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Today marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
The British art historian John Berger once said that if we want to fully understand Picasso's life and work, we must see the spirit behind his genius myth. This "hidden spirit" is revealed in a passage that Picasso himself said:
"What matters is not what the artist does, but what he is. If Cézanne (the French Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cézanne) lived and thought like Branshaw (the Parisian painter, Jacque-Émile Blanche), or if his apples were ten times more beautiful, they would never have aroused any interest in me. What attracts us strongly is Cézanne's anxiety! This is Cézanne's revelation; and the suffering of Van Gogh (the Dutch post-impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh), which is the real drama of mankind. The rest is a deceptive business. ”
John Berger pointed out that for Picasso, the spirit of creation was supreme, and specific works were merely incidental beliefs. This belief made him happy to actively create his own myth of genius, to "work enchantedly", and to make everyone around him serve his artistic needs. Picasso's genius and the state of eternal youth that genius must maintain are largely acted out, which, like his artwork, is a true lie.
The American writer Arianna Huffington points out that in his later years, Picasso began to fear death. As he ages, his destructive nature is revealed. In life, Picasso played both a bullfighter and a terrible bull, bringing misfortune to those around him. It seems that his myth of genius is about to be "shattered". But until the end of his life, in order to maintain this genius myth, he did not hesitate to close the door and insist on his work continuously, trying to prove that his genius myth did not "end" by continuous work.
<h3>01 Creation Myth: The Mysterious Power of a Young Genius</h3>
140 years ago today, Picasso was born in the small city of Málaga in southern Spain. He was a gifted child whose painting standards soon surpassed that of his father, don José Ruiz Blasco, as a painter. In 1946, when Picasso participated in an exhibition of children's paintings sponsored by the British Parliament, he said: "As a child, I could never participate in this type of painting exhibition: when I was 12 years old, I painted the same as Raphael." ”
The fact that the genius child made Picasso feel that the study of painting was meaningless, and he refused to attribute his genius to learning and the role of reason, preferring instead to think that it stemmed from a mysterious force. It is said that when Picasso was 14 years old, Don José handed over the color palette and brush to his son and vowed that he would never paint again. In The Success or Failure of Picasso, John Berg argues that this Oedipal relationship, perhaps to dispel his artistic guilt of "killing his father," fueled Picasso's conviction of his mysterious power.
Berg shows that there is a credible side to this myth of genius, as evidenced by Picasso's painting career. As an artist, Picasso's art, apart from the consistent development of the Cubist period between 1907 and 1914, did not develop at all. Each of his groups of paintings has little to do with the paintings that precede and follow, which is extremely rare among artists. This incoherence is often seen as a testament to its exuberant creativity and the wonderful way of staying young, and this extraordinary, inexhaustible creativity stems from a natural mystical power.
The Spanish cultural tradition has precisely existed with such an image of mysterious power. Berger points out that it is precisely because of this that Picasso's spirit was quickly understood and recognized by the Spaniards compared to his paintings. American poet W. S. W. S. Merwin notes that in the colloquial language of Spanish gypsy men, this power and presence is called "duquende", or "duende" (translated as "Durand" or "demon"), "a figure with boundless magic, a singer and dancer who may be dominated by the gods". In October 1933, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca discussed "Creative Enchantment" in a lecture titled "Durand's Theory and Role". Lorca points out that unlike the classical spirit of the Enlightenment represented by the muse and the clarity of Renaissance humanism represented by the angels, Durand is a Spanish concept that embodies the essence of the Andalusians; Durand was born of hope and challenged death, and most spectacularly appears in the bloody bullring.
For Durand, the most important thing is the consciousness of death, Lorca wrote: "Durand will not appear if it does not see the possibility of death..." For human life, death is a wound that human beings cannot heal, and Durand who appears in the face of death makes art possible. Lorca says that the form that art takes is not the most important, but the roaring, almost hoarse spirit it derives from—a hand-to-hand battle with death, as we see in the bullring. In this fight, "Durand is scarred" but never gives up, and the man uses all his strength to be with Durand. In the challenge of death, human genius and originality are most fully demonstrated.
In Picasso, we can see this clearly. "Every painting I have my blood in it, and that's what my paintings mean," he once said. Picasso was a bullfighting fan, and his creations and lives were often compared to bullfighting by himself or others. In bullfighting activities, the sense of death is strong. It is also here that talents are expressed as the most youthful and energetic. The idea of bullfighting thus indirectly helped Picasso create his myth of genius.
Picasso's granddaughter Marina Picasso once recalled: "He, a small man of only one meter and six tall, like a dazzling bullfighter in a sand arena, he was concerned only with life and death, his sword— the paintbrush, his cloak —the canvas." ”
Picasso also described the scars from the gallbladder and prostate surgery in 1965 as follows: "Like the ones left by an accident on a bullring." Picasso was over eighty years old at the time, and it was surprising to find that he, like a young man, had immediately recovered from the threat of death. In the presence of outsiders who came to visit, Picasso was never willing to take off the mask of a matador, and he disguised himself as "vibrant as the dew of the morning." For Picasso, this perpetual youth scam was as real as his art, but the fact that he was aging and dying physically and mentally has tormented Picasso hidden behind the mask.
<h3>02 Myth Shattered: In his later years Picasso incarnated as the Destroyer</h3>
The elderly Picasso's creativity in painting gradually declined, but the work still occupied his whole body and mind. He painted faster and faster, and his paintings became more and more crazy and rough. The paintings multiplied at a rate of two a day, enclosing his work room. The unpainted white cloth became Picasso's shame, for which he refused to receive his hometown guests from Andalusia. John Berg believes that the theme of most of Picasso's paintings in his 70s and 90s is to represent women as sexual animals that are watched or imagined by others. Although Picasso always avoided openly associating specific women with his work, throughout his life, the female body has been the source of life for his creations. In The Real Picasso, Picasso's grandson, Olivier Vidmayer Picasso, said: "A woman is to Picasso what a paint is to a paintbrush: inseparable, indispensable, and life and death are at stake." In his later years, Picasso turned his creations into a blasphemy and curse on sex.
In 1968, from March to October, Picasso created a series of copperplate engravings. Havington records: "Some of these copperplate engravings depict scenes in brothels, and some depict Selistina, an old bustard based on Spanish tramp literature. In one painting, Raphael is copulating with Vernalena while painting vigorously in and around her in the air. Some of the paintings are full of voyeurs. Others are Picasso's self-portraits of him, one moment an elderly dwarf, the next a diminutive hillbilly, sometimes a king, sometimes a clown, and some in which he transforms into a pope, but in the blink of an eye, he wears the armor of a swordsman again. Havpington pointed out that critics at the time considered these vulgar, low-level paintings to be the collapse and shrinkage of Picasso's otherwise brilliant world stage.
In Picasso: The Creator and the Destroyer, Havington points out that in Picasso's life, this inner collapse and atrophy eventually evolved into the destruction of those around him. As one critic put it at the time, "He could perform bullfighting alone in a bullring." "In life, Picasso played both the bullfighter— the Durand who challenged death— and the terrible bull—the certain death. Eventually, Picasso became a combination of the two: Minotaur Minotto, a monster that created and destroyed, loved and hated, and was full of self-contradictions.
Picasso's "Minotaur" Minotto could no longer be subdued and defeated by young girls armed with candles and flowers, as in his 1935 work The Battle of Minotto, which brought misfortune to everyone, including himself. In a relationship with the French painter Francoise Gilot, Picasso became a monster outright and utterly. In 1954, Françoise, who had left Picasso, was furious when he told Picasso that she was getting married. Since he couldn't possess this woman, he'd rather destroy her than want her to be happy. Picasso made it clear that those close to Françoise would be Picasso's enemies. Françoise soon heard the news that the dealer had apologized to her for not being able to exhibit her work. After this, Jacqueline Roque volunteered to be Minotto's next victim. Haffington writes: "Jacqueline became Picasso's secretary, housekeeper, newspaper extractor, and man who saw the way he looked. Picasso became Jacqueline's instrument to summon the wind and rain. ”
Beyond that, Picasso was reluctant to see his children or grandchildren, nor to help them out of their predicament, or even to recognize their legal family status. Almost anyone who came knocking on the door, including his closest friends, was turned away by the elderly Picasso. In "My Grandpa Picasso", Marina records that her father, Paul Picasso, sometimes stood in front of Picasso's house for four or five hours in order to beg for living expenses.
<h3>03 Myths don't end there: transcend death through work</h3>
In his later years, Picasso was always afraid of others mentioning the word death in front of him, and rarely talked about death. "All he really cared about was death, but he didn't allow anyone to mention those two words in front of him," Hafenton said. "In his later years, people never talked to him about issues related to his health. Picasso believed that the best amulet against death was work, and he realized that his physical condition was deteriorating, but added: "I have to work... I had to paint. ”
In 1966, at the age of 85, Picasso had just broken free from the clutches of pneumonia and immediately picked up his paintbrush. He felt like the Sisyphus who had received divine punishment, rolling the boulders up the mountain endlessly, rolling down the boulders whenever they were about to reach the top. "There's never a day when the work will end," Picasso said, "and you can never say, 'I'm doing a good job, tomorrow is Sunday.'" As soon as you stop, it means you have to start all over again. You can throw a painting aside and say I'll never touch it again, but you can never draw the 'end'. Picasso's heart arose some doubts: "Painting, exhibitions - what is all this for?" ”
In Guernica: Picasso's Anger and Reflections on Human War, James Attlee, a freelance editor at the University of Chicago Press, points out that Picasso has always had a fear of "finishing" a work. "Only death can end something," Picasso once said to a photographer friend, "ending, realizing—don't these words all have a double meaning?" Terminating, ending, and at the same time executing, is it the last blow of mercy? The French philosopher François Jullien, in The Invisible Elephant, points out that this questioning of completeness is an essential feature of modern painting. Correspondingly, Picasso believed that "what matters is not what the artist does, but what he is". It didn't matter whether the boulder was pushed to the top of the mountain or not, the Sisyphus mask that was actively put on was what Picasso was interested in. Sisyphus attempts to complete his final creation with an unyielding challenge, like Durand who challenges death, only to find a clown hidden behind Sisyphus's mask.
In 1956, the French suspense documentary "The Secret of Picasso" revealed the "secret" of Picasso's painting creation. French film theorist André Bazin analyzed: "Only the process of painting art creation is a truly ornamental element, that is, a cinematic element, because in essence this is a temporal element. Picasso constantly changes the image in his paintings. In one painting, flowers become fish, fish become chickens, and chickens become human faces. Picasso shows people the transformation of painting and the process of conceiving "the embodiment of dreams" through photography, at the same time, he points out that "the painting has basically not changed, except for the appearance, the initial imagination is almost unchanged." The essence of this "unchanging" painting may be found in what Picasso said to the French novelist André Malraux: "There is a Chinese proverb that speaks to the best thing in painting: it should not imitate life, but should work as life." "The youth of the painter is the only thing that matters, and the painting is just a testament to it."
On the occasion of Picasso's 70th birthday in 1951, an op-ed in le Etude française published a birthday message from the French surrealist poet Poète Surréaliste, whom Picasso was hailed as "the youngest artist in the world.". The following year, Paul Elujah fell ill and died. Recalling Paul Arya, Picasso said somewhat darkly: "Yes, genius does not have to be full of many ideas, he should live in peace." The genius's face does not leave wrinkles. In his later years, Picasso began to fear death, and he was no longer the real bullfighter of the past, but became a pretend bullfighter. Whenever news of a friend's death came, he pretended not to care and said, "You shouldn't equate age with death." There is no connection between the two. "Picasso tried to transcend death, or avoid death, through his never-ending painting work.
Picasso died in 1972. He once commented on a painting he created: "Anything interesting in art happens at the beginning, and once you miss the beginning, you are already in the end." The same applies to Picasso's life, where the myth of his genius, whose eternal youth remains unencumbered until his death. Harvington writes that shortly before his death, Picasso, although tired of all that he had done to conceal his death, performed the play to the end. A year before Picasso's death, his self-portrait finally revealed the breath of death, and those bulging eyes might have seen the landscape of another world. We may not be able to say that Picasso's efforts to escape death through work in his later years were meaningless, or that it was just another way for him to challenge death—to overcome it by pretending to be oblivious. Death itself, on the other hand, became Picasso's final creation. The curtain was not lowered, but pulled up. As Lorca said, "The dead man in Spain, when he dies, lives more than the dead anywhere else..."
Resources:
John Berger: The Success or Failure of Picasso, translated by Lian Decheng, Guilin: Guangxi Normal Press, May 2007.
[West] Lorca: Death at Dawn: Selected Poems of Lorca, translated by Wang Jiaxin, Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, August 2016.
Marina Picasso: My Grandfather Picasso, translated by Liu Hengyong, CITIC Publishing House, July 2006.
James Attlee, Guernica: Reflections on Picasso's Anger and Human War, translated by Wu Yamin, Beijing: Yanshan Press, May 2020.
Genaviève Laporte: Teardrops on canvas, translated by Ji Tang, Triptych Bookstore, June 1992.
[English] Arthur M. I. Miller: "Einstein Picasso", translated by Fang Zaiqing and Wu Meihong, Shanghai: Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, August 2003.
Jariona Havvington: Picasso: The Creator and the Destroyer, translated by Chen Zimu, Jincheng Publishing House, January 2007.
François Julian, The Invisible Elephant: Or on the Non-Object of Painting, translated by Zhang Ying, Zhengzhou: Henan University Press, February 2017.
Picasso's Legacy: The Halo and Curse of the Heirs
https://www.jiemian.com/article/387678.html
The Picasso Secret in Bazin's Eyes: I don't look for it, I find it
https://www.sohu.com/a/306759980_99909221
Picasso: "Every painting I have my blood in it, that's what my paintings mean"
12. Why is Picasso so popular in Asia?
https://www.jiemian.com/article/2011569.html