Was Picasso a faux communist?
The famed artist’s decision to join the Communist Party was a puzzling one for several reasons.
There are not many artists who can be said to have epitomised the spirit and the art of their time. Many years ago, the Louvre had an exhibition titled Le Siècle de Rubens (1977-78), plausible because although Rubens does not sum up every aspect of Baroque painting and is also highly individual, he illustrates more dimensions of the movement, from style to patronage, than any other contemporary.
In the same way, the French title of the exhibition shown in Melbourne as The Picasso Century is Le Siècle de Picasso. Once again, although Picasso cannot be said to sum up all the multifarious art movements of the 20th century, he remains the only giant who bestrode the whole period, and compared to him most other candidates appear as ephemeral or limited.
One reason for Picasso’s pre-eminence, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, is that he embodies more clearly than anyone else the dominantly masculine or yang spirit of modernism: obsessed with innovation, experimentation and dreams of revolution, while despising tradition, convention and an evolutionary development of style.
The most famous Guerrilla Girls poster (1989) complained about how many female nudes were in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and how few women artists. What most people overlook is that the poster refers explicitly to the modern collections; they would, in fact, have found fewer female nudes – certainly fewer examples of the nude as quasi-genre – and more female artists in the 18th century.
The other reason is clear from the exhibition itself. Picasso simply outshines the other artists who have here been selected as his contemporaries. Almost the only ones who really stand out as strong or distinct personalities, or even as memorable when you think back to what you have seen, are Matisse, Derain and, interestingly, Pierre Bonnard, whose work – with its much more feminine sensibility – is to be the subject of a big exhibition at the NGV next year.
The contrast with Georges Braque, with whom Picasso developed the style of analytical cubism, is the most instructive of all. He and Braque were impressed by the posthumous exhibition of Cezanne’s painting in 1907, and each painted early pictures in which they took the little cubic houses that Cezanne used like visual leitmotifs in his landscapes, and made them the main focus of the composition.
They both seem equally interested in the way that Cezanne loosens the rules of perspectival vision but simultaneously tightens those of pictorial geometry, but Picasso’s early work suggests a deeper intuition of what is at stake – bearing in mind, of course, that none of this is led by theory. Like perspective itself, it is a kind of concrete thinking that articulates itself through the representation of the world: it neither begins with ideas nor is capable of being summarised in or replaced by any kind of verbal paraphrase.
Braque is at his best here in Fruit Dish, Bottle and Glass (1912), a fine example of the cubist still life, with hints of recognisable shapes – a bunch of grapes, a few words from the title of a newspaper – all rendered in the nearly monochrome palette of warm brown and cool grey. The play of verticals, especially, and the tension between flatness and glimpses of space are all effective, especially from relatively close quarters.
From a distance, however, Braque’s picture doesn’t make the kind of complete visual shape that Picasso achieves in a smaller adjacent picture, the still life Qui, of the same year. And in the works that take formal reduction even further, Braque seems to lose track of the aesthetic trajectory, while Picasso holds on to formal resolution and articulacy even as he approaches the limits of visual intelligibility.
Braque’s later work seems rather disoriented, too, as though he didn’t know how to come back from the cubist adventure. Meanwhile, many other painters are influenced by the disruptive experiment of cubism but don’t understand what to do with it.
The so-called salon cubists such as Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes turn it into a kind of neo-academic style that can be taught and which they do, in fact, teach to several young Australian women such as Dorrit Black in the years between the wars.
The most useful outcome of this neo-academic development of cubism was that it led to a rediscovery of concepts of formal composition within the picture plane whose ultimate roots went back to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages and even to antiquity. The best-known of these concepts is the golden ratio, 1:1.618. Only by dividing a given line at this point will the proportion of the short part to the long be equivalent to that of the long to the whole.
From this follows the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the short side to the long is equal to that of the long to the sum of both – but any rectangle can be divided at the golden ratio either horizontally or vertically. These ideas fascinated Le Corbusier, and were later the subject of Charles Bouleau’s fascinating book The Painter’s Secret Geometry, published in French and English in 1963, with a preface by Duchamp’s brother, Jacques Villon.
In Australia, Black later taught the rules of the golden section to Jeffrey Smart, who made constant use of them in his own work, as I tried to show in my book Jeffrey Smart: Unpublished Paintings 1940-2007. They also had an important influence on the work of Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers, whose linocuts and other prints, currently at Geelong Gallery, will be discussed in the next week or two.
Of the other artists included in the exhibition, Bonnard stands out for a gentle but powerful self-portrait in the mirror, from the same period as the self-portrait in the Art Gallery of NSW. Derain is not always sure of himself, but the nude in this exhibition asserts itself for its strong matter-of-factness and composure. And interestingly, Matisse is much more convincing in his odalisques than Picasso is in the variations on them he painted after Matisse’s death. He simply could not contemplate the female figure with the same dispassionate interest. After the war, Picasso joined the Communist Party, a puzzling decision for several reasons. In the first place, the great love affair of art with communism had been between the wars, when Andre Breton had decreed that Surrealists should join the Communist Party because they were both engaged in parallel forms of revolution, subjective and objective. Needless to say, this all ended in tears when the communists concluded that the Surrealists were just spoiled rich boys obsessed with sex.
The ugly side of communism had already shown itself during the Spanish Civil War and was even more brutal during the French Resistance, especially after the Liberation, when the communists took advantage of the chaos to liquidate many of their left-wing rivals. The horror of Stalin’s rule should have been plain by now for anyone who cared to look.
Moreover, Picasso had carried on working throughout the Nazi occupation of France; perhaps he felt that joining the French Communist Party when it was no longer dangerous to do so would help him avoid accusations of collaboration, but even this is hard to believe, since he never appeared to care what anyone else thought. He seems to have had little or no real interest in the cause. As Salvador Dali wittily said: “Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is an artist, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”
His one important work of the communist period is shown in a room full of large and very bad paintings by contemporary communist artists now deservedly forgotten. And this picture, Massacre in Korea, is undoubtedly one of his worst. It is obviously enough quoting Goya’s great The Third of May 1808 (1814), via Manet’s adaptation of the same subject in his Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867), but the work’s lack of real conviction is painfully evident. And, fundamentally, its implicit attempt to demonise the intervention of the US in Korea, when it was part of a mission mandated by the United Nations to resist the aggression of China in North Korea, is hollow and ideological.
Guernica was made in very different circumstances. The air raid carried out on the town of Guernica in 1937 by the Italian and German air forces – in support of General Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War – was of limited military consequence and casualties were between 170 and 300 people.
But its significance was alarming. It was not the first bombing of civilians in Europe, but it was far more effective than raids during World War I, when Germany had initiated the practice of bombing non-military targets, urban areas and civilians, and it was the harbinger of a new and horrifying kind of warfare that would fundamentally erase the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.
Picasso’s enormous mural painting arose from his anger and indignation at this action, but it is symbolic and allegorical rather than literal, and it can in no way be read as a straightforward message. On the contrary, Picasso works his way back from the actual event to the deeper, darker, perennial forces that lie behind aggression. He enters into the full experience of the horror, including the thrill of violence, as well as the terror, the alarm and the suffering. Central symbolic figures such as the bull and the horse are rich with mythical resonance and not simple coded references to platitudinous moral concepts.
This is even clearer when we look at the documentation of the successive stages of the composition in photographs taken by Dora Maar, and which are projected like an animation in what turns out to be one of the most interesting parts of the exhibition. Here we can see the tremendous energy the artist put into the elaboration of the picture.
Starting with an initial compositional idea and confining himself to the discipline of monochrome painting, Picasso nonetheless works and reworks the picture, changing figures from light to dark or dark to light and even moving some of the most powerful symbolic figures around until, as in a musical composition, each element finds its most effective place in the whole.
Guernica is a great work because it is political in its occasion but transcends the political and especially the occasional to achieve an epic scale and tragic moral grandeur.
Bad political art sets out to convey a message or illustrate an ideological point. Good art arising from a political event seeks to evoke the full human complexity and even ambiguity of the occasion. There is, again, an intoxication as well as an unspeakable horror in the reality of violence and death that cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas of judgment and condemnation.
The Picasso Century, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, until October 9.
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