Art Picasso l'icAsso is g enerally said 'to be the most
inventive living artist, and this statement is true if it is taken to mean that he has inaugurated or helped to inaugurate more styles than any other artist. But it can also be maintained that he. has really only developed various tendencies implicit in the art which was being produced in the period between 1885 and 1910. These tendencies, which can be reduced to two main groups, can be seen struggling against each other throughout the artist's career, and from an exhibition of paintings by Picasso one carries away the impression of a man who has not only constantly changed his method of painting, but has been constantly torn between two funda- mentally different conceptions of the art. To verify this it is only necessary to look at the important and representative group of his works on view at the Zwei lllll er Gallery. Between the years 1885 and 1910 there were, with the exception of Degas, no serious realistic artists working in worn out, dull Paris. Realism seemed wo and inadequate, and artists were oppressed by a desire to escape from what Othon .Friesz described as la medlocrile de re'motion direete. Novelty of some sort was apparently essential, if art was nut going to stagnate. In this rather unhealthy situation painters followed one of three routes. Some, like Lautrec, became directly satirical. A second group became more emotional : Van Gogh investigated the means of conveying a strong feeling about people and nature by the emotional use of colour ; Gauguin explored a kind of exotic romanticism. Yet a third group was more analytical and scientific in its approach. Impressionism was discredited in its pure form, and its offshoot, neo-Impressionism, was used by Van Gogh and the Fauves for their own emotional purposes. But. Uezanne had begun to apply to form the same kind of scientific analysis which the Impressionists had applied to colour, and under his influence a new analytical school, represented by artists like Derain, was springing up which was still concentrating solely on the visual appearance of things.
NVith the exception of Impressionism and two-Impressionism Picasso made use of all the movements just described. He comes into painting as a direct follower of Lautrec, and during his first three years in Paris his style is grimly and savagely satirical. Gradually, however, the bitterness turns to sweetness, though the intense emotional quality is not diminished, and instead of the harsh Blue Period canvases we have . those exquisitely sentimental Harlequin scenes of 1904. By about 1006 sentimentality gives way to a rather thin romanticism, partly derived from Gauguin, but without being exotic, and this in its turn disappears under the influence of Negro sculpture, which leads Picasso to a directly emotional style in which aggressive line is supported by unrest rained co!our.
Up to this point Picasso has been almost completely dependent-on the emotional tradition of painting, but quite abruptly about 1909 his whole attitude seems to. change. Ile becomes analytical and austere, and absorbed in developing the possibilities hinted at by the later Cezanne. The magnificent Tele de Femme. (30) in the present exhibition • hows. the artist's attention focussed on breaking up form into its elements, just, as the Impressionists had broken lip colour into its components. All attempt to excite directly 11.: emphatic and simplified line and colour has been abandoned. Rut this purely analytical point of view could not satisfy Piea.sso for long, and in the developments of Cubism which followed in the next few years the emotional element slowly n-ceps back, particularly in the form of unexpected juxta-
.4 ion of different objects, different parts of the same
,ject, or of a detail of minute realism in a field of almost (..)mplete abstraction. These tendencies, which appear in t superb Arlequin of 1918 (31),, later led to Picasso's gradual
.sorption into Superrealism, in which once and for all he :intoned the analytical point of view and went. the whole in emotionalism. This, however, only took place after 'ass() had gone through a so-called classical period when looked for a moment as though he might be going to produce new realism (see Nos. 48 and 57). But the emotional
le came; out only too soon, and since about 1924 Picasso ts been apparently engaged in discharging his sub-muse'
means first of rather elaborate and then of extremely
Previous page
