The Success and Failure of Picasso Read Free Page B

wrote an essay on the new spirit of the poets.
    There is the material the poet has collected, the material the new spirit has revealed, and this material will form the basis of a truth the simplicity of which will be undeniable, and which will lead to great, very great things.
    The life-line runs through the work.
    But not for Picasso. Picasso is the exception. ‘It’s not what the artist does that counts but what he is.’
    We have here the first indication of Picasso’s historical ambiguity. He is the most famous painter in the world and his fame rests upon his modernity. He is the undisputed emperor of modern art. And yet in his attitude to art and to his own destiny as an artist there is a bias which is not in the least modern and which belongs more properly to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
    Furthermore there seems to be a connexion between this historical ambiguity and the nature and scale of his success. The popular myth of Picasso, supported by the evidence of his friends, is not in fact such a gross distortion of the truth as seen by Picasso. Picasso’s own Romantic belief in genius as a state of being lends itself to the myth. The working attitude of any of his great contemporaries, their temperamental treatment of themselves, would never have fed the myth with enough material. But with Picasso’s example it is only a few steps from genius as a state of being to the divinity of the demi-god.
    I don’t want to suggest that Picasso’s legendary character is simply the result of his own opinions about what it means to be an artist. He has an extremely powerful personality which provokes legends. Perhaps he is a little comparable in this respect with Napoleon. Certainly he has a similar power of attracting and holding allegiance. He is very seldom criticized by those who know him personally. What Picasso is, apart from what he does, is indeed remarkable – and perhaps all the more so for being indefinable. It is not how he speaks or acts that seems to be so memorable: it is his presence – the hint of what is going on inside the man.
    In recent years all accounts of Picasso as a personality have become absurd. He has surrounded himself with a court, and he is king. The effects of the consequent flattery and insulation have been devastating, not only on the judgement of all those who know him, but on his own work. A special kind of sickening poeticizing has been invented for the homages. ThusGeorges Besson wrote in 1952:
    I almost forgot to tell you – or have I told you already? – that this man, whose tastes are not extravagant, has a weakness for black diamonds. He owns two superb ones and he will never part with them. They weigh a good hundred carats each. He wears them where other people have eyes. It’s as I tell you. And I assure you that those women on whom these diamonds turn their fire are utterly bowled over.
    But before he had courtiers, those who wrote about Picasso found his eyes particularly remarkable.Fernande Olivier, describing how she first met him in 1904, wrote:
    Small, black, thick-set, restless, disquieting, with eyes dark, profound, piercing, strange, almost staring.
    His eyes [wrote Gertrude Stein, referring to about the same period] were more wonderful than even I remembered, so full and so brown, and his hands so dark and delicate and alert.
    In 1920, whenMaurice Raynal was disappointed with Picasso’s latest exhibition, he wrote: ‘Some of the stars in his eyes have gone out.’
    The eyes in the head become a symbol for the whole man.
    In the films about Picasso you can see his eyes for yourself. They reveal – or so it seems to me – the inordinate intensity of the man’s inner life and at the same time the solitariness of that life.
    Little by little we are being forced to consider the general nature, the trend of Picasso’s subjective experience. How to define this spirit which he himself values more than his work, which charges his presence, and which burns in