Picasso’s Vollard Suite: disturbing, brutish, but not pornographic
Some of this show’s tragic scenes are like images of expiation, as if fate demands atonement for life’s joy and passion.
Hylas was a beautiful youth, the companion and, according to most sources, the beloved of Heracles, although like his father, Zeus, the hero was better known for his heterosexual than homosexual adventures. Early in the voyage of the Argo, Heracles sent Hylas off to find water, but as the boy leaned over a pool, the nymphs who dwelt there, charmed by his beauty, drew him down into the water, either drowning him or transforming him into their lover. The Argo departed, leaving the disconsolate Heracles, as Virgil and others recount, wandering vainly in search of the boy.
In 1896, John William Waterhouse painted his own vision of the scene, which is now in the Manchester City Gallery, in which the chastely draped Hylas, slightly older than implied in the myth, kneels beside a pool in which seven young girls, or rather seven versions of the same young girl, tenderly but without force cajole him into joining them. They are naked but largely covered by water and plants, and their expressions evoke a very Victorian mixture of tender yearning and dreamy absence.
Waterhouse’s composition speaks almost painfully of late-Victorian romanticism, with its unique combination of idealism, poignant desire and repression. Passion is evoked in the most modest and timid manner possible; but the enforced propriety of the Victorians, and its corollary of hypocrisy, imbues all such work with a certain falseness of tone. The femme fatale appears in more aggressive form in Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), in the National Gallery of Victoria; though again the predatory temptresses are represented with more restraint and more fidelity to Homer’s text than their overtly erotic interpretation in Draper’s 1909 painting of the same subject, with Odysseus writhing in his bonds like a Laocoon of sexual frustration.
A couple of months ago, Hylas fell into clutches far more dangerous than those of Waterhouse’s dreamy naiads: a feminist curator at the Manchester Art Gallery suddenly had an epiphany and realised that the painting was an outrage to public morality, or at least to acceptable representations of the female, and took it off the walls. After making herself the object of ridicule for a couple of weeks, she reinstated the picture with the lame excuse that the intervention had been intended to provoke debate.
The excuse was disingenuous because there is too much of a mood of intolerance in the air today to indulge in velleities of censorship. Late last year a morally outraged woman petitioned to have a Balthus painting of a young girl taken down from the Metropolitan Museum in New York; fortunately the Met stood its ground and rejected this demand. In Australia, Donald Friend’s paintings have been removed from exhibition, and we have seen the careers of actors and others destroyed by unsubstantiated accusations, or by the revision of a morally compromised past into a reassuring narrative of victimhood. One of these cases has just resulted in the suicide of an innocent woman.
If they could, the new moral guardians would no doubt love to put together an exemplary exhibition of all the wicked pictures, sculptures, books and films of the past, in which Balthus and Waterhouse would be joined by many more famous names. The only problem would be where to stop. But at least there is a ready-made title waiting for their gallery of the proscribed: Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art).
Waterhouse, of course, is an easy target, an artist little known today, a relatively minor figure with no great critical standing. It’s like bullies picking on a weak child in the playground. But if they were not such cowards the moral guardians might be more shocked by some of the giants of the 19th and 20th centuries — in art, in literature and in film. And no artist is more antithetical to the spinsterish puritanism of political correctness than Pablo Picasso. This is not to say that he is above criticism, either stylistically or in his moral vision. But, as in the case of Waterhouse, that criticism should take place within the museum, which, like the library, must remain a privileged and secure home for art, culture and learning.
Picasso was an astonishingly productive, indeed indefatigable, artist whose work is remarkably diverse and at times very uneven. But one of the most remarkable things that he produced was the series of etchings made in the mid and late 1930s currently on show at the Queensland Art Gallery, on loan from the National Gallery of Australia, which holds the complete set of 100 prints. Known as the Vollard Suite (it was made for Ambroise Vollard, who had represented the impressionists and post-impressionists), the suite of prints was meant to be swapped for a collection of impressionist and post-impressionist pictures from the dealer’s collection.
The exhibition includes a number of other prints by Picasso that anticipate or parallel the great series both in style and subject. The earliest are a series of etchings made in 1927 to illustrate Vollard’s edition (1931) of Balzac’s short story Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), originally published in 1831. This tale of an artist’s pursuit of impossible beauty had haunted Cezanne, fascinated Picasso, and was later made into the film La Belle Noiseuse (1991).
Other works include an illustration for Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (1934), a series of mythological subjects from an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Albert Skira(1931), and a minotaur made for the cover of the first edition of surrealist magazine Minotaure, of which 13 issues were published by Skira in 1933-39.
The Vollard series itself is diverse, with no single line of narrative, and yet it returns again and again to certain obsessive themes and motifs. All the compositions are variations on the human figure, and no part of Picasso’s oeuvre reminds us more forcibly of the artist’s profound and visceral relationship with the heritage of classical art. And yet, apart from the image of the minotaur and in spite of numerous formal recollections of classical myths, such as a figure of a girl on a horse who recalls the traditional pose of Europa on the bull, the subjects are not specific stories.
They are rather a series of variations on classical forms, and particularly on the theme of the sculptor and his model. This motif may have arisen from the images of the painter and his model made for Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, but Picasso evidently realised that the figure of the sculptor was visually more satisfying than that of the painter, and also allowed him to achieve some poetic distance from what would otherwise have seemed too closely self-referential a subject. Perhaps, equally importantly, the figure of the sculptor allowed him to adapt and elaborate on the forms and shapes of Greek classical sculpture.
The sculptor, his model, and the sculpture itself are motifs that are juggled in constantly varied permutations. Sometimes the sculptor is at work, sometimes at rest; parts of the composition may be more fully modelled, while others are left as a calligraphic play of line. Economy and density are juxtaposed, producing contrasts of dreamlike lightness and material solidity. Like a composer producing variations on a theme, there is a delight in the formal play of simple melody and of complex harmonies and counterpoints.
And there is at the same time an irresistible pleasure in making pictures, in conjuring up images out of nothing: in the print of a satyr approaching and uncovering a sleeping woman, there is an electric charge of energy in the powerful masculine body, taut and light, contrasted with the soft, heavy and nerveless mass of the sleeping woman. But there is also an instinctive pleasure in the details of mise-en-scene which make the nocturnal encounter vivid: the steps leading down to the garden, the moonlight streaming through the arch on the left.
Eroticism is a powerful theme throughout the series, appearing in both Apollonian and Dionysiac guises, to borrow Nietzsche’s terminology. The images of the sculptor and his model or muse are in the first mode, quiet and serene. Often he is shown resting, and she is lying quietly with her head in his lap, her expression embodying the stillness of ancient statues. The model is always ostensibly passive and yet, as with the female companions of the Hindu gods, we sense that her passive energy is the ultimate dark source of his bright virile activity.
In the Dionysiac mode there are several images of erotic encounters, and particularly a series of vivid images of rape, in which Picasso represents Marie-Therese Walter, his mistress during those years, being overpowered by a massively powerful male figure. These are rightly disturbing groups, with their juxtaposition of the brutish male and the yielding, ecstatic female. But they are in no way pornographic, much less attempts at the justification of sexual violation. What is particularly notable is the contrast between the facial expressions of the two, for if the woman is experiencing an irresistible rapture — a word etymologically cognate with rape — the hulking male figure seems almost absent, expressionless, not even looking at the woman, as though embodying an unconscious instinct.
In the end, these dark visions are like meditations on the masculine and feminine instincts in a hypothetically pure form, instincts that, in real men and women, are both present in different measures. But the most memorable image — both more emblematic and less explicit — that stands for the power of the male energy is the minotaur, who appears in many versions, but especially memorably in the etching that has often been used, as here, to stand for the whole series, Minotaure caressant une dormeuse (Minotaur caressing a sleeping woman), where the overwhelming sexual power of the monster is more vividly evoked by his unexpected gentleness.
Much of the series thus alternates between serene equilibrium and violent and ecstatic encounters between the artist’s ideal symbolic figures, but it ends with a tragic reflection on the limits of power and creative energy. In four of the last images the minotaur is old and blind, reaching out with a dramatic gesture and gazing sightlessly heavenward, while Marie-Therese has now become a little girl — curiously more alert as a child than as a mature woman — who guides the blind monster.
Above all, these tragic scenes are like images of expiation, as though fate demanded some atonement for the joy and passion of life. In classical Greek culture, too, tragedy represented the reality principle of humanism, and here it is impossible not to recognise the paradigm that Picasso is recalling: the blind minotaur led by a child is his variation on the theme of the blind Oedipus, led by his daughter Antigone, doing penance for sins committed unknowingly.
Picasso: Vollard Suite
Queensland Art Gallery. Until April 15.
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