Picasso: My Experience

Picasso: My Experience

Part Six of Kitchen Table Writer's Look at Art

People are always asking me what my favourite genre of novel to read is, and who is my favourite author, but no one ever asks me the same question about art. Perhaps I just don't move in those circles, where elevated conversation gently buzzes through rooms of martini-holding guests (which is how I sort of visualise arty parties). But if anyone actually did, I'd answer without hesitation…
Picasso. 

The famous photo of Picasso shading Franciose
 Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot with Picasso’s nephew on the Côte d’Azur in 1951. Photograph: Robert Capa/Magnum

I first encountered Picasso in my twenties, when I bought the book written by Francoise Gilot; My Life with Picasso. Gilot became Picasso's lover and the mother two to of his children.  Gilot was at that point trying to establish herself as an artist when she met the older man. She is now 94, and was recently interviewed by the Guardian; read the article .

La Joie de Vivre, 1946

Since reading her biography, which was as much about their art as their love affair, I've  zoned in on the great man's work wherever I am, from travelling to London in the eightes for touring exhibitions of his work, to discovering that Antibes, in the South of France had its own picasso gallary. In 1946 Picasso spent a  year in Antibes using the 2nd floor of the Chateau Grimaldi as his workshop, and at the end of that year gave around seventy works to the city,  The gallery is now inside that magnificent chateau. I wandered around the artwork until I was face-to-face with the most enormous painting that struck a cord. This is linked to Francoise Gilot, because when he painted it, he was about to become a father again with her child in hid sixties, so he probably did feel full of the joys of life, This comes through in this painting, in fact it shouts it out. I could have stayed in front of it forever, because it is amazingly detailed and there is so much to see, interpret and understand. 


Françoise herself is depicted as the central dancing nymph accompanied by a faun and centaur playing flutes and two small goats who are dancing with her in their goat-like way. The colours are muted and restricted to yellow, blue and neutrals, and I stood there thinking how it made me feel free and re-energised. 

Three Musicians 1921
https://www.pablopicasso.org/three-musicians.jsp

Since that time, I've visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Picasso's The Three  Musician is on display. Like  La Joie de Vivre, it’s a massive painting more than 2 metres wide that swallows all your attention. Picasso was experimenting at the time with cutting out and repositioning images in paper. The  three brightly coloured figures are set against a dark background, which could be a stage as they might represent the masked figures in a type of Italian popular theatre, and it’s easy to spot Pierrot and Harlequin. The third figure is hard to make out. He is a singing monk, intriguingly concentrated into a small, grey rectangle. Using cut out paper clearly aided Picasso in his development of cubism, which, as far as my small artistic brain can work out, is when the artist tries to represent many sides of a 3-D object in 2-D, using geometric shapes to distort what we're seing and make us look again. This picture takes us backwards in art history time, to 1907 and the other famous Picasso at MoMA;  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The name is a reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels. This is traditionally seen as Picasso's pivotal first step towards the new Cubist style, establishing him as the leader of avant-garde art in Paris, and marking a radical break from traditional composition. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon

As I took in the pink, naked figures with their grotesque faces, and the incongruous bowl of fruit, which seems to be slipping down a slanting tabletop at the bottom of the composition, I  recalled a TV programme on Picasso I'd seen, which explained that the compressed, splintered, flattened and jagged naked women were inspired both by Iberian sculpture and African masks I was also struck by the connection between the powerfully muscular Art Deco bodies I'd been seeing all over New York during our tour and the ladies in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, who are equally well-built and muscular.

More recently, I’ve become fascinated by a series of paintings I've never seen, but certainly will, next time I'm in Barcelona. In his final years, Picasso combined all the styles he'd invented and embraced all his life, and his paintings became even larger and full of colour. He also began to re-examine and re-appropriate (this is, copy, with changes to make the work your own) the old masters. In 1957, he created a series of 58 paintings in little over two weeks, all from a seventeenth century oil painting by Diego Velázquez; Las Meninas. This has even more massive dimensions than Les Demoiselles and is hung in Madrid. Picasso’s works – also called Las Meninas –  are preserved at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona – well worth a visit. 

    Click here to read more about the
 painting and see who all these people are 

Although I've never seen Diego Velázquez’s painting in the flesh, I downloaded it as a screen saver, and it excited, even thrilled me. I found that I could unravel things about it just by looking for longer and longer, and that I was taken off on tangents… psychological, philosophical and practical. But when I then read more about the picture, I had to review some of my conclusions and seek further unravelling of its mysteries. This simply added to the delight of discovery.  





The first puzzle is the name given to the painting. Clearly, the central figure in Velázquez’s original is the Infanta Margaret Theresa, a five-year-old stunner in a costly white dress. The 'Meninas' are her handmaidens, ladies in waiting of high status, dressed quite similarly, a little older than her, and extremely attentive. Noticeably, they have dark, ‘Spanish’ hair, while the Infanta has golden curls. 

At first I thought Margaret’s expression was that of a little girl who loves attention. I thought she’d turned her face to the light, believing it  enhanced her beauty. But on closer inspection, I could see her eyes are looking in the opposite direction – at Velázquez's canvas. Is that because the artist is painting her? If so, why is she behind him? Or is there someone else, outside the picture, who is posing for it? Is Margaret looking at a picture of her parents? Because they are there too, in the mirrored image behind Margaret. Are we watching the court watching the painting develop, and seeing it for ourselves in a mirror? If so, what does this mean?  I wondered if by looking at this painting, I'm putting myself in the shoes of the King of Spain. If that’s true, I don’t think the king understood. Velázquez remained his favourite all through his reign.

Each figure adds to the mystery and enchantment. On the right are two dwarfs, perhaps employed to entertain the princess One has laid a foot on the dog. Is he saying “at least I have power over one creature in this court” or is he just boyishly trying to inflict pain on the animal? Above the princess are the royal chaperone and a bodyguard while at the back, in a bright, open doorway, someone looks in. This might be the Queen's Chamberlain. To the left is the artist himself, concentrating on a massive canvas. A link between Velázquez and Picasso is that they both put themselves into their paintings.

All this discovery about Velázquez’s painting had come out of learning about Picasso's tribute. I'd been listening to a programme about Picasso’s Guernica, 

Click on link to find out more about this painting

on Radio Four, of course, which explained that  in the fifties, Picasso often created works relevant to the political situation in Franco’s Spain. This enabled him to make very specific satirical comments about the fascist government without getting into too much trouble. 
His Las Meninas is harder to unravel than Guernica, but, as with other Picasso’s works, it’s even harder to look away. I discovered they also fascinate and frustrate art historians.

click link for more information

The Infanta is a picture of childhood innocence. Picasso painted her over and over again: Alone, in body and as a bust, the Infanta appears in 14 of the series interpretations. In the work to the left, she does retain that sweet, chubby-cheeked look, but Picasso subverts and alters the original throughout the series. In some she seems to have a sourer look, worldly wise and rather disenchanted. In both representations, she’s wearing a mantilla, unlike the original, which makes me think Picasso wanted to make her seem traditionally Spanish. The colour of her dress and hair also change in each representation and in some her head is out of proportion. To quote art histories, it's possible Picasso twisted Infanta Margarita’s face in order to show how difficult it was for the young princess to balance her contradictory feelings and emotions between traditional etiquette and controlled behavior on the one hand and playfulness.

click link for  further pictures

Some art historians suggest that Picasso painted re-appropriations late in his life because he finally felt equal to the great masters, also to prove he had not left his best years behind. In the art world, it is quite common for a great master to be reviled in later stages of their lives, and this was happening to Picasso.

So how are these pictures a commentary on contemporary events in Spain, observed by Picasso from his exile in France? Look at the ceiling bosses. They have become grotesque hooks for the suspension of torture victims. In some pictures, the painter becomes a figure from the Inquisition while in one of them a maid has Franco’s moustache.

In the middle of these 58 paintings, Picasso also painted pigeons, white creatures, resonant of innocence and purity. It was as if he was searching for

perfect innocence amid the desperation of Spain at that time.

I found this quote from Picasso on the Guggenheim website, about this series…
little by little, I would paint my Meninas which would appear detestable to the professional copyist; they wouldn’t be the ones he would believe he had seen in Velázquez’s canvas, but they would be “my” Meninas. 

I like the way that sums up what you see when you look at the canvases, or at least, their representations online.