The Success and Failure of Picasso

It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Émile Blanche, even if the apples he had painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety, that’s Cezanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh — that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham.²

Certainly neither Cézanne nor Van Gogh would have agreed with this. Both, in their different ways, were obsessed by what they produced; both knew that it was by their works and their works alone that their lives might be justified. Cézanne said, ‘The only thing that is really difficult is to prove what one believes. So I am going on with my researches.…’

Picasso’s attitude would, however, have found an echo with the early Romantics — who were indeed the first to formulate it. For them the creative spirit was supreme, and its concrete expressions not just incidental, but a vulgarity.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter.…

At the beginning of the nineteenth century this was a necessary belief; it was what allowed artists to continue when faced with the way in which the ever more powerful bourgeois world was reducing everything, including art, to a commodity. The creative spirit, genius as a state of being, was celebrated as an end in itself because it alone did not have a price and was unbuyable.

This dualism is now at the very heart of the bourgeois attitude to art. On one hand, the glory and mystery of genius; on the other hand, the work of art as a saleable commodity. You have only to listen to any art dealer today to hear the two in grotesque juxtaposition. The bargaining in guineas, the guarantees of investment, and then the adjectives (‘exciting’, ‘powerful’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘fantastic’) applied to the intangible quality of the work.

It is also implicit in the popular image of the genius — as it is encouraged by untruthful books and films. The genius cannot look after his own material interests (on account of madness, unworldliness, drink), and this inability comes to be seen as a proof of his genius.

One finds the same dualism — the last legacy of this Romantic illusion — in what is now the standardized method of writing art books. The pictures, which the reader can see in the reproductions, are painstakingly described — as though for an inventory. They are treated as stock. Into this description are then inserted the phrases which confer genius on the producer of the pictures. The phrases mount like an incantation. The writer becomes a kind of priest as auctioneer. Here is a typical example:

3 Picasso. An Old Man. 1895

The half-length portrait of an old beggar dating from that time discloses advanced technical skill. There is no doubt that in this as in other related early paintings Picasso was inspired by the great paintings of Velazquez, such as the famous Water Seller of Seville. That is the source of the magnificently realistic rendering of the shining skin, the pasty hair, and the coarse clothing of his model, as well as of the generous, broad brushwork vigorously juxtaposing lights and shadows, which stresses the momentary quality of the figure, and largely contributes to the serious concentrated expression. On the other hand nothing in this picture suggests imitation, let alone copying: like Picasso’s later works, even this youthful painting is characterized by the extraordinary intensity of his own effort. And like all his paintings inspired by historical models, this one reveals a mind that consumes the thing seen in the fire of enthusiasm and recreates it from the ashes as something new that belongs to Picasso alone.…³

What is said is not untrue. It is simply irrelevant. (What might be relevant is why painters paint beggars, what is special about the Spanish attitude to poverty, how the age of a man changes the clothes he wears, whether or not Picasso when he painted this at the age of fourteen was already becoming aware of the inadequacy of the provincial, illustrative style of drawing he had been taught, etc.) There is a total inability to see the work in relation to any general human experience. Instead, the picture is described, identified, and given a good pedigree as an object; whilst Picasso — at the age of fourteen — is set at Velazquez’ right hand and glorified as a phoenix-like genius.