Nearly 50 years ago, London hosted a famously successful Picasso exhibition.
Breaking all records, almost half a million people flocked to see it, and
journalists regaled their readers with stories of the country gripped by
“Picassomania”, of Hollywood celebrities jostling with the crowds and the
royal family’s secret late-night visit.
But these lengthening queues snaked down Millbank outside the Tate Gallery,
not around Trafalgar Square, for, in 1960, few people would have dreamt of
introducing Picasso, the arch-modernist — arch-iconoclast, some said — into
the sanctum of the old masters. Now, by contrast, as the extent of his debt
to the art of the past is better understood, his occupation of the Sainsbury
Wing galleries seems both proper and inevitable.
The story of the “Louvre test” suggests Picasso would have been proud and
gratified, but also very nervous, at the prospect of exhibiting in the
National Gallery. The “test” took place in 1947, when the paintings he had
donated to the new Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris were stored
temporarily in the Louvre. Georges Salles, the director of the French
museums, offered to have them taken into the main galleries and placed
alongside whichever works Picasso chose. On the day, he was tense and
apprehensive: would his work hold up beside the great Spanish and French
masters he thought of as his ancestors? Initially silent, he gradually
gained confidence, finally exclaiming excitedly: “You see, it’s the same
thing! It’s the same thing!” This reaction is telling: what Picasso must
have wanted most was confirmation that his sense of affinity and equality
was justified, confirmation moreover that he had not, as his detractors
claimed, violated and endangered the great tradition, but reinvigorated it
through his resolute commitment to doing things his way.
Picasso never wrote about art or his intentions as an artist. Contemptuous of
intellectualism, whenever young artists started outlining their theories, he
would interrupt impatiently: “But say it with brushes and paint.”
Nevertheless, he sometimes agreed to be interviewed and permitted people he
trusted, such as his dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler and the journalist and
fellow communist Hélène Parmelin, to quote snatches of his conversation in
their texts about him. Numerous remarks he made about the old masters have
been reported, and what emerges from reading them en masse is that, like all
of us, Picasso was prone to change his mind, but also that such was his
sense of rivalry that he could not be cool or objective.
His typical style was pungently partisan and blunt: “That bastard”— he was
speaking of Delacroix — “he’s really good.” “With the Italians, the
slickness is revolting.” “People are always talking about the Renaissance —
but it’s really pathetic. I’ve been seeing some Tintorettos recently. It’s
nothing but cinema, cheap cinema.” “I’d give the whole of Italian painting
for Vermeer of Delft.” Unlike the futurists and dadaists, however, Picasso
never entertained brutal iconoclastic fantasies, and when in the right mood
he could be enraptured by Italian Renaissance art: “Michelangelo. . . I love
to get lost in his work as in a rich and powerful mountain. . . but Raphael
is sheer heaven: what serenity these lines possess, what power!” He was,
indeed, highly susceptible to ideal beauty in art, although he usually
fought this impulse and extolled the power of the coarsely truthful and ugly
instead: “It’s magnificent to invent new subjects. Take Van Gogh: potatoes,
those shapeless things! To have painted that, or a pair of old shoes! That’s
really something!”
How much time Picasso actually spent in museums that were on his doorstep and
how much travelling he undertook to see those that were not remain
unanswered questions. He probably did more of both than he cared to admit:
he later pretended,for instance, not to have visited the Vatican on his
first trip to Italy in 1917, but his companions at the time tell a different
story. Museum-lover or not, Picasso possessed a phenomenal visual memory and
voracious visual appetite, and the combination provided him with endless
stimulus because, as he blithely put it, “I have a horror of copying myself.
But when I am shown a portfolio of old drawings, for instance, I have no
qualms about taking anything I want from them.” Teetering stacks of books
and catalogues accumulated in his various homes, supplemented by a mass of
photographs and postcards, none ever thrown away.
In old age, when he left his country house outside Mougins with the greatest
reluctance, Picasso immersed himself in masterpieces such as Poussin’s
Massacre of the Innocents (1630-1), Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) and a Van
Gogh Self Portrait (1889) by projecting slides blown up to a gigantic scale
onto his studio wall. And he had his own original old-master pictures to
draw upon. They are, admittedly, of mixed quality, but they provide further
evidence of Picasso’s allegiance to the art of the past, and he was proud of
paintings such as his two large Cézanne landscapes and The Procession of the
Fatted Ox (The Wine Feast), then attributed to the Le Nain brothers, which
he acquired in 1957.
Picasso’s musée imaginaire was, in short, richly stocked, and, as he grew
older, he spoke of being accompanied by other artists whenever he entered
his studio: “I have a feeling that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco
and the rest, as well as all the modern painters, the good and the bad, the
abstract and the non-abstract, are all standing behind me watching me at
work.” When he was occupied with a suite of variations inspired by a
particular picture, this sensation was acute: the artist in question never
left his side, he claimed, and he imagined debates and arguments breaking
out with the other painters who dropped by unbidden to check out the latest
developments. For Picasso, all these “dead” artists from different eras or
generations were alive, and indeed would never die, and were driven by
fundamentally the same imperatives as he was. He had said as much in 1923,
in an interview with the artist and dealer Marius de Zayas, when defending
his controversial practice of working simultaneously in cubist and
naturalist styles: “Repeatedly, I am asked to explain how my painting
evolved. To me, there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot
live always in the present, it must not be considered at all. The art of the
Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is
not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”
Picasso’s searching dialogue with the old masters is sometimes described as
the defining feature of the so-called “Jacqueline period” (after Jacqueline
Roque, his companion from 1954 onwards and, eventually, his second wife).
The dialogue is regarded as a sign of increased anxiety about his place
within the history of art and, as he entered his final decade, of the
retrospection and nostalgia of an old man anticipating death and haunted by
a kaleidoscope of memories. Censorious critics at the time accused him of
running out of ideas and living parasitically on the old masters out of
desperation. In fact, the dialogue was a constant throughout Picasso’s
career, and his attitude to his sources in his youth set the pattern for his
attitude in maturity and old age.
Picasso’s apprenticeship had involved making copies of canonical sculptures
and paintings and planning multifigure compositions in which he deployed
what he had learnt through copying. He could be very dutiful in executing
both these tasks, but precociously self-confident; a teenage Picasso also
experimented with “copies” that were far from faithful. In 1896, he was commissioned
by nuns in a convent in Barcelona to copy two altarpieces by Murillo, but,
he recalled, “the idea bored me, so I copied them up to a point, then
rearranged things according to my own ideas”. Murillo was the darling of all
pious Spaniards of his father’s generation, but Picasso got away with it.
Artists he venerated were treated with similar apparent nonchalance,
however. In 1901, he subverted The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586-8) by
El Greco in a mock altarpiece dedicated to the memory of his friend Carles
Casagemas, who had committed suicide following a disastrous love affair. In
Picasso’s sacrilegious version, the heavens are populated by naked whores,
one of whom thrusts herself at the rigid form of Casagemas, who, in monkish
black, is being borne aloft on a white horse. Admiration did not preclude
travesty. Nor did mourning for one of his closest friends preclude black
humour.
The elderly Picasso loved posturing in joke-shop disguises in front of
photographers. Self-dramatisation was another trait he developed in boyhood,
masquerading in one early self-portrait as a Mozartian Don Juan in jabot and
powdered wig. Now and then his absorptive relationship with the old masters
also took the form of explicit identification. At the height of his youthful
obsession with El Greco, when his doodles frequently included gaunt,
soulful, bearded men in ruffs, he painted a thorough-going pastiche, a sheet
of rapid sketches scattered with heads of this type is inscribed, alongside
a self-portrait, “Yo El Greco, yo Greco, Greco” (“I am El Greco, I am Greco,
Greco”). Another sketch of Spanish types done in the winter of 1899-1900,
when he was making thumbnail copies of the bullfight imagery of Goya, is
signed “Goya”. An intriguing late instance of this phenomenon is the roughly
executed painting of a bearded man in 17th-century costume inscribed on the
reverse, “Domenico Theotocopoulos van Rijn da Silva”. We can take this to
mean that the picture represents El Greco, Rembrandt and Velazquez rolled
into one, and /or that it is a homage to all three, and /or that it is by
all three. However one interprets the inscription, it tells us who was in
the studio with Picasso at the time, and on the front he added the date of
execution in giant numbers, “28.3.67”, to indicate that all three
artist-heroes were alive at that moment as far as he was co cerned. Later he
added his signature in much smaller letters beneath the date, only at that
point publicly claiming the picture as his own work.
For the spectator, all this cannibalising of “high” art can be bewildering, if
not outrageous, especially when the effect is absurd or crude. Picasso had a
real gift for caricature, which blossomed when he was still a child, and it
facilitated the development of his assertive relationship with the art of
the past: the caricaturist does not submit tamely to higher authority.
Although caricature involves ironic or satirical humour, it need not be, and
frequently isn’t, driven by hostility, and in practice the targets of the
majority of Picasso’s caricatures were people to whom he was attached by
ties of love or friendship; and he did not exempt himself. It is worth
remembering this when contemplating the caricatural aspect of the old-master
variations of his maturity — the inflated size of Velazquez in the first
version of Las Meninas or the jokey hands and feet of the picnickers in
Luncheon on the Grass paintings, for instance. Imitation, adaptation,
impersonation, elision, travesty, caricature: inasmuch as the commonly used
expression “influenced by” implies passive acceptance of the source in
question, it seems inappropriate for Picasso. His own exhortation, “Greco,
Velazquez, INSPIRE ME!”, scrawled on an early sheet of drawings, sums up
much better his position vis-à-vis the art of the past.
© The National Gallery Company Limited, 2009. This is an edited extract
from Picasso: Challenging the Past. Exhibition-only paperback £12.99;
hardback, distributed by Yale University
Press, £19.99. Exhibition sponsored by Credit Suisse. See
www.nationalgallery.org.uk. Elizabeth Cowling’s publications include
Picasso: Style and Meaning and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters
of Roland Penrose
