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| Picasso left countless paintings behind. But were they all his own work? |
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Commonly held as
representing the epitome of the modernist artist, Pablo Picasso is
widely seen as the supreme innovator, his mind firmly rooted in modern
life. By co-founding cubism, along with Georges Braque, the Spanish
master ensured his own place in the history of art.
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of a woman after Cranach the Younger, 1958, © Tate / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009
And yet what has
sometimes been overlooked, was Picasso’s debt to his artistic
predecessors. He made no secret of the debt he owed to Paul Cezanne in
the creation of Cubism. Throughout his long career the Malaga born
painter was an admirer and student of the work of the greats of the
past. Within the walls of the Louvre, he is known to have exclaimed
upon being confronted by a painting: “That bastard Delacroix, he’s
really good!” Picasso, with his enormous self-confidence viewed the
likes of Goya and Delacroix as a champion boxer would his ring rivals.
They were to be respected yet challenged in combat. The new exhibition
at the National Gallery London reveals just how instrumental this
trans-historical pictorial dialogue was in the formulation of his
artistic development.
During his formative years, Picasso, like his peers, was required by his tutors to copy masters like Velasquez and Raphael. He retained a tremendous admiration for Velasquez for the rest of his life. However, the artist’s enthusiasm for the work of El Greco was not shared by the art establishment of the early twentieth century. A series of Picasso drawings of El Greco portraits done in the Prado are clearly inscribed with the Malagan’s handwriting. ‘I Greco, I Greco, I Greco’, he declares, apparently in awe of his hero. Picasso is known to have seen El Greco’s 1586 masterpiece, 'The Burial of the Count of Orgaz' in Toledo and the spiraling arrangement of figures at the heart of the image evidently informed the composition of the mock alter-piece Picasso produced in 1901, in memory of his friend Casagemas. The deceased had committed suicide after a disastrous relationship and Picasso depicts his colour-drained corpse in the foreground. It is in the background however where the influence of El Greco becomes apparent. Here Casagemas ascends into a heaven on a white horse and yet this is a heaven frequented by naked prostitutes, one of whom thrusts herself towards him.
The artist’s time in Paris at the turn of the century exposed him to the rich artistic heritage of the French capital, then the epicentre of Western art. Drawn to the vibrant café culture,
Pablo Picasso, The Absinthe Drinker, 1901, © Photo courtesy of the owner / Succession Picasso / DACS 2008
Picasso with his astonishing visual memory, absorbed the myriad influences that surrounded him. Foremost among them were the posters of Henri Toulouse- Lautrec. The young Spaniard’s atmospheric canvases of the time bear witness to his liking for Toulouse-Lautrec’s highly stylized bar scenes. An example here can be seen in Picasso’s 1901 portrait of the critic Gustave Coquiot. The subject appears in evening dress with the reflection of a cabaret show acting as a backdrop, the writhing chorus girls bringing a lecherous smile to his lips. There are echoes of the self portraits of Munch and Gaugin, both of whom were influencing Picasso at the time.
The National Gallery exhibit reveals an artist in constant conversation with the men he saw as his competitors. In Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone (1938) on view in the first room, Picasso is clearly making a playful tribute to a Van Gogh self portrait from the late nineteenth century. Where in the original, the Dutchman had depicted himself with his customary intense expression; Picasso has placed an ice-cream in his hand which is being licked enthusiastically. There is something of Van Gogh’s application of paint and vibrant colour palette in Picasso’s tribute.
Picasso’s post-war work included several series of tremendously inventive paintings after other artists, including Poussin, Velasquez, Delacroix and Manet. Elsewhere in the exhibition, the seventeenth century Sevillian master, Diego Velasquez, receives the Picasso makeover treatment. The pride of the Prado Gallery, Las Meninas (1656) inspired 45 oil reworkings by
Pablo Picasso, Meninas after Velasquez, 1957, © Museu Picasso de Barcelona / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009
the father of cubism in 1957. Velasquez’s enigmatic depiction of the Spanish Royal family had become a Spanish National treasure long before Picasso’s time. In Las Meninas (after Velasquez) from 17 August, 1957, Picasso seizes each character in their courtly elegance and redefines them in his inimitable style, simplifying shapes, introducing a monotone colour scheme. The huge royal hunting dog at the foot of the painting is reduced in one canvas to a white dachshund, Picasso’s own pet. Faces are broken down to their basic elements: a horizontal line for a mouth, ovals for eyes, a suitably extravagant wave for a regal moustache. Picasso’s biographer and friend, John Richardson writes how these reworkings of Velasquez spurred Picasso to such crazed levels of creativity that for four months he seemed to leave his studio only for meals.
In re-evaluating such a masterpiece, Picasso was announcing to the world that he belonged in such esteemed company. Rather than being intimidated, he sought a dialogue between equals. Always aware of his own importance within the art world, the Spaniard regarded only Henri Matisse as a man worthy of his enduring respect in his own lifetime. At the death of his French rival and friend in 1954, Picasso paid his own tribute by embarking upon a series of
Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d'Alger, 1955, © Photo courtesy of Libby Howie / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009
reworkings of Eugene Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834). In the 20s, Matisse had produced a body of work on the same theme. Picasso evokes much of Matisse’s spirit in his canvases. They zing with the Frenchman’s colour, feel for composition and passion for the culture of Northern Africa. In one 1955 canvas, Women of Algiers (O) (after Delacroix), the artist’s lover at the time Jacqueline Roque, is recognizable to the left, casting her gaze at the viewer as a member of the harem. It has been suggested that Picasso was largely drawn to Delacroix’s painting due to the close resemblance one of the women within the canvas had for Roque.
Between 1960 and 1961, increasingly aware of the onset of old age, Picasso undertook a series of 27 studies based on Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. A print of Manet’s painting of 1863 has been displayed in this exhibition alongside the Picasso paintings inspired by it. The nineteenth century original had provoked a storm of controversy upon first being revealed to the public, apparently depicting two gentlemen picnicking in a wood in the company of a couple of prostitutes. Picasso appropriated the image by painting all of the figures naked. He gives the characters a Rubensesqe sensuality while simultaneously injecting them with an air of classical grandeur. They exist in a green setting that appears to consume the human forms. The viewer recalls many of Picasso’s Cubist compositions where the backgrounds merge into the main subject in defiance of painterly tradition.
Francisco de Goya was another Spanish master who captured the imagination of Picasso throughout his long life. Self-portrait with a Wig painted by him at the age of sixteen in 1897 recalls Goya’s 1800 portrait of King Charles IV of Spain. The young Picasso’s near haughty expression exudes self confidence in a manner that belies his tender years. He depicts himself in the dress of an eighteenth century aristocrat, a grey wig on his head, and a roughly rendered white cravat around his neck.
Some sixty years later, Picasso was still casting his eyes over Goya's work. By this time he was increasingly concerned with thoughts of his own legacy. Between 1964 and 1969 he produced a number of life studies of the female body that are indebted to Goya’s Naked Maja of 1797-1800 and can be seen at the current exhibition. Voluptuous, exaggerated and weighty, Large Nude (1964), Reclining Nude playing with a Cat (1964) and Reclining Nude (1969)
Pablo Picasso, Reclining Nude, 1969, © photo Orlando Faria 2008 / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009
display all the hallmarks of Picasso women and much of the artist’s humour. The nude in Reclining Nude playing with a Cat dangles a cherry towards a black cat at her feet with obvious sexual overtones. Each figure lies seductively on a sheet mirroring Goya's flirtatious Maja. The aggression displayed by the artist here in his engagement with the female nude can be said to derive from his fear of impotence, both sexual and artistic.
For Picasso, the concept of division between old and modern art was a fallacy. Egyptian art was to him as modern as anything of his time. He spoke of how standing at his easel, he felt the eyes of all other artists, both realist and abstract, alive and dead, peering over his shoulder. He kept innumerable postcards of master works and frequently projected slides of these paintings onto the walls of his studio at Mougins. Picasso saw the art of the past as a vast resource to be plundered, deconstructed and reshaped. ‘If there’s something to be stolen, I steal it’, he once asserted. Rather than imitating the styles of the masters, he preferred to draw on their composition and balance. In his most memorable monotonal reworking of Las Meninas, the figure of Velasquez to the left of the painting towers over the others behind a vast canvas. Picasso is emphasizing the proud bearing of the sixteenth century court painter.
Throughout his career, the man widely acknowledged as the twentieth century’s
Pablo Picasso, The Artist in front of his Canvas, 1938 © RMN / Gérard Blot / Succession Picasso /DACS 2009
greatest painter enjoyed placing himself in his work, his identity disguised. A particularly memorable example appears in this show, Seated Musketeer with a Sword (1969). Painted four years before the artist’s death, the proud Musketeer of the title fights for our attention with the blue feather sprouting from his black hat and bright red cape. It is as though Picasso is asserting his own cavalier attitude to the inevitability of his own demise. Musketeers were a re-occurring theme in his work and represent the Spaniard at various times in his life. In 1965 the artist underwent surgery and on his return to the South of France he had re-read Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Three Musketeers and turned to Rembrandt for inspiration. In Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Saskia the Dutch master depicts himself as a flamboyant cavalier alongside his wife. He shared Picasso’s liking for inserting himself into his work. They also had a common feeling of isolation and a sense of being misunderstood in old age.
Much has been made in the British press of the fact that this exhibition is being held at the National Gallery, a cathedral of tradition. There is something refreshing however about Picasso’s presence in such close proximity to the old masters. Thirty six years after his death, the Spaniard’s extraordinary lifetime of creativity ensures that the artists he spoke of peering over his shoulder will be undoubtedly intrigued.
PICASSO: CHALLENGING THE PAST
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON : runs through June 7 2009
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