasso’s difficulty. To have to ask of himself the question: What shall I paint? And always to have to answer it alone.

¹ This and the quotation on this page are both taken from one of the most popular of the expensive books on Picasso: Picasso, by Wilhelm Boeck and Jaime Sabartes (Thames & Hudson, 1961).

² This and most of the other quotations from statements by Picasso are taken from the very well documented Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, by Alfred H. Barr (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946).

³ See footnote, this page

⁴ For Picasso’s cultural background in Spain, see Picasso; The Formative Years, by Phoebe Pool (Studio Books, 1962).

⁵ See Letters of Juan Gris, edited and printed by Douglas Cooper.

⁶ See Lorca, Penguin Books, 1960.

⁷ See Revolt of the Masses, by Ortega y Gasset (Allen & Unwin, 1932).

⁸ For further analysis of such poverty and loneliness, see Vagrancy, by Philip O’Connor (Penguin Books, 1963).

⁹ Quoted in The Spanish Labyrinth, by Gerald Brenan (Cambridge University Press, 1943).

¹⁰ In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1925).

¹¹ This quotation comes from Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (Allen & Unwin, 1959): a profound book accessible to the layman.

¹² See Les Peintres Cubistes (Paris, 1913).

¹³ For the role of magic in art, see The Necessity of Art, by Ernst Fischer (Penguin Books, 1963).

¹⁴ See Roland Penrose’s useful but entirely uncritical biography, Picasso: His Life and Work (Gollancz, 1958).

¹⁵ Faber, 1961.

¹⁶ For a more detailed study of Léger’s view of modern man, see this author’s articles in the April and May 1963 issues of Marxism Today.

2. THE PAINTER

is now free to paint anything he chooses. There are scarcely any forbidden subjects, and today everybody is prepared to admit that a painting of some fruit can be as important as a painting of a hero dying. The Impressionists did as much as anybody to win this previously unheard-of freedom for the artist.

Yet, by the next generation, painters began to abandon the subject altogether, and paint abstract pictures. Today the majority of pictures painted are abstract.

Is there a connexion between these two developments? Has art gone abstract because the artist is embarrassed by his freedom? Is it that, because he is free to paint anything, he doesn’t know what to paint? Apologists for abstract art often talk of it as the art of maximum freedom. But could this be the freedom of the desert island?