Picasso

I’m not Pablo Picasso’s greatest admirer and some years back I went along to the National Gallery’s epic Picasso exhibition armed with my usual misgivings about the nature of Pablo Picasso’s so-called ‘genius’.

Whilst I hadn’t previously seen many of Picasso’s paintings in the buff, the ones I did make efforts to view, including Guernica, didn’t exactly scorch the depths of my being. Anyhow, Picasso: Challenging the Past was a once in a lifetime opportunity and for that reason was not to be missed.

It is a cliché that Picasso was one of the (if not THE) most influential artists of the 20th century. But how you see his influence on the world of art depends on your understanding of what the true essence, purpose and pinnacle of art actually is.
For the sake of my own simple mind, I sometimes imagine art through the ages as being one long tapestry-ride through time, on which the (varying shades of) genius of each generation has left its indelible mark.

When we get to the beginning of the last century, much of the tapestry starts to get cloudy, as seen in Claude Monet’s ‘Water-Lillies’ in Tate Modern. Brush strokes then fragment, as isms and ists spring up like ‘toadstools after a rain’, and art’s tapestry is blurred by murky footnotes and textual spin of ‘the painted word’.

Judging purely from Picasso’s National exhibition, Ol’ Dark Eyes was quick to seize upon deconstruction and what unfolded through the six rooms of the National’s exhibition was less like a painter eagerly ‘responding’ to the past’s rich tapestry, as one ripping out the threads and re-spinning them to suit his own ends. And whilst the styles may flutter, the hub of the work on the walls was unchanging.

Two defining facets of genius are these:
Firstly, that it rarely (if ever) comes via a committee or Inquisition’s approval, and:

Secondly, that compromise makes an uneasy bedfellow.
As a consequence, true genius is rarely seduced by the cult of mediocrity and the associated game of numbers. Indeed, owing to its nature, genius cannot join the club or submit to the straight jacket of mediocrity, because white heat is necessary to scorch out impurities and mediocrity cannot survive in temperatures where the soul of genius is forged.
So, for the Revolution of the Mediocritat to succeed in art, the ‘liberation from formal convention’ had to be affected before abstract tyrants could enforce a truer ‘liberation from talent, belief and skill’.

Once these obstacles (rules, conventions, prerequisite’s: call them what you will) were shifted, the void (is) was (and always will be) filled by those who were both attuned to the possibilities and had the guile to both shape and profit from them.
This isn’t to say that the shift away from art’s old school arbitrators wasn’t a passionate, heartfelt revolution for some, and that many Gimmickists were not sincere in their efforts to exhibit without prejudice and (un)invent the colour wheel.
But as in every revolution, one power class merely makes way for another: pinchbeck Machiavellis sidle through in the slipstream of front-line soldiers, then start shaping a new salon in their own favour.

Wittingly or not, art was freed from many of the underlying principles of excellence and, as in the laissez faire Friedmanomics that will time-and-again bankrupt our finances, a kind of survival of the ugliest ensued, in which the rules were (and are) forever (re)written by those who plotted, networked and politicked their way to positions of power and influence.
Anyhow, by playing his role in the unraveling of art’s unending tapestry, Picasso, arguably more than any other painter, made it possible to chuck up a major wall-filler in a minor window of opportunity. And in purveying novelty-over-skill and celebrity-over-substance, crazy-paved the way for Warhol and cultural undertakers Hirst, Emin & Price to profit from the burying of art’s dead.
I mean, why waste years on one masterpiece when you can reinvent the wheels of art industry and piece together three-score-and-ten major minors in the time it takes real masters to master one masterpiece?
What a position to have engineered (or accepted)!
What power!

It must be quite a high for a painter to know that whatever they threw up onto canvas, it would sell for buckets of money. In a way, you can’t blame Picasso for adding weight to the ‘school’ that allowed painters to pass a ‘masterpiece’ between toilets, and he doubtless would’ve rattled off a few saleable gems in the time it has taken to wrestle this (albeit trifling) collection of impressions and expressive distortions into some kind of coherent whole.
Not stupid, the proud old bull. Unless you seek value beyond coinage and worth beyond fame.

Whether Picasso merely rode the first waves of fashion art, or whether he drove them like the moon and the wind, is, like most things Pablovian, up for debate. But we never find out the depth of the skill and talent that lay within, because the ever-changing needs of fashion demoted talent and skill to a minor part of the frame. What remained was novelty and the saleable fashions of the hour.

You’ll be aware by now that, for the sake of brevity, I’m piling high the metaphors and flinging them cheap. But I sincerely believe that the highest-flying art obliterates barriers, and can transport the willing spirit of even the lowliest spectator to the essence of the spectacle.

It goes without saying that such a feat is not achievable by merely throwing paint at a canvas and parcelling it up in the pretentious, sub-prime gobshite that adorns the walls of every Turner Prize.
On the contrary, great work is given a better life by the willingness of the artist to surrender his skills to the subject, and the soul of a skilled work grows in direct relation to the artist’s subordination of his talents to the spirit of something greater than ego or mere design.

Regardless of whether the subject is inside or outside the artist’s head, or born of reality or untamed imagination, it is a basic requirement that (s)he at least surrender to the creative process. And if, within that act of surrender, you are caught by a flame that transports you above your baser interests, then magic can happen and the page or canvas can take on varying shades and degrees of fullness.
However, with Picasso’s work I always feel the opposite has happened and that his subjects are merely pawns, which are sacrificed for the greater good of King Pablo. Yes, Picasso seems incapable of giving himself to the subject and I couldn’t find one picture in the National Gallery’s bygone Picasso exhibition that bore witness to more than the man’s ego.

An example of this difference was provided by Picasso’s ‘Child with a Dove’, which I saw at the Scottish National Gallery some years back, where it was made to look lifeless and dull by the company it had been forced to keep, not least amongst which was A Portrait of Joseph Crawhall by Edward Arthur Walton.

This unassuming painting is an absolute jewel, and a wonderful demonstration of an artist both at home with his gift and willing to offer it up to another, as ‘a portrait of J.C the Impressionist by A.E.W the Realist’ (the words Walton inscribed on the canvas).

Another painting I’ve seen sharing wall-space with Picasso is Jules Bastien-Lepage’s ‘Pas Meche’, in which The Barge Boy has been given a value beyond coinage as he stares us out down the years.
‘What you looking at?’ the boy may well be asking.

You, my otherwise unknown friend, for the gift of life you still bring to the canvas because the gift of another was offered up on your behalf.

Each of these paintings has the power to humble the viewer – certainly this viewer – with the greatness of the seemingly insignificant, because the artist does justice to the subject because the subject is given preference.
Great work tends to ennoble a subject worthy of the effort, and through a selfless transfusion of artistic juices, the work can achieve a life of its own.

But whatever moves the artist moves the paint:- Picasso is the centre of his (kn)own universe and, as a consequence, he only bestows his greatness upon the subject in suitably recognizable strokes.

And this contra flow enacts a kind of disembowelment of the human spirit, before Pablo embalms the carcass in the shallowness of lesser juices.

At the bottom of the stairs to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, a huge photographic image of Pablo towered above the entrance for the duration of the National Gallery Picasso exhibition. This paparazzo-style photo was snatched at a St Tropez’s cafe in 1965 and, in both size and tone, the image affirms that this is the age of celebrity-worship and at no point of the Picasso exhibition did this feeling abate.

Picasso’s paintings, like the man, have achieved a celebrity of their own, and as fame-by-association is at epidemic levels, it is now enough merely to have been to an exhibition: coherent opinions and dissenting viewpoints are neither encouraged nor required.

Many visitors to exhibitions are immersing themselves in the essence of art celebrity and the value of currency, not searching scrabbled faces for meaning nor seeking love in the mauling strokes with which Picasso splayed his women.

Las Meninas is testament to his (belief in his own) greatness and his so-called ‘combative encounter’ with Velasquez’s masterpiece provided more than 50 canvasses.

The fact that Picasso regurgitated 50 variations of Las Meninas in 4 months, which would make one ‘masterpiece’ every two or three days, tells you quite a lot about the man and his shifty methods. The development of the original idea apart, I wonder how many variations Diego could’ve knocked out in four months? Not many…unless he hijacked some passing bandwagon that conveniently relieved him of paying life duties on the gift of genius, thus liberating him from having to render his big idea with dizzying skill and talent.

In Las Meninas Picasso enforces a Gimmickist format, turning true brilliance into a dyslexic interpretation of ‘Where’s Prince Wally?’ for bored Spanish Royals. But such is the success of Pablo Inc., and the parrots (‘Pretty Polly….Picasso’s a genius… Picasso’s a genius…’) who heap meaning onto strokes, utterances and shrewd silences, that learned donkeys nod on our behalf and we mutely accept their interpretation of another masterpiece which strives, in spite of the spin, to be anything but.

And whereas Shakespeare can be forgiven by posterity for ‘stealing’ good ideas, because he rendered them timeless (by making them more than they otherwise could’ve been), Picasso’s ego renders the ideas of his betters lifeless and soulless. I found myself wondering what Diego would make of Picasso’s ‘expressive distortions’ of his original masterpiece?
Would he rush off to the nearest ‘Purveyor Parrot of Orthodoxy’ to brush up on the latest vague and meaningless art-speak, so he may better understand the working of this re-worked re-working (of a previous re-working) of his masterpiece?
Nah. Methinks if he didn’t pee laughing he’d die crying. Or better still, paint over it, which would deny the marketplace some coin but the rest of humanity would lose nothing.

If, as was proclaimed by the film The Usual Suspects – after Le Figaro (after Baudelaire) – ‘the Devil’s greatest trick was to convince the world that he didn’t exist’, then Pablo’s most masterful slight of intention was getting so many to believe that this stuff actually matters.

And we are still in his thrall after all these years, incapable, it seems, of freeing ourselves from the ‘facets’ of spin in which both he and his entourage have enslaved us.
We go, we pay, we look. Yet little is seen other than that which has been drawn up to intimidate us by profiteers on the money-go-round, and for fear of looking unlearned and stupid, we stay fek-wit schtum.
Best to nod with the other donkeys and hope nobody asks us to explain our appreciation for the Emperor’s new clothes, when simple courage and honesty would speak volumes more.

My happily unlearned eye was caught on the way out by the upside-down woman at the foot of The Rape of the Sabine Women (after Poussin) and the horse towering above her looked like a proud, destructive Minotaur trampling her under foot.

I had a sudden urge to come to her aid by gripping the frame and spin things the right way up.
But in an upside down world, who would ever notice?
And in a world which requires art to be soulless, vision-less and meaningless, who the hell would care?