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Politics and Art
1943-1953
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His whole life long, Picasso was a man who throve on exchange with
other people, and his isolation during the occupation was not easily
to be borne. His work of the period alluded cautiously to the
universal doom, and articulated with increasing directness that inner
sense of involvement which cried out for expression. "L'Aubade" was
Picasso's way of presenting an ambiguous statement in idyllic garb. It
shows a seated figure playing a mandolin and a reclining nude. The
unbroken blocks of colour and the draughtsman's precise outlines are
by no means in harmony; rather, they create an atmosphere of conflict.
The figures seem contorted and fractured, the inside of anatomy turned
out; fully physical though they are, they reveal the skeletal figure
of Death.
Picasso's style neatly met the time's requirements of subtlety and
allusiveness. Open political commitment, or indeed direct accusation,
would have put him in personal jeopardy. To the more sensitive
observers of the age, such as the German writer Ernst Junger, the
existential depth of such paintings was perfectly apparent: "Never had
it been so powerfully and oppressively clear to me that the homunculus
is more than an idle product of the imagination. The image of Man is
foreseen as by a magus, and few sense the terrible profundity of the
decision taken by the painter. Though I repeatedly tried to turn our
talk to this subject, he evaded it, doubtless on purpose.
Of course Picasso evaded it. Open discussion of the problem would
have forced him to take an unambiguous stand. The writer, after all,
was wearing the uniform of the army of occupation, and their talk
turned upon the real political background of aesthetic approaches. For
Picasso, it was important to retain the ambiguity of form as a mask
disguising his critique of the times. He refashioned for his own ends
Surrealist techniques using camouflage, satirical incongruity and
imagery that made its appeal to the unconscious. He was not only
painting; he was also writing prose, and experimenting with his own
brand of calligraphy, a meaningless kind of hieroglyphic automatic
writing with which he filled pages.
In January 1941 Picasso wrote "Desire Caught by the Tail" - a play
(first published in 1944) about the privations of the Parisians during
the occupation. The hero of the piece is Big Foot, who endeavours to
win the favour of the Tart. The Onion is his rival. The Tart has a
Cousin and two friends, Fat Anxiety and Thin Anxiety. In addition we
meet Round Piece, the Two Bow Wows, Silence and the Curtain. The
farce, in six acts, is about basic passions and instincts. The
characters try in vain to stave off cold and starvation and assuage
their need for love.
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Woman in Green
1943
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The play was performed (if not publicly) on 14 May 1944, before the
end of the German occupation. Friends and acquaintances on the arts
scene gave a rehearsed reading in Michel Leiris's flat. Albert Camus
directed the reading; Jean-Paul Sartre played Round Piece, Leiris read
Big Foot, the writer Raymond Queneau the Onion, and the female parts
were taken by Simone de Beauvoir, Dora Maar, Louise Leiris and actress
Zanie Aubier. A number of people came to hear the reading, among them
Braque and Jacques Lacan. Tellingly, the writers and philosophers were
in the majority. Pressured by circumstances, Picasso was returning to
the literary scene, which had meant so much to him before, especially
in his Blue and Rose Periods. After the reading he invited the actors
and audience round to his studio, where he showed them the original
manuscript of Alfred Jarry's farce "Ubu Cocu", one of the cycle of Ubu
plays including the famous "Ubu Roi". Jarry's work was the very
epitome of artistic anarchy in the opening years of the 20th century,
and the source of Picasso's farce.
But the days of salon revolutions were long over. Picasso's friends
Robert Desnos and Max Jacob had died in concentration camps; others
had actively fought for the liberation of France. Picasso renewed his
contacts with intellectual circles, mainly in order to share in their
espousal of Resistance aims. The Allied landings and the reconquest of
France, followed by the end of the Second World War, marked a turning
point in Picasso's life. Suddenly he became what he had not been (to
the same extent) before: a public figure. Ever since he had been
recognised as the founder of modern art, his fame had spread, albeit
within the cultural sector only. He was internationally known, though
purely as an artist. With the entry of the Allies into Paris, two
factors enhanced his status: the growth of his overseas reputation,
and the post-war reinstatement of Modernism at the heart of the arts
and political life. Picasso, rather than any other, was the artist
whose studio soldiers, gallery owners and reporters wanted to visit.
Photographers such as Lee Miller and Robert Capa documented his life
and work in entire series of pictures; and these photos, widely seen
in the mass media, earned Picasso enormous popularity. As the leading
practitioner of an art condemned by the Fascists, and as a man who had
not yielded an inch to them, Picasso became a cult figure. Anything he
said was eagerly noted, printed and parroted.
He was of great importance for the new political and arts scene in
liberated France. Just six weeks after the Allies entered Paris, the
autumn salon - the "Salon de la Liberation" - opened its doors, on 6
October 1944. It was the first programmatic expression of Picasso's
central importance: he had no fewer than 74 paintings and five
sculptures in the exhibition. It was in fact the first Salon he had
ever shown at; his participation constituted the first official
recognition by his French fellows. His political stance and his
standing as an artist went hand in hand - and provoked immediate
reactions, too.
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Woman Washing Her Foot
1944
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Artistic and political reactionaries, the stragglers of Petain's
regime, attempted to tear down his pictures from the walls, and
prompted a scandal. The French society of authors took Picasso's side.
The day before the Salon opened, there was news that only served to
exacerbate tempers: Picasso had joined the Communist Party of France.
He had abandoned his lifelong reluctance to commit himself to
political sides. It was a logical consequence of recent history, the
expression of his ideals. Since Franco's Spain had become a
no-man's-land for an unforeseeable time, Picasso found a new home (as
he himself put it) in the French Communist Party, amongst leading
lights of the new France such as Sartre or Louis Aragon. Publicly,
Picasso repeatedly stated his view that an artist was not a
one-dimensional creature involved exclusively in making art, but also
a political being with an active interest in the problems of the age.
Picasso claimed that in his art he had always aimed to fight like a
revolutionary; art, he said, was not so much something to prettify the
home as a weapon in a political struggle. And indeed, many of the
works that followed in rapid succession attest to Picasso's
involvement in the concerns of the times.
Not that those works were an art of direct statement. For instance, in
1945 Picasso painted a number of still lifes that glance at the
privations and fears of life during the occupation. Surely the most
important of these is "Pitcher, Candle and Enamel Saucepan".
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Pitcher, Candle and Enamel Saucepan
1945
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The Kitchen
1948

The Kitchen
1948
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Tellingly, with the 1942 "L'Aubade" it was one of ten
paintings which the artist, at the suggestion of his friend,
museum curator Jean Cassou, gifted to the Musee National d'Art
Moderne in May 1946. The picture shows three objects only. It
draws upon crucial formal insights that Picasso had developed in
his great "Guernica". Here too, tried and tested stylistic modes
serve to question and undermine what appears unambiguous, but at
the same time to render it universally valid. A number of
perspective viewpoints - front, side and rear - jointly
establish unified, clear outlines that do not correspond with
the picture's spatial values. On a brown tabletop we see a
pitcher, a burning candle and an enamel saucepan, lined up at
only slightly different degrees of visual depth. The bright
yellow of the brass candlestick is the strongest colour,
strikingly contrasted by the acid blue of the saucepan. Shades
of grey, green and brown, and large patches of white, lend
stability to this restless colourfulness, so that the overall
impression of the canvas is one of subdued colour. The power of
the pure colours seems muted, despite the decidedly aggressive
use of the yellow and blue. Thus the expressive values of the
colours waver between the bright and the subdued. They are
unstable. Similarly with the light: the candle's big flame and
black shadow convey an appearance of brightness, yet the lit
sides of the three objects are on the sides away from the light.
It is not light with any real illuminative power; it is symbolic
light. The painting's symbolism is simple, using everyday
household objects to suggest the difficulty of life under the
occupation.Even the large-scale 1948 composition "The
Kitchen"reflects that everyday, basic privation. It shows
the kitchen at Picasso's studio flat in the Rue des
Grands-Augustins. Against a sad, grey, non-spatial background we
see a variety of utensils and furniture. Spanish tiles and
birdcages, plates and stove hotplates are the principal
subjects. But the overall impression is one of fragility, indeed
of utter emptiness. Personal experience of going without, in the
home and workplace, has become a generalized warning. The ochre
yellow New York version is no less melancholy, for the greater
warmth of the colour is counteracted by the greater austerity in
the positioning of the objects. Other still lifes of the period
use their motifs with even blunter directness of moralizing
intent. They tend to be dominated by a skull, a painted version
of a sculpture Picasso did in 1943 in his studio in the Rue des
Grands-Augustins. There are also objects that recall war and
menace - very evocatively, for instance, in "Skull, Sea
Urchins and Lamp on a Table" (1946). Black, white and grey
areas, awkwardly constrictive and jostling, predominate, and the
three spiky sea urchins on the plain plate seem reminiscent of
some mediaeval weapon, such as a mace.
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Death's Head
1943
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Skull, Sea Urchins and Lamp on a Table
1946
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Symbolic form, a compacted artistic treatment of given reality, and
translation of the everyday wretchedness of war into an urgent though
not superficial visual idiom, are all to be found in a major Picasso
done at the very end of the war: his great composition "The Charnel
House". It was inspired by a Spanish film about a family killed in
their kitchen. When Picasso went to work on the painting from February
to May 1945, it was with the first photographs of liberated German
concentration camps in mind - though this dimension only entered the
work at a late stage, as the composition was already fixed in formal
terms before any of the photographs were published. This only lends
additional weight to the painting's statement, though, taking as it
does political terror as its subject.
The picture shows a heap of corpses after an execution. One figure,
still tied to a post, is collapsing onto the others. It was only
during the course of Picasso's work on the painting that the location
became more precisely defined. Greyish blue, white and black areas
denote walls, floor and posts, a set of architectonic props that
suggest both exterior and interior, as in "Guernica". The still life
of kitchen utensils at top left is not only a glance at the film
original; it also underlines the everyday banality and ubiquity of
terror. It can hit anyone, anywhere, any time. Even more than in "Guernica"
the monochrome scheme, the linearity and the use of areas of unbroken
colour serve to make a universal of the statement. First Picasso
sketched in the simple outlines of his stylized figures, heaping them
so that the lines are interwoven, creating a tangled network that
defies distinction of separate forms. Later he filled in some of the
segments, so establishing an equilibrium of figural and spatial
motifs. (Only the line-drawing still life remains different.) The heap
of bodies can be seen as replicating the destruction of individual
identity in the world of totalitarian terror. Human beings cannot even
preserve their individual physical identities; even their bodies are
taken from them.
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The Charnel House
1944
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The Charnel House (1st state)
1944
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The Charnel House (3rd state)
1944
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The painting was done with an etching from Goya's series "Desastres
de la Guerra" in mind. In other words, it was using pre-formulated
artistic modes of response to war. It cannot really be seen as a
direct expression of political commitment; though Picasso often
expressed political positions at this time, as an artist he retained
his independence. But six years later things looked somewhat different
when he painted "Massacre in Korea". The Korean War had begun
six months earlier. The painting was Picasso's protest at the American
invasion. Shown at the May Salon in Paris, it took sides in a war of
ideologies. And its formal idiom was an unambiguous, partisan one,
using handed-down simple symbols and only sparingly heightening the
figural naturalism with cautious touches of the dissociative. We see
the good and evil sides in straightforward confrontation on an
extremely broad format. Four naked women, rigid with fear, and their
four similarly naked children (the nakedness symbolizing
de-fencelessness), are being aimed at by six soldiers armed to the
teeth (symbolizing far superior power). The soldiers' postures seem at
once mechanical and archaic; they are ancient warriors transmuted into
death-bringing robots. A green, sweeping, simplified landscape
featuring only a single ruined house is the backdrop to the
composition.
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Massacre in Korea
1951
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For his work on it, Picasso drew upon a number of cognate works, in
particular Edouard Manet's famous painting "The Execution of Emperor
Maximilian in Mexico" (Mannheim, Kunsthalle). From it Picasso took the
figure grouping and particularly the figure of the death squad
commander. He also borrowed from the work that inspired Manet, Goya's
familiar "3rd May 1808" (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado). The
twofold grouping and the threatening anonymity of the soldiers have
been taken directly from Goya, as has the figure of a fallen victim,
transformed in Picasso's painting into a child crouching on the
ground.
Goya too was inspired by antecedent works, Jacques-Louis David's
"Rape of the Sabine Women" and "The Oath of the Horatii" (both in the
Louvre in Paris). Picasso drew on David's paintings for particular
features such as the striding stance of one soldier and details of
mediaeval or ancient weaponry. This blatant use of other paintings is
in line with the one-dimensionality of the painting's form and
content. It is very different from other pictures of similar subject.
This is the result of aiming simultaneously at two objectives. Only
the title places the painting in the Korean War; as in his other
anti-war pictures, Picasso has carefully avoided using specific
details that would tie down his statement to a particular place and
time. The form has become programmatic.
Plainly a naturalistic, representational image is in the
foreground. What counts for Picasso is the message. Consistently, he
has presented the action as a picture within a picture: all round,
there is a margin of unpainted canvas, which gives the work a fictive,
mask-like quality. It is worth examining this defamiliarization.
Mimetic representation was far more in line with public expectation
than the formal idiom of Modernism, and could therefore count on a
more approving response. In this we see the predicament of political,
ideological art. Since the early days of Stalin, international
Communism had been advocating realism as the only acceptable mode of
artistic work. The French Communist Party toed this line too. It was
an urgent dilemma for Picasso, as became clear at the 1945 Party
congress, which gave him an accolade as man and artist but nonetheless
called for realism in art.
Communist ideology saw art as a weapon in a political struggle that
embraced every area of human activity. It is true that Picasso saw
matters in exactly the same light, and considered himself a Communist
artist painting Communist art; but his idea of what this meant was a
different one from the Party's. To his way of thinking, politics
served moral ends. For this reason his commitment was always expressed
in humanitarian causes, and never in the discharging of official Party
duties. He attended Communist peace conferences in Breslau (1948),
Paris (1949), Sheffield (1950) and Rome (1951); but he preserved a
distance from art whose form was dictated by the Party, and always
insisted on his own independence as an artist. "Massacre in Korea" was
a special case, an attempt to reconcile opposite points of view.
Certainly he did work that served propagandist purposes in those
years, but it was applied art - such as the dove in flight which he
designed for the Sheffield congress, a conventional enough image for
the concept of universal peace.
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David and Bathsheba (after Lucas Cranach the Elder)
1947
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David and Bathsheba (after Lucas Cranach the Elder)
1949
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The latent conflict between Picasso's ideas on art and those of the
French Communist Party became open after the death of Stalin, when (at
Louis Aragon's request) he did a portrait of the dead leader for the
arts magazine "Les Lettres francaises". The portrait, though
relatively true to life, was stylized in Picasso's manner; it was used
on the magazine cover, but was out of line with the precepts of
socialist realism, and furthermore ignored the features which Stalin
iconography had established as characteristic. To Picasso's
bewilderment, the portrait was consequently seen by Communist Party
members as a mockery of Stalin. The divergence of opinion between the
artist and the Party was too great to permit long-term collaboration.
Picasso did remain a member of the Party, and on 1 May 1962 received
the Order of Lenin for the second time. But the differences and
alienation between his own and Party cadre thinking became so profound
that in November 1956, with a number of others, he published an open
letter in "Le Monde" protesting against Soviet intervention in
Hungary.
Essentially, the Communist Party was using Picasso for propagandist
reasons. In this respect he shared the fate of many intellectuals and
artists who were so repelled by the Second World War and the
atrocities perpetrated by the Fascists that they felt it necessary to
espouse political causes openly. Everyday politics passed over their
idealism blithely enough. And in the Cold War, with the two power
blocs set hard and fast, individuals were only tolerated as extras on
the political stage. Attempts to unite the arts and politics and thus
to transform the state into something better proved to be illusory.
Progressive Communist artists in particular found that things went
much as they had with the Utopian Modernists, Constructivists and
satirical realists of the Twenties. Their ideas only had any impact in
brief periods of transition. Since the final years of the Tsarist age,
important Picassos had been in Russia, but it was not till the 1970s
that Soviet arts policy honoured him not only as a prominent Party
member but also as an artist. Picasso's commitment to the Communist
cause was necessarily no more than an episode in the immediate
post-war years.
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Still, Picasso persisted in expressing his general humanitarian and
political concerns in his work. During the period when he was
questioning Party sovereignty in the arts, he was painting a
deconsecrated 14th-century chapel at Vallauris. Outraged by the Korean
War, he had decided to make the chapel a temple of peace. From April
to September 1952, in over 250 sketches, he designed two huge murals
for the chapel, on the subject of war and peace. The murals (War
and Peace) were completed that December, though they were
not installed till 1954. Tellingly, Picasso again took his bearings
for the twin allegorical works from the art of the past. War is
symbolized by a kind of frieze in which a horse-drawn chariot is
taking the field against a monumental figure armed in ancient fashion
and bearing the scales and shield of justice and peace. Behind the
chariot, attacking warriors seen in black silhouette are engaged in
carnage. The death's-heads carried by the charioteer point to the only
outcome of battle. By contrast, the other mural affords a prospect of
unsullied happiness. It shows mothers and playing children, around the
central figure of Pegasus, pulling a plough at the bidding of one
child and so personifying the fertile world of peace. Both pictures,
in their own ways, continue the childlike elements in "Guernica" and
link them to forms Matisse had used in his Arcadian paintings.
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War
1952
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Peace
1952
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Matisse was then the other great exponent of Modernism and the only
artist among his fellows whom Picasso considered his equal. In 1943 he
had moved to Vence, where he decorated the chapel of a convent,
designing the stained-glass windows, the candlesticks and crucifix,
the chasubles and murals. The Chapel of the Rosary was consecrated on
25 June 1951. Picasso was not personally present at the ceremony, but
he did visit his sick fellow artist shortly beforehand. To make his
murals Matisse had transferred drawings onto glazed tiles, so
establishing a sort of equivalent to the spatial work Picasso had done
in Antibes in 1946, when he had spent two months of hard concentration
painting twenty-two murals onto plywood and hardboard for the Palais
Grimaldi. These economically drawn works, sometimes using extensive
blocks of colour, describe an Arcadian realm of peaceful Mediterranean
contentment, using motifs drawn from ancient mythology (Pastorale).
There is a sense of serene joy in these deliberately simple pictures.
The subject of joie de vivre was borrowed from Matisse. The
Antibes series was completed in 1947 with "Odysseus and the Sirens",
whereupon the Paris administrative centre for the nation's museums
redubbed the building "Musee Picasso". Though the Antibes and
Vallauris works are doubtless not among the artist's most important,
they clearly show his interest in art seen in public spaces.
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La joie de vivre (Pastorale)
1946
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Political commitment was only one aspect of Picasso's creative
efforts at that time. The distinctive dichotomy in his activities was
not least a result of particular artistic interests. This is clearest
in the sculptures he did between 1943 and 1953. One of his most famous
and characteristic, done in 1943 during the darkest period of the
occupation, when Picasso felt utterly isolated, was the "Head of a
Bull". The skeletal head and horns of a bull are conveyed by two
found objects which in themselves are meaningless, a bicycle saddle
and handlebars. Picasso subsequently had this assemblage cast in
bronze, thus reassessing the original materials, eliminating the
contrasts and opening out the ambivalence of form. It was a
continuation of what he had done in "The Glass of Absinthe", that
famous product of synthetic Cubism. The absolute economy of the "Head
of a Bull" was breathtaking, and remains stunning to this day. And
from then on Picasso retained the basic principle of metamorphosis of
formal meaning and interpretation in all his sculptural work.

Head of a Bull
1942
"Baboon and Young", done in October 1951, achieved
a comparable popularity. It was immediately cast in bronze in a
limited edition of six. Picasso was inspired by two toy cars which the
art dealer Kahnweiler gave to his son Claude, and used them for the
head of the ape, bottom to bottom so that the gap between the two
becomes the slit of the baboon's mouth, the radiator the whiskers, the
roof the receding forehead, and the two front windows the eyes - to
which Picasso added two plaster balls as pupils. Picasso then used
coffee cup handles as ears and an immense jug for the body. The arms
and the remainder of the baboon's body, and her young, were modelled
in plaster. Finally, the outstretched tail was another found item: a
car suspension spring curled at one end.
Picasso proceeded similarly with his 1950 "Nanny Goat", the
"Woman with Baby Carriage" and "Girl Skipping" (moulded
the same year but not finished till 1954) and the still life "Goat
Skull, Bottle and Candle", done between 1951 and 1953. For the
"Nanny Goat" he used a large round basket for the belly, metal strips
for the lean flanks, carved vinewood for the horns, and cardboard for
the ears. The fibrous wooden part of a palm leaf served for the smooth
brow and the hairless backbone. The legs and feet were made of wood
too; a lighting appliance was the behind; folded cardboard and metal
tubing became the genitals and anus, twisted wire the tail; and two
ceramic vessels functioned as an udder. For the "Girl Skipping" a
Vallauris ironmonger bent a length of iron rod to the shape required
for the skipping rope (and the figure's support). The girl's body is
made of two wicker baskets, ceramics, baking tins and plaster; and the
feet are clad in ordinary shoes. For the "Woman with Baby Carriage"
Picasso used a real push-chair but constructed the figures of metal
parts, roof tiles, baking tins and bits of pottery.
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Baboon and Young
1951
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Nanny Goat
1950
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Woman with Baby Carriage
1950
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Girl Skipping
1950
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Goat Skull, Bottle and Candle
1951-1953
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His older idea of using bicycle handlebars as an animal's horns
reappeared in "Goat Skull, Bottle and Candle", on a goat skull made of
baked clay, plaster and screws. For the beams of light shed by a
burning candle he used nails.
Using the technique of the objet trouve, a method much
beloved by the Surrealists, Picasso succeeded in ringing fascinating
changes. His formal analogies render the external qualities of figures
ambiguous, and indeed challenge them. There are few better places than
his sculptural work to see the intellectual vigour of Picasso's art.
Every detail is sophisticated in conception. In the "Girl Skipping",
for instance, we see a small child still unsure of how to use the
rope: her awkwardness is expressed in the instability of the
sculpture, but especially by the outsize shoes - and by the fact that
she is wearing them on the wrong feet.
Picasso's use of objects in his sculpture was radically different
from that of other modern artists. The "ready-made" of a Marcel
Duchamp, for example, is provocative in conception. The placement of
objects is less a matter of form than of what the objects signify. A
bicycle wheel on a stool, or a bottle-dryer declared as art - these
things do not revalue the objects; rather, they aim criticism at the
very concept of art. Picasso, by contrast, is fundamentally returning
to a pre-modern artistic idiom. In the mid-16th century the Mannerist
painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo had assembled various kinds of object into
allegorical portraits and figures. It was an art of analogy and
similitude. In a portrait made of vegetables, for instance, a cucumber
could stand for a nose. This mode of characterization was later to
become the province of satirical drawings in particular. It was a
marginal, little-noted kind of art, but in it an underground tradition
lived on, only to be rediscovered by the Surrealists when they hit
upon the bizarre inventions of Arcimboldo.
Picasso for his
part was not copying objects mimetically but using the real things for
sculptural purposes, expanding the principle considerably.
In this context it is necessary to consider the genesis of form.
Basically there are two possibilities: either the seen object prompts
a spontaneous idea of metamorphosis, or, conversely, a planned concept
comes first and the objects are sought out to fit it. It was in this
latter way that the "Nanny Goat" was made; Picasso went in search of
objects to fit his idea. On the other hand, the look of the toy cars
spontaneously prompted the idea of the baboon. In all his sculptures,
though, the idea is central - an intellectual exercise, which the
artwork provides material substance for, as it were. We can see this
particularly in Picasso's approach to the tactile qualities of
surfaces. In distinguishing between objets trouves and bronze
casts of them, in choosing either to gather a variety of materials or
to use his own, he was establishing specific effects. In the use of
original objects, the meaning of form is in the foreground; in bronze
casts, that meaning is subordinate to qualities of appearance - say, the juxtaposition of rougher and smoother textures. It
is practically the creation of a new object. If Picasso, as he
continued to work on a sculpture such as "Goat Skull, Bottle and
Candle", painted various casts, thus disguising and redefining the
true qualities of the metal, it was basically an approach of synthetic
Cubism.
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As they came into existence, these works defined new areas of
meaning, playing with visual form, three-dimensionality and surface
structure. Qualities of plasticity, though not unimportant, were
distinctly of secondary significance. Whether Picasso carried out an
idea in paint or sculpture was essentially a pragmatic question. Thus
he was able to alternate between the forms. "Goat Skull, Bottle and
Candle", for instance, itself inspired by a 1939 still life,
prompted two further paintings in 1952. The prime
importance of the idea, consistently enough, can be seen in the
genesis of his works, traceable through the invariable preliminary
sketches.
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Goat Skull, Bottle and Candle
1952
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Goat Skull, Bottle and Candle
1952
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Study after
"Man with Sheep"
1943
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The best illustration of this is the
large-scale sculpture "Man with Sheep", done in early 1943.
Unlike the objets trouves and the assemblages, the figure was
wholly modelled in clay on an iron frame, in conventional style, and
then moulded in plaster for subsequent bronze casting. This work was
preceded by a large number of studies, beginning as early as t 5 July
1942. At first the figure was not full-length: Picasso sketched a man
holding a sheep's forelegs in his left hand and the hind with his
right. The final form evolved through a large number of
detail and compositional studies, in the course of which Picasso drew
upon an ancient statue of a man carrying a calf, as well as on the
motif - familiar since childhood - of Christ as the good shepherd. The
figure became a personification of peace, in response to the war. Of
greater interest is Picasso's protracted irresolution (as sketches of
September 1942 confirm) whether to use the idea as a painting or a
sculpture. At first he thought both were possible. The sketches
envisaged a historical painting, while purely linear sketches done in
August 1942 suggest Picasso was thinking of a graphic
solution. We have his own word for it that it was only at a late stage
that he thought of sculpture. The finished group still reveals this
indeterminacy. The figure is still marked by the strong contrast
between the rough surface of face and torso and the smoothness of the long legs. As Picasso himself noted, he had
miscalculated the statics, and the model threatened to collapse under
the excessive weight of the clay - so that he had to take his plaster
cast from an unfinished state, despite his wish to work more on the
legs and feet.
This may seem to imply an astounding indifference to his own work on
Picasso's part. Taking a cast in these circumstances was an admission
of defeat. Judged by the artist's aims, "Man with Sheep" is strictly
speaking a failure. But we must bear Picasso's attitude to sculpture
in mind. Compared with the intellectual act of evolving the concept,
the work of producing the final object was a negligible business. What
counted was the artist's mind and will. Speaking of "Head of a Bull",
Picasso commented that he would be perfectly happy if one day someone
retrieved his artwork from the garbage and used it for bicycle parts.
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Study for "Man with Sheep"
1942
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Man with Sheep
1943
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A further indicator of the view Picasso took of his own work is his sense of himself as demiurge creating new worlds of his own
through his new techniques and genres. His command of the various
aspects of technique his art involved was absolute. Staying on the
Cote d'Azur at the small town of Vallauris, an old pottery centre,
Picasso acquired skills in ceramic art. In 1946, at an exhibition of
work by potters who lived there, Suzanne and Georges Ramie challenged
Picasso to produce ceramic ware of his own. His subconscious went to
work on the new form, and by the following summer he was full of ideas
of his own.
Initially he worked at "Madoura", the Ramies' workshop; then in
1948, with Franchise Gilot, he moved into the newly-purchased Villa La
Galloise in Vallauris, and set up a ceramic workshop of his own in an
old perfumery in the town. Within a year he had produced over 2,000
ceramic pieces, eloquent proof of the extraordinary energy with which
he tackled his new technique. The Vallauris years from 1947/48 to 1954
marked Picasso's most intensive work with ceramics. Painters and
sculptors had tended to ignore the ancient art, and in Europe it had
never recovered the high status it had had in ancient Greece, which produced vase paintings in black
and red which are among the great achievements of Occidental art.
Matisse and other Fauves had worked with clay on occasion, but
restricted their efforts to painting ware made by potters.
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Plate: "Head of a Faun". Plate: "Brown and Blue Face"
1947
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Plate: "Bullfight Scene". Plate: "Bullfight Scene"
1947
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Round Vase: "Four Fish"
1950
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Vase: "Flute Players and Dancers" (two views)
1950
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Jug: "Figurechead"
1952
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Jug: "Woman's Face"
1953
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Picasso's approach was a different one from the outset. He acquired
both the potter's and the ceramic painter's skills. His ceramic work
includes painted plates and vases, but also sculptures made by joining
preformed pieces, as well as moulded objects. At first he devoted
himself to painting finished pieces - making bullfight scenes, still
lifes or animal portrayals out of mere plates. The given form of the
objects was always his point of departure in evolving ideas, but it
became so involved in the decorative transmutation that a new thing
resulted. The numerous bullfight scenes show this well. Picasso would
paint a corrida in the base of the plate and either use the rim for a
distinct colour frame or else dab specks of paint to suggest a
grandstand full of spectators.
Clay as a material met Picasso's aims, which centred upon types of
formal metamorphosis, very well. It was capable of being moulded into infinitely various forms, remained pliable throughout
the process, and was thus at the constant disposal of the artist's
ideas. Thus, for example, a compact vase became a kneeling woman, and
the body, stem and spout of one vessel became a bird. The decorative
images were complemented with careful use of relief - added strips of
clay and indentations. Picasso used paint to reinforce and
decoratively highlight the form and function of the ware, but also
deployed its illusionist effects to redefine forms: jugs became stagey
scenarios suggestive of spatial depth, or were transformed into human
or animal shapes.
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