Picasso: Tête-à-tête

When Picasso was a young painting student in Madrid, he was alarmed by the pressure within the academy to settle on a style and join a “school” of painting. He wrote to a friend in 1897, “I don’t believe in following any particular school, for all it leads to is mannerism and affectation in the painters who do it.”¹ It was a radical insight for the young artist, and marked the first inspired turn in a career that would produce the twistiest oeuvre of any painter in history.

The intuitive leap Picasso took was to adopt “no style” as his style. His natural talents and training gave him virtuosity in both mimicry and improvisation, so the young Picasso engaged in what scholars Yves-Alain Bois and Elizabeth Cowling have called a “metaphoric seeing-as”—creating wholly original compositions, but playing them in the key of Velázquez one day, El Greco the next, van Gogh the week after.² “What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else?” Picasso is reported to have asked his friend Hélène Parmelin. “What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch. . . . And it’s at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.”³ The essential element of Picasso’s lifelong practice, precisely what keeps his work both relevant and timeless, is his ability to stay fluid, in contradiction, always in restless anxiety and flirting with making a failure of it all.

As history has proved, the gambit was far from a failure. The success of this approach pushed Picasso never to rest on his laurels, never to stop mixing it up, constantly inventing new styles. “Basically I am probably a painter without style. . . .

I shift about too much, I move too often,” Picasso told André Verdet in 1963. “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed, I’m already elsewhere. I never stay in one place and that’s why I have no style.”⁴ This was evident in Picasso’s very first exhibition, a show of sixty-four paintings and an unknown number of drawings at Ambroise Vollard’s Paris gallery in 1901. In his review of that show, the critic Félicien Fagus wrote, “One can easily discern . . . numerous probable influences. . . . Each is fleeting, no sooner caught than dropped. . . .The danger for him lies in this very impetuousness, which could so easily lead to facile virtuosity and easy success.”⁵

Impetuous, yes; but the staggering complexity of Picasso’s oeuvre wasn’t achieved with ease. The truth is, a Picasso exhibition can often be mistaken for a group show—it can appear to be the output of a dozen different artists, rather than of the single prolific polymath that he was. The vastness of his oeuvre underlines the work, the Herculean effort, that it took for one human being to create. Picasso saw this vastness as something not to be tamed but to be exploited and celebrated.

Picasso insisted on choosing the works and arranging the installation of his first retrospective himself. In 1932, the Galerie Georges Petit, on the rue de Sèze, Paris, was old-fashioned, stuffy, déclassé, and long past its heyday. According to Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, though, the artist was thrilled with the venue because the gallery’s “Beaux-Arts look made the shock of the new all the more shocking.”⁶ Alongside several new paintings created expressly for the show, he secured loans from friends and dealers and included many works taken out of storage that had never been publicly exhibited. When he hung the show, he juxtaposed works of wildly different dates and styles so that they could “talk” to each other. “The mismatching was strategic: Picasso wanted his disparate oeuvre to be seen as an organic whole and not chopped up into arbitrary ‘periods’ by critics and academics, without his authorization,” Richardson writes. “He saw his work as an ongoing family, but members of the same family don’t always look identical.”⁷ It was a strategy that particularly struck Alfred H. Barr Jr., the young director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who annotated his photographs of Picasso’s installation to document this phenomenon. “Picasso chose to present his career as one marked by dramatic and irrational changes and extraordinary diversity,” Cowling states, “and as moving not in progressive, linear fashion, but to and fro and round and round, like memory.”⁸ This is how Picasso intended us to encounter his works—not separated by period or style but in conversation with each other.

Richardson liked to say that with anything one could state about Picasso that was absolutely true, the opposite was equally true. The unpindownable nature of his output also extends to how he spoke about his work. Much as he preferred the provisional, raw-plaster states of his sculptures to their bronze casts, seeing bronze as making them too formal, too set, too “museumy,” he disdained academic critics who set about “explaining” his art with stiff interpretations and concrete categories. A playful confounding of “explanation” is evident in his comments to his friend and publisher E. Tériade while he was in the process of hanging this 1932 retrospective, first published in L’Intransigeant and reproduced here in translation by Nicholas Huckle.

IN CONVERSATION WITH PICASSO: A FEW THOUGHTS FROM THE PAINTER AND THE MAN

This Thursday will see the opening of an exhibition bringing together more than two hundred paintings, works of sculpture, and engravings by Picasso.

The importance of this painter in the pictorial movement of the past thirty years is well known, as are his audacious experiments in the field of forms.

Picasso has had an impact not only through his artistic work but also through his sparkling intelligence and inventive wit. We include here just a few of his statements, the expression not just of an artist but also of a man.

We were fortunate enough to be able to speak with him as he witnessed his paintings being hung, and we were able to catch a few of his brilliant thoughts as they fell from his lips.

—E. Tériade

I visited the retrospective at the Salon the other day. This is what I noticed. A good painting in the midst of bad paintings becomes a bad painting. And a bad painting among good paintings ends up being a good one.

Someone asked me how I was going to organize this exhibition. I replied, “Badly.” For an exhibition, like a painting, well or badly “organized,” it all comes down to the same thing. What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists, as with even the most incompatible couples, things always work out.

How many times, when I was about to apply some blue, I realized I didn’t have any. So I took some red and put it down instead of the blue. The mind’s vanity.

Essentially, everything is tied to the self. It is a sun in the belly with a thousand rays. The rest is nothing. It is for that alone, for example, that [Henri] Matisse is Matisse. Because he carries this sun in his belly. And it is also because of this that from time to time something happens.

Painting is a way of keeping a diary.

For a painter at an exhibition who, like me today, sees some of his canvases coming back to him from far away, they seem like prodigal children, returning home clothed in gold.

One always makes paintings the way princes make their children: with shepherd girls. One never does a portrait of the Parthenon; one never paints a Louis XV fauteuil. One paints a shack in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, an old chair.

At bottom there is only love. Whatever it might be. They ought to put out painters’ eyes as they do goldfinches so that they can sing better.

One of the ugliest things in art is sincerity. It has always soiled the best works because it expresses obedience to everyone.

A friend of mine who is now writing a book about my sculptures begins it like this: “Picasso told me one day that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.” Naturally I was quite astonished, and I asked him, “Are you sure that it was me who found that out?”

When one starts from a portrait and seeks, by successive eliminations, the pure form, the most reduced and essential volume, one inevitably ends up with the egg. Likewise, starting from the egg and following the opposite path and goal, one reaches the portrait. But art, I believe, escapes this overly simplistic journey from one extreme to the other. Above all, you have to be able to stop in time.

The whole interest of art is in the beginning. After the beginning, it is already the end.

I don’t paint following nature, but in front of nature, with her.

Nothing can be done without solitude. I have created a solitude for myself that no one suspects. It is very hard to be alone today because we have watches. Have you ever seen a saint with a watch? And yet I have looked for one everywhere, even among the supposed patron saints of clockmakers. So, how happy we are right now, engaged in conversation! We might be able to stay like this for years and still find things to say! Ten years from now we would be still here, happy to be here, still talking . . .

Whereupon Picasso took out his watch, saying, “Goodbye, see you soon, I’m expected at lunch.”