Picasso at the Tate ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON Before 217 identical Warhols of a Borden Cow, 0 feet by 4 feet, all arrive at the Tate as anottter munificent gesture requiring permanent instal- lation in a new wing (serve us all right if they did), take advantage of a lull in the action and spend several days exploring the great exhibition of Picasso sculpture brought to England by the Arts Council and splendidly installed at the Tate by Joanna Drew. Roland Penrose has had a decisive hand in the event, as in so many others, and deserves his knight- hood for this rescue operation alone: but be- fore 'setting down the main characteristics of Picasso's sculptural genius, let me please pay a tribute to Joanna Drew. I know that it is the artist's work that matters and that entrepreneurs and cultural mid-wives sometimes confuse their useful but separate activities with those of True Creation, but Miss Drew is a modest and self- effacing lady with exceptional taste and artistic probity; many crucial exhibitions (for example Arp, David Smith) have gained in clarity from her tact, and I refer to all this only because Joanna Drew works inside the anonymity of the Arts Council, which harbours several other dedicated and unsung individuals.
It must have been a treat for all concerned to lay this sculpture out. Reporting on the vast Picasso exhibitions—unprecedented in scale, let alone genius—in Paris about six months ago in this journal, I had no room for the way in which the sculpture was displayed in the Petit Palais. Safely back across the Channel, I can mention in passing that the way in which the sculpture was exhibited left plenty to be desired : it is a relief to see dim lighting, redolent of gas lamps, and the general cluttered frowstiness re- placed by sharp accentuation, fine spacing, and light which, if artificial, is carefully manipulated.
The sculpture commands total surrender: each piece is bristling with love for life and its formal articulation, and that kind of crackling attack which is another, high velocity, form of love. Picasso is the supreme animator of our century and, if this has a familiar ring, just try and think of another artist of his generation with remotely comparable creative vitality. There is nobody else, only Picasso. And it would be ludicrous to seal him off inside the 'distancing' frontiers of any generation : a favourite sport of lesser artists ten, twenty, or fifty, years his junior. Envy always reaches for some hypothetical game re- serve or Pharaoh's tomb in which to incarcerate a rival talent. But small wonder in Picasso's case : if you stroll around his sculpture show it is impossible not to see that everything there presages almost everything else in modern sculpture; festishes, objects orcontraptions from Duchamp, Gonzales, Giacometti, Matisse (yes, Matisse: Picasso got there first as a sculptor), Arp, all the bad cubist sculptors like Lipchitz or Zadkine, through to Rauschenberg, Johns and his 'sculptural' objects, David Smith, Caro.
In Picasso's case, what is so awe-inspiring is that all these artists and most others have done only one kind of thing whereas he has made a universe, a complete mythology. For the most part, artists have been content to project a par- ticular image and, immediately they have arrived at it, to make paraphrases : the artist identity, statement, 'message,' formal innova- tions and handwriting all contained in this one image which is then repeated in an endlessly slow motion of liturgical solemnity like bells tolling at an identically recurrent if carefully calculated pitch. I suppose this monolithic dup- lication is a comfort to us all in an age with- out religion, but Picasso makes it appear rather self-indulgent. Probably the only great sculptor of our age, apart from Picasso, is Brancusi, but that is another story, if shorter.
In the meantime, let's give plenty of time to examining these intrepid and generous works of Picasso here in London. Apart from the energy and love that I've already saluted, the only other safe general reflection is that Picasso's sculpture could have been made only by a painter of genius. A painter, moreover, whose sense of plasticity was so thorough and so in- tense that the act of painting could express only a part of his sensations. The sculpture is never, at any time, a mere echo of Picasso's painting or any kind of reflection of it or extension from it. The sculpture, all of it, has the most resound- ing authority imaginable. It is just that its anima, its frequent spontaneity, its flagrant disregard for materials as well as its inspired use of them, all have the fluidity and sense of movement or charged stillness that a painter unleashes like electricity from his eye, brain, shoulder, arm and wrist on to that mark, that touch on the page or canvas. It is also very sexy —by contrast the work of most other sculptors looks like some kind of massive bronze or granite capon, though I believe the fashionable word is androgyne.
Much of the sculpture at the Tate is a magis- terial summing-up, and a radical extension, of the history of sculpture up to the turn of the century. The comments made by Picasso on this material and the revelatory twists given to it are prodigious : see the so-called metamorphic bronzes of 1950-53, especially Woman with Pram and Young Girl Skipping. These figurative works have an almost Dickensian nineteenth century relish for descriptive, telling detail, but in a new syntax of formal equivalents (one thing seen in terms of another) which is thoroughly upsetting and disruptive to any com- placency. The massive heads, of 1932, of Marie- Therese Walter, show a unique understanding of female psychology, quite apart from the grandeur of their physical presence. Their re- ferences to ancient art show the healthiness of revivifying the past in terms of the present rather than allowing the standards and ethos of the past to converge upon, and render lifeless, the all-important present. Time and again Picasso achieves this without allowing his extra- ordinary grasp of history to produce falsely archaic comments, or mere antique-mongering- pace Marini and so many others.
Catalogue lists of this kind, compiled to help the reader, are impossible when practically every work is a thundering masterpiece; but the cubist Head of a Woman of 1909 shows what I mean about Picasso's relationship to the sculp- tures of Matisse, and the cubist still life sculp- ture has a direct relation also to most of the present-day concerns of sculpture in its explora- tion of format, the nature of basic form, and many other issues. The Guitar and Violin of 1912 are incredibly beautiful, and still mysteri- ous, examples of this connection. The 1961 Chair in cut-out metal, folded and painted, is a singing latter-day realisation of what Picasso triggered off in 1912, and the new generation of sculptors with allegiances to Smith and Caro should consider this work most carefully. Again, Picasso got there first : but with no fuss- ing rejection of a supposedly obsolete 'truth to materials' creed. He has always known that only an inferior talent could fall victim to this belief: it is truth to medium that pulls every- thing else into shape and Picasso has never done less than honour the more relevant maxim in everything he has made. Such standards have never been seen at the Tate in my lifetime in such weight, authority, quantity or sheer magic; every attendance record will surely be broken by this devastating exhibition.
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