On Art - Addresses and Writings

  On Art


IV

On Picasso : An Address


There are so many critics who have given their views on Picasso's art and they are all so different. I give only two :


1."It is non-sense to pretend that no introduction is needed, that the pictures can be left to speak for themselves." —"Picasso." by Anthony Bertram


2. "There are paintings (of Picasso) that have no discoverable organization at all."—"Meaning of Art"

Herbert Read

I. Picasso Art Periods


We shall examine briefly the technical side of Picasso's painting so that we may be able to judge and understand some of his ideas.


The first period may be called the Negro period (1906-1910). During this period, his work was influenced by Moorish sculpture in Spain and old fetish of the Negros. He adopted heavy proportions and titanic images from them. He had of course given up the current conception of aesthetic beauty.


In his "Les Demoiselles de Avions" one sees this influence and it has gone on increasing in other pictures. He also adopted the colour schemes suggested by the masks used by the Negros. Thus began what might be called the period of "dislocation" and "distortion". The effort was to create "a form which would be abstract,"—a form unrelated to humanity or even to this material world. He has painted "Peasant woman" in which



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there is clear influence of Egyptian statues. It appears a figure carved rather than painted.


Then from 1909-1911 is called the period of "analytical Cubism". During this period the human anatomy is subjected to amputations. He even gave a go by to colour during this period. He tried to break up forms into parts and then create a new one according to his sweet will.


From 1912-1921 is called the period of "synthetic Cubism" During this period., he has taken the support of forms of Nature but only as a scaffolding. He wants to get rid of what seems to him redundant or unnecessary in the natural forms during this period. He wants to bring out the "Reality", as the artist perceives it,—in his own forms. According to him, "Cubism is a language". One can concede it; but then the question is: Is it a language of beauty?


It was during this period that he resorted to "Collage" —in order, perhaps, to prevent his art from becoming entirely unreal. It is surprising that in spite of this variety of attempts, the subject matter of his art—the number of objects drawn from life, is limited: Guitar, Violin, Brandy-Bottles, articles generally found in a wine-shop in poor locality. Could this be taken as his representation of the environment in his art or as an indication of his being away from the broad stream of life? It is true that after this period, the broad stream of life did enter with force in his art-creation and gave us "Guirnica".


Some of his paintings—notably his "Mendolene",—he has done with papers and gum and nails, and a critic is constrained to say "It is neither painting nor image—nor sculpure. It is childish as a piece of carpentry." It is such works that create suspicion about all modern works of art. Picasso has also tried, besides Cubism, symbolism. "Mino Tauro Machi" and "Guirnica" both are symbolic paintings. He has himself said that the latter was created in order to express the tragedy,


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cruelty and inhuman elements of life which he felt when the Germans destroyed a Spanish village by aerial bombardment.It is "Brutality and darkness" that he has symbolised in the "Bull". "Guirnica" is regarded as one of the greatest works of Picasso. But there are contrary opinions about it among the critics. While some consider it great others think that it does not do justice to the great theme. His "Butterfly-hunter" is also a symbolic picture. He himself is the hunter and he is trying to find out the solution of the riddle of life. But the picture would hardly suggest this.


II. Picasso's Ideas on Art

Picasso has expressed his own ideas on art twice I. in 1923 and II. in 1935. It was in Spanish that he made his statement to Matins de Zayas which contains the following points. ("Art"—New York—May 1923 "Picasso speaks")


1.Nowdays one speaks of the need of research in art I don't accept that idea. The chief work of art is not to make research but to express what one has found. When I paint I want to show what I have found.


2.Art is not truth—art is such an untruth which makes us realise the Truth-it makes us realise the power of understanding Truth which is given to us. The Artist has so to represent his falsehood that it makes the onlooker realise the Truth.


3.When art tries to seek, then it commits mistakes. Such people try to paint the invisible i.e. something that cannot be painted.


4.Art and Nature can never be one. We represent in Art what Nature is not.


5.From the point of view of Art, there are no distinctions between mental or suprasensual or actual, or sensible forms.


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Only forms exist. These forms are only falsehoods that give us some conviction of Reality. There is no doubt that such lies are necessary for our mental life. By them, we attain the aesthetic point of view of life.


6.People complain that they do not understand Cubism. But Cubism is based upon other paintings. What does it matter if people do not understand it? I don't know English, but that does not mean that the English language does not exist. I do not understand it, it is nobody's fault."


7.I don't believe in the envolution of the artist. I don't believe that there is past and future in art. The art that is not in the present, the art that is not alive, one need not even think about it. Art does not evolve, there is change in 'ideas of men' and consequently, there is change in the method—style of expression. The artist standing between two mirrors sees his own reflection one by one. The reflections in the one people call "past" and those in the other, they call '"future". They do not see that it is one picture in different levels. The variation, the change that takes place in art cannot be called its "evolution" !


8.I have never made experiments, whenever I had to say something I have represented it in the manner in which it must be put. The style may differ according to different motives, but that does mean there is "evolution" !


9."There is no art of Transition."


10."Cubism is not art in its primary condition, it is an art that expresses forms. Once a form is created, it lives its own life"


The interview in 1935 was given to Christian Zervos:


"Cahier d'art" 1935 Vol, 10. No. 10.


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1."It is my misfortune and probably my delight to use things as my passions tell me...I put all the things I like into my picture. The things—so much the worse for them; they just have to put up with it"


2.I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a picture; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a colour that will create a different effect.


3.A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes, as one's thoughts change and when it is finished it still goes on changing according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it.


4.I want to get to a stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What is the point of that; simply, that I want nothing but emotion to be given off by it.


5.When I begin a picture, there is somebody who works with me. Towards the end, I get the impression that I have been working alone.


When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist really does not suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial.


6.Abstract art is only painting. There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you remove all traces of reality. Whether he likes it or not, man is the instrument of Nature. It forces on him its character and appearance. In my Dinard picture and in my "pour ville" pictures I expressed very much the same vision—I did not copy the light nor did I pay it any special attention. I was simply soaked in it. My eyes saw it and my subconscious registered what they saw: my hand fixed the impression, one cannot go against nature. Nor is there any "figurative" and


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"nonfigurative" art. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by means of "symbolic figures". Do you think it concerns me that a particular picture of mine respresents two people? Though these two people once existed for me, they exist no longer. The "vision" of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presence became blurred; they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people you see, but forms and colours; forms and colours they have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibration of their life. Certainly painting has its conventions and it is essential to reckon with them. Indeed, you can't do anything else and so you always ought to keep an eye on real life.


7.The artist is a receptacle of emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth; from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. That is why we must not discriminate between things.


8.The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainbleu, I get "green" indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.


9.Academic training in beauty is a sham—Art is not the application of a Canon of beauty, but what the instinct and brain conceive beyond any canon.


10.It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is—what forces our interest is Cezanne's anxiety—that is Cezann's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh—that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham.


11.Everybody wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night,



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flowers, everything around one without trying to understand. If only they would realise above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world and that no more importance be attached to him than to plenty of other things, which please us in the world, though we can't explain them.


12. How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as I lived it. A picture comes to me from miles away: who is to say from how far away I sensed it, saw it, painted it; and yet the next day I can't see what I have done myself. How can any one enter into my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts which have taken a long time to mature and come out into day light and above all grasp from them what I have been about perhaps against my own will?—There ought to be an absolute dictatorship—a dictatorship of painters—a dictatorship of one painter."1


III. IDEAS OF PICASSO EXAMINED


"Art is not Truth"—What does he want to say by that? Does he mean that art is not meant to give us the Truth of the physical—the objective Reality, or does it mean that art does not express the Truth of form?


If art is a falsehood, then it is difficult to understand how it can give us Truth (as Picasso says.) It seems only a way of saying, perhaps, a way of being clever like Oscar Wilde who made a similar statement about art in the eighties of the last Century.


Picasso says that the attempt to paint the Invisible is bound to fail. The question is: Has not the "invisible" been represented in arts? Look at the Medonnas, look at the works of Eastern art and the art of Renaissance and you have ample


l These statements are not full but condensed in his own words.


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proof that the Invisible has been successfully represented in arts. The Chinese or Japanese Dragon is it from the visible? It may even be asked: are the forms created by modernist art from the visible?


He has tried to say that Cubism is art-language of the modern artist. It would be truer to say it is art language of some artist of the modernist School. The difficulty is that each artist has, or seems to have, his own art language which probably he alone can understand. That renders the task of appreciation by others difficult, if not impossible. If one of the functions of language is to serve as a medium of self-expression for the creator, its other function is communicability, though it must be conceded that the creator may not aim at being communicable.


When some one argues that Cubism is not in accordance with our intellectual knowledge of the Reality, the answer is: Cubism is above ordinary experience and against man's prejudice or customary likes. It is often the result of simultaneous vision—superimposition of planes and dimensions upon each other that gives rise to what appears queer to normal sight. We have no objection to simultaneous vision if the resulting form symbolises successfully that simultaneity. If we make a frantic effort with the help of our imagination to see this simultaneous vision, can we say that our aesthetic sense is satisfied?


A picture says Picasso goes not changing after it is finished. It undergoes change according to the man who looks at it. But this happens to all pictures and this change is subjective and has nothing corresponding in the picture.


He seems to say that expression of "passion" "emotion" is his chief aim in his works. It is true that 'art' can express it. But the question to be considered is: "Is it the main aim of art to express "passion" or "emotion"? are there not many things


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other than passion in the human consciousness that are fit material for art-expression?


He says that the fact of representing two men in the painting is not important because as the picture proceeds the two men have ceased to be men and have become "problems". We can understand this as an explanation of the process in the artist's inner being. But the onlooker will have only the painting before him to form his impression or opinion. Now if the painting itself is such that the onlooker gets the suggestion that it is a problem—nevermind what that problem is—then the work may be said to succeed in its aim. But if the onlooker gets no hint or suggestion from the picture then the artist's own idea that he has represented a problem has no relevance for the onlooker.


His assertion that "not what the painter does but what he is", is important and deserves consideration. It is true that the true centre of creation in the artist is himself even though outer nature, objects or experience of life may give him the excuse for setting into movement his inner being. This inner being has many levels of its natural self. It is this complexity of man's inner being that renders the task of the artist very difficult. Very often he mistakes his vital being, the being interested in life and action—for his true soul. It is certainly true that this vital being—the being of life-force—can and often does, create great art. It draws its material not merely from the great ocean of life around the artist, but by help of imagination it can create powerful new forms which have a great appeal for life. There is a plane of the higher vital being—a higher vital world—far above the plane of ordinary life of everyday, where forms of great power and beauty exist. An artist can either rise to this plane occasionally and draw inspiration for his work from there. He can straightaway bring down forms—either literary or plastic, into his creation from this plane or may modify them in transit through his consciousness.


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He can contact the mental i.e. the intellectual—plane and feel, perceive or see forms on that plane and if they attract him, he can establish a contact with them and bring them into his creation.


He can—if he acquires the practice—contact his true soul, his psychic being, his innermost self and perceive or see forms on that plane. He can bring them down into his art creation. Or, he can see this world—men, nature, etc.—from that higher plane and it would be a very different view of it!


Above the mental level, there are ranges of consciousness attainable by man. The greatest artists are those who either unconsciously or consciously succeed in contacting these levels of consciousness and bring down some forms from that great world of harmony. Behind all the turmoil and strife of life there is a harmony trying to express itself. This harmony is not merely harmony on the life-plane, though that is its most important field for expression. This harmony is spiritual—it belongs to the levels above the life plane, but its aim is to manifest itself on the life plane. Art is one medium through which it can express that world of harmony on the plane of life in terms of material medium. An artist can contact—in fact great artist have always contacted—this plane of harmony and express forms from there in his art either without any modification or with some changes, while they pass through his consciousness.


It is perhaps necessary that the artist in modern times at least realises the complexity and multidimensionality of man's consciousness so as to save himself from obscurity due to want of clarity about the inner structure of man. He is most often confused. Some of the modern theories of psychology, like psycho-analysis, give him a very onesided view of man's inner being.


When Picasso says that it is the personality of the artist


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that is important, our difficulty in accepting it is that we have no means other than the picture to know his personaliny. So the observer has got to know the artist only through the work, through painting. While writing about Cezanne he says that "it is the anxiety in Cezanne that goads us to take interest in him". What was that anxiety? Was it his intense desire to bring something new to the world of painting? Many others may also have similar anxiety. We consider Cezanne a great master because being dissatisfied with the modes of painting current in his time, he tried sincerely to bring about two or three new departures in the realm of painting and achieved notable success. The bringing out of volume, representing "solidity" and planes of colour-tonality were some of the elements he brought into painting. His lifelong effort was to represent the "sensation" of the object, the atmosphere of the landscape etc. This individuality of Cezanne we can see in and through his painting. and achieved notable success. The bringing out of volume, representing "solidity" and planes of colour-tonality were some of the elements he brought into painting. His lifelong effort was to represent the "sensation" of the object, the atmosphere of the landscape etc. This individuality of Cezanne we can see in and through his painting.


When faced by the observer who feels the need to understand art Picasso angrily asked: "Everybody wants to understand art, Why not try to understand the songs of a bird." For the simple reason that an artist is a man and not a bird; we do understand the songs of a bird by an instinctive, if one may say, intuitive perception of the joy and harmony that flows through the songs. We do want to perceive and feel that harmony and beauty in the artist expressed in terms of his art, which is a product of a human being.


"How can you expect an onlooker to know the picture as I know it". We don't expect the onlooker to know the picture as the artist knows it in his travail and wrestle with material and technique—if he has any. We do not require to know how Raphael created his pictures to know what he went through in doing his paintings. The onlooker is not interested in how the picture came to you. Why should he be interested in that? He may be, and is interested in knowing


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about the artist from his art, if that is possible. The onlooker can only enter into that realm through the painting. If the work is such that the onlooker gets no idea either about the subject painted or about the painter, it is not his fault.


There is a great effort on the part of modernist painters —notably Picasso—in some of their works to revert to Primitive art—as represented in some of the Negro sculptures. To the Negros these masks or images were objects of worship or of fear, perhaps they represented to them 'spirits' malevolent or benevolent. They hardly looked upon them as art-products. The effort of the modern artist to go back to primitive art-forms for inspiration is, to say the least, a vain effort. It is bound to be unconvincing and lead to strange forms which neither spring from genuine religious feeling and emotion nor from sincere artistic inspiration. The desire for novelty, the need to be striking, straining for effect ete., can hardly give real artistic creation. Such efforts cannot satisfy the aesthetic feeling in the onlooker, they may at the most excite his curiosity. The thirst for beauty remains unquenched in face of these works.


This very often happens in arts when the "intellect" of man takes the lead. There is hardly an artist today who has not got his own "theory" of art! This "theory" is his intellectual formation. It is true that "intellect" can create art—but that is art of the second order. The greatest art comes from "inspiration", not from the mere "intellect."


Man may receive forms from the subconscient, the dream-world, the world of fancies, from the impulse-domain and they would generally be what the forms of these planes are—ugly, strange, repellent etc.


" Picasso gives out a secret "

"The Hindu" November 30, 1964.

A sensational " confession" has been made by Picasso,


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that in many of his extravaganzas he was simply " amusing himself" at the expense of his " intellectual " admirers.


Statement in a quaterly publication. " Living Museum " has evoked lively controversy.


He said, " People no longer seek consolation or inspiration in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers, seek the new and the extraordinary, the original, the extravagant. And myself since the epoch of Cubism, I have-contented these people with all the many bizzare things that have come into my head. And the less they understood the more they admired it.


By amusing myself with all these games, all these non-sense, all these picture puzzles and arabesque, I became famous and very rapidly. And celebrity for a painter means sales, profits, a fortune. Today as you know I am famous and very rich.


But when I am alone with myself I have not the courage to consider myself as an artist in the great sense of the word, as in the days of Giotto. Tittan, Rambrant and Goya, I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.


( Madeleine Roussau, Editor of "the Living Museum" )


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