TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0411> <title> 1970s: Pablo Picasso:The Painter as Proteus </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> TIME Magazine April 23, 1973 Pablo Picasso: The Painter as Proteus </hdr> <body> All this century, critics have been writing about Pablo Picasso in the preset indicative. He was 91 years, six months and 17 days old when the tense changed and "is" finally became "was." It seems like a malfunction of the language itself. But by now the doors of the pantheon are sealed, the first wave of reminiscences has rolled by, the wreaths are laid. The dealers have gone down to their storage racks to rewrite the price tickets. The last Picassos have been painted, drawn, etched, cast, welded, thrown or glazed, and the most generous display of creative exuberance has stopped. Picasso's death has closed the period of history known as modernism. It is not an easy fact to grasp. The world has taken Picasso's presence for granted for so long, in the 50 or more years since he became, or was made into, a culture hero, that it seemed natural to assume that he would not die. So might Tibetans take the daily sight of Anapurna as routine. The gap left by Picasso is not immediately measurable. Since the best of his long life's work survives, very little is physically lost; not even the paintings of his last years, most of which--to judge from what has been exhibited--would not be much of a loss in any case. But a myth has vanished. The Self. Like some pharaoh taking his goods with him into the winding darkness below the sand, Picasso in dying has removed an idea of artistic activity from the West--an idea of which he was the last great exponent. It has to do with a passionate omnivorousness, a scale of experience not limited by a priori definitions of what painting or sculpture can carry: with an energetic and Mediterranean humanism. The life springs from the appetites, and the art from both. Or now, "sprang"; for no artist left alive has been able to rival Picasso's cultural embodiment of the self. The confidence in which Picasso lived--that everything really pleasurable or painful to the senses or central to one's social experience could be rendered in painting and sculpture--has disappeared. That certainty about the inclusiveness and eloquence of art was shared to some extent by every figure in the heroic years of modernism from (roughly) 1900 to 1940, by Joyce no less than by Picasso, by Matisse and Breton as well as by Stravinsky, Braque, Pound and Magritte. When it faltered, art suffered a slow leakage and underwent that loss of possibility and (worse) necessity that nearly everyone involved with its production, inspection, distribution and consumption feels today. The image for this owl-eyed, leathery stump of wrinkled vitality was Proteus: the Odyssey's old man of the sea, whose power was to assume any form--beast, wave or tree--at will. He is the tutelary saint of virtuosos, and Picasso's virtuosity is the one fact of modern art that everybody knows something about. Stories about it began in his early childhood. It is said that his father, a provincial art teacher in La Coruna, Spain, turned over his own brushes and paints to this alarming offspring, confessing that little Pablo had already surpassed him as a painter and that he thus could work no longer. This Oedipal story (the child castrating the father) crops up often in the legends of genius, but it is possibly true of Picasso; he was almost as remarkable a child prodigy as Mozart. The precocity continued, through his studentship in fin de siecle Barcelona, into the Blue and Rose periods, with their dystrophied and consumptive clowns, absinthe addicts and acrobats. By 1907, Picasso's combativeness and his goading sense (which never entirely left him) of being up against history's wall resulted in the wrench of imagination that provoked Cubism and provides an arbitrary point of departure for all that is most convulsive in Picasso's art and modernism generally: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. His eclecticism--another of the virtuoso's traits--produced incessant raids on other styles, from Pompeian murals, 17th century Dutch etchings and Ingres drawings to Dogon masks and Mogul miniatures. Few great artists since Rembrandt had amassed, and used, such a hybrid pile of objects from art or nature as Picasso; variety was his sauna. He had a mysterious capacity, now documented through an almost limitless range of motifs and graphic flourishes, to become whatever caught his attention. But Homer's Proteus was more than a quick-change artist. Once pinned down--and the problem was in the pinning--he would revert to his original shape and utter prophecies. So with Picasso; and some of the deepest and most durable work he produced was made when he was, if not pinned down, at least constrained by shared responsibility. Thus his co-invention, with Braque, of Cubism: that system of anchoring and interlocking forms in space that proved to be the first workable (though less systematic) alternative to Renaissance perspective in modern art. Eros. The view that Picasso's main contribution to modernity was Cubism is not, however, just. Cubism was an inexpressive system, and therein, admittedly, lay much of its beauty. But Picasso was also a master of expression. He could give a bronze skull a terrible, impacted and bullet-like solidity, the very reductio of death, or paint a jug so it seemed distended with anxiety; or confer on the rounded limbs of his mistress in the '30s, Marie-Therese Walter, a rhythmic and sensuous languor that might otherwise have vanished from the nude after Ingres. No modern artist has been able to pack more sensation into a form than this Spaniard, engaged in his lifelong conversation with Eros and Thanatos. The full sweep of Picasso's effect on modern art will probably never be documented--not because it is unapparent, but simply because nobody, for 30 years or more, has been untouched by him, so that the lesser details involve meaningless talents and run out in peripheries and shallows. He established collage as a formal device. His Cubist constructions steered the course of modern sculpture away from mass and toward open forms and rigging. His sheet-metal Guitar of 1912 was as prophetic of future sculpture as Demoiselles had been of later painting. His combination of found objects with metal, wood or string, such as his Figure of 1935, gave clues to later junk assemblers--such a summary could go on for pages. Picasso's effect on the sociology of art was in no way less radical. That restless inventiveness provoked in collectors the expectations about stylistic "turnover" that, now built into the market, are such a strain on more single-minded talents. It is to Picasso that we owe, in no small way, the oppressive image of the artist as a superstud that is only now coming under attack. He has even had a degree of political effect: Guernica, the mural canvas he painted in protest against the fascist ruin of Spanish democracy, is certainly the most disseminated work of political art made in this century. Picasso's wealth created a flamboyant archetype of success that has affected every creative life for the worse, though nobody expects to be as rich as Picasso. Not even the conspicuous earners of the past, like Rubens or Titian, made that kind of money. Thus out of the production of one year, 1969-70, he exhibited 167 oils and 45 drawings; in all, the gross market value of that fragment of his output was probably about $15 million, and the value of Picasso's whole estate has been guessed at $750 million or more. Although Picasso had long since parted with it, his Nude Woman of 1910 recently fetched a reported $1.1 million from the National Gallery. That is believed to be the highest price yet paid for a Picasso and a clue to future price tags. By 1940 Picasso was the most famous artist in the world; by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived, in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven major women in his life, Jacqueline Roque, 47, whom he married in 1961. The old man made his final dive into the preclassical past, becoming more than ever the inaccessible Triton or satyr, Homo Mediterraneus padded in nymphs; that myth was his official interface with an insatiable and by now meaningless public, and the work went on behind it. Now that Picasso is dead, his life achieves a fleeting equality with the massive profile of the work. Whatever the verdicts on Picasso's achievement may be (there could be no single judgment on his stupendous diversity), his life was epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such demonic intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants." There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now homeless dybbuk may next descend. Pablo Picasso's Last Days and Final Journey "Death holds no fear for me," Picasso recently told a friend. "It has a kind of beauty. What I am afraid of is falling ill and not being able to work. That's lost time." Right up to the end, Picasso lost no time. The day before he died had been a day like many others at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, his hilltop villa at Mougins on the French Riviera. Late in the afternoon the artist had taken a walk in the little park that surrounds his sprawling stone house overlooking the reddish foothills of the Maritime Alps. He liked now and then to gather flowers and vegetables in the garden, often taking them inside to draw. "That day I showed him the anemones and pansies, which he particularly liked," recalls Jacques Barra, Picasso's gardener. Later that evening Picasso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. Picasso was in high spirits. "Drink to me; drink to my health," he urged, pouring wine into the glass of his Cannes lawyer and friend, Armand Antebi. "You know I can't drink any more." At 11:30 he rose from the table and announced: "And now I must go back to work." In recent weeks, he had been working hard, preparing for a big show of his latest paintings at the Pope's Palace in Avignon in May. On this night, before he went to bed, he painted until 3 a.m. On Sunday morning Picasso awoke at 11:30, his usual hour, but this time he could not rise from his bed. His wife Jacqueline rushed in and then called for help. At 11:40, before a doctor could get there, Pablo Picasso was dead. Dr. Georges Rance, who arrived shortly afterward, attributed his death to a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs. At daybreak on Tuesday, as an unseasonable snowfall blanketed the south of France, a small cortege left Mougins and carried Picasso's body to his 14th century chateau at Vauvenargues in the bleak Provencal countryside. Accompanying the body were Picasso's widow; her daughter by her first marriage, Catherine Hutin; and Paulo, 52, Picasso's son by his first marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova. After the 110-mile journey, the mahogany casket, without ceremony, was placed in the chateau chapel to await the building of a mausoleum. But the shroud of estrangement from three of his grown children that had clouded Picasso's last years also marred his death. For reasons never entirely clear, Maya, Picasso's daughter by his longtime mistress Marie-Therese Walter, and Claude and Paloma, his children by Francoise Gilot, had been prevented from seeing their father in recent years. Last week the same sad situation prevailed. Indeed, this time police were on hand to turn away Marie-Therese and other old friends who came to pay their respects. Later that day, Maya, Claude and Paloma drove to Vauvenargues and placed a large wreath of vivid flowers in the cemetery overlooking the chateau. "That was as close to our father as we could get," Maya said. "It's sad. The whole situation is very delicate." The next day, Paulo's son, Pablo, 24, of nearby Golfe-Juan, was reported in serious condition after drinking a bottle of chloric acid. According to his mother (who has long been separated from Paulo), Pablo had been despondent about being kept from seeing his grandfather. Others said he had also been depressed about financial troubles. The choice of Vauvenargues as the burial site both delighted and surprised the village's 300 residents, since Picasso had rarely visited there in recent years. "We chose it partly because my father loved the Provencal light," explained Paulo. "Besides, the majestic surroundings were more worthy of him than Mougins, where he had sordid arguments with the village council. If ever a Picasso Museum is created," he added, "Vauvenargues would be a fine place." Picasso had been enchanted with the austere medieval chateau when he acquired it in 1958. It included 2,500 acres on the north slope of Mont Sainte Victoire, and, as he told a friend at the time, "I have just bought myself Cezanne's view." He liked the vast rooms, since he was always running out of space for his paintings and sculptures. But he soon changed his mind. Few friends dropped in as they did on the Riviera, and it was too far from the sea to enable him to take an occasional swim. Finally, in 1961, Picasso decided to move to Notre-Dame- de-Vie and the balmier climate of the Riviera back country. There he kept up his prodigious pace, filling one room after another with paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures--and building on to the house when necessary. In the morning, he sometimes sketched in bed, and he delighted in going through the mail to see what outrageous request or oddity someone might have sent him. Like a good Spaniard, he lunched around 2 o'clock, then occasionally went for a walk in the garden with Jacqueline and their two Afghan hounds. After a siesta, there was tea, and when he was not expecting friends, Picasso read or worked until two or three in the morning. "Work is what commands my schedule," he told a friend. "Daylight is perfect to contact friends--which is always a must with an artist--and go out. In our modern times, we can obtain excellent light at night--which we could never do with the yellowish shade of old lamps--and I also have silence." "Picasso always lived," said a friend, "for now--right now," which may explain why he left no will. That surprising fact probably guarantees legal battles concerning his enormous estate for years to come. To be sure, he had already disposed of some of his paintings while he was alive. In 1970 Picasso, who never lost his affection for his native Spain through his long years of self-imposed exile against the Franco regime, donated some 1,000 works from his early years to a new Picasso Museum set up by his late secretary, Jaime Sabartes, in a palatial mansion in Barcelona. Picasso also decreed that his famed mural Guernica, which has been on temporary loan to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art since World War II, be returned to Spain when civil liberties have been restored. Last week, as Spain mourned him as its own, his countrymen expressed regret that Picasso had not ensured that more of his major works would one day be seen in his homeland. In Paris, Picasso's lawyer announced that his widow and his son Paulo would respect a wish expressed by Picasso and donate the artist's valuable personal collection of great painters to the Louvre. Picasso jokingly referred to the collection, which includes 800 to 1,000 works by Corot, Courbet, Cezanne, Braque, Matisse, and others, as "bric-a-brac," but Prime Minister Pierre Messmer quickly accepted the priceless gift on behalf of France. As for Picasso's Picassos, no one knows exactly how many there are, and cataloguing them may take years. The estimates of the number of his works squirreled away in his villas range from 12,000 to 25,000. That ought to be enough to enrich museums in both Spain and France--and the rest of the world as well. </body> </article> </text>