 |
The art of Picasso has never ceased to be Spanish, as the art of Van Gogh never departed from its Dutch spirit. Yet, Picasso is inseparable from the School of Paris; the artistic atmosphere of France has always been a necessity to him, and he has never attempted to deny it. Like Van Gogh, he reared himself on French art and took it as his springboard for his own individual expression. And Picasso is also connected with French painting by the influence he exerted upon it. It seems, therefore, legitimate to dwell briefly on the most outstanding works by Picasso assembled by the meritorious efforts of Shchukin and Morosov at the beginning of 20th century.
It was in 1908 that Matisse introduced Shchukin to Picasso. The two artists had met two years before, in the house of Leo and Gertrude Stein, in the rue de Fleurus. Matisse, twelve years his senior, did this great service to the young Spaniard, and no less signal a service to the Russian collections. Within six years Shchukin was to buy exactly fifty canvasses by Picasso. He was followed by Morosov who bought three.
The works date from the years 1900 to 1912: twelve years in the course of which Picasso's own art, and, following him, world art underwent a radical transformation such as historyof course, within the limits of our present information -- had not recorded.
Picasso came to Paris for the first time at the end of October 1900, very well informed about French art, having frequented in Barcelona a circle of artists who were enthusiasts of the Impressionists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Forain. He gravitated toward the intellectual orbit of the Spanish colony. He took up the subjects of Ramon Casas, an older, already Parisianized painter, whose influence on Picasso dates from the years in Barcelona. He painted cabaret or music-hall scenes in a naturalistic spirit. Embrace (1900; in Moscow) is an excellent example.
Picasso's color is at that time rich and subdued, the stroke Impressionist, the drawing sinuous; one discerns at times points of similarity with Bonnard and Vuillard. But his personal, very Spanish temperament is already asserting itself in an accent of incisive satire which has nothing in common with the ironical smile of the French draftsmen and painters. Not for nothing is he called in Paris the "little Goya." His restless lyricism makes him akin to the Van Gogh of the Parisian period.
 During his second stay in Paris, in 1901, there appears in Picasso's art the first considerable change: he moves away from the purely visual appearances of nature to interpret them by a sustained stylization, in a more expressive manner. He develops in this direction under the influence of Gauguin, and of the Synthetists, in particular of Bernard, and Maurice Denis. The Harlequin and His Companion and the Absinthe Drinker are treated in a cloisonné' manner and strongly deformed, their color is flat and decorative; an effect of strangeness is the artists's prime concern. The essential traits of Picasso can already be discerned: a theatrical sense of life and a quite exceptional boldness in the handling of artistic means. Zurbaran and Goya also created forms which transposed into unreality the most minutely observed spectacles. In these two pictures the artistic language is not entirely invented; but it serves admirably the instinct of the monstrous that is proper to Picasso.Treated by Degas or by Lautrec this underworld of the cafés of Montmartre would have preserved a trace of humanity, its professional deformations would merely have occasioned an artistic exploration mingling cruelty with tenderness. Picasso horrifies us in front of these vampires and these ghouls of a feline suppleness lurking in the midst of the city, impassive in the cages to which society has relegated them.
This literary tone, somewhat Baudelairian, is the prelude to a sentimental phase in Picasso's art. In constant touch, in spite of his Parisian sojourns, with Catalan intellectual circles, immersed in a generous confusion made up of Pre-Raphaelite, humanitarian, and revolutionary ideas, Picasso takes to painting men in destitution and distress.
The Synthetist arabesque changes into a somewhat precious linearism, the proportions lengthen, the gestures become slow and sinuous, the gaze grows heavy with a profound sadness. At the same time the color takes on an intellectual character, its sensual charms are discarded, it is now no more than a monochrome of nocturnal blue (Old Jew, 1903).
The monochrome of the "blue period" has not, so far, been satisfactorily explained. It is not even certain whether it began in Paris toward the end of 1901 or some time later in Barcelona. Be this as it may, two things are certain: neither in Paris nor in Barcelona was there a lack of examples of either these emotional themes or these reduced tone scales. In Paris, Puvis de Chavannes had opened the way, as early as 1881, with his Poor Fisherman; Maurice Denis had produced numerous languid Maternities; Carrière had formulated his "visionary realism" while pouring out tender effluviae in gray; Cézanne's paintings in which blue was the dominant, were being admired, and Matisse, a year before Picasso, produced surprising blue nudes.
In Barcelona, painters with strong French Symbolist affiliations, all of them friends of Picasso and his elders, a Sebastià' Junyent, the neurotic poet of morphia addicts, an Isidre Nonell fascinated by madmen and bony silhouettes with chiseled profiles, were yielding to the attraction of a limited gamut while submitting to the prestige of Carrière and of Whistler's "symphonies" and "nocturnes." It is clear, then, that such paintings were "in the air." But it is no less clear that Picasso's version was a personal and distinctly Spanish one. No doubt, some of the blue compositions betray memories of Gauguin, as, for instance, these large upright figures standing against a background of sea.
But their fundamental conception is closely related to various forms of Spanish Mannerism, to Greco, Morales, to the art of fourteenth-century sculptured Christs. The male nude in Life ( 1903; Cleveland Museum) betrays memories of Gothic Last Judgments, the legs of the Old Jew obey the medieval canon. Strange pictures these, at once irritating and fascinating, full of theatrical ragamuffins, of lunar twilight and of rarified air, yet impressing themselves on the mind by an exceptionally pronounced style.
|
