Exhibitions 1
Picasso (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, till 28 June)
Artistic chameleon
Robin Simon
For me, this exhibition came as a pro- found relief. I have had the gravest doubts about Picasso since the truly dreadful exhi- bition Late Picasso at the Tate in 1988. It appeared to reveal him as an old fraud: facile, vapid, full of sound and fury signify- ing nothing, for he seemed to have nothing to say. Oddly, it was something of which Picasso was acutely aware, as a letter to The Spectator (20 February 1993) from Mr George Odgers of Bremen revealed. Mr Odgers quoted from a speech made by Picasso in Madrid on 2 May 1952: 'When I am alone with myself ... I cannot regard myself as an artist. In the strict sense of the word. The great painters were Giotto, Rembrandt and Goya. I am only a joker who had understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stu- pidity, greed and vanity of his contempo- raries.'
Mr Paul Johnson could not have put it more forcefully. And yet .. . Never trust the teller, trust the tale. Picasso, if not actually lying, was only telling a kind of truth about himself — and partly what he reveals is a genuine sense of humility when comparing himself with the giants of the past. It is not a quality one associates with the vain old tortoise of the COte d'Azur. At the stage in his life covered by the Palazzo Grassi exhibition, 1917-24, it is clear that Picasso's art was that of a perfectionist ever aware of the imperfections of his own skills, and of the surprising limits of his genius.
The show is 'pegged' to Picasso's 1917 visit to Italy and reveals him to have been an artistic chameleon. There is nothing new about that, but at this time in his career Picasso's almost disastrous capacity to turn his hand to any style was still under strict control, and each manner of depic- tion was scrupulously deployed for a specif- ic purpose.
The simplest demonstration of this is the series of line drawings of the composers, patrons and musicians with whom he worked on those spectacular ballets such as Parade (the immense curtain for it is hung high in the Palazzo atrium), the Three-cor- nered Hat and Mercure. In each of these portraits Picasso returned to a particular style of presentation drawing from whatev- er other mode he was using. A more dra- matic instance is his use of the decorative geometric figure style which he evolved from Cubism. The first appearance of it here is in the sixth room where 'The Italian Woman' and 'Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace', 1917, provide a spectacular splash of colour after the graphic musings that lead up to them. Picasso returned to this manner quite self-consciously as late as 1924 in 'Harlequin Musician' but 'Alas! How changed from him ... ' The handling is suddenly perfunctory, which makes one suspect that as early as the mid-1920s Picasso was liable merely to parody him- self.
The careful and inventive drawings, watercolours and gouaches for 'Parade' of seven years earlier demonstrate, in con- trast, what a massive intellectual effort Picasso was capable of, what originality, and what care, as he searched to arrive at the definitive form of a composition. In this furious search for perfection, Picasso emerges as an artist who was not really at ease with recording momentary impres- sions from life. Those chiefly found their way into existence as caricatures, and Picasso often trod too close to the edge of that particular precipice. Rather, as he re- worked his motifs and compositions, Picas- so sought remorselessly to impose his own 'vision upon a subject. He was therefore quite happy to rely upon a photograph, as in the great 'Portrait of Olga in an Arm- chair', 1917: the photograph Picasso must have used is on view, without comment, in a nearby room. Similarly, the best of Picas- so's drawings on the theme of 'The Italian Woman' are after a 19th-century painting, while the sketches of the real-life subjects he took in Piazza di Spagna in Rome are oddly clumsy.
Picasso painted Olga again in 1917 in a developed form of his earliest 19th-century Spanish academic manner. As if to make the point, he shows her in a mantilla. In the same year, he paints another woman in a mantilla, only this time in a personal varia- tion of pointillism — yet another style which he could turn on and off. This pro- tean creature was a great designer and a wonderful draughtsman, but only occasion- ally a true painter, as even the famous clas- sicising oils of the 1920s reveal. They are conceived essentially as sculptures, their three-dimensionality captured in bounding line. The majestic 'Motherhood' of 1921 is shown next to what is described as a 'Study for Woman and Child on a Beach'. It may be: the main point is, though, that the chief lines of the poses in the 'Study' are heavily reworked by Picasso and must then have been used to provide an offset as the basis for 'Maternity': the scale is the same, the poses in reverse. It is equally revealing that many of the best-known oil paintings in the `Harlequin' series, dating from 1917 (in Berlin and Barcelona) to 1923 (Paris), are actually executed in complex patterns of hatched lines.
In the amazing theatre designs, which can hardly ever have been so well or so copiously displayed, the sparing use of Curtain for 'Parade', 1917, Pompidou Centre, Paris materials is as impressive as the certainty of line. When colour is used, it is all the more potent for its rarity, as in the explo- sive blue of the 'Project for the Costume of an Acrobat', 1917. Perhaps the single most perfect work of art on view is a minute gouache of a circus beside a beach, 1922, a jewel-like work of riveting intensity that sums up in its few square centimetres Picasso's key interests of the time: theatre, classical antiquity, and the example of Ingres.
But colour was evidently not central to Picasso's art, as 'Maternity' demonstrates and as do the 'Women at a Fountain' com- positions, and the many pictures of women in white blouses. The grisaille 'Seated Nude', 1922-3, is another case in point, but there is something else going on in this pic- ture. The nude is seen from the back look- ing in a mirror, and might even be Picasso's reference to the Renaissance debate of the `paragon', which concerned the relative merits of sculpture and painting. The pecu- liar handling seems deliberately suggestive of a stone surface to the nude, and the ele- mental mirror on the dressing-table carries a hint of a stone tablet. Subtle stuff. Shame it didn't last.
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