Picasso: the napoleon of art | thearticle

Annie Cohen-Solal, author of _Picasso the Foreigner _(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a classic outsider as cosmopolitan insider.  Born in Algeria to a Jewish family, teaching in Paris and

Milan, she passionately defends foreigners and immigrants.  But her timely (and trendy) book forces the comparison between the legal and protected Picasso, a Spaniard living in Paris, and

today’s illegal and more vulnerable African immigrants.  She even drags in W. E. B. Du Bois in order to have a Black character in the book, though he had nothing to do with Picasso. The

author has done impressive research in 32 archives, found a great deal of new material and wants to tell us about her energetic legwork.  She repeatedly and pitifully says she took this

train to that suburb, entered this building and asked for that file, for example, “on the third floor of staircase F, in the police headquarters at 9 Boulevard du Palais on the Ile de la

Cité.”  She has discovered Georges Braque’s correspondence, the papers of the Czech art critic Vincenc Kramár, letters from Picasso’s mother in Barcelona and his extensive police files.  But

Braque’s banal greetings and simple messages contain very little about art.  The views of the Czech critic are insignificant.  Kramár is perplexed by the _Seated Harlequin_ (1902) and calls

it “an attempt at sculptural abbreviation, but remains on the surface, with arms like rubber, unattractive.”  The day before World War I broke out he blindly wrote, “Personally, I don’t

believe anything will happen,” and then fought against France with the Austro-Hungarian army. Picasso’s mother led a very sheltered life and repeated the same things in thousands of

unwelcome letters sent to Paris several times a week between 1900 and 1938.  They ranged from expressions of suffocating love and adoration to fearful warnings and nagging criticism: “If I

realise now that you are not there for me, it will make me sad because I’ll understand how little affection you feel for me. . . . I am disgusted with you because I have received nothing

and, when I know nothing about you, I have the impression that my life is falling apart.”  Picasso greeted her emotional outbursts with exile, cunning and silence. Picasso’s police files

contain accusations, often based on the hearsay evidence of paid informers, that he was a dangerous anarchist (like today’s terrorists).  The police could have jailed or deported him, but

treated him leniently, even when he accidentally took possession of the Iberian statues that his close friend Guillaume Apollinaire had stolen from the Louvre.  Apollinaire was arrested but

Picasso, who failed to drown the incriminating statues in the Seine, was merely questioned and dismissed by the police. In order to suggest that he was suspected, stigmatised and ostracised,

Cohen-Solal even states that he had to go to a police station in 1918 to get documents for his marriage to a Russian ballerina, another foreigner. But so did everyone else. (On my visits to

France in the 1950s and 1960s, tourists had to surrender their passports to the hotel concièrge, who recorded the details for the police.) Cohen-Solal’s dozens of boring repetitions—“as we

have seen,” “is there any need to underline, yet again ?”—do not make a convincing argument.  During the most dangerous time, in World War II, Picasso was protected by powerful friends in

high places, received valuable advice from his legal advisor André Level and his financial manager Max Pellequer, and had a privileged position throughout the Nazi Occupation of France. 

When the German ambassador looked at a photo of _Guernica_, which condemned the Nazi bombing of the Basque town, he asked the artist: “Did you do that?” Picasso famously replied, “No.  You

did!”  He got away with it. By contrast, Arthur Koestler was imprisoned in 1939 in the Le Vernet concentration camp. Cohen-Solal ignores some useful evidence that would have strengthened her

persistent thesis.  The poet Max Jacob, Picasso’s neighbor in the Bateau-Lavoir artists’ studios during his early days of poverty, was one of his first French friends.  He described Picasso

as “small, dark, stocky, anxious, with dark piercing eyes, ample gestures, small feet and small hands.”  As a Jew and homosexual in the Drancy concentration camp, the frail Jacob was doomed

and died there of pneumonia in 1944.  In Picasso’s greatest personal and moral failure, he was afraid to help Jacob and refused to sign a petition asking the German ambassador to save his

friend’s life.  For the vulnerable Picasso, it was _sauve qui peut_. He saved himself when he could. The author provides, in fact, massive evidence that contradicts her thesis that Picasso

was persistently persecuted: “Indeed, the French police’s stigmatisation of ‘foreigners’ and ‘anarchist’, which he probably wasn’t even aware of, would only partially hinder his meteoric

rise. . . . He had become adept, even in the most complex and dangerous circumstances, at turning all possible situations to his advantage. . . . Picasso had never been imprisoned, nor had

he ever run the risk of becoming an expiatory victim.” Indeed , none of Picasso’s foreign contemporaries became victims.  Except for Modigliani, all of them eventually succeeded artistically

and financially in France: Brancusi, Chagall, Gris, Kisling, Miró, Severini, Soutine, Van Dongen and Zadkine.  No foreigner since Napoleon enjoyed greater success among the French than

Picasso, who had a spectacular rise to international fame and left an estate worth more than a billion francs. Cohen-Solal frequently blames French art officials, who did not include

Picasso’s work in national art museums, for the “ethical and political flaw in France’s cultural history”.  But these old government bureaucrats, entrenched in powerful positions, naturally

defended the academic tradition.  They instinctively rejected the controversial, disturbing and incomprehensible work by the artist who exploded familiar shapes and “murdered painting.”

Cubism, deconstructing the world, foreshadowed the suicide of the old order in World War I.  As Robert Lowell wrote: “And Paris, our black classic, breaking up, / Like killer kings in an

Etruscan cup.”  During Cubism’s austere phase and the aesthetic limitations of pasted paper, Cohen-Solal writes, “the only pleasures allowed were a few objects standing on a coffee table and

a Spanish guitar.”  Dealers and collectors were relieved and heartened when Picasso abandoned the dead end of Cubism and renewed the pictorial tradition in his Neoclassicism of the early

1920s. The author contradicts herself when comparing the American and French response to Picasso.  She first states that “the representation of Picasso’s art and personality in the United

States,” which had amassed the largest collections, offered the most interesting exhibitions and produced the most penetrating analyses of his work, was far superior to his status in France.

  But she also claims that “the hysteria surrounding Picasso in the United States” had its roots in their “philistine mentality toward art”. In 1944 the politically naïve Picasso joined the

French Communist Party.  He mindlessly swallowed the propaganda of its leader Maurice Thorez, who absurdly proclaimed of the tyrant who had killed millions of Soviet citizens: “Every man and

woman in favour of peace acclaims the name of Stalin, synonym of bravery and generosity, who is leading the people toward joy and happiness.”  Another friend blindly proclaimed in 1956, “by

shooting the Hungarian people, the USSR saved the revolution.”  Cohen-Solal again contradicts herself by first stating that the Communist Party condemned Picasso’s profanation, outrage,

indecent caricature and lack of respect in his _Portrait of Stalin_ (1953), then insists two pages later that he was never “sanctioned or scolded for his behaviour.” This bad-good book has

only thirteen illustrations, no index entry for Picasso, dark and light print on different pages.  It includes many tedious lists, some a whole page long, many digressions and trivial

details.  The author’s analysis of art is poor, and she vaguely says that the _Family of Saltimbanques _(1905) “seems to be in transit during a  break in their journey, a journey beyond

space and time, headed who knows where.”  She also pointlessly notes, “In fact, _Standing Female Nude_ (1910) is a _wonderful_ charcoal drawing, _vertical_, dynamic and suggestive, with its

_vertical_ lines” (italics mine).  She might have mentioned that Apollinaire’s “pear-shaped chin” comes from Honoré Daumier’s caricature of King Louis Philippe; and that in the erotic nudes

of Marie-Thérèse Walter, both eyes are on the same side of her face, like those of a sole or a flounder. Most important, the structure is weak in this broken-backed book.  Cohen-Solal covers

the most essential last 30 years of Picasso’s life (1944-73)—not included in John Richardson’s superb but unfinished biography—in only 75 brief fragmentary pages.  These include the FBI’s

file on Picasso, his refusal to accept his once long-sought French citizenship, his grand houses in the South of France, his experiments with local artisans on the Mediterranean coast, his

ceramics obscurely described as “_chamotée_ and painted with engobe.”  Anachronistically attempting to make him fit current foolish obsessions, she emphasizes his “pariah’s capacity for

_agenticity_, in a ‘diaspora of hope.’ ” The author also includes a useful series of chapters on relatively obscure but important figures in Picasso’s life.  In 1907 his art dealer

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler saw him languishing in wretched poverty and squalid surroundings—“a horrible fleapit”—but didn’t rescue the artist who later made him a millionaire.  His later

management of Picasso’s work was impeccably organised, and he “procured tranquility for his artists, saving them from the obligation to confront a public that had no understanding of their

newest works.”  Picasso, meanwhile, charmed his various dealers, manipulated them and forced them to compete for his favor.  When World War I broke out, the German Kahnweiler’s gallery was

forcibly closed and all his inventory of art—including 700 works by Picasso—was sequestered by the French government.  Unwilling to fight against France, he was forced into Swiss exile,

owing Picasso 20,000 francs he could not pay. The wealthy collector Leo Stein also failed to rescue Picasso from abject poverty.  When Picasso asked for an advance to buy art material, fuel

and food, Stein advised him to stop “painting horrors that nobody wants” and handed him a 20-franc coin as if he were a beggar.  The author reveals that Leo’s sister Gertrude Stein spoke

poor French and kept Picasso’s paintings covered in dust and grime.  She was a compulsive liar whose _Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ is filled with errors, deliberate inaccuracies and

blatant exaggerations.  Braque angrily exclaimed that she “understood nothing of what was happening around her. . . . She has never moved beyond the status of a tourist.” Cohen-Solal pauses

at certain moments to offer a useful summary.  Picasso’s early gate-openers in the labyrinth of Paris were the network of Catalans in Montmartre, the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume

Apollinaire, and the Steins.  In 1906 in the Spanish Pyrenees village of Gósols, he learned “the renunciation of physical resemblance and the ‘solution of the African mask.’ ” In our present

era of name-calling Picasso has been falsely accused of being a colonialist.  In fact, he had nothing to do with bringing and preserving the masks from French West Africa to the

anthropological Musée de l’homme in Paris.  He admired and was inspired by them, and included them in his major works: _Les demoiselles d’Avignon _and _Portrait of Gertrude Stein_. By

vitally connecting the masks to European art, he introduced them to a worldwide audience and greatly increased their prestige and value. The author doesn’t note that the solitude and sadness

of the Blue period (1901-04) went beyond the frustrated love and suicide in 1901 of his great friend Carles Casagemas.  Picasso was also influenced by three other traumatic deaths: his

sister Conchita died of diphtheria, aged seven, in 1895; his father died after a long illness in 1913; and his delicate lover Eva Gouel died of cancer in 1915.  In her last month on earth

she pitifully wrote, “I am much worse.  I often despair of getting better.  I don’t think I will ever see 1916.” These early losses propelled Picasso toward depicting cathartic violent

deaths in the bullfight and the suspicious fear of ever mentioning death.  His greatest and little-known painting on this recurrent theme is _Bullfight: Death of a Torero_ (1933, Picasso

Museum, Paris).  The horned and hairy black bull, and the toothy, red-tongued and twisted-necked white horse (with gored belly and dangling intestines) dominate the foreground and would soon

reappear in _Guernica_.  The horse’s bent legs are seen between those of the bull, whose thick muscular haunch appears unexpectedly between the horse’s flowing-mane neck and his white rump,

as both beasts trample the sand of the arena. Wearing a green-and-yellow _traje de luces_, the dead matador, his torn cape lying across his chest, is splayed cruciform on the back of the

head-down charging bull that has gored him.  His arms and legs are hopelessly spread, his head—with curly black hair and pallid skin—falls upside down between the bull and horse.  His morbid

right eye stares at the lively left eye of the bull whose muzzle just touches his head.  Bull, man and horse are portrayed in front of a massive blood-coloured red cloth that twists like an

ocean wave from the bottom to the high edge of the picture.  The curved top of the _plaza de toros_, with its red-tiled roof, white walls and oval entrances, decorated with six tiny

red-and-yellow Spanish flags, appears in the background, framing the bull beneath a blue and slightly cloudy sky.  The open-mouthed doomed horse shares the wounds and agony of the

open-mouthed matador.  In this richly coloured and dramatic spectacle of savage brutality, agony and death in the _corrida_, the bull reverses the traditional roles: he kills the killer.

Picasso’s quicksilver and charismatic character appears in fascinating ways.  He had master-slave relations with his old Catalan friend and factotum Jaime Sabartés.  His mind and art moved

with such dazzling speed that all his friends raced to keep up with him.  Leo Stein recalled that when Picasso looked at a print or drawing, “I was surprised that anything was left on the

paper, so absorbing was his gaze.”  During a walk in the forest he picked up two sticks and instantly turned them into a sculpture.  On the beach he drew a witty and magical face on a

woman’s knee, which smiled when she straightened her leg.  Picasso transformed reality and imposed his startling vision on the world. Jeffrey Meyers, RSL, has published _Painting and the

Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life _and _Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real._  His book on his writer-friend James Salter will be

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