AND ANOTHER THING
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Picasso and the brothel-creeping angel of Barcelona
PAUL JOHNSON
Last week Andrew Lloyd Webber admitted he was the man who paid $29 mil- lion for Picasso's 'Portrait of Angel de Soto' (1903). Easy come, easy go. If you make a fortune by writing tunes which vaguely remind people of something they've heard before, why not splurge some of it on the most successful artistic con man of the century? Webber, amazingly enough, came to Picasso via the pre-Raphaelites. He only saw the portrait three days before the Sotheby auction, so it was an impulse buy. He proposes to hang it next to a Burne-Jones. Picasso said he admired Burne-Jones and was much influenced by his line and colour. But then Picasso told a lot of lies, from a variety of motives, and I think this was just his Andalusian blather. I can detect no connection. Burne-Jones was a great artist who achieved his true level of performance quite late in life after prodi- gies of effort. He would have despised Picasso from the very bottom of his heart. If I hung a Picasso next to one of my Burne-Jones's, I would expect them to object vociferously, in the way good pic- tures do.
This particular portrait always makes me laugh. It is so confusing it is often repro- duced the wrong way round. Angel was one of two brothers (the other was a sculptor) whom Picasso sponged off in his Barcelona days. He was an idle fellow, who pretended to paint but in fact did nothing but drink and brothel-creep. But what did he do to deserve this caricature? Occasionally Picas- so took trouble over portraits of Angel. Four years before the Webber thing, he painted a sad, hung-over oil sketch of Angel (now in a private collection) and there was a revealing charcoal drawing of the lad which has disappeared — both, I suspect, reasonable likenesses. In addition, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona has two drawings of Angel — boozing in a café and engaging in mutual masturbation with a whore. They have no merit but are reveal- ing in different ways.
The work Webber has paid so much for, by contrast, has nothing at all to recom- mend it. It is a clumsy daub and it is hard to say what is most objectionable about it: the gruesome colouring, the lazy sloshiness of the brushwork, or the bad drawing. I know it is often said by 'experts', and repeated endlessly in fashionable drawing-rooms, that Picasso was a consummate draughts- man. It is true that some of his drawings are better than others. But Barcelona at the turn of the century abounded in superb draughtsmen, and none of his efforts comes within a mile of the work of Casad, Rusin- nol or Ribera, to mention only three. There was nothing special about Picasso's drawing even when he was trying hard, which he rarely was, and the results invite easy pas- tiche. I know a young lady, a genuine mas- ter-draughtsman — her sfumato shadows would make Sir Ernst Grombrich's spine tingle — who amuses herself and foxes her pretentious art-loving friends by doing Picasso drawings with a pen attached to a sex-vibrator. She calls them 'Prickassos'. Even at its best, Picasso's drawing has noth- ing special to recommend it, and in Web- ber's 'Angel' it is horrible. Perhaps he was tipsy.
To begin with, the glass on the table is out of the vertical and one side of it bears little relation to the other. Its perspective gives one an uneasy feeling, and the shine and shadow make no visual sense. (Anyone who wants to see how this kind of glass should be painted can look at Velazquez's `The Water Seller', currently part of the `Spanish Still Life' exhibition at the Nation- al Gallery.) Then there is Angel himself, poor fellow. His left arm appears to lunge out of nowhere and is attached to his body by a miracle of plastic surgery, as it bears no relation to anatomy. The right arm looks more normal but is clumsy and much too big. Both hands — Picasso was never much good at hands — have uncooked chipolata-sausage fingers which make one itch for a frying-pan. The index finger of the right hand is a Monster Show claw and the thumb has mysteriously disappeared, or been strapped inside its palm in an agonis- ing way. This may explain why Angel is hav- ing such difficulty holding his pipe — if it is a pipe and not one of those thingummyjig pipe-cleaners or giant toothpicks sold on the fin-de-siecle Ramblas. If Angel is fed up, and he plainly is, who can blame him? His eyes are looking in different directions and have been rammed painfully into their sockets. Half his left cheekbone has rotted away and he seems to have a giant gumboil which is twisting up the right corner of his mouth and causing havoc with his cheek. And that right ear! Why was it hacked off his head and glued back on the bottom side of his jaw? No explanation. It must have hurt a lot anyway.
John Richardson, Picasso's official hagiographer, explains all this by saying that the 'deformations' are deliberate, enabling the Master to transcend the nor- mal forms of portraiture and 'delve far more deeply into character'. Picasso had `learned how to exploit his inherent gift for caricature in depth as a means of dramatis- ing psychological as well as physiognominal [sic] traits'. The work, says Richardson, tells one all about Angel and is, moreover, `galvanised' with Picasso's own 'psychic energy'. The great man 'internalises things and comes up with an enhanced characteri- sation of his subject'. Yes — well. In the words of Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that, wouldn't he? If you are presenting your chap as the finest painter of all time, you have to pile on the verbals.
The art market is governed not primarily by quality but by rarity and hype. Most `Blue' Picassos are already locked irrevoca- bly into museums and his 'Angel' was the first to come on the market for five years. Hence the high price it fetched, though even the knowing were shocked by its enor- mity. Dealers have been massaging the Picasso market skilful for three generations and this explains why the price keeps up. It is the same in the stamp trade. Some kinds of Penny Blacks and Cape Triangles are no rarer than plenty of other stamps but fetch top prices because dealers have talked them into celebrity class. My friend Ken- neth Rendell, perhaps the greatest living authority on autographs and holographs, explains in his new book, History Comes to Life; Collecting Historical Letters and Docu- ments (Oklahoma UP), how and why the celebrity factor often outweighs the rarity value. The hyping of Picasso makes the punters scramble to pay up, just as the Churchill cult transforms his signature on a photo into gold — I saw one the other day go for £12,000. So paying $29 million for the 'Angel' daub tells us a lot about collect- ing mania. But of course it has nothing to do with art.
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