Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s [illustrated edition] 0-262-06213-5, 9780262062138

Citation preview

myth and metamorphosis

Lisa Florman t h e m i t p r e ss

•

c ambridge, massachusetts

•

london, england

myth and metamorphosis Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s

© 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Venetian and Engraver’s Gothic by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Florman, Lisa Carol. Myth and metamorphosis : Picasso’s classical prints of the 1930s / Lisa Florman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-06213-5 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Classicism in art. I. Title. NE2049.5.P5 F56 2000 769.92—dc21 00-56220

For David

contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Preface

xvi

1

In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints

2

Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid

14

3

The Structure of the Vollard Suite

70

4

Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs

140

5

The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre

196

Notes

208

Bibliography

244

Index

256

2

i l l u s t rat i o n s

All works by Pablo Picasso © 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. All works by André Masson © 2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. FRONTISPIECE Picasso, The Minotauromachy (colored proof ), 1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot. 1.1 Picasso, Three Women at the Fountain, 1921. Oil on canvas, 203.9 × 174 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil. Photo © 2000 The Museum of Modern Art. 5 1.2 Picasso, Studies, 1920. Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 81 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–R. G. Ojeda. 8

2.1 Picasso, unpublished version of The Death of Orpheus, 1930. Etching, 22.5 × 17.1 cm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 16 2.2 Masson, Furious Suns, 1925. Automatic drawing, ink, 32 × 24 cm. Galerie Louise Leiris. 17 2.3 Engraving of an Etruscan mirror, from Eduard Gerhard et al., Etruskische Spiegel, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1845), pl. CXXVI. 19 2.4 Picasso, The Death of Orpheus, 1930 (September 18). Etching, 22.3 × 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 20

2.12 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18). Etching, 22.3 × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 31

2.6 Picasso, Two Heads (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XV), 1931. Etching, 13.4 × 17.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 23

2.13 Picasso, Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18). Etching, 22.3 × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 32

2.7 Picasso, Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, 1930 (September 21). Etching, 22.2 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 25

2.14 John Flaxman, Thetis Finds Achilles Mourning over the Body of Patroclus, illustration for Iliad (1st edition), 1793. © The British Museum. 35

2.8 Picasso, Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, 1930 (September 25). Etching, 22.5 × 17.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 26

2.15 Picasso, The Sacrifice of Polyxena, 1930 (September 23). Etching, 22.4 × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 36

2.9 Picasso, The Daughters of Minyas, 1930 (September 20). Etching, 22.5 × 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 27 2.10 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (September 18). Etching, 22.4 × 17.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 29 2.11 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18). Etching, 22.2 × 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 30

2.16 Picasso, La Coiffure, 1954. Oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Donation Rosengart, PicassoMuseum, Lucerne. 37 2.17 Picasso, Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar, 1930 (September 18). Etching 22.3 × 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 38 2.18 Picasso, Hercules Slaying Nessus, 1930 (September 20). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 40

list of illustrations

2.5 Picasso, Fragment of a Woman’s Body (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XIV), 1931. Etching, 13.2 × 17.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 22

2.19 Picasso, full-plate etching of Hercules and Nessus, 1930. 31.3 × 22.4 cm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 41

2.27 Picasso, The Death of Eurydice, 1930 (October 11). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 54

2.20 Picasso, unpublished etching of Actaeon Transformed into a Stag, 1930 (September 20). Etching, 22.5 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Franck Raux. 43

2.28 Rubens, Cadmus and Minerva, 1636. Oil sketch, 26.7 × 42.2 cm. Private collection. 55

2.21 Rubens, Procris and Cephalus, 1636. Oil sketch, 26.5 × 28.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 46 2.22 P. Symons, Procris and Cephalus, 1637. Oil on canvas, 174 × 204 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 47 2.23 Picasso, Procris and Cephalus, 1930 (September 18). Etching, 22.4 × 17.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 48 2.24 Picasso, The Fall of Phaethon, 1930 (September 20). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 50 2.25 Rubens, The Fall of Phaethon, 1636. Oil sketch, 28.1 × 27.6 cm. Musées Royaux des BeauxArts, Brussels. 51

x – xi

2.26 Rubens, The Death of Eurydice, 1636. Oil sketch, 26 × 15.5 cm. Museum Boijmansvan Beuningen, Rotterdam. 53

2.29 Picasso, The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, 1930 (September 21). Etching, 22.4 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 56 2.30 Picasso, Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New Human Race, 1930 (September 20). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 58 2.31 Rubens, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1636. Oil sketch, 26 × 40.7 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 59 2.32 Peruzzi, Deucalion and Pyrrha, c. 1516. Rome, Villa Farnesina, Sala delle Prospettive, Rome. © Photo Alinari. 60 2.33 Picasso, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1930 (September 23). Etching, 22.3 × 17 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 63

3.5 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 6 (July 4, 1931). Etching, 31.2 × 22.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 76

2.35 Rubens, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1636. Oil sketch, 30 × 14 cm. Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 65

3.6 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 7 (July 9, 1931). Etching, 21.5 × 30.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 77

2.36 Meleager Painter, kylix depicting Dionysus and Ariadne, c. 475 B.C. © The British Museum. 66

3.7 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 26 (November 18, 1934). Etching and aquatint, 23.7 × 30 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 77

2.37 Aristide Maillol, Pomona, 1910. Bronze, 161 × 53 × 49 cm. Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund. © Photo Jürgen Spiller. 67 3.1 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 12 (November 29, 1934). Etching, 23.7 × 29.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 73 3.2 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 25 (January 1934). Etching and aquatint, 13 × 17.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 74

3.8 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 16 (November 8, 1933). Drypoint, 20 × 28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 78 3.9 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 17 (November 11, 1933). Drypoint, 19.8 × 27.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 79 3.10 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 54 (March 30, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 80

3.3. Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 25.2 × 23.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 75

3.11 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 57 (March 31, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 80

3.4 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (c. 1935). Aquatint, 24.7 × 34.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 75

3.12 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 89 (May 29, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 82

list of illustrations

2.34 Rubens, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1636. Oil sketch, 25.5 × 37.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. 64

3.13 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 70 (April 11, 1933). Etching, 36.7 × 29.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 83 3.14 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 83 (May 17, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 84 3.15 Jacques Callot, Peasant with Hat in Hand, c. 1617. Etching, 5.7 × 8.2 cm. Rosenwald Collection. © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 87 3.16 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 24 (November 19, 1934). Aquatint and etching, 24.9 × 34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 88 3.17 Goya, “Todos caeràn,” Los caprichos, plate 19, published 1799. Aquatint and etching, 21.5 × 14.5 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. © Photo RMN–Quecq d’Henripret. 89 3.18 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 87 (May 23, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 91

xii – xiii

3.19 Sigmund Freud, “Psychological schema for the word-concept,” from Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (Vienna, 1891), 60. 97

3.20 Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 4 (Paris, 1927). Etching, 19.4 × 28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 100 3.21 Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 7 (Paris, 1927). Etching, 19.4 × 28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 100 3.22 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 39 (March 23, 1933). Etching, 26.9 × 19.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 101 3.23 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 45 (March 23, 1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 102 3.24 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 28 (April 1933). Aquatint, etching, and drypoint, 27.8 × 19.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 108 3.25 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 30 (April 22, 1933). Drypoint, 29.7 × 36.6 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot. 109 3.26 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 31 (April 23, 1933). Drypoint, 29.7 × 36.6 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 109

3.35 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 61 (April 1, 1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 120

3.28 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 58 (March 31, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 112

3.36 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 76 (May 5, 1933). Etching and aquatint, 26.7 × 19.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 121

3.29 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 59 (March 31, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 114 3.30 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 53 (March 30, 1933). Etching, 19.4 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 115 3.31 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 62 (April 2, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 116 3.32 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 50 (March 27, 1933). Etching. 26.7 × 19.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot. 118 3.33 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 63 (April 3, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 119 3.34 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 65 (April 4, 1933). Etching, 19.3 × 26.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 119

3.37 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 69 (April 8, 1933). Etching, 36.7 × 29.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 123 3.38 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 34 (January 27, 1934). Etching, 27.8 × 19.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 124 3.39 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 33 (January 27, 1934). Combined technique, 13.9 × 20.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 126 3.40 Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies, c. 1632. Etching, 10.1 × 11.4 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. 127 3.41 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap (first state), 1634. Etching, 19.7 × 16.2 cm. © The British Museum 127

list of illustrations

3.27 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 51 (March 27, 1933). Etching, 26.7 × 19.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 110

3.42 Rembrandt, The Artist and His Model, c. 1639. Etching, drypoint, and burin (first state), 23.2 × 18.4 cm. Rothschild Collection. Louvre, Paris. © Photo RMN–J. G. Berizzi. 129 3.43 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 68 (April 7, 1933). Etching, 36.8 × 29.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 131 3.44 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 36 (January 31, 1934). Etching, 27.9 × 19.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN. 133 4.1 Picasso, cover for Minotaure (May 1933). Collage, 48.5 × 41 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg. Photo © 2000 The Museum of Modern Art. 141 4.2 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 84 (May 18, 1933). Etching and drypoint, 29.8 × 34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–B. Hatala. 143 4.3 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 25.2 × 34.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 145

xiv – xv

4.4 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 95 (October 23, 1934). Etching, 23.9 × 30 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 146 4.5 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 96 (November 4, 1934). Etching and drypoint, 22.6 × 31.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 146 4.6 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (November 1934). Combined technique, 24.7 × 34.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Michèle Bellot. 147 4.7 Rembrandt, The Blindness of Tobit, 1651. Etching, 16.1 × 12.9 cm. © The British Museum. 152 4.8 Picasso, The Death of Marat, 1934 (July 21), illustration for Benjamin Péret, De derrière les fagots (Paris, 1934). Etching, 13.4 × 10.5 cm. 154 4.9 Masson, Massacre, 1932. Ink drawing, published in Minotaure, no. 1 (February 1933). 155 4.10 Masson, The Minotaur, 1934. Etching for Georges Bataille’s Sacrifices (Paris, 1936). 156

4.12 “Lyons kore,” c. 540 B.C. Marble, height 113 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons. © Photo RMN–Ojéda / Le Mage. 167 4.13 Kore from the Acropolis, c. 520 B.C. Marble, height 113 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens. 167 4.14 Picasso, Woman with Leaves, 1934. Bronze, 37.9 × 20 × 25.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN 168 4.15 Picasso, The Minotauromachy (first state), 1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot. 169 4.16 Masson, Le Crucifié, 1934. Etching for George Bataille, Sacrifices (Paris, 1936). 171 4.17 Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633. Etching, 51.7 × 40.8 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. 175

4.18 Goya, Los proverbios, no. 10, published 1864. Aquatint, 24.7 × 35.5 cm. Hispanic Society of America, New York. 187 4.19 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562. Oil on canvas, 178 × 205 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. 187 4.20 Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of a secondcentury B.C. original. Marble, length 195 cm. Vatican Museum. 189 5.1 Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin, 1910. Oil on canvas, 100.3 × 73.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art. 199 5.2 Picasso, “Ma Jolie”, 1911/1912. Oil on canvas, 100 × 65.4 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art. 201 5.3 Picasso, Violin, 1912. Newspaper and charcoal on paper. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Gift of Henri Laugier. Photo: Photothèque des collections du Mnam/Cci. 203

list of illustrations

4.11 Picasso, The Minotauromachy (fifth state), 1935. Etching, 49.8 × 69.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN–Gérard Blot. 165

p r e fa c e

This is a book about a number of prints and series of prints that Picasso produced in the early to mid-1930s: his illustrations for the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the etchings of the Vollard Suite, and the Minotauromachy. But it is also a book that purports to have broader implications and to be about a good many other things—things that are at once theoretically separate from and inextricably tied to the specificity of Picasso’s prints. As such, the book will have to be judged somewhat less than successful if its arguments cannot be seen as, on the one hand, arising from (and therefore “sticking to”) this particular group of etchings, and, on the other, sustaining an interest that reaches beyond those etchings’ fairly limited scope. In light of these claims, a word or two should be said about method. As several readers of the manuscript observed (some with approbation, others more nearly with dismay), the book does not adhere to a consistent methodology throughout. The approach not only varies from chapter to chapter, but even within chapters it never really attains the status of a “method”—at least not to the extent

preface

that that would imply a set of procedures one might adopt and direct toward a whole range of objects. On the contrary, every effort was made to hold particular methods at bay, and to address the works instead as their own specificities seemed to demand. If the approach changes, then, with each chapter, it is because the works under consideration have themselves changed, in some cases quite dramatically. None of this is to say that the book is without continuity; from the start it was driven by the recognition that the various print series with which it deals are deeply interrelated, and that in particular they all share both an engagement with classicism and a strong appeal to the viewer. It is to say, however, that the classicisms and the viewers addressed by the individual series (and so as well by the individual chapters) are not quite the same. From the Ovid illustrations to the Minotauromachy, the implied viewer undergoes what, in these circumstances, can only be described as a metamorphosis. The subject who emerges from an encounter with the Ovid etchings is positioned (in a way she hadn’t been previously) to confront the classicism of the Vollard Suite, just as, following that encounter, she will have achieved a particular preparedness for the experience offered by the Minotauromachy. In this sense, one might think of the book as akin to a Bildungsroman—except that it narrates not so much the formation or development of the subject as it does subjectivity’s dissolution. The Metamorphoses illustrations force the essentially phenomenological recognition that they are works given only and always in our perception of them; as a result, they also force the recognition that we can no longer separate subject and object (and so subjectivity and objectivity) in quite the way we might once have thought we could. The Vollard Suite in turn suggests that all such negotiations between subject and object, self and something external, are intimately associated with the workings of desire—the decentering potential of which is then even more fully realized with the overdetermined imagery of the Minotauromachy. There are at least two consequences of all of this that need to be stated here. The first is that, because the book follows the story of this developing dissolution, it asks to be read from front to back, start to finish. At the very least it asks the reader to be aware that something will have been lost or compromised if the chapters are considered in isolation or out of turn.

myth and metamorphosis

1 In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints

2 – 3

Picasso scholars long ago designated a “classical period” within the artist’s career, beginning around the time of the First World War and ending, fairly abruptly, in 1925. Thus delimited, Picasso’s classicism was seen to coincide with, and therefore closely reflect, both the rise of political conservatism in France and the domesticating influence of the artist’s marriage to Olga Koklova.1 In order that these direct, causal relationships remain fairly self-evident, it was necessary that scholars downplay the significance of Picasso’s later classicizing works. The Vollard Suite, for example, was held to exhibit a merely residual classicism—a delayed aftereffect of the artist’s earlier, more thoroughgoing engagement with Greco-Roman art. Picasso’s illustrations for the Metamorphoses of Ovid were similarly discounted, on the grounds that their classicizing style had been dictated solely by the poem’s subject matter.2 In both instances the reverse seems to have been much more nearly the case. As we will see, Picasso chose to illustrate the Metamorphoses precisely because of its

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

classical associations. After a five-year hiatus, he seems to have been eager to reengage—indeed, to completely rethink—the issue of “classical” art. The Vollard Suite, far from being a casual throwback to the earlier “classical period” of the 1920s, likewise asserts a significantly different view of classicism. This is not to say that Picasso’s early classicizing works are irrelevant to an understanding of the later prints. Quite the contrary, if we want to come to terms with the Metamorphoses illustrations, for example, or the plates of the Vollard Suite, it is essential that we at least briefly review Picasso’s “classical period” of the teens and twenties. The works of that era—and, even more, the art criticism that grew up around them—greatly shaped the background of expectations against which the prints of the thirties were made and first seen. The present chapter sketches in that background of expectations, so that the prints’ distinctive features will eventually stand out more sharply in relief. To understand Picasso’s classicizing paintings of the teens and twenties, it is in turn necessary to view them against the separate critical horizon out of which they emerged. Primarily we need to remember that, in the years immediately preceding Picasso’s so-called classical period, his name had been closely associated with modernist notions of artistic progress. Those associations can be traced to at least 1913, when Guillaume Apollinaire first discerned in cubism a form of “pure painting” that was, however, “not yet as abstract as it would like to be.”3 From such claims the conclusion could easily be drawn—and was, repeatedly— that the future history of art would tell of a progressive divestment of representation and all other “extraneous” pictorial conventions, until at last painting arrived at a state of absolute, abstract purity. And yet Picasso, whose first great nod in the direction of abstract formalism had launched the avant-garde on its modernist course, proved to be a singularly unreliable guide. In fact he used the occasion of his first public statement on painting, in 1923, to denounce the whole notion of stylistic progress. “Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved,” he complained. “To me there is no past or future in art. If a work cannot live always in the present it must not be considered.”4

Picasso’s paintings of the period made the same statement even more forcefully (fig. 1.1). With their references to ancient sculpture and their emphasis on figuration and volumetric modeling, Picasso’s “classical” works posed a deliberate challenge to modernist paradigms of artistic evolution. As early as 1914, Picasso had begun experimenting with various overtly traditional modes.5 Initially these projects occupied only a small fraction of his time and involved the art of chronologically disparate periods. But increasingly they took on a specifically antique cast. As teleological accounts of painting were becoming ever more frequent—principally among artists who traced its development through cubism to their own most recent, abstract compositions—Picasso ever more fully engaged a style at the furthest remove from modernism, at the distant end, so to speak, of the historicist arrow.6 He thus positioned his art in direct opposition to the paradigms of stylistic progress.7 Judging from his 1923 statement, what Picasso most strongly objected to in these teleological models of art was their implication of a preordained goal toward which all works were (or should be) directed. In fact Picasso went to some length to discourage any critical approach that would reduce the great diversity of art by subjecting it all to the same criteria of value: Whenever I have had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but an adaptation of the idea one wants to express and the means to express that idea.8

4 – 5

Despite the clear antihistoricism of these remarks, many artists and critics refused to see Picasso’s contemporaneous paintings in a similar light. Indeed, they soon assimilated his classical works to a new historicizing account, though now one that was cyclical rather than purely progressive. Their effort was aided by the fact that Picasso’s “classical period” coincided with—and to a large extent fueled—a much broader return to artistic traditionalism in the years following World War I.9 Conservative critics, who had rather too simplistically

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

1.1 Picasso, Three Women at the Fountain, 1921.

6 – 7

equated cubism’s artistic radicalism with comparably radical political beliefs, were just as quick to proclaim this recent stylistic shift as evidence of a return to traditional values in all areas of society.10 As they saw it, the period of reckless abandon that had given rise to modern art was finally at a close. In fact this account gained such widespread acceptance that even supposedly avant-garde critics adopted its fundamental premise. Many at least hoped to salvage cubism for the newly declared Classic Age by denying that cubism represented any fundamental rupture. Differences, they claimed, were evident at only the most superficial level of style; on a deeper plane cubist and classicizing works were united by certain fundamental characteristics. Thus, for example, Maurice Raynal emphasized that Picasso’s “classical” and cubist works were equivalent in terms of their “plastic purity.”11 Likewise Paul Dermée, forecasting “an impending Classic Age” in 1918, claimed that the hallmark of classical art was purity— its rejection of all extra-painterly concerns, by which he meant specifically anecdote or narrative: “Literary painting or picturesque literature are symptoms of decadence. . . . In the great classical epochs, the independence and autonomy of each art was carefully safeguarded. Neither overlapping nor penetration: purity!”12 Dermée’s language, although more strident, clearly recalls that of earlier cubist criticism, in which supporters and detractors alike had pointed to Picasso’s “rejection of literary content” as fundamental to the new art.13 Similarly, it was via this shared critical vocabulary of pictorial autonomy and “purity” through the avoidance of anecdote that Tériade could later claim cubism had actually initiated the classical revival.14 Art criticism in France has never been univocal, and even during the early 1920s there was a good deal of disagreement, much of it still centered on the relative merits of figuration and abstraction. Yet a surprisingly broad consensus did exist among writers across the artistic and political spectra as to which qualities, in general, were the most desirable.15 “Pure,” “structured,” “harmonious,” “ordered,” “constant,” “ideal,” “invariable,” “serene”—all these were epithets of approval that could be applied to classical and cubist paintings interchangeably.16 Needless to say, use of this common terminology required a selective read-

in the background of picasso’s classical prints

ing of cubism in particular and, in some cases, revisions of its earlier appraisals. Not only did the rhetoric of revolution all but disappear, so too did any type of analysis that threatened to compromise the “constant,” “ideal” and “invariable” character of the works under discussion. Thus, although earlier criticism had dwelled on an assumed temporal dimension in cubist paintings, that tack itself proved to be of relatively brief duration.17 That Picasso was on occasion also thinking explicitly about the relationship between the two styles is evident from the curious painting of 1920, now in the Musée Picasso, in which four small classicizing figure studies intermingle with six miniature cubist still lifes (fig. 1.2). The painting clearly sanctions a comparison of the styles, for their cohabitation of the canvas is its very raison d’être. Yet the exact nature of that comparison is difficult to determine. If seen in light of Picasso’s antihistoricist remarks of 1923, the painting appears to insist that we regard cubism and classicism as simultaneously available alternatives—distinct pictorial modes each with a continuing validity. In the absence of those remarks, however, it would be possible to construe things otherwise. Then the painting, instead of seeming to present cubism and classicism as alternatives whose differences are thereby emphasized, might easily appear to assert their commonalities. Such indeed was the point of most classical/cubist comparisons drawn during the 1920s. Throughout that period, discussion of the styles’ similarities centered around Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne and its Bulletin, which together served as one of the most important showcases for late cubism and other “classicizing” trends. Even Picasso, who had at one time exhibited his work through Rosenberg,18 allowed his paintings to be reproduced in the Bulletin, alongside still lifes by Ozenfant and Severini, de Chirico’s recent figure paintings, and cubist compositions by Juan Gris, among others. Typical of many of the essays Rosenberg published was Theo van Doesburg’s “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” serialized in four issues of the journal from December 1925 through March of the following year. Stated crudely, van Doesburg’s aim was to show that modern abstraction was really the equivalent of classical art, with all the “nature” factored out. “If harmony, the essence of beauty,” van Doesburg wrote,

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1.2 Picasso, Studies, 1920.

For van Doesburg, and for the majority of artists and critics seeking analogies between classicism and abstraction, the juxtaposition of the two styles revealed nothing less than universal aesthetic laws. To be sure, the word classicisme tended to carry such connotations from the start.20 Its very inclusiveness—it could be used to refer not only to the art of antiquity, but also to the Italian Renaissance, to paintings by Fouquet, Poussin, David, Ingres, and just about anyone else whose work was included in the great canon—encouraged belief in a set of transcendent pictorial values that served as the common denominator of the whole group. The fact that the term could be applied as well to modern art was further proof of the immutability of those laws and their current vitality.21 But there was more: the incipient abstraction of cubism had ushered in a new phase—a phase of “purification,” as Apollinaire suggested—in which painting would be distilled to its absolute, indivisible essence.22 And this painterly essence, the argument now ran, was coextensive with the fundamental core of classicism, that is, with the eternal principles of aesthetics. What enabled this improbable conjunction of modernist and “classical” theories of art was precisely their shared basis in a “purist” ideology, itself grounded in the long tradition of Aristotelian essentialism.23 E. H. Gombrich, in discussing the perennial demand for an “essential” definition of painting, has seen in it a vestige of Aristotle’s system of natural taxonomy, with its foundation in induction and intellectual intuition.24 Observing the wealth of plant life around him, Aristotle had discovered that many plants shared certain structural

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is realized in the fashion of nature—that is, through the grouping, arrangement, and ordered measure of forms borrowed from nature (men, animals, plants, etc.)—there may yet be art in the work, but that art is not the result of the artistic idea, because beauty did not appear in a form that was direct, independent, and disinterested, but in an indirect form, borrowed from nature. . . . Such was classical art. You must now ask yourself: “Can there exist an art more perfect than that, where the essence of beauty would appear completely in the fashion of art?” That is precisely the logical deduction of modern art.19

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features, according to which they could be grouped into a genus or species. Although any two oak trees, for example, were bound to vary, those differences were merely “accidental” compared to the essential features they shared. Transferred to art, this way of thinking implied that the “species” of painting was united by a stable set of properties common to all its members. The proximate source for the essentialism of modernist and classical criticism between the wars—and particularly for the prohibition against “literary painting” that they both enjoined—was not Aristotle, however, but eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, especially the writings of Winckelmann and Lessing.25 Winckelmann believed that Greek art, of itself, was an art of essentials, pared of anything that might link it to the transitory or “accidental.” The status that he passionately proclaimed for it, as a timeless standard of beauty, was thus largely founded in his perception of the art’s own apparent atemporality. According to Winckelmann, the representation of movement, emotion, and all particularizing detail had been suppressed by ancient sculptors so that their work became the very embodiment of the transcendent and universal; hence the importance of the words Einfalt (simplicity) and still (unmoving, tranquil) in his characterization of the sculptures he so admired. Lessing’s innovation was to see these same qualities not as the exclusive property of Greek art, as Winckelmann had, but rather as the definitive features of visual art (for which Greek sculpture was still the paradigm). Lessing claimed that it was precisely its simplicity and lack of movement that set a painting or sculpture apart from works of literature. Whereas “poetry uses words, which follow each other in time,” the signs employed in a painting or sculpture coexist, he argued, in a single eternal instant. Said differently, the feature common to every painting—the unchanging essence of the medium—was declared by Lessing to be its own unchangingness, that is, the stasis of its elements in comparison with those of literary works.26 Lessing felt that this fundamental, material distinction placed certain constraints on the artist, while at the same time providing him with standards of excellence and beauty. If the essence of the visual arts were grounded in the stasis of the medium, then any painting or sculpture that ac-

In Greek ethical life the individual was independent and free in himself, though without cutting himself adrift from the universal interests present in the actual state. . . . There was no question of an independence of the political sphere contrasted with a subjective morality distinct from it; the substance of political life was merged in individuals just as much as they sought this their own freedom only in pursuing the universal aims of the whole.29

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cepted its inherent limitations, and that displayed its timelessness in all its parts, would be perforce a better work of art. Extrapolating from these ideas, some critics in the 1910s and 1920s directly equated painting with its material properties and called for an increasingly nonrepresentational art. But whether they preferred figuration or abstraction, the vast majority of critics singled out for praise those formal traits—balance, harmony, wholeness, and unity—that, in themselves, seemed to express the atemporality that was considered to be painting’s indivisible essence.27 It is hardly necessary to point out the tremendous gulf between this highly prescribed view of art and Picasso’s stated belief that “different motives inevitably require different methods of expression.” Nor is it very difficult to see how a deeply ingrained essentializing attitude toward painting might be exploited by conservative or reactionary ideologues seeking to deny diversity and historical change; to many, the medium itself had come to epitomize timelessness and, by extension, eternal values.28 But “classical” works in particular were subject to ideological interpretation, a fact that again owed much to Winckelmann’s precedent. Winckelmann’s admiration of Greek sculpture was strongly bound up with his admiration of ancient Greece. His written descriptions of the freestanding male nudes, especially, repeatedly emphasized the work’s selfcontainment, unity, and wholeness, as well as its “universality,” its lack of particularizing detail. Together these features were seen to provide a model of a similarly constituted ideal subjectivity: of an autonomous individual whose singularity was in perfect harmony with, and therefore representative of, society at large. Half a century after Winckelmann, Hegel would base his own claims for the formal perfection of classical sculpture on the same ideological ground:

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Indeed this vision of classical Greece—and concomitantly of “classical” art—as free from the effects of the psychic and social divisions plaguing modern society persisted well into the twentieth century, flourishing with the “call to order” of the interwar period. With the rise of abstraction, it was no longer even necessary that artists take the human figure as their subject; any work that seemed to imply completeness and to shun particularization was considered of a piece with the ideals of classical sculpture. In France, the dream of wholeness and unity such classicism fostered appealed perhaps especially to the conservative bourgeoisie, who were anxious to deny all psychic and social division and to cast themselves in the role of universal subjects. A more dire form of the same phenomenon existed, of course, in Germany and Italy, where extreme measures would be taken to eliminate difference and to appease the middle classes. Clearly some such understanding of the ideological implications of classicism informed André Breton’s unfavorable review of de Chirico’s 1925 show of neoclassical works at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. After the artist’s participation the following year in the Milan exhibition “Novecento Italiano,” which was underwritten by Mussolini himself, Breton’s criticism became particularly scathing; he reproduced de Chirico’s Orestes and Electra in La Révolution surréaliste with the figures aggressively defaced by several thick scribbles of ink.30 Picasso was specifically exempted from any such criticism, though by the end of 1925 he was no longer working in a classicizing vein. The following year Breton wrote, likely in reference to the artist’s change of interests, that “Picasso, finally escaping all compromise, remains master of a situation that except for him we should have considered desperate.”31 Many of the artist’s works from that period (the 1925 Dance, for example, or the mixed-media Guitars, with their nails protruding toward the viewer) clearly belong to the general context of surrealism.32 The rest of Picasso’s output during the latter half of the decade, remarkable in its stylistic diversity even for Picasso, is in that respect also comparable to surrealist art, to the heterogeneity of its productions. (Here it is worth recalling the difficulty Breton himself had in deciding whether or not surrealist painting so much as existed; like everyone else, he was accustomed to seeking

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definitions in the common denominators of “style.”)33 In Picasso’s case, the newly intensified pluralism was perhaps one of the few remaining strategies whereby he could check an increasingly prevalent and constraining essentialist view of art. Even so, artistically and politically conservative critics continued to single out the artist’s “classical” work for praise, and to interpret its style and imagery along narrow, essentialist lines. In 1929, for example, Waldemar George, who had recently written a monograph on Picasso, declared that “the poetic and ideological significance” of the artist’s classicizing figures resided “in their fixed and immobile features.”34 However contrary such claims may have been to Picasso’s intent, they undeniably shaped expectations of classicizing works well into the next decade. Their underlying assumptions concerning the necessary unity and timelessness of “classical” art were thus an important component of the background of understanding against which Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations and other prints of the early thirties took shape. Indeed, as we begin to look at the prints in detail, we may suspect that it was the prevalence of such comments, and their potential insidiousness, that actually provided the impetus for Picasso’s return to classicism in those years.

2 Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid

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On the surface at least, Picasso’s return to a classicizing mode in his prints of the 1930s seems a surprising development. Not only was much of his other work from that period in a decidedly surrealist vein, but the artistic and political climate guaranteed that the move would be fraught with ideological implications. Moreover, the specific circumstances of his return—a collaboration with Albert Skira on the young man’s very first publishing venture—were hardly more auspicious. Even if the stories are true that Madame Skira confronted the artist on the beach at Juan-les-Pins to plead her son’s cause, they do not explain Picasso’s willingness to take part in the project. Ultimately his decision seems to have turned on the choice of text. Under no circumstances, Picasso reportedly told Madame Skira, would he illustrate a book on Napoleon, as her son had initially requested. He might, however, be willing to consider “a classical author—perhaps something mythological.”1

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The text that Picasso and Skira finally settled upon was the Metamorphoses of Ovid, a work that apparently satisfied both of Picasso’s criteria. Certainly the poem was “something mythological,” its narrative comprising nearly 250 separate myths drawn from the ancient repertoire. Similarly, Ovid—by virtue of the fact that he wrote in Latin and lived during the reign of Augustus—generally qualified as a “classical author.” Yet there was also a sense in which the Metamorphoses could be considered profoundly unclassical, particularly as the term was understood in 1930, when Picasso approved the text. “Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” are conspicuously absent from the poem. And although Ovid wrote in the dactylic hexameter of heroic epic, his work confounds all expectations of the kind of unified and rationally unfolding plot associated with the genre and perhaps best exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneid.2 In contrast to the rigorously teleological advance of Virgil’s narrative, the Metamorphoses’ aggregative structure and lack of plot line seem particularly blatant; its 250 separate myths are held together only by Ovid’s ingenuity and the recurring theme of unanticipated change.3 Moreover, in place of the pietas of Virgilian epic, many of Ovid’s stories revolve around the very “unclassical” sentiments of unredeemed violence, failure, and lust. These were precisely the characteristics that, in 1930, had begun to attract the surrealists’ interest in myth.4 Like Freud before them, the surrealists felt that ancient mythology provided a means of access to the darker reaches of the unconscious. And although this was not especially what drove Picasso’s fascination with the material (not, at least, where this particular project was concerned), his first etchings for the Metamorphoses—illustrations of the Death of Orpheus—are strikingly similar to André Masson’s emotionally charged “automatic drawings,” as well as to that artist’s later, mythological works (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). Picasso utilized the same harsh angularity and rapid strokes, along with irrational juxtapositions of scale, to create a visually expressive equivalent to the furious violence of Orpheus’s attackers. Despite what may seem the fitting correlation between the “unclassical” nature of the Orpheus myth and the overt anticlassicism of Picasso’s illustration, the artist apparently soon became dissatisfied with the etching. Returning to the

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2.1 Picasso, unpublished version of The Death of Orpheus, 1930.

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2.2 Masson, Furious Suns, 1925.

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drawing board, he reversed course, eventually settling on a remarkably classicizing mode. The style of the new illustrations recalls that of Greek red-figure vases or, closer still, Etruscan mirror engravings, whose disproportionate figures are rendered exclusively in line, without aid of either modeling or color, and, like Picasso’s, tend to fill the space of the composition (figs. 2.3 and 2.4).5 Of course, the “classical” status of Etruscan art might itself be considered somewhat dubious, its Hellenic features having been grafted onto a very different aesthetic. This in fact was the emphasis of a 1929 article published in the Cahiers d’art, whose editor, Christian Zervos, was then at work on the first volume of Picasso’s oeuvre catalogue. Zervos had asked the archaeologist Hans Mühlestein to characterize Etruscan art and to explain his interest in it, which the scholar did in an essay entitled “Histoire et esprit contemporain.” Implicitly echoing Nietzsche’s assertion that the great art of antiquity was motivated by two opposed aesthetic impulses—in Nietzsche’s writings they were termed the Dionysian and the Apollonian—Mühlestein identified Etruscan art’s indigenous element with an uncontrolled, “expansive energy,” its Hellenic borrowings with a more ordered, “classical” strain. Mühlestein’s studies had convinced him that, in general, the classical aesthetic, with its “canons and systems, leads straight to academicism, whereas the other, because of its hybridism, ends in fruitless anarchy.”6 The finest Etruscan works, he argued, were those in which the two tendencies were held in perfect balance, each fully implicated in the other. The compound nature of these works Mühlestein contrasted—in terms that held a certain contemporary relevance—to a purer but oppressive classicism that sacrificed invention to the organic unity and technical perfection of each work. His article in fact specifically recommended the Etruscan example to modern artists as an antidote to the prevalent “idea of a world governed by purely mechanical evolution.”7 Indeed, as we will see, the Etruscan art described by Mühlestein (its classical facade undergirt by an anarchic hybridism) did find a remarkable correlate in Picasso’s “Etruscan” illustrations. Their “superficial” Hellenism offered a more subtle yet ultimately more powerful means of subverting essentialist doctrine than had his earlier, openly unclassical mode.

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2.3 Engraving of an Etruscan mirror.

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2.4 Picasso, The Death of Orpheus, 1930 (September 18).

in which the text is reduced to such infinitesimal proportions that its only purpose seems to be as a pretext for the illustrations. But an illustrated book is not an album of engravings. More than one editor has made the mistake of forgetting that the text forms the indispensible armature of the book. . . . Other editors take into account the quality of the typography in a book, but neglect the quality of the text.9 Not so with the new edition of the Metamorphoses. There the text clearly remained central, and its character was allowed to shape the layout of the volume. Because one of the most distinctive features of the poem is its apparently seamless continuity—the way that one story dissolves into another, which then shades into the next—Picasso and Skira limited the number of illustrations. In this way, the “very extensive text,” as Zervos pointed out, was able to “unfold without interruption over numerous pages.”10 Small, quarter-leaf vignettes were fit into the

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Moreover, for anyone who was the least bit familiar with Etruscan art and who recognized its forms in Picasso’s illustrations, the style of those illustrations would have called attention to the absurdity of popular conceptions of classicism as devoid of “literary content.” Current dogma may have held to the “classical” as a category of pure form, but the Etruscan mirror engravings whose style the illustrations mimicked clearly revealed that those forms had often been the vehicle of complex narratives. Not only had the Etruscans appropriated stylistic elements from Greek art, but they had also adapted much of its mythological content to their own purposes and needs. The engraved Etruscan mirrors in particular were replete with the stories of Greek myth.8 In a sense, their narrativity was one of their most classical features, their most conspicuous link to the Hellenic world. In this sense, too, the “Etruscan” style of Picasso’s Metamorphoses etchings is entirely appropriate to their context and illustrative function. Certainly when they are encountered within the book, the etchings’ narrative underpinnings are immediately apparent. Zervos, in a review for the Cahiers d’art written shortly after publication of Skira’s edition, praised both editor and artist on these grounds. “We have frequently seen illustrated books,” he observed,

2.5 Picasso, Fragment of a Woman’s Body (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XIV), 1931.

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only naturally occurring spaces within the body of the poem, namely, at the beginning of each of the Metamorphoses’ fifteen books. Falling as they do at Ovid’s rare pauses, these small etchings neither interrupt the narrative nor directly refer to any part of it. They are not, properly speaking, illustrations, but rather decorative images whose primary function is to punctuate the long expanses of verse (figs. 2.5 and 2.6).11 In contrast, the full-size etchings, which were placed between or somewhere near the centermost pages of each book, consistently refer to the events and actions described therein. Even the imagery of the Death of Orpheus, which is

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2.6 Picasso, Two Heads (beginning of Metamorphoses Book XV), 1931.

sufficiently similar to a number of Picasso’s other works of the period that we might be tempted to attribute it to his own invention, in fact remains close to Ovid’s narrative. Undoubtedly its vengeful women, martyred artist, and especially its other victim of violence, the bull,12 all carried special significance for Picasso. Yet they all can be traced to Ovid’s account of the onslaught: To provide real weapons for their mad intent, . . . [the Thracian women set upon] oxen ploughing in the fields. . . . When the farmers saw the horde of women, they fled, leaving their implements behind. . . . Savagely the women seized hold of these, tore apart the oxen which

threatened them with their horns, and rushed once more to the destruction of the poet. (XI.30–38)13

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Although Picasso clearly toned down the graphic violence of the event, perhaps in accord with Skira’s wishes,14 there remain many correspondences between the characters depicted and those described in the text. This holds true, as well, for the other illustrations. Unfortunately, the plan to place each image near the center of the relevant book—presumably so that the fifteen illustrations would be evenly spaced throughout the volume—meant that several pages occasionally intervened between the etching and the portion of the text to which it referred.15 To remedy the situation, the table of contents at the back of the book supplied identifying titles for each of the etchings. Thus reconnected to the text, even such apparently static (and in that sense canonically “classical”) compositions as those reproduced here in figures 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 acquire a certain animation. They too become narrative images—or, more accurately, images of narration, since they depict characters actually in the process of telling stories: Nestor recounting heroic exploits at Troy, Pythagoras teaching his cosmology to Numa, or the daughters of Minyas who, while spinning yarn, weave the stories that comprise most of the Metamorphoses’ fourth book. One might easily suspect that Picasso chose these particular figures from the myriad mentioned by Ovid precisely to demonstrate the narrativity of his illustrations in the most literal way. Yet the artist also took advantage of the images’ autonomy to develop a narrative dimension independent of the written text. Even in illustrations that closely parallel Ovid’s account of events, Picasso was at pains to create a more purely visual sense of the action. In the face of current dogma, he sought to give his images their own temporal aspect, by investing the figures with the illusion of movement. Perhaps goaded by critics like Waldemar George, who, it will be remembered, had declared that “the poetic and ideological significance” of Picasso’s earlier classicizing figures resided “in their fixed and immobile features,” Picasso saw to it that the characters of the Metamorphoses illustrations would actively resist any such claim.

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2.7 Picasso, Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, 1930 (September 21).

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2.8 Picasso, Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, 1930 (September 25).

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2.9 Picasso, The Daughters of Minyas, 1930 (September 20).

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The etching of Tereus and Philomela, and the several trial prints leading up to it, well demonstrate the point. The brutal myth—which tells of Philomela’s rape and subsequent mutilation by her brother-in-law16—was one of the first that Picasso attempted to illustrate. In keeping with Ovid’s telling, the initial etching (fig. 2.10) focuses on the psychic tensions of the story: the two figures are shown presumably after the rape, each self-absorbed and silently brooding. Although Picasso immediately began work on other illustrations, he seems to have been dissatisfied with the composition’s apparent inaction. Weeks later he returned to the story of Tereus and Philomela, this time evidently intent on emphasizing not so much the emotionality of the episode as its frenzied motion. Accordingly, his new efforts depict the physical struggle between the pair (figs. 2.11, 2.12). In these etchings Picasso experimented with the placement of figures, first concentrating on Philomela’s resistance to Tereus, then—through a rearrangement of limbs—on the inevitable rape itself. The final image (fig. 2.13) manages to represent both actions. Whereas the earlier figures were fixed on the page by clear and continuous outlines, many contours in the final etching are broken or plural, as if intermittently registering a transient form. Tereus’s right leg in particular is impossible to pin down. Various lines describe it in a number of different positions, from fully extended to fully bent, with the knee resting on the print’s lower margin. These multiple contours serve much like futurist “force-lines”—as graphic representations of movement that, in this case, suggest Tereus’s repeated thrusts and Philomela’s ongoing efforts to push him away. Within the same image, Picasso created an equally powerful sense of motion through nearly antithetical means: in some places a lone contour suffices to indicate two totally separate forms. The forward profile of Philomela’s left leg, for example, coincides with the lines marking the underside of Tereus’s right arm and Philomela’s own left forearm. Likewise the back of her calf and thigh are suggested by a contour that doubly serves to indicate Tereus’s straightened right leg. The area bounded by these lines appears, alternately, as solid and void, Philomela and not-Philomela. We are forced constantly to shift our assessment of which part is figure, which ground, so that the illustration becomes an almost strobo-

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2.10 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (September 18).

scopic image of motion. Unable to grasp both views simultaneously, we run through them in succession, each cycle causing Philomela, in effect, to kick out at her assailant. It is tempting to see the print’s action as a counterattack, too, on certain tenets of idealist aesthetics, newly resurrected in much of the art-theoretical writing of the period. Specifically, the illustration challenges the then-prevalent association of a simple linear style of drawing with the ideal of “classical purity.”

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2.11 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).

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2.12 Picasso, unpublished etching for Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).

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2.13 Picasso, Tereus and Philomela, 1930 (October 18).

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Whereas artists such as Ozenfant and Jeanneret privileged the use of line over color precisely because color was thought prey to the vagaries of subjective response,17 Picasso’s images demonstrate the extent to which even “chaste contours” might be full of ambiguity, and fully dependent on the viewer to puzzle out their forms. Again and again in the Metamorphoses illustrations, Picasso exploited the ambiguity inherent in line drawing to animate his figures with the radical illusion of movement. He developed a surprisingly broad array of techniques, each of them conjuring a different motion, each simultaneously undermining the dominant belief in a classicism of clarity and stasis. For the Death of Orpheus (fig. 2.4), to return to that example, Picasso produced a nearly cinematic sense of motion by confusing the contours that separate Orpheus’s attackers. As before, the device hinges on a shared outline: in this case, the narrow, elongated S-curve that links the torsos of the two Thracian women on the left. The line serves as a kind of arris, not so much distinguishing the figures as suggesting a pivot between them. Elsewhere in the group whole contours are left undrawn, so that, in passing from the bacchante at left to her sisters alongside, we have trouble finally determining their external limits, or even which head belongs to which body. The figures seem to flow one into another, as they swivel and bend and move ever closer to Orpheus: three women acting out a single, concerted lunge. Orpheus’s own contortions also turn on ambiguity, despite the fact that his contours are complete, his silhouette relatively simple. In this instance, the uncertainty arises within the bounded expanses of the figure, in the unmarked areas between outlines. Picasso omitted all internal signposts from Orpheus’s torso, all indications of either backbone or chest that would normally have provided us with a means of orienting the body in three dimensions. Nor do we get much help from below, for although Orpheus’s knees seem to point in our direction, so too do both his buttocks and his groin. The hands only add to the uncertainty; with but a slight mental effort on our part, each can be made into either left or right, truly ambidextrous. The figure of Orpheus is a spatial amphiboly:18 interpreted one way, he appears to fall over backward, while another view has him

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twisted, chest to the ground. Alternating between frontal and dorsal readings, we seem to be in collusion with Orpheus’s attackers, effectively wringing him out like a rag with each visual reorientation. To some extent, all of the figures in the Metamorphoses illustrations demand our complicity. They all require us to flesh out the gaps between outlines, to use our imagination to transform their flat, blank passages into corpulent, threedimensional form. The same might be said of any contour drawing, of course; but if we compare Picasso’s illustrations with, say, the line drawings of John Flaxman (fig. 2.14), which they superficially resemble, the difference is readily apparent. Flaxman’s compositions are decidedly planar, with figures rendered in strict profile and arranged along a single groundline that is unfailingly parallel to the picture plane. By keeping references to a third dimension at a minimum, Flaxman was able to make the various poses and the spatial relationships between figures immediately intelligible. In contrast, the overlappings, foreshortenings, and other uncertainties of Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations necessarily give the viewer pause. And it is precisely this vacillation before the image that endows its figures with the semblance of motion. The Sacrifice of Polyxena (fig. 2.15) offers yet another variation on this strategy. Although the external contours of Polyxena’s form are complete, just as they were with the figure of Orpheus, it is difficult to view her silhouette in its totality. The cloth draping from her shoulder and the arm of the man who holds her each serve to impede our ready comprehension of her form. If we force ourselves to regard the girl’s figure whole and in isolation, her body appears wildly distorted, an aggregate of aspects completely lacking in “organic unity.”19 Under these conditions, Polyxena’s figure recalls the images that Leo Steinberg has brought to our attention—those Picasso nudes whose erogenous zones all somehow manage to congregate on the picture plane, and who therefore seem to offer us simultaneous apprehension of their every aspect (fig. 2.16).20 However, the Polyxena illustration actually discourages us from seeing her figure in this way. The image’s complexity, in combination with its broad, unmodulated expanses, makes the girl’s form difficult to isolate at a glance, with the result that we are

much more apt to scan it slowly and piecemeal. In the process, the various “displacements” of her body are perceived, instead, as traces of its movement. While our eyes traverse the distance from Polyxena’s belly to her backside, she seems to slump and turn away; it’s as if her fall were being acted out in concert with our shifting gaze. The strategy is much the same in Picasso’s illustration of Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar (fig. 2.17). There, the right-side contours of Meleager’s body are easily filled out to give us a frontal view of the figure; those on his left, however, suggest a nearly profile view. The whole seems to be a kind of Mercator’s projection of his torso, which we are nonetheless encouraged to read sequentially, as movement. Working our way from one side of the image to the other, Meleager

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2.14 John Flaxman, Thetis Finds Achilles Mourning over the Body of Patroclus, illustration for Iliad, 1793.

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2.15 Picasso, The Sacrifice of Polyxena, 1930 (September 23).

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2.16 Picasso, La Coiffure, 1954.

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2.17 Picasso, Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar, 1930 (September 18).

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effectively springs into action, driving his spear down into the boar and pivoting on the follow-through.21 The most audacious use of this strategy, however, appears in Hercules Slaying the Centaur Nessus (fig. 2.18). In that etching, Picasso set out to render nothing less than Hercules’s complete about-face—a full 180-degree turn—by splicing together front and rear views along the contour of the hero’s (rather awkward) left arm.22 The effect of movement is aided by the size of the illustration within the book23 and the fact that the viewer, holding it in hand, is simply too close to absorb all of the image at a glance. Instead he must scan the work, thereby encountering its various aspects in succession. Interestingly enough, in the margin of the original copper plate, directly beneath the image of Hercules, Picasso sketched a small figure intently gazing at an open book (fig. 2.19).24 Although perhaps a portrait of his nine-year-old son, the sketch also serves to indicate that the final context for the Hercules and Nessus, and therefore the conditions under which it would be seen, were very much on Picasso’s mind. Despite the look of spontaneity to the final etching, Picasso seems to have carefully weighed the circumstances of its reception, in an effort to decide just how far the contours—and thus the temporal dimension—of a single figure might plausibly be extended.25 More was at stake here than simply a clever response to the challenges of narrative illustration. For it was precisely art’s temporal dimension that had been denied by critics and aestheticians ever since the eighteenth century and the writings of Lessing. Perhaps Zervos was thinking of the Metamorphoses illustrations specifically when he wrote, in the context of a general discussion of Picasso’s classicism, that the artist “had given the lie to the opinion of Lessing, which expressly reserved for painting and sculpture the role of description in order to impart to poetry the dual tasks of evocation and animation.”26 Lessing had built his opposition of poetry and painting around the presumption of instantaneous vision, the belief that works of art are wholly present to their viewer in, literally, the blink of an eye.27 It was a model of perception whose logic required that those works of art be unified and complete, since any nonunifying element, any

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2.18 Picasso, Hercules Slaying Nessus, 1930 (September 20).

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2.19 Picasso, full-plate etching of Hercules and Nessus, 1930.

perceived incompletion, would introduce a delay into the process. It required, too, and for much the same reason, that the viewer be endowed with a comparable integrity and wholeness: a monadic subject immediately apprehending a selfcontained object. The Metamorphoses illustrations, however, refuse to conform to this particular logic. Through their illusions of movement they not only assert the duration and activity of vision; they also, and even more importantly, demonstrate that the site of that activity cuts across the boundaries separating subject and object as those had been “classically” conceived. The movements of Meleager or Hercules occur neither entirely on the page nor purely in the mind of the viewer. In fact work and viewer seem to interpenetrate, so that it becomes impossible in the wake of the perceived action to think of either in isolation, as a separable entity. In effect, the Metamorphoses illustrations take possession of their audience (every bit as much as vice versa), compelling involvement—that is, compelling the viewer, for a change, to enter the picture. In spite of his evident desire to fill the etchings with the illusion of movement and change, Picasso avoided depicting any of the literal metamorphoses described in Ovid’s poem. He did briefly consider including one such illustration—an image of Actaeon transformed into a stag (fig. 2.20)—but soon thought better of it and substituted an altogether different work.28 Peculiar as Picasso’s omission of metamorphosis imagery may seem, his response is fairly typical of how artists over the centuries have utilized Ovid’s work. Although there are a few stunning counterexamples (such as Bernini’s famous statue of Apollo and Daphne), by and large visual artists have drawn on passages of the poem that do not involve actual metamorphosis.29 The classicist Karl Galinsky has argued that, far from being ironic, this state of affairs is in fact an accurate reflection of Ovid’s intentions: 42 – 43

In contrast to the metamorphosis poets who preceded him, Ovid included many myths which were only tangentially connected with a metamorphosis. . . . This, and the sheer number of

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2.20 Picasso, unpublished etching of Actaeon Transformed into a Stag, 1930 (September 20).

myths told by him (more than 250), indicate that his concern, to which the role of the Metamorphoses in the later literary and cultural tradition is eloquent testimony, was myth and not merely metamorphosis. Ovid’s aim in the Metamorphoses was to come to grips with and reshape myth, Greek myth in particular. Briefly, we might say that he was concerned with the metamorphosis of myth rather than mythological metamorphosis.30 Much the same point—that Ovid’s principal concern was with the reshaping of earlier mythological material—had been made by Georges Lafaye in the introduction to his French translation of the poem (the translation that Picasso and Skira chose for their own, illustrated edition of the text). “One cannot doubt,” Lafaye wrote, that the intention and the originality of Ovid lay precisely in the fact that, on the canvas provided him by Nicander or some other [Greek mythographer], he freely embroidered extended compositions, in which he could display all the resources of his ingenious mind. Nor should we forget that, along with narratives inspired by Homer, Sophocles, or Euripides, he interwove many others whose models, for the most part lost to us today, were furnished to him by the masters of the Alexandrian school; everything in the Metamorphoses that recalls romance poetry, idylls, and elegies comes from this source.31

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In short, Lafaye’s commentary implied that the poem was itself a masterpiece of metamorphosis, its marvelous “originality” most evident in its complex indebtedness to the past. As we will see, the same could be said of Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations. Among the final prints there are no images of actual transformation, yet there are numerous traces of the transformation of others’ images. Picasso would later claim that, to a greater or lesser extent, that practice was always a part of his art-making. “At the inception of each picture,” he would say, “someone is working with me. Towards the end, I have a feeling of having worked all by myself and without a collaborator.”32 In the case of the Metamorphoses illustrations, the transformations were so complete that the “collaborative” nature of the project seems

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to have gone thoroughly unremarked until now, the identity of Picasso’s principal collaborator—Peter Paul Rubens—entirely unacknowledged.33 Rubens was commissioned in 1636 to produce a large series of paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of Philip IV of Spain. Ultimately the artist executed only a small fraction of the paintings himself, though he did furnish all of the oil sketches on which the larger, finished works were based.34 As Svetlana Alpers has noted, these compositions are unusual among Ovidian paintings both in the subjects chosen and in the frankly narrative manner of their presentation. Rubens passed over nearly all of the myths that had a long tradition in monumental, allegorical painting, looking instead for his models to woodcuts and engravings from published editions of the Metamorphoses.35 The appearance of many of those same lesser-known and infrequently depicted stories among Picasso’s Ovidian etchings marks them as the third link in this chain. In all likelihood, Picasso had been aware of Rubens’s compositions for some time, conceivably since childhood. Most of the fifty surviving oil sketches were preserved in Spanish collections (the majority in the Prado, where the fullscale paintings from the Torre de la Parada were also displayed). In fact, two of the sketches ended up in the provincial museum at La Coruña, the Galician town where Picasso spent his adolescence while his father taught drawing and design at the local school of art.36 In the fall of 1930, just as work was beginning on the Metamorphoses illustrations, an article appeared in the Archivo español de arte that may have jogged Picasso’s memory of the Torre de la Parada compositions.37 The article included two illustrations, the first of Rubens’s Procris and Cephalus sketch, the second of the finished painting made after it by Peeter Symons (figs. 2.21, 2.22). Even if the Archivo español reproductions were not the immediate source, those two paintings clearly provided the models for Picasso’s own illustration of the myth (fig. 2.23). The proof lies not only in Cephalus’s gesturing left hand—an element taken directly from the earlier compositions—but also, and most tellingly, in the bow that he carries in his right. If Picasso had consulted Ovid’s narrative alone,

2.21 Rubens, Procris and Cephalus, 1636.

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it would be difficult to account for this particular choice of arms. The text is very clear: Procris, spying on her husband in the woods, was mistaken for an animal and killed with the javelin (in the French text, it is le javelot) that she herself had earlier given him. The real culprit here seems to have been Symons who, looking only at Rubens’s sketch, translated its all-too-cursorily rendered javelin into a finely detailed arrow. Picasso, although almost certainly familiar with Ovid’s account, chose to follow suit. Hence his Procris clutches at an arrow in her chest, and his Cephalus prominently holds out a bow.

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2.22 P. Symons, Procris and Cephalus, 1637.

With almost every other aspect of the composition, Picasso took great liberties. Except for the incongruous arrow and Cephalus’s extended left arm—and perhaps also the shrubbery behind which Procris was hidden—he retained little from the earlier paintings. Their style, too, was completely transformed in the translation to etching.38 Yet despite the extent of these changes, Rubens’s work was evidently crucial to the project. Indeed the few remaining vestiges of the Torre de la Parada Procris and Cephalus are all the more significant because they are

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2.23 Picasso, Procris and Cephalus, 1930 (September 18).

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so few. Additional references would only have weakened their testimony to the truly metamorphic nature of Picasso’s illustrations. The fact that those few remaining vestiges point specifically to Rubens’s work is important as well. One need only recall the long-lived debate in France between the proponents of Rubens and those of Poussin, and to see how often the name of the latter was admiringly invoked in criticism of the late 1910s and 1920s, to appreciate the significance of Picasso’s choice of models. If Poussin was the great exemplar of French classicism, Rubens was considered the quintessentially baroque artist.39 And as the fortunes of classicism rose during the interwar years, the popularity of all things baroque correspondingly declined. The essay by Theo van Doesburg discussed earlier, his “Classique-BaroqueModerne,” was but one of the more explicit statements of a sentiment widely held. Van Doesburg, it will be remembered, drew a sharp (and qualitative) distinction between the classical and the modern, based on their degree of abstraction and “independence from nature.” However, he placed both of these styles in opposition to the “degeneracy” of baroque art. The classical and the modern, according to van Doesburg, each exemplify the harmonious display of aesthetic essences, whereas those essences are blatantly disregarded by the baroque: “The baroque is based essentially on a disharmonious relation, through the predominance . . . of natural, capricious forms and through the arbitrary exaggeration of those forms.”40 It privileges the fleeting and accidental, he felt, at the expense of the transcendent. The qualities that elicited van Doesburg’s disapproval seem to have been precisely those that attracted Picasso to the baroque art of Rubens. The Metamorphoses illustrations emphasize the “capricious” and “arbitrary” features of the Torre de la Parada paintings, focusing on their exaggerated gestures and compositional “disharmonies” to the point that, in The Fall of Phaethon, “accident” becomes the very theme of the image (fig. 2.24). The story itself, of course, revolves around the upheaval resulting from Phaethon’s inability to keep Apollo’s chariot under control and on its median course across the sky.41 Taking the Torre de la Parada illustration of the myth as his starting point (fig. 2.25), Picasso

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2.24 Picasso, The Fall of Phaethon, 1930 (September 20).

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2.25 Rubens, The Fall of Phaethon, 1636.

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condensed the already compact, chaotic arrangement into an utter tangle of limbs. The image’s “Etruscan engraving” style—and especially its lack of any color or modeling that might help us to distinguish one figure from another, or either of those from ground—further intensifies the apparent confusion of the scene. In this sense, that “Etruscan” style is perfectly matched to the etching’s baroque compositional borrowings from Rubens; each invokes an artistic tradition fully engaged with classical antiquity yet displaying few of the traits deemed essentially classical by twentieth-century critics. From Rubens’s Death of Eurydice, Picasso singled out the awkward, kneestogether pose of the dying bride and accentuated its ungainliness (figs. 2.26, 2.27). In a further affront to “classical” aesthetics, he simultaneously transformed the pose into an image of movement, a record of Eurydice’s swoon and collapse. His metamorphosis of the rest of the composition was even more complete. Most noticeably, Picasso replaced Rubens’s figure of Orpheus with four of Eurydice’s naiad companions, thus bringing the illustration into better accord with Ovid’s description of the event.42 Picasso eliminated all references to landscape, and kept only the snakish line near Eurydice’s left arm as a reminder of Rubens’s coiling serpent. In a certain, rather ironic sense, these radical changes yielded an image even more “baroque” than the original composition. In van Doesburg’s estimation at least, the “disharmony” of baroque art was caused by just this sort of arbitrary and idiosyncratic appropriation. To his mind, baroque artists had been distracted by the superficialities and extraneous details of the work they emulated, and in the process overlooked its essence. Not only was all sense of “organic unity” thereby lost, but “tradition” was reduced to mere quotation, without any presumption of a deeper stylistic affinity. “The baroque became a hotbed of inspiration,” van Doesburg claimed, “but at the same time the end of any pure conception of style. . . . The baroque was a vast storehouse which any artist could ransack as he pleased.”43 Picasso continued to “ransack” the Torre de la Parada paintings for anything that struck his fancy or filled a particular need. He stole the struggling warriors from the lower right corner of Rubens’s Cadmus and Minerva (fig. 2.28);

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2.26 Rubens, The Death of Eurydice, 1636.

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2.27 Picasso, The Death of Eurydice, 1930 (October 11).

lifted out of context and spun round 180 degrees, they became the basis for the illustration of a completely different myth (fig. 2.29). The title given to that illustration, The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, is actually a misnomer, as there was no combat between the two men in Ovid’s telling of the story. Before they could even exchange blows, Perseus brought out the Gorgon’s head, turning Phineus (and all of his remaining comrades) to stone. Picasso’s illustration must have been meant to represent instead the bloodier confrontation between Perseus’s and Phineus’s men, in which—among more conventional slayings—Lycormas knocked over and killed Pettalus with a metal bar that he brought “crashing down on the bones of Pettalus’ neck” (V.121). Picasso, discovering an improbable echo of that battle in a corner of the Cadmus and Minerva, ingeniously reenlisted Rubens’s warriors for his own illustration, modifying them to suit.

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2.28 Rubens, Cadmus and Minerva, 1636.

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2.29 Picasso, The Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, 1930 (September 21).

Who would have believed what followed, did not ancient tradition bear witness to it? The stones began to lose their hardness and rigidity, and after a little, grew soft. Then, once softened, they acquired a definite shape. When they had grown in size, and developed a tenderer nature, a certain likeness to a human form could be seen, though it was still not clear: they were like marble images, begun but not yet chiselled out, or like unfinished statues. . . . In a brief space of time, thanks to the divine will of the gods, the stones thrown from male hands took on the appearance of men, while from those the woman threw, women were recreated. (I.401–413) Picasso’s illustration, however, shows nothing of the sort. There is no old couple, nor a single stone. In place of the latter we find children, begat (to all appearances) in the usual way. The explanation is not to be found within the text at all, but rather with Rubens’s illustration for the Torre de la Parada (fig. 2.31). As it turns out, Rubens’s image is itself descended from an earlier representation of the myth, namely Peruzzi’s fresco of Deucalion and Pyrrha from the Villa Farnesina in Rome (fig. 2.32).44 Rubens took over Peruzzi’s figures of Deucalion and Pyrrha almost directly, though he exchanged their positions in the transfer; in his painting, it is the old woman who occupies the immediate foreground, with the old man behind. Peruzzi’s landscape, and the general distribution of figures within it, likewise found their way into Rubens’s composition. The most significant difference between the two works is in the representation of

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With Picasso’s illustration for the first book of the Metamorphoses, his socalled Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New Human Race (fig. 2.30), there are likewise discrepancies between the image and its given title, and again the discrepancies point to a complicated relation to Rubens’s work for the Torre de la Parada. According to Ovid’s account, Deucalion and Pyrrha were an old couple, unable to bear children and thus to repopulate the world after it had been destroyed by flood. In the text, Deucalion and Pyrrha go to Parnassus to consult the oracle of Themis, which tells them—obliquely, as oracles are wont to do—to descend from the temple, casting stones behind them.

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2.30 Picasso, Deucalion and Pyrrha Creating a New Human Race, 1930 (September 20).

Deucalion and Pyrrha’s “offspring.” In Peruzzi’s image, the women grown from the rocks thrown by Pyrrha are joined together in one large sisterly embrace, while Deucalion’s newly created men similarly acknowledge their fraternity. Rubens, however, put an end to this sexual segregation. As Julius Held has pointed out, Rubens’s sketch makes clear that the metamorphosis of stones into people was a singular event, never to be repeated; after those initial transformations, the normal processes of procreation would resume.45 Here the man born from Deucalion’s first stone and the woman created from Pyrrha’s turn to each other as lovers. The next pair, presumably, will do the same. Picasso’s highly selective borrowing from, and transformation of, the Torre de la Parada composition suggests that he was well aware of the artistic metamorphosis it had already undergone. Omitting all scenery, and even the seemingly

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2.31 Rubens, Deucalion and Pyrrha, 1636.

2.32 Peruzzi, Deucalion and Pyrrha, c. 1516.

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indispensable figures of Deucalion and Pyrrha—indeed, omitting everything that remained from Peruzzi’s initial design—he focused exclusively on the righthand side of the painting and on Rubens’s newly (re-)created human race. Seeing a resemblance to children in the smaller, still-developing stone/figures of Rubens’s painting, Picasso transformed the group yet again, making it into a nuclear family. In his illustration, the man, still kneeling, now inclines his head affectionately toward his son, while the woman (already long-haired in Rubens’s composition) has her hair combed by a second child. It is tempting to interpret Picasso’s etching as a comment on its own complex heritage, by seeing the themes of tradition and artistic “metamorphosis” al-

We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap.46 Over the next few years Wittgenstein would continue to develop his “family resemblance” analogy, but the central point remained the same: the individual members of any nominal “family” have no single trait common to them all, but rather each participate in a network of overlapping similarities. Picasso’s illustration of Deucalion and Pyrrha makes much the same point, though it takes the argument a step further. By completely doing away with every element that appeared in both of the earlier compositions—the landscape, the temple, the old couple themselves—Picasso graphically demonstrated how it was possible for things (here, his and Peruzzi’s images) to have no features in common and yet

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legorically figured in the imagery itself. Ovid’s explicit comparison of Deucalion and Pyrrha’s metamorphosing “offspring” to works of art taking shape would provide a precedent of sorts. But Picasso’s anomalous representation of those offspring as a family of parents and children could be seen as extending the analogy, encouraging us to think of the transformed images in truly generational terms. Such an analogy would imply that new works of art are related to their precursors (in this case, to Rubens’s and Peruzzi’s images) like the different generations of a family: not by some stable essence or ever-inherited trait, but by a disparate set of similarities that vary from one generation to the next. Coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time that Picasso was working on his Deucalion and Pyrrha illustration, Ludwig Wittgenstein was delivering a series of lectures at Cambridge University that included an attack on essentialist thinking couched in remarkably similar terms (we can make the terms even more similar by substituting the phrase “work of art” wherever Wittgenstein speaks of “games”):

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(because each was clearly related to Rubens’s painting) to be members of the same “family.” The larger lesson to be gleaned from Picasso’s Deucalion and Pyrrha illustration is that artistic tradition—including and perhaps even especially the classical tradition—is nothing more (nor less) than a set of works bound together by “family resemblances.” Recalling that the “family” of Deucalion and Pyrrha images (like the “family” in the myth) is the product of transformation, we might phrase the lesson this way: Whereas tradition is frequently seen as the repository of aesthetic essences (the perceived presence of those essences being both what elevates the individual work to inclusion within the Grand Tradition and what ties all such works together as a tradition), the sequence of Deucalion and Pyrrha compositions asks that we think of tradition instead as metamorphosis, here understood to be (like the metamorphosis of stones into people) an instance of continuity without essence, and thus with the potential for thoroughgoing change.47 Seeing tradition in this way has important implications as well for the perception of the individual works comprising it. Divested of their pretense to a common essence, the works each also forfeit their claims to unity and indivisible wholeness. As Leonard Barkan has remarked, “such is the heritage of metamorphosis; it is an image of simultaneous but divisible multiplicity.”48 Picasso’s illustration of Vertumnus and Pomona (fig. 2.33) allows us to see with unusual clarity something of this “simultaneous multiplicity.” Its composition is the product of a marriage of Rubens’s illustration of that same myth (fig. 2.34) to the Torre de la Parada Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 2.35), whose vertical format and tighter concentration on the intimacy of its couple’s encounter are prominent features of Picasso’s etching. Visible in the etching, too, is a possible relationship to another image of Ariadne and Bacchus (or Dionysus), from a well-known Greek vase by the Meleager Painter (fig. 2.36).49 All three works seem to have contributed to the form of Picasso’s Pomona—though in the case of the Greek kylix it would have been the male figure that provided the primary inspiration. Perhaps Picasso recognized in the posture of the wine-drunk god an apt expression of Pomona’s growing emotional intoxication, and so borrowed it

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2.33 Picasso, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1930 (September 23).

2.34 Rubens, Vertumnus and Pomona, 1636.

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for his own composition.50 To that general form, he added aspects of Rubens’s Pomona and Ariadne; in each case, he seems to have been drawn to the ambivalence of the woman’s pose, which makes her appear both to shy away from and to accept her suitor’s ardent advances. For his illustration, Picasso made literal the sequentiality implied in those twisting postures. Within the frame of a single image he created two distinct options: a fleeing Pomona, and one who has at last succumbed to Vertumnus’s appeal. Her change of attitude depends, in a sense, on us, and on which of the two possible right legs we assign to her—the other going by default to Vertumnus, who either lags behind or overtakes Pomona according to our decision. Shifting restlessly between options, we witness a gen-

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2.35 Rubens, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1636.

2.36 Meleager Painter, kylix depicting Dionysus and Ariadne, c. 475 B.C.

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uinely moving scene of seduction, as Vertumnus attempts to win over the occasionally distant goddess. Picasso may have been thinking of yet one other image as he worked on this particular illustration. The sculptor Aristide Maillol had exhibited, to great acclaim, a bronze statue of Pomona at the 1922 Salon (fig. 2.37). If Picasso had this work in mind, however, it was clearly as a counterexample, for it is the nearantithesis of the Metamorphoses etching. In contrast to Picasso’s Pomona, the sculpted figure appears rigidly impassive. Her one bent knee does provide some semblance of animation—casting her hips into a gentle sway—but her feet remain planted firmly side by side, and her forearms are held out at near-perfect

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2.37 Aristide Maillol, Pomona, 1910.

right angles from her torso. The goddess’s gaze is likewise directed virtually straight ahead, as if to convey her initial solitariness and inaccessibility. Whereas we receive Picasso’s Pomona as a figure continually in flux, Maillol’s statue appears static and totally separate from the surrounding environment. Not surprisingly, one of Maillol’s staunchest supporters was Waldemar George, the critic who had admired (for largely ideological reasons) the “fixed and immobile features” of Picasso’s classicizing figures of the 1920s.51 George’s admiration for Maillol remained firm throughout the artist’s career; his praise of Picasso, however, turned to open contempt once “fixedness” and “immobility” were no longer evident in his art. Writing in the spring of 1931, shortly after the

completion of the Metamorphoses illustrations, George declared that Picasso was producing “art that was out of touch with the constants of European art,” and he went on to warn that it was only by dint of these “constants” that “the white race assures itself of its identity and survival in history.”52 Even for those less reactionary than George, Picasso’s apparent disregard for the “constants” of the European tradition was a disturbing aspect of his art. To the critics and artists who viewed tradition as the preserve of aesthetic essences, and who believed that the works comprising it were or should be organically unified wholes, Picasso’s highly selective and idiosyncratic appropriation of the past seemed almost immoral. Van Doesburg had condemned such practice as “ransacking”; “pillage” was the term used by Robert Delaunay. Taking Picasso’s art as the prime example of the phenomenon, Delaunay located the root of its evil in the artist’s egoism: Exaggerated individualism leads to pillage. The desire for quick self-glorification prevents certain artists from spontaneously deriving the form of their art from the fundamental laws and encourages them, as a result, to take the easier and more expedient route, by searching the work of others for useful types. . . . It is this continuity in pillage that individualists dare to call “tradition.”53

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Much to Delaunay’s pique, Picasso proceeded as if there were no “fundamental laws” or aesthetic essences governing his appropriation of the past. Instead, like a bricoleur, he scavenged tradition for useful types, taking whatever could be made to suit his immediate needs. In works like the Vertumnus and Pomona, where the borrowed elements are precisely those that most strongly suggest temporal duration and nonsimultaneity, the offense is only compounded. There the accepted timelessness of both the individual image and artistic tradition as a whole are blatantly flouted. Throughout the interwar period, much of the critical and theoretical writing on art—and even, in many instances, the images themselves—had been aimed at asserting a constant, universal, essentialist vision. Nowhere was this

metamorphic images: picasso’s illustrations of ovid

more true than in the area of “classical” art, with its accrued associations of timelessness and eternal values. But Picasso’s Metamorphoses illustrations put forth an alternative image, an image of a metamorphic classicism whose strength lay not in its fixedness but in its flexibility, its openness to accommodation and change. Although the particular “dynamic devices” of the Ovid illustrations would not appear again in Picasso’s oeuvre, the view of classicism and the classical tradition they had helped to embody was one that the artist would continue to explore, most searchingly in his graphic work of the next several years.

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Prior to 1930 Picasso had been, at most, an occasional printmaker. But his involvement with the Metamorphoses seems to have fired his interest in the medium, to the extent that, before he had even completed the Ovid illustrations, he began work on another series of prints, more ambitious than any he had undertaken so far. This time there was no accompanying poem or story, no pretext beyond the prints themselves. Yet there were plenty of them. By the completion of printing in 1939, Picasso’s Vollard Suite, as the new project came to be known, had expanded to a full one hundred plates. Clearly here was a “work” that could not be viewed in the blink of an eye, a “work” whose sheer bulk forcefully asserted the temporal duration of both its making and its viewing. Perhaps even more striking than the number of plates, though, was their great diversity. The series included examples of etching and drypoint, sugar-lift aquatint, and improvised techniques of an even more experimental nature. In addition to the many overtly classicizing images, there were other prints covering a broad range of subjects and styles—everything from a fantastic monster drawn in oddly elegant, calli-

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graphic flourishes to scenes of frenzied lovemaking rendered with slashing lines and dark, unevenly bitten tones. In fact, the plates of the Vollard Suite were so heterogeneous that, for a long time, its very status as a “suite” was called into question. The situation was complicated by the fact that Ambroise Vollard—the publisher who had acquired the plates from Picasso and overseen their printing—died in an automobile accident before any of the sets could be released for sale.1 For many years, they simply accumulated dust in Vollard’s storeroom. Finally, in 1948, a Parisian dealer named Henri Petiet bought the prints from the Vollard estate. Even though all of the images had been printed on identical, specially prepared sheets of paper, Petiet felt that the plates were simply too diverse, their production too intermittent, for them to have been intended as a single set. Referring to them simply as “cent estampes originales,” he frequently broke the suites apart in order to sell smaller groups and sometimes even individual prints.2 It was only after 1956, when Hans Bolliger republished the Vollard Suite in book form, all one hundred images bound together, that scholars seriously began to consider the prints as an integrated set. “At first sight,” Bolliger conceded, “the variety of themes treated might suggest incoherence. However, when the sheets are exhibited all together, one is struck by their unity of underlying implication and tone.”3 Yet the unity that Bolliger had promised would appear through such a comprehensive exhibition never quite materialized. The book did manage to convey a remarkable degree of order, by virtue of the fact that the plates were divided into several thematically unified groups: “Rembrandt,” “The Minotaur,” “The Blind Minotaur,” “The Sculptor’s Studio,” “The Battle of Love.” Over a quarter of the images, however, did not easily fit into any of these categories and so were presented, rather awkwardly, as “miscellaneous” remainder. Even more troubling, the book’s thematic divisions threatened to create the impression that the “suite” consisted of, not one hundred essentially independent plates as Petiet saw it, but several independent groups. In all, the book’s format did little to substantiate (and might even be seen to have undermined) Bolliger’s assertion of the Suite’s overall coherence.

One aim of the present chapter will thus be to offer a reassessment of the Vollard Suite—a new estimation of exactly how, and to what extent, its various plates are related. If, as seems to be the case, the Suite does not comprise a unified whole, is it possible to see it nonetheless as a single, cohesive group? How might we best describe the structure of that group, and what would be its implications for our understanding and experience of individual prints? The attempt to answer these questions will inevitably lead us back to issues of classicism and classical art as those were articulated throughout the late twenties and thirties. For no less than the Metamorphoses illustrations, the Vollard Suite issues a challenge to received notions of classicism; but it does so more subtly, less directly, and—perhaps most importantly—it does so at the level of structure. Despite its inherent limitations, Bolliger’s publication still offers the most convenient starting point for any discussion of the Suite’s complex “architecture.”4 By and large, the book’s thematic groupings do reflect actual similarities among the plates, even if (as will become increasingly clear) those similarities are not exhaustive. Moreover, Bolliger himself admitted—and even attempted to correct for—some of the inadequacies of his chosen format. In the introduction to the book, he acknowledged that his classifications were “somewhat arbitrary” and that the “miscellaneous” images, at least, were not so distinct from the others as his layout perhaps made them appear. “Among the 27 sheets that are not included in any of the cycles,” he wrote, there are a few that could easily be connected with one of the main themes. Obviously the tippler at the left of sheet 12 [fig. 3.1], with its jocose line, is closely related to the Rembrandt sheets [see figs. 3.37, 3.38, and 3.43]. The heads on sheet 25 [fig. 3.2] are probably sketches for the bearded fishermen in the Blind Minotaur sequence [figs. 3.3, 3.4]. And in their subject matter, sheets 6 and 7 [figs. 3.5 and 3.6] are closely related to the Sculptor cycle [see figs. 3.27ff.].5 72 – 73

Bolliger might well have added that the old “tippler” of plate 12, with his striped sailor’s jersey and Phrygian cap, also bears some resemblance to the

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3.1 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 12 (November 29, 1934).

bearded fishermen of the “Blind Minotaur” series, just as his younger companion seems recast as the youthful onlooker in those same scenes. Continuing the chain of associations, we might point out, too, that the youth’s likeness is reused for the vigilant sleepwatcher of plate 26 (fig. 3.7). Although seated, the latter figure assumes nearly the same pose of contemplative passivity as his counterpart in most of the “Blind Minotaur” scenes: legs crossed, elbow in one hand, chin in the other.

3.2 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 25 (January 1934). 3.3 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934). 74 – 75

3.4 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (c. 1935).

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3.5 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 6 (July 4, 1931).

3.6 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 7 (July 9, 1931). 76 – 77

3.7 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 26 (November 18, 1934).

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3.8 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 16 (November 8, 1933).

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In fact, the more we examine the plates of the Suite, the more the connections among them seem to proliferate. We soon realize that most of the images are far more closely interrelated than either Bolliger’s schema or even his prefatory comments would seem to admit. Consider, for example, plates 16 and 17 (figs. 3.8 and 3.9), which depict a bullfight and circus performers, respectively. Despite differences in subject matter and tone, the plates are manifestly related in composition, style, and technique. (There are only two other instances of drypoint within the entire Vollard Suite.) Bolliger’s placement of these two images side by side among the “miscellaneous” plates was undoubtedly intended to draw out their many formal similarities. At the same time, however, that placement obscures their connection to other parts of the Suite, and specifically to certain

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3.9 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 17 (November 11, 1933).

plates within the “Sculptor’s Studio” series. The majority of the “Studio” scenes depict an artist and his model seated in contemplation before a sculpture of some vaguely classicizing type—frequently a female nude or, more often, merely a head, either male or female (see, e.g., figs. 3.22, 3.23, and 3.27). In plate 54 (fig. 3.10), by contrast, those standard types are replaced by a sculpture of three acrobatic youths, the centermost of whom holds a pose that is nearly a mirror reflection of the balancing circus performer’s in plate 17. Similarly, the statue on view in plate 57 (fig. 3.11) depicts a charging bull and two writhing horses, sculptural counterparts, as it were, to the corrida animals of the “miscellaneous” engraving. Clearly these four plates form an interwoven group of images. Yet, again, their full interrelatedness is obscured in Bolliger’s publication by the

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3.10 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 54 (March 30, 1933). 3.11 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 57 (March 31, 1933).

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seemingly rigid boundaries his thematic organization imposed. And this group’s situation is in no way exceptional; everywhere we look within the Suite we find similar cross references between supposedly distinct categories. Indeed, were we to try to map out all of the Vollard plates’ many interconnections, the result would look less like the separate thematic strands suggested in Bolliger’s publication than like the intricate mesh of a spider’s web. Plate 89 of the “Minotaur” series (fig. 3.12) provides further illustration of the point. That image—of a young “Theseus” slaying the Minotaur before a crowd of spectators—is obviously related to the Suite’s several “miscellaneous” bullfight scenes, via not only the Minotaur’s taurine features but also the arenalike setting (rather than the expected labyrinth) in which the event takes place. Moreover, although that event seems far removed from the milieu of the “Sculptor’s Studio,” in plate 70 of the “Studio” series (fig. 3.13) the sculptor can be seen applying the finishing touches to a statuette that looks to be the very model of plate 89’s young hero. The Minotaur himself actually turns up within the sculptor’s studio in the early plates of the “Minotaur” series; in one of them (fig. 3.14) he even raises a toast, roughly echoing the more pious, libational gesture of the sculpted “Theseus.”6 Were we to group the plates according to shared stylistic or technical features, still other subsets would emerge; and these, too, would not coincide with the series that Bolliger’s publication established. Even from the few examples already discussed, it should be clear that the Vollard Suite is not merely a collection of distinct thematic groups; there are too many connections between plates with different “themes.” Yet neither can the Suite be said to comprise a unified whole,

3.12 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 89 (May 29, 1933). 3.13 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 70 (April 11, 1933). 82 – 83

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3.14 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 83 (May 17, 1933).

for its images are simply too diverse, and their interconnections are not all of the same order or kind. Perhaps the best characterization of the Suite’s complex structure would be in terms of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances,” which served in the previous chapter to describe artistic tradition as represented by the series of Deucalion and Pyrrha images. Wittgenstein first introduced the notion of “family resemblances” using an analogy to games:

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I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? . . . If you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. . . . Look for example at boardgames with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many cor-

Likewise the plates of the Vollard Suite form a large extended family, its members linked through a complicated network of similarities and associations rather than by some feature or “essence” common to them all. Of course, it was precisely this lack of a common, unifying feature that lay at the heart of the controversy once surrounding the Vollard plates. Finding no single, overarching theme, critics tended to assume that the “suite” was instead an arbitrary collection, culled from whatever works Picasso happened to have on hand. Yet however unusual the Suite’s complex structure may seem—and however reluctant some dealers and critics were to acknowledge even the existence of that structure— it is certainly not without precedent. Roughly analogous series can be found throughout the history of printmaking, especially within the tradition of the capriccio.8 Almost since its inception, printmaking has involved the production of series. And although many of the staple series of the early printmakers’ repertoire (the compendia of saints, for example, or the months of the year) were organized around a single theme, others, perhaps most notably the sets of playing

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respondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all “amusing”? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning or losing or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at a wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. . . . And we can go through many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of the examination is this: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing; sometimes overall similarities and sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between the members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: “games” form a family.7

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cards (with their recurrent face values and varying suits), possessed a more complex, “familial” structure. When, in the early seventeenth century, Jacques Callot introduced the capriccio to printmaking—primarily as a means of showcasing his newly developed technique of etching—that kind of complexity only increased. Callot had borrowed the term “capriccio” from the field of musical composition, where it referred to a work whose production was guided by fantasy or whim (caprice). His contemporary, the music theorist Michael Praetorius, described the composing of a keyboard capriccio as follows: “One takes a subject, but deserts it for another whenever it comes into mind so to do. One can add, take away, digress, turn and direct the music as one wishes. . . .”9 Similarly, the first series of capriccios that Callot produced was remarkable for its thematic “digressions.” In fact its plates—images of peasants and bandits, city squares and military maneuvers—were so diverse that the series’s given title, Capricci di varie figure, seemed the only common point of reference for them all. The precedent of Callot’s Capricci is everywhere imprinted on the pages of the Vollard Suite, most noticeably in the latter’s own startling diversity. Yet other, more distinctive traces may occasionally be glimpsed there as well. Because the Capricci were intended “to instruct students and amateurs in drawing,” Callot included prints of paired figures, one drawn in simple contours, the other skillfully shaded (fig. 3.15). A number of similar pairs turn up within the pages of the Vollard Suite: the modeled and unmodeled women of plate 6 (fig. 3.5), for example, or the odd characters of plate 12 (fig. 3.1). For Picasso, of course, working within a tradition never precluded variation upon it, and in the latter etching the lines of hatching acquire a new representational significance. No longer mere shading, they have become the knotted pattern of an old jersey, tightly curled beard hairs, wrinkles of age—in short, features of experience as contrasted with unblemished youth.10 Moreover, these evocations of Callot’s prints are not the Suite’s only references to the history of the genre; there are also numerous allusions to the Caprichos of Goya. Goya’s fantastic series of aquatint etchings was, if anything, even more heterogeneous than Callot’s suite, since alongside its images of contempo-

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3.15 Jacques Callot, Peasant with Hat in Hand, c. 1617.

rary (in this case, Spanish) society were others drawn from the monster-filled world of dreams. Some of that same eclecticism is preserved, for example, in the imagery of Vollard plate 24 (fig. 3.16). The theme of the masquerade, which figured prominently in the Caprichos, reappears in the masked figures of Picasso’s etching. (Note the radical disjunction between the heads and bodies of the two figures at the far left, and how their hands are positioned as if holding masks in place.) One of Goya’s fanciful creatures—a kind of seductively sociable harpy, with the face and breasts of a woman and the body of a bird (fig. 3.17)—receives a tribute in the plate as well.11 All of these allusions are cemented by Picasso’s use of aquatint. Prior to the execution of this plate he had largely restricted himself

3.16 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 24 (November 19, 1934).

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to etching and drypoint, but here, apparently challenged by Goya’s example, he produced one of the most technically ambitious works of the entire Vollard Suite.12 Sketching the figures first in a varnish resist to stop out the bite of the acid, Picasso created a negative or reverse image that beautifully captures the dark mystery characteristic of Goya’s series.13 The Suite’s allusions to the prints of Callot and Goya are allusions, respectively, to the beginning and the grand finale of the capriccio tradition. Together they form quotation marks around the entire genre, designating the whole as precedent. It is perhaps not too much, then, to say that the Vollard plates are Picasso’s Caprichos, and thus his bid to revive a tradition that had lain dormant for

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3.17 Goya, “Todos caeràn,” Los caprichos, plate 19, published 1799.

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well over a century. What seems to have attracted him to the genre—beyond the particular contributions of Goya and Callot—was the open-ended, improvisatory nature of the capriccio format. Unconstrained by the thematic consistency demanded with other series, the capricious artist could give himself over to impulse, could allow his imagination and attention to wander as they would. The individual plates of his series served both to track the course of those wanderings and to supply points of departure, frequently multiple, for others yet to come. Every suite had the potential, therefore, to be both tremendously diverse and ingeniously interrelated—to include extended, intertwined series of prints, in which each image was a transformation of one (or even several) that had preceded. Perhaps no single plate better testifies to this quality of the Vollard etchings than number 87 (fig. 3.18). Bolliger dubbed the work Minotaur Assaulting a Girl, evidently following a rather cursory glance at its figures. Closer inspection reveals that the “girl” is a girl, at best, only from the waist up. Below that, she has the body of a horse: we see forelegs, rear haunches, tail. Although clearly based in misrecognition, Bolliger’s reading is nonetheless one that the composition itself encourages. The chiastic arrangement of the figures, which relegates the human portion of each body to the lower half of the pictorial field, effectively divides the “centaur’s” torso from her hind quarters and makes it difficult for us to reconcile the two. The Minotaur’s form is scarcely easier to discern. Because his back is neatly aligned with the “centaur’s” equine rump, the two sections tend to fuse visually into a single continuous anatomy. Both of the plate’s figures thus seem perpetually in the process of transforming themselves—from bull into Minotaur, woman into part-horse. In a very real sense, the figures’ apparent metamorphoses act out the transitional nature of the plate as a whole. Executed in the spring of 1933, sometime between the first of the “Battles of Love” (see figs. 3.24, 3.25, and 3.26) and the Suite’s several bullfight scenes, the plate resembles each group in a number of ways. Its overall composition generally repeats that of the “Battles,” while the upper part fades into a taurine landscape reminiscent of the later corrida images.

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3.18 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 87 (May 23, 1933).

The so-called Minotaur Assaulting a Girl provides, in effect, a bridge between the two series. It’s as if Picasso, in making the leap from “Battle of Love” to bullfight, left this plate as evidence of the trajectory his imagination had followed.14 In the context of the full Suite, plate 87 is particularly significant because it demonstrates with exceptional clarity the associative and transitional—we might even say the metamorphic—character of the Vollard prints. It does so, moreover, via figures drawn from the cast of ancient Greek mythology. In combination these two features strongly point to another model, in addition to the capriccios, underlying the Suite’s complex, heterogeneous structure: the model of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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The Metamorphoses is, of course, filled with tales of men and women transformed into animals and other assorted things. Yet, as we’ve seen, the importance of metamorphosis in the poem is far from exhausted by its subject matter. In fact, given the relative insignificance of literal transformation to many of the stories, one might reasonably concur with those who have argued that Ovid “emancipated metamorphosis from being an actual subject and made it into a functional principle . . . operative in all essential aspects of the poem.”15 As Picasso surely discovered in his own reading, the Metamorphoses is distinctive not only for the vast number and diversity of its stories (their many different moods, subjects, and styles) but even more for the finesse with which, in spite of that diversity, the stories are woven together. The ingenuity of Ovid’s transitions was pointedly brought to the reader’s attention by Georges Lafaye in the introduction to his French translation of the poem. Paraphrasing Quintilian, Lafaye gently criticized the “affectation” of Ovid’s style, “wherein the transitions themselves are designed to score points and win applause like some magic trick.” He quickly added, however (again following Quintilian), that “Ovid had necessity as an excuse, for he needed to give the appearance of a whole to an assemblage of very diverse material.”16 Effective as they are, Ovid’s transitions are still not the entire story; the narrative is also held together by a network of cross references among episodes widely separated in the text.17 Many of these references Ovid created through the repetition of a particular motif or phrasing. Others were provided more or less ready-made by the corpus of Greek mythology, with its complex latent structure of contrasting characters and interrelated events. “Myth,” the anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote in 1939, “is the mesh of a spider’s web and not a definition in the dictionary.”18 By exploiting this aspect of his mythological material, Ovid was able to produce a poem shot through with parallels and oppositions, with links of every sort, thematic as well as formal. In view of Mauss’s characterization of myth, it is worth recalling that many classical scholars have seen in the Metamorphoses’ tale of Arachne (VI.1–145)— or, more precisely, in the tapestry she weaves—a synecdochic encapsulation of

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Ovid’s own style.19 In contrast to the symmetrical, ordered, and thematically unified composition of Minerva’s weaving, with which it is compared, Arachne’s tapestry presents a bewildering array of narrative scenes strung together in apparently haphazard fashion. There is no recognizable pattern, only a spider’s web of stories linked by loose association. Arachne’s work, like the Metamorphoses itself, violates nearly all of the Aristotelian criteria for unity. In neither tapestry nor poem do the elements follow as inevitable (or even probable) consequences of everything that has preceded. Nor would the integrity of either work suffer much, as Aristotle felt it should, were a number of its episodes to be transposed or removed.20 These were criteria that in Ovid’s own day, as in the 1930s, were considered hallmarks of classical epic. But Ovid explicitly rejected the “organic,” Aristotelian unity typified by works such as Virgil’s Aeneid in favor of an aggregative collection of complexly interrelated stories. It seems likely that Picasso’s decision to begin work on an extended series of prints (when he had never been much of a printmaker before) was motivated by a similar determination. Like Arachne’s tapestry, the capriccio format he adopted provided a close visual analogue to the “anticlassical” structure of Ovid’s poem—a radically nonunified group of images held together by an intricate web of parallels and associations. The Suite, however, has a decided advantage over the Metamorphoses (or, for that matter, Arachne’s composition): because its plates are unbound, the work can be continually rearranged, the better to draw out its many interconnections. Shuffling through the prints, we are made to see that the Suite, for all its brilliance, is not a “profound” work—or rather, that its brilliance lies precisely in its shallowness. Whenever we might be tempted to look behind one of the Vollard images for a deeper, hidden level of meaning, we are drawn back, by our awareness of its associations with others, to the very surface of the suite.21 This continual displacement of our attention from print to print recreates, at least in general form, the pattern of the Suite’s production, so that Picasso’s comments regarding a similar instance of serial variation seem no less appropriate here: the images’ fascination, he said, lies precisely in that they preserve the movement of

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thought “from one vision to the next.” “I have reached the stage,” he added by way of explanation, “where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”22 These comments by Picasso serve to direct our attention in turn to an important affinity between the Vollard Suite and the surrealists’ contemporaneous experiments with what they called “psychic automatism.” The latter had been equated by Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism with surrealism at large, and defined as any practice whereby “one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner [including, as Breton would later make clear, painting and drawing]—the actual functioning of thought.”23 Not, we should hasten to add, logical or conscious thought; Breton’s interest in automatism was based in the belief that, by relaxing purposive or directed control over the text or image being made, its production would be guided instead by the unconscious. Although the feasibility of automatism in general met with a good deal of skepticism, even from within the surrealist circle itself, the greatest doubt was reserved for the specific practices of automatic painting and drawing. At the heart of the controversy was the belief, by now familiar to us, that the visual arts are essentially atemporal, and that the individual work is therefore given for instantaneous apprehension. Even those who advocated the extension of surrealist practices to the visual arts tended to frame their case around these terms. Max Morise, for example, writing in the very first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, conceded that de Chirico’s paintings, championed by some as the very model of surrealist art, were in truth ill suited to the movement’s stated goals. The problem, he implied, lay with their transfixing stillness (pronounced in works by de Chirico but endemic to the medium itself ) and with the conflicting fact that the “stream of thought cannot be viewed statically.”24 Pictorial automatism, Morise suggested, by diverting attention from the finished work to the process of its making, offered a way around the problem—provided, that is, that the limitations of the medium nonetheless be respected. The process of making should remain relatively brief in duration, he felt, and the image correspondingly restricted to recording only “the most imperceptible undulations in the flux of thought.”25

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Even these provisos, however, were insufficient for Pierre Naville, who two issues later in La Révolution surréaliste unequivocally declared, “There is no surrealist painting. Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture, nor the image retracing the forms of the dream, nor imaginative fantasies, of course, can be described.”26 Although much of Naville’s opposition sprang from his belief that painting was a fundamentally bourgeois practice, some also seems to have been rooted in his sense that the medium was too static to either capture or convey “the actual functioning of [unconscious] thought.” Naville himself saw far more surrealist potential in cinema, with its constant transformation of images. Morise and Naville’s assertion of the dynamic nature of unconscious thought no doubt derived, at least in part, from the surrealists’ reading of Freud. As early as in his 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had begun describing a mode of mental functioning—he dubbed it the “primary process”— that was completely different from the more ordered, stable, and linear processes regulating preconscious and conscious thought. It involved a kind of relational frenzy, a perpetual free association of ideas. Dreams, Freud felt, afforded perhaps the best opportunity to track its operations. In analyzing the manifest content of his patients’ and his own dreams, Freud repeatedly discovered that each aspect of the dream was indirectly connected to the others with which it appeared via an intricate network of variously related, latent ideas (or “dream-thoughts”). For example, where his own Dream of the Botanical Monograph was concerned, Freud was able to chart a host of associations—from a distant memory of once finding bookworms in a herbarium to a recent conversation with a professor named Gärtner (Gardener) and the recollection of a festschrift with which the latter had been involved—all apparently underlying the dream’s conjunction of botany and books.27 Freud envisioned such associative complexes as analogous to (or perhaps even coincident with) neuronal networks, the links among the separate dream-thoughts serving as conduits for the transfer of psychic energy. First set in motion by the wish or desire that was the initial impetus for the dream, this energy was displaced from idea to idea in search of fulfillment, with

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those ideas or components most frequently “cathected” thereby gaining entry into the content of the dream. “It will be seen,” Freud remarked, “that the chief characteristic [of the primary process] is that the whole stress is laid upon making cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and proper meaning of the psychical elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated as of little consequence.”28 Again, it was this constant mobility of unconscious thought, the restlessness of its desiring energy, that led Morise to question, and Naville to deny, its compatibility with the medium of painting. Importantly, however, neither man argued the incompatibility of the unconscious with images at large; as The Interpretation of Dreams makes abundantly evident, Freud considered images endemic to the primary process. He repeatedly claimed that the unconscious selects for the dream’s content not only those ideas that have the strongest and most numerous associative links with others, but also those that exist as (or most easily translate into) images. “Of the various subsidiary thoughts attached to the essential dream-thoughts,” he emphasized, “those will be preferred which admit of visual representation.”29 In Freud’s own visual representations of the kinds of relational processes governing unconscious thought (such as the diagram reproduced here as figure 3.19), the reasons for that preference are made clear: in contrast to the relatively stable and circumscribed associations provoked by the aural and scripted forms of a given concept, its visual representation was seen to generate an elaborate network of “object associations,” a veritable spider’s web of related images and ideas. As if in confirmation of this point, Freud’s diagram itself evokes a host of associations; most importantly for us, it calls to mind both the structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and, nearer at hand, that of the Vollard Suite. It makes us aware, in short, that both the poem and the print series are homologous with the Freudian unconscious. Indeed, it allows us to see that, in their viewing as in their making, the Vollard plates effectively model the operations of the primary process and the restlessness of its motivating desire.

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3.19 Sigmund Freud, “Psychological schema for the word-concept,” from Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 1891.

None of this should be read as implying, however, that the Suite is in fact the realization of Bretonian automatism, the product of Picasso’s unconscious freed from the grip of psychic censorship. (Here automatism’s critics were right: release of that sort seems unattainable and, we might add, unlikely to yield anything recognizable as art.) What does seem appropriate to say is that the Suite amounts to an acknowledgment that printmaking—and especially the making of capriccios—offers an adequate approximation of the automatist goal. Not only is production relatively free from deliberation and directed control, but the end result is a collection of densely interrelated images that provoke a sort of visual wanderlust—very much like the kind of continual, desirous displacement of attention characteristic of the primary process.

There is, however, one relatively substantial section of the Suite within which this displacement seems to slow. The relational frenzy aroused elsewhere by the multiple associations among plates is calmed around these particular images, in large measure because they share a common subject matter. It’s not the case that other, more eccentric associations among these plates, or between them and other parts of the Suite, can’t be drawn. But those associations tend to be overshadowed—our awareness of them repressed—by the group’s internal thematic consistency. One important consequence of this is that the images within the group readily offer themselves for comparison, their shared subject matter serving as a common denominator against which differences emerge as significant. Among the other plates, differences are too numerous and too diverse to be thought within a single frame of reference. Here, by contrast, the differing elements tend to fall out into paradigmatic pairs—more or less stable oppositions that we could, for example, easily imagine mapping onto the ordered, isotropic space of a structuralist grid. Indeed, the second half of this chapter will be devoted precisely to a structural analysis of the images in question. With them (in distinction from the images cathected in the primary process), the content and proper meaning of the elements are of some consequence—as is, of course, the fact that they all concern, in one way or another, the making and viewing of classical art.

98 – 99

Like any structural analysis, the following account is predicated on the assertion that the individual elements involved are not fully discrete and intrinsically meaningful entities. Whatever significance or value accrues to each is instead a function of its place within the overall network of relations, a product of its differences from other, comparable elements. Accordingly, our analysis will consist of a series of juxtapositions—first of groups of images, then of individual prints— whose differences seem especially significant. We will move, that is, from the general to the specific, the distinctions between images becoming increasingly fine as we attempt to clarify the meanings put into play. The analysis will focus roughly on those images that, in Bolliger’s subdivision of the Suite, comprise the

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“Sculptor’s Studio” series. But it will not restrict itself exclusively to them. In fact, to properly situate the “Studio” plates, it seems necessary at the start to move outside of the Suite altogether, contrasting the series with yet another group of etchings to which it is often compared: Picasso’s 1927 illustrations for Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu.30 The theme of the artist’s studio, which dominates those illustrations (and, in truth, provides their only consistent link to Balzac’s text), is shared, obviously, by the “Studio” series of the Vollard Suite (see figs. 3.20–3.23). There are as well certain stylistic similarities between the two print series. Yet the total absence of hatching from most of the Vollard “Studio” plates aligns those works much more closely with the style of ancient vase painting and engraving. Their figures’ nudity and idealized features are conspicuously classicizing, too, as are the vine-leaf garlands and Doric pedestal that are present in many of the scenes. In comparison, the elements of the Balzac illustrations seem pointedly disparate, alluding at once to many periods and none. Where they, as a result, seem to offer generalized comment on the making of art, the prints of the Vollard series address instead the particularities of classicism. Juxtaposition with the Balzac etchings points up yet another significant characteristic of the Vollard “Studio” series: its classical artist is neither a painter, as in most of the illustrations for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, nor a printmaker, as the self-reflexive nature of the imagery might lead us to expect. He is always a classical sculptor. If initially surprising, there is yet a sense in which the Suite’s identification of classicism with sculpture is perfectly apt. During the 1930s, classicism was most prevalent in the practice of sculpture, and the most popular contemporary sculptors—artists such as Maillol, Bourdelle, and Despiau—were working in a strongly classicizing vein.31 The situation was in part a reflection of the fact that, while not a single major work of Greek painting had survived from antiquity, examples of ancient statuary had been known and admired for centuries. Because of this accident of fate, sculpture had long been thought of as normative for classical art, and classicism was frequently defined in relation to properties

100 – 101

3.21 Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 7, 1927. 3.22 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 39 (March 23, 1933).

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3.20 Picasso, illustration for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, plate 4, 1927.

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3.23 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 45 (March 23, 1933).

As much as movement, and sometimes by the same means, Rodin has sought the pictorial. He competes for “effects” with the painters, and with the most “sensational” among them. Certainly one is able to move around his statues; but it is almost always possible to determine the

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considered intrinsically sculptural. Such was the case, for example, in the Aesthetics of Hegel, whose description of Greco-Roman art seems very much of a piece with the view of sculpture that predominated during the interwar period. The assertion that “sculpture is the art proper to the classical ideal”32 served as the very linchpin of Hegel’s text, which aimed to describe a history of art through the shifting hierarchies of its various mediums and forms. In contrast to the sculpture-dominated aesthetics of the classical era, the romantic period that followed was characterized, Hegel claimed, by the ascendancy of painting, music, and literature—characterized, that is, both by the preeminence of other art forms and by the dispersion of that preeminence among them. There is a sense, then, in which the Aesthetics holds up classical sculpture as the apogee of the visual arts in general and even as a kind of timeless ideal (however passé). “Sculpture transcends itself,” Hegel noted disapprovingly, “when it becomes an expression of the romantic art-form, and only when it takes to imitating Greek sculpture does it acquire its proper plastic type again.”33 The revival and strength of such views during the interwar years is especially well attested in an essay by the novelist and critic Jules Romains that appeared in the April 1930 issue of the journal Formes. In that essay Romains sought to draw a distinction between the art of Rodin and Maillol via a series of oppositions that in the end “seem to be epitomized in a single pair: romanticism–classicism.”34 Beginning with a line of reasoning that at first seems drawn straight from Lessing, the writer condemned Rodin’s interest in the representation of fleeting emotions and movement, while he praised Maillol’s “search for equilibrium and stasis.” As the essay unfolds, however, it becomes clear that Rodin’s art is held to be flawed, and therefore unclassical, because it is deemed inappropriate to the material essence of not the visual arts in general but sculpture in particular:

point of view from which the artist imagined them, and from which he invites us to view them. . . . [In contrast, the work of] Maillol, a former painter, is in no way pictorial. His sculpture appears to be anterior to painting, uncorrupted by its absences and malices. His works ignore the spectator, or rather the position that the spectator takes in order to contemplate them. They are more tactile than visual, in a word, plastic.35

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In making these claims, Romains was implicitly endorsing the Hegelian view that a work of sculpture is (or should be) complete and utterly selfsufficient, whereas a painting exists “not independently on its own account but for subjective apprehension, for the spectator.”36 The assumption is, of course, that painting is essentially illusionistic, and therefore dependent upon the viewer’s constitutive role. So too, Romains felt, was Rodin’s art, with its strong “pictorialism” and other “romantically” subjective effects. But sculpture, by the very logic of its materials, ought to avoid all such forms of illusionism, since it is in fact fully three-dimensional, fully objective. It exists entirely apart from the viewer and without regard to his or her presence before it. That, so the argument went, was the key to its inherent classicism, as it was only through its resolute separateness that the classical statue could reflect back to the viewer an image of his or her own ideal wholeness and autonomy. Again, Romains’s essay is important chiefly because it articulates with exceptional clarity beliefs that were influential and widely held at the time. In fact an astonishingly similar view of sculpture—as complete and self-sufficient— emerges from the Vollard “Studio” plates. One of the most conspicuous differences among those plates concerns the level of the sculptor’s involvement with his work. A few of the images (figs. 3.13, 3.22, 3.29) depict him in the actual process of carving or modeling, but in the vast majority (e.g., figs. 3.10, 3.11, 3.23, 3.27, 3.28, 3.30–3.34) he simply sits transfixed, gazing from some distance at his already completed work. Plates 39 and 45 (figs. 3.22 and 3.23, respectively) are fairly representative of these two strains. In the former, the sculptor is presented as still actively engaged with his work, carefully touching up the bust’s sculpted features. His physical involvement is further emphasized

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(particularly in comparison with the figure of plate 45) by the lateral extension of his face. Its sideways elongation suggests—in a manner not so very different from that used with the Metamorphoses illustrations—a gradual turning through space, as though the sculptor were slowly working his way around the sculpture, all the while keeping his eyes trained upon it. In plate 45, by contrast, the sculptor, hunched over, his chin in his hands, merely stares at the carved classical head from which he now seems quite removed. The model by his side is more actively engaged with the work; but although she reaches out to the statue, it stares back unresponsively from pupilless eyes, oblivious to the spectator, as Romains argued it should be.37 If the sculpted head of plate 39 also lacks pupils with which to reciprocate its viewers’ gaze, it nonetheless seems fully connected to them by a radiating aura that bridges the distance between.38 To reiterate: the vast majority of the Vollard “Studio” plates are like number 45 in that the sculpture is depicted as complete and self-sufficient, with the sculptor (no less than his model) relegated to the role of merely looking on. In fewer than a third of the prints is the situation otherwise. And, given the differential structure of the “Studio” series, even those exceptional images serve to reinforce, rather than to mitigate, the message of the majority. That is, the few plates in which the sculptor remains in close physical contact with his work actually emphasize, through their contrast, his separateness in the majority of instances. More than that, it is the presence of those exceptional plates that makes that separateness significant. Once we are made aware of this general opposition between the active and passive sculptors of the “Studio” series, other images seem to emerge and mark (in one way or another) their similarity or difference from these. A prime example is plate 26 (fig. 3.7). One of a group of images depicting a female nude fast asleep and watched over by a wakeful male,39 the plate differs markedly from the etchings of the “Studio” series in style, setting, and dramatis personae. Yet its similarity with the series turns precisely on the relationship between those characters—specifically, on the distance between viewing figure and viewed. In an evocative essay on Picasso’s “sleepwatchers,” Leo Steinberg noted that the treatment

of the motif within the Vollard Suite differs substantially from its appearance in earlier works of art. Where traditionally the “sleepwatch” had represented “unplanned or delicious encounters”—all sorts of opportunities for the intruder— the advantage is reversed in the Vollard prints. There, the wakeful male, unable to share [the woman’s] thoughts, feels shut out. It is her sleep that precludes the knowledge of her. Her sleep, so far from offering a main chance or licentious occasion, awakens the [male] to his banishment. The sleeper’s withdrawal is recognized as a desertion. Which leaves [her] newly empowered; no longer defenseless game, she holds the power of the kept secret, the power of safe and lock.40

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In the self-containment of the sleeping nude, her obliviousness to the watchful youth, and the resultant physical and emotional distance between them, plate 26 echoes the main themes of the “Sculptor’s Studio.” Indeed, as Wendy Steiner has remarked in reference to the Vollard plates, the sleepwatch motif has long served, in both painting and literature, as a metaphor for the relationship between art and its audience.41 That it functions so within the Vollard Suite, however, is due less to the existence of that tradition than to the simultaneous presence of the thematically related “Studio” plates. When the two groups of images are seen side by side, it is evident that the “sleepwatch” scenes are transformations of the “Sculptor’s Studio”—in much the same sense that Lévi-Strauss spoke of the “transformational” relationship between different myths possessing similar meanings.42 A number of pentimenti in plate 26 bear out this observation: there, in the area of the boy’s chin, the features of another face and a beard, nearly burnished out, still linger on the plate. It seems that, initially, the sleepwatcher’s position was occupied by none other than the Suite’s classical sculptor. This replacement of figures—the excluded youth of plate 26 for the disinterested artist of the “Studio” series—reflects back in important ways upon the latter plates, throwing that disinterest into question and suggesting as well a certain interchangeability between the artist’s model and his sculpture. Both of these implications are further strengthened by the presence within the Suite of the

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plates that Bolliger referred to as the “Battle of Love” (see figs. 3.24–3.26). At first glance, those plates would seem to have nothing in common with the “Sculptor’s Studio.” Each of the five “Battle” images depicts a couple in the throes of sexual passion: bodies entangled, mouths open—in all, a far cry from the visible quiescence of the “Studio” scenes. But this difference between the two series is not merely difference; it is direct opposition, and it operates on a number of levels. Whereas figures in the “Sculptor’s Studio” are characterized by a certain air of detachment, those in the “Battle of Love” seem anything but detached. By the same token, where vision dominates relations within the “Studio,” the “Lovers” are pressed too close for sight; they shut their eyes tightly or stare without seeing. Although these features are plainly there in the prints, they are brought to the fore only through a comparison of the two series. Those series are, in effect, polar complements, mutually defining each other in their opposition. Confirmation is to be had from plate 28 (fig. 3.24), the earliest of the Suite’s five “Battle” scenes. In the upper lefthand corner of that image, a window sill and vase of flowers—much as appear throughout the “Studio” series (see figs. 3.23, 3.27, 3.28, 3.30, 3.31, and 3.32)—are clearly visible. Their inclusion in this plate links the “Battle” with the sculptor’s studio, and thus its frenzied lovers with the studio’s own, more subdued occupants. The opposition with the “Battle of Love” is drawn most sharply, perhaps, in plate 51 of the “Sculptor’s Studio” (fig. 3.27), where the statue itself is a voluptuous, full-length female nude. The effect of substituting that standing figure for the sculpted heads of the earlier compositions is to introduce into the studio the possibilty of an erotic relationship between the work and its audience. And yet that possibility remains conspicuously unrealized. The sculpted figure makes absolutely no concessions to her audience’s presence; she is, to borrow Michael Fried’s terminology, thoroughly nontheatrical. What’s more, her evident disregard for her viewers is countered by a dispassionate response from them. So ethereal is the model’s contemplation that she seems little more than a disembodied gaze. The sculptor’s attitude is registered in turn by his recumbent pose, and even more by the position of his right hand. Its placement near his genitals

3.24 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 28 (April 1933). 3.25 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 30 (April 22, 1933). 108 – 109

3.26 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 31 (April 23, 1933).

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110 – 111

3.27 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 51 (March 27, 1933).

At the same time the person, too, caught up in the individual, restricted and nugatory interests of his desire, is neither free in himself, since he is not determined by the essential universality and rationality of his will, nor free in respect of the external world, for desire remains essentially determined by external things and related to them.43 Especially in front of the classical work of art, whose self-sufficiency was understood to ideally mirror the viewer’s own, desire had to be absent, sublimated, or repressed. Time and again in the “Studio” plates of the Vollard Suite, the relation between art work and audience is characterized by just this sort of pointed absence or repression of desire. The means, however, are always slightly different, and those differences are, of course, significant. In plate 58 (fig. 3.28), for example, a new sculpture has been substituted for the standing nude of plate 51. The embracing centaur and nymph that are its subject may be consumed by mutual desire, but their passionate display serves primarily as a foil to the relations between the artist and model (whose features their own so clearly resemble). Despite the sculptor’s gentle embrace of his companion, the pair are made to seem both passive and passionless in the comparison. The effect is only amplified when we realize that it is they, the sculptor and model, who now most recall actual works of ancient art—specifically, the effigy figures that frequently adorned the lids of Etruscan or Roman sarcophagi.44 The couple’s resemblance to sculpture (and

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raises the suggestion of something more than his disinterested interest; as that’s all that it raises, however, it functions mostly to point up his nondesirous relation to the statue, a corollary of its distinct disregard for him. The similarity here with generally Hegelian views of the classical is again worth remarking. Hegel, too, insisted that the viewer stand in intellectual or spiritual contemplation before the work of art, relating to it without desire. The rationale was fairly straightforward: desire poses a clear threat to the wholeness and autonomy of work and viewer alike. Under its sway, the work is perceived as a mere consumable, there only for the viewer’s satisfaction.

3.28 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 58 (March 31, 1933).

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funerary sculpture, at that) solidifies the contrast: if the centaur and nymph seem to be lost in their desire, the artist and his model suggest at most a kind of nostalgia for a passion that has long since faded and died. Within this single image, then, we find repeated the same general opposition seen earlier, between the “Sculptor’s Studio” as a whole and the plates of the “Battle of Love.” There is, in addition, another aspect of these two series that sets them in opposition, and that seems particularly significant in conjunction with plate 58. In “The Battle of Love” not only are the figures pressed tightly against one another, they crowd forward, filling the frame, thereby encroaching on the space this side of the image. The result, as Leo Steinberg has observed, is that the

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viewer too “experiences some of the visual disorientation which attends carnal knowledge.”45 The experience of the “Sculptor’s Studio” plates is much different. The generally smaller scale of their figures, together with their more clarified forms, seems to place the viewer at a much greater remove. The difference is pointedly brought to our attention with plate 58, in which the sculpture is positioned at the very center of the composition—about midway back into the represented space—while the sculptor and model look on from the far wall of the studio. As a consequence of this arrangement, a certain symmetry is created between the sculptor and his model and ourselves; their position in regard to the statue now mirrors our own (and, perhaps even more to the point, Picasso’s). We are all cast in the role of mere onlooker. Occasionally within the Vollard Suite we find images that frame the relationships between the sculpture and the etching and their respective artists in less passive terms; one such example is Plate 59 (fig. 3.29). That plate’s most distinctive feature is the oddly separate treatment of its two halves: the right is rendered in the simplified classical style familiar from the other “Studio” plates, while the left side is covered in a dense thicket of line. Closer observation reveals yet another inconsistency between the two halves, in the sculptor’s respective views of his model and his work. The two are 90 degrees out of phase, so that although the model stands facing him, he views the sculpted figure in profile. The result is that the artist’s position relative to his work is made identical with ours—and Picasso’s—relative to the model. Here is where the handling of that left half becomes significant, because it emphasizes that area as an etching and thereby recalls Picasso’s presence before the plate as its artist. From the curved lines on the model’s body that suggest the fullness of her form to the hatching and cross-hatching and patterned designs of the background, the evident freedom and spontaneiy of Picasso’s strokes calls attention to the process of etching, in parallel with the process of sculpting actually depicted on the right. In each case the emphasis is on the artist’s physical involvement with his work—his hands-on approach, as it were, to the female form.

3.29 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 59 (March 31, 1933).

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Plate 59 is a rare exception, however, and one whose presence within the Suite serves mostly to confirm the rule. In the other “Studio” scenes where an analogy is suggested between the depicted sculpture and the etching as a whole, distance and detachment provide the common points of reference. In plate 53 (fig. 3.30), for example, the model and sculpture are again closely identified, this time by the gentle contrapposto—the slight twist at the waist—that registers in the left-hand contour of each figure. Once again that identification cues our recognition of the homology between vantage points: we (and Picasso) see the model’s midsection from exactly the same angle as the classical artist views his sculpted version of it.46 But the analogy extends beyond mere angles of vision. The sculptor in plate 53 also serves as a model for the viewer’s emotional re-

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3.30 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 53 (March 30, 1933).

sponse to the image—or, rather, his lack of response. The classical sculptor is the very figure of restraint, and between his legs is an evident sign of the aesthetic disinterest that, here, seems to constitute the whole of the beholder’s share. Another set of parallel (or more accurately perpendicular) instances of viewing is offered by plate 62 (fig. 3.31). Here the model’s gaze provides the primary cue; by acknowledging our presence, she both establishes the analogy between us and the contemplative sculptor and simultaneously introduces into that analogy an unsettling asymmetry. For the nude, with her fixed stare, clearly marks her difference from the pupilless sculpture; not only is she not withdrawn from exchange with the external world, but her appearance specifically suggests that all such exchange will necessarily trade in desire. At once rebuke and come-on,

3.31 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 62 (April 2, 1933).

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her stare makes visible the repression on which our aesthetic disinterest—no less than the classical sculptor’s—is founded. At this point it is crucial that we note how different these “Studio” etchings are not just from the “Battle of Love” and other series within the Vollard Suite, but also from the bulk of Picasso’s oeuvre. Art, as Picasso usually conceived it, had nothing to do with disinterest. On the contrary, most of his paintings and drawings seem explicitly designed for the imaginary satisfaction of desire. Where the majority of artists constrained themselves, like a camera, to a solitary and often distant vantage point, Picasso sought instead the visual equivalent of an embrace; hence the apparent multisidedness of so many of his figures, especially the female nudes. As Steinberg has eloquently argued, to Picasso drawing was a form

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of “possession” or “inhabitation”47—in either case, we might say, a kind of phantasmatic projection of both the figure’s and the viewer’s total presence. Picasso himself, adhering to the fantasy, phrased things this way: at its best, he claimed, art was “actual lovemaking”48—and this was true for both its initial creation and its subsequent reception. Little wonder, then, that the nude model of plate 62 should confront her audience with its voyeuristic passivity, or that her counterparts in other prints might well expect more ardor from their artist-companions. The classical sculptor of plate 50 (fig. 3.32), for example, is completely absorbed in admiration of the statue before him. Although the model feigns to share his cool fascination, it is only a mask; below it, she casts a furtive and critical eye at her dispassionate lover. Elsewhere the sculptor’s neglect of his model is signaled by increasing age. In plate 63 (fig. 3.33) his wrinkled face and body contrast markedly with the displayed voluptuousness of hers.49 The wasted sculptor of number 65 (fig. 3.34) no longer even absently caresses the beautiful nude whose attention is once again directed our way; a tunic covers his disinterest. More tellingly still, the sculptor’s lassitude is suggested by the sculpture at which he stares. In place of the female head that appears in so many of the plates, we find one that looks suspiciously like the sculptor in his youth. The head even turns its eyes in his direction, as if in wistful recognition of their similar fates: both are little more than disembodied gazes, incapable of “actual lovemaking.” This same sculpted male head appears in several other of the Vollard studio scenes from which the artist himself is absent. In plate 61 (fig. 3.35) it is enlarged to such enormous proportions that it stands as a surrogate for the missing sculptor, and would seem to aspire as well to his role as the model’s lover. Yet, rooted in place and lacking arms, the head evidently strains to hold her even in his peripheral vision. Meanwhile she remains aloof, her relaxed stance and casual tilt of the head mocking his maddening immobility.50 Plate 76 (fig. 3.36), if stylistically different, offers a variation on the same theme. There the living model has been replaced by a sculpted figure, but one that is still female, still nude, and still clearly the object of the male head’s scopic

3.32 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 50 (March 27, 1933). 3.33 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 63 (April 3, 1933). 118 – 119

3.34 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 65 (April 4, 1933).

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120 – 121

3.35 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 61 (April 1, 1933).

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3.36 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 76 (May 5, 1933).

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desire.51 The head, placed on the floor, eye-level to the center of his interest, would seem to be in a much better position than in plate 61. However, the sculpted nude, as if intentionally to block his voyeuristic gaze, clutches her knees tightly together. The dark hatching that enshrouds the left half of the room cuts her off even more from her would-be admirer. Similarly, the curtain drawn over the window falls exactly between the two figures, again emphasizing their separation and the occlusion of his vision.52 The artist and model return to the studio in plate 69 (fig. 3.37). Although he is his youthful self again, the sculptor still refrains from embracing the nude. (In fact, his body inclines in the other direction.) He merely stares at her across the broad expanse of the window behind, the distant landscape visible through it accentuating their separation. On a different plane, the window also serves to emphasize our isolation from the model. Throughout history, of course, windows have often stood as metaphors for works of art, with paintings and prints typically being compared to the view through the glass. Here, as in many of the Suite’s other studio scenes, the window seems built in as a self-reference—a reference to the kind of image that, however inviting it may appear, nonetheless requires its viewers to maintain a “proper” aesthetic distance. The window’s message is transparent: look but don’t touch. And the same theme is reflected in the figure of the model who, peering into the mirror placed at her knees, consciously fashions herself as spectacle. The dark modeling concentrated on her face and upper body suggests the concentration there as well of gazes—hers, the artist’s, and, not least of all, our own. Only the sculpted head looks elsewhere. Lying on the floor, a prop for the model’s mirror, he is denied even the limited pleasure of voyeurism. Instead the head stares directly out, reminding us that we too are constrained to an ocular response, and one that is very nearly as detached as his. With plate 34 (fig. 3.38) the situation changes abruptly. The sculpted head, now fully erect, has completely abandoned his classical demeanor. His features coarsened and twisted into a lewd grin, he ogles the female model at the extreme left. Her marginalization on the plate serves to center attention directly on this male gaze, so that its newly charged sexuality dominates the entire com-

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3.37 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 69 (April 8, 1933).

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3.38 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 34 (January 27, 1934).

It’s all on account of that varnish that cracks. It happened to one of my plates. I said to myself, “It’s spoiled, I’ll just do any old thing on it.” I began to scrawl. What came out was Rembrandt. I began to like it, and kept on. I even did another one, with his turban, his furs, and his eye—his elephant eye, you know. Now I’m going on with the plate to see if I can get blacks like his—you don’t get them at the first try.53 In all likelihood that initial plate, with its cracked varnish, was not number 34, but another Picasso produced the same day (plate 33, fig. 3.39). There Rembrandt’s visage is clearly visible among several profile views of women, a few stray curlicues, and sheaves of lines of varying thickness where Picasso seems to have been experimenting with the etching needle and ink. The unconnectedness of these elements would appear to corroborate Picasso’s claim that Rembrandt’s appearance had been an accident, the product of random scribblings. But if so, those scribblings were clearly strokes of luck. The end result is quite similar to many of Rembrandt’s own prints, where the artist treated his copper plate like a sketchpad on which to try out new methods of shading, or to improvise figures and faces, on occasion including his own (fig. 3.40). Such images could not have been far from Picasso’s mind when, as he tells it, his scratching on the “spoiled” plate suddenly “came out Rembrandt.” That fortuitous event may also have been inspired by memories of other Rembrandt prints. Otto Benesch has pointed out that Picasso’s portrayals of the Dutch artist owe much to Rembrandt’s self-portraits of the 1630s, including the Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap of 1634 (fig. 3.41).54 It seems possible, then, that

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position. Even the once-restrained artist is fairly bursting with lecherous enthusiasm—though that is perhaps not the most surprising aspect of his appearance. Unexpectedly, the classical sculptor has been replaced by the wild-eyed figure of Rembrandt. Explaining the Dutch artist’s sudden appearance within the Suite, Picasso told his old friend and dealer D.-H. Kahnweiler that it had been the result of a kind of spontaneous generation:

3.39 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 33 (January 27, 1934). 3.40 Rembrandt, Sheet of Studies, c. 1632. 3.41 Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap (first state), 1634.

126 – 127

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Picasso’s “Rembrandt” plates—all of which date from January 1934—were part of a tercentenary tribute (and, no doubt, challenge) to the master etcher. While these explanations undoubtedly help to account for Rembrandt’s abrupt arrival within the Vollard studio, they all overlook one crucial point: in one sense, he had been there all along. Although previous analyses of the Suite seem not to have noted the allusion, each of the “Studio” prints appears to be, to some extent, a variation on Rembrandt’s unfinished etching of The Artist and His Model (fig. 3.42).55 Within that one image we find much that is familiar—the precedent for the selective shading of plates 59 and 69, for example, and the predecessors to Picasso’s small cast of characters. Even the onlooking sculpted bust is on hand, as are, of course, the artist and distant nude. They are likewise accompanied by the air of disinterest that permeates the Vollard “Studio.” In a fairly typical account of Rembrandt’s etching, Christopher White has written of the “detached, penetrating look of the artist, measuring in his mind’s eye one form against another, hardly aware that his subject is a human being.”56 Perhaps the single Vollard plate that most closely corresponds in composition and tone to Rembrandt’s is number 51 (fig. 3.27). Crucially, though, in that plate the identities of the sculpture and model are reversed, with the model at right, in profile, gazing upon the standing nude statue. Although clearly a departure from Rembrandt’s composition, this new version points up ambiguities already present in the original. Rembrandt’s volumetric modeling of the sculpted bust imparted to it a degree of animation and substantiality lacking in the more cursorily drawn “living” model. Yet Picasso’s interpretation of the latter figure as a statue seems to have been additionally motivated by another aspect of the print, one that was both cause and effect of its ambiguities. In 1910 Fritz Saxl convincingly demonstrated that Rembrandt had based The Artist and His Model on Pieter Feddes van Harlingen’s print Pygmalion; the discovery only lent further credence to a longstanding tradition that referred to Rembrandt’s own work under that same title.57 Its association with the myth of Pygmalion must have given the etching a special resonance for Picasso. The artist was unquestionably familiar with the

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3.42 Rembrandt, The Artist and His Model, c. 1639.

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story from (if nothing else) his recent involvement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As his illustrations for that book make clear, Picasso evidently read the poem with some care, and Ovid’s telling of the tale is its canonic version. Earlier accounts identified Pygmalion as the king of Cyprus, who had fallen hopelessly in love with a cult image of the goddess Aphrodite. But Ovid altered the myth, deepening its artistic significance by making Pygmalion a sculptor smitten with the beauty of his own creation.58 Viewed through the filter of this story, Rembrandt’s etching undergoes several important changes of its own. In the first place, the scene is transposed from a seventeenth-century painter’s studio—presumably Rembrandt’s own workshop—to the studio of a classical sculptor. In the second place, the distance between the artist and the nude (herself transformed from model into statue) takes on a completely new significance. Whereas it had been possible before to see that distance as indicative of the artist’s detachment and disinterest, such an interpretation becomes untenable once the image is associated with Pygmalion. Then the space between the two figures fills with tension, their separation conveying the alienating inaccessibility of the nude and the sculptor’s unrequited desire. The Vollard “Studio” prints, as we have already discovered, tend to emphasize (if often critically) the artist’s critical detachment. However, there are a number of images within the Suite that seem to draw on the more dissonant aspects of Rembrandt’s etching in order to intimate a much closer relationship between the artist and his model. Plate 68 (fig. 3.43), for example, effects a rapprochement of the pair via an elaboration of the etching’s Pygmalion theme. If association with the myth of Pygmalion rendered the separation of the figures distressingly problematic, it also hinted at a possible resolution in the eventual metamorphosis of the statue into a living, flesh-and-blood woman. That event, as we noted earlier, is anticipated in Rembrandt’s print by the ambiguity of its female figures—by the sculpted bust’s strange animation and the equally uncertain status of the standing nude. In closer keeping with the myth, ambiguity in Picasso’s print devolves upon a single figure; and the difficulty we have in deter-

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3.43 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 68 (April 7, 1933).

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mining whether she is a statue or a living woman seems mirrored in the sculptor’s expression of anxious confusion. Meanwhile, the tool that he holds—semierect—in his hand signals his own imminent transformation from sculptor into lover, somewhat more passionately involved with his work.59 The depictions of Rembrandt within the Vollard Suite likewise suggest an understanding of The Artist and His Model sharply different from the usual interpretations that see it as an image of “critical detachment.” As plate 34 (fig. 3.38) suggests, with its lecherous, if also rather comical, image of the artist, for Picasso Rembrandt represented an artist involved with his models in the most literal sense. He once explained it to Kahnweiler this way: “Caravaggio sees the daughter of his concierge, paints her portrait and there you have Bacchus! But look at Rembrandt—he wanted to do Bathsheba, but his servant girl who was the model interested him much more, and so he painted her portrait.”60 The mention of “Bathsheba” is clearly a reference to the Louvre painting (or one of its variants) in which the Old Testament figure bears the unmistakable features—and lovingly rendered nude body—of Rembrandt’s mistress/housekeeper Hendrickje. Such paintings fueled the belief that Rembrandt, much as was said of Picasso himself, painted the women he loved, and loved those that he painted. That belief seems to have dominated Picasso’s image of the Dutch artist;61 certainly it dominates the image of him within the Vollard Suite. In plate 36 (fig. 3.44), for example, Picasso reworked the composition of The Artist and His Model so that the figure of Rembrandt abandons his former position of detachment to stand handin-hand with the beautiful draped nude. Oddly enough, when Picasso showed the Vollard print to Françoise Gilot a decade later, he equivocated on the identity of its male figure. “You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” he asked. “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe Balzac; I’m not sure.”62 In fact Picasso’s uncertainty seems to have been even greater than his comments concede, for he almost surely had in mind not (or not simply) Balzac but Frenhofer, one of the principal characters of Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, the book for which Picasso had provided illustrations a few years before. Like Rembrandt, the fictional Frenhofer was a painter,

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3.44 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 36 (January 31, 1934).

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active during the first half of the seventeenth century. More significantly for both Picasso and the dramatic tension of the story, he fancied himself a second Pygmalion. Frenhofer madly claimed that his Belle Noiseuse, the “unknown masterpiece” of the story’s title, was actually a living woman—both his creation and his “spouse.” Although Frenhofer was a kind of demonic antihero in Balzac’s novella, he seems to have held an irresistible appeal for Picasso. He was someone who (again like Rembrandt) had managed to reconcile the competing claims of love and art, someone for whom painting really was “actual lovemaking.” 63 That attitude alone might have been sufficient to link Rembrandt and Frenhofer in Picasso’s imagination, yet there were other motivations besides. When Frenhofer is first encountered in Balzac’s novella, he is described as an old man, bearded, wearing a doublet and hefty gold chain: “You would have said it was a Rembrandt painting, out of its frame, walking silently through the dark atmosphere that was the hallmark of that great painter.”64 Perhaps remembering the passage from his earlier work on Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Picasso offered a recreation of sorts with plate 36. In the upper portion of that print, the figure of Rembrandt is outlined against an open window, while below he is cut off at the knees by the straight edge of an elaborate frame.65 He seems to be simultaneously a living person and a painting, existing both within the frame and without. No doubt this conceit was partly inspired by Balzac’s written text, yet the material for its visualization seems to have been provided, uncannily, by Rembrandt’s etching. In The Artist and His Model, the painter is placed in front of an empty canvas—an arrangement that may have suggested to Picasso (with but a bit of imaginative license) that the artist had emerged out of the painting. From there, it was just a small step to the configuration of plate 36, in which the portrait-cumRembrandt has come forward to join the nude (who, it should be noted, appears to welcome these advances). By reworking the motif of the artist and empty canvas so as to draw out its latent possibilities, Picasso created an image directly at odds with the usual interpretations of Rembrandt’s print that emphasize the artist’s critical detachment and disinterest. Other details of the composition were exploited in much

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the same, subversive way. Rembrandt had given his sketchy self-portrait two sets of eyes, one pair leveled at the nude, the other raised to her face. The Rembrandt figure in plate 36 exhibits a similar degree of ocular abundance: the spare left eye, a tightly coiled spiral, is placed adjacent to its twin, while the extra one on the right hides in the bushy eyebrow on that side.66 If taken at face value, the additional eyes cast into doubt the supposed detachment of the artist’s gaze. In Picasso’s etching—and even Rembrandt’s, when it is viewed in tandem—the two pairs of eyes seem to trace out the trajectory of a glance that is both embodied and aroused, which darts to and fro, eager to hit all the high points. The allusions to Pygmalion, Rembrandt’s reputation, the apparent doubling in the etching of the artist’s eyes, as well as the figure’s complex relation to the blank canvas behind, and the intimations there of Balzac’s Frenhofer—all these features are so many loose threads running through The Artist and His Model. Together they threaten to unravel the etching’s ostensible message of aesthetic distance. The “Rembrandt” plates of the Vollard Suite, in effect, pull those threads out for a closer look, revealing the contradictions woven into the very fabric of the original etching. To phrase things somewhat differently, we might say that those plates point toward what is typically repressed in interpretations of The Artist and His Model—or even better, that they encourage us to interpret that etching as itself staging desire’s censorship or repression. They suggest, that is, that the artist’s apparent “disinterest” is founded precisely on the active sublimation of the workings of desire. In addition, the “Rembrandt” and closely related plates of the Vollard Suite enable us to see how even the “Battle of Love” could have taken its impetus from The Artist and His Model—the Pygmalion associations of the latter driving, in the former, both the emphasis on the artist’s sexual arousal and the condensation into a single figure of the studio model and sculpture. In fact, given sufficient time, it would be possible to show that nearly all of the Vollard plates are variations, or variations on variations, of Rembrandt’s unfinished etching. From the images of the Minotaur (who, it will be remembered, entered the Suite via the artist’s studio) to the “miscellaneous” scenes of the circus and bullfight, the

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entire series can be seen as the result of a “centrifugal” process of improvisation leading outward from Rembrandt’s print.67 Thus, to the extent that the Suite can be said to have a center, that position is occupied by the etching of The Artist and His Model. Which is to say that the “center” is not actually present among the pages of the Vollard Suite. Like the spider’s web whose structure it resembles, the Suite is built around an empty space, a hole. Moreover, this absent center points in different—and even diametrically opposed—directions, as Picasso’s variations brilliantly reveal. In their light, it seems clear that what attracted the artist to Rembrandt’s etching in the first place was its inherent contradiction; that, and the fact that its subject impinges on classical art. Indeed it appears likely that Picasso was drawn to the Dutch artist, as he had earlier been drawn to Rubens and the Torre de la Parada compositions, by the eccentric and even subversive vision of classicism he found there. The Artist and His Model is particularly rich in this regard, because even as it gives overt support to the “classical” ideal of disinterest on the part of both viewer and viewed, it simultaneously calls attention to the repression (and not merely the absence) of desire upon which that disinterest is founded. It is important for us to recognize that the ambivalence of Rembrandt’s etching does not simply get taken up into the imagery of the Vollard plates. It registers too, and perhaps even more powerfully, in the structure of the Suite at large, so that each encounter with the prints, each instance of their viewing, enacts both the movements of desire and their repeated repression. A brief review here might help to clarify the claim. Earlier it was argued that the plates of the Suite, bound as they are to one another by a complex network of associations, offer themselves as a kind of structural analogue of the Freudian unconscious, and that the pattern of viewing they encourage likewise resembles the desire-driven operations of the primary process. It was also claimed that the “Sculptor’s Studio” plates and those most closely associated with them (whether through similarity or outright opposition) are something of an exception in this regard. In their viewing, that visual restlessness is subdued. Our attention is directed to those relations among the images that fall out into ordered oppositional pairs, and that as a result tend

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to be productive of meaning. To couch the phenomenon in the Freudian language that we have been using for the Suite as a whole, we might describe those plates as modeling the secondary processes, those that govern preconscious and conscious thought. These, Freud argued, are characterized by a binding of energy and a repression of the desire feuling it. The primary process, he wrote, “is directed towards securing the free discharge of quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one.”68 Said differently, the job of the secondary process is to limit the number of associative links established among separate mental images and ideas, and thereby to stabilize the relationships between them. As a pair of recent commentators on Freud have put it, “repression takes place when energy is bound, and . . . the binding of energy is, precisely, a denial of entry into the conscious mind, not merely to specific representations, but perhaps above all to the multiple relations among representations which characterize the primary process.”69 It is certainly a remarkable feature of the Vollard Suite that this “repression” (this “denial of multiple relations among representations”) occurs within and around a series of prints—the “Sculptor’s Studio”—whose subject itself concerns the repression or sublimation of desire in the quiescent contemplation of art. Yet it is also a feature worth remarking that the repression effected by the “Studio” prints is never quite complete. Even when focused on that series, our attention is in fact occasionally diverted to the images of bullfights or circus performers—led astray, that is, by associations that are clearly beside the point. The centrifugal pull of those associations is guaranteed by the very embeddedness of the “Sculptor’s Studio” within the Suite at large, a condition that is difficult to ignore in the actual handling and viewing of the prints. Consequently, and somewhat ironically, it is with the “Studio” series that we are made most forcefully aware of the destabilizing impulses encouraged by the Suite at large. It’s there, too, that we are most clearly able to glimpse the implication of those impulses. As a group, the plates of the “Sculptor’s Studio,” like the Rembrandt etching of The Artist and His Model out of which they were generated, effectively stage

repression; they allow us to see that the “classical” disinterest not only figured in but actually encouraged by the series is achieved through the active and ongoing denial of desire, and doesn’t merely arise in its absence. As a result, we are made to see as well that, in contrast to the prevalent and securing image of “classical” art as unified and self-sufficient—the image that most often appears within the “Sculptor’s Studio” itself—the Suite is a “classical” work that is both decentered and decentering, that, in spite of its own repressions, repeatedly catches its viewers up in something like the involuntary restlessness of desire.

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4 Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs

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The Minotaur’s introduction into the Vollard Suite coincided with the publication, in May 1933, of the first issue of the journal Minotaure. Picasso had been asked by Albert Skira, the magazine’s publisher, to produce the inaugural cover (fig. 4.1), the centerpiece of which, appropriately enough, was a drawing of the halfbull, half-man hybrid. Given that Picasso had already collaborated with Skira on the edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in which, moreover, the Minotaur’s story had been recounted), and given that the artist had already produced several images of Minotaurs,1 the appearance of Picasso’s Minotaur collage on that first cover seems highly overdetermined—in retrospect, almost inevitable. And yet, it had been neither Picasso nor Skira who had initially proposed the journal’s title. The idea for Minotaure came instead from Georges Bataille (and, if we are to believe André Masson, from Masson as well).2 Bataille’s own review, Documents—a journal dedicated, as its triadic subtitle proclaimed, to “Archéologie/Beaux-Arts/Ethnographie”—had folded three

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4.1 Picasso, cover for Minotaure (May 1933).

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years earlier, and no doubt Bataille was hoping that Minotaure would step into the breach.3 Although the new journal would in fact concern itself far more with “beaux-arts” than with either archaeology or ethnography, the recent archaeological excavations at Knossos were clearly a factor in its naming.4 The unearthing of Minos’s palace, with its dark, convoluted passages and stairways leading nowhere, had revealed a Greek architecture unlike any known before; it had simultaneously lent a certain currency to the myth of the labyrinth. In view of the image of ancient Crete beginning to emerge, that myth itself took on new connotations for Bataille. The labyrinth became seen as the site of a decisive turning point in the history of civilization, for it was there that the Athenian hero Theseus slew the Minotaur, in that one stroke severing all ties to both the dark, archaic world represented by Crete and the human bestiality incarnated in the monster.5 Hence Bataille’s championing of the Minotaur. Like the ass- and cockheaded gods on the Gnostic gems Bataille so admired,6 the Minotaur upset the clear distinction between man and animal—all the more so in that its lowly, brutish features appeared at the pinnacle of its human form, the site that should have been the locus of the most elevated aspects of its being.7 Insofar as the Minotaur of the Vollard Suite arrived on the scene concurrently with Minotaure, we might easily presume him to be the same as the mythological creature envisioned by Bataille. Certainly Picasso himself was drawing closer to Bataille and the other “dissident surrealists” at precisely this time.8 Yet Picasso’s Minotaur, we should remind ourselves, was and remains foremost an inhabitant of the Vollard Suite; like that of all the Suite’s characters, his significance is a function of the place he occupies within its complicated network of relations. To situate this Minotaur, therefore, it is necessary to return him to his native context and to look first at the parallels and differences between those plates in which he appears and the other, related images of the Vollard Suite. Only then can we properly begin to assess his significance. The Minotaur’s arrival within the Suite—and specifically within the “Sculptor’s Studio,” where he first appears—was prepared in a sense by the presence of sculpted bulls in a few of the earlier “Studio” scenes (see fig. 3.11). In

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4.2 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 84 (May 18, 1933).

fact, a comparison of those scenes with the later “Minotaur” images (in particular, with number 84 [fig. 4.2]) reveals a great deal about the relationship between the two series. One almost gets the impression that with plate 84 the sculptor and the sculpted bull simply exchanged roles, the one becoming a carved classical head, the other the much more animate Minotaur. Indeed, the print’s explicit juxtaposition of the Minotaur’s taurine features with that bearded, staring face suggests an even more localized exchange—as if the sculptor’s head was merely displaced to the back of the room, and a bull’s grafted onto the body left behind. The effect of this substitution is rendered most tangible in the relation-

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ship of the Minotaur to the model, and, in turn, in her relationship to the viewer of the print. Where earlier (fig. 3.11) the model’s stare had been aimed directly at the viewer, and at making him aware of his distanced vantage point outside the image (a vantage point in many ways comparable to that of the artist’s vis-à-vis his sculpture), in this later scene the model has, on the contrary, become fully engaged with the Minotaur. If, through her spread legs and contorted pose, she offers up her sex not to him but to the viewer, the move seems specifically calculated to put the two relationships on an equal footing—to cast them both, that is, in overtly physical terms. As we saw in the previous chapter, the classical sculptor of the “Studio” series was most often characterized by his detached and distant (which is to say, his purely ocular) relationships to his work and to his model. The Minotaur’s reign within the studio is characterized, in contrast, by relationships that are much more intimate—we might even say, much more tactile.9 At the same time that the Minotaur, through his brute physicality, is sharply differentiated from the classical sculptor, he also stands in marked opposition to the grappling figures of the “Battle of Love” (see figs. 3.24–3.26). The difference is perhaps most evident with “Minotaur” plate 87 (fig. 3.18), whose composition nearly duplicates that of the “Battle” scenes. Earlier we noted how the “Lovers”—precisely in contrast to the figures of the sculptor and his model—are pressed too close for seeing, how instead they shut their eyes tightly or stare blindly into space. Vision seems eclipsed in their embrace. This is decidedly not the case, however, with the Minotaur of plate 87 and his female companion. Despite their proximity, her eyes remain wide open and fixed upon the Minotaur, while he lowers his head to, in effect, pin her in his gaze. In short, the Minotaur seems to have gained a place within the Vollard Suite largely through his relationship to the protagonists of its two principal opposing series. On the one side, there is the detached and seemingly disembodied gaze of the classical sculptor and, on the other, the unseeing embrace of his alter ego in the “Battle of Love.” Together these two figures articulate the poles of an opposition, an opposition between opticality and physicality, or more simply be-

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4.3 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 94 (September 22, 1934).

tween vision and touch.10 The Minotaur’s importance within the Suite seems to reside precisely in the fact that, in him, vision and touch are reconciled. In this context, his taurine head signifies, by virtue of its brute animality, a mode of vision that is thoroughly carnal and characterized by all the rapaciousness of a bull. The Minotaur thus represents a synthesis or transcendence (Hegel would say, eine Aufhebung) of the opposition between vision and carnality posited by the “Sculptor’s Studio” and the “Battle of Love.” Of course, all of this pertains only to the sighted Minotaur. His blind counterpart, who makes a first appearance in the Suite in September of 1934, represents instead a radical negation of that synthesis: carnal vision replaced by blind, feeble groping (figs. 4.3–4.6). Once indicating a mode of seeing that was wed to

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4.5 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 96 (November 4, 1934). 4.6 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97 (November 1934).

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4.4 Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 95 (October 23, 1934).

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the physical—sight that aggressively took possession of all that it surveyed— the Minotaur’s taurine features are, in these plates, emptied of that significance, or rather (since, on the surface, they remain virtually unchanged), his features have come to signify precisely the absence of their former meaning, the failure of the synthesis they once represented. The Minotaur’s head, no longer transcendent, has become merely bestial. Which is to say that, with his blinding, Picasso’s Minotaur has joined the company of Bataille’s. As if to underscore the point, Picasso depicted the blind Minotaur with his head thrown back in anguish, so that his sightless eyes descend in the hierarchy of his face, and his open mouth becomes its crowning feature (see especially fig. 4.5) In the “Critical Dictionary” that was a recurring element of Documents, Bataille had written of just such a pose. The reference appeared in the entry under “Mouth,” where Bataille set out to contrast the “architecture” of humans and animals. The mouth, he wrote, is the “beginning” or “prow” of an animal, its foremost (and, in that sense, most characteristic) feature. Man, however, does not have such a clearly recognizable beginning: “He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one’s attention; it is the eyes . . . that play the meaningful role of an animal’s jaws.”11 This hierarchical difference is nonetheless obliterated, literally upended, Bataille claimed, during moments of extreme anguish or pain: “It is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals.”12 What intrigued Bataille in these moments when the face is “inverted” was essentially the same thing that intrigued him in the figure of the Minotaur. In both cases, the opposition between man and animal is, far from being transcended, thoroughly transgressed.13 Especially in the present context—that is, within a discussion of Picasso’s “classical” prints—it is important to recognize that Bataille’s “Mouth” is engaged in a dialogue, so to speak, with Hegel, specifically with a passage from the Aesthetics concerning classical sculpture and its revelation of the inherent spiritu-

In animals the mouth or nasal bone do form a more or less straight line, but the specific projection of the animal’s snout . . . presses forward as if to get as near as possible to the consumption of food. . . . The express prominence of these formations exclusively devoted to natural needs and their satisfaction gives the animal head the appearance of being merely adapted to natural functions without any spiritual ideal significance.14 By contrast, the human face, particularly as presented in classical art, is structured, Hegel asserted, in such a way that “its soulful and spiritual relation to things is manifested”: [Its focus] is in the upper part of the face, in the intellectual brow and, lying under it, the eye, expressive of the soul, and what surrounds it. That is to say that with the brow are connected meditation, reflection, the spirit’s reversion into itself, while its inner life peeps out from the eye and is clearly concentrated there. Through this emphasis on the forehead, while the mouth and cheek-bones are secondary, the human face acquires a spiritual character.15 This head-to-head comparison appears as part of a larger argument in which Hegel presents the classical sculptor’s turn from an archaic interest in animal forms toward a repertoire devoted almost exclusively to human ones as a quite literal elevation of the work’s spiritual content, keyed to the ascent of its central axis. Bataille’s contrary aim in the “Mouth” essay, as we saw, was to overturn the verticality of the human anatomy and, in the process, the hierarchical opposition from which Hegel had derived its meaning. But it was left to Picasso’s blind Minotaur—albeit following Bataille’s lead—to raise the issue (or perhaps we should say lower it) within a field once again proper to “classical” art and aesthetics.

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ality of the human form. Hegel, too, had begun from a contrast of facial structures, of what he described as the primarily horizontal orientation of an animal’s head with the insistent verticality of the Greek profile:

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Several other aspects of the “Blind Minotaur” series, and even the Suite at large, also strongly evoke Bataille’s writings, especially those writings done in response to Hegel. Recalling the associative, “metamorphic” relations among the Vollard plates, we could point to the structure of Documents’ “Critical Dictionary” itself—or, even better, to that of Bataille’s “Dossier hétérologie,” whose dense interconnectedness but simultaneous refusal of unity or closure serves as both a parody of the Hegelian Encyclopedia and an emblem for Bataille’s writing in general.16 Then, too, much of the specific imagery used by Bataille touches on that found in Picasso’s prints; the figure of the blind Minotaur is especially caught up in the labyrinthine network of images that circulated throughout Bataille’s writings of the late 1920s and 1930s. We’ve already encountered something of Bataille’s preoccupation with the figure of the Minotaur. In his essay “Rotten Sun,” both bulls and blindness are recurrent motifs—a coincidence that seems all the more significant in that this piece was written as part of Documents’ special “Hommage à Picasso.”17 Because of its aggregative structure, “Rotten Sun,” like most of Bataille’s writings, resists paraphrase. And although it suffers, too, from selective extraction, it is perhaps nonetheless worth drawing out and pausing over those portions most germane to the discussion at hand. The essay begins with Bataille’s distinction between two different views of the sun or, as he puts it, between two different suns: on the one hand, the sun is elevated and enlightening, as well as being “the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at fixedly”; on the other hand, the sun that is stared at is blinding, mutilative. “In the same way,” Bataille writes, “that the preceding sun (the one not looked at) is perfectly beautiful, the one that is scrutinized can be considered horribly ugly. In mythology, the scrutinized sun is identified with a man who slays a bull (Mithra), with a vulture that eats the liver (Prometheus).”18 Following a gruesome description of Mithraic sacrifice, Bataille adds that its slain bull is also associated with the blinding sun—as is, he later concludes, the art of Picasso. There are several things worth noticing here. One, which we earlier gestured toward, is the way the individual elements of the essay are tied to one an-

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other less by the aid of deductive or logical reasoning than through associations perhaps best described as operating “laterally.” That is, rather than being in the service of an argument that is developed and methodically carried through, images, anecdotes, and fragments of myth are linked to one another on the basis of shared but seemingly tangential points of reference. In one of his earliest essays, “The Solar Anus,” Bataille had in fact specifically addressed the possibility—if not the inevitability—of composition by means of such “lateral” linkages, “because,” as he said, “with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought through its own labyrinth.”19 (Needless to say, that statement is both a commentary on the complex network of associations to be found in Bataille’s writings, and itself very much a part of that network.) We should also notice how in “Rotten Sun”—and “The Solar Anus,” too, for that matter—the “Ariadne’s thread” of associations repeatedly loops back on itself, forming knots or nodal points around which the other images, as a result, seem to congregate. Another way we might remark the same phenomenon would be to say that those “nodal” images appear overdetermined by the elements surrounding them.20 Later, the narrative thread of the present chapter will itself loop back to pick up the discussion of overdetermination. In the meantime it is perhaps sufficient, first, to point out that the figure of the blind Minotaur is nowhere specifically mentioned in Bataille’s writings (including the essay on Picasso), but that, because of its numerous connections to figures and images that are, it in effect creates and comes to stand at another major node or crossing within the Bataillean labyrinth of thought.21 Secondly, we should remind ourselves that the blind Minotaur is equally bound up with the imagery of the Vollard Suite. In fact, in addition to his multiple and complex relations to its various other characters, he, like many of them, derives from one of Rembrandt’s etchings. The blind Minotaur’s pose—with mouth agape, arms, legs, and cane fumbling forward—clearly mimics that of the main figure in Rembrandt’s Blindness of Tobit (fig. 4.7).22 Having recognized this, we might say (and in such a way so

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4.7 Rembrandt, The Blindness of Tobit, 1651.

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as to emphasize its apparent redundancy) that the blind Minotaur is simultaneously overdetermined by the imagery of Bataille’s essays and by that—equally associative—of the Vollard Suite. There remains a final way in which the “Blind Minotaur” series is entangled in the Ariadne’s thread of Bataille’s writings: like them, it manifests a thoroughgoing concern with the act of sacrifice.23 Perhaps the most direct—if also the most literally peripheral—indication of that concern is to be found in the small Death of Marat that appears, canceled and inverted, on the left side of the first of those Blind Minotaur plates (see figs. 4.3 and 4.8). The etching of Marat was initially produced some two months earlier, to accompany a book of verse by the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.24 Although little in its composition recalls any of the particularities of the poems collected in that volume, the imagery of Marat is broadly consistent with the character of Péret’s work, full as that work often is of political invective and suggestions of sexual strife.25 Clearly Picasso’s own desire to rethink classicism—or at least, in this case, the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David—also figured in the choice of subject matter. But more than either David or Péret, it is Bataille who is invoked by the subject’s actual presentation. Marat’s murder is envisioned as a violent act of sacrifice, the bathtub of the Davidian composition having become an altar and Charlotte Corday’s weapon a massive knife, now poised at the throat of Marat. Presiding over the entire sacrificial scene is a soleil pourri, an orb that is simultaneously sun, eye, and “solar anus.”26 In both its style and its subject matter, Picasso’s Death of Marat closely resembles the contemporaneous work of André Masson. From 1932 to 1933, Masson had done a whole series of pen-and-ink Massacres (fig. 4.9): drawing after drawing in which one group of figures (exclusively male) slits the throats of another (almost always female).27 Except for its reversal of gender roles and its art historical reference, Picasso’s Marat would be perfectly at home in this world. Masson, of course, was the artist most closely associated with Bataille, and the one who had dedicated himself most completely to images of sacrifice.28 In 1934—the year of the Marat and the “Blind Minotaurs”—Masson embarked on

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4.8 Picasso, The Death of Marat, 1934 (July 21).

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4.9 Masson, Massacre, 1932.

a collaboration with Bataille that eventually culminated in an album entitled, simply, Sacrifices.29 The volume contained an essay by Bataille and five of Masson’s etchings depicting gods who had been sacrificed or slain: Mithra, Orpheus, Osiris, “Le Crucifié” (a Christlike figure with a decidedly equine head), and, perhaps most significant in the present context, the Minotaur (fig. 4.10).30 To the uninitiated, Masson’s fascination with sacrifice may seem at best eccentric. To Bataille, however, nothing could have been more innate to an artist. In fact, the majority of Bataille’s essays for Documents were concerned precisely with articulating what he felt to be the fundamental relationship between sacri-

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4.10 Masson, The Minotaur, 1934.

The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself from devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or it is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.32 If Bataille admired the passage’s assertion that life is always tinged with death, that a certain negativity is inherent in our very being, his attitude toward the Phenomenology as a whole was much more deeply ambivalent. His misgivings

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fice and the visual arts. Before we can address that relationship, though—much less its specific connection to Picasso—it is imperative that we understand a bit about the powerful fascination that sacrifice held for Bataille. This, too, would seem to have been a product of his colloquy with Hegel. Already strong, that colloquy intensified in 1934 when Bataille began attending the lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit given by Alexandre Kojève at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. One of the fundamental tenets of the Phenomenology as presented by Kojève was that human (Spiritual) being differentiates itself from animal being when its desires are directed no longer toward real, “positive” objects, but toward the Desire of others. Kojève also emphasized that, because animal desires are all essentially aimed at self-preservation, human being comes to light only when life is willfully risked in the attainment of some other end. Being human, then, necessarily entails exposing oneself to death. Bataille likewise foregrounded this aspect of the Phenomenology in his 1955 essay “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,”31 which, though written after the period with which we are concerned, nonetheless makes explicit much of what had long been at stake for Bataille in the philosopher’s work. The essay, for example, quotes at length and with the utmost admiration the following passage from Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology:

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can be traced to the fact that the book presents itself—like the human consciousness whose history it purports to be—precisely as a whole. Through a dialectical process of reconciliation, what was described in the preface as “utter dismemberment” resolves itself, by book’s end, into a coherent totality. For in “tarrying with the negative,” Spirit is eventually able to recoup all that was lost, to sublate it and thus turn it to positive ends. Even death ultimately works, in Hegel’s system, to the profit of meaning and life. Bataille would have us understand that there is a fault beneath the system, a hidden abyss that Hegel himself both saw and refused to see. We can perhaps best glimpse it for ourselves through the parable of the master and slave (the focal point of Kojève’s course of lectures), which opens the Phenomenology’s section on the emergence of self-consciousness. As Hegel describes it, self-consciousness is the product of social interaction: one (nascently human) individual confronting another. Each desires the other’s Desire. Each, that is, wants to be recognized by that other as representing an admirable and even enviable value. This is what Kojève means when he says that “all human Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness—is, finally, a desire for ‘recognition’.”33 Since the humanness of that desire is brought to light, however, only when it outweighs considerations of self-preservation, the Phenomenology’s parable of the master and slave centers on a violent struggle for recognition between mortal adversaries. Eventually, Hegel explains, one of the combatants gains domination and forces the other, through enslavement, to accede to his point of view. Subsequently, of course, will come the dialectical reversal of the hierarchy, when both parties independently realize that the master’s status is contingent upon the slave; this reversal in turn paves the way for a moment of mutual recognition, followed by reconciliation and spiritual advance. Bataille described Hegel’s account of the master and slave as “blinding in its lucidity.”34 By this he seems to have intended to pay tribute to the clarity and power of the dialectic as enacted there—its brilliant demonstration of the implication of death in life, other in the formation of self. At the same time, however, Bataille’s language suggests that the very lucidity of the demonstration blinds

I will speak later about the profound differences between the man of sacrifice, who operates ignorant (unconscious) of the ramifications of what he is doing, and the Sage (Hegel), who surrenders to a knowledge that, in his own eyes, is absolute. Despite these differences, it is always a question of manifesting the Negative (and always in a concrete form, that is, at the heart of the Totality whose constitutive elements are inseparable). The privileged manifestation of Negativity is death, but death, in truth, reveals nothing. In principle, death reveals to Man his natural, animal being, but the revelation never takes place. For once the animal being that has supported him is dead, the human being himself has ceased to exist. For man finally to be revealed to himself he would have to die, but he would have to do so while living—while watching himself cease to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self) consciousness at the very moment when it annihilates conscious being. In a sense this is what takes place (or at least is on the point of taking place, or which takes place in a fugitive, ungraspable manner) by means of a subterfuge. In sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies with the animal

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us, specifically to the abyss upon which the dialectic is founded. As Hegel sets up the encounter between the future master and slave, each necessarily risks death in the struggle for domination. What the dialectic fails to acknowledge (because it cannot subsume) are those instances in which there really is loss of life, where one or both parties are killed in the struggle. These irredeemable and therefore meaningless deaths are at once crucial to the story Hegel is telling—without them it would be evident that neither “master” nor “slave” has really risked anything—and yet phenomenologically invisible.35 The entire system rests, in a sense, on those inadmissible corpses. Through their exclusion, the dialectic is able to give meaning to death, while simultaneously “blinding itself to the baselessness of the non-meaning from which the basis of meaning is drawn.”36 Bataille compares the operation of the dialectic and the sleight-of-hand it employs to acts of sacrifice in which, at the last minute, an animal is substituted for the would-be human victim. By means of this subterfuge, the sacrificer is able to survive his own death in order to experience Spirit rising, phoenixlike, from the ashes. Here it is perhaps worth quoting Bataille at some length:

struck by death. Thus he dies while watching himself die, and even, after a fashion, dies of his own volition, as one with the sacrificial arm.37 “But this,” Bataille quickly asserts (now speaking as much of the Hegelian dialectic as of the sacrificial ritual he has just described), “is a comedy!” A necessary comedy, we might add, that allows man, still rooted in nature, to successfully imagine his passage beyond, into something like pure Spirit. All, thanks again, to the subterfuge that converts (by excluding) the nothingness of death into the foundation of self-consciousness and meaning. Jacques Derrida, writing on Bataille’s reading of the Phenomenology, has similarly sought to draw attention to the exclusions that set the dialectic in motion: The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—here we would have to say an expenditure without reserve—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or system.38

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With Derrida’s mention of a “blind spot” we may well be reminded of Bataille’s own imagery of the two suns, articulated in his essay in homage to Picasso. The first sun, it will be recalled, was enlightening, if “impossible to look at fixedly,” and associated above all with “spiritual elevation.” The second sun, by contrast—the “blinding,” “mutilative” one that clearly held the most fascination for Bataille—was closely linked with mythology and an excessive, unproductive expenditure of energy. The first, we might say, presides over the founding of the Hegelian system; the second (but of course they are really the same sun) threatens to undermine it from within.39 A few months after the appearance of “Rotten Sun” and the special “Hommage à Picasso,” Bataille published “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.”40 Like the earlier essay, but now at greater length and in more detail, this one interweaves many of the strands that we have just been

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attempting to sort out: Bataille’s fascination with sacrifice, the imagery of the blinding sun, and the connection of both to painting and the visual arts more generally. For that reason alone, the text merits our relatively extended consideration. It opens with excerpts from a clinical report concerning a young painter, a certain Gaston F., who, after staring into the sun, promptly bit off his finger. The essay then proceeds to a discussion of Van Gogh, via Van Gogh’s obsession with the sun and sunflowers, and his own comparable act of self-mutilation. The latter half of the essay describes various horrific sacrificial rituals—ones in which there is no substituted animal victim—and dwells at some length on mythological tales of the “sacrifice of a god.” Such tales had recently come to the attention of a number of ethnographers and mythologists,41 who discovered in them a curious identification between the god and his supposed adversary. When studied in the context of the full mythological system, these antagonists—Bataille refers specifically to Prometheus and the eagle (aetos prometheus)—are revealed to be in fact different aspects of the same being. Thus, the essay, which had begun by implying that automutilation was a perverse form of sacrifice, ends conversely by suggesting that sacrifice has its mythological origin in automutilation. The essay’s two halves—further differentiated in that the first deals exclusively with painters, the second with a more diverse group of sacrificers and automutilators—are joined together by the story of a young woman (not an artist) who tears out her eyes. Despite the fact that it is accorded fairly brief space, the woman’s story serves in a sense as the linchpin for the entire essay. Everything turns on her blinding. What enables this act to play its pivotal role within the structure of the text is that “Oedipean enucleation,” as Bataille refers to it, not only is “the most horrifying form of sacrifice,” but it also, and more importantly, inscribes sacrifice squarely within the field of vision. In the previous issue of Documents, Bataille had likewise sought to draw a connection between the visual arts and sacrificial self-mutilation, this time on historical (or rather, prehistorical) grounds. The occasion was a review of G. H. Luquet’s L’Art primitif (1930), a book that aimed to account for the origins and

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development of art throughout the Paleolithic period.42 Luquet’s interpretation of the Aurignacian cave paintings was modeled, it would seem, on the hunting expeditions to which they presumably referred. When the primitive artist created an image of a bison or reindeer on the wall of the cave, his desire, according to Luquet, had been essentially that of the hunter: to possess the beast, to grasp its form. Tracking his quarry over the centuries, prehistoric man had gradually learned to perfect the image, until finally he had captured the animal, as it were, exactly. Luquet compared this progress with the development of artistic skills in children, which, he claimed, similarly proceeded from inchoate scribbling to recognized (and recognizable) form, the drawing becoming ever more accomplished with each repetition. Bataille referred to Luquet’s scenario as the development of art by progressive “appropriation”; and while he conceded that it held a certain explanatory power, he believed that it was not the only possible account. In fact, Bataille argued that “appropriation” failed to explain one of the most striking features of the Aurignacian hunt scenes: the marked difference in their depiction of men and animals. Whereas the animal forms were delicate, detailed, conveying a wealth of information, the images of the hunters themselves were crude and deforming—in a way, much more bestial than those of the reindeer or bison. The scenario that these figures suggested was of an art motivated not by a desire for mastery and possession, but by an urge to degrade and destroy, an urge that— because it was reserved for the images of man—might aptly be characterized as automutilative. Just as Luquet had sought evidence for his hypothesis in the example of children’s art, Bataille turned there for confirmation of his own claims. The child’s impulse to draw, Bataille reminded his readers, was often vented on walls and other initially pristine surfaces. It was an impulse less recognizably aesthetic than destructive: a drive to mar or deface. In contrast to Luquet’s account of progressive appropriation, Bataille asserted that much art “proceeds in this sense through successive destructions.”43 And indeed, confronted with André Masson’s etchings or Picasso’s Death of Marat, we may well be tempted to agree. Such works would seem to belong fully to the mutilative strain of art elaborated by Bataille.

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For theirs are the styles of vandals: crude markings that appear to deface the very figures that they constitute, and which, as a result, seem perfectly in keeping with their chosen subject of human sacrifice. Yet there is still a sense in which we might want to say that Picasso’s Death of Marat, for all its seeming collusion with Bataille, remains an assiduously Hegelian image. After all, in illustrating sacrifice, in turning it into a representation (however crude), doesn’t the etching essentially repeat the substitutive “subterfuge” denounced by Bataille? Doesn’t it domesticate and thereby betray sacrifice by making it into a purely vicarious experience? Perhaps it was just such a recognition that led Picasso to cancel the image, by deeply gouging an “X” across its surface. Art, as Bataille said, often “proceeds in this sense through successive destructions.” In fact, in an interview conducted during the winter of 1934, when work on the “Blind Minotaur” series was still ongoing, Picasso himself used words remarkably similar to describe his artistic practice. “In the old days,” he said, “a picture went forward to completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case,” he claimed, virtually echoing Bataille, “a picture is a sum of destructions.”44 The Blind Minotaur that soon appeared on the plate alongside the canceled Marat does indeed suggest an engagement with Bataillean notions of sacrifice that is at once deeper and more subtle than its predecessor’s. Graphic depiction has been replaced by suggestion (so that the plate seems less strictly illustrative), while sacrifice of another has given way to apparent automutilation. In the company of his youthful female companion, the blind Minotaur in fact stirs associations with specifically “Oedipean” enucleation—in Bataille’s words, “that most horrifying form of sacrifice.”45 Nonetheless, we may object, isn’t it yet the case that at least that first Blind Minotaur—positioned as it is alongside the canceled and inverted Marat—perfectly illustrates (if now in a slightly different sense) a Hegelian view of history and change? Doesn’t the plate’s peculiar pairing of images exactly correspond to the movement of the Aufhebung—the negation that simultaneously preserves what it cancels, and that thereby drives the Hegelian dialectic? Shouldn’t we,

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then, view the “Blind Minotaur” series as the transcendent outcome of the dialectic’s smooth operation: the Truth revealed through its determinate negations? Such a conclusion would be incontrovertible were it not for the fact that in other, more significant ways the “Blind Minotaur” prints explicitly disturb and undermine the ordered functioning of the dialectic. Crucial in this regard is the images’ embeddedness within the Vollard Suite and, consequently, their relation to its other plates. In particular, the blind Minotaur needs to be seen alongside his sighted counterpart. For that Minotaur, as we discovered at the beginning of this chapter, really did appear to be the product of dialectical reconciliation: the sublation of the opposition between vision and touch as those were staked out by, respectively, the classical sculptor and his alter ego from the “Battle of Love.” As such, the sighted Minotaur was the very embodiment of what Bataille had referred to as an aesthetic of “appropriation”; his gaze seemed capable of embracing everything within its scope. By contrast, the blind Minotaur, although still occupying a position in relation to the terms of opticality and physicality, effectively dislodges them from the grip of the dialectic. Following Derrida, we might say that the Minotaur’s blinding constitutes so irreversible a sacrifice, so radical a negativity, that it can no longer be identified as negativity in a process or system. It is instead that which undermines the system from within. To phrase things somewhat differently: the Minotaur’s enucleation reveals the “blind spot” of the system proposed by the “Sculptors Studio” series; the point at which Picasso’s fantasy of carnal vision passes over into mere carne. In this regard the “Blind Minotaur” series differs from such illustrations of sacrifice as Masson’s etchings (even the most ostensibly Bataillean) or Picasso’s own Death of Marat. It involves foremost a sacrifice of meaning. Strictly speaking, the Minotaur’s depicted blindness is only a consequence of the “automutilation” of sense, sense that had been generated out of the Suite’s structural relations. This, we might say, is what makes the “Blind Minotaur” series less an illustration of sacrifice than its performance or enactment. It is also what makes its Minotaur—much more than Masson’s—the equivalent of the “sacrificed god” of mythology.

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4.11 Picasso, The Minotauromachy (fifth state), 1935.

Near the end of March 1935, Picasso began work on what would become his most famous print, the large etching known as The Minotauromachy (fig. 4.11). From the print’s scale, its complexity, and the evident care that Picasso lavished on the plate, it is clear that he intended it from the start to be a “masterpiece,” if not the culmination (since that would imply a notion of development to which Picasso very explicitly did not subscribe) then at least a sort of resumé of his most recent graphic work. Many of the characters and concerns that preoccupied him in the Vollard Suite resurface in its composition. Foremost among these are not only the figure of the Minotaur but also the Bataillean subject of sacrifice. Restored to sightedness and removed from the immediate context of the Suite, the Minotaur now stands in a somewhat different relation to sacrificial is-

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sues. More than previously, that relation hinges upon the print’s supporting cast of characters and the multiple, even labyrinthine associations that accompany them. Before turning our attention to these, we might first pause to recall that the mythological figure of the Minotaur himself is a figure intimately associated with sacrifice. Athenian youths were regularly demanded as offerings to the Cretan monster—until, that is, Theseus was sent as one of the victims. And even there, with Theseus’s victory, sacrifice can be read in the story. As we saw earlier, it was the death of the Minotaur, as much as the deaths he caused, that made him a sacrificial figure in the eyes of André Masson and motivated his inclusion among the “Dying Gods” in the album of Sacrifices Masson produced in collaboration with Bataille. Given that one of the other gods in that album was “Le Crucifié,” it is perhaps not difficult to see that the bearded figure at the far left of the Minotauromachy—so Christlike in his appearance, and with what might easily be taken for a wound in his side—could also be construed as a sacrificial figure. On numerous occasions, including in his Sacrifices essay, Bataille specifically invoked the Crucifixion as an example of the sacrificial violence upon which, he claimed, all religion was founded.46 The Minotauromachy’s “Christ” derives additional significance from his association with the print’s other figures, most especially the three young women immediately adjacent. The “sacrificial” status of these women is perhaps less obvious but no less crucial, as we will see, to the overall interest of the image. Through their attributes and appearance, all three women can be linked to the blind Minotaur’s guide (see figs. 4.3–4.6). In the first plate of that series (fig. 4.3) the guide carries what is clearly a sheaf of wheat; in the subsequent plates she cradles a dove instead. The shared point of reference between those two things—the similarity that apparently sanctioned the substitution of a bird for a sheaf of grain—is that both are common sacrificial “victims.” Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s essay on sacrifice, a text repeatedly cited by Bataille and the other contributors to Documents, records numerous examples of agrarian sacrifice, as well as rituals in which a bird serves as victim.47 Picasso’s familiarity with the

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4.12 “Lyons kore,” c. 540 B.C.

4.13 Kore from the Acropolis, c. 520 B.C.

elements of sacrifice more probably came from works of archaic art; one thinks especially of the Greek korai, who typically proffered to the gods sacrificial offerings of birds, small animals, or pieces of fruit (figs. 4.12 and 4.13). In 1933, Cahiers d’art devoted an entire issue to archaic Greek art, and several kore statues were included among the illustrations.48 Shortly thereafter, comparable figures began to appear in Picasso’s own sculpture. His 1934 Woman with Leaves (fig. 4.14), with her corrugated “Ionic” peplos and arm outstretched in offering, is specifically reminiscent of those archaic Greek prototypes. These sculptures in view, it becomes apparent that the girl holding the candle in the Minotauromachy also resembles the ancient korai. Feet planted firmly together, right elbow bent at a near-90-degree angle, her pose alone is enough to establish the figure’s sacrificial connotations. Then, too, there is the matter of her “offering.” Although normally interpreted as a bouquet of flowers, it appears

4.14 Picasso, Woman with Leaves, 1934. 168 – 169

4.15 Picasso, The Minotauromachy (first state), 1935.

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on close inspection to more nearly resemble the sheaf of wheat carried by the first of the blind Minotaur’s companions. In prints pulled from early states of the Minotauromachy (fig. 4.15), before the relevant area was darkened by hatching, individual ears of grain are plainly visible.49 With their birds, and through their own resemblance to the blind Minotaur’s guide, the two women in the upper left-hand corner of the print are likewise implicated in the imagery of sacrifice. In fact the birds themselves are implicated twice over; positioned as they are alongside the Christlike figure, they allude not only to pagan sacrificial victims but also to the Holy Spirit.50 The doves’ pairing encourages our recognition of this doubleness—and of the fact that they thus represent two separate and even diametrically opposed aspects of sacrifice. On the one hand they refer to the animal put to death, on the other to that element which, in surviving death, emerges from the sacrifice as pure, ascendant Spirit.

In view of the considerable overlap in subject and significance we witnessed earlier between Masson’s Massacres and Picasso’s Death of Marat, it might be interesting to reintroduce Masson’s Le Crucifié here (fig. 4.16). The main figure in Masson’s etching, animal-headed and chin upturned, plainly recalls Picasso’s blind Minotaur, as well as the inverted facial hierarchies about which Bataille had written. Just as strongly, though, the print’s crucified figure stirs associations with the third- and fourth-century reliefs of quasi-bestial gods that illustrated Bataille’s 1930 essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” In light of the close collaboration between Bataille and Masson—and still with an eye toward discerning the Bataillean connotations of the Minotauromachy’s own Christlike figure—a short discussion of that essay and its illustrations may prove to be illuminating. (As always, we must be prepared for the possibility that it will be a blinding illumination, like “the horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp.”) The Gnostic gods were of interest to Bataille because they represented, as he said, “a bizarre but mortal subversion of the ideal and the order expressed today by the words ‘classical antiquity’.” The essay gives us to understand that Bataille has in mind not simply an aesthetic ideal and order (although certainly that), but also a religious and philosophical one. Describing Gnosticism as “a kind of superior Christianity elaborated by philosophers who had broken with Hellenistic speculation,” Bataille suggests that its strangeness, its radical otherness, has the potential to undermine the seeming self-evidence and hegemony of more modern systems of thought. Once again, it is Hegel who epitomizes the latter for Bataille: Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel’s period, apparently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among others, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most monstrous dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.51 170 – 171

As Bataille goes on to imply in the footnote that follows, seeing Hegelianism in this way, as historically descended from Gnosticism, has the effect of mak-

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4.16 Masson, Le Crucifié, 1934.

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ing it appear drastically reductive. By focusing its considerable energies on overcoming dualism, on reconciling contradiction, the dialectic aims—and this is perhaps the real point of the essay—toward a monism on par with (and to a large extent modeled after) Christian theology. We might ourselves underline that point by noting, as others have, the compelling structural similarity between the Holy Trinity and the Hegelian dialectic, with its thesis, antithesis, and ultimate synthesis. The similarity takes on an even greater force and significance if we resurrect at the same time Bataille’s comparison of the dialectic to a sanitized form of sacrifice. In view of that comparison, the Crucifixion seems virtually paradigmatic of the “sacrificial subterfuge” of which Hegelianism stood accused; for although it undeniably involves the death of a human being, that death is completely recouped by Christianity as Spirit and for meaning. Masson’s repulsive, vaguely Gnostic deity brings all of this, as it were, to a head. The move is strategic: meant to undercut the orthodox, idealizing interpretations of the Crucifixion by monstrously emphasizing the dualistic nature of “Le Crucifié” and thereby forestalling any assumed transubstantiation of base matter into Spirit. Picasso’s tack is somewhat different. Avoiding literal depictions of sacrificial crucifixion, it relies to a greater degree on associations between and among figures, and, partly as a consequence of that, on the viewer’s interpretive process. As with the Blind Minotaur, the result is a print that doesn’t so much illustrate sacrifice (the way Masson’s does) as put sacrifice into practice. That claim may be more fully persuasive if we understand a bit more about the nature of sacrifice and why it exercised such a powerful hold on the imaginations of Bataille and his group. In large measure, it seems to have been due to the perfect ambivalence of sacrificial rituals, an ambivalence that is registered in the word “sacrifice” itself. The Latin root, sacer, was, as Bataille once noted, one of the “primal” words, studied by Freud, that contained two absolutely antithetical meanings.52 It signified both the holy and the damned. Over the centuries, of course, the word “sacred” and its cognates lost their originally dual sense. Just as Western religions, by relegating sacrifice to merely symbolic activities, had repressed what Bataille referred to as the “left” (or sinister) sacred, so Western

the sacrifice for the cleansing of a leper includes rites analogous to those for the consecration of a priest. Thus there are here two sacrifices, one apparently expiatory, and the other of communion, which end up by being similar rites. Thus even these two irreducible ideas of expiation and communion, of communication of a sacred [or, rather, holy] quality and of expulsion

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logic had contrived to eliminate the ambivalent duality of words, to construct a system of language and thought in which each term would be assigned a specific and singular value. The project Bataille set for himself (a project that was formalized in 1937 when he, along with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, founded the Collège de Sociologie) was twofold: to reintroduce the sinister sacred into contemporary society, and to create some experience of the ambivalent, an experience that might be capable of unraveling the neat binary oppositions of logical, Hegelian thought. Both aims, it was felt, could be accomplished through violent rituals of sacrifice and automutilation. The group’s understanding of sacrificial practice was primarily based, as we earlier remarked, on the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss,53 particularly his study in collaboration with Henri Hubert, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1898). Prior to the publication of this study, most of the literature on the subject had been devoted to the description and classification of sacrificial rituals. Each of the various forms of sacrifice, performed on whatever occasion and to whatever end, had been generally assigned to one of two groups: it was either a sacrifice of communion or one of expiation. Yet these two groups were thought to be of unequal importance. A number of studies (foremost among them those by the English anthropologist William Robertson Smith)54 had suggested that expiatory sacrifices were merely derivations of communion rituals, and that all sacrifice was at base, then, a matter of communing or joining with a potentially beneficent god. Mauss and Hubert disagreed. They argued that expiation was every bit as fundamental and irreducible as communion, but that the two were still not entirely separable forms of sacrifice. Summarizing their observations of ancient Hebrew practices, they noted that

of an opposing [sinister] quality, cannot form the basis for a general and rigorous classification of sacrifices.55

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According to Mauss and Hubert, the fundamental ambiguity of sacrifice— which is to say, its thoroughgoing engagement with the sacred—was increasingly concentrated over the course of the ritual in the figure of the victim: “The victim represents death as well as life, illness as well as health, sin as well as virtue, falsity as well as truth.”56 In addition, as Mauss and Hubert repeatedly emphasized, the victim represents the sacrifier (“the subject to whom the benefits of sacrificing thus accrue”);57 without that fundamental identification, there simply is no sacrifice. This fact goes far toward explaining the authors’ deep interest in myths of the death of a god, and their insistence that those myths revealed the purest form of sacrifice. “This time,” they write, “all intermediaries have disappeared. The god, who is at the same time the sacrifier, is one with the victim. . . . All the differing elements which enter into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together.”58 The inherent ambiguity of sacrifice—at its most intense with the sacrificed god—has its equivalent in a number of the Minotauromachy’s characters, including, appropriately enough, its “sacrificial” Christ. The nearby doves, each looking in that direction, each representing simultaneously divine Spirit and mere animal victim, do much to assert the figure’s intrinsic ambivalence. At an even more fundamental level, the Minotauromachy’s “Christ” figure itself embodies the contradiction characteristic of sacrifice. We have already seen that Picasso freely availed himself of Rembrandt’s etchings in the making of the Vollard Suite. It should come as little surprise, then, that the Minotauromachy’s Christ, too, derives from a print by Rembrandt—specifically, the large Descent from the Cross of 1633 (fig. 4.17).59 What is surprising to discover is that the figure has two separate “sources” within that one print: both the long-necked, bearded Christ and the man on the ladder, traditionally identified as an image of Rembrandt himself, appearing fully guilt-ridden and stooped with shame. Picasso’s conflation of the pair in the Minotauromachy yields a figure that is truly sacred, representing at once

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4.17 Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633.

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the holy and the damned, victim and sacrifier. In view of the figure’s irreducible duality, we might note as well the perfect ambivalence of his pose: under the circumstances, it is impossible to decide whether he is in fact ascending the ladder or making his way down. Compared to the depicted dualism of Masson’s Le Crucifié, the strategies employed here are exceedingly subtle, albeit oriented toward the same end— namely, the sustained failure of any dialectical reconciliation of opposites, and so the prolongation of their “sacrificial” status. We might now consider in a similar light the torera and horse, the figures most literally central to the Minotauromachy. In this regard, much undoubtedly remains to be said about the Minotaur as well. To the extent that all three figures refer to the participants in a bullfight (particularly presented as they are, in a tight-knit group), we would do well to consider contemporaneous references to bullfighting, especially any that place it within the arena of sacrifice. Bataille himself invoked the bullfight on several occasions; probably most relevant to our concerns are the photograph and caption that accompanied his article on “The Sacred” when, in 1939, it was published in the Cahiers d’art. After identifying the Torero Villalta and the bull he has just killed, the caption explains that “modern bullfights, owing to their ritual enactment and their tragic character, represent a form close to ancient sacred games.”60 Situated still nearer to our concerns is Michel Leiris’s Mirroir de la tauromachie.61 The essay was clearly not a “source” for, or “influence” upon, Picasso’s print; it was written only in 1937 and not published until the following year. Yet Leiris was, as we know, a close friend of Picasso’s during this period. On occasion the pair even attended the bullfights together.62 It should hardly astonish us, then, to discover that Picasso’s Minotauromachy and Leiris’s Mirroir de la tauromachie are mutually informing works. The latter not only references the study by Mauss and Hubert, but it treats the bullfight explicitly as a form of sacrificial ritual—a structured confrontation between opposing elements which, in the culminating moments of the event, transgress the opposition on which they are founded, and so cross into the realm of the fully ambiguous. The torero, Leiris writes, “with his calculated movements, his skill, his technique, ultimately rep-

This would still only be just a contrast, an opposition, if the pass [executed with aid of the cape or muleta] didn’t also present itself as a kind of tangency or convergence immediately followed by a divergence (the bull nears the torero, then man and beast are separated, the cape pointing the bull to the ‘exit’)—or rather not even quite in this manner but in such a way that the contact, at the very instant it is about to happen, is just barely avoided, by means of a deviation imposed upon the bull’s trajectory or by an evasion on the man’s part—a slight swerve, a mere slant of his body, a kind of twist that he makes his coldly geometric beauty undergo, as if he had no other means of avoiding the bull’s evil power than partly to incorporate it, stamping his person with something slightly sinister—something from the wrong, the twisted side of things, not the right.63 Slightly later Leiris elaborates: Pushing this rather cabalistic examination—or dissection—of the corrida to its extreme, one could assign a symbolic significance to the very cry that the spectators raise so frequently during the cape work in order to incite the matador to dare the left-handed passes . . . (which normally involve the greatest risk for him): ‘The left! The left! La izquierda! La izquierda!’ For it is understood that the spectators will not be fully satisfied unless the matador has taken upon himself the entire ‘left’ aspect of the drama—drunk the poison to the last mortal drop—before the kill, in a sacramental lightning flash of justice, restores law and order.64 It is thus at the instant before death, with the ever-so-fleeting identification of bull and torero, sinister and dexter, that the event is at its most fully sacred. Picasso’s coupling in the Minotauromachy of the imagery of sacrifice with that of the bullfight reveals a remarkably similar conception and concern. The print, too, sets up a structured confrontation between opposing elements; we are encouraged to view its Minotaur, horse, and torera in terms of the traditional antagonisms of the bullfight (the Minotaur, of course, being assimilated to the role

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resents a superhuman, geometric beauty,” while the bull signifies all that is “bent” or “twisted.”

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of the bull). Both the torera and horse appear, then, as adversaries—or, more accurately, as victims—of the Minotaur. Indeed we are even encouraged to view the horse and torera as a single composite figure (horse/woman, in contrast to bull/man), a view that has the effect of drawing the oppositions all the more sharply. And yet the torera’s sword disrupts that neat binarity. Whether we see it as poised to deliver the coup de grâce to the horse, or as directed at the torera herself in a gesture of automutilation, the sword, in effect, divides the “figure” against itself, transgressing the very opposition that would seem to endow it with all of its significance and value. The torera’s sword might thus be said to mark these figures with the “beauty” of the bullfight—a beauty that, according to Leiris, is “comprised not simply by the joining of opposing elements, but by their very antagonism, by the altogether active way that one tends to erupt in the other, making its mark like a wound, like devastation.”65 The figure of the Minotaur reveals himself, on close inspection, to be much the same. Not only does he, in himself, embody the corrida’s antagonism between man and bull, he also carries slung over his shoulder the cape of a torero. In the two colored proofs that were made of the etching (see frontispiece), the identification is unmistakable: the bright red cape stands out dramatically from the darker earth tones of the rest of the composition. Thus the Minotaur, too, is a figure self-divided, self-different—like the sacrificed god of mythology. Much as was said of the “Blind Minotaur” prints, this would yet be but a representation of sacrifice (although an extremely subtle and complex one) were it not for the fact that, on another level, the print seems to offer something much closer to the experience of auto-annihilation, what Bataille referred to as “the ecstatic loss of one’s self.” The experience—or better, the self—in question is, in the first instance, Picasso’s, though the implications for us, in our own encounter with the print, are scarcely less dire. In any case, before the issue can be addressed at all, we need to pick up the threads of two issues abandoned earlier: the relation of the Minotauromachy’s imagery to that of the Vollard Suite, and the question of overdetermination. Although the two are closely related, we might as well at least begin by addressing them in turn.

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Upon the Minotauromachy’s introduction to our discussion, we noted that the print was like the Vollard Suite (and, of course, especially the “Blind Minotaur” plates) in at least one quite obvious regard: in each, the figure of the Minotaur looms large. In fact, the very pose of the blind Minotaur—facing left, with that outsized arm stretched before him (see particularly fig. 4.3)—is repeated almost exactly by the Minotaur of the Minotauromachy. Thrust into this new context, the extended arm no longer functions as a gesture of the Minotaur’s blindness. Yet its meaning here is not so very different, either: held out as if to block the illumination of the candle, that arm at least signals a desire not to see. In that sense, it signals, too, the same rejection of vision-as-appropriation incarnated by the blind Minotaur. Just as remarkably, the origin of the candle can also be traced to the Vollard Suite, specifically, to plate 26 (fig. 3.7). Indeed, the entire triangular grouping of onlooker, candle, and recumbent female that formed the basis of that plate’s composition returns, just left of center, in the composition of the Minotauromachy. No sooner have we noted the unlikely reappearance of this group, however, than we become aware of the fundamental changes that have been wrought. The vigilant youth has been transformed into a young girl—and a girl, moreover, who is clearly related to the blind Minotaur’s guide. (There are distinct “family resemblances” among the three figures.) Similarly, the Minotauromachy’s recumbent female owes as much to the toreras of the Vollard Suite (see, e.g., fig. 3.8) as she does to the somnolent nude of plate 26. She is, in effect, an amalgamation of those characters, a composite, analogous to the “collective figures” produced by the mechanism of condensation in dreams. In fact, the terminology of the dreamwork is particularly well suited to describing the Minotauromachy’s entire central group. We can see the plates of the Vollard Suite on analogy with the latent content, or “dream thoughts,” the later etching with the dream itself. As Freud repeatedly emphasized, the relationship between these two is not one of direct correspondence—not one, that is, in which each element of the dream represents (or is determined by) a particular dream thought. Things are more complicated than that. Not only can a single

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dream thought be manifested in several elements of the dream but, perhaps even more significantly, a single element of the dream can have been motivated by several separate dream thoughts; this is what Freud meant when he referred to the overdeterminedness of dream imagery.66 As we have seen, the imagery of the Minotauromachy is related to the Vollard Suite in much the same manner: each of its principal figures can be traced to at least two separate Vollard plates and, conversely, each of those plates appears to have inspired at least two separate figures of the Minotauromachy. The result is a complicated, subterranean network of associations that, even more than the print’s dense cross hatching, binds its central group inextricably together. For example, the young girl is linked to the Minotaur via their common origin in the “Blind Minotaur” series, at the same time that she is bound to the torera by the resemblance they share to the sleepwatcher and sleeper of plate 26. The torera, through her reference to the Suite’s scenes of the bullfight, is of course also closely associated with the bull-headed Minotaur (who in turn is independently linked to the young girl, and so on). Finally, the Minotaur’s outstretched arm draws these tangled relationships into a kind of Gordian knot. Held out before him as it had been throughout the “Blind Minotaur” series, that arm now reaches straight for the candle, uncannily positioned just there as a result of its origin in the triangular configuration of plate 26. In consequence of that gesture, and that coincidence, the whole group of figures acquires a strong sense of the inevitable. We get the impression that each element is absolutely necessary exactly as it is—that, had any figure been represented in any other way, the group would not possess the same astonishing coherence. In what is almost certainly a parallel instance of overdetermination, at precisely this time, in 1935, Roger Caillois, a friend of Bataille and the other dissident surrealists, was concluding a study on “automatic thinking” whose main points bear directly on the interwoven imagery of the Minotauromachy.67 Caillois had become convinced that “waking thoughts, left to their own necessity”— which is to say, left unconstrained by the demands of narrative or logic—“would act exactly like condensed dream images, so that the automatic association of

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ideas would function according to the same mechanism of overdetermination as the elaborative activity of dreams.”68 To test the hypothesis, Caillois conducted a kind of experiment in which, after lulling his mind into a state of relaxation, he quickly jotted down the ideas that crossed the threshold of his awareness. Analyzing the list subsequently, Caillois noted that its items were not linked by a simple chain of associations (the first idea motivating the second, the second in turn suggesting the third). Rather, the entire list seemed thoroughly overdetermined, each item evidently having made its appearance by virtue of the variety, strength, and number of its connections to the others.69 Far from being arbitrary, then, a purely chance association of ideas, the list possessed a certain necessity, each item seeming—at least in retrospect—to be required for the coherence of the whole. Hence the significance of the study’s title, La Nécessité d’esprit. It emphasizes both the rigorous interdependence of the thoughts produced through the process of automatic thinking, and the complete autonomy of that process with respect to any will or intention. There were, Caillois realized, several closely related items on his list that nonetheless appeared more important—because more overdetermined—than the others. In fact, beyond even its demonstration that the mechanism of overdetermination guided automatic thinking, what struck Caillois most about the experiment was that it indicated the existence of certain objects and ideas whose exceptional compellingness seemed to derive not merely from the associations they conjured but also, and more crucially, from those associations’ own dense interrelatedness. Caillois dubbed such objects and ideas “lyrical ideograms,” and (despite what may seem the oddly romantic or sentimental connotations of that term) he insisted that their effect was not to be considered purely, or even primarily, subjective. The tightly woven web of associations surrounding each ideogram had, he emphasized, developed over time and through a myriad of cultural, linguistic, and even, in some cases, biological relations, to the point that it could claim to be “an essential part of the element in question and consequently to have as much claim as that element to objectivity.”70

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Dramatizing the point, Caillois proceeded to analyze the ideogrammatic qualities (in essence, the overdeterminedness) of an “element”—the praying mantis—drawn from the natural world itself. Texts on entomology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, philology, ancient myth, even works of fiction were marshaled for the cause. Caillois discovered in this trove of mantis-related information a remarkable recurrence of certain interconnected themes. The insect appeared, for example, on an ancient coin from Metaponte that also depicted an ear of corn and that therefore was thought to refer to Demeter and the Eleusinian mysteries. One of the early names, empousa, for the genus under which the mantis was classified was also the name, in ancient Greece, for a specter associated with the goddess Hecate. As Caillois points out, the earliest recorded reference to that goddess is in a Homeric hymn to Demeter composed precisely for the mysteries of Eleusis. Moreover, Hecate very early became identified as the goddess of sorcerers and necromancers—the root of the latter word being the same, of course, as the root of “mantis” itself. And that’s only the beginning. To the African Bushmen the mantis was a god, associated with the moon and, like Demeter, agriculture and the procurement of food; in their mythology the mantis also possessed a tooth, in which all of its power resided. Lunar and dental associations recur—improbably, it would seem—in French lore about the insect. For instance, in Provence the mantis’s nest was once widely regarded as the best remedy for toothaches, particularly if it could be collected during the full moon. Noting this repeated association of the mantis with teeth, Caillois adds that many popular guides to dream imagery assert that a tooth, and especially the pulling of a tooth, symbolizes castration. Along the same lines, Caillois also remarks that it has become nearly a commonplace of psychoanalysis that “most castration complexes . . . originate in a terror of a toothed vagina.”71 Inevitably this observation evokes one of the more memorable facts about the mantis: that the female of the species decapitates the male before copulation, and devours him entirely afterward. Caillois continues in this vein for page after page, listing information about the mantis culled from the most heterogeneous of spheres and pointing

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out, where not obvious, the connections that might be drawn. To anyone skeptical of the project—who views its overdeterminations either as so extraordinary as to be unique to the case at hand, or as simply the products of a mind having lost all touch with reality—Caillois counters that there is in fact nothing particularly unusual about his demonstration. When one considers the sheer number of possible associations (the myriad things that might conceivably be said about a praying mantis), and when one factors in, additionally, first the great multiplicity of associations that could be made among the elements of that initial set via intermediaries, and then the mind’s evidently enormous capacity to produce such associations, it becomes apparent, Caillois claims, that “overdeterminations, like coincidences, are not only normal, but unavoidable.”72 The acknowledged pervasiveness of overdetermination does nothing, however, in Caillois’s eyes, to blunt its effect. Far from it, that pervasiveness seems to lend the ideogram a sense of inevitability that instead enhances its power, at least for anyone caught in its grip. By way of example we can turn to Caillois’s own youthful encounter with the praying mantis, an event whose circumstances are also detailed in La Nécessité d’esprit. Although Caillois had been intrigued by the mantis—and, no doubt, especially by its mating habits—for a number of years, he had not actually seen one of the insects until a summer afternoon when, as a teenager, he was vacationing with his family in Royan. On that very same day two other events occurred that seemed to so overdetermine his discovery of the mantis that, years later, he still could not help thinking of them as “a disconcertingly coherent whole.”73 The first event also involved the capture of an insect, this time one with which he was not previously familiar: the death’s-head moth. (Coming across it as he did, on a dark street next to the cemetery, its skull-like markings plainly visible, undoubtedly heightened for him its deathly connotations.) The second event was no less alarming and subsequently appeared no less related to the finding of the mantis; for the first time in his life, Caillois was approached by a prostitute, a woman “dressed in a green coat [manteau], as green as the praying mantis [mante].” Seized by a sudden fear far out of scale with anything demanded by the immediate situation, Caillois recoiled. It was only much later,

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after recognizing the multiple connections among these causally unrelated events, that he began to understand the intensity of his response, and the great effect the day’s events had had on his subsequent emotional development. Caillois would refer to the praying mantis and other such “manifestations of overdetermination in the material world” as objective ideograms. The phrase clearly seems designed to both recall and supplant the “objective chance” beloved by the Bretonian wing of the surrealist movement. In La Nécessité d’esprit Caillois in fact included (along with his response) the two-question survey sent out by Breton and Paul Eluard that launched their objective-chance-oriented investigations: “What do you consider the essential encounter of your life? To what extent did this encounter seem, and does it seem to you now, to be fortuitous or foreordained?”74 When Breton himself republished the survey, in L’Amour fou, he defined objective-chance encounters as rare moments in which “an exterior necessity opens a path in the human unconscious.”75 They are moments, that is, marked by the spontaneous appearance in the outside world of an object that answers to, even as it reveals, one’s innermost desires.76 If Breton, looking back on surrealism from the vantage point of 1952, regarded objective chance as “the problem of problems,”77 this was perhaps because it encapsulated so well many of his aspirations for the movement as a whole. Through its sheer unexpectedness, Breton believed, objective chance could breach the barriers separating the unconscious from consciousness, inner life from outside world, thereby holding out the possibility of their ultimate reconciliation. “Freud is Hegelian in me,” Breton once remarked,78 confirming what is already evident from this discussion of objective chance: that he hoped, through surrealism, to effect a dialectical resolution of the self’s current state of dividedness and alienation. Instances of chance were to be important catalysts toward this end. Encountering its (heretofore repressed) desire in the exteriority and otherness of the found object, the self, Breton reasoned, would become fully conscious of its own activity and so able to return to itself, newly whole. In his response to the Breton-Eluard survey, and throughout La Nécessité d’esprit, Caillois attempted to make clear his objections to the concept of objec-

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tive chance. First, he denied the very existence of what was normally understood by the word “chance.” Apparently fortuitous occurrences were, to his mind, not only predetermined (or “foreordained,” to use Breton’s terminology), they were overdetermined by events. And it was precisely those encounters that were the most overdetermined—like Caillois’s own with the praying mantis—that would come to seem the most affecting and therefore “essential” of one’s life. Second, Caillois assiduously avoided reference to the “unconscious,” despite his use of Freudian language elsewhere and his occasional remarks about “consciousness” or “the conscious mind.” In place of the term he spoke only of an “imaginative faculty.” It seems that, for Caillois, the unconscious (like chance) was a nonexistent entity—and repression nothing more than the failure to recognize the multiple overdeterminations of our thought. Caillois differed from Breton, too, in his relation to the dialectic, and in his generally greater willingness to engage Hegel as a participant in an active, ongoing conversation.79 It seems likely, even, that the title of La Nécessité d’esprit was deliberately chosen to echo La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, as Hegel’s text was translated into French. Certainly there are numerous parallels, as well as points of overt contrast, between the two works. Hegel and Caillois each assert, for example, that there is a direct continuity between the mind and the world at large, of which it is an integral part. The structure of thought, in other words, is held by both men to be perfectly homologous with that of the world, and in that sense thoroughly objective. Where Hegel and Caillois part company, however, is in their vision of that structure. In Hegel’s mind it has the tripartite shape of the dialectic; and his project is to reveal how all of human history (everything that is or ever was) has developed, logically and systematically, through a chain of theses, antitheses, and eventual syntheses. Against what might be called the determinism of Hegelian thought, Caillois juxtaposes the overdeterminism of the imagination and the world. For Caillois, too, knowledge is a matter of understanding the place of everything within an overarching structure; but, in his view, that structure is a dense, weblike network, organized (to the extent that it is) around certain particularly overdetermined “nodal points.” The logical relation-

ships that organize the dialectic are but one of the many kinds of associations produced by Caillois’s automatic thinking. We might say, as a result, that Hegel’s rational antitheses comprise only a “restricted economy” operating within the larger, more general one of the “imagination.”80 It is surely not the least of the ideogram’s fascinations for Caillois that it has the ability to bring this situation to light, to reveal the unlimiting boundaries of non-sense inside of which the economy of reason is inscribed. Armed with this understanding of the ideogram, we are perhaps ready to return to the Minotauromachy and its distinctly overdetermined figures. The print’s torera in particular seems to lend herself to consideration in this regard. If, like Caillois during the conduct of his experiment, we lull our minds into a state conducive to free association, her ideogrammatic qualities soon become apparent. We realize that the figure not only draws on multiple characters appearing within the Vollard Suite, but is equally overdetermined by a host of other images scattered throughout the history of art. Her pose, for instance, especially in combination with that rearing horse, readily brings to mind the ecstatic equestrienne of Goya’s Los proverbios (fig. 4.18). (If we transpose left and right, thereby undoing the reversal achieved in the Minotauromachy’s printing, the similarity becomes even more evident.) At the same time, however, the torera also recalls the main figure from Titian’s Rape of Europa (fig. 4.19). Already in the bullfight scenes of the Vollard Suite, the pose of the torera—slung, belly up, over the back of a bull—conjured strong associations with Europa’s image. In the Minotauromachy, the woman’s bared breasts and raised right arm evoke Titian’s figure even more overtly, so that, despite the substitution of the (Goyaesque) horse

4.18 Goya, Los proverbios, no. 10, published 1864. 186 – 187

4.19 Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562.

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for the mythological bull, the connection with the painting remains. And still there are distinct echoes in the print of at least one other work. With her crossed legs, closed eyes, and the head-encircling gesture of her arm, the torera clearly points as well to the Hellenistic statue of the Sleeping Ariadne (fig. 4.20).81 Indeed, the odd disjunction in the torera’s anatomy—the “break” her body appears to undergo as it passes behind the horse’s neck—seems inexplicable except as a means of keeping those crossed legs (and thus the Ariadne connection) firmly in view. There are, of course, certain visual similarities among all of these overdetermining images, similarities that are pointed up by those images’ simultaneous evocation in the Minotauromachy. Independent of any formal likeness, though, those works are also linked to one another, and to Picasso’s print, by a number of indirect and latent associative paths. For example, although bulls (and bullfighting) do not actually figure in Goya’s Los proverbios etching, elsewhere in his oeuvre they are rampant. His print series La tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux can easily be seen as overdetermining factors in the “nomination” of the Proverbios equestrienne for inclusion in the Minotauromachy. Here, as with the dream thoughts studied by Freud, it seems to have been those images with the strongest and most numerous supports that gained right of entry into Picasso’s print. An obvious factor motivating the selection of the Hellenistic Ariadne— again, apart from any resemblance her pose bears to that of either Goya’s woman or Titian’s Europa—is that Ariadne was the half-sister of the Minotaur (as well as one of the people most responsible for his death). In fact, Europa’s story, too, belongs to the mythological cycle that culminated with the Minotaur; it was her rape by the bull-disguised Zeus, and her ensuing pregnancy with Minos, that set the whole cycle in motion.82 Were we to classify the Minotauromachy as a “mythological” image, it would be less on account of its references to these specific mythological figures, however, than a result of its own figures’ thoroughgoing overdetermination. In his book Le Mythe et l’homme (1938), which grew out of the earlier studies on automatic thinking and the imagination, Caillois forcefully argued that overdetermi-

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4.20 Sleeping Ariadne, Roman copy of a second-century B.C. original.

nation was the defining characteristic of myth. It was also, he felt, the reason why most interpretations of myths—coming at them as they did from a single perspective, considering only a single group of determining factors—always proved insufficient to their task.83 Most interpretations were equally at a loss to explain the affective power of myth. On this point, Caillois set his views in strict opposition to the “archetypal” interpretations of Carl Jung and his followers. Where Jung saw myths as operating at the deepest and most abstract levels of thought, and felt that that was the source of their special hold on the imagination, Caillois argued just the opposite. In his view, the potency of any mythological image derived from its multiple, concrete connections to the most heterogeneous

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spheres of life, connections that, in overdetermining the image, endowed it with a certain compellingness, and even a strong sense of the inevitable. Thus, if the figure of the Ariadne/torera, for example, seems especially compelling to us—or seemed so to Picasso—it is not because she is an archetypal figure representing the most fundamental and abstract facets of our emotional lives,84 but because, on the contrary, she carries with her an astounding multiplicity of very specific, interrelated associations: to the plates of the Vollard Suite, to works by Titian and Goya, and especially, through them, to the imagery and ritual of the bullfight and the various myths surrounding the Minotaur.85 It is important that we recognize how very different the Minotauromachy is in this regard from classical art as presented by Hegel (and as understood for generations thereafter). In Hegel’s view, the classical period was that rare historical moment when form and content perfectly coincided. A work’s content, in other words, just was its form, with the result that statues did not so much “mean” as simply exist. The significance of the typical fifth-century sculpture, Hegel felt, resided in its beauty, wholeness, and unity, rather than in some symbolic meaning buried beneath its surface. A strong case could be made that the Minotauromachy, with its numerous classical figures and associations, also abjures meaning. But it does so through a wild proliferation and expenditure of sense, instead of through any spare, “classical” self-showing. In place of a discrete symbolic meaning, the print’s imagery offers a flurry of interrelated associations, concrete and irreducible.86 Obviously, the experience it affords its viewers is therefore also distinctly different from that provided by Hegel’s classical sculptures. The overdetermination of the Minotauromachy’s imagery provokes a kind of associative delirium, wherein it becomes increasingly difficult to discern which connections belong to the work—and so might be considered proper to it—and which are instead imposed on it by our own active imaginations. Whereas the sculptures Hegel had in mind necessarily required a certain separation from their viewer (in order that the wholeness and autonomy of both might be realized), the Minotauromachy acts to collapse that critical distance and to erode the distinctions between inside and outside on which it depends.

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For the thoughtful would-be interpreter (and for those same reasons), the print necessarily incites a deep methodological crisis. Iconographic analysis proves to be of only limited use, and the usual standards of artistic intent suddenly seem irrelevant.87 No doubt Picasso experienced this “intentional” crisis as acutely as anyone, indeed even more so. He must have felt himself to be merely a passive observer before what could only have been—how else to explain it?— the imagery’s more or less automatic production. If Caillois’s descriptions of his own similar “productions” are any guide, the sensation was less of drawing associations than of being drawn by them, less of having thoughts than of simply being the vehicle through which thoughts are had. In La Nécessité d’esprit Caillois compared the experience with the paranoid condition that at the time was known as psychasthenia. He recalled having observed several patients suffering from the condition. “I am not living,” one woman had reported, “but someone is living me; when I sleep, someone sleeps me.” Caillois enthusiastically adopted her language to describe his own obsession at the time with automatic thinking: “What I wanted to do more than anything was to break the interdependence of my body and my thought. I wanted to cross the border of my skin, live on the other side of my senses; I practiced watching myself from a given point in space.”88 Later, in Le Mythe et l’homme, this comparison of psychasthenia and overdetermination was brought to bear on Caillois’s discussion of myth. Also included in the book, along with an expanded version of his study on the praying mantis, was an excursus on instinctual mimicry in insects.89 The latter’s seemingly eccentric presence in the book Caillois justified through an appeal to Bergson’s assertion that “mythological representations are intended to provoke, in the absence of instinct, the behavior that that instinct would have set in motion.”90 The instinctual mimicry of insects, Caillois argued—from the camouflaging of the mantis itself as a stem or long blade of grass, to certain butterflies’ simulation of leaves—was not, as had always been assumed, a defensive measure. Studies had shown that predators were rarely fooled by such homomorphy, and that even inedible insects, which had no need for defensive measures, often employed it. Caillois attributed mimicry instead to “an overwhelming desire to imitate,” and

specifically to imitate space, the surrounding world. Far from aiding the preservation of the organism (as is the case with most animal instincts), mimicry, he asserted, actually affects its dissolution and dispersal.91 And the same holds true, he felt, of myth, with its multiple overdeterminations. Like the claims of the psychasthenic, both myth and mimicry testify, Caillois believed, to a crisis in identity, an inability to distinguish between self and other, I and not-I. Here we may well recall that in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the acquisition of self-consciousness, and so the differentiation of self from other, was addressed through the dialectic of the master and slave. Necessary for that stage of spiritual development was that the adversaries risk death—but only up to a point. Precisely to the point, that is, where death acquires meaning before sliding over into sheer meaninglessness. Derrida (paraphrasing Bataille) describes the mechanics of the master/slave dialectic as follows: The putting at stake of life is a moment in the constitution of meaning, in the presentation of essence and truth. It is an obligatory stage in the history of self-consciousness and phenomenality, that is to say, in the presentation of meaning. For history—that is, meaning—to form a continuous chain, to be woven, the master must experience his truth.92

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But, Derrida soon adds, this is possible only under the condition that the master “stay alive in order to enjoy what he has won by risking his life.” The entire dialectic of the master and slave is thus oriented (unlike either insect mimicry or human myth) toward preservation, specifically the preservation of life and meaning. It is important that we hear in that term, in addition to its more overt sense, connotations of something like a wildlife or nature preserve—a restricted area, in other words, cordoned off for protection, within a larger, more general, much unrulier one. The purview of the dialectic, of logic and meaning, is, we might say, but a bounded space within the unbounded field of mythological and “imaginative” thought.93 To stray outside of its borders is to risk a certain dispersal, and thereby the loss of both meaning and self-consciousness.

of myth and picasso’s minotaurs

It is in this context that we must also hear Caillois’s reference to Nietzsche’s definition of myth as an utterance that performs an “orgiastische Selbstvernichtung”—a phrase that might well be translated by Bataille’s “self-annihilation” or, better still, his “ecstatic loss of one’s self.”94 If Mauss and Hubert asserted that it was in the myths of the dying god that the nature of sacrifice was most purely expressed, Le Mythe et l’homme seems to suggest, conversely, that it is in those same tales of sacrificial self-annihilation that myth finds its most characteristic subject matter. The associative delirium provoked by myth’s overdetermination allows the self to exist only, to use Hegel’s phrase, in utter dismemberment. Explaining his own attraction to myth, and his periodic recourse in writing to a quasi-mythological mode, Bataille drew attention to the vigilance with which logic guards its self-preserving boundaries. “The exclusion of mythology by reason,” he wrote, “is necessarily a rigorous one, on which there is no going back. . . . But at the same time,” he continued, now explaining the strategic aspect of his mythologizing, “it is necessary to overturn the values created by means of this exclusion; in other words, the fact that reason denies any valid content in a mythological series is the condition of its most significant value.”95 We might add that it is perhaps, by the same token, the condition of the Minotauromachy’s most significant value, the circumstance that gives its “mythological” overdeterminedness and “sacrificial” ambiguity a certain strategic import. The fact of reason’s denial of myth is also what makes the print’s evocations of the myth of the Minotaur so extraordinarily apt. We noted near the beginning of this chapter that, historically, the Minotaur’s death has been read as in effect the foundation myth of logical thought. Theseus’s slaying of the monster amid the dark, disorienting spaces of the Cretan labyrinth, and his subsequent escape to the other side of its walls, is often taken to prefigure the triumph of logic and metaphysics—the philosophy that was born, like the vanquishing Theseus himself, under the clear blue skies of Athens. The Minotaur’s death appears in this light as Derrida’s “obligatory stage in the history of selfconsciousness and phenomenality, that is to say, in the presentation of meaning.”

Alongside this view of the myth, however, we might juxtapose Picasso’s own encounter with the Minotaur, an encounter that (as we also noted near the beginning of the chapter) was thoroughly overdetermined—by the artist’s relationships with Leiris and Bataille, his previous collaboration with Skira on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his love of Goya and the bullfights, and no doubt a host of other associations (related to these) that we have yet to discover. It is as if the Minotaur lay in wait for Picasso, suddenly appearing at every turn. The artist must have felt at the time much like the sacrificial victims of the myth: trapped in a labyrinth of images, driven down associative paths plainly not of his own making, risking simultaneously the loss of both self and meaning. There is, it should be obvious by now, a great irony in the fact that autobiographical interpretations have become standard for the Minotauromachy, since the print attests above all to a profound loss of self. On reflection, it might be more accurate to say (with Bataille) that there is a great comedy in the situation, given that those autobiographical interpretations essentially repeat the “sacrificial subterfuge” that Bataille saw at work in Hegel. Faced with an image that attests to the virtual disintegration of self-consciousness and that threatens the absolute loss of meaning, art historians have tended to respond as “preservationists,” locating the truth of the work, narrowly, in the life of the artist. Hence we read repeatedly that the figure of the Minotaur is Picasso, the other characters important people in his life. If, under the circumstances, it seems right to refuse such easy equations, we might nonetheless concede that the bull-headed monster is an apt figure for Picasso’s experience—the experience, that is, of being helpless before one’s own irrational, alien, and overpowering “imagination.”

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5 The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre

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Regardless of actual medium, the classicism in vogue during the interwar period was primarily a sculptural classicism, the qualities and values with which it was most closely associated being ones seemingly innate to sculpture. There were, as we’ve seen, historical reasons for this: views of the classical at that time were built largely on the foundation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory (principally the texts of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Hegel), which had been written with an eye trained on Greco-Roman sculpture. The twentieth-century “classical” ideals of wholeness and unity (ideals pertaining first to the work, but implying a similar status for the viewer) were consequently ones that might be said to be most naturally at home with works of sculpture, especially marble statues, solid, permanent, and freestanding. In contrast, the medium of Picasso’s 1930s classicism was etching, a medium of multiples, traditionally heterogeneous, and fundamentally incomplete (in the Hegelian sense that an etching, lacking the three-dimensional objectivity of sculpture, necessarily relies on a measure of

the classical prints in the context of picasso’s oeuvre

illusionism). As opposed to the centeredness of the monolithic classical statue, etching is characterized by a decenteredness and dispersal. Thus, where the sculptural classicism of the interwar period offered its viewers a reassuring image of their own wholeness and autonomy—hence its popularity, as well as its susceptibility to appropriation for right-wing propaganda—Picasso’s classical prints emphasized the absence of that kind of self-possession, and more, its inherent impossibility. How different the prints are in this regard from many of Picasso’s most characteristic images, and how seemingly antithetical to the myth of Picasso that has been handed down to us—the myth, that is, of the great master, in full command of his imagery and talent. So instrumental was that myth that, as Leo Steinberg has shown us, possession became one of the guiding metaphors of the artist’s work. He drew or painted as if to grasp his figures (on a model that was as much physical as visual) in their entirety and all at once. Unwilling to restrict himself to a given vantage point, and to the mere 180 degrees of his subject that would have been visible from there, Picasso sought instead optical omnipotence, the visual equivalent of an embrace. The resulting images, by displaying the complete presence of their subjects, proclaim even more strongly the self-presence of their artist, and of each individual viewer in turn. Admittedly, his classical prints are not the only images by Picasso that refuse to conform to this model. Many of the works for which he is best known— namely, the cubist paintings and papiers collés—are likewise glaring exceptions. Although the early champions of cubism often claimed that those images presented multiple aspects of their subjects simultaneously, the overriding impression the works themselves leave us with is of dispossession, of the depicted figures’ and objects’ intangibility and elusiveness. To observe the development of cubism over the course of its so-called analytic phase is, in effect, to watch volume and depth (and therefore physicality) drain from the image. The illusionistically rendered, faceted forms of the early paintings gradually flatten and fracture to become complicated but primarily two-dimensional intersections of lines. Chiaroscuro modeling, as intense as in any Renaissance painting, remains,

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yet it is so inconsistently applied as to prevent resolution into solid, volumetric form. It’s as if the machinery of illusionism were malfunctioning, chugging on without purpose, its devices laid bare. At the start of that process (that is, in the paintings of 1908 and 1909) there was a pronounced sense of three-dimensionality; that, after all, was much of what motivated the assignation of the “cubist” epithet. Yet simultaneously, and then with increasing frequency, flatness began to assert itself—as in those places where, for example, the facade of a house bleeds into the ground upon which it sits, or the neck of a guitar merges seamlessly with the wall behind. This marked tension between two- and three-dimensionality has its precedent, of course, in the art of Cézanne. Not coincidentally, it also has a certain affinity with late nineteenth-century debates on the nature of perception. Associationist psychologists at that time asserted that, contrary to one’s common sense of things, vision does not actually have access to depth.1 The images formed on the retina of the eye are, they claimed, utterly flat; it is only with the superaddition of remembered tactile and kinesthetic cues that the two-dimensional image is filled out into the spatial plenum of the world as we experience it. In Cézanne’s paintings there appears to be a constant probing of these perceptual possibilities. In certain areas, and primarily through a careful modeling of hues, a strong sense of the palpable emerges; yet elsewhere within the same canvas there will be a passage or telescoping of planes through which the near and distant are made to abut like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. With Picasso’s cubist paintings, in turn, one senses an even greater conflict between the (retinally) flat and the (corporeally) three-dimensional. Again, in the early works the two are held in relatively equal tension. By 1910, however, in such paintings as Girl with a Mandolin (fig. 5.1), flatness has already gained the upper hand. In the maddening evasiveness of that nude figure and its partial submersion into the background, we can perhaps experience, as Rosalind Krauss has suggested, something of the poignant loss Picasso himself must have felt “as he watched depth and touch— what we could call the carnal dimensions—disappear, quite literally, from sight.”2

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5.1 Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin, 1910.

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During the winter of 1911–1912 the last vestiges of the figure were eradicated, assimilated beyond recognition to the gridded-off plane of the picture. Significantly, it was at precisely this moment that Picasso introduced language— actual letters and words—into the space of the painting. His “Ma Jolie” (fig. 5.2), the title of which is prominently written along the bottom edge of the canvas, underlines the significance of the move. For that title, evoking as it does the beautiful woman who is precisely not there, serves to register the poignancy of her absence even as it reinscribes her in the face of it. Language is suited to this task in a way that iconic images are not, since, as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was insisting at almost exactly this same time, words not only function in the absence of their referents, they themselves belong to a system founded on absences and spacings, on the interstices between words.3 Shortly thereafter Picasso began producing his collages and papiers collés, and in these works too language figures large. Not only do many of them contain fragments of newspaper, labels, and other printed texts, but the fragments themselves function within the image in a manner roughly analogous to the signs of language.4 One of the fundamental tenets of language emphasized by Saussure is its essentially arbitrary nature, the unmotivated connection between signifier and signified. In contrast to the iconic images of Western art, which point to their referents by virtue of a mimetic resemblance to them, words bear no likeness to the objects and ideas they denote. Rather, their significance derives from the position they occupy within the overall linguistic system (their difference from other words), and from the context in which they are used. The situation is similar with the pictorial signs of Picasso’s papiers collés. An upended trapezoid, for example, is able to stand perfectly well for the neck of a wine bottle, even though—and here is where its difference from iconic images is most evident— were it isolated from the rest of the collage, its meaning would be impossible to discern. In fact, so much do these cubist works emphasize the fundamentally arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and their dependence upon context, that often an identical elements is used to signify two entirely different things. In one collage, a rectangle with a semicircular indentation along its edge

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5.2 Picasso, “Ma Jolie,” 1911–1912.

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serves to represent, in abbreviated fashion, the sound hole and front surface of a guitar; in another, the very same shape designates instead the notched silhouette of a violin. The pieces function, that is, like homonyms. But there are as well more scandalous cases. Krauss has pointed out that in certain instances—her example is the 1912 Violin (fig. 5.3)—indistinguishable signifiers (here, two pieces of newspaper once belonging to a single sheet) are able to signify antithetical terms: the front face of the instrument and the space behind it, planar surface and atmospheric depth.5 Of the many insights to be gleaned from Picasso’s papiers collés, none would prove more important than this, that the meaning and value of any element is inherently unstable and derives only from its position within a larger field of signification. Time and again in the works that followed, this point would be reiterated. And yet it was a point frequently missed by Picasso’s contemporaries, even in regard to cubism itself.6 The semiological turn of the later cubist paintings and papiers collés marked a radical departure from the tradition of iconic representation that had ruled painting since the Renaissance, introducing into the history of Western art a mode of pictorial representation not tied to mimetic likeness. With but a few exceptions, however, artists and critics of the period overlooked the semiological import of the images and misunderstood their abandonment of mimesis. The elements of cubist composition were taken for signs of an altogether different sort: directional markers on the road to abstraction, to non-representational art. As a result (and as we saw in the first chapter), when histories of modernism first came to be written, cubism was coopted into a grand narrative of painting’s inexorable drive toward nonobjectivity. Picasso himself wanted nothing to do with such histories. He shunned abstraction and equally resisted the prescriptiveness of teleological views. Once cubism became widely regarded as having initiated the move toward flatness and nonrepresentation, Picasso expanded his repertoire to include images done in a classicizing style and whose figures appeared to have the weight and palpable presence of sculpture. Borrowing again the terminology of Saussure, we might say that, whereas the advocates of ab-

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5.3 Picasso, Violin, 1912.

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straction clung to a fairly traditional, diachronic conception of style (one style following another in succession), Picasso’s classical paintings asserted, by contrast, a synchronic view of things—any one style being but a selection from a range of simultaneously available alternatives. Those same classical paintings also helped to reveal that this field of alternatives is structured, much like language, around oppositions, though oppositions that are intrinsically unstable and therefore subject to change. In the 1910s and early 1920s, when works such as Three Women at the Fountain appeared (fig. 1.1), there was one overarching opposition on the verge of dominating the field: that between modern art and art of the past, abstraction serving as the shibboleth distinguishing the two. Picasso’s paintings, however, did much to upset that opposition and thereby restructure the field. For what they brought into the open and used to their advantage was the prevalence within critical discourse at the time of the rhetoric of “purity.” According to the logic undergirding this rhetoric, one of the aims of modern painting was the purification of the medium, the discovery and isolation of its absolute essence. Certainly abstraction had its place here; illusionistic representation could easily be identified as an “impurity,” extraneous to the medium of painting proper, and therefore quite dispensable. But illusionism was, in many ways, peripheral to the crux of the “purist” argument, implicated only by being in the service of what was felt to be the true threat, namely anecdote or narrative. Visible just beneath the surface of this argument are, as we’ve seen, the contours of Lessing’s Laokoon, with its emphatic insistence on the necessary separation of the visual and literary arts. Following that logic, many critics during the teens and twenties advocated “pure form” over “literary content.” And it was by trading on precisely this antithesis that Picasso’s classical paintings made their way into the modernist canon; with their stolidly impassive figures, they appeared as uncompromisingly nonnarrative as any of the artist’s earlier cubist works. In fact, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that it was at this moment of their assimilation, and partially through the agency of the classical paintings themselves, that modernism found its preferred rallying cry in “purity” rather than “abstraction.”

the classical prints in the context of picasso’s oeuvre

Yet Picasso’s subsequent works no more adhered to this “purist” version of modernism than his earlier ones had to the dogma of abstraction. When purity was posited as its own teleological end, Picasso declined to follow. It seems clear that his classical paintings were intended less to set a new course for modern art than to destabilize the opposition that had been guiding the old. Such, in any case, was their effect. Following the intervention of Picasso’s paintings of the twenties, modernism was reconceived, this time with classicism as its ally. The opposing side was likewise redrawn, its ranks comprised of what were perceived to be the pair’s common foes: the narrative, the nonunified (and therefore noninstantaneous), the otherwise impure. Of course, this general opposition in turn became dominant—and very much complicated by the fact that, during the interwar years, classicism was enlisted in the service of right-wing propaganda. Rather than ceding the field, however, Picasso reentered it, this time with his several series of prints, all of them plainly classical on the face of things, but in each of which many of the features that had been opposed to or excluded by classicism also reentered. In their subversive aspect, Picasso’s classicizing prints resemble what Roland Barthes referred to as a “third language.” The function of the latter Barthes explained via a recollection from his childhood of playing the game Prisoner’s Base: “What I liked best was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners—the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation: the game started over again at zero.”7 Like a third language, like the child playing Prisoner’s Base, Picasso’s prints were meant to scatter the terms and restart the game—in this case, by confounding the oppositions upon which classicism’s very identity was based.8 Despite their differences, the Metamorphoses illustrations, the Vollard Suite, and the Minotauromachy all function along much the same lines: within the context of images that at a glance appear wholly classical emerge elements of the transient, the baroque, the subjective. In that sense, it must be acknowledged that those prints are among Picasso’s most beautiful works—at least if, with Leiris, we agree that “beauty is comprised not simply by the joining of opposing elements,

but by their very antagonism, by the altogether active way that one tends to erupt in the other, making its mark like a wound, like devastation.”9 In view of their “beauty,” we might also want to note how extraordinarily appropriate are the classical prints’ mythological references (and how foresighted was Picasso’s initial impulse to illustrate the work of “a classical author—perhaps something mythological”). For the ambivalent structure of the prints’ classicism is very much like the structure of myth. As Jean-Pierre Vernant has written, myth brings into play shifts, slides, tensions and oscillations between the very terms that are distinguished and opposed in its categorical framework; it is as if, while being mutually exclusive, these terms at the same time imply one another. Thus myth brings into operation a form of logic which we may describe, in contrast to the logic of non-contradiction of the philosophers, as a logic of the ambiguous, the equivocal, . . . not the binary logic of yes or no but a logic different from that of the logos.10

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Again, this is the same “logic” brought into play by Picasso’s classical prints (and of course by specific mythological figures, such as the Minotaur, within them). But its appearance is not restricted to these; a kind of mythological logic governs all of Picasso’s classicizing images, the paintings of the twenties included, to the extent that their function was to unravel the neat distinctions between classicism and whatever at the time was serving as its defining antithesis. Moreover, that logic is equally evident in the papiers collés—in the 1912 Violin, for example, in which a single sheet of newspaper is made to signify both surface and depth, a pair of opposing terms.11 Yet this logic decidedly does not enter (at least not directly) into those works discussed so eloquently by Steinberg—those, produced throughout the length of Picasso’s career, in which the presence and possessability of the figure are uncategorically asserted. The existence of those works seems contradictory, in opposition to the rest of Picasso’s oeuvre. It is largely on their account that we are forced to concede that the oeuvre has no unifying essence. Instead there

the classical prints in the context of picasso’s oeuvre

is a fundamental, irreconcilable opposition, an antithetical set of artistic visions and practices. On the one hand are images (principally of female nudes) whose subjects are given to us in their seeming entirety, and who as a result appear palpably, unquestionably present; on the other are ambiguous, equivocal works, each prone to “tensions and oscillations” between the very oppositions structuring its meaning. In light of this opposition, between two mutually exclusive—albeit mutually implicated—alternatives, we might conclude by considering once more the much-vaunted myth of Picasso’s mastery. By now it will be evident that “myth” is precisely the right term in this context, given that it denotes a site of contradiction, the entanglement of antitheses. But the appropriateness of “mastery” should be no less evident. To the extent that it evokes the dialectic of the master and slave, the term brings to our awareness the fact that Picasso’s “mastery” was likewise achieved through his risking the loss of both self and meaning. Because those risks were embraced most openly with the Minotauromachy, we might want to observe, finally, that Picasso’s oeuvre as a whole is much like the mythological figure of the Minotaur. Perhaps it would be better to say that the Minotaur is an apt figure for that oeuvre as a whole (and not simply, as we argued earlier, for the artist’s experience with that one print). In fact, we may even be inclined at this point to agree with those who have seen the half-bull, half-man hybrid as a selfportrait of Picasso—but only on condition we make clear that the reference is less importantly to Picasso the man than it is to the body of work, irremediably double, that is made to cohere under the name “Picasso.”

notes

1 In the Background of Picasso’s Classical Prints 1. See especially Phoebe Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-Classicism: Second Period, 1917–1925,” Apollo 85, no. 61 (March 1967), 198–207; and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, 1989). 2. Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-Classicism,” 207. 3. From chapter 2 of Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (Paris, 1913); originally published as an article, “Du sujet dans la peinture moderne,” Soirées de Paris (February 1912), 1–4. A translation appears in Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York and Toronto, 1966), 114–115. 4. “Picasso Speaks,” The Arts (May 1923), reprinted in Fry, Cubism, 166. 5. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 63ff., discusses and reproduces many of these works. 6. A modernist teleology was implicit in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du cubisme (Paris, 1912), but was even more programmatically asserted in the writings of Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier); see their Après le cubisme (Paris, 1918) and Ozenfant’s earlier “Notes sur le cubisme,” L’Elan, no. 10 (December 1916). Meanwhile, Picasso’s recourse to a “classicism” that drew much more heavily on archaic Greek models than on fifth-century (classical) ones only served to emphasize his opposition to such teleological accounts. 208 – 209

7. This antiteleological—but by no means reactionary—aspect of Picasso’s “classicism” has been persistently ignored in literature on the subject, with the result that the “classical period” paintings are often condemned for being precisely what they were not: a capitulation on Picasso’s part

8. “Picasso Speaks,” in Fry, Cubism, 167. 9. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, and Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London, 1990). 10. Silver cites many examples of conservative reaction to both cubism and early twentiethcentury “classicism” in Esprit de Corps, particularly in chapters 1 and 3. See also Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, 1989), esp. 98–106, for the reception of cubism by the political right wing in France. Among the many instances she cites, Leighten mentions a debate in the Chambre des Députés in 1912 concerning the possible exclusion of cubist works from exhibition at the Grand Palais on the grounds that the paintings were a “dangerous” and “unpatriotic” influence on French life. In the end the motion failed, but the attitudes that gave rise to it lingered on. The tendency to find direct parallels between formal properties (order, disorder, etc.) and political ideology continued; even Leighten’s book is not immune to its influence. 11. L’Esprit Nouveau 9 (June 1921), n.p. 12. Paul Dermée, “Un prochain âge classique,” Nord-Sud 2, no. 11 (January 1918), 3: “La peinture littéraire ou la littérature picturale sont des symptômes de décadence. . . . Aux grandes époques classiques, l’indépendance et l’autonomie de chaque art étaient soigneusement sauvegardées. Pas de chevauchement ni de pénétration: la pureté!” 13. See, for example, Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan (October-November 1910), 649–651; and G. Coquiot, Cubistes, futuristes, passéistes (Paris, 1914). 14. Tériade [Efstratias Elestheriades], “L’Avènement classique du cubisme,” Cahiers d’art (1929), 452: “Le cubisme apporta une pureté nouvelle dans la peinture et réussit à fixer pour quelques fécondes années le mouvant esprit du classicisme. . . . Délaissant toute idée d’anecdote, tout abandon sentimental à l’expression dramatique ou autre, les peintres responsables de ce mouvement adoptèrent une ligne sévère de reconstructeurs pour arriver entièrement à ce silence plastique, tout gonflé d’élans réprimés, d’équilibre mouvant et de vie secrète.” 15. This situation would of course change when the Surrealists came on the scene. But La Révolution surréaliste did not begin publication until December 1924, and the first installment of Breton’s “Surrealism and Painting” appeared only in July of 1925.

notes to pages 2–6

to the demands of external criticism. See, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” October 16 (Spring 1981), 39–68.

16. It should also be noted that the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque presented a considerable challenge to would-be neoclassicizing revisionists. They were far more successful in applying the “classical” label to works by, among others, Gris, Léger, Severini, Lhote, Metzinger, Lipchitz, and Ozenfant. See Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde (New Haven and London, 1976), esp. 124ff., and his Cubism and Its Enemies (New Haven and London, 1987), esp. 52–62. 17. The earliest articulation of this idea—that cubist paintings were designed to render movement and that, in contrast to traditional works, they were thereby able to express time as well as space—seems to have been Jean Metzinger’s “Cubisme et tradition,” Paris-Journal 16 (August 16, 1911). See the translation and commentary in Fry, Cubism, 66–67, as well as the discussions in Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, 25–26; and Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism (Philadelphia, 1985), 31ff. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 217–218, discusses the later revisions to cubist interpretation via its changing relation to Bergsonian philosophy; whereas Bergson’s ideas were frequently cited to explain cubist paintings before the war, his name rarely appears in criticism after 1914. 18. Picasso transferred his business dealings to Rosenberg during the war, when Kahnweiler was forced to leave the country. In 1917, however, Rosenberg’s brother Paul became the artist’s new dealer. 19. Theo van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 21 (January 1926), 3: Si l’essence de la beauté, l’harmonie, se réalise à la façon de la nature, donc par le groupement, la position et la mesure ordonnés de formes empruntées à la nature (hommes, animaux, plantes, etc.), il peut bien y avoir de l’art dans l’ouvrage, mais cet art n’est pas la conséquence de l’idée artistique, parce que la beauté n’apparaît pas sous une forme directe, indépendante et désintéressée, mais sous une forme indirecte, empruntée à la nature. . . . C’était là l’art classique. Vous devez vous demander maintenant: “Peut-il exister un art plus parfait que celui où l’essence de la beauté apparaît complètement à la façon de l’art?” Eh bien! c’est là la déduction conséquente de l’art moderne.

210 – 211

20. The French term classique meant only “exemplary” or “worthy of emulation,” without any explicit reference to antiquity, until the seventeenth century. It was at that point, when works of art and literature from other eras threatened the privileged status of Greco-Roman models, that the word acquired its additional, more specific meaning. By the nineteenth century classique had taken on a definite stylistic sense as well, and was used to designate certain formal characteristics (restraint, measure, balance) held up to praise in the academies. See Michael Greenhalgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London, 1978), 11; and J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972), 1–2.

22. For a general discussion of this line of argument, see Green, Cubism and Its Enemies, chapter 10: “The Aesthetics of Purity,” 158–167. 23. For a very different understanding of the philosophical bases of modernist essentialism—one that claims to find Platonic (rather than Aristotelian) thought undergirding its logic—see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, 1991). 24. See the title essay of Gombrich’s Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 2d ed. (New York and London, 1971), esp. 87. David Summers, in an article directly relevant to the present discussion, has explored the consequences of essentialism for the practice of art history: “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), 372–406. 25. The pertinent texts are Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon (1766). For abbreviated English translations and a useful commentary on each, see H. B. Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe (Cambridge, 1985), 1–133. 26. Lessing’s direct claim is that poetry is an art of time, painting an art of space. But because throughout the Laokoon he treats time and space as opposites, “spatial” is clearly synonymous with “atemporal.” For a trenchant discussion of Lessing’s time/space polarity, see W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre,” in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986), 95–115. David E. Wellbery’s Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984) offers an excellent general analysis of the book. 27. The praise of unity so prevalent in the art criticism of this period can also be ultimately traced to Aristotle, specifically to his notion of entelechy: the essence of any natural thing was thought to govern its structural growth and development, and thus to guarantee the unity of its various parts. Similar notions found their way into Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the philosopher argued that works of art should also possess an organic and harmonious wholeness. Of course, the Poetics was concerned exclusively with literary texts; in the period presently under discussion, however, notions of entelechy could easily be assimilated to a theory of the visual arts as well. In fact, according to the logic then in place, works of visual art required an even greater degree of unity than

notes to pages 6–11

21. Thus Ozenfant and Jeanneret, in the first issue of their journal L’Esprit nouveau (1920), juxtaposed photographs of a sculpted Greek kore, Seurat’s Le Chahut, and a cubist still life by Gris. In subsequent issues they published essays on Fouquet, Poussin, Ingres, and Corot amid reproductions of modern art, in an effort to demonstrate the constancy of the laws of pictorial order.

literary works, because, unlike the latter, they were meant to be perceived immediately and all at once. Any nonunifying element would introduce a delay into the process, thereby frustrating the possibility of instantaneous apprehension. For discussions of the pervasive (and often detrimental) influence of standards of unity on art history and criticism, see Gombrich, “Norm and Form,” and Summers, “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” esp. 379–380. 28. Thus even modernist painting could serve as the vehicle for conservative ideology. For example, Silver discusses the “self-consciously antirevolutionary theory” underlying Ozenfant’s and Jeanneret’s purism (Esprit de Corps, 387–388). Indeed it could be argued that—again thanks to the widespread acceptance of the sort of distinction Lessing drew between poetry and painting— painting, of whatever style, was particularly susceptible to propagandistic appropriation because of its supposed atemporality. A similar point has been made, from the opposite side, as it were, by literary historians writing on what they refer to as “spatial literature,” which they connect with the rise of fascism. See Mitchell, “Space and Time,” 96–98; Frank Kermode, “A Reply to Joseph Frank,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 3 (Spring 1978), 579–588; and Robert Weimann, ‘New Criticism’ und die Entwicklung der bürgerliche Literaturwissenschaft (Halle, 1962). 29. Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 437. 30. Of course even de Chirico’s early works, which were much praised by the surrealists, contained many references to antiquity and ancient art. By the mid-1920s, however, Breton felt that both the intent behind de Chirico’s imagery and the context in which it was given had acquired a decidedly reactionary edge. Hence the damnatio memoriae performed on the artist’s work before its publication in the March 1926 issue of the surrealist journal. 31. “Le Surréalisme et la peinture”; the translation is from Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley, 1968), 409. 32. A photograph of The Dance was published in the July 15, 1925, issue of La Révolution surréaliste. For a discussion of Picasso’s various Guitars and their relation to surrealism, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Paris, 1996), 73–79. 33. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” esp. 91ff., in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985). 212 – 213

34. Italics added. Waldemar George, “Picasso et la crise actuelle de la conscience artistique,” Chronique du jour, no. 2 (1929), 4. Quoted in Eunice Lipton, “Picasso Criticism, 1901–1939” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975), 183.

Metamorphic Images: Picasso’s Illustrations of Ovid

1. This, anyway, is how Picasso described the incident to Françoise Gilot; see her Life with Picasso (New York, 1964), 191. Of course it is possible that events transpired otherwise, and in fact a completely different scenario is given by Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso: catalogue de l’oeuvre gravé et lithographie, vol. 1 (Berne, 1968), 54. For our purposes, however, the veracity of the story is less important than the fact that Picasso, looking back on the project a decade after its completion, felt that the choice of text had been crucial—so much so that he wanted to ensure that he received most of the credit for having made it. 2. On the deliberately antithetical relation of the Metamorphoses to “classical” or Virgilian epic, see Charles Segal’s two essays “Myth and Philosophy in the Metamorphoses,” American Journal of Philology 90 (1969), 257–292, and “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Greek Myth in Augustan Rome,” Studies in Philology 68 (1971), 371–394; also Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (Chapel Hill, 1988), 154ff.; and Leo C. Curran, “Transformation and Anti-Augustanism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Arethusa 5 (1972), 71–91. 3. These traits undoubtedly accounted for much of the poem’s lack of popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even in 1930 scholars were only beginning to challenge Quintilian’s assessment of the Metamorphoses as “faulty” epic, and the poem enjoyed little of the critical esteem in which it is currently held. Thus Picasso’s and Skira’s decision to publish the work was not an obvious one, and perhaps even a bit risky. 4. In fact Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular attracted the admiration of some of the surrealists, including Michel Leiris, who discussed the poem in his essay “Metamorphosis,” Documents, no. 6 (November 1929), 333. (Picasso’s relation to the Documents group will be discussed at some length in chapter 4.) On the surrealists’ interest in myth in general, see Whitney Chadwick, Myth in Surrealist Painting, 1929–1939 (Ann Arbor, 1980). 5. In her dissertation, “Ancient Mediterranean Sources in the Work of Picasso, 1892–1937” (New York University, 1980), Susan Mayer comments on the “Etruscan” style of the Metamorphoses illustrations (460–461). It should be noted, however, that Picasso’s immediate “sources” were probably not actual Etruscan works but the black-on-white engraved reproductions of bronze cistae and mirror designs included in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folio volumes of Etruscan art; these bear a still more striking resemblance to the Metamorphoses etchings. See, for example, Eduard Gerhard, Etruskische Spiegel, vols. 1–5 (Berlin, 1840–1897). 6. Mühlestein, “Histoire et esprit contemporain,” Cahiers d’art 4 (1929), 379: “Et ceci en fait [est] l’expression de l’une des tendances de la force créatrice de l’humanité; l’energie expansive, en contraste avec la concentration d’expression qui, à travers canons et systèmes, conduit tout droit à l’a-

notes to pages 11–18

2

cadémisme, comme l’autre aboutit, par son hybridité, à la sterile anarchie (exemple: l’art étrusque tardif ).” Earlier in the same paragraph Mühlestein had characterized Etruscan art as follows: “cet art tardif des époques primitives est en réalité, dans l’histoire de l’art, le dernier sursaut collectif du principe de liberté, poussé jusqu’à l’anarchie, contre le principe historiquement rigide, et il devient nécessairement, en tant que contemporain de l’art classique grec, le facteur anti-classique par excellence.” 7. A number of scholars at this time, foremost among them Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, viewed the study of Etruscan art as having important political connotations for the twentieth century. Italian and German archaeology in particular were dominated by a quasi-Hegelian approach whose primary goal was to trace the artistic developments that inevitably culminated in the works of the Roman Empire. The independent study of earlier, Etruscan art—based on scholarship that was analytic rather than prospective—thus became for some a kind of anti-fascist statement. On the historiography of Etruscan art see Massimo Pallottino, Etruscologia (Milan, 1963), 1–21 and 288–307. 8. Nonmythological subjects are in fact exceedingly rare on the bronze mirrors. For a discussion of their style and iconography, see Otto J. Brendel, Etruscan Art (London, 1978), 353–370. 9. Christian Zervos, “Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide illustrées par Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 6, nos. 7–8 (1931), 369: “Nous avons vu souvent des livres illustrés où le texte réduit à des proportions infimes ne semblait être là que pour servir de prétexte aux illustrations. Or, un livre illustré n’est pas un album de gravures. Plus d’un éditeur a commis cette faut d’oublier que le texte constituait l’ossature indispensable du livre. . . . D’autres éditeurs tiennent compte de la qualité de la typographie dans un livre, mais négligent la qualité du texte.” 10. Ibid.: “Le texte très étendu de ce livre crée un rythme d’architecture typographique qui se déroule sans défaillance sur de nombreuses pages.”

214 – 215

11. Although these small Metamorphoses etchings are both beautiful and interesting, they are not involved in any significant way with either narrative or myth—the topics at hand—and so they will not be included in the present discussion. Moreover, although it is difficult to know when, or how, decisions concerning the book’s layout were made (letters from Skira to the artist, which are now in the possession of the Musée Picasso, shed little light on the matter), there is some indication that the small etchings were an afterthought, and that the full-page images (to be discussed next) were the only ones originally intended to accompany the text. The strongest evidence comes from the fact that all of the full-page illustrations were produced in September and October of 1930, while the smaller vignettes were not even begun until sometime the following year. 12. See Picasso’s illustrations for the Tauromaquia of José Delgado y Gálvez, reproductions of which are included in Bernhard Geiser, Picasso, peintre-graveur (Berne, 1933), figs. 139ff. Of course,

13. Passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses are quoted from Mary M. Innes’s English translation (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955). 14. See François Chapon, Le Peintre et le livre: l’âge d’or du livre illustré en France, 1870–1970 (Paris, 1987), 145. 15. This rather awkward situation seems to have arisen because Picasso chose which myths he would illustrate without regard to where they appeared in the text. (The death of Orpheus, for example, is the first tale recounted in Book XI, but the illustration does not appear until ten pages later.) In a couple of instances, the image was displaced a few pages forward or back of center, so as to bring it into closer conjunction with the relevant sections of the narrative. There was, however, no precise algorithm—only a general effort to reconcile the desire for central placement with proximity to the story in question. 16. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI.424–674. 17. Kenneth Silver discusses the currency of idealism in French art criticism of the 1920s, in particular the purists’ assertion that “the idea of form precedes that of color” (Esprit de Corps, 254–255). Here again modernist theory seems remarkably close to eighteenth-century aesthetics, especially that of Lessing, who believed that the best works of art were those most easily translated from matter into mental representation. The fundamental materiality of color (in contrast to line) inhibited the process. For that reason, Lessing suggested in an early version of the Laokoon that it would “have been preferable if the art of painting with oils had never been invented.” See David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984), 114–123. 18. The phrase is Leo Steinberg’s. He discusses other instances of Picasso’s “reversible,” dually oriented figures in “The Philosophical Brothel,” Art News 71 (September and October 1972), a revised version of which appears in October 44 (Spring 1988), 7–74; see esp. 55ff. 19. When viewed whole in this way, the figure of Polyxena (and not just the style of the drawing) bears a strong resemblance to the figures of Etruscan art. Instead of presenting the human form in the classical Greek manner—as a unified whole, its individual elements interrelated through a system of rhythmic balances and numerical proportions—Etruscan artists treated the body as if it were comprised of independent, separable parts. For a discussion of this additive approach to form—what has been termed the Etruscans’ “appendage aesthetic”—see Richard Brilliant, Gesture and Rank in Roman Art, Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 (New Haven,

notes to pages 18–34

one also thinks of the artist’s subsequent images on related themes, from the Minotaurs (to be discussed in chapters 3 and 4) to Guernica.

1963), 26–37; and G. Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Ausgewählte Schriften (Berlin, 1965), especially the essay “Bemerkungen zur Struktur der altitalischen Plastik,” vol. 1, 38–83. 20. See Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria (Oxford, 1972), 124–234. 21. Our experience of the etching is perhaps better reflected in the work’s French title, Méléagre tue le sanglier de Calydon. The English participle (“killing”) suggests a perpetual state, an event captured and frozen; in contrast, the simple present tense of the French verb seems to convey a fleeting act, occurring only in the “now” of our present viewing. The full list of French titles, as they appear in the book’s table of contents, is given below. Although the titles are rendered in a variety of grammatical forms, the number of present-tense verbs is nonetheless striking: (Book I) Deucalion et Pyrrha créent un nouveau genre humaine; (Book II) Phaéthon: chute de Phaéthon avec le char du Soleil; (Book III) Amours de Jupiter et Sémélé; (Book IV) Les filles de Minyas refusant de reconnaître le dieu Bacchus; (Book V) Combat pour Andromède entre Persée et Phinée; (Book VI) Lutte entre Térée et sa belle-soeur Philomèle; (Book VII) Céphale tue par mégarde sa femme Procris; (Book VIII) Méléagre tue le sanglier de Calydon; (Book IX) Hercule tue le centaur Nessus; (Book X) Eurydice piquée par un serpent; (Book XI) Mort d’Orphée; (Book XII) Récits de Nestor sur la guerre de Troie; (Book XIII) Polyxène, fille de Priam, est égorgée sur la tombe d’Achille; (Book XIV) Vertumne poursuit Pomone de son amour; (Book XV) Numa suit les cours de Pythagore. 22. Nessus had promised to carry Hercules’s bride, Deianira, across a particularly dangerous river, leaving the hero free to swim on ahead. No sooner had Hercules reached the other side than he realized that the centaur had betrayed his trust and was in fact making off with Deianira. It is at this point in the story—as Hercules discovers what has been transpiring behind his back—that the action is joined in Picasso’s illustration. 23. 225 × 175 mm (roughly 7 × 9 in.); the dimensions of the other illustrations vary slightly. 24. The presence of marginalia on the Metamorphoses plates is not uncommon, but the degree of intricacy and finish in this case is. The other instances are all either mere doodles (usually of faces) or abbreviated studies for the main composition.

216 – 217

25. That the marginal drawing of book and reader appears on the Hercules plate seems especially appropriate in that the 180-degree turn of Hercules’s body mirrors the turn of the page (the axis around which he pivots being parallel to the binding of the book). In the one case the arc described cuts counterclockwise, in the other the movement is clockwise; but in both cases we eventually encounter both front and back.

27. On the importance of this notion to the development of modern art, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Blink of an Eye,” in David Carroll, ed., The States of “Theory” (New York, 1990), 175–199. 28. The Actaeon etching was made September 20, 1930. A month later, on October 25, Picasso replaced it with another illustration drawn from the same book, a depiction of Jupiter and Semele. See Geiser, Picasso peintre-graveur, pl. 148, or Bloch, Pablo Picasso: Catalogue, pl. 104. 29. See E. J. Kenney, “Discordia Semina Rerum,” Classical Review 81 (1967), 52. 30. Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 3–4. 31. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, trans. Georges Lafaye (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, vi: On ne peut douter que l’intention et l’originalité d’Ovide aient été précisément, Nicandre ou quelque autre lui ayant fourni le canevas, d’y broder librement des compositions étendues, où il pourrait déployer toutes les ressources de son esprit ingénieux. Cependant n’oublions pas qu’à des récits inspirés par Homère, Sophocle ou Euripide il en a enlacé beaucoup d’autres dont les modèles, aujourd’hui perdus pour la plupart, lui ont été fournis par les maîtres de l’école alexandrine; tout ce qui, dans les Métamorphoses, rappelle la poésie romanesque, l’idylle et l’élégie vient de cette source. Earlier in his career, Lafaye had written an entire book on this subject: Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide et leurs modèles grecs (Paris, 1904). 32. Quoted in Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York, 1971), 310. 33. Even though the connection between the Metamorphoses illustrations and the Rubens compositions has not been previously recognized, Alice Doumanian Tankard makes the case that Picasso borrowed extensively from the Flemish artist for the composition of Guernica; see Tankard’s Picasso’s “Guernica” after Rubens’s “Horrors of War” (Philadelphia, 1984). 34. For discussions of Rubens’s work on the project, see Svetlana Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, 9 (Brussels, 1971); and Julius S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (Princeton, 1980), 249–301. 35. Alpers, Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 78ff.

notes to pages 34–45

26. Christian Zervos, “Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 9 (1934), 88: “Picasso a pu également mettre en défaut l’opinion de Lessing qui réservait expressément à la peinture et à la sculpture le soin de décrire, pour confier à la poésie le double soin d’évoquer et d’animer.”

36. Neither of these sketches—of Aurora or of Daedalus and the Minotaur—was directly used by Picasso in his Metamorphoses illustrations, despite the significance that the Minotaur was to assume in his later work. If it is still tempting to see some connection between the sketch in La Coruña and Picasso’s fascination with the creature, it must nonetheless be pointed out that Rubens’s Minotaur is an inversion of Picasso’s—that is, it has a bull’s body and the face of a man. It should also be noted that the provenance of the two sketches in La Coruña is difficult to trace. They entered the collection of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes only on its founding in 1947. Prior to that time they were in the possession of the Biblioteca Publica of La Coruña— though their whereabouts in the 1890s, when Picasso lived in the town, are uncertain. On the recorded history of the paintings, see Alpers, Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 73–74. 37. E. Lafuente Ferrari, “Peeter Symons, colaborador de Rubens,” Archivo español de arte y arqueología 6, no. 18 (September 1930), 251–258. 38. In fact the spare linearity of Picasso’s Procris and Cephalus might be considered the polar opposite of Rubens’s painterly style. In this regard, Picasso’s strategy with the Metamorphoses illustrations seems similar to the one he adopted with his painting The Peasants’ Repast, after LeNain (1917–1918), in which a decorative, pointillist mode was substituted for the hard-edged realism of LeNain’s original. See Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of The Peasants’ Repast in “Re-Presenting Picasso,” Art in America 68, no. 10 (December 1980), 90–96. 39. The thinly veiled nationalism underlying this antithesis should not escape our attention. Indeed the common claim of the French (heard nearly as often today as in 1930) that theirs is the only culture in unbroken continuity with the classical past, and that France is as a result the true heir of the classical tradition, rests largely on this schematic view of the seventeenth century. Poussin is held to have been the lone classicist during a period when European painting was otherwise dominated by Rubens and the very different stylistic impulses of the baroque. Even Apollinaire is on record as having said that he hoped Picasso would make “large paintings like Poussin.” Whether or not we follow Kenneth Silver in seeing Three Women at the Spring (1921) as a fulfillment of that wish, it is clear that by 1930 Picasso had chosen what might be considered the opposite path—making small etchings, that is, based on compositions by Rubens. (See Silver, Esprit de Corps, 276–277.)

218 – 219

40. Theo van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 20 (December 1925), 5: “Le Baroque repose essentiellement sur le rapport disharmonieux, par la prédominance du particulier, ce qui se traduit dans l’art baroque par la prédominance des formes capricieuses et naturelles et par l’exagération arbitraire de ces formes.” 41. Metamorphoses, II.1–328. See also the insightful discussion of Ovid’s treatment of the Phaethon story in Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven and London, 1986), 34–35.

43. Van Doesburg, “Classique-Baroque-Moderne,” Bulletin de l’effort moderne, no. 21 (January 1926), 2: “Le baroque devint le foyer de l’inspiration, mais en même temps la fin de toute conception pure du style. . . . Le baroque était un vaste grenier où tout artiste pouvait fouiller à sa guise.” 44. This identification is made by both Alpers and Held. For a discussion of Peruzzi’s fresco, see S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 400–401. Of relevance to the present discussion is Freedberg’s claim that, because of Peruzzi’s departure from classical proportions and his strong interest in representing action, the “frieze is almost the antithesis—and by some might be regarded as the antidote—of the exactly contemporary tendency of classical style among the Roman masters. What is asserted in it is not a protest against the evolution of art into the Grand Manner, but only the liberty of the artist to think and paint otherwise” (401). 45. Held, Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, 255. 46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1969), 17. 47. That Picasso was not alone at this time in his understanding of metamorphosis is confirmed by the series of “Metamorphosis” essays that appeared in the dissident surrealist journal Documents in November of 1929 (see note 4 of this chapter). Like so many of the early Documents entries, these were clearly motivated by an underlying anti-Hegelianism. In his Aesthetics, Hegel had praised classical art for its perfect adequation of external appearance to inner essence. He admired Greek sculpture above all other because he felt that, through it, the essential humanity of man was clearly expressed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses posed a challenge to Hegel’s view of classicism, however, since many of its instances of metamorphosis were ones in which essence and external appearance could not possibly be seen to correspond—in which, in fact, their disparity was brought to the fore. (For Hegel’s discussion of Ovid’s poem, see Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford, 1975], 394; see also 447ff.). All three Documents authors—Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille—extolled metamorphosis precisely for that reason: it was a phenomenon wherein appearance pointed to the absence of an essence, particularly an idealized, ennobling one. As mentioned earlier (note 4), Leiris, with whom Picasso was especially close at this time, made Ovid’s Metamorphoses central to his essay; see Documents, no. 6 (November 1929), 333.

notes to pages 45–62

42. Ovid’s brief account suggests that Orpheus was not present at Eurydice’s death. He says only that “while the new bride was wandering in the meadows, with her band of naiads, a serpent bit her ankle, and she sank lifeless to the ground” (X.9–11). Picasso’s illustration thus seems truer to the text than does Rubens’s, in which Orpheus is clearly present. It might be said, however, that Orpheus is not entirely absent from Picasso’s etching either, for the array of women around Eurydice’s fallen body brings to mind the similar composition of the Death of Orpheus (see fig. 2.4 above), the very next illustration within the volume.

48. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 32. Applied to art, the notion of “simultaneous but divisible multiplicity” is similar to Gombrich’s definition of “polycentric order,” according to which an individual work is to be understood as “doing” any number of things at once—things that may be otherwise quite unrelated. See Gombrich, “Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia,” in Norm and Form, 2d ed. (New York and London, 1971), 77; and David Summers, “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter, 1989), 399–400. 49. The connection between the vase and Picasso’s illustration was first made by Susan Mayer, “Greco-Roman Iconography and Style in Picasso’s Illustrations for Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Art International 23, no. 8 (December 1979), 29. 50. Picasso may have followed a chain of associations leading from the grapevine-encircled tree of Rubens’s Vertumnus and Pomona to the images of Bacchus and Dionysus where, not surprisingly (given those gods’ purview), similar vines appear. In Ovid’s text, Vertumnus evokes the image of the vine and tree as a metaphor for the mutual support of marriage; and that appears to have been the intention behind Rubens’s use of the motif as well (see Held, Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, 299). Whether or not Picasso was cognizant of these associations, his own illustration—to the extent that it evokes the Meleager Painter’s image of Ariadne holding up the drunken Dionysus— itself seems a fitting image of conjugal support. 51. For a discussion of George’s enthusiasm for Maillol, see Christopher Green, “Classicisms of Transcendence and Transience: Maillol, Picasso and de Chirico,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London, 1990), 267–282. 52. Waldemar George, “Les Cinquante Ans de Picasso et la mort de la nature-mort,” Formes, no. 14 (April 1931), 56; quoted in Green, “Classicisms of Transcendence and Transience,” 279. 53. Robert Delaunay, “Fragments, Notes” (1923/24), in Delaunay, Du cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris, 1957), 101: L’individualisme exagéré conduit au pillage. Le besoin de se glorifier vite eux-mêmes empêche certains artistes de tirer spontanément des lois fondamentales la forme de leur art et les incite, par conséquent, à chercher dans l’oeuvre des autres—ce qui est plus facile et plus expéditif—le genre utile. . . . C’est cette continuité dans pillage que les individualistes osent appeler “la tradition”. 220 – 221

The high degree of moral (and not merely aesthetic) indignation heard in Delaunay’s attack on “individualism” is yet another index of the extent to which artistic forms and practices were invested with ideological meanings during this period. We will see in the next chapter—as

3 The Structure of the Vollard Suite 1. The degree of Vollard’s involvement with the project has been the source of some debate. Hans Bolliger asserted that the publisher actually commissioned the Suite from Picasso, though he provided no substantiating evidence for the claim. Even if Vollard’s role as initiator must therefore remain in doubt, the scenario advanced by Riva Castleman—in which Vollard simply received some of the plates as barter whenever he came into possession of a painting that Picasso coveted—probably understates the level of his involvement. The fact that, after the fatal accident, Picasso added three portraits of Vollard to the original series (thereby bringing the total to an even one hundred plates) suggests that Picasso, at least, considered Vollard instrumental to the project as a whole. For a summary of the several competing accounts of the Suite’s origins, see Anita Coles Costello, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite” (New York, 1979), 1–3. 2. Picasso: 100 estampes originales was the title of Petiet’s 1973 catalogue of the Vollard plates. Oddly, despite the controversy over the Suite’s status, neither Petiet nor anyone else seems to have consulted Picasso on the matter. According to Françoise Gilot, however, when the artist first showed her a set of the prints, he stated that it was “a series of etchings, one hundred of them, that I did for Vollard.” The implication plainly seems to be that the prints belonged together as a suite, and that that had been the intention from the start. (See Gilot, Life with Picasso [New York, 1964], 51.) A good general review of the debate surrounding the status of the Suite is provided by Daniel Robbins in the catalogue to the exhibition “Picasso’s Vollard Suite,” which was held at the Dartmouth College Museum in 1980. 3. Hans Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite” (London, 1956), x. 4. Indeed Bolliger’s classifications and plate numbers have become the standard means of referring to the Vollard prints, and as such will be preserved throughout the present chapter. 5. Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” xiii.

notes to pages 62–72

indeed was already mentioned in the previous one—that the perceived self-sufficiency of freestanding Greek sculpture and the figure’s simultaneous nonparticularization were held to express the perfect integration of the individual with the universal, the singular citizen with society at large. Similar connotations seem to have attached to the formal relationship between the work as a whole and its individual parts; again, complete integration was the ideal. When “classical” abstraction did away with the human figure, however, it became the person of the artist that was seen as holding together these two potentially separate spheres of the social and the formal. It was then his relation to tradition that was taken to be the fundamentally ethical matter. Picasso’s piecemeal borrowings from other works of art was immoral, according to this rationale, because it not only sacrificed the whole for the part but egoistically placed individual concerns ahead of the communal.

6. The imagery of the Minotaur, as it appears in the Vollard Suite and in Picasso’s 1935 etching The Minotauromachy, will be discussed in detail in chapter 4. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§66–67, as translated by Renford Bambrough, “Universals and Family Resemblances,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 50 (1961), 208–209. 8. For a brief but illuminating account of the history and concept of the capriccio, see David Rosand’s essay “Capriccio: Goya and a Graphic Tradition,” in Janis A. Tomlinson, Graphic Evolutions: The Print Series of Francisco Goya (New York, 1989), 3–9. The “capriccio” entry in the Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1954), vol. 3, 329ff., also provides useful information. 9. Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum (1619), quoted in Rosand, “Capriccio,” 5. 10. Interestingly enough, Callot’s Capricci also include images in which a youthful figure stands face to face with a character much older; in these instances, however, the figures display roughly equivalent amounts of shading. See Edwin de T. Bechtel, Jacques Callot (New York, 1955), capriccio no. 34. 11. Of course, this plate’s allusions are not to Goya alone; interwoven with the references to Los caprichos are others to the imagery of ancient Greek myth. The general importance of the Suite’s involvement with myth will be discussed at length in the following chapter. 12. For a discussion of Picasso’s technique here, and in some of the other more complicated plates of the Suite, see Burr Wallen, Picasso’s Aquatints (St. Petersburg, Florida, 1984), 14–16. 13. The closest comparison is probably with Goya’s “Porque fue sensible” (Los caprichos, plate 32), which depicts a woman sitting alone in a cell lit only by the glow of a small lantern. In order to achieve the proper effect, Goya forwent his burin to work exclusively with aquatint. 14. Of course, the plate also gestures toward—and thus appears to have served as the jumpingoff point for—the Suite’s extended series of Minotaur images. But to stop at this obvious connection, neglecting the multiple and divergent “trajectories” involved, is to lose sight of the full complexity of the Suite’s structure.

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15. This is the argument made by Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 69. Galinsky provides a trenchant discussion of the structure of the poem in his chapter “Unity and Coherence,” 79–109. 16. Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, trans. Georges Lafaye (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, vi–vii.

18. Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, ed. V. Karady (Paris, 1969), vol. 2, 165. Jean-Pierre Vernant, a scholar very much in the tradition of Mauss, briefly summarizes the weblike or systemic nature of myth in his introduction to Marcel Detienne’s The Gardens of Adonis (New York, 1977), iii: A god has no more one particular essence than a single detail of a myth is significant on its own. Every god is defined by the network of relations which links him with and opposes him to the other deities included within a particular pantheon; and similarly, a single detail in a myth is only significant by virtue of its place within the ordered system to which the myth itself belongs. 19. See, for example, Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 82–83; W. S. Anderson in American Journal of Philology 89 (1968), 103; and Leo C. Curran in Arethusa 5 (1972), 83–84. 20. These precepts derive from chapters 8 and 10 of Aristotle’s Poetics. For a discussion of them in the context of Ovid’s composition, see Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 80ff. 21. Similarly, Charles Altieri has discussed the Metamorphoses (and several works of postmodern fiction that he feels belong to the same tradition) in the following terms: “Reader, writer, and material remain moving about in a closed system which is nonetheless in continual motion and offering on its single uninterrupted surface, an infinite field of possible recognitions and interrelationships.” Altieri, “Ovid and the New Mythologists,” Novel 7, no. 1 (Fall 1973), 32. 22. Quoted by Marie-Laure Bernadac in her essay “Painting as Model,” from the exhibition catalogue Late Picasso (London, 1988), 88. 23. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, 1969), 26. 24. Max Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés,” La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1, 1924), 27. 25. Ibid.

notes to pages 81–94

17. “It is true,” Sara Mack wries, “that the poem is so long and full of characters and events that readers reading for pleasure [or only once] will not pick up on all the allusions to what has preceded. But there are enough verbal and thematic echoes back and forth, enough reappearances of characters and situations we have seen before, that we are bound to recognize some of them as old friends when they emerge again.” Sara Mack, Ovid (New Haven and London, 1988), 112–113; also see Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), esp. 9–14 on “The Search for Structure.”

26. Pierre Naville, “Beaux Arts,” La Révolution surréaliste 3 (April 1925), 27. Quoted in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), xvi. 27. As Frued explains: “The elements ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ found their way into the content of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of the dreamthoughts, because, that is to say, they constituted ‘nodal points’ upon which a great number of the dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London, 1953ff.), vol. 4, 283. 28. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 5, 596–597. 29. Ibid., 344. 30. The customary association of the Vollard plates with the Balzac illustrations no doubt arises from the fact that, in addition to their strong visual similarities, both series of etchings were done in collaboration with Vollard. Moreover, although Picasso completed the illustrations in 1927, Vollard did not release his edition of Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu until 1931, presumably because that was the centennial of the story’s original publication. By then, Picasso had already begun work on the Vollard Suite. 31. For a discussion of classicism in modern French sculpture, including an account of the popularity of artists such as Maillol, Bourdelle, and Despiau, see Patrick Elliott, “Sculpture in France and Classicism, 1910–1939,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London, 1990), 283–295. 32. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 708. 33. Ibid.; translation slightly modified. 34. “Tout ces oppositions semblent vouloir se résumer en une seule: romanticisme, classicisme.” Jules Romains, “Maillol,” Formes, no. 4 (April 1930), 7. 35. Ibid., 6:

224 – 225

Autant que le mouvement, et quelquefois par le même moyens, Rodin a cherché le pittoresque. Il lutte “d’effets” avec les peintres, et avec les plus “sensationnels” d’entre eux. Sans doute on peut tourner auteur de ses statues. Mais il est presque toujours possible de découvrir sous quelle perspective de choix l’auteur les a imaginées et nous invite à les voir. . . . Maillol, ancien peintre, n’est aucunement pittoresque. Sa statuaire paraît antérieure à la

Romains’s views, it should be noted, although based in aesthetic theory of the 1830s, actually represent a substantial departure from the ideas concerning classical sculpture that had dominated academic training throughout most of the intervening period. Those ideas—largely shaped by the art and writing of Adolf von Hildebrand—held bas-relief to be the ideal form of classical sculpture, precisely because it was thought to reconcile “plastic” (or tactile) and visual experience. (See Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in den bildenden Künsten [Strasbourg, 1893]; or the English version, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert M. Ogden [New York, 1907].) According to Romains’s rationale, by contrast, the defining characteristics of relief—its severely restricted viewing angle, its “pictorialism”—made it necessarily antithetical to the classical ideal (which, to his mind as to Hegel’s, found its greatest expression in freestanding sculpture). Without attempting to chart an entire history of attitudes toward classicism and sculpture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we might still observe that Hegel’s case for sculpture (based as it is on claims about the inherent nature of the medium) would have readily appealed to a later, modernist generation already committed to essentialist views of art. We should also note, although it entails getting a bit ahead of ourselves, that Romains’s categories of the “visual” and the “tactile” will be completely undermined by the “Sculptor’s Studio” plates of the Vollard Suite—even though those plates (surprisingly) preserve much of Romains’s larger view of classicism. For Picasso, any work that “ignores the spectator” necessarily seems distant and aloof—quite literally out of touch with its audience. To characterize such sculptures as “tactile” would therefore be contradictory, for those works more than any reduce the viewer’s role to a matter of mere looking. 36. Hegel, Aesthetics, 806. 37. In his Aesthetics, Hegel made much of the fact that, on most ancient statues, the eyes are either blank or entirely missing. Discounting evidence that many of the empty sockets were originally inlaid with colored glass and that, similarly, some of the carved eyes were once painted with iris and pupil, he saw their present blankness as entirely appropriate to the intrinsic meaning of the work: “The eye looks out into the external world; by nature it looks at something and therefore displays man in his relation to a varied external sphere. . . . But the genuine sculptural figure is precisely withdrawn from this link with external things, and is immersed in the substantial nature of its spiritual content, independent in itself, not dispersed or complicated by anything else” (Aesthetics, 732–733). 38. It should be pointed out that the sculpted head in plate 39 resembles, more than any ancient or generically classical work, the sculptures that Picasso himself was producing at the Château de Boisgeloup in Gisors at precisely this time. (For illustrations and discussion of those sculptures,

notes to pages 95–105

peinture, non corrompue par ses exemples et ses malices. Ses oeuvres ignorent le spectateur ou plutôt la position qu’il lui plait de prendre pour les contempler. Elles sont tactiles autant que visuelles, en un mot plastique.

see Werner Spies, Picasso: Das plastische Werk [Stuttgart, 1983], 149–158.) Several similar heads crop up elsewhere in the “Studio” series. In some cases the arrangement is like that of plate 39, with the sculptor and/or model in close physical contact with the work; in others there is the same distance between sculpture and audience as in most prints of the series. The existence of both types of prints suggests that this general problem—concerning the relative “objectivity” and independence of the work of art—occupied Picasso’s thought at Gisors as well. That said, we need to remain skeptical of any and all attempts to draw conclusions about the Boisgeloup sculptures from the Vollard etchings. The systemic nature of the “Sculptor’s Studio” series, in which each print derives its significance from its differential relation to the others, should dissuade us from seeing any direct correlation between elements of the etchings and possible referents in the external world. 39. Other plates in the series include numbers 93, in which a Minotaur crouches over a sleeping woman, and 27, the well-known aquatint of a faun kneeling before another somnolent nude. It should be mentioned that there are also a couple of different permutations on this theme—such as in plate 86, where a young (clothed) woman keeps watch beside a sleeping Minotaur. 40. Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers,” in Other Criteria (Oxford, 1972), 101–102. In plate 26 the position of the sleeper’s left arm, encircling her head, further emphasizes her withdrawal and complete self-absorption. 41. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, 1988), esp. 1–4 and 131–132. 42. See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago, 1969), as well as Yve-Alain Bois’s mention of the “transformation group” in his essay “The Semiology of Cubism,” in William Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), 195. 43. Hegel, Aesthetics, 36–37. 44. Several examples of such sarcophagi, with figures posed as in plate 58, are in the collection of the Louvre; the closest comparisons are afforded by a second-century A.D. Attic sarcophagus from Thessaloniki, and the well-known painted terra-cotta sarcophagus from Caere. For illustrations of these works see, respectively, Bernard Andreae, The Art of Rome (New York, 1977), fig. 101; and Otto J. Brendel, Etruscan Art (Middlesex and New York, 1978), figs. 158 and 160. 226 – 227

45. Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria, 175. 46. The similarity of the two vantage points was first noted by Anita Coles Costello, who asserted that it allowed the spectator “to take a vicarious place within the print by identifying with the gaze

47. Steinberg’s fullest elaboration of the artist’s aesthetic of “possession” is given in “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large.” More recently, he has modified that argument, attributing to Picasso less a desire to possess his subjects than to inhabit them: “Inlassablement, les figures multiaspectuelles de Picasso semblent suggérer non pas quelque chose qui empiète sur un corps—non pas le corps comme objet de la vision d’un autre, objet de connaissance pour cet autre, offert à sa possession et à sa puissance—, mais le corps en pleine possession de soi, comme si l’artiste s’était tellement projeté dans l’être de son modèle qu’il puisse y éprouver de l’intérieur sa propre intériorité.” See Steinberg, “La Fin de partie de Picasso,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 27 (Spring 1989), 11–38. A somewhat abbreviated version of this essay has been translated into English as “Picasso’s Endgame,” October 74 (Fall 1995), 105–122. 48. Cited by John Richardson, “L’Epoque Jacqueline,” in Late Picasso (London: Tate Gallery, 1988), 40. 49. In her studies of Degas and his representation of the female body, Carol Armstrong uses Picasso’s art as the example of greatest contrast. With Degas, Armstrong writes, “the female body— the object— . . . is declared as unapprehensible; the viewer—the subject—remains separate, his myth of sublimated union through aesthetic vision denied him. . . . How different [this view] is from that of . . . Picasso (who admired Degas’s work and owned some of his images of prostitutes), with his tremendous myth of virility and his myriad pictorial devices for formal apprehension and erotic appropriation. The appropriate myth for Degas, whether biographically true or not, is that of abstinence.” (Carol M. Armstrong, “Degas and the Female Body,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture [Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985], 241.) The point to be made here, however, is that, with the Vollard Suite, it was Picasso’s turn to invoke the metaphors of abstention and impotence, even if he seems to have done so with a touch of irony and disapproval. 50. In this instance, the “blind” eyes of the sculpted head do not seem to indicate the selfsufficiency of classical art that Hegel so admired, since the rest of the face so clearly registers the strain of looking. In this image the pupil-less eyes seem to function instead as a kind of commentary on the impoverishment of vision unaccompanied by touch. 51. Picasso first etched the male head in profile, then reworked it in drypoint to a three-quarters view that allows its features to more clearly register the figure’s frustration. 52. The significance of the partially covered window is raised by Wendy Steiner in her Pictures of Romance, 134. The present chapter is indebted not only to specific observations of this sort, but

notes to pages 105–122

of one of its participants.” (Costello, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” 123.) My point, however, is that the identification does not so much draw us into the print as it makes us self-conscious of our position outside it.

also to Steiner’s general discussion of the Suite in her chapter 5, “A Renaissance-Modernist Dalliance: Joyce and Picasso,” 121–143. 53. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Huit entretiens avec Picasso,” Le Point 42 (October 1952), 24; translated in Bolliger, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” xii. 54. Otto Benesch, “Rembrandts Bild bei Picasso,” in his Collected Writings, vol. 4 (London, 1973), 171. 55. Picasso could have seen The Artist and His Model (in its second state) either at the Bibliothèque Nationale or in the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre. It is obviously also possible that he knew the print only from reproductions. In any event, the Suite seems to mark the beginning of Picasso’s dialogue with the art of Rembrandt—a colloquy that would continue sporadically for the rest of Picasso’s life. See Janie L. Cohen, “Picasso’s Exploration of Rembrandt’s Art,” Arts Magazine 58 (October 1983), 119–125. 56. Christopher White, Rembrandt as an Etcher (London, 1969), vol. 1, 161. 57. Fritz Saxl, “Zur Herleitung der Kunst Rembrandts,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst (1910), 42. Charles Blanc’s L’Oeuvre complète de Rembrandt (Paris, 1859) is typical of many books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in that it introduces Rembrandt’s Artist and His Model as “cette estampe, connue en Hollande sous le nom de Pygmalion” (vol. 2, 12, cat. no. 157). 58. Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion in Book X, 243–297. For his changes to the myth, see Solodow, The World of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” 215–216. 59. More might be said about the shape of this implement; although one can imagine a sculpting tool of its approximate dimensions, we might be forgiven for thinking instead of an etching needle or burin. The confusion only reinforces the analogy between sculpture and the Vollard prints themselves that runs throughout the “Studio” series.

228 – 229

60. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Entretiens avec Picasso au sujet des Femmes d’Alger,” Aujourd’hui (September 4, 1955), 12–13. Translated by Marilyn McCully in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (Princeton, 1981), 251. Although the part of the comment that concerns Caravaggio is certainly not without interest, a discussion of its implications would plainly constitute a digression from the subject at hand. 61. Many years later, in 1963, Picasso would execute a painting that was partially based on Rembrandt’s Dresden self-portrait with his wife Saskia, the two of them carousing in a tavern. Picasso’s

62. Gilot, Life with Picasso, 49. 63. See Dore Ashton’s chapter on “Picasso and Frenhofer” in her A Fable of Modern Art (London, 1980), 75–95. Ashton makes no specific connection between Frenhofer and the “Rembrandt” figure of plate 36. She does, however, associate the two artists in reference to plate 34 (fig. 3.38), by seeing in the “mesh of wild, gyrating lines” the expression of a “Frenhofer-like furor” (91). Ashton also mentions that, in 1937 (just three years after the “Rembrandt” etchings were made), Picasso moved into studios on the rue des Grands-Augustins, the same street that was the setting for Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu. In fact Picasso’s building matched Balzac’s description extremely well, and, according to Brassaï, the artist was delighted by the possibility that his might be the very studios that were the setting for the story. 64. Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1956), vol. 14, 477. Picasso seems to have assumed, as indeed the text encourages us to do, that the Rembrandt painting Frenhofer most resembled is a self-portrait of the artist. 65. The frame might easily be overlooked—considered simply the embroidery on “Rembrandt’s” hem—were it not for the lines that converge on the lower right corner of the print. They are almost certainly intended as sightlines, or perspective orthogonals, meant to affirm the figure’s (partial) status as a painting. 66. That the similarity is no mere coincidence is evident from plate 35 of the Suite (not illustrated here), in which “Rembrandt” again sports two sets of eyes, the second pair even more noticeable than in plate 36. 67. This “centrifugal” process of improvisation could of course also be counted a “metamorphic” one, as described in chapter 2. Like the series of Deucalion and Pyrrha images by Peruzzi, Rubens,

notes to pages 125–136

painting also includes references to Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina; but whereas the latter image is, in the words of Leo Steinberg, “about the claims of erotic attachment as against the vocation of art,” Picasso seems to have construed the Rembrandt portrait as offering a resolution to any such conflict. Because it is a self-portrait (that is, by Rembrandt’s own hand), the painting with Saskia is able to present the Dutchman as both hedonistic lover and productive artist. In Picasso’s variation upon the work, Rembrandt is literally represented in both roles, his superimposed right and left profiles allowing him to divide his attention equally between the woman on his lap and the canvas on his easel. For commentary on Picasso’s painting, see Jean Sutherland Boggs, “The Last Thirty Years,” in John Golding and Roland Penrose, eds., Picasso in Retrospect (New York, 1973), 271; and Costello, Picasso’s “Vollard Suite,” 92–95. See also Leo Steinberg, “A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 3, no. 5 (November/December 1972), 102–105.

and Picasso, Rembrandt’s Artist and His Model and the plates of the Vollard Suite are related in unbroken continuity but do not partake of any common essence. 68. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 5, 599. 69. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York, 1985), 118. On page 116, they describe the job of the secondary process as one of creating stable representations within the mind: Bound energy would be equivalent to a relational stability among mental representations, and relations are stabilized by being limited. Bound energy is obviously a precondition both of logical, concentrated thought and of the effective manipulation of objects in the external world. Knowledge depends on the ability to arrive at conclusions, and conclusions can be reached only if the terms of our thoughts and the relations among them remain relatively constant.

4 Of Myth and Picasso’s Minotaurs 1. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: oeuvres, vol. 7 (Paris, 1957), nos. 135 and 423. In both of these images, however, the Minotaur is comprised of only a (bull’s) head and (human) legs. 2. André Masson, “Re-‘Minotaure’,” View, 2d ser., nos. 1–4 (April 1942), 20. 3. On the brief but brilliant life of Documents, see Denis Hollier, “The Use-Value of the Impossible,” October 60 (Spring 1992), 3–24. 4. Roger Caillois, who would become a regular contributor to Minotaure, included a lengthy discussion of the Palace at Knossos in his Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris, 1938), 137ff. The excavations themselves were published in four volumes by Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (London, 1921–1936). 5. For a discussion of Bataille’s interest in the myth of the labyrinth, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989), 61. 6. See Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” trans. Allan Stoekl, in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis, 1985), 45–52. 230 – 231

7. In 1937 Bataille would found his own journal, Acéphale, whose emblematic headless man (drawn for the cover, this time, by André Masson) might be considered a natural outgrowth—or, better, ingrowth—of the bull-headed Minotaur.

9. We should also note that the right side of plate 84 is devoted to the gratification of the remaining senses: taste and smell by the still life with oysters, sound by the flute-playing figure above. 10. On the importance of the vision/touch polarity to Picasso’s work, and in particular to the beginnings of cubism, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), 261ff. 11. Bataille, “Mouth,” Documents 2, no. 5 (1930), 299. Translated in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 58–59. Italics added. 12. Ibid. For a discussion of the “Mouth” entry, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), 156–157. 13. On the distinction between these two terms, see Michel Foucault’s homage to Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), 29–52. 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 728. 15. Ibid., 729. 16. For the structural relations between Bataille’s writings and Hegel’s, see Stephen W. Melville, Philosophy beside Itself (Minneapolis, 1986), 74; and Rodolphe Gasché, “The Heterological Almanac,” in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, ed., On Bataille (New York, 1995), 157–208. 17. Documents 2, no. 3 (1930), 173–174; a translated version of Bataille’s essay appears in Visions of Excess, 57–58, from which the following quotations are taken. 18. Ibid., 57. 19. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5.

notes to pages 137–151

8. On Picasso’s relationship to this group, see John Golding, “Picasso and Surrealism,” in John Golding and Roland Penrose, eds., Picasso in Retrospect (New York, 1973), 49–78, especially 66–67. Picasso’s main link to the group was Michel Leiris, with whom Picasso had been friends for some time. Indeed, according to Jaime Sabartés, who was clearly in a position to know, Michel and Louise Leiris were two of Picasso’s most frequent visitors during this period. See Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores (New York, 1948), 112.

20. On the phenomenon of overdetermination, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1965), 312ff. 21. The present chapter, as is no doubt already apparent, is largely organized around a juxtaposition of Picasso’s Minotaur prints with writings by Bataille and the other contributors to Documents. Recently Karen Kleinfelder, in an essay written for the occasion of the exhibition “Picasso and the Mediterranean,” attempted much the same thing, again using Picasso’s Vollard Suite and Minotaur etchings but now placing them alongside passages from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Arguing that “the logic of the philosopher’s text parallels the logic of Picasso’s own complex body of works inspired by the Mediterranean,” Kleinfelder sought to demonstrate Nietzsche’s pervasive influence upon the artist. And indeed the juxtapositions proved illuminating. Comments such as the following, made as a prelude to discussion of Picasso’s Minotauromachy, seem particularly apt: “In a truly transgressive turn that looks back to the pagan Dionysus and forward to the postmodern deconstruction to come, Picasso sets up the Apollonian-Dionysian duality as a dialectic designed to undo the whole system of [Hegelian] dialectics” (28). Yet the discovered parallels never rise much above that level of general similarity—principally a similarity of “tone.” By contrast, in citing works by the contributors to Documents, the current chapter is citing works that are in fact contemporaneous with the prints and are products of the same cultural milieu. It argues for similarities that are both rather more concrete than those revealed by the Nietzsche/Picasso comparison, and the result of something other than direct “influence.” (The appropriate term would perhaps be “mutual overdetermination.”) See Kleinfelder, “Monstrous Oppositions,” in Picasso and the Mediterranean (Humlebaek, Denmark, 1996), 22–33. 22. The resemblance to the figure of Tobit is strongest in the first of the “Blind Minotaur” plates (fig. 4.3). Subsequently the Minotaur’s pose is altered slightly: the cane changes hands, for instance, and the foremost leg drops back to take the rear. Yet, of all the characters in the “Blind Minotaur” series, the figure of the Minotaur is transformed the least in the course of it, and this stability seems designed specifically to preserve the reference to Rembrandt’s etching. 23. On Bataille’s interest in, and understanding of, sacrifice, see (among others) Hollier, Against Architecture, esp. 47–49; Michèle Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore, 1982); Rosalind Krauss, “No More Play,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987), esp. 54–56; and Alfred Métraux, “Rencontre avec les ethnologues,” Critique, nos. 195–196 (1963), 677–684. 232 – 233

24. Péret’s De derrière les fagots was published with Picasso’s etching in a limited run by Editions Surréalistes (Paris, 1934). A precursor to the Marat is the painting Woman with Stiletto, from 1931. For a discussion of that painting—one that places it in the context of Bataille and surrealism more generally—see Neil Cox, “Marat/Sade/Picasso,” Art History (Winter 1994), 383–417.

26. In many of Bataille’s writings of the period, from “The Solar Anus” and “Rotten Sun” to “The Jesuve” and “The Pineal Eye,” the terms “eye,” “sun,” and “anus” are continually associated and periodically substituted one for another, in a manner not unlike that found in Picasso’s etching. On the role of such paradigmatic substitution in Bataille’s writings, see Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, 1972), 239–247. 27. A number of these Massacre drawings were published, along with Picasso’s Minotaur collage, in the first issue of Le Minotaure. 28. Though see also Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of Giacometti’s work and its relation to Bataillean notions of sacrifice in “No More Play,” 41–85. 29. The album was not actually published until 1936, but, according to Denis Hollier, an exhibition of the drawings was held at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher from June 13 to June 25, 1934. See Hollier, Against Architecture, 133–134, as well as the note on the album’s publication in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1970), 613–614. Bataille’s essay for the album is translated in Visions of Excess, 130–136. Jean-Paul Clébert discusses the collaboration, and reproduces all of Masson’s etchings, in his article “Georges Bataille und André Masson,” in André Masson. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Axel Matthes and Helmut Klewan (Munich, 1990), 42–71. 30. Apparently Masson had wanted to name the album The Dying God, after one of the volumes of Frazer’s Golden Bough. Bataille, however, prevailed upon him to adopt the more general title Sacrifices. See Clébert, “Bataille und Masson,” 50. 31. Georges Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Deucalion 5 (1955), 21–43; translated as “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” by Jonathan Strauss, and included in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford, 1997), 279–295. 32. Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 26–27; the English text comes from A. V. Miller’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), 32. 33. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London, 1969), 7. 34. From Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure (Paris, 1943), 140; quoted in Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy—A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 252.

notes to pages 151–158

25. See especially Benjamin Péret, Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là (Paris, 1936).

35. See Stephen Melville’s discussion of Hegel and Bataille, to which the present account is heavily indebted, in Philosophy beside Itself, 71ff. 36. Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 257. 37. Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 32–33. 38. Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 259. 39. In “Rotten Sun,” Bataille himself comes close to saying the same thing: If we describe the notion of the sun in the mind of one whose weak eyes compel him to emasculate it, the sun must be said to have the poetical meaning of mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation. If on the other hand one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion, adequately expressed by the horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp. (Translated in Visions of Excess, 57.) 40. Documents 2, no. 8 (1930), 10–20; translated in Visions of Excess, 61–72. See also Denis Hollier’s analysis of the essay in Against Architecture, 79ff., to which the following discussion is indebted. 41. Bataille specifically cites the study by Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (Paris, 1898); translated as Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago, 1964). 42. Georges Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” Documents 2, no. 7 (1930), 389–397; reprinted in Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 247–254. Rosalind Krauss discusses both Luquet’s book and Bataille’s review in her “Antivision,” October 36 (1986), 147–154; see esp. 149, on which the present summary is based. 43. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 254. 44. The interview, with Christian Zervos, was published in Cahiers d’art 10 (1935), 173. (The translation is from Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views [New York, 1972], 38.) 234 – 235

45. A number of scholars have noted references to the myth of Oedipus in the prints of the blind Minotaur. See, for example, Lydia Gasman, “Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso, 1925–1938” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), 1450–1451.

47. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. On agrarian sacrifices, see 66–76; for sacrifices involving birds, 54 and 57. 48. Cahiers d’art 8, nos. 7–10 (1933). 49. Note, too, that in these early prints the girl’s dress is explicitly patterned after the garb of the ancient korai. 50. Interestingly enough, it has been suggested that the Minotauromachy’s doves derive from two separate sources, both mosaics: one from the Capitoline Museum that is thought to reproduce a Greek original of the fourth century B.C., and the other from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. (See Sebastian Goeppert and Herma Goeppert-Frank, Die Minotauromachie von Pablo Picasso [Geneva, 1987], 82.) The latter mosaic depicts two doves perched, as in the Minotauromachy, on either side of a vessel of water. The former image contains four birds, yet the pose of the one on the extreme left, and the dark coloration of the bird next to it, accord remarkably well with the configuration in Picasso’s print. The Minotauromachy’s simultaneous evocation of these works, one classical, one Christian, thereby seems to parallel its dual evocation, through those same birds, of the imagery of ancient pagan and Christian sacrifice. 51. Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 45–46; originally in Documents 2, no. 1 (1930). 52. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” trans. M. N. Seal, in Freud, Character and Culture (New York, 1963). Bataille’s reference to Freud’s work on the subject appears in a note found among his papers (7 Aa fo 39); see Hollier, Against Architecture, 192, n. 121. 53. Although he kept his distance from the Collège de Sociologie, Mauss was nonetheless on familiar terms with its members. He had been an occasional contributor to Documents, and had even written a brief essay for the journal’s special “Hommage à Picasso”; see Documents 2, no. 3 (1930), 177. 54. See especially Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (London, 1889). 55. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 17.

notes to pages 159–174

46. For an English translation of the essay, see “Sacrifices,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 130–136. See also, in that same collection, “The Notion of Expenditure,” especially 119: “From the very first, it appears that sacred things are constituted by an operation of loss: in particular, the success of Christianity must be explained by the value of the theme of the Son of God’s ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.”

56. Ibid., 60. 57. Ibid., 10. 58. Ibid., 101. 59. If “large” is specified here, it is because size may indeed have been a factor in Picasso’s appreciation of the print. Certainly the size of the Minotauromachy (approximately 50 × 70 cm) seems designed to compete with such acknowledged masterpieces of printmaking as Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, which itself had been made as a response to the challenge of Rubens’s Descent, or rather to Lucas Vorsterman’s large-scale engraving after that work. For a discussion of Rembrandt’s etching and its relation to the Rubens engraving, see Christopher White, Rembrandt (London, 1984), 56–58. 60. Georges Bataille, “Le Sacré,” Cahiers d’art, fourteenth year, 1–4 (1939), 47–50. Translated and reprinted in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 240–245. See, too, Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil, especially chapter 10, which describes a bull’s goring of a matador through the matador’s right eye. 61. The original French edition (Paris, 1938) was accompanied by three André Masson etchings. An English translation of the essay, by Ann Smock, was published (sans illustrations) as “The Bullfight as Mirror,” October 63 (Winter 1993), 21–40. 62. According to Françoise Gilot, Leiris frequently accompanied Picasso to the bullfights in Arles; on at least one occasion (in 1949), Bataille was also a member of the party. See Gilot, Life with Picasso (New York, 1964), 244. 63. Leiris, “The Bullfight as Mirror,” 27–28. 64. Ibid., 37–38. 65. Ibid., 26.

236 – 237

66. See Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, esp. 318, where he says: “A dream is not constructed by each individual dream-thought, or group of dream-thoughts, finding (in abbreviated form) separate representation in the content of the dream—in the kind of way in which an electorate chooses parliamentary representatives; a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dream-thoughts being submitted to a sort of manipulative process in which those elements which have the most numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the dream-content—in a manner analogous to election by scrutin de liste.”

68. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 23. 69. It should be obvious enough—or should at least soon become obvious—that “automatic thinking” as envisioned by Caillois has much in common with Freud’s primary process; both involve the perpetual free association of ideas. (On the primary process, see chapter 3 above.) Both, too, are subject to overdetermination—though in Freud’s scenario the latter is a mechanism apparently acting upon the associations already produced by the unconscious, whereas for Caillois it guides even the associations’ initial production. 70. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 67. On the phenomenon of the ideogram, see Michael Syrotinski, “Echec et nécessité dans La Nécessité d’esprit,” and Danielle Chaperon, “Sémantique de la mante,” both of which appear in Laurent Jenny, ed., Roger Caillois, la pensée aventurée (Paris, 1992). 71. Caillois, The Necessity of the Mind, 78. 72. Ibid., 109. 73. Ibid., 97. 74. The results were published by the authors in Minotaure, nos. 3–4 (1933). 75. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris, 1937); the quotation is from Mary Ann Caws’s English translation, Mad Love (Lincoln, Nebr., 1987), 23. Breton also offers there an explanation of what he hoped to accomplish through the circulation of the survey. He wanted, he said, “to emphasize the interdependence of these two causal series (natural and human). . . . I think I have succeeded in establishing that both kinds share a common denominator situated in the human mind, and which is none other than desire. What I have wanted to do above all is to show the precautions and the ruses which desire, in search of its objects, employs as it wavers in pre-conscious waters, and, once this object is discovered, the means (so far stupefying) it uses to reveal it through consciousness” (Mad Love, 24–25). 76. Thus, in Mad Love, Breton recounts his visit to a flea market with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who discovered there a metal mask of unknown origin. Giacometti felt himself oddly, and

notes to pages 174–184

67. Roger Caillois, La Nécessité d’esprit (Paris, 1981); translated as The Necessity of the Mind, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Venice, Calif., 1990). Although completed in 1935, the book was published only posthumously, in 1981. Versions of chapters 1 and 3, however, appeared as articles in, respectively, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 5 (May 1933) and Recherches philosophiques (1934–1935). In addition, chapter 5 was published in a slightly scaled-down form in Minotaure 1, no. 5 (1934), and later became the central section of Caillois’s Le Mythe et l’homme.

at the time inexplicably, attracted to the mask, which he bought and took home. Only later, in conversation with Breton, did he realize that the mask answered certain formal problems that he had been having with his work, problems that had prevented him from completing the face of the figure in his sculpture Invisible Object. The intervention of the mask, Breton wrote, “seemed intended to help Giacometti overcome his indecision on this subject. The finding of an object serves here exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the sense that it . . . makes him understand that the obstacle he thought insurmountable is cleared.” See Breton, Mad Love, 25–35. For an interpretation of Invisible Object that treats the metal mask more as an objective ideogram (if without using that term) than as an example of objective chance, see Krauss, “No More Play,” 43–85. 77. André Breton, Entretiens (Paris, 1952), 140–141. In his Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), Hal Foster also quotes these remarks and proceeds to discuss objective chance as a manifestation of the uncanny, an effect produced by the return of the repressed; see especially 29–42. 78. Quoted in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago, 1990), 32. 79. Caillois and Breton, we should note, both attended Kojève’s lectures on Hegel—though, of the two, Caillois was the much more regular participant. 80. The language of economies used here is borrowed from Derrida’s essay on Bataille and Hegel, “From Restricted to General Economy—A Hegelianism without Reserve.”

238 – 239

81. In their 1987 book Die Minotauromachie von Pablo Picasso, Sebastian Goeppert and Herma Goeppert-Frank illustrate and discuss all three of these works—the Sleeping Ariadne, Goya’s Los proverbios aquatint, and Titian’s Europa—in relation to the figure of the torera. The reader is simultaneously referred, however, to works somewhat further afield—Ingres’s Vénus Anadyomène, one of the Dying Niobids—and it soon becomes apparent that these earlier paintings and sculptures are evinced not to demonstrate the overdeterminedness of Picasso’s torera, but simply to ascertain the significance of her pose. (It is found to connote both “weakness” and “a sensual availability close to abandon.”) Thus, despite the evident debt the present study owes to the work of Goeppert and GoeppertFrank, it departs from them substantially in its view of how these anterior images function within the Minotauromachy. According to Goeppert and Goeppert-Frank, Picasso forged from these images a totally personal vision: “Picasso . . . realized his works beginning with a repertoire of symbols derived from preceding generations, epochs, and cultures, in order to integrate them, through paraphrase, alteration, or perversion, into a pictorial rhetoric that would permit him to formulate a totally subjective vision of reality” (5). The argument of the present study is, to the contrary, that even Picasso’s most ostensibly personal “visions” are thoroughly pervaded—which is to say, overdetermined—by the images of others.

83. Caillois, Le Mythe et l’homme; see especially chapter 1, “Fonction du mythe,” 13–32. 84. There have, nonetheless, been scores of Jungian interpretations of the etching. See, among others, Curt Seckel, “Picassos Wege zur Symbolik der Minotauromachie,” Der Kunst und das schöne Heim 85 (1973), 289–296; Wilhelm Boeck, Picasso (Stuttgart, 1955), 206ff.; and Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown (London, 1960), 64–75. 85. It is, of course, also likely that the figures carried personal associations for Picasso—to friends, lovers, and family members. Certainly the literature on the Minotauromachy has been largely devoted to uncovering such associations. If the same concerns have been omitted from the present study, it is, at least in part, because that territory has already been so well covered. But it is also due to the fact that autobiographical readings have tended to posit direct identifications (e.g., Picasso = the Minotaur) that are completely at odds with the overdetermined nature of the imagery. We have to take seriously Picasso’s statement to Dor de la Souchère: “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.” (Quoted in Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, 159.) What is remarkable about the statement, however, is not so much Picasso’s self-association with the Minotaur as the manner in which that association is made. It can hardly be a case here of strict identification, since the Minotaur that Picasso describes is not a discrete entity but rather a figure standing at the intersection of a vast number of quite different images and events—a figure that is, in a sense, overdetermined by those referents. 86. Along these lines, we might also consider the dark hatching that spreads across the entire surface of the image. In this context, that hatching seems to gesture toward the kind of “cancellation” that would in fact be the equivalent of Bataillean sacrifice—a cancellation whose product would be a materialism so base that it would entirely (and impossibly) escape meaning. 87. When an earlier version of this chapter was presented at a symposium on Picasso and classicism several years ago, it met resistance from a colleague clearly disturbed by what he perceived to be its lack of objectivity. He insisted on the importance of intent and other criteria for firmly establishing what was actually a part of the print and what was merely the product of free association. His response was one that Caillois would have dubbed repressive, bent on denying the multiple overdeterminations of thought that it is precisely the ideogram’s function to bring to light.

notes to pages 184–191

82. This might also be the place to mention that the Ariadne/torera, more than any other figure, allows us to see the tremendous appropriateness of the Minotauromachy as a title. Given, it seems, by Christian Zervos and Alfred Barr before Picasso’s 1936 New York retrospective, the title elides the terms “Minotaur” and “tauromachy,” thereby neatly conveying the main compositional device of the print: its association of diverse (overdetermining) elements around common points of reference. On the naming of the Minotauromachy, see Sebastian and Herma Goeppert, “Picassos Minotauromachy,” in Picasso in der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1981), 24–35.

88. Caillois, The Necessity of Mind, 104. This might be the appropriate place to recall Michel Leiris’s entry in Documents’ “Critical Dictionary” for “Metamorphosis.” The definition begins: “Hors de soi.” 89. Caillois’s essay, entitled “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” has been excerpted and translated into English by John Shepley as “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1994), 16–33. 90. Caillois, Le Mythe at l’homme, 24. 91. The specific language Caillois uses to describe and define mimicry (“the desire for reintegration with an original insensibility”) is strongly—and, we have to assume, purposefully—evocative of Freud’s description of the death drive. Compare, for example, the following sentences: “If we assume that living things come later than inanimate ones and arose from them, then the death instinct fits in with the formula [of the drives] . . . to the effect that instincts tend towards a return to an earlier state” (Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 5–6). “This assimilation to space is necessarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life. It should be noted in any case that in mimetic species the phenomenon is never carried out except in a single direction: the animal mimics the plant, leaf, flower or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in relation to others. Life takes a step backwards” (Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 30). Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which first introduced the notion of a death instinct, was published in 1920 and translated into French in 1927. Significantly, Jacques Lacan—who also attended Kojève’s lectures on Hegel—very explicitly drew on both the Freudian death drive and Caillois’s discussion of mimicry in his theorization of the Gaze. Equally significant in the present context is the fact that Lacan sought to present the Gaze largely in relation to painting and the visual arts. See his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), esp. 73 and 99–100. 92. Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 254. 93. The parallels here with our discussion in the previous chapter of the relationship between Freud’s primary and secondary processes should be evident enough. Translating things into their terms, we would have to say that the Hegelian dialectic is founded on a form of repression—at least if we understand repression to be “a denial of entry into the conscious mind, not merely to specific representations, but perhaps above all to the multiple relations among representations which characterize the primary process.” 240 – 241

94. Caillois, Le Mythe et l’homme, 25. 95. Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81. (Italics in the original.) For more on Bataille’s use and understanding of myth, see also Rodolphe Gasché, System und Metaphorik

5 The Classical Prints in the Context of Picasso’s Oeuvre A version of this chapter, with some important modifications, serves as the “Picasso” entry for The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford, 1998). 1. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), esp. 262 and 283, n. 1. 2. Ibid., 271. 3. See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), esp. 120: “In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.” 4. The most complete discussion of the relation between linguistic signs and the signs of Picasso’s papiers collés and other cubist works is Yve-Alain Bois’s “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Rubin and Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 169–208. 5. Her specific argument is that the left-hand piece is the one that denotes the surface of the violin; and that the lines of type on the rightmost fragment (which was clearly cut from the other and turned back-to-front) are to be read as lines of hatching, more or less continuous with the charcoal markings below, and so designating, like them, the shadowy space alongside the instrument. See Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” 263ff. 6. The main exception, as Bois points out, was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, in his preface to Brassaï’s The Sculptures of Picasso, compares Picasso’s cubist works to “script” and refers to their elements as “signs.” See Brassaï, The Sculptures of Picasso, trans. A. D. B. Sylvester (London, 1949), n.pag.; and Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” 173. 7. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977), 50. 8. For a similar notion of how the “classical” has, historically, been constructed, see Marshall Brown’s essay “The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry, no. 9 (December 1982), 379–404. 9. Michel Leiris, “The Bullfight as Mirror,” trans. Ann Smock, October 63 (Winter 1993), 26.

notes to pages 191–206

in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (Berne, 1978), esp. chapter 1, “Die mythologische Repräsentation,” 39–148.

10. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (London, 1980), 239–240. 11. In his “Semiology of Cubism,” 170, Yve-Alain Bois notes that “during the early and midthirties one witnesses in Picasso’s art, among many, many other things, a certain return to his problematic of 1912–13. . . . One cannot but interpret the collage Picasso created in 1933 for the cover of Minotaure as an homage to his earlier papiers collés, from which it directly borrows a few elements.” The “mythological” logic that can be seen to govern both the papiers collés and the works of the thirties should perhaps be considered another manifestation of this “problematic” return.

242 – 243

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index

Acéphale, 230 (n. 7) Alpers, Svetlana, 45 Altieri, Charles, 223 (n. 21) Anti-narrative impulse in modern art, 6, 10, 39–42, 204 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 3, 9, 218 (n. 39) Ariadne, 151, 153, 188, 190, 220 (n. 50). See also Sleeping Ariadne Aristotle, 9–10, 93, 211 (n. 27) Armstrong, Carol, 227 (n. 49) Ashton, Dore, 229 (n. 63) Associationist psychology, 198 Automatic drawing, 15. See also Psychic automatism

Balzac, Honoré de: Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu,

256 – 257

99, 132–135, 224 (n. 30), 229 (n. 63) Barkan, Leonard, 62 Baroque art, 49–55, 218 (n. 39) Barr, Alfred, 239 (n. 82)

Barthes, Roland, 205, 233 (n. 26) Bataille, Georges, 140–142, 148–166, 172–173, 176, 180, 192–194, 219 (n. 47), 230 (n. 7), 236 (n. 62) “L’Art primitif,” 161–162 “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” 142, 170–172 on Hegel, 157–160, 170–172, 192 “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” 157–160 “Mouth,” 148–149, 170 and myth, 160–161, 193 “The Notion of Expenditure,” 235 (n. 46) “Rotten Sun,” 150–151, 160, 234 (n. 39) and sacrifice, 153–163, 166, 173, 239 (n. 86) “Sacrifices,” 155, 166 “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh,” 160–161 “The Solar Anus,” 151

Cahiers d’art, 18, 21, 167, 176 Caillois, Roger, 173, 230 (n. 4), 237 (n. 69), 239 (n. 87) Le Mythe et l’homme, 188–189, 191–193, 230 (n. 4) La Nécessité d’esprit, 180–186, 191 Callot, Jacques, 86–90, 222 (n. 10) Capriccio, 85–91 definition of, 86 as example of “psychic automatism,” 97 Castleman, Riva, 221 (n. 1) Cézanne, Paul, 198 Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Le. See Balzac Classical art, 210 (n. 20), 215 (n. 19) Hegel on, 11, 111, 149, 190, 196 as model of ideal human subjectivity, 11–12, 42, 111, 138, 196, 219 (n. 47), 221–222 (n. 53) sculpture as epitome of, 99–104, 196–197, 225 (n. 35) Classicism (modern), 6–7, 10–12, 29, 33, 69, 196–197

Collège de Sociologie, 173, 235 (n. 53) Corot, Camille, 211 (n. 21) Costello, Anita Coles, 226 (n. 46) “Critical Dictionary.” See Documents Crucifixion, as example of Bataillean sacrifice, 166, 169, 172, 174 Cubism, 3, 6–7, 210 (nn. 16, 17). See also Picasso: and cubism

David, Jacques-Louis, 9, 153 Death drive, 240 (n. 91) Death’s-head moth, 183 De Chirico, Giorgio, 7, 12, 94, 212 (n. 30) Degas, Edgar, 227 (n. 49) Delaunay, Robert, 68 Dermée, Paul, 6 Derrida, Jacques, 160, 164, 192–193 Desire as driving unconscious thought, xvii, 95–97 in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 157–158 and objective chance, 184, 237 (n. 75) repression of, in aesthetic contemplation, 111–112, 137–138 Despiau, Charles, 99 Dialectic, 158–160, 163–164, 172–173, 176, 184–186, 192, 232 (n. 21), 240 (n. 93). See also Hegel Documents, 140–142, 150, 161, 166, 219 (n. 47), 235 (n. 53) Doesburg, Theo van, 7–8, 49–52, 68 Dreamwork, 95–96, 179–180, 188, 224 (n. 27), 236 (n. 66) Dutoit, Ulysse, 230 (n. 69) Eluard, Paul, 184 Essentialism, 9–11, 61, 68, 211 (nn. 23, 24), 219 (n. 47)

i n dex

Benesch, Otto, 125 Bergson, Henri, 191, 210 (n. 17) Bersani, Leo, 230 (n. 69) Bianchi Bandinelli, Ranuccio, 214 (n. 7) Bloch, Georges, 213 (n. 1) Bois, Yve-Alain, 226 (n. 42), 242 (n. 11) Bolliger, Hans, 71–72, 78–81, 90, 107, 221 (n. 1) Bourdelle, Emile Antoine, 99 Braque, Georges, 210 (n. 16) Breton, André, 12, 94, 97, 184–185, 212 (n. 30), 237 (n. 75), 237–238 (n. 76) Brilliant, Richard, 215 (n. 19) Buchloh, Benjamin, 209 (n. 7) Bulletin de l’effort moderne, 7

Etruscan art, 21, 111, 214 (n. 7) characterization of, 18–19, 214 (n. 6) compared with Picasso’s etchings, 52, 213 (n. 5), 215 (n. 19) Europa, 186–188

Family resemblances, 61–62, 84–85, 179 Feddes van Harlingen, Pieter, 128 Flaxman, John, 34 Foster, Hal, 238 (n. 77) Foucault, Michel, 231 (n. 13) Fouquet, Jean, 9, 211 (n. 21) Freedberg, S. J., 219 (n. 44) Freud, Sigmund, 15, 172, 184–185, 240 (nn. 91, 93). See also Primary process on dreams, 95–96, 179–180, 188, 224 (n. 27), 236 (n. 66) on overdetermination, 180, 237 (n. 69) Fried, Michael, 107

258 – 259

Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, 7, 12 Galinsky, Karl, 42–44, 222 (n. 15) Gaze (Lacan), 240 (n. 91) George, Waldemar, 13, 24, 67–68 Giacometti, Alberto, 233 (n. 28), 237–238 (n. 76) Gilot, Françoise, 132, 213 (n. 1), 221 (n. 2), 236 (n. 62) Gleizes, Albert, 208 (n. 6) Gnosticism. See Bataille: “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” Goeppert, Sebastian, 235 (n. 50), 238 (n. 81) Goeppert-Frank, Herma, 235 (n. 50), 238 (n. 81) Gombrich, E. H., 9, 220 (n. 48) Goya, Francisco de, 86–90, 186–188, 190, 194, 222 (n. 13) Greek art. See Classical art

Griaule, Marcel, 219 (n. 47) Gris, Juan, 7, 210 (n. 16), 211 (n. 21)

Hegel, G. W. F., 145, 150, 160, 163, 170–173, 184–186, 192–194, 196, 232 (n. 21), 240 (n. 93). See also Dialectic on classical art, 11, 103, 111, 148–149, 190, 219 (n. 47), 225 (nn. 35, 37) dialectic of master and slave, 158–159, 192 Phenomenology of Spirit, 157–159, 185, 192 Held, Julius, 59 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 225 (n. 35) Hollier, Denis, 230 (nn. 3, 5), 233 (n. 29) Hubert, Henri, 166, 173–176, 193, 234 (n. 41)

Ideogram, 181–184, 186, 238 (n. 76), 239 (n. 87). See also Caillois, Roger Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 9, 211 (n. 21), 229 (n. 61), 238 (n. 81)

Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard (Le Corbusier), 33, 208 (n. 6), 211 (n. 21), 212 (n. 28) Jung, Carl, 189

Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 125, 132, 210 (n. 18), 241 (n. 6) Kleinfelder, Karen, 232 (n. 21) Knossos, 142, 230 (n. 4) Kojève, Alexandre, 157–158 Koklova, Olga, 2 Korai, 167, 211 (n. 21) Krauss, Rosalind, 198, 202, 217 (n. 27), 231 (nn. 10, 12), 233 (n. 28), 234

Labyrinths, 142, 166, 193 as structural model of thought, 151, 194 Lacan, Jacques, 240 (n. 91) Lafaye, Georges, 44, 92 Léger, Fernand, 210 (n. 16) Leighton, Patricia, 209 (n. 10) Leiris, Michel, 173, 176–178, 194, 205, 213 (n. 4), 219 (n. 47), 231 (n. 8), 236 (n. 62) Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10, 39–42, 103, 196, 204, 211 (n. 26), 212 (n. 28), 215 (n. 17) Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 106 Lhote, André, 210 (n. 16) Line, versus color, 33, 215 (n. 17) Lipchitz, Jacques, 210 (n. 16) Luquet, G. H., 161–162 Lyrical ideogram. See Ideogram

Mack, Sara, 223 (n. 17) Maillol, Aristide, 66–67, 99, 103–104 Masson, André, 15, 140, 162, 164, 166, 230 (n. 7) Le Crucifié, 155, 166, 170–172, 176 Furious Suns, 15, 17 Massacres, 153–155, 170 Minotaur, 155–156, 166 Master and slave, dialectic of, 158–159, 192, 207. See also Dialectic; Hegel Mauss, Marcel, 92, 166, 173–176, 193, 234 (n. 41), 235 (n. 53) Mayer, Susan, 213 (n. 5), 220 (n. 49) Meleager Painter, 62, 66 Melville, Stephen, 231 (n. 16), 234 (n. 35)

Metamorphosis, xvii, 49, 69, 219 (n. 47) as model of tradition, 61–62, 229 (n. 67) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 42–44, 91–92 and the Vollard Suite, 91 Metzinger, Jean, 208 (n. 6), 210 (n. 16) Mimicry, 191–192 Minos, 142, 188 Minotaur. See also Picasso: Minotauromachy; Picasso: Vollard Suite as figure for Picasso’s work, 194, 207 Greek myth of, 142, 166, 188, 193 Minotaure, 140–142 Mithra, 150–155 Morise, Max, 94–96 Mühlestein, Hans, 18, 213–214 (n. 6) Mussolini, Benito, 12 Myth Bataille and, 160–161 Caillois’s understanding of, 189–194 (see also Caillois: Le Mythe et l’homme) character of, 92–93, 206 “transformational” relationships in, 106

Napoleon Bonaparte, 14 Narrative. See Anti-narrative impulse in modern art Naville, Pierre, 95–96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 193, 232 (n. 21) Objective chance, 184–185, 237–238 (nn. 75–77) Objective ideogram. See Ideogram Orpheus, 15, 22–24, 155, 219 (n. 42). See also Picasso: Metamorphoses illustrations: Death of Orpheus Osiris, 155 Overdetermination, xvii, 151–153, 178, 180–194, 237 (n. 69), 239 (n. 87)

i n dex

(n. 42), 237–238 (n. 76), 241 (n. 5)

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso): Metamorphoses, 23–24, 28, 42–44, 45–46, 49, 52, 57, 61, 140, 194, 213 (n. 4), 219 (n. 47) compared to Virgil’s Aeneid, 15, 93 compared to Vollard Suite, 91–93, 96 structure of, 15, 91–93, 213 (n. 3), 223 (nn. 17, 21) Ozenfant, Amédée, 7, 33, 208 (n. 6), 210 (n. 16), 211 (n. 21), 212 (n. 28)

Péret, Benjamin, 153 Peruzzi, Baldassarre, 57–62, 219 (n. 44) Petiet, Henri, 71, 221 (n. 2) Picasso Balzac illustrations, 99–100, 132–135, 224 (n. 30), 229 (n. 63) classical period (1914–1925), 2, 3–4, 13, 202, 204–206, 208 (n. 6) criticism of, 3–6, 13 and cubism, 3, 197–203 The Dance, 212 (n. 32) Death of Marat, 153, 162–163, 170 Girl with Mandolin, 198–199 Guernica, 215 (n. 12), 217 (n. 33) Guitar, 212 (n. 32) “Ma Jolie,” 200–201 Metamorphoses illustrations, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 13, 15–69, 70, 72, 105, 205

. Actaeon Transformed into a Stag, 42, 217 (n. 28)

. Combat for Andromeda between Perseus and Phineus, 55

. Daughters of Minyas, 24 . Death of Eurydice, 52, 219 (n. 42) . Death of Orpheus, 15–18, 22–24, 33–34, 260 – 261

215 (n. 15)

. Deucalion and Pyrrha, 57–62, 229 (n. 67) . Fall of Phaethon, 49–52 . Hercules Slaying Nessus, 39–41

. Meleager Killing the Calydonian Boar, 35–39 . Nestor’s Stories from the Trojan War, 24 . Numa Following the Lessons of Pythagoras, 24 . placement within text, 21–24 . Procris and Cephalus, 45–49 . Sacrifice of Polyxena, 34–36, 215 (n. 19) . style of, 15–21, 52 . Tereus and Philomela, 28–33 . Vertumnus and Pomona, 62–68 . visual narrative in, 24–42, 64–67, 69 Minotaure cover, 140–141, 242 (n. 11) Minotauromachy, xvi–xvii, 165–194, 205, 207, 239 (n. 82) papiers collés, 197, 200, 202, 206, 241 (n. 4), 242 (n. 11) The Peasants’ Repast, after LeNain, 218 (n. 38) sculptures from Gisors, 225–226 (n. 38) statements by, 3, 4, 93–94, 117, 125, 132, 163, 239 (n. 85) Three Women at the Fountain, 5, 204, 218 (n. 39) Violin, 202–203, 206 Vollard Suite, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 70–138, 140–164, 165, 174, 178–180, 186, 190, 205

. “Battle of Love” series, 71, 90–91, 107–109, 112–113, 116, 135, 144–145, 164

. “Blind Minotaur” series, 71–73, 145–164, 166, 169, 179–180

. general description of, 70–71 . “Minotaur” series, 71, 81, 140–145, 164 . “Rembrandt” series, 71, 72, 125–136 . “Sculptor’s Studio” series, 71, 99–122, 142–144, 225 (n. 35)

. “Sleepwatch” images, 105–106 . structure of, 71–98 Woman with Leaves, 167–168 Woman with Stiletto, 232 (n. 24)

Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 92, 213 (n. 3)

Raynal, Maurice, 6 Rembrandt van Rijn, 125–128, 228 (n. 55), 229–230 (n. 61) The Artist and His Model, 128–137 The Blindness of Tobit, 151–152 Descent from the Cross, 174–175, 236 (n. 59) Self-Portrait with Plumed Cap, 125 Studies, 125 Révolution surréaliste, La, 12, 94–95, 209 (n. 15), 212 (nn. 30, 32) Robbins, Daniel, 221 (n. 2) Robertson Smith, William, 173 Rodin, Auguste, 103–104 Romains, Jules, 103–105, 225 (n. 35) Rosenberg, Léonce, 7, 210 (n. 18) Rubens, Peter Paul, 45–49, 136, 218 (n. 39) Descent from the Cross, 236 (n. 59) paintings for the Torre de la Parada, 45–65

. Aurora, 218 (n. 36) . Bacchus and Ariadne, 62–65 . Cadmus and Minerva, 52–55

. Daedalus and the Minotaur, 218 (n. 36) . Death of Eurydice, 52, 219 (n. 42) . Deucalion and Pyrrha, 57–62 . The Fall of Phaethon, 49–52 . Procris and Cephalus, 45–49 . Vertumnus and Pomona, 62–64, 220 (n. 50) Sacrifice, 153–178, 193–194, 239 (n. 86) of a god, 155, 161, 164, 166, 174, 178, 193 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 200, 202, 241 (n. 3) Saxl, Fritz, 128 Sculpture, classical. See Classical art Secondary processes, 137–138, 230 (n. 69), 240 (n. 93) Semiotics. See Saussure; Structural analysis Seurat, Georges, 211 (n. 21) Severini, Gino, 7, 210 (n. 16) Silver, Kenneth, 209 (n. 10), 210 (n. 17), 212 (n. 28), 215 (n. 17), 218 (n. 39) Skira, Albert, 14–15, 21, 24, 140, 194, 213 (n. 3), 214 (n. 11) Sleeping Ariadne, 188–190 Steinberg, Leo, 34, 105–106, 112–113, 116–117, 197, 206, 215 (n. 18), 227 (n. 47), 229 (n. 61) Steiner, Wendy, 106, 227 (n. 52) Structural analysis, 98 and semiotics, 200–204, 241 (n. 3) of Vollard Suite images, 98–138 Summers, David, 211 (n. 24) Surrealism, 12, 15, 94–97, 184, 212 (nn. 30, 32), 213 (n. 4). See also Automatic drawing; Psychic automatism Symons, Peter, 45–46

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Poussin, Nicolas, 9, 49, 211 (n. 21), 218 (n. 39) Praetorius, Michael, 86 Praying mantis, 182–184 Primary process, 95–98, 136–137, 240 (n. 93) Prometheus, 150, 161 Psychasthenia, 191–192, 240 (n. 91) Psychic automatism, 94–97, 191. See also Ideogram “Pure painting,” 3, 6, 204 Pygmalion, 128–132, 135

Tankard, Alice Doumanian, 217 (n. 33) Tériade (Efstratias Elestheriades), 6 Theseus, 81, 142, 193 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 186–188, 190 Torre de la Parada. See Rubens Tradition, 52, 61–62, 68 “Transformational” relationships, 106

Unconscious, 94–97, 137–138, 184–185, 237 (n. 69). See also Primary process Unity, 52, 93, 211 (n. 27)

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 206, 223 (n. 18) Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro): Aeneid, 15, 93, 213 (n. 2) Vollard, Ambroise, 71, 221 (n. 1), 224 (n. 30). See also Picasso: Vollard Suite Vorsterman, Lucas, 236 (n. 59)

White, Christopher, 128 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 10, 11, 196 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 84–85 Zervos, Christian, 18, 21, 39, 239 (n. 82)

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