Picasso: Selected Essays 9780226816609

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Picasso

Essays by Leo Steinberg Edited by Sheila Schwartz

Picasso S e l e c t e d E s s ays

Leo Steinberg Edited by Sheila Schwartz

The University of Chicago Press | Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by Sheila Schwartz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in Italy 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81659-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81660-9 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816609.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011, author. | Schwartz, Sheila, editor. | Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011. Essays. Selections. 2018. Title: Picasso : selected essays / Leo Steinberg ; edited by Sheila Schwartz. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Essays by Leo Steinberg | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021046172 | ISBN 9780226816593 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816609 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC ND553.P5 S785 2022 | DDC 759.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046172 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments, Sheila Schwartz vii Introduction, Richard Shiff xi

1.

The Intelligence of Picasso 1

2.

Drawing as If to Possess 41

3.

The Prague Self-Portrait 58

4.

The Philosophical Brothel 71

5.

Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women 117

6.

The Polemical Part 140

7.

Touring the Stockholm Collage 155

8.

In the Algerian Room 165

9.

A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch 170

10.

Picasso’s Endgame 176

11.

“Belied with False Compare” 189 Notes 207 Leo Steinberg: Chronology

231

Leo Steinberg: Publications (1947–2010) Photography Credits 241 Index 243

235

Preface and Ac kn ow le d g m e n ts

L

eo Steinberg greeted the turn of the millennium with a new venture in mind: the republication of about a dozen of his most important Old Master essays in a single volume, a companion to Other Criteria, his 1972 compendium on modern art. But, as he passed eighty, the burden of time began to weigh upon him and instead he opened files on unpublished matter, eager to work up what had not yet been scripted and engage in fresh writing tasks. In the two years before his death in 2011, however, another, larger project evolved: the posthumous publication of essays in all fields written during his six-decade career, along with some unpublished lectures.1 His hope was that I would bring off what he had neither the years nor the inclination to do. The present volume on Picasso is the fourth in a planned series, the fifth to cover other modern and contemporary artists. Excluded here are the three Picasso essays published in Other Criteria in 1972: “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers,” “The Skulls of Picasso,” and “ The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large.” Other Criteria remains in print, whereas unpublished or less readily accessible works needed accommodation. A word about “The Algerian Women”: at more than one hundred printed pages, it was Steinberg’s first extended foray into Picasso. The subject was Picasso’s lifelong bid to grasp things at a glance from more than one station, as if his drawing were “an embrace gifted with sight”; it remains fundamental to Steinberg’s later work on Picasso.2 I leave to Richard Shiff an explication de texte, addressing instead the biographical origins of Steinberg’s arthistorical method.

Steinberg had a well-earned reputation as a writer of fine prose, which won him both praise and blame from fellow art historians. He often recalled Walter Friedlaender’s judgment at a faculty conference during his graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts: “I don’t trust Leo Steinberg, he writes too well.”3 Anyone concerned with style could not be concerned with scholarship; if it doesn’t sound like art history, it isn’t. Steinberg’s dedication to English style was that of a foreigner who had to learn what native speakers took for granted. English was his fourth language, preceded by Russian, Hebrew, and German. He arrived in London from Berlin in May 1933, not quite thirteen years old, fluent in German, able to mimic half a dozen dialects, but without a word of English. He quickly came to resent English as the “instrument of my impotence” and “humiliation.”4 At age seventeen, however, he decided that English would be his language and began to school himself in its literature—Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Dickens. English, he soon realized, was as noble a language as German. He memorized Shakespeare sonnets, pages from Paradise Lost, and long prose passages from other favorite authors, “reciting them to myself in order to internalize the rhythms of English prose and verse.”5 A friend gave him a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which became his cicerone to English. “I had the naive notion that any word or turn of phrase in Ulysses that was unfamiliar to me was unfamiliar because I was a bloody foreigner, and of course any native English speaker would know words like ‘tholsel’ or ‘inkle.’ I

Preface and Acknowled gments [viii]

would look every one of them up.”6 Late in life, he still knew pages of Ulysses by heart. This internalized vocabulary—and syntax, styles, and structures— of great English literature became a vast linguistic resource. And writing, he taught me in the more than four decades we worked together, was thinking. Ideas and narrative structures evolve and are refined— or forsaken—in the search for the most precise and expressive locution. Put into the service of art history, his prose illuminated the subject, revealing what a more pedestrian style would keep hidden. Richard Shiff put it well: “Leo’s writing has the freshness of speech, even though he fussed over choice of word, syntax, and meter, just as a painter might fuss over nuances of color and the rhythms of strokes, without detriment to the overall picture. His models included Shakespeare and Joyce, writers who took delight in sound without losing the deeper reaches of sense.  .  .  . Such sonorous writing risks striking its reader as self-indulgent, too finely orchestrated, leaving the impression that the rhetoric is the message. . . . [But] his descriptive terms and analytical concepts bore an organic relationship to whichever art objects he brought under investigation. He set eye and mind to the immediate task, as opposed to administering a fixed vocabulary, a fashionable method, or a hierarchy of values.”7 The roots of Steinberg’s art history lie equally in his training as an artist. He enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, London, age sixteen. At graduation four years later, a skilled draftsman with prizes in hand for drawing and sculpture, he “had the good sense to know” that a career as a professional artist was not for him.8 But he continued to draw from the model and sculpt portraits of friends. In 1948, looking for a way to support himself in New York, he got a job teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, adding art history lectures to his course load in 1951. He taught at Parsons through the 1950s, drawing along with the students, even while studying art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, writing contemporary exhibition reviews for Arts Magazine, and becoming renowned for

his lectures at the 92nd Street Y and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Long after he was an established art historian, he would now and then join artist friends for drawing sessions with a live model.9 Steinberg brought his artist’s eye to the study of art history. To understand a painted composition, sculpted figure, or building, to follow the creator’s thought, he drew it, in whole and in part, over and again. He respected every inch of a work as the product of an artist’s decision. Nothing, even if unsuccessful, was accidental or casual. Thus too the alterations made to great works of art by copyists: he saw these alterations not as incompetence, but as negative criticism, visual corrections of perceived flaws that serve to reveal the intentionality of the original. Comprehending an artwork extended beyond twodimensional replication. Steinberg often said that he didn’t trust art historians who’d never drawn and never danced.10 He didn’t mean those who’d never waltzed, but rather those who never tried to translate looking into physical equivalencies, to animate static art with gestural simulations. He taught his students that mere looking was never enough. They had to hold the figure’s pose “till the strains of it become an inward intuition.” “At stake is the identity of an action, its feel and import. It has to be danced to be known.”11 Drawing, writing, dancing painted and sculpted figures—all this built the foundation for Steinberg’s art history. We see it in the indefatigable conjunction of form and content. Nearly everything Steinberg wrote includes passages of old-fashioned formal analysis. “The very distinction of form and symbol, insofar as it suggests different things, appears as an imposition, a projection from habits of language.”12 Looking long and hard, reaching into his verbal storehouse, he describes what is seen—and drawn and danced. But in Steinberg’s work, such description becomes the basis for interpretative erudition. However learned his footnotes or discussions of difficult theological and critical issues, these textual reinforcements always followed visual analysis. He went to the museum before he went to the library.

Preface and Acknowled gments

The primacy of the visual is a credo of Steinberg’s thinking about art. He titled the series of six Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1995–96 “ The Mute Image and the Meddling Text,” pleading against what he elsewhere called the “tyranny of the written word.” His writings are punctuated with such statements as “let thinking take off from what comes in at the eye.” Or “the primary problem is simply our educated reluctance to take seeing seriously; for it is easier to read and rely on one’s reading than to keep vision alerted and trust appearances. Reading discursive prose, we feel confident that the vehicles of signification are guaranteed, that meaning is promoted . . . by dint of words. . . . In parsing a painting, one stoops to inferior orders of certainty, and it is understandable that folks who seek surety while looking at art reach for collateral reading.”13 Finally, at the end of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, he explains one of the reasons why he risked hypothetical interpretations: “to remind the literate among us that there are moments, even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.” Peppering the critical objections to Steinberg’s art history is the accusation of overinterpretation, of claiming more than the artist could have intended. Let Steinberg again speak for himself: “A word needs to be said about the limits and license of interpretation. I am aware of the position that frowns on excessively free speculation at the expense of the masters. But there are, after all, two ways to inflict injustice on a great work of art; by over-interpreting it, or by under-estimating its meaning. If unverifiable interpretations are rightly regarded as dangerous, there is as much danger of misrepresentation in restrictive assertions that feel safe only because they say little. . . . [T]he probity of resisting interpretation is not the virtue to which I aspired. . . . [N]othing would seem to me more foolhardy than to project upon [an artist’s] symbolic structures a personal preference for simplicity.”14

Notes to the Texts After the first two chapters, the book follows Picasso’s chronology of creation and incorporates notes and revisions Steinberg made in the years subsequent to each publication. In the case of lectures, I have added endnotes from material in his files. A word about these previously unpublished lectures, one of which begins this volume. From the early 1950s on, Steinberg was a sought-after lecturer in museums and institutions here and abroad. He used the occasion of a lecture to work out and test new ideas, in the expectation of eventually publishing them. Sometimes he did manage to publish; but more often, his speaking schedule as well as teaching obligations kept important lecture material from reaching the printed page. Steinberg poured as much effort into lectures as he did into published books and essays, though such effort took time away from writing. But he felt a sense of responsibility to his listeners, a conviction that they deserved his very best. Even when a lecture was repeated over the years, he revised it for each venue, updating and improving it. Moreover, he treated the spoken word differently from the written: “I try to write the lecture not as publishable prose, but as speech to a living audience. It’s written the way a playwright might write dialogue, to sound spontaneous.”15 Little wonder that he usually played to packed houses. Lecture texts originally took the form of typed notes on small cards, with much adlibbed. But around 1980, with his reputation as a lecturer secure, he began to write out his lectures in full, every word, every impromptu aside, with notations for emphasis and pace—all so as not to disappoint the audience’s expectations, no less than to avoid the clichés born of improvisation.16 It is these lectures that he authorized me to include in the present series. The literature cited or discussed by Steinberg reflects what was relevant to him at the time of publication. If his postpublication notes contained comments on or references to later literature, they have been included. The attentive reader will observe that some literature which Steinberg must have known goes unmentioned.

[ix]

Preface and Acknowled gments [x]

These omissions were intentional, for they often involved text-based interpretations completely at odds with his image-based principles. No point, he felt, in arguing apples and oranges. He would dismiss such literature in the spirit of Dante, guarda e passa.

Acknowledgments Ever since Steinberg published “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun” (1980)—“a mischievous satire” to divert those who have been “struck by a certain selfaddressed puffery amidst the ostentation of thanks”— I’ve been aware of how easily the form can slip into inadvertent parody, though the acknowledgments he wrote for his own books raise the prefatory convention to a literary level. No matter the challenge, these volumes would not have seen print without the pragmatic and affective support of those who follow. Steinberg’s dear friends Paula and Herbert Molner and Kate Ganz cheered me on as I made the transition from working with Leo to working without him. YveAlain Bois, Jack Flam, and Richard Shiff read parts of the Picasso typescript, offering astute counsel and catching errors that slipped in during the preparation of this volume. Lisa Florman settled a thorny issue in Demoiselles studies. Among those who nourished the series from the outset was Olivia Powell, Steinberg’s last research assistant; she became my own indispensable researcher, whose quick trips to the library kept the production of these volumes on a steady course. Equally essential have been her responsive and intelligent comments on parts of this manuscript. Christine Smith, professor of architectural history at Harvard and my good friend for decades, answered pesky questions on architectural affairs with patience and expertise. Another old friend, Charlotte Daudon-Lacaze in Paris, stepped in to help investigate illuminated manuscripts and arrange contacts in French museums. Renaissance man John Cunnally was Leo’s student and assistant at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s. A longtime professor at Iowa State University, he came through with insights into numismatic forgeries as well as difficult Greek and

Latin translations. Alexander Nagel, who wrote the introduction to the volume on Michelangelo’s paintings, has been a stalwart advocate of the entire series. My meetings and email exchanges with Daniele Di Cola have added immeasurably to these volumes. Di Cola’s PhD thesis for the Sapienza, University of Rome, explored the foundations and intellectual context of Steinberg’s art history; he was also the motivating force behind the May 2017 symposium in Rome, “Leo Steinberg Now,” whose proceedings will soon be published by Campisano Editore.17 I was fortunate to have the aid of James Whitman Toftness, then assistant editor at the University of Chicago Press, whom I enlisted to oversee the messy business of securing images and permissions; his technical expertise helped ensure the quality of the reproductions. Christine Schwab’s sharp eye guaranteed editorial consistency in a disparate volume. Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the press, arrived there in 1996, just as the revised edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion was going into production. She saw the book to completion with patient skill and soon became Leo’s supportive confidante in the publishing world. It is with great pleasure that I put this project in her proficient hands. My largest debt is to Prudence Crowther, a staunch and devoted friend to Leo in his last decade. She has been a constant companion in this publication venture, offering both encouragement and wise editorial feedback. But my debt to her began at Leo’s death. The job of closing his apartment was a melancholy one. His presence, and his absence, abided in every pile of papers, every book, in his scattered jars of pencil stubs and the dust layers on long-abandoned projects. For fifteen months, Prudence worked closely with me in the excavation of a man’s life, helping to sort, organize, or recycle thousands of documents and sustaining me with sound advice, welcome humor, and shared emotions. It would have been an impossibly lonely job without her. Sheila Schwartz New York, 202 1

Introduction Richard Shiff

A

ttributing a critical method to Leo Steinberg is surely possible—every critical thinker has one— yet I hesitate to articulate his. Steinberg disdained analysis that adhered to theoretical principle and procedural structure. When he invoked theory (philosophical, theological, historiographical, linguistic), he matched particular to particular, wary of generalizing from the correspondences. His essays kept their conclusions aligned with the specifics of the sensory experience initially motivating each study. Method? Not much of one. Steinberg confined his elements of organization to lists of possibilities and enumerations of alternatives along with straightforward presentations of chronological sequence (one image or pictorial conceit following on another).1 Many of Steinberg’s analytical gestures suggest that we learn more from the example of art than from his example, which only leads back to the art. No doubt some of his respect for the activities of artists derived from his substantial studio experience with life drawing. But Steinberg devoted most of his creative energy to refining the expository, interpretive, and rhetorical features of his writing. A Steinberg text is never far from the spoken word. His public lectures were riveting, attending to vocalization as much as to discursive flow. Before a live audience, as also in print, he resorted to direct vocative address (a degenerate vocative because the addressee goes unnamed). He would ask his listener or reader to perform an action and trust the ensuing experience. Eliciting his tacit interlocutor’s sensations replaced suasion by a logic or method of analysis. Do it, Steinberg instructed; focus on a feature of this art

and imitate it as gesture or posture. Beyond seeing it, you will feel it and think it. Viewing Pablo Picasso’s Bust of a Woman of 1932 (fig. 10.5), Steinberg perceived a “consciousness folded in on itself [in] meditative inaction.” He supported his characterization by pointing to a telling graphic detail, a conflation of lip and fingernail. “You might try it yourself,” he wrote in “Picasso’s Endgame”: “press a finger’s length to your lips, gently, and mutual surfaces yield and pulp into each other” (pp. 177–78). His vocative amounted to a provocation, because a reader absorbed in the text translates “you might” into “I should.” “Pulp” becomes the feeling Picasso represented, a sensation both intimate and active and best comprehended by mimicking pulping. To pulp: Steinberg verbalizes the noun, extending it well beyond its reference to paper or fruit toward a palpable communion of interiorities. He understood Picasso himself as actively pulping into his painted subjects. The artist lived into the bodies he observed and the representations he created, lived into them by “vicarious inhabitation [with] intrusions into selves other than his” (p. 177). So, too, Steinberg the writer was pulping; and so, too, would his attentive readers, whatever their gender orientation. Despite speaking with a male voice about a male artist, Steinberg eroticized his textual presentation pansexually. When Steinberg asked his imagined interlocutor to imitate a gesture—or merely attend closely to his language—he was enacting through the text one of the lessons he derived from studying Picasso’s art: “a meeting of persons is a reciprocal mirroring. . . . The self sunders to retrieve itself and re-selve in mutual awareness” (p.

Introduction [xii]

101).2 As viewers of Picasso, as readers of Steinberg, we yield—we pulp—a bit of our fixed sense of self in a continuing process of selving. The result is an enhanced sensibility, an increase in emotional and intellectual acuity. In “The Philosophical Brothel,” Steinberg avoided psychoanalytic theory as he developed his sense of self and selving. Instead, he cited a seventeenth-century Spanish novel in which a person of critical intelligence encounters a person of instinct, exemplifying the “classical Spanish notion that self-discovery occurs in intercourse with another” (p. 101). Perhaps Steinberg plays intellect to Picasso’s instinct; but a reader of Steinberg on Picasso surmises that both embodied both. Tracing the formal evolution of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (fig. 4.1), Steinberg unpacks its “sexual metaphor”: “the direct axial address, the spasmodic action, the explosive release in a constricted space, and the reciprocity of engulfment and penetration” (p. 109). He concludes his essay with an analogy worthy of a cultural historian: “Like those mystics of old who used sexual metaphor to express union with the divine, so Picasso will have used sexuality to make visible the immediacy of communion with art. Explosive form and erotic content become reciprocal metaphors” (p. 109). If the Demoiselles—the painting, not the five women depicted—has sex with its pansexual viewer, then the Picasso-Steinberg image of pulping, suited to this “constricted space,” offers a chaste form of autoeroticism. To derive from all this the commonplace notion that art sublimates sex would trivialize the probing specificity of Steinberg’s observations. Do I nevertheless impute to Steinberg elements of a theoretical program even as I deny that he had one? This talk of mirroring, imitating, reciprocity, pulping into, re-selving—it all evokes modes of psychoanalysis and literary criticism familiar to students of the 1970s and 1980s. But Steinberg had no prescribed scholarly guidance system; his close looking, disciplined archival work, and scrupulous self-editing were coupled with his critical anarchism. His career encompassed decades of formalism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism as well as discourses of gendered and queered identity. Each of these methodological and

moral persuasions found compelling historical justification even as Steinberg persisted without cover of a theory. Remaining apart from currents affecting his home discipline of art history, he expressed an out-of-fashion humanism as he studied Picasso’s phenomenological imagination and technical inventiveness. His writing conjured verbal and pictorial projections of the artist’s sexuality, sense of family, and attitude toward aging and death: “the psychic energy which powered [Picasso’s] revolution flowed from the artist’s total humanity— from his meditation on man and woman no less than from his struggle with art” (p. 102). Just when Steinberg devoted a concentrated burst of critical energy to Picasso, the art and its artist were falling irretrievably out of favor. Steinberg commented in 1988, in a “retrospect” to the republication of “ The Philosophical Brothel”: “Today it is difficult to reconstruct the dismissive anti-Picasso stance adopted . . . by New York’s opinion makers” (p. 110). He was referring to 1972, when the essay first appeared, six months before Picasso died. He expressed the sadness he now felt, having “ceased to be Picasso’s contemporary”: “The privilege of confronting the Demoiselles as the work of a living man has been rescinded” (p. 116). Because Steinberg faced the totality of Picasso’s art as a living image and object, it mattered that the self that generated this work was no longer regenerating both art and itself, re-selving in the process. Steinberg entertained concepts, principles, methods, and aims; but they emerged only through study of the art that drew his attention, “myself content to observe what Picasso did” (p. 143). Though looking preceded conceptualizing, the critic’s eye was hardly innocent; he recognized that art arrived with preexisting conditions, its cultural context and its maker’s identity. As a counter to his own habits of mind and eye, he utilized writing as a creative process of discovery. It was as if language, through its practice—part Augustine, part Shakespeare, part Nietzsche, part Joyce, part everyone—released to Steinberg thoughts and observations not entirely his. Through writing, he related his experience of art, at once immediate and pondered. He developed his language as a medium of expression adequate to the task of

Introduction

pondering art analytically while preserving its sensory immediacy. When he hit on the verbal construct pulp into to describe the feel of finger-and-lip, the sensation of two hypersensitive anatomies merging, I suspect that the term acquired unexpected implications. The words we find mean more than we intend. In “Drawing as If to Possess,” Steinberg used a fifteenth-century engraving of several female nudes as a foil to Picasso’s alternative mode of observing a body. The engraver “models each insulate aspect [front, back, side, oblique] in order to know. Picasso, knowing each aspect, wants to have them in simultaneity” (p. 45). Why the rare adjective insulate, rather than the adjective isolate, still unusual but less so? To me, insulate connotes insularity or self-containment rather than the somewhat figurative sense that the corresponding verb acquires in relation to electrical or home insulation. My reading connotes the word as much by its sound as by its etymology (which isolate shares). An insulate aspect is one isolated-in-itself (selved) as opposed to one isolated by external circumstances and contingencies. An insulate aspect exists independent of perspective or context. At least in Steinberg’s rendering, the term seems antithetical to isolate, which connotes an isolation imposed, perhaps by the application of a system of analysis: a canon of pictorial beauty isolates beautiful aspects. In Steinberg’s understanding, Picasso seeks a living whole, an integration of parts counteracting their traditional structural distribution. Does it matter to the message of the text whether the adjective is insulate or isolate? Maybe not. But the difference would register within the observational and rhetorical processes that Steinberg enjoined, with words illuminating a path for thought. Readers will be affected depending on how attentively they read. Unfamiliar phrasing disrupts a superficial perusal, encouraging focus. I prefer to think that insulate extends beyond introducing an erudite variant of isolate (itself a variant of the familiar isolated). Rather, Steinberg’s choice teases out a subtle distinction through the language itself—a distinction that the specific phrasing clarifies even to the writer who formulates the thought. This may be the point: the tradition of

art, for the sake of its organized science, isolates what is insulate, cataloguing it, archiving it, standardizing its presentation. In “ The Intelligence of Picasso,” Steinberg considers the artist’s apparent boast that he never drew in a childlike manner—in other words, he had never been ignorant of the accumulated cultural archive and its norms. In fact, as Steinberg demonstrates, Picasso’s statement expresses regret for having been introduced to adult methods at too early an age, denied the obliviousness of naive drawing (pp. 1–2). Over his long professional career, Picasso sought to reintegrate isolated pictorial aspects, viewing them as insulate matter for internalized study; he would feel what he was observing and rendering. And feelings spout from his images. Hence, Steinberg’s experience of the Demoiselles as a “reciprocity of engulfment and penetration.” As we know, he called this work Picasso’s “sexual metaphor,” but only from the distance of critical interpretation (p. 109). Metaphor, by equating or comparing one quality to another, is inherently indirect. Steinberg’s immediate experience of the Demoiselles was too felt to be figurative. Lacking a metaphoric veneer, it was sex aestheticized.3 Often terse or blunt, Picasso’s pictorial devices answered to his “deepening sense of the disparity between things seen in the round and their simulacra on a flat ground. . . . [H]e would forge his own means to match the reasoning of his eyes” (pp. 64, 65). The artist zeroed in on the concrete elements of visual representation, configuring them as a poet figures words by attending to their qualities—alliteration, meter, rhyme, assonance, spacing—devices operating below the level of figuration by metaphor or allegory. Steinberg, too, forged novel means with his concentration on the elements of language. When he describes Picasso’s view of a boat at harbor, his phrasing mimics the rhythm to which he alludes: “the rhythmic play of light over arris and edge” (p. 26). Sound and meter are likely to affect the reader subliminally in advance of sense and reference. As Steinberg tracked Picasso’s reinvention of picturing, his texts conveyed a refinement worthy of the artist’s visual nuance. Yet like Picasso, resort to blunt

[xiii]

Introduction [xiv]

force was often his inclination. At one point, Steinberg animated one of the demoiselles, observing that she “wrenches her face around” (p. 84). Of course, it was Picasso who skewed the figure’s comportment. Wrenching a face (not the head) is a disfiguring movement, to which Steinberg applies his suitably aggressive verb. Consider this comparable passage of two sentences, restricted to words of one or two syllables. It inventories what Steinberg succinctly labeled the “vagrant aspects” of Picasso’s pictorial manipulation: “A right profile settles upon a left side. A cloven curve, fetched from behind, buttocks a frontal view” (p. 57). The description pertains to a standing female nude, Large Nude Woman, a linoleum cut of 1962 (fig. 2.24). Viewing such works, Steinberg referred to the “close weave of disparate aspects” (p. 57). Profiles and distinctive anatomical features are insulate elements, the “disparate aspects.” Integrating them, Picasso also allowed them to wander. Or, as Steinberg might put it, capturing the forceful action, Picasso wandered them. By picturing a body in the flat yet with full volume available to the eye—rendering front, back, and side, all prominent features included—Picasso, Steinberg observed, performed an “embrace gifted with sight” (p. 57). This new variety of pictorial simulacrum realized the long-term goal of projection-in-the-round by a painter who practiced sculpture as well. Committing such innovation to words, Steinberg converted buttocks to a verb in the present tense: Picasso “buttocks a frontal view.” Just as the writer pressed a noun into unexpected verbal service, the artist’s representation violated fundamental figural decorum by pulling the body’s backside forward. The female nude, a culturally sanctioned, decorous subject, lost its easel-ready and camera-ready fixity. The upright human body, female or male, was such a conventional object of art that its classical aesthetics had gradually de-eroticized it—which is something of a contradiction because, one might argue, whatever is to be appreciated aesthetically, by appealing to the senses, must stimulate the sense of the erotic. In the nude of 1962, one of many similar cases, Picasso turned the posterior into an aspect of frontal perspective, the entire “cloven curve” of it. Steinberg understood this

buttocking as a means to endow an act of tactile embrace with vision, so that front and back constitute an immediate optical unity, what he called an “ambiguous simultaneity”—a backside, projected to the front, remains nevertheless at the back (p. 55). The issue of simultaneity was germane to Steinberg’s cumulative study of Picasso if only because the concept had been a central feature of the interpretation of Cubism, the revolutionary style to which the great majority of critics attached Picasso’s aesthetic and cultural value. The persistent association of the artist’s genius with certain formal innovations achieved early in his career led commentators to neglect his later decades—a situation Steinberg viewed as a serious lapse of attention that demanded correction: “The phrase ‘Cubist simultaneity of point of view’ has been with us so long that it was taken to cover whatever else in that line there was to invent. . . . [It] substituted for looking” (p. 56).4 By selecting a nude of 1962 for trenchant analysis near the conclusion of “Drawing as If to Possess,” Steinberg stressed the long evolution of Picasso’s effort to reconceive the picturing of volume in the flat. The project produced simultaneity but not the Cubist kind, which was premised on a succession of multiple external views, an optical analysis far removed from a tactile “embrace gifted with sight.” Steinberg notes that Picasso, especially during the 1940s, painted women as if they were unobserved, selfabsorbed, and even preconscious, their bodies offering no appearance, bodies existing “before the invention of beauty.” “Such figures,” he wrote, “are often best understood as bodies which the artist’s imagination seeks to inhabit, so as to arrive at the manifest from inside. . . . Picasso is saying that any apparency [owes its] seeming to the vantage point of a looker. Whereas the mix of aspects in simultaneity can be made to imply unobserved selfhood, the artist identifying his own kinesthesia with the impulse of the depicted” (p. 178). In other words, to depict aspects in simultaneity differs from showing apparency in multiple—the many external viewpoints of the Cubist manner. Picasso paints human bodies the way a body feels to its inhabitant in its wholeness, which is analogous to how he feels within his body. His

Introduction

art of re-selving generates a situation of sympathetic pansexuality. Steinberg observed variants of buttocking and related “ambiguous simultaneity” in Picasso’s oeuvre from the first decade of the twentieth century onward (p. 216, note 51). The Bather of 1908–9 (fig. 2.22) expresses this “impulse to possess” by inhabitation. It manifests “both pubis and rump, and a good deal more backbone than a frontal perspective allows. The splay-out principle . . . confirm[s] a known fullness of body by wrenching its averted sides into view” (pp. 53, 55). We recall that Steinberg referred to a face wrenched around in one of Picasso’s studies. Wrenching, an abrupt displacement, is analogous to buttocking, though less specific since any body part can be wrenched (or even pulped) but only buttocks are buttocked. For Steinberg, who coordinated analysis of form with interpretation of subject matter, as for Picasso, who demeaned the pretentiousness of a “pure” abstract art, such manipulations did not violate the body nor even represent its figured violation. An appearance of “violence” results from flouting pictorial convention. Picasso’s radical reconfiguration of the body extended perceptual understanding in the interest of humanistic selving and re-selving. It nevertheless goes against the perceptual habits and moral judgment of many viewers to distinguish between violating a body and violating the normative image of a body, its canonical beauty. Although beautifully painted in technical respects— tonal harmony, variation in optical and tactile texture, rhythmic distribution of facture—Picasso’s Bather is hardly beautiful as a representation of human form. It is female, though a male with such “wrenched” characteristics would fare no better. Again, the judgment hinges on comparison with conventional standards of depiction. Addressing Picasso, whether as aging contemporary or historical luminary and with all periods of the artist’s productivity in mind, Steinberg had to catch a moving target without arresting the movement. “As the scrambling of aspects continues, . . . one looks and keeps looking, marveling how these impossible contradictions become necessities, until you wonder how we ever put up with the poor showing of one-sided

representation”—unwrenched representation (p. 57). A possible response to the wonder: conventional representation was tolerated because it affirmed a standard of beauty, presumed eternal. Perhaps, to repeat Steinberg’s phrasing from a different context, Picasso with his Bather returned art to an era “before the invention of beauty,” before an aesthetic canon determined what was proper and what improper. Picasso released the human figure from the bonds of normative beauty. Our aspects become free to appear as they feel. Facing the challenge of an aesthetics without “beauty,” Steinberg’s essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” (1972, centerpiece of the collection Other Criteria) introduced the term devenustation, applying it to the Demoiselles and then to the Bather painted the following year.5 Regarding the latter work, Steinberg, with sly irony, invoked its threat to existing cultural values: Picasso’s innovative rendering came “at the cost of devenustation” affecting “the female anatomy”— traditionally, the physical manifestation of the abstract concept of beauty.6 Devenustation, a term long abandoned, refers to the loss or removal of beauty. What Picasso gained with his “embrace” of the human body entailed this deficit. The look of the Bather raises an aesthetic dilemma for philistines: is it the art, the rendering, that lacks beauty, or is the picture showing an ugly, deformed person? A more sophisticated query: How can competent art, inherently aesthetic, be devoid of beauty? In any case, by any standard (even early Cubist practice), this body, Picasso’s Bather, is awkward. Much of the public of Steinberg’s time, as now, considered Picasso’s art devenustated in toto. Devenustation is an obscure word but not a neologism, nor, as Steinberg might have said (coining a neologism) a leologism.7 So, too, buttock as a verb is not invented. In wrestling, to buttock refers to a throw that involves shifting the position of the buttocks to gain leverage. Perhaps the connection is apt and reinforces the sense of stretch, stress, and wrench in Picasso’s depiction of visual embrace. Yet Steinberg’s usage is neither metaphorical (like “visual embrace” itself ) nor otherwise allusive. This is the beauty, elegance, precision, concision, poetry of his language—whatever quality

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Introduction [xvi]

we ascribe to it as most apt. Though embedded in analytical prose within an interpretive text, the language seems unanalytic, too direct to be deductive or even inductive. To buttock: placing the buttocks here or there on a represented human figure. Does the term signify an intuition, analogous to Picasso’s own? It introduces an aspect proper to a selving body. Words act. Buttock in Steinberg’s context is a word with its base physicality exposed by the most proper usage we imagine—usage that seems literal. The reference is as physical as the sound of the word with its hard consonants and pair of syllables abutted at the doubled t. “To buttock” a figure refers to positioning this feature, this insulate aspect, into view. Writing on Picasso, Steinberg used many striking metaphors. Yet I find it remarkable how often he managed to invoke the physical experience the artist represented as well as his own viewing experience, by capturing the gist, all without metaphorizing. Instead, he relied on the verbal force of his terms (their implied action) as well as the sound and meter of their phrasing (their impact on the sensibility of the reader). “To buttock” is straight-up description, direct, enlisting the power of the word in lieu of rhetorical figuration or intertextuality. You don’t internalize bodily feeling through metaphor. Even rather abstract relations of spatial order received from Steinberg verbs that animate without invoking metaphor. When viewing a still-life collage (fig. 7.1), for which description would associate and analogize certain elements with others, he took a lexical shortcut by using the verb assort (this “assorts with” that). In the same text, we encounter Picasso’s line “incidented,” that is, altered by incident (something befalls it) (p. 160). This odd predicate adjective succinctly collapses the graphic gesture into a single term of action. Yet no dictionary at my disposal lists incident as the verb that could produce the verbal adjective. Here, Steinberg may have turned to leologizing. A reader sensitive to language feels solicited, then seduced by Steinberg’s words. The text conveys Picasso’s

art as it projects a self, one that belongs to the image; it selves with the reader’s self. Though Steinberg exceled at concision, his verbalization was only occasionally as concrete as pulp, buttock, or incidented.8 He sometimes resorted to allegory, as in generating an evolutionary “nativity story” to account for peculiarities in the misleadingly titled Three Women (fig. 5.1; p. 138). At times, when a composition was correspondingly complex, he cascaded waves of metaphor. Many have noted his eroticized description of Picasso’s sexualized Demoiselles, an instance of copulative immersion, text and image: “This is an interior space in compression, like the inside of pleated bellows, like the feel of an inhabited pocket, a contracting sheath heated by the massed human presence. The space of the Demoiselles is . . . [n]ot a visual continuum, but an interior apprehended on the model of touch and stretch, a nest known by intermittent palpation, or by reaching and rolling, by extending one’s self within it” (p. 109).9 The verbal action is that of vagina and penis, yet the eroticism is all too human to be limited by gender specificity. I have referred to a pansexual humanism in Steinberg and Picasso, a source of the critic’s attraction to the artist. Despite allusions to human sexuality, which appear in Steinberg’s descriptions as naturally as they do in Picasso’s imagery, it is his language, the flow of his thought, that is sexy. I mean this in the colloquial sense, that, whatever the topic, a Steinberg text is provocative, stimulating, and intensely engaging. Wit is sexy. Steinberg with words matched the supreme visual wit of Picasso. Movement is sexy. Steinberg’s verbs provide it; and when the normal descriptor does not, he wrenches a variant into action. His words for color morph, as words and as colors: “the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt into blueing air” (fig. 1.49; p. 24).10 Blueing prods placid blue to move. Syntactically alien yet appropriate to the context, the term performs a literary sleight of hand, slighting normative semantics. It constitutes one of Steinberg’s many ambiguous simultaneities— very sexy.

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t age ninety, Picasso produced an enormous painting of a little boy with a shovel—looking, I think, forlorn and superannuated, whatever his actual years; it’s one of the saddest pictures I know (fig. 1.1). In some ways, despite the practiced sophistication

Figure 1.1. Child with a Shovel, Mougins, July 15 and November

14, 1971, Z.XXXIII.229. Málaga, Museo Picasso; on temporary deposit from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte.

The Intelligence of Picasso

that inscribes the right profile on the full face, the work seems childlike—painted as this artless kid might have painted it. This is also how Picasso drew his final selfportrait, aged ninety-two, done as in kindergarten in colored crayons, as if untutored, without intervention of skill (fig. 1.67). But that’s not how Picasso drew when he was little. His earliest extant drawing was done in 1890 when Pablo was nine—and it has had a bad press (fig. 1.2).1 Whereas Picasso claimed to have never drawn like a child, John Richardson argues, on the evidence of this drawing, that Picasso’s habit of self-mythologizing misled him. He saw an element of wish fulfillment in Picasso’s statement that “I have never done children’s drawings. . . . I remember one of my first drawings. I was perhaps six, or even less. In my father’s house there was a statue of Hercules with his club in the corridor, and I drew Hercules. But it wasn’t a child’s drawing. It was a real drawing.” Richardson comments: “Wishful thinking played him false. Picasso had forgotten that the drawing

A lecture first presented at the Grand Palais, Paris, in May 1976, and delivered nearly thirty more times, with constant revisions, until its last presentation at the National Gallery of Art, December 14, 2003, on the occasion of the exhibition “The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier” (repeated at the New York Studio School, March 17, 2004). Large parts of it were incorporated into Steinberg’s sixth Charles Eliot Norton Lecture at Harvard, May 1, 1996. The version published here follows the National Gallery lecture, restoring some material that could not be accommodated in the time frame. The discussions of the 1907 Self-Portrait in Prague and the 1912 Cubist still life in Stockholm were expanded in 2007 for publication in the Musée Picasso exhibition catalogue Cubist Picasso; see chs. 3 and 7.

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in question is dated November 1890, that is to say, three years later than he thought. The execution and conception are . . . [what] one would expect of a gifted nineyear-old. . . . On the evidence of the Hercules drawing, however, it would seem that Picasso . . . conforms to the rule that no great painter has ever produced work of any serious interest before puberty. However, his legend obliged him to have been a genius from earliest days.”2 I suggest that Picasso’s claim to have never drawn like a child was not meant to be taken literally. He made the remark in the 1930s when he was fiftyish to a woman friend as they were leaving a Paris exhibition of children’s drawings. And you have to remember that, since before 1900, modern artists had been enthusiastic about the drawings of children. Paul Klee was enchanted by them.3 So Picasso’s remark about never having drawn like a child must have been made not in bluster, but in

Figure 1.2. Hercules, Málaga, November 1890. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB110.842.

regret. Its mythic component is not the wonder of instant maturity, but the fantasy that fate (or his father) had robbed him of an Edenic beginning in innocence.4 With this is mind, let’s look at this Hercules. The nine-year-old Pablito was drawing a statuette of the club-swinging champion in the family home.5 Drawing completed, the boy decides that the hero’s left foot is no good and (though it looks no worse to me than the other) crosses it out. Such a self-critical impulse is exceedingly rare in a child’s drawing—child artists rarely cross out. Stranger still in the Hercules drawing is the correction at upper left: Pablo redrew the raised arm in a different position, that is, he was testing his original statement against what he could see and departing from the earlier inaccuracy. And this is truly extraordinary, as any teacher of life drawing knows. Beginners who notice that a line in their drawing seems wrong—if they try to correct it, just keep repeating it; grinding it in. They don’t dare depart from what is already down on the sheet. Watching beginner students compulsively reinforce a misguided line, you realize how hard it is to rethink a position once taken; it’s like changing one’s political views or religious beliefs. So we agree with Richardson that the Hercules drawing is childish. But the habit of self-correction in the light of renewed observation at age nine betrays a precocious professionalism which Picasso throughout his life will both exploit and resist. He never forgot how expert his work had become by 1895, age fourteen, when he painted his sister, or at fifteen, when he painted his mother (Girl with Bare Feet, Paris, Musée Picasso, and Doña Maria, Barcelona, Museu Picasso). Through his late teens, Picasso continues to exercise his virtuosity—as at eighteen, in his Portrait of Josep Cardona (Z.I.6). But before long, signs of dissatisfaction appear. He begins to question the axiom that an accurate representation must be the analogue of a momentary appearance seen from a fixed point of view. Here he is, still under twenty, enrolled as an art student in the Barcelona Academy, knocking off thousands of studies, such as three sheets that include random sketches of a heroic figure (figs. 1.3–1.5). I once published this statement: “You are not a proper art his-

Figure 1.3. Page of sketches, Barcelona, c. 1900. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB110.293r.

Figure 1.4. Page of sketches, c. 1900. Barcelona, Museu

Figure 1.5. Page of sketches, c. 1900, reproduced upside down. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB110.835r.

Figure 1.6. Antonio Canova, Creugas, 1795–1801. Vatican

Picasso, MPB110.803r.

Belvedere.

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torian until you’ve written a sentence beginning: ‘It has not been previously observed that . . .’” Well, the original marble is in the Vatican—a work by Canova, representing a mythological pugilist, Creugas (fig. 1.6). The Barcelona Academy evidently had a plaster cast of the statue for students to draw from. And so Pablo did— eight times altogether. And in the top register of figure 1.3, he attempts the figure’s back view. Perhaps he got up to take a look at it from the rear, but I doubt it. Because farther down the sheet at the right, I notice an almost illegible scribble—the same figure again as it would appear in top view, seen from directly above. There’s the round head, the hoisted elbow, and the retracted right arm. It’s a difficult thing to bring off, and, with all due respect to such a promising student, I don’t think he succeeded. But the intention is unmistakable: Picasso is trying to envision a complex bodily action the way an architect thinks the projected plan of a building.

Figure 1.7. Leonardo, Studies for the Christ Child with a Lamb, 1503–6. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum.

What made him try? No one else in his generation worried about this sort of thing—no one else wasted time wondering how a given form might appear from an angle other than the one that gave it its shape. But to this eighteen-year-old, the “realism” that renders objects from one fixed viewpoint seems merely a special case. As I think, it did to Leonardo, who draws the Christ Child holding a lamb, and twice more, with the child’s head turning from three-quarter front view to profile and then to lost profile—as if the child’s head, or the viewer, had moved (fig. 1.7). And Leonardo wants all three on one sheet, to be seen at a glance. Which leads me to a fantasy I have about Leonardo’s Ginerva de’ Benci. Her face always seemed to me somewhat too broad. Then, one day at the National Gallery in Washington, I tried watching her at an angle, which happily narrowed her face. In this my fantasy, Leonardo would have reasoned that the direct perpendicular view

Figure 1.8. Study of a Glass, Paris, winter 1914–15, Z.II/2.862.

The Intelligence of Picasso

of an immobile sitter is only one view among many; and that he widened Ginevra’s face to come right when seen at a slant. Such an experiment would be in keeping with Leonardo’s mentality—as with Picasso’s. Both men sought to stretch the agenda of representation, trying to shape the mobility of three-dimensional things seen—or handled—such as a drinking glass meant to be raised and tipped (fig. 1.8); or a woman’s head seen in the round (figs. 1.59, 1.60). We experience changing states successively. But, says Picasso, why not collapse them to convey at once the availability of successive perceptions? Is not this a legitimate subject for realism? The problem is to find ways to do it—against the inertia of common usage. Since his death in 1973, at age ninety-two, nearly two hundred of Picasso’s sketchbooks have come to light; they range from 1894 to 1967—some only about the size of a postcard. All these were carefully guarded and held

back from exhibition or sale until the man was well in his eighties. And they are for the most part the private repository of Picasso’s nocturnal thought, his night life. One sketchbook, dated 1905—the twenty-four-year-old Picasso now settled in Paris—offers a good example of his nightly brooding.6 It opens on the first right-hand page with a pen-and-ink drawing of a nude youth seated on a square block (fig. 1.9). It can’t have taken more than five minutes to draw. Turn the page to the first double spread, and the figure appears twice more in the same posture—but from alternative three-quarter back views (fig. 1.10). Page turned again, and the pose is visualized (more or less) in left profile, then from the front (fig. 1.11); and finally, on the next verso page, in three-quarter front view (fig. 1.12).7 What was Picasso doing here, evoking six successive views of the same object? Well, the drawings tell clearly enough. Looking at what appeared on the initial sheet

Figure 1.9. Page from sketchbook no. 35, Paris,

Figure 1.10. Page from sketchbook no. 35, Paris, 1905, fols. 3–4. Sotheby’s, London, sale L11005,

1905, fol. 2. Sotheby’s, London, sale L06006, February 8, 2006, lot 137.

February 9, 2011, lot 252 (left); Sotheby’s, London, sale L06006, February 8, 2006, lot 12 (right).

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Figure 1.11. Page from sketchbook no. 35, Paris, 1905, fols. 5–6. Kunsthaus Lempertz, Cologne, sale

Figure 1.12. Page from sketchbook no. 35, Paris, 1905,

1051, May 29, 2015, lot 231 (left); Sotheby’s, London, sale L10005, February 4, 2010, lot 149 (right).

fol. 7. Sotheby’s, London, sale L10005, February 4, 2010, lot 135.

(fig. 1.9), he sensed the inadequacy of the mere profile, the silhouette. It’s as if he were thinking: “All I’ve drawn is an aspect. Whereas the object draws attention from all around.” It seems to me that Picasso in 1905 may be the only modernist painter to fret on this score. Such exercises had been common enough in the Renaissance (fig. 1.13).8 But for artists following the generation of Post-Impressionists, such as Cézanne, Gauguin, or Matisse, an alternative aspect of a figure whose front view was being drawn would be the least of their worries. Yet this is what keeps nagging Picasso: the felt need to transcend the constraints of mere aspect. Most of us, most of the time, don’t mind these constraints. We are used to them. But there are some who regard our meager biological vision as a deprivation. Foremost among these complainers are the inventors who produce visual aids, from the earliest lenses and spectacles to modern sonograms, MRIs, CAT scans,

holography, and whatnot. In 1879, two years before Picasso was born, they came up with the periscope to help us look around corners; in 1895 came the invention of the X-ray. So much for the inventors. A second group includes certain Renaissance theologians who wove fantasies about the capabilities of human vision that would follow our resurrection in perfected “glorified bodies” with enhanced optical powers. Those who reach heaven will, they believed, regain whatever powers Adam and Eve must have enjoyed before they sinned. So one Bartholomew Rimbertinus published a book On the Sensible Delights of Heaven (Venice, 1498), in which he argued: “If Christ, even though himself in heaven after his Ascension, saw his dear Mother still on earth and at prayer in her chamber, clearly distance and the interposition of a wall does not hinder [his] vision. Christ could see the face of his Mother when she was prostrate on the ground . . . as

The Intelligence of Picasso [7]

Figure 1.13. Hans Bock the Elder, Four Views of a Nude Woman, 1590. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett.

if he were looking directly at her face.” Similarly, Celso Maffei, in a book of the same name, published in 1504, speculates that the blessed in heaven would have a vision “so keen that . . . it will not be impeded by . . . the interposition of solid bodies.” You will be able to see the front of an object from the back, “the face through the back of the head.”9 Somewhat, perhaps, like this Picasso, painted when he was ninety (fig. 1.14). So we have three groups that chafe at the shortcomings of human vision. They agree in their diagnosis, differ only in their respective remedies. One group says, “How about visual aids”; the second group says, “Live right and have faith and you’ll see better hereafter.” Thirdly, Picasso, saying, “Can’t wait!” Impatient with the conventional image that rations him to one view at a time, he begins to grope around the limiting contour. Consider this project for a picture of circus acrobats practicing. In the foreground, a young man sits on a barrel, turning his head to watch a slip of a girl, a younger sister, perhaps, balancing on a sphere (fig. 1.15). Barrel and sphere display similar curves, so that these siblings complement one another about an open center. The contrast between their respective supports—his secure, hers precarious—is part of the story. Then a second

Figure 1.14. Reclining Woman, Mougins, July 26, 1971/II, Z.XXXIII.118. Private collection.

Figure 1.17. Young Acrobat on a Ball, Paris, 1905, Z.I.290. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Figure 1.15. (top left) Study for Young Acrobat on a Ball,

Paris, late 1904–5, Z.VI.603. Sotheby’s, New York, May 13, 1992, lot 8. Figure 1.16. (bottom left) Study for Young Acrobat on a

Ball, Paris, late 1904–5, Z.VI.604. Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris.

The Intelligence of Picasso

study for the same project (fig. 1.16). The girl, further off, is lightly sketched; her practice supervised by her bully brother, whose weightlifter’s hulk has turned inward to follow the lead of his head. And then the completed painting (fig. 1.17): the girl—now her head alone clears the horizon—has mastered her sphere, which henceforth contrasts absolutely with the block supporting her brother, an athlete of immense brawn and a pinhead. He is still watching her, but with dark, surly severity. Psychologically, the contrasts within the painting are richly evocative: cube/sphere; nearness/recession; maturity/adolescence; judgment confronting performance; authority and compliance; deadweight shamed by agility; female and male. But the picture tells yet another story. It is the story of the man’s back, overreaching at his right shoulder. Wasn’t that passage more convincing before, in the drawing? What had been a round mass of shoulder

Figure 1.18. (left) Portrait of Fernande, Paris, 1906. Geiser/Baer

I.18 bis. Figure 1.19. (right) Head of a Woman in a Chignon (Fernande), Gósol,

summer 1906, Z.XXII.331. Susan and Lewis Manilow Collection.

turning away, now appears like dough on a baking board—and we can tell what has happened: a kind of thought experiment. Picasso wants to lodge on the picture plane more than an aspect would show; and the distorting excess at the right shoulder is mass annexed from around the bend. The picture is among Picasso’s earliest bids to overcome, in a single image, the constraint of a fixed viewing position. There are other works from roughly this same period that try to incorporate averted aspects and produce similar sidelong distortions, among them the head of Fernande Olivier, whom Picasso portrayed in a small etching in 1906, one point of view at a time—like any mugshot (fig. 1.18). But something weird happens during the summer in Gósol. One portrait shows her face in standard three-quarter view, without letting the hinder part disappear (fig. 3.10). And look at the gouache known as Head of a Woman in a Chignon (fig.

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1.19). Cover the left three-quarters of the face with a sheet of paper, near to the point where the ear begins. Fernande now appears in profile, the frontal ear suggesting a head in side view, confirmed by the nape and the gathered hair. But look at the whole: what had begun as a three-quarter front view, moving rightward, refuses to pass out of sight; it has dilated to include what no fixed viewpoint could comprehend. Hence the spread to the back of the head, which appears as if in side view, and the consequent, rather disagreeable thickness of neck. To say nothing of the sloping shoulders, which get no orientation at all; there Picasso is cheating. I don’t think the trial succeeds, and neither did Picasso, for the effect of such surface distension is merely to bloat, and the objective is not achieved. The exper-

iment is soon abandoned, because all it does is stretch out what still registers as one aspect—more seeming aspect than ever. Occasionally, the idea recurs, as in the 1910 Cubist portrait of his dealer Vollard—whose boundless pate Picasso is loath to seal with a definitive contour (fig. 1.20). He just wants to keep going over the top. But again, in the long run, this is not going to work, if only because it’s too localized. So, back to the drawing board to find some other solution. How about leaving the contours their proper spread, but with variable orientation of body parts in between? In a nude from the fall–winter of 1906, the viewpoint keeps shifting; even within the face (fig. 1.21). There’s a sweet mouth, perfectly frontal—as the nose is not. Try to think her right thigh, then down to the twist

Figure 1.20. Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Paris,

1910. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

The Intelligence of Picasso

of the lower leg. Picasso is importing select dislocations into the close-contoured body to acknowledge alternate aspects. This is a fertile moment, the beginning of what the French now call le regard flottant, the wavering glance, the destabilized vantage point, which Picasso will exploit ever after. The possibilities he checked out could be unsettling—like looking up at one half of a thing and down at the other at the same time. Consider the 1908 Woman with Fan, which started out as another Fernande (fig. 1.22). I used to wonder about her unequal shoulders—that drop-off or step-down effect, studiously preserved in his sketches (Z.II/2.700–702). Then, on a sudden hunch, I decided to look separately at each half of the figure. Seeing the picture’s right side alone (cover the left with paper), I

found myself looking up at the figure from a viewpoint below, and her left leg bent at the groin, so that she seemed to be seated. Seeing the picture’s left half alone, I was looking down at her head and shoulders—and the rest of her body erect. So then she looms both aloft and below, standing and sitting. The perceived distortions are neither anatomic nor gestural. Picasso, in a sense, is looking her up and down; testing the availability to the observer of distinct points of view. And this must be why this Woman with Fan thrones like an icon: with so much destabilizing ambiguity built into her figure, she needs monumentality to stay put. I like this painting; and some may not. But I hope we agree that it shows some intelligence, even in giving the woman two left hands—but that’s another subject.

Figure 1.21. Seated Woman, Paris, fall–winter 1906.

Prague, Národní Galerie.

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one Figure 1.22. Woman with Fan,

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Paris, summer 1908. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

Meanwhile, I suspect that one crazy drawing of Fernande’s head (fig. 1.23) shows Picasso still chasing the paradox of an object seen from above and below at the same time. And he’ll try it again five years later on the face of a weary sitter: we’re to look down at one side of it, up at the other (fig. 1.24). Not that it works—because at this stage Picasso still clings to

the body’s coherence. It is only after Cubism—when the reign of discontinuity had been established—that bodies will be able to incorporate distinct perceptions in simultaneity. During these pre-Cubist years, when Picasso had much else on his mind, the problem of viewing simultaneously from above and below was a minor side

Figure 1.23. Head of a Woman (Fernande), Paris, spring 1909. Private collection.

Figure 1.24. Man in a Bowler Hat, Avignon, summer 1914, Z.II/2.506. New York, Museum of Modern Art; The John S. Newberry Collection.

Figure 1.26. Still Life with Coffee Pot, Paris, April 6,

1947, Z.XV.45. Collection of Helly Nahmad.

Figure 1.25. Studies of a Table, Paris, September 3, 1943, Z.XIII.110, 111. Private collection.

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issue. But the idea—better applied to furniture than to faces—recurs, as on a sheet of studies produced decades later in 1943 (fig. 1.25). And in 1947, Picasso paints a still life that troubles the familiar calm of a tabletop by recalling that it’s not just a platform but a slab poised between underneath and above (fig. 1.26). Sitting at table is not like squatting on bedrock; there is a significant underside—as any little child knows. This Picasso never forgot. As a grown man, he recalled moments of early childhood when he would crouch under the table at which the grown-ups were dining and draw on his personal ceiling. And he would honor that private resource—the view from below—for the rest of his life. The summer of 1909 Pablo and Fernande spent in the village of Horta de Ebro in the Spanish Pyrenees (fig. 1.27). For Fernande, it was a season of illness and discontent; for Picasso, the hardest-working vacation on record. He attacked—as if the problem were new—the reluctance of the flat canvas to accommodate bodies and depth of space (fig. 1.28). If the plane of the canvas presented a barrier that denied “direct access to depth through vision” (Rosalind Krauss’s phrase), then he must breach that barrier

with more powerful, new-sharpened weapons.10 So, having taken a photograph of the village, and finding its surface resistant to penetration, he paints the motif from slightly to the left, hued like bare flesh, but with canyons separating the houses, and each surface honed to a razor edge. In these Horta landscapes, Picasso obviously scorns the coziness of hamlets nestled about a hill or a reservoir (fig. 1.29); and he spurns shapes that come preadapted to his plane surface; or the sort of perspective wherein all things obey one command, aimed jointly at one vanishing point, all pulling together under the direction of a single will. Houses on the Hill dramatizes the willfulness of the particular, the unpredictability of each thing going its way; and the clearance between one thing and another—the internal spatial intervals—like that little window, which allows occupants of an upper floor to gossip across the street. Or in Reservoir, the sweep of reflecting water into the field—which must be what led him to choose the reservoir as a subject. Here the attack on space is hurled like a Frisbee. In the other, like a torpedo, exploding inside its target. Thus Houses on the Hill and Reservoir are complementary. What unites the two pictures is the perception of energies plunging inward, downward, or surging up.

Figure 1.27. Landscape, Horta de Ebro, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Paris, Musée Picasso.

Figure 1.28. Houses on the Hill,

Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Private collection; on loan to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen.

Figure 1.29. Reservoir, Horta de

Ebro, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller.

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Figure 1.30. Head of a Woman, Paris, summer 1907, Z.XXVI.15.

Figure 1.31. Hans Holbein the Younger, Mary Zouch (?), c. 1532–43.

Private collection.

Windsor Castle, Royal Collection Trust.

Back to the human head, Picasso’s home field. Since Fernande is around—as in an earlier drawing of 1907 (fig. 1.30)—hers becomes his preferred testing ground. It’s where those energies will have to be put to work, or put on trial. Compare a beautiful Renaissance drawing by Holbein, where every feature sits well emplaced (fig. 1.31): Picasso is not content to see a face widening at the cheekbones, he wants to see that wideness in labor; wants to experience the expanding pressure that puts outposts, such as jaws and cheekbones, in place. By the summer of 1909, he is waging his program with his personal brand of rigorous rage (fig. 1.32). Color erupts, not to describe skin tones, but to register internal heat. He wonders which axis predominates in a head: the one from scalp to chin, vertical as a vase of flowers; or the other, from ear to ear. And

he insists on his own selective precision: he wants to measure the salience of the nose by securing its underside from the tip back to the philtrum (the vertical groove on the median of the upper lip). And of course to reach under the jaw, no matter how slack, and around the cheeks. Doing a woman’s head (fig. 1.33), he wants to know that it doesn’t stop at the outline, any more than the earth stops at the horizon—those spare tires at the cheek are thoughts. Picasso’s summer at Horta became a stint of hard labor, as he wrestled with problems no one else gives a damn about. Take, for instance, the human head, of which we call one facet the “face.” Is it the nameable features in it that matter—the ear and the eye, the nose and the mouth, while the spaces between remain no-man’s-land—as Picasso had wondered two years before, in 1907 (fig. 1.34)? Or, on the contrary, is the

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Figure 1.32. Head of a Woman (Fernande), Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Düsseldorf,

Figure 1.33. Study for Head of a Woman (Fernande), Horta de Ebro,

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

summer 1909, Z.VI.1084. Sotheby’s, London, sale L14004, February 6, 2014, lot 105.

head more like a chunk, lump, or boulder that may be studded with accessories, such as eyes, nose, and lips (figs. 1.35, 1.36)? Or is this a silly question, since the likeliest answer is both. Imagine churning this sort of conundrum all night. And that’s only part of it. Picasso wants to feel his way inward, not to be fobbed off by surfaces. The effect is a shattering of every snug continuity—as across the smoothness of forehead. Picasso’s Horta foreheads look like none that we know, but he won’t have

foreheads thought of as surfaces, like stretched rubber sheets. If in the end these brows look arbitrarily pleated, buckling, and crunched, at least they’ll imply internal action, as under the crust of the earth; and Picasso is symbolizing interior convulsions on the outside—like Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. I say “symbolizing” because, to suggest upheaving mass, Picasso draws out the arris, the ridge formed at the convergence or collision of planes (see p. 220, note 37), so that every projection sends out a flange, the length of a blade—as in the bronze

Figure 1.34. (top left) Head of the Medical Student (study for

the Demoiselles d’Avignon), Paris, spring 1907, Z.VI.977. New York, Museum of Modern Art; A. Conger Goodyear Fund. Figure 1.35. (top right) Head of a Woman (Fernande), Paris, 1910. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro d’Arte Reina Sofia. Figure 1.36. (bottom) Seated Woman, Horta de Ebro, summer

1909. Sotheby’s, London, sale L16006, June 21, 2016, lot 8.

The Intelligence of Picasso

Figure 1.37. Head of a Woman (Fernande), Paris, autumn 1909. Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Edmund Hayes Fund, 1948.

Fernande (fig. 1.37). What a weird private obsession this was! Summering in a remote mountain village, Picasso alone worried these matters. And nothing suggests that Fernande was in on her lover’s anxiety. The results—much of the time—are brutally ugly. Looking at some of these deformations, one may feel that such fierce fractures should be reserved for rocks, but leave our noggins alone. Of course, Picasso saw these creatures turn ugly. He had a keen eye for beauty, and its negation. He may at this moment have experienced a hatred of beauty—hating it perhaps for being ephemeral; not what lover and love object may safely

call theirs. If he subjected the human image to such inhumanity, he was not only meditating on the forces that might configure a familiar physique, but showing the body in the grip of something excessive, the body punished and unpossessed, not possessed by the self, but imposed on the self, and beyond its control. We become aware of such imposition in pain, sickness, or aging, when our bodies alter against us. But these images suggest that Picasso—at least during this Horta summer—sees the body plying its own agenda, inaccessible to the will; as if our intentions were helpless before the forces that compound our anatomies. And yet, vulgar humanity, even a hint of sex, may be obscurely acknowledged, Picasso reminding himself that it’s still humanity he’s dealing with. Cubist or not, the model in figure 1.38 sits in a friendly green wicker armchair—and performs a gesture Picasso had used before, in a pornographic doodle, dated 1905–6 (fig. 4.27). The creature points to her open crotch, while her left hand opens invitingly: “Come on in.” S’il vous plaît. Well, what do you expect of a horny twenty-four-year- old? The gesture recurs three years later in 1908 in an awesome large painting called The Dryad—a sort of primeval She (fig. 4.26). This picture, too, began as a nude in an armchair (fig. 4.28): a token of domesticity to be reclaimed by the jungle, whence this stalker approaches, one hand inviting, the other plying its fist like a bludgeon. Does this painting—produced a year before the Horta vacation— give us Picasso’s take on female sexuality? Or specifically Fernande’s? The s’il vous plaît gesture recurs in these Horta paintings once more (fig. 1.39). It makes one wonder what Pablo and Fernande talked about during their long summer alone. The two books she wrote offer no clue, and these early Cubist works remain resolutely hermetic, resistant to empathy—Picasso being determined to distance himself from his earlier sentimentalities, when he sought to arouse fellow feeling and responsive compassion, as in the 1903 Disinherited Ones (Barcelona, Museu Picasso). Now that the poor have been converted into statistics, we have no use for a picture like this—which I still admire. And

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Figure 1.38. Nude Woman, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Kanagawa, Pola Museum of Art.

Figure 1.39. Female Nude, Horta de Ebro–Paris, summer 1909. Sotheby’s, New York, sale NY7249, November 17, 1998, lot 112.

I love Woman Plaiting Her Hair of 1906, sentimental in a different way (fig. 1.40). How old, would you say, is this young woman? I’d guess about ten thousand years— give or take a millennium. It’s feelings like this that Picasso renounces by 1909. The catalogue of the 2003 Cubist Portraits of Fernande exhibition at the National Gallery of Art speaks of the melancholy of some of the work produced during this 1909 summer. And that sounds right. Some of the heads painted at Horta attain tragic grandeur—such as the one in Frankfurt (fig. 1.41). Here more than ever I feel daunted by the geology of the brow. The frontage we associate with a forehead yields to irregular corrugation, with plates grinding into each other, and becoming—to my eye—emblematic of inwardness, however

defined. The human head as a solitary peak, thrown up by material forces, in which, somehow, feeling is trapped; a lone summit, uncompanionable, and conscious. I would call this a masterpiece. And it marks for the young Picasso a closure, the end stage of this grapple with heavy matter, of his hope to engage dense, massive form on flat canvas. What happens next is quite unexpected. Picasso lets go of material cohesion and begins to dismember, going for discontinuity. It is an alternative enterprise, broached or intuited two years before, but long held in reserve. I have in mind his Self-Portrait of 1907, wherein one line—the most fertile single line drawn in the twentieth century—needs urgent attention (fig. 1.42). The Self-

The Intelligence of Picasso [21]

Figure 1.40. Woman Plaiting Her Hair, Gósol–Paris, late

Figure 1.41. Head of a Woman (Fernande), Horta de Ebro, summer 1909.

summer–fall 1906. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Florene May Schoenborn Bequest.

Frankfurt, Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Portrait is made up of crude strokes afloat on unstructured ground. How was Picasso’s intelligence involved here? What was he getting at? I’ll ignore the expressive brunt of the image—its suddenness, its concentration, hypnotic stare, and so on. These speak for themselves. I’ll focus instead on one line in it, the one that runs down the right cheek. What this line intends is obvious. It signifies a change of plane, as it does in Matisse’s 1905 portrait of his friend André Derain (fig. 3.3). In both portraits, the oblique stroke at the same anatomical site defines the transition from the façade to the turning cheek. It’s a watershed, our trusty arris. But if the representational function of the arris in the Picasso and the Matisse is identical, there are interesting differences—of which I’ll mention three. First, in the Matisse portrait the cheekline is still substantive color. In the Picasso, the corresponding line belongs to an independent system of imposed draw-

ing in black. Second, in the Matisse, the line of the arris, like the mustache and the string tie, lies flush with the picture plane. Picasso’s arris doesn’t stabilize. It seems to recede—backing toward the ear. And yet it works: think it away, and the side of the face turns mushy (fig. 3.6); the blank ear sidles up to the eye like a parenthesis, and would confound the whole facial system, were it not for this commanding black rod that tells the ear—“You stay back there!” Picasso’s arris, then, tends to command rather than structure. Third, in the Matisse, the line accords with the rest of the face. It respects continuity, linking up with the chin and with the eye socket. Anatomically, its placement and its extension are exactly right. In the Picasso, the cheekline is only just right enough to show it going astray. It doesn’t stop where everyone knows it should; or as Picasso knew when he was years younger (figs. 3.4, 3.5). In the 1907 Self-Portrait, the cheekline runs wild,

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Figure 1.42. Self-Portrait, Paris, spring–summer 1907. Prague, Národní Galerie.

lancing, impaling the ear. The line, black and rigid, flouts the ostensible anatomical program—cooperating neither with skin tone nor with the requisite continuities. It signifies a change of plane at the cheek from front to side on a receding slope—and that’s all it will do. With chin or eye socket it makes no connection; and that’s why it looks wrong. How shall we explain this wrongness?

And explained it should be, if we believe in Picasso’s intelligence; because intelligence should be intelligible. So what about this cheekline that is clearly too long and too inorganic? Picasso has abstracted it from its bedding. In the given context, the line still tells as an arris, defining a change of planes—but without adhering to the planes it supposedly turns. Does this sound

The Intelligence of Picasso

absurd? Can a ridge at the junction of planes, as in this early Picasso, exist apart from those planes? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship—can you imagine it without the planes it defines (fig. 3.7)? Yet this is exactly what Picasso conceives. He wants the arris seen apart from its connection with body—as an idea: not a thing but a meaning. And by making it unanatomical, inorganic—black, rigid, and overlong—he dissociates that line from its physical cause, from the bulk it articulates, almost as an abstracted sign. And how do you engineer such dissociation when depicting a face? Picasso answers: by means of sufficient error. That cheekline had to be just wrong enough to force a shift from one context into another—from visual analogue into a sign situation. Picasso was discovering that anomaly and displacement could convert an anatomical feature into a sign: the bodiless token of planar change, planar change being a defining condition of all embodiment. From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off on an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge (fig. 5.1). Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris. Planes define themselves as prismatic facets. And not body planes only: in a back view (fig. 1.43), at bottom center, even the interval between the thighs joins in the faceting, as if solids and void deserved the same stepwise pacing from any one point to whatever lies next. Picasso here disavows all continuous surfacing—the kind you caress; he is plotting the incidence of watersheds in a faceted system. The wonder is that emotion still stirs in these constructs, as in the 1909 Fernande portrait, painted at Horta (fig. 1.41). In the year following, the burden of materiality is shed. In this familiar idiom of 1910 Cubism, the bulk, the mass that is being articulated, almost evaporates, while the thin ambience solidifies. In Picasso’s portrait of his dealer Kahnweiler, we receive the idea of threedimensionality only from the scatter of planar articulation (fig. 1.44). But rather than generalize about this classic phase of Cubism, which can be, and has been, discussed

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Figure 1.43. Back View of a Nude Woman, Paris, autumn 1908,

Z.XXVI.359. Private collection.

Figure 1.44. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paris, autumn 1910. Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman in memory of Charles B. Goodspeed.

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in many different ways, I prefer to consider a single work and the studies for it, which show how Picasso was thinking. He spent the summer of 1910 in Cadaqués, a small fishing village near Barcelona. There he produced, among other things, a series of drawings of a fishing smack in the harbor. The series begins in recognizable analogues of what Picasso saw before him—but rendered characteristically, from different viewpoints (figs. 1.45, 1.46). The one showing the boat from top down was imagined, like that bird’s-eye view of the Canova statue. Though Picasso may have approached the smack for a close look, he did not fly overhead. He just had to know the inside as well as the out. And he goes for the arrises at the prow and the keel; and for the implicit axis from stem to stern where the bitts are attached. More sketches follow: an oil study in which the coherence of the boat begins to give way, letting the parts

diffuse (fig. 1.47).11 A diagonal starting at lower left cuts a path from here to the hull; that’s how a boat is approached: sidewise. In the next sketch, this line passes right through, from outside in (fig. 1.48). And finally the lovely small painting in Prague, called Harbor at Cadaqués (fig. 1.49). The boat, half reclaimed by its atmospheric surround, dissolves into quivering accents, tokens of planar change accentuated by light. The component parts of the boat are still recognizable: stem and stern; the hint of a mast; the ribbing of its concave; the phantom anchor at lower right; while the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt into blueing air. As Picasso told William Rubin in 1970, “Reality haunts these pictures like a perfume.”12 We can still sniff it. We still sense the presence of an object resolved into discontinuous planes—planes emancipated from matter—and reduced to such vestiges as turns and edges need to define themselves.

Figure 1.45. Fishing Smack at Cadaqués, Cadaqués, summer 1910.

Figure 1.46. Fishing Smack at Cadaqués, Cadaqués, summer 1910. Private collection.

Paris, Musée Picasso, MP644.

Figure 1.47. (top left) Fishing Smack at Cadaqués,

Cadaqués, summer 1910, Z.VI.1112. Private collection. Figure 1.48. (top right) Fishing Smack at Cadaqués, Cadaqués, summer 1910, Z.XXVIII.6. Private collection. Figure 1.49. (bottom) Harbor at Cadaqués, Cadaqués,

summer 1910, Z.II/1.230. Prague, Národní Galerie.

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Picasso now thinks mass and space simultaneously in graded articulations. The sharp definitions you see in the upper reaches are the steps by which extension is told, like the knots that chart distance at sea. Or think of music—where pauses between measures of sound participate with the sound in the same paced duration. Now all space, whether empty or occupied, will dance to one beat—the rhythmic play of light over arris and edge. Matter distilled into accents of definition. By winter 1910–11, in a pair of charcoal-drawn heads (fig. 1.50), Picasso can dream of visualizing, in one image and without contradiction, density and transparency.13 Facing a head from in front, he visualizes right through. In the year following, around 1912, the implications of what Picasso had been groping for were fully realized: he discovered that the visual representation of things need

Figure 1.50. Head of a Man, Paris, 1910–11, Z.XXVIII.81. Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler.

not mirror them, but could refer to them, the way language does (pp. 29–39 below). Consider a still life produced during the summer of 1912. It comes as close as anything in Picasso to theoretical formulation—perhaps because he was using squared paper; or else he reached for that paper because he was in a theoretical mood (fig. 1.51). So, for instance, having decided to place his protagonist—that’s the fruit bowl or compotier—at dead center, he stakes out the rectangular area to be occupied by the bowl, following the given grid of the squaring. Only the upper edge of this indicator of place seems ambiguous; it could be the rim of the bowl seen at eye level. For the rest, Picasso is determined to avoid all obscurity. The drawing represents (no, that’s not the right word—it refers to, evokes, or conjures) a number of objects: the compotier, with four pears in its bowl; behind it, on one side, a bottle; on the other, a French bread loaf cleft on the median, as in Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1908–9 (Kunstmuseum Basel). These three items—compotier, bottle, and bread— rest on a tabletop which Picasso observes to be about an inch thick. He tells us so at bottom center by doubling the tabletop’s edge. But, of course, there’s no need to run that doubling all the way up to the next corner. Just as in speech: if I tell you—with appropriate gesture— that the tabletop is one inch thick, I don’t need to add that it’s an inch thick all the way. A word to the wise is sufficient, and the unwise are not being addressed. But then I notice that this inch-thickness of the tabletop shows up again on the opposite side, upper left. So this freestanding table is potentially visible from another angle; you can walk around it. Now for the lower left, where I see a drawer with a key stuck in it. If you want to interpret it as a phallic symbol, as some scholars have probably done, go ahead; just don’t interrupt the plot—the scandal of the drawer’s disagreement with the table it’s part of. I think we can take it to be universally true that the front of a drawer falls flush with its side of the table—as in Cézanne, and in thousands of other still lifes (fig. 1.52). But not here, where the drawer cleaves to the picture plane, while the table twists away catercorner. Such

The Intelligence of Picasso

mismatch would be scandalous, unless Picasso were thinking, why need the table repeat the information already gained from the drawer? Why not rather observe that this approachable, freestanding table may be seen at a different angle? Picasso, it seems to me, is importing into his sign situation some of the resources of language—the admission of an alternative, the probable, the pun, the subjunctive, the abbreviation. So the table’s front edge, bottom left, tilts away to intimate spatial recession; and the tabletop’s thickness need not be restated on this nearer side, since it’s already acknowledged—though not all the way, as it is in the Cézanne still life. Because Cézanne still aims at an optical analogue to what he calls “the spectacle that

the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads before our eyes.”14 Picasso spreads a spectacle before his mind’s eye. Meanwhile, I notice that the rectangular face of the drawer is interrupted (probably by an alternative table corner) and that the drawer’s own lower-left corner launches an upward diagonal—to acknowledge, I think, that the drawer comes with a sliding depth. It wouldn’t live up to its name if it didn’t pull out and in. Just as the key in it wouldn’t be solid if it weren’t casting a shadow—like the inner face of the table leg, lower left, which tells that the light falls from the left. But you don’t have to repeat that same finding at the other two table legs. And then that proud centerpiece, the compotier: with the fruit nesting inside the bowl

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Figure 1.52. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Milk Jug and

Fruit, c. 1900. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman.

Figure 1.51. Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread

Loaf on a Table, Sorgues, July–September 1912, Z.II/2.778. Paris, Musée Picasso, sketchbook 110, MP1864, fol. 33v.

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and the splendid curve of its bottom—stopped short, lest it arrogate too much of the sheet. The stem of the compotier comes in three upright strokes rising from a circular base. Of course this basic circle is incomplete, but do you mind? No one complains that the wheel in the familiar handicap access sign fails to come round. Because a circle may come either full, or penannular—almost a ring—as here. We may see it direct, as in plan, compass-drawn, or perspectivally, as an ellipse. And Picasso knew that. Look at that circular footing from twelve o’clock down, and you first see it in plan, then flattening to describe an ellipse, and then— well then something amazing happens. Where the curve of this compotier base ought to proceed into foreshortened depth, it breaks off to launch instead one rigid diagonal, the longest line in the picture, which represents nothing but a visual thought—thither and hither—from

the abridged foot of the compotier to the bottle stopper far off, upper right. The line tells the bottle not to worry about being recessed; we’re all in this together, and everything, near or far, will get its share of the field. It surely gets its share of attention: as the bottle’s outlines rise in straight elevation, five separate curves—at the stopper, the neck, the midriff, etc.—declare it cylindrical. And we are shown that it is labeled, and maybe transparent, since it allows a table edge to show through. And all these data, whatever they predicate about this bottle, appear as separate signs. (More on this in a moment.) There are many similar works from this annus mirabilis, 1912; all beautiful, like the collage drawing of a flask with straw covering, a drinking glass, and a newspaper on a drop-leaf table (fig. 1.53). I love the airy brightness of it, every object conceived in thought, without clotting embodiment. If some find these products of Picasso’s

Figure 1.53. Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper

on a Table, Paris, autumn–winter 1912. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne; Gift of Henri Laugier, 1963.

The Intelligence of Picasso

nightlife unappealing, I hope, at least, they’ll respect the intelligence of their maker. My own pleasure in them derives partly from their elegant clarity, their cool; and in part from their wisdom. The tactic employed relies on apparent discontinuities; it shows visual thought approximating the habits of language, where nearly every utterance links distinct vocal signs, concatenations of words. The signs Picasso deploys may refer to a tangible object—or to your hunch that the face of a drawer masks a known depth; or to the fact that a freestanding table permits walking around; or to the distance from one thing to another—as from a cheek to an ear; or—seeing a boat at anchor—to the transit from here inward to its interior; or—sitting at table—to the reach from fruit bowl to bottle. Only minimally do the objects evoked serve as analogues to exclusively visual data. The still life becomes what semioticians now call a sign situation.15 It is a corrective system that accuses traditional art—and photography—of being meanly one-sided, too dog-inthe-manger in excluding all aspects but one; too captivated by the sheer heft of things, their obesity; and too insistent on continuities that reflect neither habitual speech, nor the jumpy way we perceive, nor the piecemeal process of making pictures. Much of what I am trying to say may be related to, or can be confirmed by, the findings of perceptual psychology, the physiology of vision, the neuroscience of the last thirty or forty years. Oliver Sacks cites “kinetic stutter” and “sequential episodes” in discussing the nature of vision.16 Such formulations are marvelously suggestive. Unfortunately, I know little about these things, and Picasso knew less. But of language—and being bilingual and all his life befriended by poets—he was keenly aware, and could use it with power. As when he says, “When I paint smoke I want you to be able to drive a nail into it” or “Matisse has the sun in his belly.”17 The clearest expression of discontinuity in Picasso— the rendering of visual experience in closer accord with habits of language—is what I call the separation of predicates. I’ll try to explain what I mean by citing a review of a new novel called Elizabeth Costello by the

South African Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. The book’s heroine, Elizabeth Costello, is a successful novelist, much in demand as a lecturer. Lecturing on the death of realism in modern literature, Coetzee has her say: “There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘on the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. . . . But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken.”18 Now let’s examine the “reality” status of the speaker’s “word-mirror” text. When an object such as a glass of water appears in an Old Master painting, or in a photograph (fig. 1.54), it shows lots of things which the phrase “glass of water” knows nothing of. I mean—let me enumerate—the size of it, its shape, and whether it’s clear or tinted, smooth-bodied or fluted, clean or soiled, full or half-empty, alone or in company. We see as well where on the tabletop the glass stands—in the middle or near a brink; we see (if we can see the thing at all) how the light strikes it, and whether it casts a shadow, and if so, which way. I have just listed ten predicates concerning that glass, ten things to be said or predicated about it—all of which are perceived instantaneously. And what does that so-called “word-mirror of the text” give us? Not what we see, but, as language habitually does, a generic abstraction—convenient enough, but hardly “reality.”

Figure 1.54. Photograph of Lobmeyr glassware, 1950s.

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Now Picasso, in this phase of his visual thinking, embarks on what I called the separation of predicates. The imagery he creates will not be a mirroring representation of things but a system of references to things. Here’s what I mean. Glass on a Table, 1914, is of modest dimensions, and it’s about saying “on the table stood a glass of water” (fig. 1.55). What things need saying, how and when do you say them, and in what order? The first reference to the glass is a white collage cutout, which tells something of its size, shape, and location. The glass is restated, carefully out of register, by a charcoal drawing that refers to its roundness, its fluted cup, and its transparency. And then the same glass again, cut out of woodgrain paper. We know this cutout to be the same glass, since it has no independent location. Finally, some of the charcoal lines and hatchings overrun both collage elements, identifying them, in case we had any doubt,

as still the same object (see also p. 68 and fig. 3.14). The top of the glass is now apparent in three distinct manifestations: plan, perspective, and elevation, corresponding, trivially, to diverse angles of vision. “Trivial,” as you know, means literally “three ways.” But why should one statement about this glass come as woodgrain? Surely wood is not what it’s made of? No, but the table probably is. And Picasso’s original reference to the table neglected to specify its material. This neglect is now remedied. We already know—from the charcoal lines and the white pasteup—that the glass is colorless and transparent; and the dark shape at the right assures us that it is solid enough to throw a shadow. And now this third statement about the glass associates it with wood, presumably because it is standing on wood. And the quality of the support has migrated to the object supported.19

Figure 1.55. Glass on a Table,

Paris, spring–summer 1914, Z.II/2.453. Sotheby’s, London, sale L08007, June 25, 2008, lot 25.

The Intelligence of Picasso

Ancient writers on rhetoric identified this kind of migration, or interchange, in a figure of speech. It’s called a hypallage, and it is common in language, as when we speak of a drunken tavern, a topless bar, or of a gardener’s green thumb. Hamlet, brooding on his widowed mother’s too hasty marriage to her brotherin-law, exclaims: “Oh, most wicked speed to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.” Is it the speed that is wicked, or the speeder? And what on earth are incestuous sheets? Can you get them at Bloomingdale’s?20

Common as such hypallages are in plain or poetic speech, before Picasso they were exceedingly rare in visual art. Exceptional is a hippopotamus type from Middle Kingdom Egypt (fig. 1.56). You just know that the papyrus and lotus on the animal’s hide are not its own, but absorbed from its environment. Magritte’s watery ship of 1950 may be a hypallage—or perhaps a metonymy (fig. 1.57). And then a few weeks ago I came across a portrait of Handel with the sound of a thousand-voiced Hallelujah about his ears (fig. 1.58). It

Figure 1.58. Cathy Hull, Handel, New York Times,

December 12, 2003, p. E6.

Figure 1.56. (top left) Egyptian, Middle Kingdom, Hippopotamus, c. 1961–1878 BC. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1917. Figure 1.57. (bottom left) René Magritte, The Seducer, 1950. Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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transubstantiates him—or a part of him—as the sea transubstantiates hull and sails of Magritte’s ship; or as the wood tabletop transubstantiates Picasso’s glass. Sure enough, the Handel idea quickly reemerged but with a further twist. In an illustration for a New Yorker essay on Thucydides, the hair, beard, and mustache of the Athenian historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, curl with combatants—it’s the thought of those fighting men he couldn’t get out of his head.21 It used to be done differently: if, in the late fifteenth century, an artist wanted to show at once an author and what he was writing about, then his subject matter had to be represented—but as distinct from himself, like Aristotle, writing on the Generation of Animals,

Figure 1.59. Jacqueline, Vauvenargues, April 3, 1960, Z.XIX.223. Private collection.

with Adam and Eve, foremost of the animal kingdom, up front; or when Boccaccio, in the act of writing his book about Noble Men and Women, beginning with Adam and Eve, appears at his writing desk, receiving a pair of visiting nudists—outsiders to his proper milieu.22 Because hypallage—the interchange between the surround and the surrounded—had not yet entered the artist’s arsenal, as it will, after collage, when the attributes of a thing become detachable, to attach to something else. I said before that Glass on a Table exhibits three ways to say “glass”—each using a different code, and each code with its special competence to inform. Each one of these separate statements coincides with the others, refers to the identical object, being seen to invest the

Figure 1.60. Jacqueline, Mougins, January 5, 1963/II, Z.XXIII.115. Private collection.

The Intelligence of Picasso

same place. Of course you can’t have more than one object in one place at any one time. But there’s no limit to the number of things you can say about an object such as a glass, or about the face of a woman. So Picasso, thinking a woman’s head, will say at once both full face and profile (fig. 1.59); then raise the ante to three: a right and a left profile sliding across a head that rests on squared shoulders, eyes front (fig. 1.60). Such coincidence of distinct statements would be inadmissible in a picture conceived as the analogue of a visual experience—like the handsome photograph of a wine bottle and glass (fig. 1.61); or a similar arrangement in a Picasso drawing of c. 1899 (fig. 1.62). In normal vision, the data of shape, size, location, light and shadow, color, and texture arrive as one instant sen-

sation, which only conceptual analysis pries apart; or which language, in its linear character, assembles by naming select predicates one after another; or, in Picasso’s approximation to language, one next to another, or overlapping. A sentence such as “the glass is on the table,” does not tell where on the table, any more than does the negative glass in the Au bon marché collage (fig. 1.63); while the Menil collage drawing indicates whereness by framing the foot of the glass in a trapezoid that defines the glass as here (fig. 1.64). In Picasso’s hands, even the attribute of place becomes detachable, to be emphasized or muted at will. So the cut newspaper element is somewhere on the table, but, as in speech, receives no specific site, while the circular foot of the glass gets firm footing as a separate datum.

Figure 1.62. Three Figures Speaking and Still Life, c. 1899. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB110.315.

Figure 1.61. Photographer unknown,

photo published in Réalités, March 1959.

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one Figure 1.63. Au bon marché, Paris, early 1913. Cologne, Museum Ludwig.

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Figure 1.64. Bottle and Glass on a Table, Paris, 1912, Z.II/1.331. Houston, The Menil Collection.

In Glass, Pipe, and Lemon, 1914, objects and their whereabouts forfeit the automatic coincidence they enjoy in a Cézanne, or a photograph (fig. 1.65). Marble table, wallpaper sample, an ace of clubs, a pack of tobacco, a drinking glass, a pipe, an abridged lemon—all become semantic events, whose location may, but need not be, given. As in language, and unlike photography, nothing enters the system unless as a separate sign. Do you want to include a pipe? Go ahead, say it! Is it a briar pipe of the usual brown? Go ahead, say it! Do you want to re-

call that it’s solid enough to be casting a shadow? Well, then, say it. And you may as well add that the table edge comes with a notched molding; and that the far wall of the room features a band of cherry vine ornament at roughly the height of the table; so that the colored sample of it at the lower left must refer to the band’s circumambience: it runs all around the room we’re in; it symbolizes the fact that it continues behind us. As for the tabletop, we are shown that you can draw, or see it, three ways. First, tentatively, in perspective, at

The Intelligence of Picasso

Figure 1.65. Glass, Pipe, and Lemon, Paris, spring 1914, Z.II/2.482. Private collection.

lower right, where two slightly converging lines take off from a corner and quickly fade out. Picasso is thinking: “they used to do it this way, but I won’t.” Then the same tabletop in isometric projection, supporting the pack of tobacco. Finally—supporting glass, pipe, and lemon—a white marble slab. Three distinct statements about the same object. Why not? One effect of these apparent disjunctions is to create a new kind of pictorial space. Not a preformed optical or physical space, like a preexistent receptacle, but a space comparable to that engendered by language, or music—

a space generated by dint of successive utterance. In other words, a semiotic space, without preformed physical properties other than reactivity. Another feature of these novel procedures is that, looked at with care, they turn out to be fun. There is wit in these works. As never before, Picasso is enjoying himself. Which brings me to the last image I want to share with you—my special favorite: Bottle, Glass, and Violin of 1912 in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (fig. 1.66). Using disposable newsprint, it lays out four household items: a freestanding bottle in levitation; a biased newspaper masthead; a loose-jointed drinking glass some-

one

Figure 1.66. Bottle, Glass, and Violin, Paris, December 1912. Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Purchase 1967.

what tipsy; and one sprawling fiddle. Underlying them all, a tabletop, its edge barely hinted at near the right margin. The last time I admired this spread, I found myself counting the paper scraps Picasso had pasted on. Discounting the B-shaped woodgrain paper at the far right, which seems to refer to the violin’s body, I tallied five pieces of newsprint and marveled to see them vicissitate. (There’s no such word, but there should be.) Focus first on the bottle at left. Its shape against neutral ground posits a tangible thing. The tiny lettering on it, laid sideways for unreadability, is merely its surface texture, or maybe the fizz inside, bubbling up.

But there is no doubting the contours: they cut a fine figure, signing a cylindrical body. Next comes the aggressively legible masthead—the word “Journal” closely trimmed; a clipped logo wherein wordage and newsprint, the message and its material conveyor, are palpably consubstantial—unlike the adjacent embottlement formed from the alien substance of paper. Thirdly, a wine glass charcoal-drawn over printed matter. But the jagged newspaper clipping that hosts this wine glass comes with spatial pretensions. It offers the glass an accommodation against which, on which,

The Intelligence of Picasso

or into which, the glass throws its shadow—for I don’t see how else to read the stain at its right. The stain tells what the artist had left unmentioned when he assembled the glass: that this convocation of parts is solid enough to cast a shadow. And receptivity to such shadow renders this snippet of newsprint recessive and spatial. Fourthly, at upper right, the pegbox of a violin, traced once again over newspaper. But here the recycled scrap assumes yet another function. Unlike its neighbor, it pretends no recession—repels any thought of accommodating cast shadow. Nor is it, like the pinched “Journal” masthead, ingrown with its message; and it outlines no object, such as a bottle. This fourth newsprint sample at upper right is nothing but a surface to sketch on, interchangeable with any scrap whatsoever. My question is (and it gives me no peace) why this fourth application was needed? Wouldn’t the given support sheet, the underlying white ground, have done well enough for a charcoal drawing of scrollwork and tuning pegs? The answer appears to be no, because the stability of this ground had long since evaporated. That freestanding bottle at upper left had converted the support sheet into thin air, which, stealing across the field even to upper right, would have cautioned the draftsman that you cannot impress charcoal lines upon ether. Hence the timely interposition of newsprint to pave a work surface sturdy enough to take pressure. As Picasso in 1912 wrote in a letter to Braque, you need to apply pasted paper and other stuff to overcome “our awful canvas.”23 I conclude that this trapeze of newsprint at upper right does indeed signify: it “means”—if that’s the right word—paper to draw on, a signification which the support sheet had forfeited when it allowed itself to turn atmospheric. The newspaper cannibalized for the Stockholm collage yielded one further item—a blank, printless, somewhat soiled patch erected at bottom center: deadpan and placed like a conjurer’s prop, or as blobs of paint sit on a palette in a painter’s self-portrait. This is what I work with, says the performer. I love this collage—and not only for the inven-

tiveness that keeps finding fresh roles for these various newspaper clippings. What delights me is the individuality Picasso concedes to every bit part, Picasso’s partnership with his troupe, the way he, as producer- director, shares with his cast the privilege of the uniquely personal role. If the careers of the players in this collage all began in the trashcan where Picasso recruited them, they now perform as dramatis personae; differing each from each. Which leads me to reflect on Picasso’s wit. He’s mischievous. Having just said that you need better than empty whiteness to draw on; and having firmly planted the fiddle’s upper extremity, he leaves the rest of it reserved in a papery abyss, then builds bridge, strings, and body over precisely nothing, teasing a negative space back into positive; the sort of inversion that would have marvelous consequences in Matisse paintings and cutouts; and in some of the best commercial design that enrolls negative space. By 1932, the brilliant Cassandre, born in Cracow in 1901, a poster artist deeply influenced by the Cubist Picasso, here advertising the bar on French railroad cars, shapes a recessive white gap into a siphon (fig. 7.5). Once you accept the conversion of representation into sign situation, it becomes immaterial whether your objects are made of stuff or thin air, so long as they shape your sign. By the late twentieth century, this novelty is all over America.24 To return to Picasso’s siphon at upper left—if that’s what it is; because a purebred siphon should come with both valve lever and spout (fig. 7.2), as Picasso knew back in 1901, when he painted the Absinthe Drinker (fig. 7.3). But the hybrid in the collage, lacking a spout, displays instead a stopper or cork, so that it seems to compound wine bottle and siphon. And there’s worse to come. This mongrel is crippled. Of course, we take it to be of the bottle species, i.e., symmetrical, with a neck rising on shoulders evenly spread. But the bottle in the collage comes with one atrophied shoulder, which seems to deprive this bottle of its proper girth, aligning it skimpingly with the neck. Unless we look sharp at the undercut that gives play to the lever. The curvature of this cut is so scissored as to imply the negative of a matching shoulder; and down from that phantom

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Figure 1.67. Self-Portrait, Mougins, June 30, 1972, Z.XXXIII.435. Private collection, Tokyo.

The Intelligence of Picasso

shoulder—full body. In other words, this lopsided bottle is so engineered that white flanking paper accrues to it—somewhat as white-paper ambience, forty years later, accrues to the understated torsos of Matisse’s Blue Nudes. Lastly, the bottle’s midriff: it simulates a manufacturer’s label, with the legend “proposition intéressante” run up one side. That this foursquare midportion is not a separate paper glued down, but part of the newsprint, is plain to see. Yet, thanks to its situation, it gets to preen like a label, as if pasted on, and this prompts a thought: isn’t such pasting the very gist of collage? So then this mimicking midriff, pretending to label status, mocks the whole enterprise; it becomes an ironic self-reference—which is what makes this proposition so intéressante. The still life, proceeding from left to right, opens with a sly

prologue: a non-collaged collage-simulation to introduce a collage. The separation of predicates in these collages engages the three-dimensional nature of things as earnestly as did the eighteen-year- old Picasso drawing Canova’s statue from three different angles (figs. 1.3–1.5); or the twenty-four-year-old visualizing a seated youth from six different points of view (figs. 1.9–1.12). Picasso stays at it intermittently through the rest of his life, inventing alternatives to the trompe l’oeil illusionism of the Old Masters. The question I have been asking myself for decades is: why is this painter, this modernist par excellence, almost alone in his century in cleaving so tenaciously to the three-dimensional? I suggest that we may get a hint of an answer through that abject annulment of

Figure 1.68. Self-Portrait, Mougins, July 2, 1972, Z.XXXIII.436. St. Moritz, Switzerland, Gilbert de Botton Family Trust.

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body in the June 30, 1972, Self-Portrait, which Picasso produced a few months before his death (fig. 1.67). It’s his face all right, a good likeness, even to the want of neck. The drawing, as I said earlier, is primitive; note the childish scribble at the shrunken shoulders. But it is profoundly ingenious, inventive, prophetic, in denying these pick-up-stick features any hold in embodiment. No bone structure left to contain the stare; the only tangible feature is the nose drooping like overripe fruit. The rest is afterglow and putrescence, and consciousness with no corpus to home in on. This work—about which Picasso said to his friend Pierre Daix, “here I think maybe I touched on something. It’s not like anything I’ve done before”25—was followed immediately by two drawn versions (fig. 1.68; the second is Z.XXXIII.437), in which the vaporous unphysicality of the colored version hardens into eroded stone; a slab offering no alternative views—no embraceable being, no three-dimensionality, no life. In what sense was this self-portrait unlike anything Picasso had done before? Going on ninety-two, he here envisions himself in the likeness of a death’s-head—sans ears, sans flesh.26 Unlike his earlier skulls, which were generic, anonymous, and fully embodied, the novelty in this last, skull-like self-portrait is its privacy, the inti-

mate vision of one’s own dying.27 And the concretion of this deepest knowledge—so long resisted—resides in the failing cohesion, the cracking of the contour that no longer contains; the scatter of marks that imply no changes of plane strewn over the surface; the sheer impossibility of any backmatter to sustain the apparition of antimatter. A system of broken strokes and symbolic color, in which self and death coalesce at the verge of imminent dissolution. Let the metaphysicians expatiate on the transient mirage of the body and the superior reality of ideas; let the pious cling to the hope of postmortem bodily resurrection. Picasso foresees a fossil at best. I take this image to be an icon of unbearable truth—the most obscene of possible images— death in the first person singular.28 Picasso knew, had known for at least sixty years, that his immortality was assured. What he was now about to surrender was body. And perhaps that’s the key: because then all the effects he had striven for to affirm the presence of backmatter, the stereometry of a body, since the first decade of the century, no matter how analytical or grotesque they may look at first sight, were essentially affirmations of embodiment as the condition of life.

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Picasso drawing of 1931 shows a sculptor at work on a statuette (fig. 2.1). I compare it with a small oil of similar subject by the seventeenth-century Fleming Gonzales Cocx (fig. 2.2). Such comparisons are unproductive if they stop at the similarities, but they are good for telling the differences. In the painting, the artist’s bespectacled gaze and meticulous operation converge on one patch of surface—one patch at a time. In Picasso’s drawing, the sculptor’s wide-angle vision circles the figure, and the statue turns at the touch of his hand; hence its double exposure, the lineaments of a frontal anatomy imprinted on a three-quarter back view. We are assured that the figure is understood in the round. Shortly thereafter, Picasso launched a series of erotic drawings and prints—again the female body in the grasp of a male (fig. 2.3).1 But whereas, in the statuette, possession through total knowledge was symbolized in the overlay of an alternative aspect, no distinction of aspects is allowed in The Embrace. The possessed woman, downed and engulfed, clings too close for seeing. Blind grappling overwhelms every aspect, so that the viewer, rather than receiving multiplied visual data, experiences some of the visual disorientation which attends carnal knowledge.2 The differences between the subjects of artist and ravisher are plain enough—in Picasso’s dream of total envelopment they are opposite poles. But they share their reference to a single compulsion. Both reach for that knowing intimacy which Picasso’s iconography confounds in a twofold expression of creation and love.3 The will to have the full knowledge of what is depicted, the refusal to be confined to an aspect, is not Picasso’s

Drawing as If to Possess

alone. It pervades Western art, fed by multiple impulses, to all of which Picasso responds. The impulse may be sensual, released by fantasies of erotic fulfillment; it may be cognitive—an intellectual anxiety for complete information, like wanting a picture of the back of the moon; and it may be moralistic, spurred by the preacher’s injunction to remain undeceived by the fair face of appearance. In the late Middle Ages the preacherly impulse gave rise to such images as the “Prince of the World” on the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral. The figure stands at the inner jamb of the southwestern portal—a witless fop smiled upon by Five Foolish Virgins; nor do they see that a rip in his garment exposes his arse and spine crawling with toads. Or this macabre contrivance: an early sixteenthcentury ivory pendant detached from a rosary (fig. 2.4). The obverse represents a young bridal pair, the damsel in the tender embrace of her groom. But the figures are worked in the round and intended for manipulation, so that you could not finger the lovers without feeling grim Death behind. Taking their love at face value, you would be missing its future tense and God’s plan for the whole; which is why the museum has the object installed against a small mirror. Scaled to a lady’s hand, Originally published in Artforum (October 1971) as an independent essay from material then in draft form for “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” in Other Criteria (1972), where it was modified for a larger context. The essay was revised again, with minor alterations, for the anthology Major European Art Movements 1900–1945, edited by Patricia E. Kaplan and Susan Manso (New York, 1977), pp. 193–221. This is the version reprinted here.

Figure 2.1. The Sculptor, Juan-les-Pins, August 4, 1931, Z.VII.338. Seattle Art Museum; LeRoy M. Backus Collection.

Figure 2.2. Gonzales Cocx (Coques), Sight. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum

voor Schone Kunsten.

Figure 2.3. The Embrace III, from the Suite

Vollard, Boisgeloup, April 23, 1933. Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Dennis Adrian.

Drawin g as I f to P o s s e s s [43]

Figure 2.4. Bead from a rosary or chaplet, French or Netherlandish, 1500–1550. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; William E. Nickerson Fund.

it was designed to transmit that surpassing knowledge, which is not stayed by the façade of romantic love.4 Such blatant moralizing seems at first sight remote from Picasso’s mentality. Yet a personal version even of this homiletic mode, whether adapted or newly conceived, does appear in his work. The theme—I am thinking of the skull-girl portraits of 1940 (fig. 2.5)— may be that of death ingrown with youth; or, more often, of an animal nature impaled with the human, both natures faceting a single core. The bitterness, the brutality, of these wartime images reflects their historical moment. But as visualizations of coincident opposites, they bespeak a lifelong obsession with the problem of all-sided presentment—an obsession so keen that whatever means Western art may have found to display front and back simultaneously, Picasso appropriates all those which he came too late to invent. Four such means were developed within the traditional system of naturalism and focused perspective: front and back in juxtaposition; the averted back revealed by a mirror; the averted back shown to a

Figure 2.5. Head of a Woman, Paris, June 26, 1940,

Z.XI.54. Private collection.

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responsive watcher upstage; and the figura serpentinata. They are four ways of harmonizing an ideal of omnispection with the logic of a fixed point of view. A description of each in turn is in order, for Picasso’s art passes through them continually even as it breaks free.

About-Face in Sequence “Because the Danae, previously sent to Your Majesty, had appeared entirely from the front, I wished [in the present Venus and Adonis] to show the opposite side [la contraria parte], to the end that the chamber where [these pictures] will hang, may become more delightful to see [riesca più grazioso alla vista].” Thus Titian to his client Philip II of Spain in a letter of 1554. He adds that

Figure 2.6. La Lola, Paris, 1905, Z.XXII.189. Private collection.

an Andromeda currently under contract “will display yet another view.”5 Titian was doing more than pandering to the salacious taste of a king; he was showing off the power of painting. As his theme was the female nude, he would render it from all angles, silencing the sculptor’s taunt that painting, being one-sided, was the weaker of the two sister arts. And he would treat the king’s chamber as Giorgione before him had treated one canvas alone. For Giorgione, “to prove that painting shows more to a single view than sculpture does,” had painted a nude soldier half turned, while a limpid stream, a looking glass, and the high gloss of a discarded corselet reflected his various aspects.6 Both masters followed a canonic procedure—displaying frontal and dorsal views of otherwise similar figures by juxtaposing them in one visual field.

Figure 2.7. Master P. M., The Women’s Bath, 1490–1500. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Purchased with the support of the F. G. Waller-Fonds and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, 1997.

Drawin g as I f to P o s s e s s

The idea was rooted deep in antique compositional principles. One can trace it from late Archaic reliefs to such Hellenistic baroque groups as the Farnese Bull. And if Renaissance masters thought the device too banal, they knew how to disguise it, the game being to maintain hidden identities in variation. In Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (London), the two foreground archers are inversions of one another: as one loads a crossbow, his comrade nearby (repeat) loads a crossbow, being but himself again seen from behind. And Pollaiuolo surely did not mean their identity to go unperceived. Examples of such procedure abound at every level of sophistication. The verso adjoined to the recto is the common means of conveying, or holding on to, full information about three-dimensional objects. You find it in modern coin catalogues and documentary photographs (such as fig. 2.4), and you find it again and again among Picasso’s early study sheets of female nudes. At first glance the expository arrangement of his La Lola, for instance (fig. 2.6), seems comparable to the Master

P. M.’s engraving, The Women’s Bath (fig. 2.7): both works exhibit a schematic sequence of front, back, and side, plus one squatter flexing a leg. Yet the two works are worlds apart. One sees at once how the abstraction of Picasso’s line prevents his successive images from dispersing. The fifteenth-century German engraver models each insulate aspect in order to know. Picasso, knowing each aspect, wants to have them in simultaneity. He will, if necessary, spend the next fifty years learning how. The paradigm of the sequential mode is the Three Graces—a cool deliberate exposition of anterior and posterior aspects (fig. 2.8).7 Endlessly copied in Roman times, the group was enthusiastically revived in the Renaissance and remained a staple of Salon art. One is somewhat surprised to discover that this Late Hellenistic invention passed into the twentieth century as no other antique has been able to do. The Three Graces inspire Gauguin, Matisse, Delaunay, Maillol, Lehmbruck, and Braque. They are constant in Picasso’s oeuvre where, beginning with Three Dutch Women of 1905, they reappear in almost every period. It was their two-

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Figure 2.8. Antonio

Federighi, Three Graces, c. 1450. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung.

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dimensional about-face routine which allowed the Three Graces to survive the flattening of twentieth-century art.

The Reflected Reverse A fifteenth-century account of a lost picture by Jan van Eyck describes women bathing, “the reverse of their bodies being visible in a mirror, so that their backs as well as their breasts could be seen.”8 This is one mode of simultaneity which Picasso disdains. The mirror’s dependability in giving back a predictable likeness—though it delighted great masters from van Eyck to Matisse—leaves him unmoved. In his vast output, literal mirroring is remarkably rare.9

One lonely Seated Nude of 1922 (Z.IV.454) bestows an off-shoulder glance on her sad mirrored self—but the subject is dropped for ten years. Then, in 1932, two famous paintings emerge during a three-day spell: The Mirror of March 12, depicting a sleeper whose lucid posterior is assigned to the looking glass; and, two days later, the Girl before a Mirror, standing face-to-face with her image.10 These pictures are proof that Picasso does not spurn mirrors as such—only their prosaic fidelity. As in allegories and fairy tales, his mirrors are oracular instruments that tell secrets, or instruments of transformation. The catoptrics are magical. And the reflections revealed—unlike workaday mirror images—strive out of their frames to rejoin their originals.

Figure 2.9. (top left) Study for L’Aubade, Paris, September 18, 1941, Z.XI.298. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1252. Figure 2.10. (top right) Study for L’Aubade, Paris, September

18, 1941, Z.XI.306. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1265. Figure 2.11. (bottom) Study for L’Aubade, Paris, September

19, 1941, Z.XI.301. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1259.

Drawin g as If to P o s s e s s

A mirror resemblance, after all, is always elsewhere. From the viewpoint of the body’s integrity, it disassembles; so that we grasp its identity with the thing mirrored not by intuition, but by inferring it from relational clues. A girl’s mirror image, whether addorsed or confronted, cannot but widen the gap between her knowable aspects. Object and image, even if carefully hyphened by means of proximity and obvious likeness, repel one another. They do not cohere; they want to diverge like one’s own two hands back to back. Picasso seems to regard this as a fault that requires correction. In a series of drawings dated September 18– 19, 1941, he includes a nude seated at a three-quarterlength mirror. And the progress of the series (figs. 2.9– 2.11) plots a gradual rapprochement, until the woman and reflection have coalesced, her blended aspects at once simultaneous and indivisible. Compare such pictures as Bedoli’s Portrait of Anna Eleonora Sanvitale (Parma), Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (London), Ingres’s Comtesse d’Aussonville (Frick), or Matisse’s numerous paintings and drawings with models reflected: the effect is a dispersion of aspects rather than palpable continuity; the form is fielded but not embraced. And though the volume of information is doubled, the loss in sensuality is, for Picasso, the wrong price to pay.

functioning double. He colludes with our own seeing to round out the protagonist form in its fullness. In the most moving early examples of such co-opted vision, the watched protagonist is a Christ with his back to us—like Mantegna’s Christ Harrowing Hell; or H. S. Beham’s Man of Sorrows Appearing to Mary—an engraving whose dramatic action gathers in one searching gaze aimed at what we cannot see (fig. 2.12). Baroque masters will stretch such dramatized sight lines to the full depth of the scene. Thus Rembrandt’s Denial of St. Peter (Amsterdam): forgathered near the picture plane is the group about the Apostle; as Peter puts off the questioning maid, Christ, recessed in deep space, turns

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Implied Rearward Aspect Delacroix’s Journal for September 14, 1854, describes hearing mass in the Church of St. Jacques at Dieppe. After a brief account of the ceremony, which ends with the Kiss of Peace, he concludes: “One could make a beautiful picture of that final moment, taken from behind the altar.”11 Delacroix—like the heir of Baroque art he aspires to be—sees in depth and imagines his physical vision rebounding from its own vanishing point, so as to visualize the scene in reverse. The pictorial stage of Renaissance and Baroque art makes frequent appeal to a character whose function it is to personify such rebounding vision. You find him in the depths of depicted space, focusing on the rearward aspect of some powerful foreground form of which we are not shown enough. The upstaged observer, a painted figment, becomes our

Figure 2.12. Hans Sebald Beham, Man of Sorrows Appearing to Mary, 1519. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

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his head looking, so that Peter’s lapse is seen, as it had been foreseen, de profundis. Or else the foreground motif is a canvas under attack—as in Rembrandt’s Painter before His Easel (Boston) and in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Both pictures rivet attention on the glance of the painter; behind the reverse of the canvas, we see its obverse observed. And even this pure Baroque mode of suggestion Picasso retains. In some pre-Cubist works, and again during the 1930s, he had allowed watchers upstage to function dramatically—though with no intent to promote a stereometric illusion.12 But just this is unmistakably the effect of the couped head on the horizon in On the Beach (fig. 2.13). The two huge little heroines in the foreground, remarkable for developed feminine charm and wholly preoccupied with their toy boat, are spied upon from afar. Someone in earnest is eyeing them, an immense rock with a face in it, yet clearly one of their

kind and, I think, masculine. Who else looks so avid watching from across the divide? He studies the seaward aspect of what we watch from the shore. The apparent all-sidedness of the foreground figures owes much to their modeled openwork fabric—but almost as much to the inquisitive rover peering from beyond the high sea.13

Serpentination In a note to Vasari acknowledging the gift of a drawing, Aretino (1540) praises a certain nude which, “bending down to the ground, shows both the back and the front.”14 He was describing a frontal figure doubled over like a hairpin, a headlong variant of the Mannerist figura serpentinata. Its elastic anatomy, lengthened at most by two or three vertebrae, displays front and back simultaneously, incorporating both views at once on its own jackknifing spine, that is to say, without re-

Figure 2.13. On the Beach, Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, February 12, 1937. Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Foundation; The Solomon R.

Guggenheim Foundation.

Drawin g as I f to P o s s e s s

course to repetition, external props, or assisting witnesses. In sixteenth-century pictures, such figures tend to approach at speed, bending down so precipitously that the back signals before one becomes aware of diminished frontality. Indeed, in the best hairpin figures, the torso swerves aside as it folds over so as to leave as much as possible of the front elevation in view.15 Thematically, such figures draw their justification from the narrative context. It wants a catastrophe to discharge both the requisite speed and the conflicting emotions—curiosity conquering fear, solicitude interfering with flight, and so forth. Hence the complex rotation of a figure such as Paolo Farinati’s Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 2.14): fleeing the dragon, she has to

Figure 2.14. Paolo Farinati, Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1560. Windsor Castle,

Royal Collection Trust.

maintain equilibrium as she falls in love on the run. The more common variety of serpentination, which requires no strenuous pretext, is the reclining or standing figure revolving on its main axis. Its motivation is sensual; it suggests well-being, self-admiration, or erotic enticement. You would not believe the amount of enticing frontage a Mannerist back view can show; Jan van Hemessen’s Judith, for instance (fig. 2.15)—and Picassos galore (figs. 2.16, 2.17). The understanding of this motif in our culture is immediate and universal. Pinup models posing for calendar art tend to work up a figura serpentinata; and their photographer, if endowed with a sense of craft, knows just how much expository rotation is needed to meet the terms of an “eyeful.” Picasso’s draftsmanship, always ready to wring female figures to ensure that all breasts and buttocks show, impounds every known form of serpentination from the stores of the past.16 The Bathers, a drawing of 1918 famous for its classical reminiscences, exhibits both Mannerist types—one woman atwist on a spiral waist, and a jackknife figure capping the composition (Z.III.233, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum). Sometimes the source is mocked, as in the aquatint entitled La Puce (Bloch 359). Dated 1936, it was produced for the Vollard edition of Buffon’s Natural History to illustrate “The Flea.” For reasons unstated but not far to seek, the etching was excluded from the published edition.17 It is of course based on the Late Hellenistic Venus Callipyge—the “Venus of the handsome behind,” who turns about to acknowledge her other aspect (fig. 2.18). I know that Picasso’s conception seems trifling; but the frivolous virtuosity of his adaptation is that of a passionate, possessive eye. Since the statue’s pose, seen from the normal front view, amounts to a promise— the promise, that is, of its implied rearward aspect— Picasso synchronizes promise and actuality by flipping half of the torso around, and makes it work without seeming discontinuity. Frivolous subject matter is no serious deterrent to work. Picasso made a beautiful line drawing on December 6, 1953, a drawing which visualizes an imposing measure of three-dimensionality—in spatial depth as well as volumetric displacement (fig. 2.19). The subject is

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Figure 2.15. Jan van Hemessen, Judith, c. 1540.

Art Institute of Chicago; Wirt D. Walker Fund.

Figure 2.16. (bottom left) Nude Woman with Raised

Arms, Royan, January–May 1940, Z.X.234. Paris, Musée Picasso, sketchbook 217, MP1879, fol. 32r. Figure 2.17. (bottom right) Nude Woman with Raised

Arms, January–May 1940, Z.X.235. Paris, Musée Picasso, sketchbook 217, MP1879, fol. 37r.

Figure 2.18. Venus Callipyge, late 1st century BC. Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (left and right). La Puce, Paris, spring 1936 (Bloch 359) (center).

Figure 2.19. La Ronde, Vallauris, December 6, 1953, Z.XVI.32. Private collection.

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a roundelay of six frisky nudes holding hands. It is a bravura performance, like a Chinese brush painting; thinking and ceaseless practice precede, and no fumbling thereafter. The success is especially remarkable at the two ends, where the projecting of a round dance poses its greatest challenge: how to sustain the continuity of the circular motion through the foreshortened depths of the turns. Picasso meets the challenge with two brilliant solutions. At the left the dancers are stacked three deep, showing—like his many Three Graces—front, side, and back in succession; at the right one frolicking nude alone incorporates all phases in one. I suggest tilting the drawing ninety degrees to appreciate the cunning of her serpentination. But serpentination here is mere pretense. Such gyrations as hers, or as those of the girl with the flea, presuppose a disjunctive maneuver far beyond anatomical elasticity. And this antecedent disjunction, followed by impulsive reconstitution, situates Picasso’s dancer outside the limits of Mannerism in a universe of his own. For most of Picasso’s twisting anatomies, serpentination is in fact a misnomer. It suggests that the action is athletically self-induced and thus, in principle, traceable

from the model. Whereas the model’s seeming turns and versations are largely induced by Picasso’s unique approach to the nature of contour. Picasso’s line tends to snare a hidden dimension—at certain strategic moments it becomes a horizon, at every point of which the mind can sight into depth and zoom in. He draws like the stylus on a kymograph. While his stylus pretends to pan along the outline of a cylinder, his imagination makes that cylinder turn like a drum or spit, so that a longitudinal contour ends up recording an implied transverse motion. And the agility of Picasso’s gyrating limbs resembles that drum rotation; it is part gesture, but in complicity with his own zooming eye. When he traces the innocent flank of a body, he seems not to be thinking a margin but a continuous hither and thither. A meander of three-dimensional reference collapses into a one-dimensional line. Is it not astonishing that the figure in the Nude Girl Asleep (fig. 2.20) can register as a front view even though no less than one-third of her back shows at the top, and another third at the bottom? The power behind the conception (and the laborious fieldwork preserved in the related studies, Z.XVI.242–247) is

Figure 2.20. Nude Girl Asleep, Vallauris, February 28, 1954/VII, Z.XVI.249. Collection of Marina Picasso.

Drawin g as I f to P o s s e s s

belied by the winsomeness of the subject. Yet the verve of the body and its internal strain disguised as sweet rest are of a Michelangelesque quality of imagination. And a half century of Picasso’s art underlies that upper contour which rides in such smooth ambiguity from nape to hip. The principle was well in hand by 1920. Already then a bland contour that seemed only to sail at the edge of a volume could engender that volume as a revolving form. In the Nessus and Dejaneira drawing (fig. 2.21) the linear trace of the bride’s torso from left breast to right groin is rendered as if on a turning shaft. It moves on a surface itself moving in depth, and the rotation enclosed by the contour can no longer be rationalized as a posture of serpentination. The writhing of a nymph in distress

merely helps to trap the roll of foreshortened planes in the economy of a line. But Picasso’s impulse to possess the delineated form in a simultaneity of multiple aspects runs even deeper within his past. Its earliest monumental expression takes us back to the pre-Cubist moment. A new bid for symbolic solidity is made in the large 1908–9 Bather (fig. 2.22)—a standing nude on which some of Picasso’s most famous distortions appear for the first time. Carefully synthesized and conscientiously transferred from its preparatory drawing (Z.II/1.110), the painted figure shows both pubis and rump, and a good deal more backbone than a frontal perspective allows. The splay-out principle by which Cézanne had bonded inanimate objects into the painted field is applied to the female anatomy, but

Figure 2.21. Nessus and Dejaneira, Juan-les-Pins, September 12, 1920, Z.VI.1394. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange).

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Figure 2.22. Bather, Paris, winter 1908–9. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest.

Drawin g as If to P o s s e s s

with a contrary purpose: to confirm a known fullness of body by wrenching its averted sides into view. Unlike the four modes of simultaneity that imply a fixed point of vantage, the implication of Picasso’s Bather is that of a vision cut loose. Here emerge those effects which encourage talk of circumspicuous or circumambient sight, of visual rays bent around corners, etc. The early literature of Cubism gave currency to the notion that the new painters designed a figure as though they had toured it to collect impressions of its various aspects. “ They move round the object, in order to give . . . a concrete representation of it, made up of several successive aspects,” wrote Metzinger in 1911.18 Such descriptions are overly rationalistic; who has not had the experience—especially with the Cubism of Picasso—of seeing the work confound its interpreters? The liberties Picasso takes in the Bather’s figure by transgressing its contours seem superficially simple, but every explanation is doomed if it fails to locate itself in a constellation of possibilities. In the Bather, for instance, the excess visibility at spine and buttocks may record the artist’s bent vision; it may equally well stand for the object itself revolving, as though the bather’s torso had ceded its boundaries to the directions of motion. The thought of the body turned, or of the body signaling its capability for such turning, is as inviting an explanation as the restlessness of an ambulant viewer. And then again, is not touch involved—the pencil as delegate of the groping hand? And beyond these poetics lies a simpler hypothesis: that we are dealing with a conflation of representational modes; that the use of separate vantage points trained upon the body at rest is but a graphic device for maximum density of information— disturbing only because it amalgamates the traditional painterly mode with the diagrammatic. None of these interpretations can be ruled out; ambiguous simultaneity is part of Picasso’s essential approach to the rendering of the external world. In the Bather, where the overspill from the optical silhouette makes its first dramatic appearance, we are given a further clue in the figure’s physical action, and in the impacted solidity which that action achieves. The far side of the bather’s face, her pronated right arm and

her twisted right leg—not obviously pigeon-toed but in-turned—all these together promote one massive implosion; the whole of the body’s right side grinds inward upon the fixed left. Once again, the appearance of aspects interlocking and fused is generated by the figure’s gestural energy cooperant with the artist’s eye. It is essential to Picasso’s multi-aspected imagery that the object he draws meet his circumspection halfway. His marvelous evocation of gesture feeds a devouring vision. The subjects cooperate, as when, thirtythree years after the Bather, a cross-legged nude with crossed breasts sits up with both buttocks showing and both knees to the fore (fig. 2.23); the very action of left and right thighs intercrossing, the sheer impetus of their involution, shakes up and shuffles the elements of

Figure 2.23. Seated Nude, Paris, October 6, 1941, Z.XI.332. Málaga,

Museo Picasso; on temporary deposit from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte.

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frontality, causing further overlaps of antipodal aspects. The image is a weird junction of wills—the depicted action abetting the grasp of an encompassing vision and compounding the visualization of corporeality. It is here, I believe, in the emphatic substantiation of bodies, that Picasso’s lifelong explorations of simultaneous front-and-side, fore-and-aft, in-and-out, etc., depart from—and far transcend—the original intentions of Cubism. Yet the phrase “Cubist simultaneity of point of view” has been with us so long that it was taken to cover whatever else in that line there was to invent. The phrase, and the engaging concept behind it, substituted for looking. If Cubism had done it all in the teens of the century, why fuss about Picasso still doing it forty years later? But the truth is that Cubism had not done it at all—except in bestowing the license for what remained to be done. Cubism had been a transformation of remembered solids into a system of discontinuous notations and fragments. The world it inherited was the world’s theater spaced out with objects, and its effect on the imaging of these objects was to unsolder their structure and scatter their parts. Whereas in Picasso’s subsequent work, the two-dimensional Cubist field, with its staccato of abbreviated or dismembered particles, was taken for granted. Its creator had been at home in it for a generation. And the task he now set himself was to recover the stereometry of the body without regressing to pre-Cubist illusionism, to restore sensuous presence to things conceived and maintained in the flatlands of post-Cubist space. Simultaneity of aspects aiming at consolidation became the efficient principle of a new constructivism. For this enterprise—in which Picasso was to find himself increasingly isolated—Cubism furnished some of the tools, but no more; its own so-called simultaneities are of a different order. Their function is always disjunctive; a bottle in elevation separates from its support by posing against a tabletop shown in plan; the elliptical brim of a pipe bowl floats free to be cocked as a circle; here and there glimpses appear of a sidelong facet splintering off a dice cube or human head (see pp. 34, 68). The purpose is not the embodiment of solid structures but, on the contrary, their dismem-

berment for insertion in an occasional semantic space of uncertain depth. Within the Cubist style, the very ideas of aspectsimultaneity and corporeality are antagonistic; they disfranchise each other. The crystalline structures of the first Cubist phase (1908–10) retain a good deal of residual density, but they reveal little interest in simultaneous point of view. (Picasso’s Ambroise Vollard [fig. 1.20] is as frontal as a portrait by Raphael.) And by the time that interest develops in Cubism’s later phases, the signs standing for objects are drained of mass, leaving whatever had once been incorporated dispersed. Picasso’s late work, beginning around World War II, picked up the loosened facets yielded by the atomizing forces of Cubism; what he did with them was something new. From 1940 onward his faces and nudes look for firmness of structure. So do his animals, from bulls to birds; likewise his chairs and tables. But their solidity hardly relies on such tried devices as perspective and

Figure 2.24. Large Nude Woman, Mougins, March 2, 1962 (Bloch 1085).

Drawin g as If to P o s s e s s

chiaroscuro. It depends rather on the close weave of disparate aspects—partial views summoned from different compass points and their interpenetrating convergence once again symbolizing three-dimensional form (fig. 2.24). The female body, for instance. Continually rearranged like a hand of cards in a space without depth, it remains locked within contours that define a coherent self. The body’s familiar landmarks, its conceptual commonplaces, serve as exponents of vagrant aspects. A right profile settles upon a left side. A cloven curve, fetched from behind, buttocks a frontal view. A dotted bosom becomes the prefix to any aspect soever, so that a forward figure bent over sprouts breasts at the shoulder blades. A Sleeping Nude, prone on her stomach, shows her top sunny-side up and her face facing both ways, like the cover of a book dropped and splayed out on the floor (fig. 2.25). Yet the body coheres; we see neither Cubist dismemberment nor schematic disjunction. The

figures work, and Picasso’s draftsmanship makes their irrational translocations seem genuinely informative. As the scrambling of aspects continues, always centripetal, always generating coherence, one looks and keeps looking, marveling how these impossible contradictions become necessities, until you wonder how we ever put up with the poor showing of one-sided representation. Could a cartographer do it?—make the world’s other side present to the imagination by entering Pacific islands on the Atlantic? Picasso’s feat was to have fashioned a syntax of elastic pseudo-anatomical intervals, an invented grammar within which such transpositions do not simply register as jokes or mistakes. The displacements themselves are not hard to make; making them work, making them human, required the better part of Picasso’s life.19 Meanwhile, however, the settled notion that Cubism was a release from visual fixity, intended to represent objects from all sides at once, blinded us to the goals and inventions of Picasso’s post-Cubist years. Wherever in the 1930s, or ’40s, or ’50s Picasso achieved an unprecedented realization of simultaneity, the effect was duly noted as a “characteristic Cubist device,” implying that the old genius was living comfortably off his early investment. Surveying Picasso’s lifelong commitment to the theme of woman as partner embraced, to the larger theme of embracing vision, and to the ultimate mystery of an embrace gifted with sight, one arrives at a disturbing conclusion. That the inventor of Cubism has had to cope in himself with the most uncompromising threedimensional imagination that ever possessed a great painter; and that he flattened the language of painting in the years just before World War I because the traditional means of three-dimensional rendering inherited from the past were for him too one-sided, too lamely content with the limited aspect—in other words, not three-dimensional enough.

Figure 2.25. Sleeping Nude, Paris, summer 1941, Z.XI.198. Belfort,

Musée d’Art Moderne; Collection Donation Maurice Jardot.

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Figure 3.1. Self-Portrait, Paris, spring–summer 1907. Prague, Národní Galerie.

Three

The Prague Self-Portrait

A

s of today, the googled name of Picasso scores more hits than such also-rans as Einstein, Gandhi, Greta Garbo, and Hitler, trailing only Elvis Presley.1 Hard to remember the 1970s, when the gist of the following paper was delivered in lecture form; when the work of 1907 still challenged its champions to recognize, along with the wildness, the intelligence of Picasso. The question is as old as the picture and in some quarters still nagging: why would a boy who could paint so knowingly at age fifteen go on to paint so crudely in his mid-twenties (figs. 3.1, 3.2)? What made Picasso renounce the skill that had served him until about 1906 in favor of the manner of 1907, exemplified in the Prague Self-Portrait—eyes staring out from a mess of raw flesh overrun by black stripes? Painted two years before the historic arrival of Cubism, the picture, like others of 1907, flouts anatomical norms and every rule of classical painting. Why this lapse into primitivism? How was Picasso’s intelligence engaged here? It is all too easy to speak of exotic influences—from ancient Iberia or tribal Africa (or from Matisse); but why would a man yield to their suasion? An influence is something one undergoes. The word originally referred to an astral emanation believed to determine one’s fate. As an explanation of radical change in a mature artist’s work, it belittles his presence of mind and ignores the specificity of his choices. So the question persists: what did Picasso will in this portrait? Where did he think he was going? Let me bypass the fierce psychological brunt of the portrait—its sustained suddenness and binocular

Figure 3.2. Self-Portrait with Wig (Self-Portrait as an 18th-Century

Gentleman), Barcelona, 1898–1900, Z.XXI.48. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB110.053.

A shorter version of this essay originally formed part of the lecture “The Intelligence of Picasso” (ch. 1). Steinberg expanded it in 2007 for the exhibition catalogue Picasso Cubiste/Cubist Picasso (Paris, Musée National Picasso), pp. 103–17. This is the version published here, with minor revisions following Steinberg’s notes.

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concentration, the fever, the hectic flush under that stare, and so on. These speak for themselves. I propose, instead, to ignore most of the image. Since this paper is short and the picture unusually dense, I will not presume to discuss its entirety, but focus on only three or four lines in it, asking why these lines behave as they do: (1) the oblique stroke down the cheek; (2) the slope of the forehead at upper right; (3) the level brushstroke across the mouth. Consider the line that runs down the right cheek. We hardly need to compare it with Matisse’s portrait of his friend André Derain, dated 1905 (fig. 3.3). The device, known to any competent draftsman, such as the young Picasso (figs. 3.4, 3.5), is understood to register

a change of plane. In both portraits, the sharp linear definition at the same anatomical site locates the break between the frontality of the face and its receding, foreshortened side. We may call such a line a watershed, or better, an arris, i.e., the salience that defines the external junction of convergent planes. But if the representational function of this arris in the Picasso and in the Matisse is identical, there are telling differences: First. In the role assigned to that cheekline, the Matisse portrait remains securely traditional. For all its linearity, the line is a color, and that color is consistent with what we read elsewhere as skin—as on the side of the nose. In the Picasso, the corresponding cheekline is black, as if it belonged to another

Figure 3.4. Head of a Man, Barcelona, January 1897. Barcelona, Museu Picasso, MPB111.306r.

Figure 3.3. Henri Matisse, André Derain, 1905. London, Tate Gallery;

Purchased with assistance from the Knapping Fund, the Art Fund and the Contemporary Art Society and private subscribers 1954.

The Prague S e l f - P ort ra i t

system, a more reductive code, like drawing in black and white. Second. In the Matisse, the arris lies flush with the picture plane. Picasso’s recedes, backing toward the ear. This is best seen when that line is removed (fig. 3.6).2 Without the arris, the side of the face turns doughy, and the blank ear settles on the picture plane like a parenthesis introducing the eye. That empty ear would confound the whole facial system were it not for this commanding black rod that tells the ear—“You stay back there!” Picasso’s arris, then, unlike Matisse’s, functions as a three-dimensional event. Third. In the Matisse, the cheekline shows a decent regard for its neighbors. Reaching down, it nearly joins Derain’s chin; and it links up with the eyebrow to define

Figure 3.5. Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899–1900. Barcelona, Museu

Picasso, MPB110.690.

the eye socket and the bend at the temple. Place and extension keep it anatomically correct. In the Picasso, the cheekline is just correct enough to show it run wild. It overreaches, impaling the ear! Rigid and dark, it resists the ostensible anatomical program, agreeing neither with the color of flesh, nor with the requisite continuities. This cheekline signifies a change of plane from frontage to flank, and that’s all it will do, refusing to connect with eye socket or chin. And that’s why it looks wrong. How should this wrongness be understood? And understand it I would, because I believe in Picasso’s intelligence, and intelligence should be intelligible. Let me qualify that cheekline again: black anti-color adrift from the given carnation; rigidity and excessive

Figure 3.6. Figure 3.1 with cheekline removed.

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length; oblique flight over clueless terrain and no launch or landing in sight. Each of these features helps to abstract the line from its bedding. In view of the context, the line still tells as an arris, signaling planar change, but without planes to operate on. Does this sound absurd? Can a ridge that rides a cresting of planes survive in their absence? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship; is it viable without the buttress of converging sides (fig. 3.7)? Yet this is what the Self-Portrait envisions: a cheekline apart from its physicality—not a thing, but a meaning. Let its location alone suffice to argue the line’s anatomical aptness. By endowing it with the characteristics of inorganic non-color, rectitude, and gratuitous length, Picasso dissociates it from material causation—from the mass it articulates—almost as an abstracted sign.

Figure 3.7. A. M. Cassandre, Normandie, 1935.

Of course the cheekline profits from the vicinity of the streak down the nose. This too is an arris, setting the bridge of the nose off from its side. But no one ever saw it so dislocated and keen. Instead of tracing the outer contour—as millions of noses in foregoing art insist upon doing—Picasso’s defining noseline slides over from far edge to near arris, and with an emphasis too stark to bond with the planes it defines. Of course, nothing in Picasso ever happens for the first time. Hence it is no surprise to see the effect I have tried to describe anticipated in a self-portrait drawing of 1899 (fig. 3.8). Such self-assertion on the part of an arris approximates the greater autonomy of the cheekline, which now arrives well companioned. They are twin symbols of planar change center-staged. The arris, as Picasso promotes it, becomes the conditioning agent of all embodiment. Whether embedded or loosed, it becomes the principle on which embodiment turns. And the Self-Portrait’s cheekline—arris par excellence— declares itself free to float between optical analogue and conceptual abstraction. A manifesto could not be more outspoken. Henceforth, the arris as a defining requisite of threedimensional form enjoys an amazing career. In Picasso’s work of 1908, every curved surface abuts on a sharpened edge (figs. 1.43, 5.1). Undulations become discontinuous, sharpen into prismatic facets, bounded by edge and arris. A year later, 1909, the bronze head of his companion Fernande Olivier spells it out (fig. 1.37): the arrises—those at the cheek and jaw, or beneath the eye sockets—become bladelike projections. They congeal and reach out, while the planes they were riding subside, drain away. It is as if the acquired linearity of the arris were homing back to the headmass from which it had been abstracted. The effect does not flatter Fernande. The flange-like bags under her eyes suggest aging or sleep deprivation. Definitions of planar change at the jowls would look wattled if taken literally as appearance. But appearance is not now Picasso’s concern. He is plotting the incidence of watersheds like a geologist, or like a crystallographer studying a faceted system. What surprises us is the persistence of mood, of emotional life even here.

The Prague S e l f - P ort ra i t

And even more poignantly in a painting of Fernande’s head in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (fig. 1.41). This steep crag looks to me both harassed and heroic; an image of human consciousness laboring against the assault of its constituent matter. Picasso has begun— and ever after continues—to question his creatures, “What is your substance, whereof are you made?” But to follow this trail would take us too far afield.3 Sufficient to see this colossus of 1909 ruled by arrises that disturb even the sky. Back to the 1907 Self-Portrait and to the next in line for attention: the inclined edge of the forehead at upper right. We need hardly compare it with other Picasso self-portraits in three-quarter view (fig. 3.9) to recognize

Figure 3.8. Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899, Z.VI.107.

the forehead’s contour as a deforming abscission. What could have made Picasso claw this distorting slope again and again, insisting on its deformity? Normally, the trace of a forehead’s outline, as of any round object, serves two functions: to declare where a surface swerves out of sight, and to guarantee its continuance past the bend—the latter being taken on trust, so long as the defining contour looks right. But Picasso renders that contour cruelly wrong, giving it an oblique amputation that spares only a triangular vestige of forehead. What we are shown is the slashed margin of a frustrated aspect, a cut that forestalls foreshortening and precludes the offing of a left temple. Why would Picasso feign this false brink and rob a noble brow of its sway?

Figure 3.9. Self-Portrait, Montrouge, 1917–18, Z.III.75. Collection of Maya

Widmaier Picasso.

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The culprit, I think, is Picasso’s deepening sense of the disparity between things seen in the round and their simulacra on a flat ground. Once a depictable object flattens under a painter’s hands, any portion of it that lies parallel to the work surface gets full representation, because perceived extension coincides with the extended planarity of that surface; feels naturally at home in it. Whereas the data of mass and recession remain underprivileged. Denied full resident status, they come foreshortened, squeezed into pinched quarters, the slums of perspective. For the phrase “slums of perspective” (a lapse into inexcusable rhetoric) I apologize. It was meant to denote such perspectival contractions as the throw from cheekbone to ear when a face shows head-on. Giacometti called it “the longest distance in the world,” presumably because, in frontal view, this tract becomes incommensurable. Picasso too had complained about the obscuring effect of foreshortening, citing the distance inward from the nose tip to the philtrum. “In a painting by Raphael,” he told Kahnweiler (referring, I suppose, to the Louvre portrait of Castiglione), “it is not possible to determine the distance from the tip of the nose to the mouth. I want to make paintings that would make it possible.”4 Look at the heads Picasso painted in 1909, and you see at once what he meant (e.g., figs. 1.32, 1.35, 1.36, 1.41). He was protesting that illusionistic representation, by belittling whatever at any one moment recedes, renders as less what we experience as more—more impending bulk, more operant density, more “backmatter.” Hence in the 1907 Self-Portrait, his refusal to let an outreach of forehead attenuate into foreshortening. His alternative freezes a thought, a decision: rather than falsify on the sly, I will frankly abbreviate. But notice a concomitant gain in the buildup of the back of the head, one that shows best in a simple experiment: with a reproduction at hand, cover the face from the chin up past the eyebrows. Instantly, the back of the cranium, along with the slashed forehead, defines the head in side view, not the en face. What starts from the eyebrows down is a sudden reorientation. And it may be that the shock of the sitter’s stare owes some of its

power to this abrupt wrench into a frontal address not anticipated above. Meanwhile, the portrait demands that the shortfall at the forehead be seen at once with the amplified rear. We are to see frontality docked as the back of the head swings into action, i.e., into the act of appearing. There had been earlier signals of Picasso’s determination to include averted backmatter in a pretended coup d’oeil. Some of the portraits he drew of Fernande while summering at Gósol in 1906 show her face in standard three-quarter view, without letting the hinder part disappear (figs. 3.10, 1.19). New in the 1907 Self-Portrait is the forehead’s truncation. It overrules the rule of the readymade aspect; gives notice that a given spread— that of a face, a physique, an item of still life—could be cut short to admit other matter. Note that the abridgment of the full aspect in the Self-Portrait is performed on what Francophones call le front (frente in Spanish)—as if the routine eminence

Figure 3.10. Fernande (Massive Head of a Woman), Gósol, summer 1906,

Z.XXII.331. Private collection.

The Prague S e l f - P ort ra i t

of frontality, exemplified in the honorific le front, had to be humbled. From now on, no facing plane in Picasso’s sight remains safely privileged. Familiar aspects turn out to be frangible and divisible (cf. fig. 1.41), subject to repositioning in the field, compelled to accommodate competing claims on the picture plane. Ancient pictorial hierarchies, such as up-front and behind, nearby and far-off, find themselves reconfigured, newly leveled to participate in that free fraternal equality which nonCubist societies find so hard to achieve. Two large charcoal heads drawn in the winter of 1910–11 never cease to astonish (fig. 1.50 and p. 209, note 13). Here Picasso makes tokens of the interior and of the back of the head cohabit in easy union with shreds of frontage, yielding an unheard-of visualization: the sheer transparency of a maximum density system. Picasso’s problem, then, was not to arrive at flatness (a goal long since attained by others), but to match his imagery to his intuition of solid things, his sense of mass unfairly blocked by façades. Henceforth (by, say, 1910), the frontal aspect of things might need abridgment, there being no other recourse. Picasso’s grip on whatever his sight engulfed demanded that superficies loosen their tenure on the work surface; that in depicting three- dimensional objects, forefronts must be restrained to admit longslighted backsides and profiles in community with compliant façades. It is as if Picasso, stationed at the close of the Middle Ages, had chosen a forward course other than the one pursued by Renaissance artists. He would not rely on their magic—prospettiva, chiaroscuro, lo scorto, sfumato; nor on fading color and diffusion of contour to produce effects of recession. No, he would forge his own means to match the reasoning of his eyes. If a particular aspect, such as a forehead, preened for one fleeting moment in full visibility, is that reason enough to leave every alternative aspect permanently dislodged? Only by shrinking the spread of aspect could backmatter and surface extension approximate equal presence. Then let backsides and sideviews deliver representative samples to share the franchise of

frontality. Let a redundant façade abdicate some of its frontage to reveal what it hides. Which is what eventually happens in Picasso’s Guitar sculpture of 1912 (fig. 3.11), where the imagery developed on paper and canvas reenters the dimension of depth, testing its viability in real space. In real space or, by remote analogy, in the kind of space that frames human speech. Picasso’s visual thinking seems, during his Cubist phases, to approach habits of

Figure 3.11. Guitar, Paris, October–December 1912. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of the artist.

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language, including abbreviation, metonymy, hypallage, synecdoche, and so on—figures of speech identified by ancient grammarians. A syntactical shift in midsentence was named an anacoluthon. Would that describe the volte-face in the Self-Portrait, where visage and cranium suddenly jerk apart? Since the 1970s, thoughtful critics have come to see a Cubist Picasso as a sign situation, a system wherein things, or portions of things, may get no more visibility than they need to serve as a sign. Here I find something that even a non-painter, such as myself, can put to practical use, e.g., in alleviating the problem of too many books in too little space. Long trapped in this misery, I had begun to shelve books two deep, only to realize that the stack at the back was soon lost sight of— out of sight, out of mind goes the adage. And that’s where Pablo’s pictures made a helpful suggestion. You need not, they counseled, display multi-tome sets at full stretch. Let two or three volumes tell where the rest huddle. Pars pro toto; synecdoche! The space saved up front will benefit your occluded backmatter, just as the back of the head in the 1907 Self-Portrait profits from the abridgment at the forehead. To say nothing of the cutaway shirtfront of the Guitar. What is left showing converts into a sign. Granted that the parade of my forty-volume Goethe Gesamtwerk looks nice and honors traditional bibliophily. But when the truth is at risk—the true state of your library holdings—why, then, tradition and nicety be damned. Amazing what you can learn from Picasso. A brief interruption before turning to the third line I hope to discuss. Comparing Picasso’s Self-Portrait of 1898–1900 (fig. 3.2) with the one painted about eight years later—even in reproductions laid side by side—I cannot help but experience the former as furtive, the adolescent poseur not only in the unlikely guise of a Rococo fop, but, as it were, lurking within his flesh, or cumbered by it; whereas, in the juxtaposition, the face of the twenty-sixyear-old in his new herringbone suit looks worse than exposed. Past all nakedness, it looks raw, as if flayed.

And perhaps it is this that keeps us spellbound. But such distraction falls outside the scope of this paper. On to line 3, the level streak yanked across the mute painter’s mouth. Notice that this mouth was already in place. It describes a conventional figure with heart-shaped upper lip and dipping curve for the lower—the kind of kewpie- doll “mouth” which, in a Cubist Head of a Girl done six years later, Picasso inverted. You need to turn figure 3.12 upside down to savor these succulent lips. The artist just got them on wrongways. You’d think the mouth was a thing worn like a brooch or a badge, liable to land topsy-turvy if you didn’t watch out. Picasso’s own mouth in the Prague portrait displays shapely lips of the same kind. But they are suddenly overrun by a rigid bar superposed and de trop—not to cancel the earlier emblem, not to modify, correct, or supplant it, but as the signature of second thought.

Figure 3.12. Head of a Girl, Paris, winter 1913–14, Z.II/2.452. Kanagawa, Pola Museum of Art.

The Prague S e l f - P ort ra i t

And this follow-up declaration of “mouth” respects its precursor, leaving it legible as an alternative reference to the same item in a same place. The cross-stroke says “mouth” again, but in a simplified idiom. It enters as a reductive sign, drawn from a more primitive code, and here displayed as an available or preferred option. The double entry converts the commonplace slot into something to think about—thinking against the grain. The coexistence of alternative styles in one picture is not without precedent. Think of the way Duccio, for instance, varies the treatment of drapery folds (fig. 3.13): gold-leaf patterning à la byzance for the garments of deity, while the woman’s dress submits to natural light and shade. But Duccio employs such stylistic disparity to designate things separate and distinct; whereas Picasso will strive ad absurdum to keep disparity both distinct and coincident. In traditional Western painting, an object emplaced occupies a specific location and thereby displaces every alternative candidate. As on a chessboard, two pieces cannot sit on one square at the same time. True enough, says the picture, but an object can be targeted by more than one thought, and thinking thoughts is what the

artist is doing. So, in the 1907 Self-Portrait, bethinking the mouth, Picasso lays down two notions about it: one standard kisser and one to assort with its proper kin, the family of black stripes that “depict” only by virtue of context. In the present instance, this redoubling may not seem a big deal, but it draws on a profound original intuition, fraught with vast consequence. For centuries past, continuity and stylistic coherence had been a prerequisite of acceptable painting. Picasso now sees that internal consistency is not a necessity but a choice made—and his choice is another. He will make diverse modes of representation cohabit—like speakers in a polyglot city. Instead of depicting every grouping of things necessarily in one style, he will, where he deems it appropriate, train incompatible styles upon just one member; render one object two or three ways. And he will make this shift—from depicting a thing to the possibility of plural statements about it—his subject matter. Because, as Baudelaire had long ago pointed out, “le possible est un des provinces du vrai.” Example: In a large papier collé still life, spring 1914 (fig. 1.65), Picasso packs the center with a jumble of glass, pipe, ace of clubs, jostling shadows, and quartered

Figure 3.13. Duccio, Noli me tangere from the Maestà, 1308–11, detail. Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

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lemon. We are not meant to doubt that this litter rests on a table, but the table it rests on is moot. And Picasso has left it in such disarray that a thousand words will not tidy it up. Disregarding most of the picture’s delights, I propose to focus only on a portion of it, starting at lower right, where the tabletop exhibits a clear-cut corner poised on a sturdy leg. Linger here for a moment, and watch Picasso pondering the prospects of this two-sided corner. He is posing a question: given the flatness of the support sheet, how do you get from this pivotal point to the table’s far corner? To say it another way, how do you angle the receding side of the tabletop? Any number of such still-life tables, including a dozen Cézannes (fig. 1.52), had shown how to do it, as Picasso was well aware. Accordingly, he draws two slightly converging lines that propose to put the table’s right flank in perspective. But within inches, these paired lines abort. Picasso is thinking: You can do it this way; they used to. Not I. Anybody can see that these hopeless lines have nowhere to go, no room to reach into. Their fated fade- out delivers a deadly polemic against the claims of focused perspective. Start again. Up from that same proximal corner, Picasso now rears a substantial panel, whose tilt would suggest that of a music stand were it not for the pack of tobacco squatting on its own flatout shadow and partying with the rest of the litter. No matter how that tipped tray might read without the tobacco, seen with its present charge, it is one with the board that supports pipe, glass, and lemon. Though it be differently stated, it remains this mere tabletop, not (God forbid) in perspective, but in isometric projection. Yet to be mentioned is the centerpiece, an upright white slab seen head-on, wherein we must recognize once again our recidivist tabletop, the requisite base underlying the objects depicted, the same level surface which, isometrically projected, hosts the tobacco pack, the same tabular fetch that would have proceeded from the table’s right edge had its halting attempt at perspective been allowed to materialize.

So the question returns: with the table’s pivotal corner firmly in place, where do you pin the table’s far corner? Answer: wherever you will. It depends on the convention employed, perspectival, isometric, or—to quote a common Renaissance sneer—flat as a playing card. In this papier collé of 1914, the far corner could arrive at any of three different venues, and this trilemma is what the right half of the picture expounds: the availability of all three, the fielding of three contenders on the outs with each other, at peace in Cubist concinnity.5 It’s been seven years since Picasso laid down two statements of “mouth” in the 1907 Self-Portrait. Does it make sense to associate that doubling with the nimiety of the still life’s three tabletops? Was that early redundance premonitory? You could say that it offered variance at a glance; the concretion ad oculos of incompatible options. Just so in the 1914 collage we receive distinct simultaneous modalities, though somewhat in overplus. Better to close with a lighter load—Picasso’s 1914 collage Glass on a Table (fig. 1.55). Here the occasion ought to be simpler, since the depicted event recruits only a piece of glassware, the cast of its shadow, and the table they respectively stand and fall on. But the glass alone appears strangely repetitive. (To follow its phases, it helps to copy it in tricolor, fig. 3.14; see also pp. 30–33.) How did Picasso proceed? After applying a spotted gray ground, he glued down a white-paper cutout of the goblet’s base, stem, and bowl. He then reached for a sheet of faux-bois paper, from which he scissored the glass again, somewhat variant in detail and in the kind of information delivered, yet sufficiently similar to register as identical with its double—the more so, since the faux-bois half covers its antecedent while lacking independent location. They are two pronouncements about one selfsame item.6 Step three. Done with the scissors and crayon in hand, Picasso begins to draw. A doubled arch over the top and a half-swag below track the ellipse of the rim in perspective (the first appliqué had shown the rim in straight elevation, the second, in plan).

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Figure 3.14. Author’s diagram of figure 1.55.

The crayon glides down the side of the goblet, but gets sidetracked midway. Moving centerward, it declares that the bowl is fluted, five flutes spilling over to overrun the faux bois, which the faux bois receives and absorbs—assuring us, lest there be any doubt, that it never intended to overlap, but rather to coexist. Indeed, the continuous fluting performed by the crayon-drawn glass engages both appliqués as if they were one and all consubstantial. The crayon embraces almost all of the glass, and with such intimate trespass, such interlacing and compenetration, that the threesome can nowise be sundered. We behold an insoluble mystery, a fusion of monads more individualized than ever were the Three Graces, yet all three coincident, at once in one place. It is enough to make one think of the ways in which Christian art sought to emblematize the triunity of the godhead. Not that a drinking glass on a kitchen table compares to the Trinity’s persons. The analogy refers to the comparable endeavor of turning a conceptual paradox—three- equals- one—into a visual datum.

The Trinitarian doctrine was not, originally, meant to be visualized. The formula advanced by theologians to define the interpenetration of the three persons in the unity of the godhead was a verbal construct, which the Greeks called perichoresis (literally, “proceeding, or dancing, around,” later latinized as “circumincession”). The mystery abates somewhat if one plumbs the etymology of the word “person,” i.e., an actor’s mask, a role played. So, in the Trinity, the godhead acts in three roles.7 For over a thousand years, artists labored to master the problem of visualizing the mystery (fig. 3.15). They proposed triangulation and captioned diagrams; or seating three look-alikes in a row; or showing three faces freakishly fused (denounced as heretical); or grouping the three discrete persons in one rigid bond—a familiar trio, but not illustrative of their “circumincession.” Picasso, in the collage phase of Cubism, posits one drinking glass by way of three coincident figures that inhere in each other. And twenty centuries of Christian art and emblematics have failed to match what

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Figure 3.15. French, Trinity with Symbols of

the Four Evangelists, 1524. Austin, Blanton Museum of Art; The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002.

Picasso brings off: envisioning the triune as reciprocal compenetration. Strange that the miracle of visualizing such an intractable mystery was realized by a seer of avowed irreligion, one who would hardly have thought of the Trinity while he worked. The

domestication of unitary triplicity was task enough. Then let readers dismiss my joining the 1907 SelfPortrait to this Verre sur une table as but a Picassophile’s brainchild—stillborn, though conceived from the artist’s own mouth.8

Fou r

T

he picture (fig. 4.1) was five years old when Picasso’s poet friend, André Salmon, mistook it for nearly abstract; its team of prostitutes seemed to him “almost entirely freed from humanity. . . . Naked problems, white signs on a blackboard.”1 But at that early date, who could foresee where the picture was heading? Or predict that its twenty-six-year-old creator would live to defy seven decades of abstract art? Kahnweiler’s apology for the Demoiselles followed soon after. Though he found the picture unachieved and lacking unity, he honored it as a desperate titanic struggle with every formal problem of painting at once and hailed its right section as “the beginning of Cubism.”2 During the next fifty years the trend of criticism became irreversible: the Demoiselles was a triumph of form over content; to see the work with intelligence was to see it resolved into abstract energies.3 The reluctance to probe other levels seemed justified by what was known of the work’s genesis. The first phase of the Demoiselles project was to have included two men: a sailor seated at a central table and a man entering the scene from the left with a skull in his hand— apparently a symbolic evocation of death. “Picasso originally conceived the picture as a kind of memento mori,” wrote Alfred Barr; but, he continued, in the end, “all implications of a moralistic contrast between virtue (the man with the skull) and vice (the man surrounded by food and women) have been eliminated in favor of a purely formal figure composition, which as it develops becomes more and more dehumanized and abstract.”4 The evidence for the presence of the skull in the early phase seemed incontrovertible, having come from

The Philosophical Brothel

the artist himself.5 Barr therefore concluded—and his view became canonic for the next thirty years—that the picture had at first been intended “as an allegory or charade on the wages of sin.”6 There were two remarkable consequences. First: since the mortality emblem dropped out as the work progressed, the Demoiselles d’Avignon—“the most important single pictorial document that the twentieth century has yet produced” (Golding)7—came to be seen as the paradigm of all modern art, the movement away from “significance” toward self-referential abstraction. Even the violence of the depicted scene was understood as an emancipation of formal energies, energies no longer constrained by inhibiting content. Second: Picasso’s numerous drawings for the Demoiselles were as good as ignored. If the painting was his release from a misguided allegorical purpose, then the drawings presumably recorded no more than a false start; they could have no bearing on that premonition of Cubist structure which made the picture historic. As the criteria of criticism hardened and set, so the questionnaire addressed to the work was gradually formalized. The questions discussed, and obediently answered, concerned the chronology of the painting, its “The Philosophical Brothel” was originally published in ArtNews, 71 (September and October 1972). It was republished, with revisions and a retrospect, in French translation for the exhibition catalogue Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Paris, Musée Picasso, 1988) and in Spanish translation for the catalogue of the same exhibition at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. The text used here, with some further revisions, is that published in October, no. 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–74. See p. 211, the unnumbered note preceding the first endnote, for the later life of the essay.

Figure 4.1. Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange).

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debt to Cézanne, its incorporation of Iberian and African influences—above all, its leap toward Cubism. It was the work’s destination and its points of departure that had to be ascertained. Like a traveler at a stopover, the picture was only asked to define itself in terms of wherefrom and whereto. But the picture at sixty-five deserves a new set of questions. For instance: Those five figures in it—did they have to be whores? Could the proto-Cubist effects in the right half of the picture—the breakdown of mass and the equalizing of solids and voids—have been accomplished as well with a cast of cardplayers? If the essential idea derived from Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, why the retreat from the healthful outdoors into a maison close? Why is the pictorial space still revealed like a spectacle and enveloped in curtains—so much Baroque staging in a picture whose modernist orientation ought to be to the flat picture plane? Those African masks at the right: are they here because this was the picture Picasso happened to be working on when tribal art came his way, so that he incorporated the novel stimulus regardless of its irrelevance to a Barcelona brothel interior? Are the anatomies of these women, in their radical transformation from 1906 to 1907, a matter of changing taste, or of substituting the abstract expressiveness of sharp angles for anatomical curves; or are these morphological changes metaphors for states of existence? Since no other painting (Las Meninas excepted) addresses the spectator with comparable intensity, how does this intensity of address accord with the abstract purposes normally ascribed to the Demoiselles? Is the stylistic shift that bisects the painting into disparate halves a by-product of Picasso’s impetuous evolution, or do these discrepant styles realize a pervasive idea? Did this “first truly twentieth-century painting” (Fry) really begin as a half-hearted reiteration of the familiar preachment that “the wages of sin is death”—a contrast between vice, symbolized by the enjoyment of food and women, and virtue, by a contemplation of death? Is it true that in this “first Cubist painting” the artist

has “turned away from subjective expression” (Sabartés), unconcerned with subject or content of any sort? Finally, what of the many drawings that relate to the work? Not counting the drawings for individual figures or details of figures, the full composition studies alone number at present knowledge no less than nineteen. Three were first published by Barr in 1939 (figs. 4.6, 4.7, 4.15). These, plus another thirteen (seven of which are here reproduced as figs. 4.4, 4.9–4.14), appeared in volume II of the Zervos catalogue in 1942; two more (one of them fig. 4.8) appeared in the supplementary volume VI, 1954.8 Another, just come to light, is published here for the first time (1972; fig. 4.5). Do these nineteen drawings reveal an intelligible progression, and will their study throw light on the content of Picasso’s thought while the Demoiselles was taking shape in his mind? I believe that the drawings have much to tell. And I am convinced that the picture contains far more even in its formal aspect than the words “first Cubist painting” allow. Indeed, the chief weakness of any exclusively formal analysis is its inadequacy to its own ends. Such analysis, by suppressing too much, ends up not seeing enough. For it seems to me that whatever Picasso’s initial idea had been, he did not abandon it, but discovered more potent means for its realization. No modern painting engages you with such brutal immediacy. Of the five figures depicted, one holds back a curtain to make you see; one intrudes from the rear; the remaining three stare you down. The unity of the picture, famous for its internal stylistic disruptions, resides above all in the startled consciousness of a viewer who is suddenly aware of being seen. To judge the distance the project has traveled since its inception, consider the early, hitherto unknown composition study (fig. 4.5): seven figures disposed in a deep curtained interior. The subject, set in a brothel parlor, is a dramatic entrance—the advent of a man. But the arrangement displays the most conventionally Baroque grouping Picasso ever devised, not only in the topography of its floor plan, but in its unity as a theatrical situation. Picasso knew such narrative

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paintings from his early days at the Prado. Juan de Pareja’s Calling of St. Matthew (fig. 4.2, reproduced in reverse) is a good prototype: a magisterial figure entering from one side commands sudden attention; then a secondary focus in a man seated behind a table at center, and a back view serving as repoussoir at the other end; and the rest of the cast grouped in depth before curtained openings in the rear. What puts Picasso’s design so squarely within this Italianate Baroque tradition is the dramatic rendering of the scene—a half dozen figures in one compound reflex to a sudden signal. His actors, like Juan de Pareja’s, are caught up in their own time, place, and action; the viewer looks in from without, but is not there. In the Demoiselles painting this rule of traditional narrative art yields to an anti-narrative counterprinciple: neighboring figures share neither a common space nor a common action, do not communicate or interact, but relate singly, directly, to the spectator. A determined dissociation of each from each is the means of throwing responsibility for the unity of the action upon the viewer’s subjective response. The event, the epiphany, the sudden entrance, is still the theme—but rotated through ninety degrees toward a viewer conceived as the picture’s opposite pole.

The rapid swing between these contrary orientations is not surprising for 1907, nor unique to Picasso. A juxtaposition of these alternatives was in fact up for debate. Five years earlier, the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl described the very absence of psychic cohesion between depicted persons as evidence of a distinct stylistic will.9 He was speaking of the traditional Dutch group portrait (fig. 4.3)—the primitive kind, before Rembrandt’s dramatic naturalism restored it to the main European tradition. And his profound analysis of this native genre—the most original expression of the Dutch genius, he called it—was a courageous bid to enfranchise a mode of painting which, judged by Italian compositional standards, had always seemed inept and provincial. Riegl showed that Dutch art, even in its fifteenth-century religious narratives, suppressed the dramatic encounter which expresses a will, the coordination of action and responsive reaction which acknowledges the unifying force of an event. Instead of graduated active and passive participation, Dutch art strove, on the contrary, to project in each figure a state of utmost attentiveness, i.e., a state of mind that dispelled the distinction between active and passive. The negation of psychic rapport between actors, their mutual autonomy and spirited dissociation even from their own

Figure 4.2. Juan de Pareja, Calling of St. Matthew, 1661, reproduced in reverse. Madrid, Museo del Prado.

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doings—and their incapacity for joint participation in a unified space—all these “negative” factors tightened the positive hold of each single figure on the responsive viewer; the unity of the picture was, as Riegl put it, not objective-internal, but externalized in the beholder’s subjective experience. Riegl’s pioneering regard for this naive Northern genre is comparable to Picasso’s early admiration for Iberian and tribal art. And the historian’s definition of its intrinsic value, formulated in opposition to the narrative mode, parallels Picasso’s shift from that early study (fig. 4.5) to the Demoiselles painting. Not that Picasso had, or needed to have, any direct knowledge of Riegl’s work, or of the obscure Dutch pictures discussed. But he did know the supreme realization of this Northern intuition—that Spanish masterwork which the Prado in large letters of brass proclaims to be the “obra culminante de la pintura universal”—Velázquez’s Las Meninas.10 Like Picasso three hundred years later, Velázquez had oriented himself both to the Mediterranean and the Northern tradition. Heir to Titian and Veronese, he could yet bring off a work that presents itself not as internally organized, but as a summons to the integrative consciousness of the spectator. The nine, ten, or twelve characters in Las Meninas seem uncom-

posed and dispersed, unitive only insofar as they jointly subtend the beholder’s eye. And the lack of immediate rapport between any two of them guarantees their common dependence on the viewer’s embracing vision.11 In the Demoiselles, as in Las Meninas, no two figures maintain the kind of mutual rapport that excludes us; and the three central figures address the observer with unsparing directness. Neither active nor passive, they are simply alerted, responding to an alerting attentiveness on our side. The shift is away from narrative and objective action to an experience centered in the beholder. The work, then, is not a self-existent abstraction, since the solicited viewer is a constituent factor. And no analysis of the Demoiselles as a contained pictorial structure faces up to the work in its fullness. The picture is a tidal wave of female aggression; one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off. But the assault on the viewer is only half of the action, for the viewer, as conceived by the painting on this side of the picture plane, repays in kind. The picture impales itself on a sharp point. It is speared below by a docked tabletop, an acute corner overlaid by a fruit cluster on a white cloth. The table links two

Figure 4.3. Dirck Jacobsz., A Group of Guardsmen, 1529. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; on loan from the City of Amsterdam.

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Figure 4.4. Study for the

Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.643. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1859, fol. 32r.

Figure 4.5. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.59. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 29r.

Figure 4.6. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/1.19. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett; donated by the artist to the City of Basel; permanent loan of the City of Basel, 1967.

Figure 4.7. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/1.20. Picasso estate.

Figure 4.8. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.VI.980. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP534.

Figure 4.9. Study for the

Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.632. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 1r.

Figure 4.10. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.633. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 2r.

Figure 4.11. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.637. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 6r.

Figure 4.12. Study for the

Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.642. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 18r.

Figure 4.13. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.641. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 11r.

Figure 4.14. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.644. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett; Gift of Douglas Cooper, Paris.

Figure 4.15. Study for the

Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/1.21. Philadelphia Museum of Art; A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952.

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discontinuous systems; space this side of the picture couples with the depicted scene. Anybody can see that the ladies are having company. We are implied as the visiting clientele, seated within arm’s reach of the fruit— accommodated and reacted to. It’s like the difference between eavesdropping on a group too busy to notice, or walking in like the person they’ve been waiting for. Our presence rounds out the party, and the tipped tabletop plays fulcrum to a seesaw: the picture rises before us because we hold our end down. The best commentary on a Picasso is another Picasso. The artist tends to anticipate and repeat his inventions, so that the most enigmatic of them usually turn up in simpler contexts. Thus an ink and pencil sketch, clearly related to the Demoiselles, “explains” the kind of interspatial connection proposed in the painting (fig. 4.17). It shows four seated sailors in a tight caba-

ret watching two entertainers. The watchers are seen from the back, close-up and half-length. And you can develop the staging of the Demoiselles—of its center portion—by imagining a movie camera zooming in. Evidence for Picasso’s persistent interest in such continuities is common in earlier works, such as the small canvas of 1901, formerly at the Art Institute of Chicago, called On the Upper Deck (fig. 4.16). Since most of its depicted field is taken up by the bow of a vessel seen from amidships, we, the spectators, become fellow travelers on the same deck.12 It is characteristic of Picasso in all his phases to engage situations of closest proximity so as to keep the interval between point of perception and thing perceived palpably physical. Like the Demoiselles, the Upper Deck picture is speared from below, the center rail entering like a leveled lance.13 The very subject is a connection—a passage from out

Figure 4.16. On the Upper Deck, Paris, early summer 1901, Z.XXI.168. Christie’s, London, sale 7951, February 9, 2011, lot 7.

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here inward into the body of the presentation. And the theme of the deck renders the heave of the ground surface ambiguous. We are watching an infield diamond rise up like a pyramid. The depicted plane, high over water, is a vertical horizontal. Simultaneously level and up, it tilts like a pitching boat. Half a century later Picasso paints his own shadow as it enters a room to fall on a woman—another uncanny simultaneity of horizontal and vertical (fig. 4.18). And in the Demoiselles, the same paradox of erected recession is maintained by the raised peak of the table. Of all the ways Picasso invented to insinuate the physical availability of the image, this visual metaphor of penetration is the most erotic.14 The table was not there from the start. Earliest among the known composition studies for the Demoi-

Figure 4.17. Study for Sailors on the Town, Paris, 1907–8, Z.II/2.629. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1863, fol. 45v.

selles is a small pencil sketch, dense with adjustments (fig. 4.4). It is the first of four studies that record the seven-figure phase of the composition. The floor plan, due to the low relief character of the design, is still indeterminate; so is the surface fill—the scale of several figures is heightened to load the foreground; there is no front table as yet. In figure 4.5 (which I propose to put second), all locations are clarified; the central group is recessed, space sweeps inward on a diagonal from left to right, and the magnified scale of the curtained setting is fixed. The result is what I have called a standard Baroque composition, and we may well ask why the artist at this advanced point of his career took such a backward step. The answer may lie in the clearing of space at the bottom. Here, over the threshold, the artist traces a faint segment curve, the

Figure 4.18. L’Ombre, 1953, Z.XVI.99. Jerusalem, Israel Museum; on permanent loan from the Art Gallery of Toronto.

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ghost of the table to come. He is introducing an orthogonal axis, the kind of invasive attack on the picture that needs spatial depth to operate on. In the next drawing (fig. 4.6), that faint curve solidifies as the rim of a circular table, the balance of which overflows into our space. Then, as if to reverse the table’s momentum, its shape is revised (fig. 4.7): it grows acute, suggesting the distal tip of a lozenge or threesided plane plunging in from out here.15 And the still life on it bursts forth in a flowering crest, heralding an intrusion of such forcible presence that the squatter at lower right wrenches her face around in salute. Three more changes in the intrusive table are due, all designed to quicken its penetration: its upended corner is further sharpened (figs. 4.8ff ); the full-bodied flower vase of figure 4.6 slims down to a cylinder and moves aside to let the tabletip show; finally, in the painted version (preceded only by the Philadelphia watercolor, fig. 4.15), the inward thrust of the table is both emphasized and restored to the picture plane by the toss of a horned slice of melon. But the table’s literal inclination as in-

ward tilt remains in force. More than that; its obliquity sends parallel tilts across half the picture—beginning at upper left. It used to puzzle me to find the hand at the curtain so disconnected. The imminence of Cubism, with its routine fragmentations, has nothing to do with it, since the hand’s isolation was already fixed in the first composition drawings (figs. 4.4, 4.6; cf. also 4.15). As a feature preserved through successive studies and reaffirmed in the painting, the breakaway of that hand ought to have some specific function. And so it does. Its abrupt appearance over the curtain figure, with no apparent mediation of arm, makes sense if the upper edge of the curtain to which the hand is referred is understood as flowing inward, away from the picture plane. Assume that Picasso here wants an oblique recession, pursued by an implied outstretched arm raised at thirty degrees. The disconnectedness of the hand at the visible terminus of the stretch then becomes emblematic of maximum distance.

Figure 4.19. Nude Woman Serenaded by Harlequin and Pierrot (study for the stage curtain

Figure 4.20. Nude in Profile, Paris, spring 1907, Z.I.350.

for the ballet Pulcinella), Paris, 1920, Z.III.196. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1734.

Philadelphia, Barnes Foundation.

The Philosophical Brothel

Again, other Picasso works confirm that he does not necessarily think of such left-hand curtains as perpendicular flats. Compare, for instance, the 1920 drawing of a draped interior (fig. 4.19); or the pompous little picture of a wench in a dishabille grasping a checkered curtain (fig. 4.20)—clearly related to the corresponding figure in the Demoiselles.16 In the latter, as in all studies for it, the curtain drops down at the forestage and stays in its salient plane as far as the curtain raiser’s right hand; thereafter, to get to and pass under her hoisted hand it must needs recede. The aim is to express the recession of this upper flap not through linear or aerial perspective, not by way of color or physical clues such as overlaps, but through the suasion of gesture, the supposed necessity of an omitted arm between head and hand—a saccadic leap offered only to our anatomic intuition. The effect is twofold: the proscenium curtain cups over a tentlike interior; and the spandrel formed at the upper left of the design doubles the sloping plane of the table. Lower center and upper left tilt and tip in precarious unison.

But there is more. Midway between curtain and table the nude with the pinnacle elbow assumes a similar tilt. Her underslung feet, tucked out of sight, are not those of a figure sitting, nor of one standing or leaping. In the first four studies (figs. 4.4–4.7) she does indeed sit bolt upright in a high-backed chair, her shins arranged post-and-lintel, as on the ancient Spinario.17 But in the twelve subsequent studies her chair dissolves and she sinks back, disposing herself at last like an odalisque. She ends up recumbent—what the French call a gisante—but seen in bird’s-eye perspective. Her action then reverses that of the curtain: not a given vertical bent into a foreshortened arch, but a recessional figure upended, an upstanding orthogonal. Yet both elements, curtain and figure, articulate the picture plane with the same rigid ambivalence. And both, through the suggestiveness of posture and gesture alone, parallel the ambivalent plane of the foreground table. Once again, the gisante’s character is best understood by comparing similar images. The posture is that of the sleeper in the 1918 Bathers (fig. 4.21); or that of the

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Figure 4.22. Three Nudes in an Interior, Paris, 1920, Z.III.444. Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981.

Figure 4.21. The Bathers, Biarritz, summer 1918, Z.III.217. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP61.

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Figure 4.23. The Painter and His Model, Paris, January 2, 1933. Christie’s, New York, sale 3789, November 9, 2015, lot 1A.

lounger in the Nudes pastel of 1920 (fig. 4.22). With one flexed leg crossing the other and one arm overhead, such figures rehearse a canonic recumbency pose. The idea of verticalizing supine figures has precedents. Think of Michelangelo’s drawing of Tityus, the punished giant laid low and chained to a rock; on the reverse of the sheet turned ninety degrees, the artist traced the figure again—but as a Christ resurrected.18 Even Michelangelo’s swooning Slave at the Louvre becomes an unstable image, for the statue’s attitude of dream, rapture, or willing death—a pose which haunted Picasso during the Demoiselles period— is vertical only in material actuality, not in its psychic surrender. In late 1932 Picasso himself began a series of drawings in which an imagined gisante becomes upright in manifestation. The drawings show Marie-Thérèse at an easel—his mistress-model engendering her own image. But the sleeping form that slumps under her feet

Figure 4.24. Henri Matisse, right panel of the Osthaus

Triptych, 1907. Hagen, Germany, Osthaus-Museum.

appears perpendicular on her canvas (fig. 4.23).19 And in the very year of the Demoiselles, the notion of the reclining nude in vertical presentation must have been under discussion, for it occurs in a Matisse ceramic of 1907 (fig. 4.24).20 But Picasso’s interest in those years is not—like Matisse’s, or Marie-Thérèse’s, or Michelangelo’s—a gisante shifted through ninety degrees on the plane, like the hand on a clockface moving from nine to noon. Bent on more radical leverage, Picasso envisions the straining of a receding orthogonal back to the surface—as he does in the small oil panel of 1908, Reclining Nude with Figures (fig. 4.25).21 The topic here is a reclining nude in footling delivery, yet unforeshortened, almost vertical on the picture plane. To accentuate the anomaly, Picasso has her flanked by two upright figures, so that her presumptive verticality jars against their unequivocal kind. She rests recessive but still extended, insulated in her own rocking space capsule. Adjacency

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Figure 4.25. Reclining Nude with Figures, Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/2.688. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP24.

without nearness; withdrawal without attenuation of presence. The full-length projection of her, claiming undiminished scope in the field, makes the beholder work harder; one has to push mental levers to keep an erected gisante lying down. And then the great life-size Dryad of 1908 (fig. 4.26). It is not sufficient to keep reassuring ourselves that this awesome engine, stalking us in her jungle, “represents a movement into analytical Cubism”; she meant more than that to Picasso. Part of her meaning is explained by a certain “Personnage féminin” (Zervos) from the end of 1905 (fig. 4.27). A trifling croquis—lewd and faintly frightening at the same time—a fantasy of the cloven sex as an open arch, keystone in place, inscribed “S.V.P.” (“S’il vous plaît”). Posture and gesture signify invitation, solicitation, here as in the Dryad. But that’s only half of it, for the Dryad painting plots an ominous change of mood from left to right, from welcome to threat. One hand still invites, but the left arm, turned down, plies

its fist like a bludgeon. So menacing is the approach of this figure, so disquieting the ambivalence of its offering, that I think it no blasphemy to recall the analogous shift from grace to damnation on the hands of a Last Judgment Christ.22 It’s a different kind of shock to learn from the preparatory drawing (fig. 4.28) that the Dryad was conceived, and fully elaborated, as a harlot slouching with parted knees in a tall chair. The painting then is a precise transposition, even to the lines of the armchair reinterpreted as vegetation: brothel reverting to jungle. And the elevation toward the spectator of what is still a recumbent pose becomes an upshot of power. The rampant gisante in the Demoiselles bears a similar erotic charge. In the drawings (especially figs. 4.11 and 4.13), she lies back, sexually unfurled, une horizontale, as the Parisians called their cocottes, posed like the woman in the 1905 picture called Nudes Embracing (fig. 4.29). Facing her clientele, she becomes the frontal

Figure 4.26. The Dryad, Paris, autumn 1908, Z.II/1.113. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

The Philosophical Brothel

Figure 4.27. S.V.P., Paris, late 1905–6, Z.XXII.296. Paris, Musée Picasso,

MP487r.

counterpart of the shameless squatter at right. But her élan and the suddenness of her apparition—in the late drawings, but most of all in the painting—derive from the secret lay of her original pose, a pose of relaxed extension such as is possible only in floating, gliding, or lying down, when no exertion is spent on maintaining stability. Relieved of gravitational pull, she arrives like a projectile. Does it work? Does the figure in the painting still come across as recumbent? There are two possible answers. The fact that its recumbency has so long gone unobserved might be taken as proof of failure. On the other hand, the failure may be a lapse of ours, and a

Figure 4.28. Study for The Dryad, Paris, summer 1908, Z.II/2.661. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1863, fol. 34r.

short-lived one at that. We tend to perceive as we are programmed. For the past fifty years we have been training our eyes to ricochet off the Demoiselles toward Cubism. A more focused approach may habituate us to seeing Picasso’s “naked problems” once again as nude women. And then that particular figure will begin to register on the picture plane like a Murphy bed hitting a wall, and the painter’s intention will have become a success.23 Much of the disquiet in the left half of the picture dramatizes Picasso’s rage against the sheer drop, the stolidness of the canvas. What he wants is a restless beat and a reactive presence. So the backbend of the

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Figure 4.29. Nudes Embracing, Paris, late 1905,

Z.I.228. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst.

Figure 4.30. The Harem, Gósol, summer

1906, Z.I.321. Cleveland Museum of Art; Bequest of Leonardo C. Hanna, Jr.

curtain is steadied by its supporter. Her rigid profile abuts on a rampant gisante, who twins with a pillar nude, who in turn surmounts the entrant tip of the table. Our vision heaves in and out; a variable pressure, like the pitching of a boat in high seas, or a similitude of sexual energy. Permissive similes. The plain effect of the erected gisante in her tight quarter is to ensure her spatial autonomy within a narrow scheme of disjunctions. And the drawings prove that this disjunctiveness is no sudden side effect but a sustained program which the painting brings to fruition. In figure 4.4, here placed at the head of the series,

all seven figures congregate in a shared space. But already in the two drawings following, the four recessed figures—three women and the man at the table—are silhouetted by backdrop partitions used as framing devices. The remaining three are more cunningly set apart: the man at left by his marginal placement and function; the squatter at right by her unique orientation (of which more below); the sitter, bell-jarred in a high chair. It is as if, even at these early stages, Picasso sought to encyst his characters in space pens susceptible of insulation. In the painting, finally, the separation of figure from figure is consummated. There are no spatial connectives. The wedged interspaces

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Figure 4.31. Three Nudes, Gósol, summer 1906, Z.I.340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Gift of Leonard A. Lauder, 2016.

become fields of antimagnetic repulsion, or simply congeal. But the famous solidified intervals in the Demoiselles are part-parcel of the larger conception; they confirm the autonomies already claimed for the figures. And the wonder of the final work is the clinch imposed upon elements thriving in idiosyncrasy. At the center of the Demoiselles composition Picasso originally stationed a sailor. In the three earliest drawings (figs. 4.4–4.6) he sits meekly behind his table, the object before him recognizable as a porrón. The shape of the porrón—a Spanish drinking vessel designed for jetting wine down one’s throat—is characterized by an

erect spout, and it had recently begun to intrigue Picasso. Staying at Gósol in the Spanish Pyrenees during the summer–fall season of 1906, he painted it into three still lifes.24 But he also used it tellingly in two figure compositions of that same year. In the first of these, a painting called The Harem (fig. 4.30), the male figure is surely not meant as a eunuch, since eunuchs do not sit around nude. He lolls like a proud possessor, reserves his favors, and conveys his velleity by the penchant of his porrón. The porrón as sexual surrogate recurs in another Picasso project of that same Gósol season—a gouache known as Three Nudes (fig. 4.31). It is an

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Figure 4.32. James

Gillray, Ci-devant Occupations, 1805. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917. (See note 25.)

elaborate study for a large picture with notations on it in Picasso’s hand. The project never materialized, perhaps because Picasso could not, at this fertile moment, work fast enough to keep pace with his imagination; the idea for the Three Nudes may have been overtaken by the Demoiselles project already broached in his mind. The gouache shows one standing nude, her right hand retracted in the narcissistic gesture last used in Picasso’s Two Women (fig. 4.42). Another charmer lazes at the edge of a bed, smoking a cigarette. Both women gaze sympathetically at the youth at their feet, a delicate lad, kneeling with penis erect. “El tiene un porrón,” says Picasso’s note, and the visual rhyming of spout and phallus is of a publicity unknown in Picasso’s finished works of the period. The unmistakable phallism of the porrón in two works just preceding the Demoiselles fixes its meaning in the early Demoiselles studies. It occupies the vital center of the design: on the table; in front of the sailor; his attribute.25 For the rest, the sailor remains enigmatic. In the earliest study (fig. 4.4) he shares everyone’s interest in the newcomer, though his round-shouldered pose, with

both arms drooped under the table, seems strangely demure. He is the man inside, yet within this band of five mannish whores, his one distinction (maintained through figs. 4.5 and 4.6) is an effeminate personality. Conventional sexual character traits seem reversed. In the fourth study (fig. 4.7) he retreats further, rolling himself a cigarette; and two surviving studies for his head and half figure (fig. 4.33; cf. also Z.II/1.6) show him as mild and shy, with a soft down on his upper lip . . . inadequate as a personification of vice; more likely a timid candidate for sexual initiation. In the next thirteen drawings he remains a shadowy presence; Picasso gives him no thought. Finally in figures 4.13 and 4.14—the very drawings in which the gisante raises a sleepy elbow—the seated sailor assumes an articulate pose, resting his arm on the table. Immediately after, in the Philadelphia watercolor (fig. 4.15), he disappears.26 There can be no doubt that the sailor was meaningful to Picasso, but the meaning eludes, the more so as his figure drops out. An interpretation would have to proceed from the contrast Picasso drew between the two men in the picture—one well inside, of effeminate temper, inundated by womankind; the other, halting at

The Philosophical Brothel

Figure 4.33. Sailor Rolling a Cigarette (study for the Demoiselles),

Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/1.7. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen.

the divider, half in and half out, volatile in his transformations and identity glides, his unstable attributes and final sex change. In 1939, when Alfred Barr published his great exhibition catalogue, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, all conclusions as to the character of the curtain figure had to be drawn from four pieces of evidence— three available studies (figs. 4.6, 4.7, 4.15) and one reported remark of the master: that the man, meant as a student, had at first carried a skull.27 On this evidence Barr based his subsequent statements that Picasso originally “conceived the picture as a kind of memento mori, allegory or charade”; but Barr felt bound to add that the painter, whose passions were never those of a puritan, must have approached the

theme “with no very fervid moral intent.” And again, “obviously Picasso was interested in other than homiletic problems.”28 But this left an anomalous situation. Would Picasso have embarked on one of his grandest projects with a lukewarm uninterest in its subject and a morality at odds with his feelings? For though he may link sex to danger, Picasso does not link it to sin. Nor would it have been in his character to deploy grapes, apples, and melons as symbols of pernicious indulgence. Picasso liked eating and he mistrusted people who don’t.29 Troubled by these anomalies, I looked again at the known drawings. Not one of them showed a death’shead, not even that oft-reproduced Basel sheet (fig. 4.6), in which a whole generation of Barr’s readers pretended to see it—though in this drawing the large rectangular object on the man’s arm is neither shaped, nor scaled, nor held like a skull.30 It was then (I must at this point refer to personal history) that I began to restudy the genesis of the work—without reference to any memento mori idea, or to that dubious skull on which it was founded but for which no hard evidence had yet come forth. In a public lecture at the Metropolitan Museum (March 1972), I proposed to proceed with no further regard to any initial death theme, unless hitherto unpublished drawings appeared. The approach was at least fertile. It brought information from Mila Gagarine, successor to the late Christian Zervos in the continuing Picasso oeuvre catalogue, that a number of unknown drawings for the Demoiselles had just come to light, including several that referred to the man with the skull—“il s’agit bien d’un crâne,” she said transatlantically. The new finds were to be published in a forthcoming supplementary volume during 1973.31 At the same time, William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art, with whom I had discussed the matter, found occasion to mention the disputed skull to Picasso himself during a visit in April 1972. The result was rewarding. Whoever has been unable to see a skull in the Basel drawing (fig. 4.6) is now officially vindicated, for the drawing hails from a stage when

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the skull emblem had been long discarded. And the presence of the skull at an earlier stage need no longer be taken on faith. On the other hand, the memento mori interpretation remains as doubtful as ever. Questioned by Rubin, Picasso confirmed that the original conception of Les Demoiselles had indeed included the skull motif and produced a then unpublished sketchbook containing pages of studies directly related to the curtain figure—whom he identified as a “medical student” (figs. 4.34–4.38).32 A medical student? Rubin comments as follows: “Since in discussing the Student, Picasso made a special point of identifying him as a medical student, the skull may be considered a casual medical-school, i.e. ‘professional,’ prop. . . . His being a medical student obviates any necessity to read the picture allegorically as does Barr (the skull being an anecdotal prop), but by no means eliminates the possibility that the picture also functions on this level.”33

Figure 4.34. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.45.

Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 37v.

But suppose we press further. Why a medical student rather than a student of, say, engineering, law, or philosophy? Had Picasso wished to evoke the idea of a contemplation of death, he could have given the skull to any man, everyman. Why to a medical student dressed in a business suit? Does that uniform make him an antihero, clinical and irreverent before the forces of life, like Joyce’s Buck Mulligan? And why the skull as his symbol? It is not even an efficient mark of its bearer’s profession, since it could as easily designate a gravedigger, or a life-drawing instructor. And contrariwise, is not a medical man more securely defined by such insignia as Aesculapian staff, urine bottle, scalpel, or stethoscope? We are still left in need of one answer to two distinct questions: why choose a medical student and why make his symbol a skull? Perhaps because a medical student is the one member of human society who can, and who does, look at a

Figure 4.35. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.55. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 32v.

Figure 4.36. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.74.

Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 17v.

Figure 4.37. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.75. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 16v.

Figure 4.38. Study for the Demoiselles, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.73. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1861, fol. 18r.

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skull with thoughts other than thoughts of death—i.e., looks at it as an object of scientific inquiry. It is surely significant that this errant skull is interchangeable with a book, and that both items are inappropriate gear to bring to a brothel. The fact that in Picasso’s evolving conception a second drawing shows the man burdened with both book and skull (fig. 4.38), and thereafter with a book only (figs. 4.4–4.6), suggests that these attributes served as symbols of knowledge, and of a particular brand of knowledge—non-participatory and theoretical. They signal the chilling approach of analysis. Hence the death’s-head in the hand of the medical student—as against the sailor’s ithyphallic life symbol. For while the meek sailor behind his Bacchic porrón is in the thick of it, his counterpart, the knowing man at the curtain, becomes the outsider. Not a personifier of pious death consciousness, nor (as R. de la Souchère has suggested) a man imperiled by entering into sin, but the opposite—a man apart, self-exiled by reliance on studious dissection; condemned for not entering. In the context of Picasso’s Demoiselles studies, as a man placed in transit in the plane of the curtain, the student stands for an attitude. He never looks at the nudes in his path; despite the summary character of the drawings, Picasso always succeeds in turning his head up, his glance away. He is the non-participant, the excluded one in the ultimate game of inclusion. Since we must have an allegorical starting point, I suggest that the Demoiselles project began, not as a charade on the wages of sin, but as an allegory of the involved and the uninvolved in confrontation with the indestructible claims of sex. For Picasso, seventy years ago, was not listening to Church Fathers, but hearing the voice of the philosopher who had written: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated—into a vice.”34 Speaking to Kahnweiler in December 1933, Picasso recalled the jokes he and his friends bandied about the women in the Demoiselles painting, identifying one of them as Picasso’s girlfriend, Fernande, another as Marie Laurencin, a third as the grandmother of his poet friend Max Jacob—“all in a brothel in Avignon!”35 Since

the male characters did not survive the initial studies, not even mock names for them have come down; but it would be in character for Picasso to have had specific persons in mind. Rubin sees Picasso’s own features in the youth with the skull in figure 4.34; and he proposes to read both men in figure 4.5 as partial self-portraits, aspects of Picasso’s split nature.36 This is surely a possibility. On the other hand, a symbolic role for the curtain figure as the sexual “outsider” may have allowed it to coalesce with successive identifications. Not only does the figure quickly grow tall and lean (figs. 4.38, 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6), as if to belie the artist’s own build; in figure 4.7, the last to include the full crew of seven, the man at the curtain becomes bald and distinctly older, taking on a resemblance to Max Jacob (figs. 4.39–4.41). Physiognomic clues are of course always inadequate, but it remains a suggestive alternative to link the changeable male in the original cast of the Demoiselles with the homosexual temperament of the poet—a man morally drawn to, but repelled by, the love of woman, fluctuating between what he called his “amours d’enfer” and contrition. As Picasso’s former roommate, literary mentor, and most intimate friend of those years, he must have caused the artist to ponder that mysterious housing of sexuality which is a man’s body; and to brood on the difference between possessing, and being possessed by, one’s sex.37 The man at the curtain passes through rapid changes of personality. He begins, skull in hand and left arm disconnected, as a stocky youth with close-cropped hair (fig. 4.34); his precise profile interests Picasso enough to repeat and enlarge upon (fig. 4.35). The skull-holding gesture alone is studied in further drawings (figs. 4.36, 4.37).38 Immediately afterward, in the same sketchbook, the figure becomes long and faceless (fig. 4.38); a book (or portfolio?) under his arm joins the death’s-head, as though this second attribute were needed to sustain the significance of the first. In three further drawings (figs. 4.4–4.6), the man’s character remains constant, but papers replace the skull—until at last all attributes disappear. Rid of symbolic props in the last full-cast study (fig. 4.7), the short, balding, ex–medical student with the

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Figure 4.39. Jacques André, photograph of Max Jacob in Montmartre, c. 1907, detail. Paris, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet.

Figure 4.40. Chère Mademoiselle Suzanne [Bloch],

1905, detail. Location unknown.

Figure 4.41. Jean

Cocteau, photograph of Henri-Pierre Roche, Max Jacob, and Picasso in front of La Rotonde, Paris, 1916, detail. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP2003-15, fol. 82.

plump features of Max Jacob seizes the curtain with an ambidextrous will, the left hand aloft, the right arm crooked behind like the harlequin’s in Les Saltimbanques of 1906 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art). In the drawings that follow (figs. 4.8–4.11), he grips the curtain with waxing determination and his body leans forward as though inclined to drag it along—as though he had the power, or the intention, to foreclose the act. Finally (figs. 4.12–4.14), the figure undergoes a sex change and petrifies. The face mask she wears in the painting protects a secret history. But her marginal relationship to the rest of the cast remains constant; she still differs from the nudes

on stage in being gowned. Yet she belongs, and parades like the picture itself, being unveiled by her garment as the picture is by its curtain. Her déshabillé introduces the theme of exposure. She is the overture, the true curtain raiser. The character that invested her figure from the beginning still clings; she remains non-participant and go-between, not part of the revelation but one who reveals. And the crucial change in her role consists in this, that the brothel staff, instead of reacting to her dramatic entrance, are through her made to react to us. What then has happened to the original drama—the polarity of external knowledge and initiation? As the

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action turns through ninety degrees to confound the viewer, the picture ceases to be the representation of an adventure enjoyed by one or two men and becomes instead an experience of ours, an experience, that is, of the painting. The change seems drastic; from an allegory of man meeting woman to the adventure of a collision with art. As if the theme had been shunted from the subject of sex to that of painting itself—which is, in a sense, what has always been said, that the picture has become “significant” as painting only. Whatever the original subject had been—wages of sin or detachment versus engagement—that subject seems superseded when the confrontation proceeds between the contained work of art over there and its observer outside. But, I think, the picture says otherwise. It declares that if you wholly accept and undergo the aesthetic experience, if you let it engulf and scare you—as Gertrude Stein says Alice B. Toklas was scared by the Demoiselles—then you become an insider. It is in the contagion of art that the types of knowledge, the external and the engaged, intermingle, and the distinction between outsider and insider falls away. Not every picture is capable of such overriding contagion. Few works of art impose the kind of aesthetic experience which the young Nietzsche called “a confrontation with stark reality.” And this, surely, is why Picasso strove to make his creation a piece of “wild naked nature with the bold face of truth.” He wanted the orgiastic immersion and the Dionysian release.39 Once more one realizes the importance to Picasso of dissociating those five figures from one another. Despite the packed grouping, there is no communication between them, no conceivable traffic across the narrows that keep them apart. The disjunctions are part of the mechanism; each figure at its own terminus connects individually with the viewer, much as our five fingers connect with the arm. And the appeal, appropriately enough, is to the most primitive intuition, to that ground of earliest consciousness wherein all perceived beings relate separately to the perceiving self. The infant’s slow recognition that there exists, say, between mother and father, a mutual intimacy from which its own self is excluded, constitutes a state of enculturation,

an achieved intellectual detachment that allows the registration of external interrelations. Picasso’s Demoiselles, piercing this cultured crust, alerts a regressive impulse and activates the most instinctual mode of addressing experience. There is, after all, a thoroughgoing consistency in the work, a oneness of theme and structure and a spirit of insolent summons to the beholder. Hence the repetition of vectors that define the orthogonal axis—inward from the spectator’s station, by way of the penetrant table, past the masked curtain raiser who unveils an event of overwhelming proximity: the sudden exposure of cornered whores startled by our intrusion and returning our gaze. Without the mutual dependency of aroused viewer and pictorial structure there is no picture. The whole picture, form and subject together, strives against educated detachment. Why is the blue curtain in the upper right always parted, and why the inquisitive demoiselle peering in? Picasso never questioned the finality of the motif and carried it almost unchanged through nineteen studies. Of course, it’s a space-making device; given the compressed staging of the Demoiselles, it opens the backdrop just as the spilling table spread opens the front. But why so much extraterritoriality in this “first Cubist picture”? Or put it this way: What secret reserves of space does that slab-nosed nude, looking in from backstage, leave behind? One possible answer lies in a comparison of the Demoiselles with the last major work that precedes it in Picasso’s oeuvre—the Two Women (fig. 4.42), produced, after innumerable preparatory studies, in Paris in the late fall of 1906. The contrast between the two paintings is absolute. The Demoiselles is all actuality, a clash of the sexes and a reciprocal shock—the women, themselves the quarry, stare at their game. The intruded table, bridgehead of the masculine presence, turns the depicted space into common ground, the site of shameless exposure to shameless eyes. In the Two Women, all is privacy and anticipation; absorbed in each other, the women stand in an anteroom—a place, a condition rather, of woman alone. Since these two works are so nearly consecutive—

Figure 4.42. Two Women, Paris, autumn 1906, Z.I.366. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of G. David Thompson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

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the many studies for them, including postscripts to the Two Women, almost shading off into each other40 —it may be well to reconceive them in sequence. Begin with the changed body image. In the earlier painting, a pair of crude, sturdy maidens stand like carved logs—timber lately enwoman’d, ensouled. They are forms intact, their humanity sealed in integuments of solid fusion. As sculptured monoliths, they suggest matter never yet plied or stretched. As creatures of growth, they appear raw and unbreached. As physiological types, they seem unadapted and unaccustomed to motion, with flesh that has never submitted to pressure. Bodies, then, of primal virginity, designed only to encase their own substance, retained on the sheltered side of the curtain, antecedent to the strains of experience. And then the eager anatomies of the Demoiselles become Picasso’s complementary metaphor—bodies manipulable and articulated for play. It is worth recalling that the earliest of Picasso’s many images of two women paired in an intimate meeting is the Two Sisters (The Meeting) of 1902 in the Hermitage, the subject of which Picasso spelled out in a letter to Max Jacob. The picture, he wrote, represents the meeting of a nun and a prostitute in the hospital of St.-Lazare.41 Nun and harlot: the extremes of woman’s physical life joined in a single arch; the body unused and the body abused—poles of innocence and experience; and this same polarity at a wider stretch spanned again in the succession from the Two Women to the Demoiselles. Consider the contrast of gesture in the two pictures. Picasso’s painting of the Two Women closes a period of preoccupation with woman as a contained figure, restricted to self-sealing attitudes—hands folded, arms crossed, limbs locked together, and elbows that cleave to the trunk (fig. 4.43). Then, in the Demoiselles— all elbows out! Let the reader repeat these respective motions to experience the explosive psychic effect of abruptly released elbows. Two Women is a mysterious picture: a pair of young massy females on either side of a breach. One of them is poised to go through—but not the one on the left. In a gesture of self-absorption, one hand

Figure 4.43. Two Nudes, Paris, autumn 1906, Z.I.365. New York, Museum of Modern Art; The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection.

recoils to her shoulder, the other hand grasping the curtain as if to show it or draw it aside. This farther hand introduces our “disconnection” motif, an earlier example of that space jump by way of understated backshortened gesture which Picasso renders more recondite in the Demoiselles. But the whole figure is a tour de force of depicted depth in compression—from her right wrist, through the hulk of her shoulders, to the distant grip on a curtain. And beyond that, some ulterior world to be broached. By whom? She eyes the other—I, I or you. The woman at right is half lost to us, facing away. Her face in lost profile is addressed to the cleft in the curtain; likewise the stony index of her raised hand. Several of the studies for the Two Women show Pi-

The Philosophical Brothel

Figure 4.44. Study for Two Nudes, 1906, Z.I.364.

Figure 4.45. Study for Two Nudes, Paris, fall 1906, Z.XXII.467. Boston, Museum of

Fine Arts; Arthur Tracy Cabot Fund.

casso thinking a pointing hand (figs. 4.44, 4.45).42 In the painting, the arm retracted as far as it may and the elbow pressed to the waist indicate that the pointing hand hovers free of the shoulder, so that the large, lighted finger looms in midair. Such a gesture, like that of the Sistine Ceiling’s Isaiah, bespeaks inly awareness or self-recognition. The whole picture is inner directed, a strange prelude to the extrovert plot of the Demoiselles. And then the close congruence of the two women. The near identity of their lower limbs suggests duplication. To Alfred Barr, who admired the picture before others took notice, the two figures seemed to stand for one woman—like a self and its mirror image self-

searching. There is a beautiful parallelism in the two rising hands, the reflexive hand that falls back on its shoulder, and the other whose finger is cocked in the direction to go. But this question, whether we are seeing one woman or two, is not framed for a literal answer. It is a classical Spanish notion that self-discovery occurs in intercourse with another, that a meeting of persons is a reciprocal mirroring.43 But the image the other wins from you is your surrendered part, held by the other for fair exchange. The self sunders to retrieve itself and re-selve in mutual awareness. The picture then—if it is indeed of one woman—is of a person on the threshold of an encounter, about to pass through the curtain that screens the unmated self.

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At least three surviving sketches for the pointing partner in the Two Women externalize her premonitions: she is beset by two devilish little satyrs (Z.VI.803) or flanked by a satyr and cupid (Z.VI.805).44 In a fine watercolor (fig. 4.46) she stands alone, but alone with a goat-footed faun traipsing up. What connection is there between the gift of the satyr and the index addressed to the mind? Whether Two Women represents one twofold personage or paired companions with complementary roles, face and finger of the woman at the right direct

Figure 4.46. Standing Nude and Faun, Paris, fall 1906, Z.XXII.412. Christie’s, New York, sale 2256, November 5, 2008, lot 18.

themselves to the place where a curtain is about to divide. And is there no sequel? We know that Picasso wonders about the averted back of what he sees, and that his oeuvre exhibits inversions of viewpoints from back to front in infinite ways. I propose that his next decision constitutes what the movies call a shot/countershot. As if his next picture must inevitably behold that same curtain from the reverse side. This next picture is the Demoiselles d’Avignon, originally dubbed “the Philosophical Brothel” by André Salmon in 1912.45 To us the picture has long been familiarly revolutionary by every stylistic test; but the psychic energy which powered that revolution flowed from the artist’s total humanity—from his meditation on man and woman no less than from his struggle with art. For both the Two Women and the Demoiselles are about the human condition, about that perpetual moment in which self-knowledge arises in sexual confrontation. The “wherefrom” of the incoming demoiselle at the upper right now becomes answerable: she has left the state antecedent, the state of woman alone. What lies behind, behind the cleft in the curtain, is as solidly female as the domain in front of the picture is male, and the depicted space upon which she intrudes is the common ground. But such an answer has little face value, since we are not actually seeing consecutive frames of a filmstrip. The nosey bawd peering in as if from the mouth of a cave is not the “same” character as the one outward bound in the Two Nudes. More important to Picasso than a sustaining identity is precisely the transformation of character implicit in the two states— from bluff simplicity to keen-edged articulation. Yet certain features shared by both figures suggest a residual constancy. The breast of square shape—apparent in the Philadelphia watercolor even before being canonized in the Demoiselles painting—is anticipated as a left breast in the Two Women. And the three-quarter back view of the earlier picture is reversed in the threequarter face of the slab-nosed demoiselle. In fact, one suspects that the latter’s whole figure is conceived as a forced fusion of divergent three-quarter views. The one-breasted chest, which describes the body turn-

The Philosophical Brothel

ing away (as in the Two Women), is counterpointed by hither turn of the head. Her dissonant visage, like that of the squatter below, accords with the theme of the Demoiselles painting, if not with its style. Most of the composition studies— those small ones that represent the six-figure phase (figs. 4.8–4.14)—show faceless figures. But there is a radical difference between the faces that appeared early (in figs. 4.4–4.7) and those in the Philadelphia watercolor (fig. 4.15). Picasso’s conception has gained in tempo and violence, and now a fiercer physiognomic type troubles the scene. The shift is away from conventional Western types. In the watercolor—which must date from the spring of 1907, just before the painting itself was undertaken—the women already suggest a primitive life lived in the subsoil of civilization. It has been shown that two-fifths of the painting is due to a later campaign, datable to the end of the summer of 1907, and that the sharpened ferocity of the two right-hand figures followed Picasso’s exposure to African art.46 But there was clearly good reason why the artist was willing to channel the new influence into this particular work. Even before the revision of the right side of the painting under the impact of tribal art, Picasso wanted his doxies depersonalized and barbaric. In the end, his reason for making them savage was the same as his reason at the beginning for making them whores. They were to personify sheer sexual energy as the image of a life force. The primitive was let in because that’s what the subject craved. If Picasso in 1907 felt, as Joyce did, that “female coyness and male idealism were counterparts, [that] the sugaring of love and courtship was a part of the general self-deception and refusal to recognize reality,”47 then he would, in this picture, project sexuality divested of all accretion of culture— without appeal to privacy, tenderness, gallantry, or that appreciation of beauty which presumes detachment and distance. His women’s faces were to be orgiastic; masks of impersonal passion with no interference of personality. Like the original chorus of satyrs whom Nietzsche saw giving birth to Greek tragedy, Picasso’s strumpets were to be “nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every

change of generations and historical movement.”48 And the assimilation of African forms was but the final step in the continuing realization of an idea—the trauma of sexual encounter experienced as an animalistic clash, a stripping away even of personal love—again, parlor reverting to jungle; again, Nietzsche’s “wild naked nature with the bold face of truth.” A small gouache from the Demoiselles period records more of Picasso’s thought about woman as the image of animal destiny (fig. 4.47): a jungle dweller of slumbrous vitality, she walks alone, listening to the surge of the body as her left leg metamorphoses into the hind leg of a quadruped—a hock on the reverse side of the knee.49 It is as though the goat leg of the faun who approached the reflective nude in figure 4.46 had invaded her being to reduce her anatomy to “wild naked nature.”

Figure 4.47. Nude with Raised Arms, Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/1.39.

Paris, Musée Picasso, MP575r.

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Picasso in 1907 had grown too modern in spirit to let his vision of “the bold face of truth” be other than a regression. He would allow no idyllic primeval state, no celebration of unsoiled innocence, like Matisse’s Joie de vivre of the previous year. To uncover the face of truth, Picasso’s return to nature in the Demoiselles must be ironic—not to Arcady, but to the city stews. Hence the smell of the hothouse, the effect of a caged jungle whose graceless inmates, at once frightened and frightening, awesome and comical, start up like jerked puppets. That squatter at right—was there ever a trollop more like a jumping jack? Within the life of the city, even the reversion to nature becomes part of a show; the brothel a circus spectacle, and five plucked performers—Matisse interpreted them as a hoax—to invite ridicule and provoke ribaldry (incitement to ribaldry being the certainest way to engage the spectator). Picasso himself and his friends made them butts of broad humor; every one of those sluts got a name. Seeing them for the first time, the critic Félix Fénéon advised the young painter to take up caricature—“not so stupid,” Picasso commented in retrospect. And most later observers, at one time or another, have come down on the funny side of the Demoiselles: Roland Penrose described one of the figures as “opened out like a suckling pig”; they were, according to Barr, “five of the least seductive female nudes in the history of art.”50 Did Picasso expect us to take the work seriously—all of the time? His contemporaries probably needed to see them as partly comical to survive them at all. How, otherwise, could they relate to a vision of five bedeviled viragos whose sexual offering, visually inescapable, was decivilizing, disfiguring, and demoniacal? The two at the right are key figures, both of them with disordered anatomies and ambiguous orientations. The incoming figure had been arriving upstage in composition drawings repeated over and over, and Picasso knew very well that the three-quarter view in which he was casting her was fraught with consequence. Unlike a strict profile or an en face, which tend to lie flush on the picture plane, her transitional three-quarter aspect

implies spatial depth—rearward as in Two Women, or hitherward on a diagonal. Observe that her puissant nose aims at the curtain raiser as through a traversable medium. Thus her oblique intrusion threatens to redefine the entire space of the picture as a continuum. To insulate her, as he must, from all connective ambience, Picasso makes his most fateful decisions. The crouching figure below, precisely because she is her nearest companion in point of space, gets removed to the utmost stylistic distance. At the risk of scandalizing logic and art—to say nothing of abashing his friends—he will negate the fixity of focused vision, the vacancy of empty space, and the coherence of style. Three momentous decisions, or intuitions, which we trace in the last two composition studies and in the final phase of the painting. The last of the drawings to include the sailor in a six-figure group is a large, accurate composition study in charcoal (fig. 4.14). It lays down the main tonal divisions and outlines the figures as blank shapes in the field, suggesting that Picasso is no longer staging actors in space, but approaching the thought of his canvas. But that he is not sacrificing spatiality to decorative values of flatness is proved by the drawing on the reverse of the sheet. On the back of figure 4.14 appears a large, carefully structured design of a Standing Woman (fig. 4.48). Her single breast is an important sign. Were the body presented as a conventional side view, such a breast contour would be acceptable as the profilation of a familiar silhouette. But on a thorax that is clearly not in strict profile, the single breast implies—as it did in Two Women, and as in the two demoiselles on the right—that the body inhabits a depth of space which holds another breast in the offing. The lone breast becomes the thoracic version of the profil perdu—a signal that Picasso is not thinking flat. And indeed, the figure is a spatial amphiboly, his earliest essay in diametric two-way orientation.51 Is the lady facing or backing away? Are we seeing her front or her rear with turned head looking back over her shoulder? Faint traces in the zone of the pelvis may once have spelled rump, but Picasso has let

The Philosophical Brothel

Figure 4.48. Standing Woman, Paris, spring 1907, Z.II/2.685 (verso of

Figure 4.49. Standing Woman in Suit, Paris, spring 1907, Z.XXVI.130. Paris,

fig. 4.14).

Musée Picasso, MP1862, fol. 19v. (See note 53.)

them fade out; their precise reference to a back view would have dispelled ambiguity. Contours of waist, thorax, and breast yield no specific clue; nor does the cylindrical neck, or the flat falling arm. The head, of course, can be read both ways— either turned over her right shoulder toward us or as a three- quarter front view. This leaves only the lifted hand which, as an open palm with straight thumb, would stand unequivocally for the right hand of a figure seen from the rear. And this is precisely why the thumb is removed by a slash continuous from elbow to index. The rest of the hand is no problem, since the emphatic cross-stroke at the roots of the four fingers defines the back of the hand as readily as the palm. Thus every part of the figure ends up at the same ambivalence level.52

Inside its bounded planes the drawing is flat. But it re- creates the idea of “body,” of something denser than silhouette, through the sustained front/back ambiguity. Not a body in the sense of spatial displacement, but the embodiment of two-way visibility, a form impressed between antipodal points of sight. Visual duplicity in the interest of symbolic concretion—a principle which Picasso will pursue for the rest of his life—is here laid down for the first time. And it is vastly significant for the history of his art that this figure was drawn on the back of a study for the Demoiselles d’Avignon.53 Return now to the squatter’s blank silhouette in figure 4.14. The pigtail which would have established an explicit back view is not confirmed by the system of reinforced contours. Hands and feet are suppressed

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and overlaps are ruled out; what remains is a flattened impress that orients itself simultaneously inward and outward. Looking back, one observes that Picasso had been courting this prodigy for some time. His early oil study (fig. 4.7) had already smoothed the squatter like a butterfly to a pane. Arms cut away at the elbows, one leg cropped by a curtain, breasts evasé, and the head twisted around—the figure appears somewhat ambiguously dorsal and frontal. And a hint of the same obsession returns in drawings such as figure 4.11. But Picasso seems also to resist the idea; it may have seemed too contrived and too cleverly punning, like those riddle drawings for children that read two ways—rabbit or duck; or those diagrams that depend on tricks of omission.54 In the Philadelphia watercolor (fig. 4.15) the device is abandoned; the squatter becomes once again a back view with defining pigtail, and her acknowledgment of the spectator is conveyed by the anatomically sound turn of a head. But in the painting the two-way orientation returns with a vengeance. Frontality—a warped facemask cupped in a huge boomerang hand—settles without anatomic sanction upon a back; half of an arm akimbo accedes to a rising thigh, and what’s left may as well be right—recto as well as verso. Picasso discovers that abruptness of gesture can be expressed by suppressing transitions—no neck, for instance, between head and shoulders. His squatter becomes a focus of concentrated disorientation, like something too close to see. Gradually, as the studies reveal, Picasso edges her straightforward back view toward contradiction.55 Frontal and dorsal aspect—the latter full-splayed and spread-eagled—arrive in simultaneity. And the suddenness of the inversion more than makes up for abstraction and flattening. It gives her pink flesh an aggressive immediacy, brought nearer still by the impudence of her pose and the proximity of an implicated observer who knows every side of her. The Philadelphia watercolor (fig. 4.15) is the only known study for the Demoiselles in its definitive fivefigure state. The sailor and his table-to-lean-on have been discharged, allowing Picasso to adjoin the two

central nudes. One of them, the caryatid, long treated as a distant, archaic effigy, is brought down to stage center, her sex at the intersection of all coordinates, her crownpost position aligned with the thrust of the table. There is a new determination to clench dispersed elements without easing their mutual repulsion. But the outstanding event in this final drawing is the positive charge given to the interspaces at right. The vacant surrounds fill up and harden, and the inspissation of intervals converts the two right-hand figures into negative shapes reserved on a dark ground. Much has been written about the eruption of these solidified voids in the painting. Ever since Kahnweiler, they have been seen as a stylistic break with the rest of the work, a shift in intention. Their prophetic energy seemed to Kahnweiler to offset the sacrifice of internal unity. Robert Rosenblum, too, felt that the painting traced a headlong change of style from left to right, a change come, as it were, in the heat of action, within the painting itself: “[Its] very inconsistency is an integral part of Les Demoiselles. The irrepressible energy behind its creation demanded a vocabulary of change and impulse rather than of measured statement in a style already articulated. The breathless tempo of this pregnant historical moment virtually obligated its first masterpiece to carry within itself the very process of artistic evolution.”56 Can it be that the noble enthusiasm of this description, penned just before 1960, echoes the cry of American Action Painting? For it appears that the “radical quality” of the Demoiselles, the reversed charges of ground and figure, “the threat to the integrity of mass as distinct from space,” that all this was already envisaged in the Philadelphia watercolor. It was part of a program, part of the eruption effect planned for the picture. Already here, that open curtain in the upper right— previously rendered by two canted lines—condenses into cold boulders of color that turn the space intervals into mass. And there is good reason why these curtain floes gelled exactly here, where the scene is intruded on with a momentum sufficient to reconvert the whole setting to open spatiality. Think the blue curtain

The Philosophical Brothel

away, and that savage entrance will dissipate all of Picasso’s carefully plotted disjunctions. But if those five clustered nudes are to remain discontinuous, the artist must quarantine the intruder and build the gap between her and her neighbors into an insurmountable barrier. It is this imperative which the Philadelphia watercolor obeys. And in the painting, what had once been a tame background curtain behind an interval of airspace becomes an outcropping of glacial blues that transmit neither dramatic motion, nor body heat, nor lines of sight. The painting maintains a relentless consistency in isolating each figure, and the viewer is called on to keep switching between divergent pictorial modes. Reading from left to right, we encounter the curtain raiser who shows nothing but side, who defines her flat shape like a surface incision—a sunk relief with its ground removed, a profile traced on the diaphane that sets off the stage. It has been observed that one cannot quite tell whether the leg she shows is the right or the left; it is indeed one leg standing for both, as though to forestall any hint of a partner behind. And the angularity of her limbs is in keeping: the leather-cut arm; the broadside from shoulder to breast as if stretched between tenterhooks; and the left hand, articulated like somebody else’s—not issuing from a substantial body but landing by an abrupt spatial leap in another register. No intelligible continuity relates the curtain raiser to the next figure, our rampant gisante. We see her lift off against shreds of recession—halations of private space which she shares with nobody else. She and her elbowing neighbor seem to present a common front— both of them footless and levitating, kindred in dress, flesh, and feature, and both plainly facing. But one figure’s frontality calls for looking down from above, the other for looking up. Their respective spatial orientations remain unreconciled. At the right sits the squatter, flattest in drawing, but of multiple aspects, as though seen in duration or from an embracing position. Offering both front and back, she imputes an alarming intimacy to the spectator. And at last the intruding savage, deeply recessed, trapped in the crack of a curtain whose collapsing pleats

simulate an impenetrable solidification of space—the famous birthplace of Cubism. But Cubist pictures are remarkable for stylistic coherence, whereas the program of the Demoiselles is an accelerating mutation of pictorial means in a narrowing cage. What Picasso attempts in this work throws shadows across vast reaches of twentieth- century art. He challenges far more than traditional focused perspective—which after Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Fauves had long lost its hold on advancing art. Far more is at stake than Cartesian space conceived as a geometry of infinite homogeneous extension—a philosophic projection whose psychic detachment reflects neither the way we see nor the way we dream nor the way we move. Picasso’s ultimate challenge is to the notion that the coherence of the artwork demands a stylistic consistency among the things represented; that one style must obtain in every part of the canvas, whether to correspond with the supposed unity of an instant visual experience or to maintain constancy in transformation. In both these alternatives, the persistent style registers as an objective rule, preformed like the grammar of language. The viewer follows a system that leads to the expectation of a predictable regularity. And the shock of the Demoiselles resides largely in the frustration of this expectation. In Picasso’s farewell to stylistic unity, the means of rendering and the modes of experiencing become subjectified—open choices, acts of the will. Those three rocking orthogonals—curtain top, supine nude, leveled table—will not come flush with the picture plane. The straight curtain raiser and the gisante in bird’s-eye perspective juxtapose a legitimate upright with a usurper. They are two images as distinct as two pictures. And the two-way squatter in the lower right is a disturbed diagram. Neighboring objects diverge willfully into discrepant styles; styles become subjects to paint. Only in the mind of the perceiver and nowhere else is their consanguinity re-created. One realizes from how deep a conviction spring such perverse statements as this: “When you draw a head [Picasso said sometime in the 1950s] you must draw like that head. . . . [T]ake a tree. At the foot of the tree there is a goat, and beside the goat is a little girl tending

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the goat. Well, you need a different drawing for each. The goat is round, the little girl is square, and the tree is a tree. And yet people draw all three in the same way. That is what is false. Each should be drawn in a completely different way.”57 Or this anecdote from the Bateau-Lavoir days, i.e., the Demoiselles period. Time: 2 a.m. Place: outside Max Jacob’s window where the oil lamp, as usual, is still alight. Picasso: Hey, Max, what are you doing? Jacob: I’m searching for a style. Picasso (going off): There’s no such thing.58

Collage was the first major outgrowth of Picasso’s intuition that discrepant modes of representation can cohabitate, like diverse fruit in a bowl. But the idea of combining unreconciled elements in one presentation recurs continually in his art; its ultimate reach is explored half a century later in a series of paintings which have yet to receive serious attention— Picasso’s variations on Las Meninas, begun in 1957 (Barcelona, Museu Picasso), wherein each painted personage comes in a different style and each distinct image finds a space metope in which to be its own picture. In the Meninas series (as in the final canvas of the Algerian Women, fig. 10.8) these autonomies are clearly deliberate. In the Demoiselles, where internal stylistic diversity makes its first monumental appearance, the phenomenon has been attributed to haste, to the supposed incomplete state of the picture, or to the uncontrollable surge of Picasso’s creative momentum. But we have potent reasons to regard the apparent lack of coherence in the earlier work as equally purposeful. One of these has been discussed in detail: we have seen that the inconsistencies in the Demoiselles are not merely late interferences, but programmed throughout; the striated masks at the right may look more discordant, but are not more damaging to received notions of pictorial unity than that flown kite of a hand in the upper left, or the divergent eye levels incorporated by the twinned central figures.

There are further reasons for rejecting any notion of discontinuity by inadvertence. The shatter effect, the rule of disruption in the Demoiselles, is too knowingly neutralized by deliberate countermeasures to have resulted from haste or runaway evolution. Consider the handling of color. It is used consistently as a bonding agent; it binds together whatever the stylistic rifts pull apart. Flesh tones of homologous pinks control the entire field, and a crescendo of blues expanding toward the right is counterpointed by diminishing browns and ochers. Equally binding are the definitions of edges that lace and crisscross the surface, whether to line body contours or pass through and beyond. The remotest points of the canvas communicate. A slash anywhere in the field elicits sympathetic responses elsewhere; every shape or limb is directive. A diagonal discharged from the squatter’s knee homes in on the hand at the curtain—its trajectory grazing the loincloth of the pillar nude and the gisante’s listing shoulders. Linear structure is organic throughout, like a nervous system. Even the swoop of the squatter’s nose breaks through the peak of her head to produce further contours. But the will to unity in the Demoiselles touches more than color and line. It acts as a compressor upon the whole composition. It determines the format and within the format every spatial allotment. The composition began as an oblong, as befits a multifigured narrative scene (figs. 4.4ff ). But throughout the known composition studies the artist periodically applies lateral inward pressure to contain his ebullient crew. The one option he keeps available until the end is the frame’s elasticity. As he rehearses the scene, the picture shrinks and dilates, narrows down to a square (as in figs. 4.8 and 4.14), but expands again to a rectangle in the Philadelphia study, where the personnel is reduced to five (fig. 4.15). That was the last stage before beginning to paint. It was then that Picasso ordered his huge eight-foot canvas, prepared, we are told, “with unusual care. . . . The smooth type of canvas that he liked to paint on would not have been strong enough for so large a surface. He therefore had a fine canvas mounted on a stronger material as a reinforcement and

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had a stretcher made to his specified unconventional dimensions.”59 These dimensions—slightly higher than wide—represent a final contraction, so that in the painting, as in no preceding study, each figure is crowded and each interval squeezed. As might be expected, the centripetal forces working against the latitude of the field are personified in depicted actions—the pulling across of the curtain in figures 4.8–4.10 and the dramatic entrance from the side opposite. But this compression of the flat field proceeds within two dimensions, whereas Picasso’s thinking is tenaciously three-dimensional. Accordingly, the marginal squeeze coincides with a compression of depth dramatized by the staging. The shallowness of the pictorial space is not given but won, for it wins out against aggressive incursions: the backbending proscenium is stayed by the curtain raiser, the inward thrust of the table, by the timely advance of the two central nudes, buffers in action. Indeed, every spatial dimension— width, height, and depth—lives under stress. The five demoiselles, though conceptually freed from each other, become an ingathered conglomerate, cohere like tensed fingers, and the whole collapsing interior stage of the picture closes in like a fist. It is selling the picture short to be thinking it flat without grasping what it is that is being flattened. Its spatial cues may be offered in contradiction, but they are offered; they are both deployed and restrained. And the vehemence of the picture resides in the conflicts between crush and expansion. That famous near-Cubist space at the right is not a stacked pile, but a recessional sequence. Read from the threshold up, an inroad takes off between the white flat in the corner and the lifted still life at center; it is stopped by a roadblock nude squatted down on an ottoman; halts again at the sudden chill of blue draperies falling, then meets with the figure upstage fronting a cavernous hollow. No terms taken from other art—whether from antecedent paintings or from Picasso’s own subsequent Cubism—describe the drama of so much depth under stress. This is an interior space in compression, like the inside of pleated bellows, like the feel of an inhabited pocket, a contracting sheath heated by the massed human presence.

The space of the Demoiselles is a space peculiar to Picasso’s imagination. Not a visual continuum, but an interior apprehended on the model of touch and stretch, a nest known by intermittent palpation, or by reaching and rolling, by extending one’s self within it. Though presented symbolically to the mere sense of sight, Picasso’s space insinuates total initiation, like entering a disordered bed. Gertrude Stein has a telling Picasso story.60 She was showing him a first photograph of an American skyscraper, and the young Spaniard, who evidently did not yet know about elevators, produced what Stein calls “a characteristic reaction.” Where others would have marveled at the sheer height of the thing, Picasso’s comment eroticizes the American engineering feat into a situation that entails the exertion of climbing, the impatience of waiting, and the denouement of an intimate quarrel. “Good God,” he said, “imagine the pangs of jealousy a lover would have while his beloved came up all those flights of stairs to his top-story studio.” Even the skyscraper is felt from within to become a sexual witness. The Demoiselles d’Avignon seems to me to have one insistent theme to which everything in the picture contributes: the naked brothel interior, the male complicity in an orgy of female exposure, the direct axial address, the spasmodic action, the explosive release in a constricted space, and the reciprocity of engulfment and penetration. The picture is both enveloping and transfixed; it sorties and overwhelms and impales itself. And it ought to be seen as it was painted—hung low in a narrow room, so that it spills over into it, tupped by the entrant wedge of the table. In one sense the whole picture is a sexual metaphor, and Picasso will have used all his art to articulate its erotics. But it is also the opposite, a forced union of dream image and actuality. The picture is about the image in its otherness locked in with the real world. And like those mystics of old who used sexual metaphor to express union with the divine, so Picasso will have used sexuality to make visible the immediacy of communion with art. Explosive form and erotic content become reciprocal metaphors.

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Decades later, having passed eighty, Picasso gives the secret away (fig. 9.2) and makes the action of painting coincident with making love.

Retrospect: Sixteen Years After (1988) Remember . . . it’s summer 1972: Picasso is ninety-one and has given up smoking for the good of his health. Myself, having finished a dogged essay on Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger, painted in the mid-1950s, am reverting to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. The halfcentury swing is good exercise and besides, continuity here counts for more than the customary division by periods. Friends returning from southern France unpack stories of their visits to Monsieur Picasso. Whom I have not met. With my halting French and professorial mind, I think it would be a mistake. He didn’t even like Alfred Barr; complained that Barr’s book on Matisse (1951) was bigger than Barr’s earlier Picasso (1946), and that when they lunched at a nearby restaurant, Barr hardly touched his food— “He didn’t eat!” Bill Rubin tells casually how he was slapping Picasso’s shoulder last week. “You what?!” I ask in shocked unbelief. Rubin explains, “Oh, you have to be very physical with Picasso.” I suppose it’s a retaliation of sorts—“very physical” is just what Picasso has been with us, at no matter what distance. Sturdily nonagenarian, he now allows no living memory to reach back to a time when he was not the foremost painter alive. By all appearances, he always will be. It seems that the myth of Tithonus is being replayed, not in the halls of Aurora, but down at Mougins, where the old immortal continues up and about, aging and shrinking and, still and again, generating detractors. He had evidently made one mistake: to have forgotten to ask for eternal youth is unforgivable. The most unforgiving—in 1972, while the foregoing essay was being written less than a year before Picasso’s uncalled-for death—were to be found in New York among the best critics. Within the succession of Picasso’s detractors, they formed a new wave. Unlike the carpers who had pestered Picasso’s earlier career, they

came from inside the art world and showed abundant sophistication. Gone was the day when a C. G. Jung, speaking for fellow philistines, could diagnose Picasso’s art as schizophrenic, demoniacally attracted to evil and ugliness, and symptomatic of those anti-Christian and Luciferian forces which infect our bright daylight world with a deadly decay, and so on. That was written in 1932, the year before Hitler (whose idealism Jung rather admired) took power. Forty years and one world war later, the world was still plagued by “Luciferian forces,” but no one thought of locating them in Picasso. He had emerged from the war as a culture hero, and New York (like Chicago) had taken him to its heart. But by 1972, the love affair had turned sour. One was now told by the best informed that Picasso’s genius was spent. The undeniable greatness of his youth and early maturity was a closed chapter, and the survivor, still painting away, a quaint anachronism whose chronic iconorrhea deserved no serious attention. Today it is difficult to reconstruct the dismissive anti-Picasso stance adopted during those years by New York’s opinion makers. Did Picasso still matter—was he still thought of at all? I lay the question before the artist Saul Steinberg, who responds with admirable recall, “In those days, if you praised Picasso, you were lost; nobody noticed you.” Trust a Steinberg. In 1972, one praised the long-dead Matisse for paving the high road to American Color Field painting. And when Conceptual art settled in, it was Marcel Duchamp who was named Founding Father: the refined, hands-off thinker beggared the busy laborer at Mougins meeting his daily production quota. In view of Picasso’s almost mythic prestige, his dismissal by New York artists and critics who had passed through the ordeal of Cubism required a certain valor. They would not be beguiled by the painter’s renown, or by the buzz of his market, or by his photogenic appeal as the century’s icon of naked genius. (By the way, is this the place to point out that no other individual within Western civilization—neither showman, athlete, nor dancer, female or male—has projected upon the visual consciousness of his contemporaries across half a century the image of his own naked physique?

The Philosophical Brothel

Even Josephine Baker and the shorter-lived Marilyn Monroe displayed themselves only insofar as they personified an ideal. Whereas Picasso’s bare body—from early full-length self-portrait drawings of around 1900 to the man in shorts bestriding the set of Clouzot’s film Le mystère Picasso [1956]—is known to us as a personal nudity weathering through a lifetime, like a man’s brow. One knew it not as the embodiment of an erotic or athletic ideal, but as the unembarrassed undress of a certain homebody who, as he humbly and not unjustly conceded, could “draw better than Raphael.”) But all the glamour, the cult, the mystique, the overload of charisma, impressed the stern critic no more

than the emperor’s no-clothes impressed the uncorrupted child in Andersen’s fairy tale. An influential article by Clement Greenberg entitled “Picasso at Seventy-Five” (published in 1957, reprinted in Greenberg’s Art and Culture [Boston, 1961]) had set the tone by writing an early finis to Picasso’s career. Greenberg’s article begins by heaping the highest praise on Picasso’s work of the twentyyear period following 1905. What follows is merciless. In a painting of 1925, the Three Dancers (fig. 4.50), Greenberg detects “the first evidence of a lessening of [the] certainty” that formerly enabled Picasso “to lead toward his strengths.”61 “ The swan song of his

Figure 4.50. The Three Dancers, Paris, 1925. London, Tate Modern; Purchased with a special Grant-in-Aid and the Florence Fox Bequest with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society 1965.

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greatness” is found in a series of drawings done in 1938. “ The period from 1950 to 1953 is one of marked weakness. . . . In 1956 there is a new blossoming under Matisse’s influence, which Picasso seems ready to accept with pastiche-like abjection now that the older master is dead. Yet the blossoming remains undeveloped, static, and the blossoms are by way of being artificial.” Nine years later—in an article that begins, “Picasso’s painting started to fall off in quality after 1925”—Greenberg returned to the epitaph he was writing: “ The evolution of Picasso’s art over the last decades has been taking place in a side alley, and a blind one too, off the high road of art. . . . The truth is that he no longer knows where high is.”62 No question but that the critic’s motives were fair. He perceived himself—and was perceived—as the Incorruptible, upholding the values of serious, high, searching art against sinking standards, against the routine adulation of sycophants and the cupidity of the market. But, regardless of one’s assessment of Greenberg’s actual judgments, his censoriousness makes painful reading; it comes to us now as a killing obituary, its cold passion not aesthetic so much as political-parricidal, gloating, and murderous. And it prevailed, so long as Picasso insisted on living on. One would hear it said that Picasso’s stylistic shifts revealed uncertainty, lack of direction; that his recourse to Old Master art betrayed his own inner void; that the steady decline of Picasso’s late work (which in 1972 nobody doubted) offered some ground for suspecting the whole of the oeuvre, since a truly great artist—a Rembrandt, a Cézanne, a Matisse—continues in growth even to his last moments. Some said that great artists are known by their masterpieces, whereas Picasso had dissipated his gifts in thousands of minor works. The charge was not new. It was the motif of an open letter published in 1936 by Picasso’s false friend, the Catalan writer Eugeni d’Ors: Some five years ago, I begged and begged you to produce works . . . like those time-honored masterpieces now in the best galleries of the best museums.

The five years have passed in vain. We still have to be content with your “almost-masterpiece.” . . . My friend, my friend, we belong to a generation which . . . seems destined . . . for the glory of the athlete who, having jumped the hurdles, stumbles and loses time and distance just at the moment when he was about to reach the finish line. . . . Gravely, then, I tell you: Pablo Picasso, produce a masterpiece! Believe me, it is high time.63

Noble, high-minded stuff, but all skewed; because a given work achieves masterpiece status only by virtue of the attention it gets. And strange to say, as late as 1972, when William Rubin published Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, he found with surprise that the Picasso literature, though vast in volume, dwindled to virtually zero if one searched it for evidence of sustained attention. “After discounting the non-books,” Rubin wrote, “only the merest fraction of the serious writing that remains touches on individual works of art except in passing.”64 Rubin’s “merest fraction” includes an exceptional article by Lawrence Gowing, touching the very picture— the Three Dancers of 1925—in which Greenberg had discerned the first fatal symptoms of Picasso’s decline. Greenberg had damned the work in a brief paragraph that concludes: “The Three Dancers goes wrong, not just because it is literary . . . but because the theatrical placing and rendering of the head and arms of the central figure cause the upper third of the picture to wobble.” Picasso himself, on the other hand, thought well of the picture and for forty years had refused to sell it. He yielded at last to the entreaties of his old friend Roland Penrose, a trustee of London’s Tate Gallery. And it was in 1965, on the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s acquisition of the Three Dancers, that Gowing for the first time gave the picture its due.65 After citing the casual incomprehension of some earlier critics (“one of them suggested that [the picture] represented the Charleston, while another supposed that it derived from Carpeaux’s bronze group on the Paris Opéra, and naturally remained unconvinced that it could be called a masterpiece”), Gowing proceeded to devote to the

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picture six closely packed pages of exact observation and sustained excitement—and left it a masterpiece. We are led back to a familiar morality: where values count, you find what you bring. Or, as Eliza Doolittle puts it in act 5 of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), what marks a flower girl off from a lady is “not how she behaves, but how she is treated.” Without the courtesy of full attention—using Picasso paintings only to fleece them for arguments, or as occasions for dicta about culture and art, or as testing grounds for your infallible taste—no single work rises to masterpiece status. We have seen that a sophisticated hostility to Picasso, as distinct from prewar philistinism, began to develop during the later 1950s. And by 1972, the proponents of the new aversion were in mutual competition, each seeking to clock his qualms earlier than the next disappointee. Former Picasso admirers confessed their eventual disillusionment later or sooner, with special merit attaching to anteriority. I have heard reformed Communists similarly compare the chronologies of their respective conversions. “And when did the scales fall from your eyes?” Only the most gullible dupe still supported the Soviet system in 1968, at the invasion of Czechoslovakia; or in 1956, after the Hungarian affair. Clearer sighted were those earlier defectors, whose faith was shaken by the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939; or better still, were disabused by the Moscow Trials of 1937. But had not more rigorous intellectuals, such as Edmund Wilson and André Gide, faced the truth by the mid-1930s (following collectivization and induced famine), regretting their former infatuations? And they too were tardy, for had not others, such as Ignazio Silone, left the party by 1930? But on this scale of regress, pride of place surely belonged to those who, like Max Eastman and Bertrand Russell, avowed the failure of the great Russian experiment by the middle twenties. And as these ex-sympathizers and penitents, denouncing the Soviet “betrayal,” tended still to honor the sanctity of the Revolution itself, so the repudiators of late Picasso offered continued obeisance to the sacrosanct moment of Cubism. The exemption of the Cubist revolution from negative criticism (and from the judgment of taste) did not

necessarily work to Picasso’s advantage—not in 1972. Firstly, because the compartmentalization by periods imposed on Picasso’s oeuvre so insulated his Cubism that it came to be seen as but the lucky strike of his youth. Secondly, Picasso’s Cubism had been collaborative, and the habit was long entrenched of giving equal credit for its invention to Braque. Thirdly, New York painters and critics valued Cubism less as a body of work than as a modus operandi, a pictorial “strategy” that offered escape from the pitfalls and sinkholes of deep perspective. The so-called Cubist grid was an ideated flat-level armature that enabled a painter, any painter whatever, to traverse the expanse of a canvas without falling through. Rather than seeing Picasso’s Cubist creations as part of an artist’s personal inventory, continually feeding into the rest of the work, the supposed structure described by the term “Cubist grid” was depersonalized. By furnishing painters with a user-friendly alternative to perspectival illusionism, Cubism, it was believed, had fulfilled its historic role. And whatever else Picasso’s original work may have undertaken to do on its own terms was not relevant to present needs. Lastly, since we must have four causes: the theoretical understanding of Cubism until about 1970—in criticism and in attempts at historical surveys—was lamentable. There were a few valiant exceptions, but the bulk of the literature was blague. As Picasso himself seems to have known, for he remarked late in life that criticism had never yet come to grips with Cubism. What chiefly characterizes the writing of critics and historians in dealing with Cubism during the first sixty years of its historic existence is a professional inability to confess that the phenomenon was not yet understood. How different from the writings of scientists! Of course, it did not take long to scuttle the early hokum about relativity and fourth dimension. But almost equally silly claims for Cubism survived in textbooks for half a century: that Cubism rendered objects in their geometric essence; that it represented the object from all viewpoints at once (though the portrait of Monsieur Vollard, fig. 1.20, is as steadily frontal as any portrait by Raphael, and Juan Gris’s Picasso portrait is

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as unilateral as the Mallarmé of Manet); that Cubism was a language-like code which the viewer must learn to read, but that the code, in intention, was perfectly representational. None of which was supportable if one looked at the pictures, so that, by 1970, an intolerable disparity distanced the works from the propaganda. To this disparity I am inclined to attribute much of the popular resistance to Cubism. At the immense Picasso retrospective in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1980, it was the Cubist rooms that visitors found most rebarbative—even visitors who enjoyed Kandinsky, Mondrian, or the Abstract Expressionists without mental strain.66 As for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, so long as critics, following Kahnweiler, proclaimed it to be proto-Cubist, indeed, the very birthplace of Cubism, one scanned the picture for confirming traits—and lost most of it. And so long as one focused on the irruption of African “influences,” one observed an abrupt stylistic change at the right and explained the picture as unfinished, abandoned, wanting internal coherence. But why expect aesthetic coherence if this painting was born in an access of anger and dread? Long ago, in 1965, the British critic John Berger had suggested almost in passing that Picasso, during his first years in Paris, “probably was suffering from venereal disease and was obsessed by it.”67 Then, in her Picasso: Art as Autobiography, Mary Gedo substantiated Berger’s suspicion (having had it confirmed by Françoise Gilot). Accordingly, she interpreted much of the evolution and final character of the Demoiselles in the light of the artist’s medical history and consequent ambivalence toward women, and she concluded that “elements of Picasso’s unresolved conflict about the picture persist in its lack of cohesion.”68 Well, let the truth be known. But the syphilitic appeal of this revelation suggests that our perception of the Demoiselles has undergone an emphatic shift, which may well lead us back to a simplistic reductiveness more jejune than the doctrinaire formalism that needed correction in ’72. The other day, I learned from a well-informed New Yorker (excuse the redundancy)

that the secret is out: Picasso in 1907 had contracted VD and painted the Demoiselles to vent his rage against women. Voilà. But if this were indeed the rock-bottom truth about a picture still acclaimed “the first modern painting,” would this tell us something we perhaps ought to know about being modern? A larger body of critical writing since the early 1970s presents the etiology of the picture as the product of influence—not that of the spirochete, but of influential museum art. The Demoiselles has been historicized and surrounded by a vast, varied ancestry. The influences imploding upon this great masterpiece have been found to include not only Iberian and African art, to say nothing of Cézanne’s compositions of bathers or Temptation of St. Anthony; we learned that they included Caravaggio’s Entombment, Goya’s Tres de Mayo, Delacroix’s Massacre at Scio and Femmes d’Alger, and Ingres’s Turkish Bath at the Louvre—as well as nudes by Manet and Goya, and Matisse’s Blue Nude of 1907. We were informed that the painting was a competitive response to the challenge of Derain’s Bathers (a stupid picture, shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907). And only last year an excited Anglo-American critic announced once again that Picasso’s main source for the Demoiselles was El Greco’s apocalyptic vision of The Opening of the Fifth Seal (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, but in 1907 in the El Greco collection of Picasso’s friend Zuloaga in Paris). Because of the similar format and the alleged similarity of an uplifted hand, the Spanish picture was named the inspiration of the Demoiselles d’Avignon, the latter, by virtue of association, becoming “as powerful in its way as El Greco’s altarpiece: a religious painting but with the religion left out.” To my eye, the comparisons that give rise to such claims for influence or inspiration are rarely close enough to convince. But they do have a sort of negative function: instead of focusing vision, they tend to scatter it. The picture drops into the pond of art history: you can watch circles swelling about the impact, but something has passed out of sight. Some years ago, in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I came upon

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a watercolor by the British academician Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, entitled Midday Slumbers (fig. 4.51). It had been exhibited in London in 1888, and the chances that Picasso ever laid eyes on it are almost nil. Yet the likeness of Sir Lawrence’s foreground figure to the curtain raiser in the Demoiselles is . . . will someone please call it remarkable, diverting, suggestive? Challenged to force the comparison, I might say, mobilizing all my rhetorical skills, that Midday Slumbers is a picture essentially similar to the Demoiselles, except only that the sleeping beauty behind the curtain has woken up and quintupled. To me it seems that most source-hunting forays serve to remove our gaze from the picture itself. And this applies even to the hunting for African prototypes. “Is not the intrusion of art nègre the true content of the Demoiselles?” I was recently asked by a Paris friend. I think not, because the picture’s “content” is the sum (incommensurable) of its internal and outgoing relationships. So, in the Demoiselles, the remembered forms of stiff tribal effigies are naturalized in a furnished boudoir and galvanized into Baroque agitation; and this motor explosion of once-rigid symmetrical models becomes the expression of sexual menace unloosed on the viewer. This and lots more. Whereas the scouting for “look-alikes” is a diverting sport, releasing us from the tedium of holding a picture in focus. Perhaps it’s a question of no time to spare. My old friend Tom Hess, under whose editorship my 1972 essay on the Demoiselles first appeared, used to say, “It takes years to look at a picture.” I looked long at the Demoiselles, and the longer I stayed, the more intense the sensation of surveying uncharted ground. Fortunately, I did not then know that hundreds of sketches for the Demoiselles remained to be published; their abundance might have seemed too daunting to tackle. Working with the material in hand and trying to manage the picture itself, I got its message of dread and danger but shrank from the picture’s invocation of death.69 Intent on wresting it from the professional formalists, I concentrated instead on the theme of disengagement versus participation, on the image engineered as a direct assault. And

Figure 4.51. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Midday Slumbers, 1888.

Minneapolis Institute of Art; The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund.

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Figure 4.52. Pietro Michis (d. 1903), Zeuxis and the Maidens of Cortona. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera.

I contrasted it in my mind with a nineteenth-century painting, depicting the choice of Zeuxis, by the Milanese pompier Pietro Michis (fig. 4.52). This picture, which I did not reproduce in 1972, shows the painter erotically unengaged, perusing five naked girls. His program is to select from each her best part, and from these parts to assemble one perfect goddess; while witnesses in the background, ignoring the paltry lure of girlflesh, admire the painter’s professionalism, his aesthetic distance and expertise. I wanted to set the Demoiselles d’Avignon against this ludicrous fiction and restore it to its character as a traumatic encounter.70

Now, sixteen years later, with formalism in full retreat, my argument for the sexual charge of the picture seems almost embarrassingly banal. But such is the nature of my melancholy profession: for as I wrote in 1962 in an essay on the young Jasper Johns, “It is in the character of the critic to say no more in his best moments than what everyone in the following season repeats; he is the generator of the cliché.” Sadder still is a drastic change I have suffered since the above essay was written: I have ceased to be Picasso’s contemporary. The privilege of confronting the Demoiselles as the work of a living man has been rescinded.

Fi v e

Resisting Cézanne Picasso’s Three Women

2007: The following essay was written thirty years ago, when the late William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, had just unraveled the enigma of Cubism, reducing it to three characteristics and locating its debut in Picasso’s Three Women.1 I disagreed, because a memorable encounter with the picture had long before steered my thoughts in another direction. Un peu d’histoire. In June 1964, LIFE magazine sent a mission to St. Petersburg to prepare a story on the vast art collections of the Hermitage. The team comprised Dorothy Seiberling, head of LIFE’s art department, Dmitri Kessel, LIFE’s preeminent art photographer, and myself as adjunct art historian, reader of Russian, and husband. The final installment of our three-part story (LIFE, April 9, 1965) gave pride of place to Three Women: a full page in color. But since LIFE as a mass-circulation weekly had no standing in the art world, this sudden boost of Three Women failed to disturb the critical hush that had silenced the painting for some fifty years. More than a decade passed before the silence was effectively broken. I have wanted to write about it for years, Picasso’s masterwork of 1908, a painting nearly seven feet tall known as Three Women. Did I say known? The picture has dwelled in remote sequestration since World War I, and despite several bids for attention on trips abroad has only just entered the stage of discussion. It enters now under the sign of Cézanne, and as the latest candidate for the dignity of being Picasso’s first Cubist painting (fig. 5.1).2 The history of the picture—by which I mean, above all, its effective life in the consciousness of those who

react strongly to art—is strangely vacant. The earliest comment recorded is still the best. It comes from Alice B. Toklas, who saw the work in its birthplace, Picasso’s studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, and found it “frightening.” “ There was something painful and beautiful there, and oppressive but imprisoned,” she said.3 Her companion Gertrude Stein acquired the picture and lived with it for five years; but no mention of it appears in her book on Picasso—perhaps because by the time that essay came to be written (1938), the Three Women had passed out of sight. Yet, during those prewar years, the work was seen in Stein’s Paris home by expatriate American artists, of whom Morgan Russell was one. Deeply impressed, the future Synchromist copied the picture in a pencil sketch datable about 1911, a spirited drawing, sharply observed, the product of a wished-for affinity: the drawing reads like a scaffolding for Russell’s subsequent elevations of color (fig. 5.2). But this rare document—the birth certificate of American Synchromism—remained unexhibited until 1976 and unpublished until 1977; only now do we learn that Picasso’s Three Women stood by at the nativity of twentieth-century American art.4 In 1913 the picture was sold to Sergei Shchukin of Moscow; contrary to its manifest destiny, it went Originally published in Art in America, 66 (November– December 1978), pp. 115–33. In 2007, the essay was revised for publication in the exhibition catalogue Picasso Cubiste/Cubist Picasso (Paris, Musée National Picasso), pp. 71–101. Because of a publisher’s error, the revised version, presented here, appeared only in the French edition of the catalogue. In the March–April 1979 issue of Art in America, Steinberg published “The Polemical Part” (ch. 6), a sequel, to which William Rubin responded in the same issue.

Figure 5.1. Three Women, Paris, spring–autumn 1908. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women

Figure 5.2. Morgan Russell, Study after Picasso’s “Three Women,” c. 1911. Montclair, NJ, Montclair Art Museum; Morgan Russell Archives and Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Reed.

eastward instead of west. And two disputatious Russian critics took notice—Yakov Tugendkhold with a full paragraph that deserves quoting from, if only because our picture has not yet incurred enough commentary to fill a page: “Picasso’s nude women,” he wrote, “seem built of stone, united by the dark cement of the contour. Such are the ‘ Three Women’ of brickred color in whom is the heaviness and relief quality of a monument.” To this, Nikolai Berdyaev objected that Picasso’s “geometric bodies” were not as hard as they seemed. “In actuality,” he predicted, “they disintegrate at the slightest touch.”5 Under the Soviets, the Shchukin collection of modern Western paintings was nationalized, and the Three Women entered its stint of oblivion. It could not under Stalin have done more than serve as an instance of bourgeois decadence.6 But a political use for the picture was found after Stalin’s demise—in Italy first, then in

Paris.7 There, in June 1954, the Communist Maison de la Pensée française staged an impressive display of thirty-seven paintings from Soviet museums by the declared Communist Pablo Picasso—supplemented by twelve Picassos which Alice B. Toklas contributed from the collection of the late Gertrude Stein. The Three Women, conspicuous in size and power, dominated the show—and its exclusion from the historiography of twentieth-century art seemed about to end there and then. What did happen was the reverse. A Russian émigré living in Paris, the daughter of Sergei Shchukin, brought suit to recover the paintings which, she argued, had been illegally confiscated. Whereupon the Russians hustled their hoard back to Moscow and St. Petersburg, leaving Picasso to replenish the blank walls of the House of French Thought with thirty-nine recent paintings. Though the exhibition had been billed as “Picassos from Soviet Museums,” what was on view for the rest of the year was a different show. As for Three Women—a red, red picture put forth by Soviet and French Communist propaganda as the creation of a prestigious fellow-Communist artist—it remained undiscussed. Not until twelve years later was the painting disengaged from the frivolities of twentieth-century politics—by Edward Fry, writing a few lines in earnest. Placing Three Women, with its “tense ambiguities of spatial structure,” in “symmetrical relation” to the Demoiselles d’Avignon, Fry found it “more successful and unified, though less ambitious” than the Demoiselles (fig. 4.1). Both works, he wrote, “create haunting new states of mind.”8 In 1970—through the efforts of Margaret Potter, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art—the picture was brought to New York for the exhibition of the collections of Gertrude Stein and her family.9 In the year following, it stopped in Paris to help celebrate the master’s ninetieth birthday. But Cubism by that time was no longer a burning issue. Not in New York; not in Paris. Without disturbing the settlement of neglect that protects us from works outside the canon, the picture returned to its Hermitage. And so until 1977, when an essay by William Rubin proposed to make the Three Women a turning point in Picasso’s career.

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Rubin’s essay, “Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism,” is elaborately revisionist, a minutious attempt to clock the stylistic progress of Picasso and Braque through their crucial years. The essay establishes, among other things, a two-stage chronology for Three Women (painted in the spring of 1908, reworked toward the end of the year); and it isolates those traits of style—new in Picasso’s work—which place the picture in debt to Cézanne and on the road to Cubism: [a] relatively subtle facture and gradation of tones fostering a smooth linkage of planes . . . a smoothly graduated surface of muted green and terra-cotta planes whose very close light values permit them to pass easily into one another. . . . What all this spells out is a composition conceived within a consistent system of passage—a step-wise linkage and fusion of close-valued planes in a shallow, bas-relief space.10

Rubin demonstrates that Three Women had been begun under somewhat different stylistic auspices— with greater reliance on tonal contrast. And he argues that Picasso must have reworked the picture in the fall of 1908 under the impact of the new landscapes Braque had been painting a few months before while summering at L’Estaque (fig. 5.3). From these new Braques, Rubin believes, Picasso received his revelation of “Cézannist syntax” (here used interchangeably with early Cubist syntax). For Picasso’s own earlier work had shown “only a primitive and inconsistent grasp of Cubist syntax as compared with that in Three Women.” The Demoiselles d’Avignon, in particular, should be relieved from participating in the evolution of Cubism. This notorious original turns out to be less forward looking than had been thought, being subject still to African influences, expressionism, and erotic content—therefore unhelpful to the oncoming phase and to the tasks of 1908. During this latter year, the critical issue was the absorption of Cézannism, and in this enterprise it was Braque who was further along, so far ahead of Picasso that he “would have created early Cubism had Picasso never existed.”11

It is not my purpose here to question Rubin’s carefully studied chronology, nor his decision as to who led the march toward Cubism. Within the terms of his definition, Rubin may well be correct in seeing Braque meet those terms sooner than the painter of the Demoiselles. What I want to suggest is that Picasso’s problem in 1907–8 was not merely to assimilate what Cézanne had to teach, but how to resist him. There was a conflict, and this conflict seems to me crystallized both in the faceted surface and the dire emotional tone of Three Women. That the picture defers to Cézanne is self-evident. Unlike the Demoiselles, it really did evolve through a series of Cézannesque composition studies of bathers.12 Picasso’s versions are wilder, of course, and more obviously metaphorical (figs. 5.4–5.8). In his hands, the sylvan sets and Provençal river scenes he admired turn into

Figure 5.3. Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908.

Kunstmuseum Bern; Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation.

Figure 5.4. (top left) Bathers in a Forest (study for Three Women), Paris, spring 1908, Z.XXVI.291. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Hillman Periodicals Fund. Figure 5.5. (middle left) Nudes in a Forest (study for Three Women), Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/1.105. Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection. Figure 5.6. (bottom left) Study for Three Women, Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/1.107. Hannover, Sprengel Museum. Figure 5.7. (top right) Study for Three Women, Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/1.104. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne; Donation M. et Mme. André Lefèvre. Figure 5.8. (bottom right) Study for Three Women, Paris, spring 1908, Z.II/1.106. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

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Figure 5.9. Paul Cézanne, Bathers, 1898–1900. Baltimore Museum of Art; The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland.

hotbeds, dank tropical forests whose denizens prosper like vegetation. And yet, throughout Picasso’s known composition studies for the Three Women, Cézanne is acknowledged. All of them preserve Cézanne’s obsessively repeated gesture of the peaked elbow; and the first four of the studies include a figure so native to Cézanne’s bather pictures that Picasso must have intended it as an hommage (fig. 5.9). I refer to the figure with upraised arms and squared chest, striding in from the right.13 If the Three Women project owes its initial theme and some of its characters to Cézanne, the debt in the final version is more substantial. To say it again: we are given a faceted surface with no recessed intervals and no gaps; figures and ground near homogeneous; broken planes set off by minor chromatic or tonal shifts; and depth of field in compression to yield that illusion of bas-relief which deploys nothing but fronts. In a literal sense, this last point could be made of all painting: the Mona Lisa too shows no back. But

the foreshortened sides of her recede as if to envelop a body, whereas the plenitude of Picasso’s three figures stays this side of the silhouette. The figures terminate at their margins, coalesce where they touch, or cross over in clinging flatness, while back-up anatomical features (a right leg for the right-hand croucher, for instance) are not even implied, so that no round of body is thinkable. Note also that the middle figure is still engaged to the rock behind—its mere promontory; that her haunch fills the mold of a neighboring thorax; and that the counterchange of dark and light tones on her centered leg forms a repeating pattern with another’s adjacent thigh. Even where outer limbs give on flesh-colored rock, the momentum of mutual incorporation runs on, making body mass and surround consubstantial. Some of these features— given certain limiting definitions—are describable as Cézannesque, but with this crucial proviso: that prototypes be sought else-

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s T hr ee Women

where than among Cézanne’s compositions of bathers. For Cézanne’s bather pictures (of which there are about seventy in oils alone) minimize physical contact among humankind; figuration in most of them is deliberately dispersed, each standoff nude occupying a clearing that allows its contours to breathe (fig. 5.9). The old recluse, one feels, would rather not see warm bodies commingle, as he encourages cold rock, fruit, and leafage to do.14 Even in Cézanne’s last monumental compositions of bathers, where individual anatomies assemble in clusters, the figures are contour-bound—stacked, superposed, even congested, but resistant to fusion. Cézanne’s bathers, whether in herd or apart, astir or at rest, remain as discrete as the nudes in the Old Master paintings he sought to emulate. But Picasso in the Three Women was emulating Cézanne. And yet, his dramatis personae became unlike Cézanne’s in two startling ways: in being interfused limb and person, and again in their perturbation. Where Cézanne’s Arcadians sport under open skies in agreeable weather, Picasso finds encaved sleepers toiling in sunless heat. They agonize in confinement—“painful and beautiful . . . oppressive  .  .  . imprisoned.” Whatever the burden of this troubled vision, Picasso evidently conceived his symbiotic group as something other than Cézannesque bathers, treating them rather as Cézanne might have treated the rough front of boulders, the exposed wall of a cistern, a rock face or mountainside. In Three Women, the pleating of rigid flesh materializes like a terrain under geological pressure, with facets tilting and tipping at random from form to form, as though the turns, swells, and flexures of human anatomy were accidents, irregular as the crags on the quarry faces at Bibémus or the slopes of Mont Ste.-Victoire. Granted that the painting exhibits the faceted basrelief surface sometimes ascribed to Cézanne; its quickened subject engenders an effect of intolerable constriction, as if to say, this is what human existence would be, had the landscape painter Cézanne been entrusted with its design. So then, if the formal treatment of Picasso’s Three Women recalls Cézanne, that same treatment, applied to autochthonous flesh,

projects an anthropocentric myth. The picture becomes a portion of uninhabited Cézannish ground personified in three human figures—three women, if that’s what they are. Is it permissible to inquire into their sex; or to ask what they are up to? Hitherto, such unprofessional questions have been excluded by inattention, but it is doubtful they would have been asked even if the picture had always ranked as a key monument. The rigors of formal analysis are too exacting to admit iconographical trivia—as, for example: that Picasso’s supposititious bathers have nothing to bathe in, being nowhere near water; that their eyes are shut tight and their gestures somewhat overemphatic for people drying their necks; that they differ morphologically from one another, as Cézanne’s bathers do not; and that they are probably incorrectly labeled “Three Women.” “Two or Three Women” would be more to the point. Certainly they began as all women, appearances notwithstanding, for Picasso’s feminine type in 1908 could be grotesquely robust. No reason, therefore, to regard the left-hand figure in the so-called Three Women as other than fellow-female. Moreover, the composition studies (figs. 5.4–5.8) appear to make no issue of sex. But I submit that Picasso’s thinking as he works toward the painting reveals a progressive concern with sexual identity. Soon after initiating the project, he reduced the original composition from five figures to three by lifting out the pair of affectionate women at left and turning them into a separate picture called Amitié (Hermitage)—two rough-hewn jungle dwellers with flat pectorals and mighty shoulders, one of them hanging back and leaning tenderly on the other; women in love. Turn next to the elaborate pencil study for the lefthand croucher in the Three Women (fig. 5.10). The sex, concealed by no drapery, is plainly female. But observe that her wanton legs right and left are methodically interchanged, a right inner calf and right foot facing out on her left. This is no neutral shift. For the notion that dexter and sinister correspond respectively to male and female is a near-universal myth,15 and no willful

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disturbance of these orientations can be sexually innocent; certainly not in Picasso’s imagery where only female nudes are so garbled—women bedded down or somnambulant, whose nether limbs in cross-traffic intimate sexual mix, or man-woman encounter, or a subliminal sorting out of sexuality.16 Thus our naked nude betrays an unsimple gender: overtly female, but with male interference built in. In the painted version, the actual sex of the lefthand figure is concealed by a cloth; not from modesty, to be sure, nor, I suspect, because the design at this point required a color change of adaptive green that could only be rationalized by a towel, but in deliberate ambiguation. And ambiguity here is all we need. For it makes little difference whether we read this figure as wholly male or as mannish woman. What counts is the drift toward a masculine pole, the emphatic differentiation from the round-bodied woman at right. The jaws of the left-hand figure are wider, chest and shoulders are broad, flat and angular, the thighs lean by comparison. However we might have sexed the figure in isolation, apposed to its all-woman counterpart, this uneasy she-he strives for a complementary nature. The event represented becomes a process of bifurcation, a moment of self-definition, the sexes straining apart to position themselves as confronted halves. And this subject, the mood of it, is as contemporary as the picture’s avant-garde idiom. It addresses a modern awareness of sexuality as a force impinging from inside the organism upon personality. Three years before the picture was painted Freud wrote: “It is not until puberty that the sharp distinction is established between the masculine and feminine characters. From that time on, this contrast has a more decisive influence than any other upon the shaping of human life.”17 Picasso’s picture emerges as a kind of creation myth, a psychogram of “the shaping of human life,” its iconography neither arcane nor excessively private. The whole story is given. It begins in the subhuman clod posted at center—primitive and inert, barely evolved from the bedrock behind, a figure that seems less a bathing companion than an anterior condition personified in a preconscious hominid, the reserved

matrix whence humanity sunders forth, the he and the she of it. It was here that Picasso made a startling decision: to abandon stylistic unity in the interest of the story. Articulating the faces of the lateral figures, he introduced a stylistic break where the dramatic subject called for a breaking away of the sides from the center, and left the visage of the recessed middle figure to preserve a fossil stage of the project—almost as if the genesis of the picture had to match the pictorial subject as an instance of evolution. Looking back to the studies for the Three Women or to the photographs taken at the Bateau-Lavoir, which show part of the painting in earlier states,18 we discover that the three faces in our picture appeared at first, and long remained, in perfect stylistic consistency; and that Picasso, in that winter of 1908, overpainted the lateral faces in a black linear mode, divergent not only from Braque and Cézanne but, more pertinently, from the simian face left behind. In the process, Picasso produced once again, as in the Demoiselles, a disruptive internal mutation—not from inadvertence, nor from incompetence, but, I suggest, from the need to characterize the emergence of male and female as a maturation, a dual departure from the receding center as from a common background and precondition. To this antecedent state the full-blown brooder at right is the more closely connected. She is woman dormant, her raised arm arrested in the canonic posture of sleep. Unwittingly, her masculine counterpart magnifies, as he mimics, her pose, converting its thrust to an expression of power—though still ineffectual and aimless, since the elbow is an odd member to make a pinnacle of. The hoisted elbow, repeated crescendo, is the dominant action throughout: inchoate in the gauche central figure; somnolent in the female where it swathes the head; roused to strength in the male. A baffling gesture that grows increasingly urgent, yet, since it wants an intelligible objective, one that remains unintelligible in terms of what is nowadays called body language. Perhaps it is no more than a formula out of art. Indeed, the immediate reference is unmistak-

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women

ably to Cézanne, whose bather pictures produce lifted elbows galore, both male and female, and with no hint of drama or psychic stress. On the other hand, Cézanne’s earliest use of the motif associates it with pathos and female sexual aggression: the pose is struck as a provocation that tempers bland nakedness into a weapon—as when a temptress with elbow aloft flashes a dreaded armpit at a St. Anthony all aghast; or when two courtesans do it, flaunting what nature keeps undercover. Not until the mid-1870s does Cézanne face the bared armpit with equanimity.19 That Picasso could revert to the pinnacle elbow in the original meaning it had for Cézanne is apparent from his Demoiselles of the previous year. But in Three Women the expressive charge of the pose is transformed by being assigned to hunched, sightless figures. Discharged from a difficult crouch, the gesture becomes one of yearning, of protesting an inhibiting grip. Especially is this true of the man-figure, whose soaring elbow betrays a compulsion larger than his own will. To this larger necessity the whole man succumbs. His action seems overdetermined, as though programmed by stored ancestral influence—the remembrance perhaps of a Dying Niobid, struck by an undeserved arrow (fig. 5.11); or the genetic memory of that drowsing androgyne at the Louvre, Michelangelo’s so- called Dying Slave (to which Degas, Cézanne, and Matisse, too, had been drawn, and which, less than two years later, inspired Picasso’s Cubist Woman in a Chair, figs. 5.12, 5.13).20 Even El Greco’s familiar Agony in the Garden (fig. 5.14) may have contributed to the chain of transmission: I am thinking of one of the cave-bound Apostles whose ill-timed sleep is rendered as an intrinsic agitation of limbs.21 One cannot be sure of specific links, only that Picasso’s atavistic man-figure stirs with redundant energies, as if the prescribed turbulence of the pose obeyed an inherited code. Picasso’s Three Women may be seen, as Edward Fry put it, in a “symmetrical relation” to the earlier Demoiselles d’Avignon; not, I think, because the two giant pictures have much in common, but because their differences

are correlative. In their respective eroticism, both works distance themselves from socialized forms of love, seeking anarchic manifestations—one in the direction of decadence, the other, in the primordial. And we know that both projects began as gregarious compositions of oblong shape, ending up similarly as immense canvases nearly square, unendurably concentrated. Thereafter, all else is sheer contrast.22 The very space of the two pictures suggests contrarious intentions: a sort of collapsing baroque in the Demoiselles, with fossil curtains before and behind in a setting of petrified plush. In the Three Women—a primitive crust, unused to the third dimension, heaving and folding in a first bid to break out of the flat. Spatiality in the one running down, burgeoning in the other. Then again, the cast of Three Women works as one mass. In the Demoiselles, despite

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Figure 5.10. Kneeling Nude (study for Three Women), Paris, spring–fall 1908, Z.II/1.107. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998.

Figure 5.11. (top left) Dying Niobid, 5th century BC.

Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Massimo. Figure 5.12. (top right) Michelangelo, Dying Slave, c. 1513–14, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Figure 5.13. (bottom) Woman in a Chair, Paris, spring

1910, Z.II/1.215. Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler.

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women

Figure 5.14. El Greco, Agony in the Garden, c. 1590–95, detail. Toledo, OH, Toledo Museum of Art; Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment,

Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

mutual proximity and common cause, the five harlots are disconnected—each encapsuled in her own spatial pale. Yet, out of this brittle conglomerate we are addressed by three of them with incriminating immediacy: three startled predators individually fix the visitant with a ravening stare. And here again the contrast is absolute. For the action in the Three Women, pressed up to the immanent picture plane, is all inwardturned—a summons not to responsive reaction but to our resources of empathy. And instead of stark staring eyes, the figures in Three Women show eyelids shut, attention turning on what Yeats called “the vision of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed.” If, as Yeats says elsewhere, “love comes in at the eye,” then these sealed lids, which can never yet have been open, imply the egotism of a sexuality as yet without focus— the sexual awakening as an internal event before the love object is known. But what has all this to do with the Cézannism observed in the style of the work? What connects these

discrepant interests—the adoption, on the one hand, of a Cézannist (or proto-Cubist) syntax, and then this theme of the sorting out of the sexes? What brings these two things together to produce, not two schools or two chapters of criticism, but one close-knit painting? Or, put it another way: if Picasso, in the autumn of 1908, was getting exercised about close-valued color planes and passage; if Cézanne’s pictures (or, as Rubin sees it, Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes by mediation) were now converting him to a bas-relief mode of modeling, why reagitate this particular painting, with its expressive theme so alien to the message received? Why not leave alone the already abandoned Three Women and embark on a fresh batch of canvases? If Picasso chose to rework this of all pictures—applying a new-learned mechanic of landscape construction to three overwhelming nudes—was it because the Three Women happened to be around, or did he sense that the rework might serve to accentuate the work’s meaning? It must be that the psychic content and the chocked surface structure of the painting are somehow coin-

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cident; for the coincidence is what one sees—only in thought and theory do these “two” fall apart to become separate considerations. And this coincidence, to which the act of mere seeing gives instant knowledge, must always have been apparent to those who, like Morgan Russell, received the work without resistance. Russell did not, so far as we know, discuss the Three Women in his voluminous notes. But there is indication that he saw more in the picture than its organization, more than the interlock of triangular wedges on which he would found his own system. Gail Levin has shown that Russell’s first mature works, the ostensibly figureless Synchromy in Blue-Violet and the Synchromy in Orange, incorporate the sensual rhythms of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, a work Russell had seen more overtly alluded to in Three Women.23 And the full title under which Russell first exhibited his Synchromy in Orange offers a further hint of his preoccupations: he subtitled it “The Creation of Man conceived as the result of a natural generative force.” His apparent abstraction, then—the very work that depended so heavily on Picasso’s Three Women and, like the Three Women, on Michelangelo’s androgynous prototype—was conceived as another creation myth. No wonder that Three Women was the first of the Picassos at Gertrude Stein’s which Russell admired. Himself a transvestite, oscillant between sexual poles, he received the work in the fullness of its perplexity, before its iconography and its form were divorced. The present task, similarly, is to face the sum of the picture, “the whole of it,” in Picasso’s phrase, to describe the work as it appears, that is to say, as a creative moment in which disparate intentions converge. Could it be that Picasso’s Three Women makes the impact of Cézannism and the shock of sexual polarization coalesce in one psycho-pictorial metaphor? To pursue the question I assume certain hypotheses: that Picasso’s response to Cézanne was at least as complex as psychological responses to parental authority usually are; that he reacted ambivalently to the effect of Cézanne’s method on the imaging of the world; and that Cézanne’s way of immersing all perceived data in the systemic unity of the painting aroused more resistance in him than it did in Braque. Picasso may have

loved the late visionary Cézannes (those that exerted the strongest impact on Cubism) for transcending the seeming selfhood of objects; he may yet have experienced these paintings as depredations, spoilers of native character and inherent diversity. He would have seen Cézanne’s intuition of wholeness gradually override local distinctions, blotting out differences of shape, density, texture—collapsing the spaces that hold things apart and unnaming the things themselves in an economy of correlative color, the colors of brushmarks applied in uniform strokes of constant slant from ground to sky: a universe whose ingredients were no longer possessable, since they retained only those attributes of location and color that confirmed the system itself in its cohesion. A world so integral, so irradiated by hue alone, is profoundly compelling. But it is not the world of the lover and the contestant which is Picasso’s; whose possessive sight grapples the things it sees, and whose selfhood demands complementary selves in responsive embodiment. Cézanne’s method, therefore—precisely because its coherent strength made all other painting look slack—may have struck the youthful Picasso as a threat to his own field of action; it abrogated the very conditions that made the world fit for contest, encounter, embrace. In my hypothesis, the ambivalence of Picasso’s response to Cézanne would have sprung irresistibly from his nature. There can be no doubt that Picasso was moved by what he saw in Cézanne. Perhaps he sensed the nobility of Cézanne’s progress from gross sensuality and fascination with violence to that unitive vision which only a genuine mystic achieves. But the young man Picasso— amorous, combative, self-willed, than whom no one was ever less mystical—must have known that this would not be his way. Hence, I believe, his need to resist that in Cézanne which contravened his own ego—unless he could make something of the conflict induced; fashion an image wherein Cézanne’s syntax, reinterpreted as a constricting condition, would tighten the lock on embedded selves seeking release. Three Women had been conceived as the symbolic form of a psychic upheaval, a visualization of those fatal forces through which the

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s T hr ee Women

human condition is sexually polarized. By working the canvas toward planar fusion and bas-relief, by tamping down and reducing the tonal contrasts that individualized limbs and figures, the depicted group would enter a deeper hold to wrench away from; their straining for individuation would be more sensibly motivated, the intensity of the drama redoubled. The end result would be a forced merger of three sentient bodies, three beings in single mass dehumanized by the leveling syntax, a rocklike anatomic conglomerate laboring like the earth’s crust in a time-lapse vision of volcanic prehistory, yet irreducibly psychological in their rage for self-definition. Perhaps so; but a cool head, impervious to rhetoric, will want to know how the author would go about proving it. Is there a document of some sort, a notebook entry perhaps, a letter or recorded aside to tell us what the painter intended? And if there’s nothing in writing, no cue from the artist himself, what authority resides in such speculation? And furthermore, dare we ignore the documentation we do possess by imputing ambivalence to Picasso’s view of Cézanne when the younger man never professed anything but admiration? This last question is worth taking up.24 For Picasso’s attitude to Cézanne we have evidence of two kinds: the paintings produced while Cézanne’s influence pressed hardest upon him; and the statements Picasso delivered in later life, whether or not they refer to the master directly. To dispose of the statements first. They are, of course, consistently reverent. There is the famous remark of 1935 about Cézanne’s anxiety being even more precious to us than his paintings.25 And that eloquent comment, reported in various forms: “from the moment he puts down a stroke of paint, the painting is already there.”26 As the years passed, nostalgia prevailed. “Cézanne was to us like a mother who protects her children,” Picasso told Kahnweiler. And told Brassaï: “He was like our father. It was he who protected us . . . my one and only master.”27 In such reminiscences, the aging Picasso liked to present himself as a model of filial devotion. Some of Picasso’s later pronouncements upon

Cézanne appear to be more direct, and their objective has shifted. So in the statement published in 1954 by Sabartés: “One doesn’t pay enough attention. If Cézanne is Cézanne, it’s precisely because of that: when he is before a tree he looks attentively at what he has before his eyes; he looks at it fixedly, like a hunter lining up the animal he wants to kill. If he has a leaf, he doesn’t let it go. Having the leaf, he has the branch. And the tree won’t escape him.”28 Who is the septuagenarian Picasso here talking about? Is it Cézanne, the master of the saccadic scan, champion of the unified field, who sees a leaf only to see its hue resonate in every corner? Cézanne is the least deserving of a comparison with the hunter who “looks fixedly” at one sighted target. (God help the hunter whose focus spans the whole visual field while taking aim.) On the other hand, there are many whom Picasso’s compliment fits very well—any artist, in fact, who isolates and delineates with precision, such as Dürer, or Picasso himself. One gets the impression that the aging Picasso invokes his name saint in conventional piety, citing Cézanne simply as the type of the honest painter. The actual content of his acclaim is egotized, projected from his own fixed regard for specific things. Picasso says of the master what he would like to hear said of himself. Meanwhile, with respect to Cézanne, the 1954 statement could as well be an unconscious rebuke. For the obverse of Picasso’s attachment to the uniqueness of objects is his disdain of painters who smother it under a personal style. Hear his complaint about Rubens, for instance, delivered some twenty years earlier: “Everything is the same. He thinks he can paint a large breast by doing this (describing a circle in the air), but it isn’t a breast. Draperies are like breasts with him, everything’s the same.”29 Would Cézanne with his a priori color, his “suppression of localized texture [and] standardization of touch” (Elderfield) escape such a reprimand? Or this again from the 1950s: “When you draw a head, you must draw like that head. . . . Ingres drew like Ingres, not like the things he drew. If, for instance, you take a tree. At the foot of the tree there is a goat, and beside the goat is a little girl tending the goat. Well, you need a different

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drawing for each. The goat is round, the little girl is square, and the tree is a tree. And yet people draw all three in the same way. That is what is false. Each should be drawn in a completely different way.”30 Interesting. But why pick on Ingres? Is not Cézanne equally culpable? Indeed, in a moment of irritation, Picasso concedes that he is: “He had no gift, no skill at all for imitation. Every time he tried to copy other artists, it was a Cézanne he painted.”31 All these remarks—some of them hasty, some made in moments of unguarded conviviality or exasperation, and all of them recorded from memory by auditors with motives and personalities of their own—they all, nevertheless, sound a consistent note: they demand respect for the distinct shapes of things, and that their specificities not be surrendered to the homogenizing action of style. Nor is it likely that a painter of such persuasion would enlist under Cézanne without second thoughts. But the evidence for Picasso’s conflicting attitudes to Cézanne rests more solidly on the paintings produced in 1908. During most of that year the creative disorder at the Bateau-Lavoir was presided over by the Three Women. In a sense, then, most of the pictures of 1908 are its contemporaries. They were witness to what was engaging Picasso’s mind while Three Women went through its phases. And they testify that the grandest of Picasso’s “Cézannesque” paintings evolved in collusion with pictures that amount almost to anti-Cézanne manifestos. Here are three or four instances. There is a darkish, nearly monochrome picture at the Museum of Modern Art called Repose, dated to the spring of 1908 (fig. 5.15). It represents a nude woman half-length, upright, asleep—in stark proximity and in the sparest economy of graphic means: black contour lines, mostly straight, overlapping, with color held down to a minimum. This concentration on a single device—the management of rigid rods crossing over and under—is astonishing in its effective evocation of mass. Observe how the body bulks from the lower right up—from the leveled forearm above the base. That forearm is made of two rails, one of them overlapping the upper arm, which in turn overlaps a left breast set

off in twin curves from the deeper plane of the chest. The chest itself props the tipping beam of the collar bone, treated here as the sloping hypotenuse of a right triangle whose inclined perpendicular edges the neck, itself projected in overlap from the crest of the shoulder. At two points only is chiaroscuro admitted: in the planes of the face and the convergent sides of the right elbow. For the rest, all this weight of woman hangs on a single trick, the overlap, the most archaic convention for feigning spatial relations in a flat field. Now if Picasso was at this moment undergoing the influence of Cézanne (whose influence flooded everything, he has told us), then he must have seen Cézanne’s painting take the opposite course, that is to say, toward a system which increasingly questioned the need, nay, the very reality of overlappings. I am thinking here not of the layering of translucent brushstrokes in Cézanne’s watercolors, but of that jostling behavior of solids in file behind one another, that competition for priority in the beholder’s eye, for which Cézanne’s late work substitutes tangent colors—a system wherein degrees of depth and differential locations arise solely from the hithering thithering function of hues; quivering color flakes, each equally present to sight, as flatness would be to touch, yet expressive of relative spatial positions. In these late Cézannes, the overlap has no place and no meaning. This granted, Picasso’s overlap-ridden Repose becomes sheer recalcitrance. Let him ever after claim Cézanne for his father and mother; but was there ever a more insubordinate son? Or consider the Bather from the winter of 1908 (fig. 2.22). It constitutes Picasso’s first bid to describe corporeality by circumventing the figure’s visible margins and tugging averted sides into view. Sternum and spine, rump and pubis arrive simultaneously, and the frontality of the face involves its own profile: a coalition of aspects to symbolize the round of the body.32 During the next fifty years, Picasso spent much of his energy on this same enterprise. He was determined to teach the splayed fronts of objects to relinquish their privileged hold on the picture plane, to let foreshortened sides and hidden back views share in the preferred

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women [131]

Figure 5.15. Repose, Paris, spring 1908.

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Acquired by exchange through the Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, and the Hillman Periodicals, Philip Johnson, Miss Janice Loeb, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mr. and Mrs. Norbert Schimmel Funds.

visibility of the en face. Year after year, he would invent ways of outflanking the silhouette, introducing periscopic techniques that would bend around contours, arch over horizons. And once again, this ambition to clutch the integral thing is exactly opposed to Cézanne’s. One might say that Cézanne and Picasso make rival claims to “absolute vision”: the old man immovable, seeing all things at once; the younger, ranging to see one thing from all points at once. Thus the 1908 Bather, poised in full round against remote sea and sky, breaks away from that illusion of bas-relief—that “modeling, in effect, only the fronts of objects,” as Rubin defines the Cézannean mode33—which Picasso had just adopted in his Three Women. Picasso explores yet another line of resistance to the bas-relief principle by refusing to collapse spatial inter-

vals seen in perspective. This, I think, is his program in those powerful still lifes created during the summer and autumn of 1908—pictures such as Pitcher and Bowls in the Hermitage (fig. 5.16), and even Still Life with Fruit and Glass in the Museum of Modern Art (fig. 5.17). In some respects, both works are obviously Cézannesque. What distinguishes them from Cézanne is Picasso’s anxiety to keep open the collapsed intervals between objects that upstage one another. Consider the Hermitage picture. Its four vessels and the wayward shadows they cast are arrayed (insofar as these objects are read two-dimensionally) to trace a continuously looped surface rhythm; in recession, they stand apart. Cups, bowl, and bottle, each at its contour lifts off from the form behind, either by dint of shadow or by a warm atmospheric glow; not like Cézanne’s all-

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enveloping air, but as directed air circulating in staggered intervals, in the spaces between—parting the latent interfaces of objects to maintain at all costs their integrity and the mutual gift of encounter. But Still Life with Fruit and Glass might appear to be doing the opposite. Indeed, it was in discussing this work that Rubin, in an earlier essay, noted Picasso’s adoption of Cézanne’s bas-relief space. Cézanne, he wrote, had reinstated the illusion of sculptural relief, which the Impressionists had dissolved. This he achieved by modeling, in effect, only the fronts of objects, thus turning the picture into a simulacrum of a bas-relief; his objects never appear to have backs, nor do they create the illusion of space behind them. It was in terms of such

Figure 5.16. Pitcher and Bowls, Paris, summer–autumn 1908. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

an accommodation of modeled forms to the twodimensional surface, and their disposition in sequential groupings, that Cézanne seems to have interested Picasso in Fruit and Glass.34

This could be persuasive, since most of the still life’s surface presents a solidified front. Fruit and glass and the drop effect of the tabletop form a continuum, a bond tight enough to include—at right, between glass and pear—an ambiguously shared contour, much as in Three Women: the remoter pear, disdaining its upstaged situation, cleaves to the side of the goblet, whose own upper rim shears off at the frame to avoid coming full circle. The main objects, then, perform as a basrelief with no “illusion of space behind them.” But, to my mind, this grave little picture yields further evidence

Figure 5.17. Still Life with Fruit and Glass, Paris, autumn 1908. New York,

Museum of Modern Art; Estate of John Hay Whitney.

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s T hr ee Women

of the conflict I have been trying to document. Look at its upper left corner. Here the “solid front” has been breached by a team off on their own: a spearhead pear with a codling in tow threatens to outflank the main group in a clockwise movement of potential encirclement, as if our “bas-relief ” were, after all, a freestanding slab approachable from behind; or as if the paired fruit in the upper left were ironic quotation marks to the allegedly “backless” clump at the center. The picture, like so many Picassos, plays off contending styles. We are shown distinct modes of organization in simultaneity—an earnest of Cubism’s later phases. The juggling of disparate pictorial conceptions—and the diversity of objectives pursued in the other paintings discussed—these facts together suggest a conclusion for our view of Three Women. Its stylistic character ceases to be interpretable as the effect of a linear transmission of influence from Cézanne, whether directly or via Braque. If Picasso here used a Cézannean syntax (close-valued faceting in a bas-relief space), he did not seize upon it as a new way to make pictures, but as one among several alternatives that needed testing. And he applied a Cézannean style in Three Women as he would exploit styles ever after, at the subject’s behest—in the present case to dramatize a symbolic content of assertiveness versus constraint.35 The alternative, theoretically, is to regard the Cézannism of Three Women as a milestone in a linear stylistic progression. Those features (the reduction of value contrasts and of space to the similitude of a bas-relief ), which in Three Women are said to constitute Picasso’s giant step toward Cubism, will then have to appear, further developed, in the work of the following year, especially where this later work is hailed as the true beginning of Cubism. Should such further development fail to occur, the later work would have to be ranked as a retreat from the position won in Three Women—which is absurd. In other words, the insistence on schematic linearity in the evolution of early Cubism would be raising a thankless problem. I am referring, of course, to the pictures Picasso painted at Horta de Ebro in the Pyrenees during the

summer of 1909—in Rubin’s phrase, “the most crucial and productive vacation of Picasso’s career.” Suppose we searched the Horta landscapes (figs. 1.29, 5.18, 5.19) for those incidents only which exhibit a continuity with the Cézannism of Three Women. We would miss the beautiful contradictions in them, their conspicuous repudiation of bas-relief syntax, the cunning conflation of diverse aims which makes these pictures more interesting than anything dreamt of by Picasso’s fellow Cézannists in France. Since the Horta landscapes are almost never discussed except as stepping-stones toward Cubism, a few pages devoted to them alone are in order. First as regards close-valued color change. It does occur in the Horta landscapes, but as a scintillant play on surfaces already emplaced; the elements that establish the structure—two coincident structures, rather: pictorial and perspectival—are linear definition and chiaroscuro. The more remarkable that the results appear “modern,” that the paintings seem to be all about surface tension, yet without clouding the transparency of deep space. But then, the modernism of these “first Cubist paintings” involves vastly more than close-valued color planes and passage. Consider, for instance, the central smoke stack in the Hermitage Factory (fig. 5.18), a feature registered as both distant and prominent. It stands flush with the unbreached plane of the canvas, not because its twin facets are leveled by means of passage or close-valued hues, but because the recession we impute to an object looming on the horizon is countermanded by multiple negatives—by deep-tone shadow, which will not let the smoke stack fade into distance; by “faulty” perspective, which contradicts its deep-set location and orientation with respect to eye level; and by a kind of collusive parqueting in the air above, joining top of chimney and sky in a flat repetition of diamonds. Perspective in Factory is not necessarily faulty; just full of surprises, as on the inface of the large house at left. This upright plane viewed from on high is so steeply angled that its proximal upper corner dips on the picture plane below the bottom at the far end; with the result that this four-pointed wall contracts on the surface into an acute, slender diamond. A revelation— the surface pressure of shape working both with and

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Figure 5.18. The Factory, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

against the ordonnance of perspective. But “recession” in almost every portion of Factory is continually stated and questioned, asserted and canceled out, every familiar space-making device being made to parade under two aspects—as capable and as incapable of performing its task. The single-pitched roof of the nearest house (bottom right) displays a counterchange of close-valued grays and browns, yet without inflecting its flat-roof character: the kind of motley which elsewhere in this picture promotes a Cézannean distinction of planes is here powerless to effect it. Conversely, in the gabled house at the left, the roof plane undergoes strong contrasts of tone—similar to those which elsewhere in this picture produce abrupt planar changes. Here they

do not; the tonal contrasts remain paradoxically superficial. And while the houses against the upper left margin make solid blocks by showing dark on the left and bright facets right, the palm branches nearby do the reverse; some even sport lighted undersides, with improper shadows riding on top. The whole inventory of space- and body-building devices is up for trial: linear perspective, color change, tonal contrast, overlap, and cast shadow, even the distant diffusion of fading contours, sometimes called “atmospheric perspective”—all are deployed at one point or another to induce spatial depth. And so are all anti-illusionistic devices: reverse and inconsistent perspective, harlequin colors, tonal equivalents and

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women [135]

Figure 5.19. Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Private collection; on loan to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie,

Museum Berggruen.

identical hues where overlapping suggests staggered spatial locations; cast shadows tossed off like samples by less than half the responsible plane; atmospheric perspective annulled by heavily modeled forms misplaced on the horizon; and lastly, mocking the overlap, a firmament laid piecemeal with ethereal shingles. This is serious play, irony in meditation on the resources of the pictorial idiom, without which Picasso’s Cubism will not let itself be defined. The formal character of this picture is a reflective analysis of all known formal devices. To single out close-valued color planes as a major defining trait of this phase of Picasso’s Cubism would be arbitrary. Nor does the bas-relief principle as a measure of early Cubism survive the test of the Horta landscapes.

Houses on the Hill puts the principle literally in perspective (fig. 5.19). Much as this splendid picture owes to Cézanne, it gives the impression that the old man’s paternity is being acknowledged and at the same time defied. What this landscape rejects is precisely the close bond of Cézanne’ s faultless masonry—here relegated to the optical distance, to that opaque backdrop of sky which lies beyond access. In fore- and middle ground, where the town is at hand, Picasso makes sure to keep space traversable. The buildings we overlook from a high Cézannesque vantage separate about intervenient lanes, while their stereometry is accentuated to make sure that each unit gets sides enough for adequate cubic displacement—a resolute No to last year’s enticement of bas-relief. And where passage, the active principle

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of Cézannesque compenetration, appears, it appears sometimes as a way of un-spacing, and sometimes as a carrier of meaning; as at the door of the house in the left middle distance. What sort of door? An incontinent door that seeps into the pathway, as though passage were a pun on the passage from home to outdoors. Furthermore, the same pathway runs clear to the foreground wall, ensuring its visibility from the door and allowing neighborly intercourse to wall, path, and house; one is glad to see these parties respect one another. Similarly, the large foreground house that backs into the set in reverse perspective: Picasso checks its intrusion in time to forestall collision, leaving its visà-vis at a friendly distance, intact. The latter is even given a window, making two confronted façades— two house fronts barely inferred by us—intervisible to each other. No proto-Cubist townscape by Cézanne, Braque, or Dufy insinuates such companionability, on an orthogonal axis, in depth. Unlike the ingredients of Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes, which stew thickly together, Picasso’s hilltop houses consort as distinct entities. Where they lie close enough for felt access, they intercommunicate.36 Not all of the Horta landscapes are so tolerant of free play, or so hospitable to penetration. But all allow internal slack in high-density systems. In Landscape with Aqueduct (Prague), foreground and backdrop part wide to let three airy arches sail athwart the middle zone of the picture, making luminous perforations where we expect solid core. Even the crystalline surface of Factory encourages breathing and remains strangely spacious: note particularly the almost perspectival approach to the square door at center. As for Reservoir (fig. 1.29), its impacted housing is shelved on a distant height so as to keep mid- and foreground free of congestion. Not only do the two houses at center stage send shadows unhindered in all directions while their doors are preceded by sweeps of access and sortie, but the whole picture opens in a huge three-dimensional swerve—a lavish allowance of vacancy instead of a barrier threshold. One cannot see or describe the duplicities of the Horta landscapes without rampant paradox. For all the packing and the tight surface mesh of these paintings, their parts are

immersed in depth with room to maneuver. Had they followed a single goal, without simultaneous clearance and closure, they would not work on us as they do. By comparison, the steep, pegboard landscapes painted in 1908–9 by Braque and Dufy seem to me clogged, encumbered and airless—Cézannism turned doctrinaire. (Compare Picasso’s Reservoir with Braque’s Château at La Roche-Guyon, Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, both painted in mid-1909.) The Horta landscapes, then, pose a methodological problem. That they are Picasso’s decisive leap into Analytical Cubism is universally granted; but since they largely abandon the close-knit bas-relief surface which in Three Women was accounted a forward step, should they be rated as a step back? That would be silly. Conversely, if the Horta landscapes, with their deep inroads and freestanding units aerated by spatial flow, introduce Picasso’s version of Cubism, how progressive in retrospect do they make Three Women look? Do they scorn its bas-relief traits as a passing sclerosis, seeing that the Cubism reached at Horta relied on more flexible means? A conclusion no wiser than the foregoing, yet one that follows perforce if one describes the style of Three Women exclusively in terms derived from Cézanne (linkage of close-valued planes, shallow basrelief space, passage, and so on); if its idiom is strained through a descriptive apparatus that isolates what that idiom shares with Cézanne, while suppressing what makes it Picasso. I suggest a shift of attention. Rather than seek out closevalued facets in smooth mutual transition, why not focus upon what is more clearly apparent—the strong linear divisions formed where these facets meet? Wherever we look in Three Women, planes gel into hardness, angular joints run between flattened surfaces, so that depicted form solidifies everywhere in catastrophic abutments. Passage, the supersession of margins, is, in fact, sparingly used in Three Women. Far more characteristic are the breaks thrown up between clear-cut contours, the accented arris, as I will call it—discontinuity where the trajectory of a curve changes from rise to fall.37 In its immediate impact, the picture is about the pervasive

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women

presence of sharp-edged turns that interrupt surface flow and convert the glissading flesh to a staccato of tilting planes, mostly triangular. But a caution is necessary. Picasso’s system as here described has nothing to do with those geometrized diagrams that reduce every curvature to cubiformity. These latter—certain drawings by Uccello or Dürer (fig. 5.20), for instance, or the sketches of Luca Cambiaso— are schematizations, produced most often with didactic intent. What they describe is understood to exist in more irregular shape, or more imperceptibly modulated; their analysis refers to bodies of familiar appearance, whose smooth-flowing sides have been planed down. But no such processing is implied in Picasso’s Three Women. On the contrary: though the postures of the three figures follow a mysterious ancestral determinism, their humanity remains raw and approximate, patently incomplete as to terminal members. Their bodies—untried, uncertain, ambiguously flat and voluminous, compound and singular, obdurate and collapsible—seem created ad hoc; provisional incarnations. If anything can be said to precede the mo-

dality of these figures, it is not the native roundness of human limbs (such as underlies Dürer’s conception), but a thing flatter and closer at hand: I mean the canvas plain whereon these figures are charted and from which they lift off. The distinction I am trying to make may be expressed by describing a characteristic detail of the picture in two variant ways—say, the widespread thigh of the croucher at right. Suppose we begin by recognizing it as an anatomical member. We then perceive it to be faceted by three interlocked triangles—a red wedged between browns; and perceive the three facets together as one large triangle with a descending apex roughly southwest of the croucher’s hand. So much if we honor that configuration as a human limb first. But there is an alternative. For what we see begins further out in the picture’s lower right corner, a corner whose angle of ninety degrees is bisected by a diagonal aimed centerward to proceed to the croucher’s raised knee. Triangulation now becomes the first move, followed (in the thigh’s triangular facets) by a process of continuing subdivision. In other words, it is the field that divides

Figure 5.20. Albrecht Dürer, page from

the Dresden sketchbook, 1519, detail. Dresden, Sächische Landesbibliothek, Ms. R. 147, fol. 101v.

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into segments and, in so doing, engenders a woman’s thigh. This operational principle—coincident with the first, rather than a supplanting of it—holds in varying degree everywhere in the picture: the larger units of the depicted anatomies are treated as sectors generated in the partitioning of the field. Thus the faceting of these bodies is arrived at by a process the opposite of Cambiaso’s or Dürer’s: it depends less on rationalizing organic form in terms of constituent planes than on parceling an available acreage into lots whose shifting tone values induce the sense of planes tipped at angles conformable to the human physique.38 We are given to see that the breeding ground whence the image takes rise is not so much a remembered world of forms preexistent (though this world too is at work), but rather the slate of the original field. And it is surely significant that the artist kept narrowing this field in relation to the size of the inhabiting figures, so that the figures seem pressed on all sides. Their compression, their tortured expulsion from an unaccommodating flat ground, gives palpable evidence of bodies jarred into existence by a catastrophe in three dimensions. In Picasso’s metaphorical idiom, the canvas terrain, come under pressure, reacts by contracting, buckling, and folding; each plane brought up sharp to a sudden ridge, as though the faceting of the figures registered an ongoing upheaval. Picasso, one suspects, is here meditating yet another nativity story—the old miracle play about threedimensional matter nascent in two. His subject is the native self-contradiction of image making; as Nietzsche put it ironically, “how could anything originate out of its opposite?” Picasso is tracking the concretion of volume in the flat of the canvas down to its origins in manipulation. In the end, his Three Women proposes a working code for the denotation of mass. With a kind of epistemological doggedness inbred in its substance, the picture argues that our optical sensation of mass results from the articulating function of watersheds; that depicted mass is an inference drawn from the fact that the canvas plain is crisscrossed—like crumpled foil or like an aerial view of the Alps—by lines standing for pleats and ridges, the incessant flip-over from plane to plane.39 Whence it follows that the content of

the planes themselves—whether this content registers in chromatic change, striated hatching, or tonal contrast—is immaterial, so long as the marker locating the tilt of the plane reads as a sign of discontinuity. An irregular lattice of arrises emerges as the condition of three-dimensionality in symbolic form. This latticework remains Picasso’s love and obsession. In the Horta landscapes of 1909, the sharp lineaments that plot the distribution of changing gradients become more assertive. In the Cubist heads and figures that follow (e.g., figs. 1.32, 1.35, 1.36, 1.38, 1.39, 1.41), they jut out as so many beaked prows, converting even such slow-rolling planes as cheeks and foreheads into systems of abrupt, salient angles. The angles continue to grow more acute, more pointed in section. Ridged watersheds evolve into rims, into vanes and flanges— paradigmatically in the bronze Head of Fernande (1909; fig. 1.37), where they come to abandon the very planes they define: they project like propeller blades, while the gradients to which they refer begin to fall out! Picasso isolates the incidence of planar change, much as a linguist might attend to the incidence of syllabic stress in the soundstream of articulate speech, screening out other factors. Or think of the dashes in Webster’s Dictionary that dismember the flow of a mel-lif-lu-ous word into component parts: Picasso meditates on optical disconnectives until the linear markings of planar change become his disembodied sign system. The arris—abstracted symbol—becomes the lone exponent of mass, to dominate at last even the Cubist masterworks of 1910–11. But that is another essay. In the Three Women, meanwhile, the system is still referable to the bas-relief principle, since the facets bordered and shaped by those arrises heave away only slightly from their original base; and the changed angulation from plane to plane tends to be minimal. But this is the special case of Three Women. What connects its syntax to Picasso’s earlier and later production, to the Demoiselles no less than the Horta landscapes, is the insistence on discontinuity—to my mind the governing principle of Picasso’s Cubism. So, in Three Women, convexities verge upon ridges, flexures dip into furrows. Each parcel

Resisting Cézanne : Picasso’s Thr ee Women

of form, each curving segment, however smooth, corrugates into planes bound by precise demarcations. Articulation throughout is linear, the draftsman’s trace— tonal values cooperating. But color recedes, to depart almost entirely as Picasso attains the High Analytical Cubism of 1911. And where does this put Cézanne? At a great distance, since Cézanne relied ever more on the sufficiency of his color to transcribe the spectacle which, as he put it, the Omnipotent Father spreads before our eyes;40 for the arris, the linear seam at the cresting edge of convergent planes, he had less and less use. And yet, there remains the profoundest kinship between the two men. Each in his way refused to be beguiled (as Braque was) by those outlines of things which readily accommodate themselves to the flat working surface. Each in his way made the rendering of the real a struggle against impossible odds (as Braque never did). For Cézanne was no less obsessed than Picasso by the three-dimensionality of his visual sensation, and the ontological resistance to it of his canvas. Whatever he looked at—straight wall or piece of fruit—seemed to be thrusting at him what he called a point culminant.41 But it was a point he was seeing, and he insisted on expressing it, and the points in retreat from it, by flecks of pigment constant in shape and direction, and interchangeable except for their hue. What mattered in the rendering of a spatial point was the nuance of precedence or recession expressible in the purified code of color, all claims other than that one precision being treated with astonishing disrespect. Like any semantic system, Cézanne’s pictorial structure was codetermined by its exclusions. As was Picasso’s. But he, contrary to Cézanne, humbled his color, letting it lapse toward uniformity; while specificity invested the plane, whose running ridge in

projection between bounding edges became for him the factotum that the color patch had been for Cézanne. Thus, in Three Women, color as a structuring agent is held in check; only in a handful of places is a movement from red to green within the figures allowed to signify planar change. And we have seen that the principle of structural color change was even more emphatically rejected from the rooftops of Horta. Where the latter underwent abrupt reversals of tincture, slipping from gray to ocher, from cool to warm, these alterations remained surface play—iridescent as the captive colors in the depths of an oil slick on a flat ground, but unable to modify a three-dimensional configuration already settled by other means. One might describe Picasso’s program as Cézanne in reverse—comparable only in being equally radical. And one may see Picasso’s Three Women—where the color is either constant or arbitrary, but every plane is uniquely oriented, uniquely contoured and non-interchangeable—as a protest against the exclusions performed by Cézanne. Seeing the work in this way does not break the link between the two masters; it redefines it in terms more consonant with Picasso’s own temper. The inheritance Picasso assumed from his chosen sire was not so much a facture of brushstrokes, or a particular syntax which he would leave or take depending on the calls of the moment, but the model of an intransigence potent enough to “protect” his own. The creator of Cubism—whom I shall continue to call Picasso—knew what he needed and when to resist. The Three Women, then, is a picture threefold in subject. It is about the sexes laboring for self-definition; about three-dimensional form starting from the barrenness of the flat; and about the young man Picasso arranging his escape from Cézanne. There may well be more to the picture, but not a whit less.

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Figure 6.1. Three Women, 1908, detail. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

Figure 6.2. Georges Braque, Houses

at L’Estaque (Landscape with Houses), October–November 1907. Private collection.

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esisting Cézanne” was projected in 1964 on first seeing Picasso’s Three Women in St. Petersburg (figs. 5.1, 6.1). It was intended then as a brief statement of three observations: that Three Women has a grave subject which it is irresponsible to overlook; that the painting shows the young Picasso at his most Cézannesque; and that this intrusion of Cézannism in an enterprise of such magnitude must somehow be pertinent to its theme. I had hoped originally to get all this said in a couple of pages. That it took ten times as many is largely due to the challenge of William Rubin’s redoubtable essay, “Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism.”1 Rubin deals only peripherally with Three Women; his main subject is Braque—the path of Braque’s Cubist-bound evolution prior to his partnership with Picasso. For Rubin, “the earliest form of Cubism was . . . an invention of Braque alone,” while Picasso emerges “less as a contributor to the formal language of early Cubism than as a model of daring.” Thus a small, previously unpublished Braque landscape of October–November 1907 (fig. 6.2) takes on an “extraordinary historical importance,” because, standing “midway between Cézanne and Cubism . . . it demonstrates that Braque arrived at Cubism by . . . accepting Cézanne’s conceptions integrally and expanding their limits (as contrasted to Picasso, who took Cézanne in bits and pieces in combination with many other sources).” More specifically: “the immense advance made here by Braque in the rendering of Cézanne abstractly, has to do essentially with his grasp of Cézanne’s passage of planes, precisely the means which—extrapolated to meet new needs—would henceforth characterize

The Polemical Part

Braque’s Cubism and set it in advance of Picasso’s during the following eighteen months.”2 Now any ruling that casts the Picasso of those crucial years in the role of a follower is an upset. And to anyone who would register disagreement with upsetting conclusions, two options present themselves. You may, in the common style of the discipline we profess, quash the offending argument with one trenchant adjective in a footnote, such as “implausible” or “unconvincing.”3 This method, being pithy and economical, has much to commend it. I, unfortunately, have fallen into the wearier course of worrying through my objections.

1. Concerning Temperament It seems to me that Rubin, in offering his historical reconstruction of the beginnings of Cubism, is caught— like the great painter we both admire—in conflict. There is a clash between his aesthetic judgment, a sense of quality that tolerates no interference, and a model of historical evolution which, in fact, does interfere. As he pits Braque and Picasso against one another, he sees that “the Picassos of 1907–09 . . . are stronger paintings.” Place Braque’s “early 1909 Port in Normandy next to [Picasso’s] Bread and Fruit Dish of the same period and it

“The Polemical Part” is the second part of “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women” (ch. 5), published in Art in America (March–April 1979), pp. 115–27; reprinted here with minor revisions following Steinberg’s notes. The essay expands on the concept of passage, the meaning of the word, and William Rubin’s claim that Picasso got to early Analytical Cubism through Braque. Rubin’s response followed in the same issue of Art in America.

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gets blown off the wall by the Picasso—not by virtue of the latter’s size, but by its plastic intensity.” On the other hand, Rubin finds Picasso’s pre-Cubist works infected by “frequent eclecticism”; and considers Braque’s admittedly weaker paintings to be more coherent in style, better aimed, as it were. Braque’s “commitment to a Cézannist syntax,” he writes, “kept his paintings more stylistically unified and more advanced in the direction of what proved to be High Analytical Cubism than Picasso’s until at least the summer of 1909.” Hence Rubin’s belief that “Braque would have created early Cubism had Picasso never existed.” He concedes that this hypothetical early-Cubism-sans-Picasso “might have been a narrow enterprise in the hands of Braque alone.”4 But having taken his stance, he closes the essay on the boldest subjunctive ever proposed to art-historical scholarship. Braque’s formation of a syntax for Analytic Cubism was the basis on which, beginning in 1909, he was able to engage Picasso in a probing four-year dialogue of a kind that Picasso—to judge by his personality and habits over the rest of his career—was instinctively inclined to avoid. The reflective, meditative character of the Analytic Cubism of those years, its searching, metaphysical quality, is alien to Picasso’s art both before and afterward, though it is consonant with the spirit of both Cézanne’s and Braque’s enterprises. It may therefore be no exaggeration to say that we owe many of our greatest Picassos—those of High Analytic Cubism—to Braque’s ability to get the Spanish master patiently to explore the depth of the syntax which was their common heritage from Cézanne.

Suppose we dismiss Rubin’s paradox, that we owe our greatest Picassos to the intervention of Braque, as a provocation—that would be missing its point. For in his valedictory flourish Rubin is not writing history, not describing events, but following through on the consequences of his position. And in this sense, in the consistency of their logic, Rubin’s conclusions are sound. If there is to be disagreement, it must be with the premises from which they derive. Consider, for instance, the middle portion of the above paragraph, where a tempera-

mental distinction between Braque and Picasso is stated as a matter of fact; Picasso being described as wanting that searching metaphysical spirit which Braque is said to share with Cézanne. The upshot is inescapable: if Braque’s spirit is reflective, probing, and metaphysical, as Picasso’s is not; and if the High Analytical Cubism of Braque and Picasso manifests a searching, metaphysical character, then that quality in it must be ascribed to Braque’s influence. I will leave it to others to question whether Braque’s career gives enough evidence of a temperament to justify comparison with Cézanne. But in regard to Picasso: what are we to make of the multitudinous studies that precede most of the major works of these years?5 Twentieth-century criticism (unlike the art market) has made nothing of these painstaking preparations— presumably because the very acknowledgment of their existence would disturb the image we have of Picasso: a prodigy of talent, devilishly inventive, reckless in exploration, possessed of intuitive certainty in his best moments, but fickle and too impatient for sustained endeavor or constructive self-criticism. Surely, so spontaneous a genius cannot be guilty of fastidious elaboration. Indeed, when the author of a standard modern history of Cubism points to that work of Picasso’s which initiated “a new phase in the history of art,” he takes for granted that the striking force in its creation was not thought or volition, search, trial or judgment, but instinct; “the new pictorial possibilities in the Demoiselles d’Avignon were instinctively hit upon.”6 No room here for those tortuous preparations, those doubts and revisions which, in fact, precede works such as the Two Women of 1906, the Demoiselles of 1907, the Dryad or the Three Women, both of 1908 (figs. 4.42, 4.1, 4.26). Furthermore, preparatory studies in the Renaissance manner seem uncharacteristic of early twentiethcentury art; they fit no historical schema. It is not surprising, then, that the effort I made in a 1972 essay on the Demoiselles d’Avignon to retrace Picasso’s slow mediation through scores of studies remains, so far as I know, an exception (ch. 4). But having once made that effort, I have retained ever since a strong sense of Picasso’s tenacity in exploring the depth of an idea—especially

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if that idea, in its final appearance, was to project a look of impetuous improvisation. My reluctance to salute Picasso’s public persona (“I do not seek, I find,” he says in his braggart moods) was compounded by another study I published earlier.7 It dwelt on Picasso’s obsession with simultaneity, his lifelong search for the graphic equivalents of a vision restrained by no point of view—a kind of absolute sight testing and proving itself in seizing objects from several sides at once. To this problem Picasso returned tirelessly over and over, decades on end, pushing it far beyond anything dreamt of in the heyday of Cubism. From the naive conflation of mug and profile in human heads, he proceeded to take on the whole anatomy, then the description of animals, furniture, and the like (some of his tabletops flip from bird’s- into frog’s-eye perspective; cf. fig. 1.25). And it was not until the early 1940s, as he pondered the staging of ubiquitous vision, that his search reached its outermost limit: it was then that Picasso began to envision a depth of field wherein near and far became interchangeable, where the traces of multiple, ever-rebounding sight assembled a room as a network of intersections. All you saw were indelible vanishing lines that sent complementary perspectives coming and going—visual rays converging on foci whence sight always turned home again. Extension, caught in Picasso’s cat’s-cradle space, became collapsible. I have in mind certain drawings that show only space lanes and vanishing lines receding, but “receding” from both there and here simultaneously. After some years of looking I came to see Picasso’s commitment to “absolute vision” as cumulative, and as a tour de force of persistence across a half century. Picasso was attempting what is literally metaphysical—to make a defeating physical impossibility possible. And having described the matter as best I could, I concluded: “In this enterprise Picasso has had neither help nor companionship; nothing in modern art that encouraged it. The shared goals of painting since the mid-century lie elsewhere.” I might have added that the subject has seemed just as jejune to twentieth-century criticism, perhaps because it suits no marketable pattern of stylistic development.8 As a result of this unconcern, a major

theme of Picasso’s life work is left undiscussed—and I have no quarrel with that: no one is obliged to discuss what they find without interest. But if critic-historians, having bypassed Picasso’s preoccupation, persuade themselves that it did not exist; if they strike the artist’s lifelong quest from the record to conclude that his temperament was incapable of sustained quest—then something has gone awry. You may discount Picasso’s probing and searching as misguided in its objectives— “of no interest at all,” as Mel Bochner informed me, speaking of Picasso’s all-sided representations; but you cannot excise it from the man’s nature. Here, then, Rubin and I arrive at different estimates of Picasso’s “personality and habits,” because our respective investments in Picasso studies took different routes; myself content to observe what Picasso did, no matter whether influential or no; Rubin preferring to study whatever Picasso did that was historically significant in nourishing twentieth-century art.9 Accordingly, because my prior interest in Picasso showed me a searcher, I find the “searching, metaphysical quality” of his Cubist phase sufficiently consonant with his character. Rubin finds it inexplicable, unless in response to Braque’s steadying presence.

2. What Exactly Is Cubism? Is it a real thing or a conventional designation? The latter, I think, and as such a slippery concept, a misnomer that remains to this day resistant to definition; as Rubin knows well enough. He therefore sharpens his sense of the term by limiting the temporal reference of his discussion to “early Analytic Cubism.” For the rest, he assumes that the whatness of Cubism will be generally agreed upon by readers to whom that body of work, that moment, that method, that ideology, has been always familiar. This is why the terms “Cubism” or “Cubist syntax” are reified in his essay as if they stood, like place names, for certain fixed points. When Rubin writes of Braque’s Landscape with Houses (fig. 6.2) that it shows the artist “clearly moving in the direction of Cubism,” and that it “reflects a greater understanding of [Cubism’s] structural principles than anything in the

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Demoiselles,” he is presenting the Cubism which our artists will go on to invent as a thing already emplaced—a gate at the end of the turnpike, a magnet that draws Braque into its field.10 When he speaks of Braque getting Picasso to “explore the depth of the syntax which was their common heritage from Cézanne,” we are to think of some natural resource, such as a mine or lake, whose given depth lies ready to be explored by whoever has the patience and the equipment. But Rubin hates to be vague. Writing “Cubism,” or “Cézannist syntax,” or “Cubist syntax,” he wants us to bear in mind certain formal criteria which he restates patiently throughout his essay. Reading with care, one gathers these four: (1) modeling by means of closevalued color planes, i.e., planes not dependent for their apparent tilt on tonal contrast or chiaroscuro; (2) space and its content as the “simulacrum of a bas-relief ”; (3) the massing of forms from a closed backdrop forward,

Figure 6.3. Georges Braque, Viaduct at L’Estaque, June–July 1908.

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

so that instead of receding they seem to stagger toward us—which I call the “hithering spill”; and (4) passage, the passing of planes into each other across open or effaced borders. In Rubin’s view, as I understand it, these four categories preexist in Cézanne, either as “intuitive origins” or full blown.11 Thereafter—distilled, explicated, expanded— they characterize the pictorial syntax of Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes (to August 1908); whereby these latter become the “first full-fledged Cubist pictures”—“Cubist in the full sense of the word” (figs. 6.3, 6.4). Note that no later work achieves this clear title: the joint production of Braque and Picasso in the succeeding years is always carefully qualified as “early Analytical Cubism,” followed by “High Analytical.” Only Braque’s L’Estaque pictures of summer 1908 earn the generic label “in the full sense of the word”—they alone manifest the defining features of Cubism in perfect purity.

Figure 6.4. Georges Braque, Road near L’Estaque, late summer 1908. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Given anonymously (by exchange).

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Now if these four Cézanne- derived features constitute essential Cubism—and Braque corners them first—then, of course, Rubin is right to nominate Braque the creator of Cubism. For then he is not writing history, but proposing a limiting definition of what he thinks essential Cubism is: that which Braque painted in 1908, he would be saying, shall henceforth be called Cubism straight, all later developments to be variously qualified. Yet this is not what he conveys. His decision that Braque had a fullfledged Cubism in the hand, while Picasso was still beating the bushes, appeals to the larger sense of the term, to that notional Cubism (no matter how modified by the word “early”) which revolutionized Western art. And those who still wonder about the full sense of that revolution will protest, as I do, that it is not Picasso’s Cubism that is being created in Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes. Picasso’s painting through 1910 will not stay in the compass of Braque. And the syntactical categories which constitute Rubin’s “earliest form of Cubism,” and which the lagging Spaniard is supposed to adopt to qualify for his Cubist matriculation—Picasso’s work shrugs them off. (At this point, the original typescript of the present paper contained four disquisitions on each of these categories. The intent was to prove that close-valued color planes, bas-relief, hithering spill, and passage were marginal to Picasso’s early Cubism and inadequate to its definition. But the argument became irksome in its tireless negativity—the more noticeably since in composing it, I sought periodically to refresh my spirits by reading Tom Jones; where I found myself counseled to “adhere to a rule of Horace; by which writers are directed to pass over all those matters which they despair of placing in a shining light” [book VII, ch. 6]. I have therefore scrapped most of the argument, or grounded it in the footnotes—except for the still prolix section concerning the mysteries of passage.)

3. The Failing Grip of Categories Close-valued color planes. They are assiduously used by Picasso in 1908.12 But value contrast with linear

accent is back in control by 1909. Never in Picasso’s subsequent work is the form- and space-making function of chiaroscuro abandoned. On the threshold of Cubism, Picasso lets the principle of close-valued color planes go.13 The “simulacrum of a bas-relief ” as a defining trait of Picasso’s early Analytical Cubism poses a problem of a different order. Rubin employs the term “bas-relief ” analogically for pictorial structures whose elements seem embedded, so that substantial forms, like those in a sculptured relief, “have no backs.” This description may apply usefully to Cézanne; and it helps to define the Cézannean effect of Braque’s 1908 landscapes and of Picasso’s Three Women. But the looseness of the criterion of backlessness—and the arbitrariness of the supposed Cézanne-Braque-Picasso transmission—are brought home to us in John Elderfield’s observation that “the bas-relief effect had characterized most of Picasso’s work since 1906.”14 In the 1908 Three Women, the bas-relief effect reaches a climax—yielding soon after to new concerns. Those exemplars of early Analytical Cubism, the Horta landscapes of summer 1909 (figs. 1.29, 5.18, 5.19), subvert the consistency of the bas-relief subtly or blatantly. How else explain the deep inroads, the immersion of freestanding units in spatial flow, in Houses on the Hill (fig. 5.19)? Even Reservoir (fig. 1.29) largely renounces that clinging density which still satisfied Braque at La Roche-Guyon (summer 1909). But the spatial reading of Reservoir depends on one’s mental set. If, for instance, the black comet-tail shadows about the houses at center are read formally only as incidents of passage, the whole system congeals to confirm the bas-relief reading. If they are understood as carpets of shadow unrolled fore and aft to space the houses between lanes of access, then here even horizontality will dilate from within against the press of bas-relief.15 And after Horta, with the increasing fragmentation of solids in the further evolution of Cubism, the bas-relief as controlling principle abdicates. Thirdly, the hithering spill. Rubin believes that there exists “the kind of relief modeling . . . through which the structure of the composition moves step-

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wise downward and outward.”16 The type of picture which he finds most advanced in 1907–8 displays, we are told, “that Cézannian-Cubist conception of a composition which unfolds downward and outward toward the spectator rather than retreating from the picture plane.”17 These statements astonish me, for the tenor of Rubin’s argument led me to expect an objective description, not a pathetic fallacy. Immobile systems, such as still pictures, do not of themselves move, unfold, or retreat. It is we who invest stationary configurations with motion by reading them—not as we read English from left to right, nor like palindromes backward, nor alternately as the ox plows, nor indeed according to any linear sequence whatever. For the human eye flitters incessantly, projecting fixation points willy-nilly. Sight by nature is jumpy, and its scattershot scanning patterns, known as saccadic movement, are not adaptable to the mechanical model of an automobile shifting from drive into reverse. Thus Rubin’s account of the Cézannian-Cubist composition “which moves downward and outward toward the spectator from a back plane that closes the space” is only a solicitation to join him in a personal habit; an invitation declined by whoever observes that they don’t read pictures that way—that Braque’s little cubes seem, on the contrary, to mount and pile up against a hard backdrop.18 Which is just what John Golding says: describing Braque’s paradigmatic Houses at L’Estaque of 1908 (fig. 5.3), he speaks of “the houses . . . continued upwards almost to the top of the canvas so that the eye is allowed no escape beyond them.” Clearly, it never occurred to Golding that the houses might be slipping downhill.19 It may well be that Braque himself, at one time, thought of his depicted forms as proceeding from backdrop forward. Both he and Kahnweiler made statements to that effect.20 But no such mechanical turnabout could have held Picasso’s attention for long. His pictures of 1907–10 activate too many simultaneous responses to submit to the simplistic criterion of the hithering spill. At the risk of giving offense, and of outdoing Rubin in subjectivity, I would argue that Picasso’s quasi- erotic attitude to

his painting assumes rather an imaginative reciprocity of directions. If the fill of depicted space presses toward us, it also craves penetration, approaches to be approached, open-laned, as it were, open to impalement or entry, so that the paintings, whatever their ostensible subjects, whether landscapes, still lifes, or figures, become simulacra of sexual acts more than of bas-relief. “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality,” wrote Nietzsche, “reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.”21 Lastly, passage, to which Rubin assigns a central role in the evolution of Cubism. But here I must interrupt myself with a confession: it is a regrettable fact of my education that it never included a single course in modern art, undergraduate or advanced. Consequently, after my formal schooling had ended, whenever I found the terminology of modernist criticism obscure, I attributed my bewilderment to that hiatus which had left me unprepared for esoteric terms such as passage. At last, broaching the present task, I began timidly to ask around, and received definitions ranging from “aptness of color relations” to “Oh, I thought it meant like a sort of general overallness.” What, then, does passage signify? Unfortunately, the answer is convoluted, and dispirited readers are advised to skip the next three pages.22 Written not as plain English but in italics to keep it French, the word passage looks faintly daunting. Like most learned foreignisms, it affects a technical meaning; and as Joseph Conrad remarked, “there is a precision about technical terms that is almost sacred.” Yet, in Cubist parlance, passage turns out to be neither technical nor precise enough to be hallowed. It seems to denote a kind of brushwork or hatching that “passes” across suppressed contours to unite disparate elements. The question is, what sort of elements?—and on this point the word’s meaning bleeds worse than its referent. Alfred H. Barr was the first to introduce the term into English.23 Discussing a “magnificent” Picasso charcoal of 1910 (fig. 6.5, called Figure or Nude, and by Stieglitz, who owned it, “The Fire Escape”), Barr described its characteristic passages as “the merging of planes with

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space by leaving one edge unpainted or light in tone.”24 It is perhaps the best definition we are likely to get. Ten years later, Barr wrote of the same drawing: “Some of the planes defined by an angle are open on the opposite side so that they merge into others—a device derived from Cézanne and called passage.”25 Here the sense of the word has undergone a slight shift. In the first definition, passage involves the diffusion of plane into field; it points to a process that prevents the materialization of full-sided solids: strong level planes launched from one side or corner simply evaporate and fade out. In the second definition, passage is a merging of plane with plane—including, one might think (if one did not look at the work described), the interrelation of tangent surfaces on solid bodies. But such inclusiveness is undesirable; for if the definition is worded to cover convergent planes on a compact three-dimensional form, then passage threatens to become merely a softening of transitions, a “merging of plane with plane,” which sounds confusingly like the classic sfumato. Fortunately, that threat is averted by attending to the drawing before us, the occasion of Barr’s definition, which ensures that sfumato is not what he meant. The drawing does indeed hint at the planes of a body—planes interpretable as facets of chest, belly, pelvis, etc.—and it shows them somehow running together; but only insofar as each plane has merged with space first. Their intermingling is secret, conducted in pockets of black or white darkness where planes subside before others take off. Thus, in view of the drawing described, we can discount Barr’s second definition and abide with the first. In short, passage for Barr does not mean the smoothed, melting junction of contiguous planes at their meeting. His passage of planes is rather a working process that constantly starts and suspends materiality, regardless of whether the process occurs among the planes of one broken form or between things discrete. The definition articulates a structural principle that transcends individual objects and their constituent facets to involve larger pictorial continuities—as Golding also implies when he cites “Cézanne’s technique of opening up the contours of objects, so that . . . the eye slips inward and upwards from plane to plane.”26

A more limiting definition of Cézannean passage is offered by Edward Fry. He explains it as one of the means Cézanne used to integrate surface and depth—a method of creating spatial ambiguity, passage being “the running together of planes otherwise separated in space.”27 Excellent: “planes otherwise separated in space” gets us further along. The phrase draws attention to those events which make Cézannean passage momentous for subsequent painting—as when a part of a three-dimensional unit, securely positioned in threedimensional space, levels unexpectedly with a tandem plane at some spatial remove.

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Figure 6.5. Standing Female Nude, Paris, autumn–winter 1910, Z.II/1.208.

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.

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The effect of it can be described somewhat differently, and in a way more consonant with the artist’s intent. For I suspect that Cézanne would have been shocked to learn that his pictures, so exactingly structured in echelon, let spatially discontinuous planes “run together” in ambiguity. And right he would be. In the last analysis, Cézanne’s precisely interlocked color planes, stacked in different spatial registers, do not really blend into each other; rather, the objects of Cézanne’s representation—once their location has been defined— revert intermittently to un-definition. The intermittency principle attends all his process of formulation. By means of contours trespassed or partly omitted, the realization of solid objects is stayed, to revert here and there to the two-dimensional. In other words, it is not that one plane melts into another, but that, at certain expendable points, the demarcation of planes is checked so that, whatever their place in depth, they may be retrieved by the neutral substrate of the canvas. In this description of the event, it would be inaccurate to say that Cézanne makes foreground foliage blend with a far-off mountain whose own substance oozes through broken contours into the sky; say rather that repoussoir foliage, background massif, and brushed-in sky, being all alike partial testimonies to things experienced, are all alike subjected to intermittency; with the result that the layers of depth predicated by the representation relapse continually into unpredication, and remain mysteriously interwoven on—and reclaimed by—the immanent picture plane.28 Armed with the intermittency principle, we can make Fry’s sense of passage agree with Barr’s. We need only extend his phrase about “separateness in space” to include planes of different angulation, even if such planes are tangent and constituent of one body. For where Cézanne seems to elide the break between the planes of a solid, he again does not meld or fuse them, but rather suspends their definition. The contiguous walls of a house placed catercorner, for instance, will desist intermittently from their task of convergence to align with the picture plane. Thus the planes involved do not really “run together,” since at the point where

passage occurs, they have ceased to be planes. Whether contiguous on one body surface or held apart by foreshortened recession, they have surrendered their spatial inflection to rejoin the pervasive field as incidents of pure color. This I believe to be the sense of Cézannean passage. But, for the present, it is immaterial whether Cézanne’s passages are understood as a merging of planes with space, or as products of intermittency. Both formulations describe the same visual result. What muddles the issue is the application of the word to entirely different orders of visual data; and here, I think, Rubin does not serve us well. Alone among writers in English, he leaves the term passage undefined, even as he inserts it at the center of his conception of Cubism. Thus his description of Three Women equates passage with “a step-wise linkage and fusion of close-valued planes in a shallow, bas-relief space.”29 This formulation (wherein “step-wise” and “fusion” are somewhat in contradiction) makes passage apply, not to the running together of planes otherwise separated in space (Fry); and not to the merging of planes with space (Barr); but to the tryst of still palpable planes on a solid. So Rubin’s prime exhibit of passage in Three Women is “the right-hand plane of the upper arm [at top left] which is in shadow.” In the original version of spring 1908, we read, this plane was “much darker than its adjoining planes and it is totally demarcated from them by a firm edge. In the work as we see it today, that plane is only slightly darker than its neighbors, into which it now blends imperceptibly towards its top.” Here passage becomes merely a gentled contingence of planes in transition. The significance of passage as a non-planar interval, or as an ambiguous integration of discontinuous layers of depth is lost; and the reference to reduced value contrasts in the planes involved only adds further confusion, since the occasion of Barr’s original definition of passage was a charcoal drawing, wherein the passage action runs from deepest black into white. If passage is to be more than a catchall; if we want a sharpened vocabulary to differentiate between the

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kinds, the uses, and the aims of passage in Cézanne, Braque, and Picasso, then we would have to begin by separating two groups of phenomena, of which the first group of three should be ruled out. (1) The reduction of value contrast in the coloration of planes constituting a solid: this occurs prominently in Picasso’s Three Women, and it does promote Rubin’s “smooth linkage” of planes. But it does not fall under the head of passage, which is capable of involving the starkest contrasts of tone. (2) The avoidance of sharp changes of gradient from plane to plane: another conspicuous feature of Three Women, and one that is largely responsible for its shallow bas-relief character. But this again has nothing to do with passage, which is capable of trespassing even right angles. (3) The blurred definition of watersheds or internal contours where convergent planes meet. Traditionally known as sfumato, or blending, this effect, which more than any other produces “a smoothly graduated surface,” is conspicuously absent from the Three Women, where most of the facets are securely delimited. Inside a delimited facet, changing hues occasionally run together, but the plane itself remains edged and ridged with remarkable sharpness. Within passage proper at least four functional types should be recognized. (1) Cézanne’s way: the brink of an object locked in one spatial register opens upon an apparent distance—without drain of its materiality or detriment to its own station. (2) Cézanne again: a projecting edge between convergent surfaces (e.g., the sides of a house) fades out suddenly at top or bottom, forcing both former planes into agreement with the plane of the canvas. It is not that the planar junction is smoothed or softened, but that a foregoing differentiation of planes is annulled. (3) Characteristic of proto-Cubist Picassos: distinct but adjoining surfaces, such as planes vertical and horizontal, invade one another; things standing up root in supporting ground, as when the brushwork defining the door of a house overruns the pathway before it. The effect, reserved for objects in meaningful symbiosis, is a mutual interpenetration of solids. (Cf. Rubin on a Picasso of 1908: “the earth ‘passes’ into the

tree trunks.”)30 (4) Characteristic of Analytical Cubism: incipient planes fade out on one or more sides. This follows Barr’s definition. The objective, different from Cézanne’s, is not to suspend but to forestall the concretion of solids, to maintain discontinuity even as real planes (i.e., planes palpably tilted) continually start and proliferate. One other mode of intermittency, which I call the “penannular,” hardly deserves the name of passage. Suppose we draw an incomplete (penannular) circle on paper: would the break in the outline qualify as passage? I think not, for no planes are involved. Nor do I see them involved in Braque’s Landscape with Houses of late 1907 (fig. 6.2), a picture whose “immense advance,”

Figure 6.6. Georges Braque, Large Nude, 1907–8. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne; Gift of Alex MaguyGlass, 2002. (See note 32.)

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Rubin tells us, “has to do essentially with [Braque’s] grasp of Cézanne’s passage of planes.”31 But what is it that the so-called passages in Braque’s Landscape accomplish? Its hillocks and houses, foliage and tree, are rendered in heavy outlines spread flat and wide. Then, in the picture’s soft midriff, where somewhat nondescript shapes overlap like stage flats, these fat contour lines open up; but outlines without tilt of plane or impending mass they remain. Unlike Cézanne and Picasso, who never lose sight of the projecting brunt of a form, the painter of Landscape with Houses limns nothing but outer borders; with respect to the objects defined, outline, whether full-round or partial, is all he sees. Whence I conclude that this painting— important as it may be in Braque’s own development— fails as yet to display a serious “grasp of Cézanne’s passage of planes.”32 Passage in Cézanne’s sense is more earnestly understood in Picasso’s Gósol Landscape of

1906 (fig. 6.7), where pitched rooftops of unmistakable inclination drift continuously with the upright flank of the mountain. “Backwardness in terms of syntax” hardly characterizes the man who painted this charmed landscape during a Spanish vacation in 1906. And from that season forward Picasso uses passage as he will, moving on to Cubism at his own dizzying speed. Meanwhile, whether Braque draws his outlines dehiscent or closed has no effect on locating Picasso before, abreast, or behind.

4. Fear of Disunity Modern criticism is not yet modern enough to resist rating stylistic unity as a plus; failed unity still gets a minus—even when the culprit is Pablo Picasso who, by the time he was twenty-five, had painted a thousand stylistically unified pictures, then rejected their kind

Figure 6.7. Gósol Landscape, Gósol, summer 1906, Z.VI.732. Private collection.

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of integrity as too smooth, too inactive, too comfortable. From around 1907 onward, Picasso forced his pictures to acknowledge an undertow of disorder against any aesthetic solution. Joyce is reported to have told a hopeful beginner: “Young man, you have not enough chaos in you to create a world.” Picasso, going forth to create one, knew better than to leave the chaos within him behind. That is why he painted the Demoiselles; and devotees of style remain disconcerted by the result. Kahnweiler sighed that it never gelled into a whole. Clement Greenberg regrets that “the Demoiselles d’Avignon, superb as it is, lacks cohesive unity.” Its “obvious inconsistencies of style” make it “in many ways an unsatisfactory painting,” writes Golding; and Douglas Cooper: “It is not easy to appreciate or judge the . . . Demoiselles as a work of art today because it was abandoned as a transitional and often re-worked canvas, with many stylistic contradictions unresolved.” We are continually reassured that of course Picasso would have harmonized the clashing styles of the picture had he not abandoned it before finishing—though the artist sold the picture as is, and recalled it with pride ever after: “It was my first exorcism-painting—yes absolutely!” he told Malraux.33 Even Edward Fry, whose comments on the Demoiselles are searching and sensitive, finds fault in disunity when he calls Three Women “more successful and unified.” And Rubin ranks Braque’s paintings of 1907–8 more advanced because their Cézannism seems more “stylistically unified” than any Picasso of similar date. But was the concern for stylistic unity in 1908 the most promising mental set for the creation of Cubism? We need not be misled by the beautiful aesthetic consistency of the mature Cubist pictures of 1910–11; their internal coherence is maintained at the cost of the most thorough dismemberment ever imposed on received notions of form. With fragmentation in full career, Picasso’s poetic vision of discontinuity could rest satisfied, for a stint—until 1912, when collage and mixed media introduced discontinuities even more radical, reverting to premonitions announced in the Demoiselles. Let me too revert to the Demoiselles for a moment. In my essay on the picture (ch. 4), I described Picasso’s

discontinuity principle in its explosive debut. To say it again: the picture crowds five disconnected figures— not as one age group, nor in one ambience, but each singly encapsulated: the lone curtain raiser at left, separated even from her own lifted hand by an unmediated space jump; the second figure stretched forth in reclining position seen from on top—she arrives “on the picture plane like a Murphy bed hitting a wall”; the straight middle figure adjacent, but with no spatial ties to her sister, seen from below again. Then those curtain folds like packed ice to quarantine the intruding savage at upper right—treated in a menacing “African” mode; and lastly—“crouched for employment”—an exotic jade realized like no other, dorsal and frontal at once. Comparison with the numerous studies of the Demoiselles revealed how tenaciously Picasso pursued to this end; he was resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. The famous stylistic rupture at right turned out to be merely a consummation. Overnight, the contrived coherences of representational art—the feigned unities of time and place, the stylistic consistencies—all were declared to be fictional. The Demoiselles confessed itself a picture conceived in duration and delivered in spasms. In this one work Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; by elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the web of connecting space; by abrupt changes of vantage; and by a sudden stylistic shift at the climax. Finally, the insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the picture’s address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomful of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides. So far from suppressing the subject, the mode of organization heightens its flagrant eroticism. One result of the foregoing analysis—that the Demoiselles is not an abstraction but a painting with an erotic theme—seems to have gotten by without resistance. Rubin himself welcomes it as a tool that should help disconnect the picture from the great train of Cubism. According to him, my essay showed that “our tendency to view the Demoiselles from a Cubist perspective has blinded us to many aspects of the picture’s mean-

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ing,” and “that the most important consideration suppressed in prevailing views of the Demoiselles is the picture’s specific erotic content.”34 But I hate to get credit merely for pointing out that a picture of naked whores in a brothel may have somewhat to do with sex. (Far more remarkable, surely, is the feat of repression that enabled critics for fifty years to think otherwise.) Nor did I claim that it was a specifically “Cubist perspective” that had obscured the picture’s full meaning, but rather the formalist bias in general; the argument being that formalism is inadequate to its own ends, since those who attend to form only don’t get to see enough of the form. The essay, then, was neither strict formal analysis nor pure iconography, but an attempt to acknowledge their coincidence in the painting. It concluded that the picture’s erotic meaning was sustained and confirmed by one ruling principle deliberately intensified as the project progressed—the multiplication of structural and stylistic disjunctions. And since I regard Picasso’s vision of discontinuity from 1907 on as a matter of passion rather than syntax, I recognize the same vision again underlying the inspired fragmentations of Cubism; so that I embrace the tradition which makes the Demoiselles the fountainhead of the movement. What sort of Cubism Braque would have managed “had Picasso never existed” I do not know. Braque’s conversion from the company of the Fauves to the order of Cézanne and thence to close partnership with Picasso, maintaining through each allegiance a virtuous attention to stylistic consistency, does not suggest that he had enough chaos in him to create a world.35

5. What Did Picasso Contribute? Assessing the respective gifts of Braque and Picasso to the formation of early Cubism, Rubin credits Braque with a concrete program—the development and exploration in depth of Cézannist syntax. Picasso’s input, on the other hand, is designated throughout by abstractions—“plastic intensity,” “daring,” “robustness,” and “range.” As though Picasso, his strength lacking focus, merely brought his abundant energy to bear on a

plan of campaign which Braque had placed in his hands. Since I can hardly believe that Rubin means what he seems to imply, I take this to be one of those cases where the words we use put chasms between us. And this is why our differences are worth spelling out—before a new batch of popular textbooks, careless of concealed verbal snares, appropriates his conclusions. Rubin’s position seems clear enough. He conceives the syntax of early Analytical Cubism as a procedural system “extrapolated” by Braque from a single source (Cézanne), and subsequently obeyed by both Braque and Picasso, much as the syntax of a language is obeyed by its speakers. It follows that Picasso’s earlier preoccupations (e.g., his involvement with African art in 1907) could have little bearing on the shaping of the new syntax in its early Analytical phase. Could it be that our disagreement hinges merely on the meaning of “syntax”? I have maintained, for instance, that Cubism’s characteristic techniques of fragmentation derive directly from Picasso’s earlier premonitions of discontinuity. Suppose I were answered that “discontinuity” and “fragmentation” are concepts too general to fall under the narrower rubric of “syntax”; ought I to counter that “syntax” is a linguistic term whose status in discussions of painting is uncontrollably metaphorical, and that Rubin never indicates just what his notion of syntax is meant to exclude? All I can do is to revert again and again to the glorious succession of pictures Picasso produced from, say, 1907 to 1910; and observe that the later work—its syntax, idiom, style, manner, or whatever you call it—flows from Picasso’s prior obsessions in at least three respects: first, in its vision of discontinuity; second, in Picasso’s abiding determination to grasp every form at its salience, acknowledging arris and outline alike by discontinuous notations that refer alternately to flatness and depth; third, in the continuing relevance to Picasso of his confrontation with African art. This last point requires a paragraph of explanation. Cubism come, Picasso’s antecedent involvement with African art is not, in my view, put behind, but remains an indwelling force. Picasso had embraced African art because, he explained, it had struck him

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as “plus raisonnable”—more conceptually structured, he thought, than the art of the West. The energy he derived from it—not from this or that piece of tribal motif, but from the aggregate he beheld at the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro—was a freedom and an obligation. Faced with a run of African figures, Picasso discovered the ineluctable mutability of the makeable. The task henceforth was threefold: firstly, to recognize that familiar end products, such as home furnishings or anatomy, were variably divisible and recomposable. In the projective interpretations of vision, facial features could be signs on a disk, modifiers of a spheroid mass, markings inside a hollow; the face of a man could be changeably complex or simple, flat as a mask or bivalve as a prow. A head was a cluster of pellets, a puzzle of cubes, a diffraction of planes; or again a single block gouged, whittled, corrugated, and so on and on; as though intrinsic anatomical structure depended on the schema and materials the sculptor or painter brought to its fabrication. Secondly, since African sculptures tended to stand symmetrical and inert, the task was to animate their rigidity through changing moods, gestures, and postures, and, above all, by continual reorientations; in other words, to rethink the unstable stereometrics of forms in motion. Thirdly, as these three-dimensional variants, changeable both in material structure and orientation, must be impressed upon an unsympathetic flat ground, every drawing of even so old familiar an object as a human head would become a new feasibility study (fig. 6.8). Nor can I look at the Cubist Girl with a Mandolin (fig. 6.9) without seeing its formal-representational syntax codetermined by what Picasso had made of that prior experience. In Picasso’s evolved Cubist syntax of 1910, the collective message of African art—not in superficial manifestations of striated hatching or pie-wedge noses, but essentially as Picasso received it—is still at work. A head, torso, or bottle by the Cubist Picasso is still a rethinking and a reimagining of its total ever fluctuant stereometry; and in that sense the work is still driven by the license derived from African art. Without that resource, at once reductive and liberating, the richness

and the radicalism of Picasso’s Cubist invention makes no historic sense.

6. Scorekeeping “One man cannot overtake another unless both are running in the same direction,” said G. K. Chesterton. This homely wisdom informs Rubin’s historic perspective and careful wording. He never forgets that if Braque is to be ahead of Picasso at any point, both men must first have been placed on the same track and given a common objective. Only then can Braque’s painting from late 1907 “until at least the summer of 1909” be “more advanced in the direction of what proved to be High Analytical Cubism.”36 But how apt is the metaphor implicit in being ahead or more advanced?—as though Braque

Figure 6.8. Head, Paris, June 1907, Z.II/2.680. Private collection.

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Figure 6.9. Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny

Tellier), Paris, spring 1910. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest.

and Picasso had both received the same charge to begin at Cézanne and proceed forthwith toward Cubism. The notorious similarity of their works in 1911 is deceptive and superficial. Picasso and Braque, it seems to me, start from different places, carry different baggage, and, in the longer sequence, move toward different goals; so that their respective courses look more like an intersection than like parallel lanes on a single art-historical track.

And the terms of the race course (more advanced, behind, catching up, and so forth) are out of place for this further reason: a runner aiming to win should have only one thought in mind—to make the finish line as fast as possible; and we do not require such narrow purpose from someone who makes paintings, least of all from the bravest painter of our time—or, if yours is Matisse, the second bravest.

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elcome my favorite bottle, the one guarding the upper left quarter of a vintage Picasso collage (fig. 7.1). It is, of course, misbegotten; two bottle types rolled into one. If this offense has been long overlooked, look at it now without prejudice. The lever at shoulder height and the deep armpit that gives the lever its play—these are features that would make it a common siphon, and a “siphon” it’s been called ever since. But here’s the problem. A purebred siphon (fig. 7.2) is sealed at the top and needs a spout opposite to the lever, and this much Picasso knew. He had painted its kind accurately in 1901, when he painted the Absinthe Drinker (fig. 7.3). So did fellow painters, many times over (fig. 7.4).1 Yet this dysfunctional bottle, lacking any lateral outlet, opens instead at the top, where it gapes for the ghost of a cork. Such is the consequence of miscegenation: an outlandish hybrid, a wine bottle crossed with a siphon! Observe these types, the two of them in a wagon-bar, minding their distance in public (fig. 7.5). And our acquaintance with their unruly offspring has barely begun. Whether siphon or bottle, we take it to be of the sort that comes like the rest of us in bilateral symmetry, i.e., with a neck centered on likely shoulders. But the freak in the Stockholm collage shows one atrophied flank, a shoulder wanting its proper span, so that its debit side aligns with the neck, posting deficit down to the bottom line. The deprivation tends to go unobserved, but a simple experiment exposes the artist’s bluff. Lay a thin object over that cunning incision and the lopsidedness of the bottle leaps to the eye.

Touring the Stockholm Collage

Why is it not normally noticed? Because of the care Picasso brought to the scissoring of the cavetto under that lever (which I should never have called an armpit). This beak-like incision has its upper contour finetuned to mimic the curvature of the opposite shoulder. Thanks to its similar shaping, the vacancy produced by the cut feigns parity with embodiment. The phantom shoulder grows voluptuous enough to insinuate fullness of body all the way down. “Deficit” is disguised and the bottle’s imbalance rendered so inapparent that no bottle fancier ever complained. This bid to annex, to incorporate—this maneuver by which a caved hollow is suddenly reified—strikes me as a move of exceptional daring. The familiar leveling of mass and void in Analytical Cubism offers no precedent. Nor is it like those negative spaces which, being shaped all around, hallucinate into palpable objects— like the top of the siphon in Cassandre’s Wagon-Bar poster, or like a Doric intercolumniation (fig. 7.6).2 To such conversion we have long grown accustomed. You find plentiful instances in Picasso and in commercial work ever since (see p. 209, note 24). More recondite, far more risqué, is the voided shoulder in the Stockholm collage, where a near nil swells into plenitude. As if the scanted side of the bottle replenished itself in the clasp of a single parenthesis. Decades later, we shall see A shorter version of this essay originally formed part of the lecture “The Intelligence of Picasso” (ch. 1). Steinberg expanded it in 2007 for the exhibition catalogue Picasso Cubiste/Cubist Picasso (Paris, Musée National Picasso), pp. 165–71. This is the version published here, with minor revisions following Steinberg’s notes.

Figure 7.1. Bottle, Glass, and Violin, Paris, December 1912. Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Purchase 1967.

blankness similarly incorporated in the ironworks of Julio González and in more than one Matisse découpage.3 One more homage to our versatile siphon. Its midriff simulates a manufacturer’s label bearing the legend “proposition intéressante.” Obviously, this foursquare mid-portion is of a piece with the rest of the cutting, not separately glued down. Yet, thanks to its situation, it gets to preen like a label, as if pasted on, and this prompts a thought. Isn’t such pasting the very gist of collage? Then this mimicry, the pretense of privileged label status, mocks the whole system. It becomes a joshing self-reference, an aside on the mendacity of repre-

sentation. The whole still life, starting at this perjured label and proceeding from left to right, is ushered in with a sly prologue: a non-collaged collage-simulation to introduce a collage. I suspect (on no solid evidence) that the Stockholm papier collé began at the bottle. Accordingly, deferring to primogeniture, I devote five paragraphs to this firstborn as usher to the rest of the clan—whose mounting impatience is unmistakable. The still life lays out four household items. A Paris newspaper, showing only its masthead and bias, leaves the bottle behind to approach an oversize, loose-jointed

Figure 7.2. (left) Siphon bottle from

the Petit Larousse illustré, 1917. Figure 7.3. (right) The Absinthe Drinker, Paris, summer–autumn, 1901. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

Figure 7.4. Fernand Léger, Le siphon, 1924. Buffalo, NY, AlbrightKnox Art Gallery; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Bunshaft.

Figure 7.5. A. M. Cassandre, Restaurez-vous au Wagon-Bar,

1932.

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Figure 7.6. Photograph of the Temple of Hera Argiva, Paestum, 5th century BC.

wineglass of distinctly Cubist persuasion. The glass sidles up to a violin, of which more below. Underlying the latter, but barely hinted at near the right margin, I discern the edge of a tabletop hoisting one or two provisional upper right corners. I scan the field, and count the pasted-on newspaper scraps. Discounting the B-shaped faux bois at far right (which misinterprets the violin’s undulations), I tally five pieces of newsprint and watch them mutate—watch how they undergo speciation to convert sameness of substance into sheer difference. Revert to the bottle. Silhouetted on neutral ground, it posits a tangible object. The tiny lettering on it, laid sideways for illegibility, becomes mere surface texture. It could be the fizz inside, bubbling up.4 But there is no doubting the bottle’s claim to be a compact, freestanding hulk, a soi-disant cylindrical body. No other snippet of newsprint in this procession comes with comparable pretension.

Next, the all-too-legible masthead, the word “Journal” closely trimmed; a clipped logo wherein printed word and material conveyor, the legend and its requisite vehicle, are seen to be consubstantial, flat unto flat and made for each other—unlike the adjacent embottlement, the hybrid siphon in arbitrary symbiosis with the physique of cheap paper. Thirdly, a wineglass charcoal- drawn over printed matter. But the ground that plays host to this glass comes with spatial ambitions. It offers a haven into which the glass throws a shadow—for I don’t see how else to read the stain at its right. The stain tells what the artist had just neglected to mention: that a glass of this sort is, for all its transparent fragility, a creature of substance. Though presently in reduced circumstances, this shaky pile once had solid credentials, and is therefore, by virtue of former status, entitled to cast a shadow. And hospitality to such shadow renders its glued-paper ambience recessive and vaguely spatial. Note the helpful little inset at top showing a ship at sea and evoking both open space and liquidity.5 Fourthly, at upper right, the pegbox of a violin, traced over a trapezoid clip from the same paper. But here the newsprint serves only to disillusion. Unlike its neighbor, it hints at no depth of field. Nor is it, like the pinched Journal masthead, ingrown with its message; and its shape outlines no touchable thing, such as a bottle. This fourth installment of newsprint consents to be nothing more than the artist’s work surface, interchangeable with any alternative patch, so long as it’s flat and fit to be drawn on. Why, then, was it needed? Could not the mesh of scrollwork and tuning pegs rest as safely on the original white paper ground? It could not, since that ground’s stability had proved deceptive ever since the freestanding siphon had rarefied all its surround into thin air. This airiness, stealing across the field even to upper right, would have cautioned the draftsman that you cannot impress charcoal on atmosphere. In a letter to Braque (October 9, 1912), Picasso complains that we must apply pasted paper and other stuff to overcome “our awful canvas.”6 Hence the urgent underprop of

Touring the Sto ckholm Coll age

textured newsprint, laying a floor sturdy enough to take pressure. Blank paper or canvas is evidently too flighty to secure stable grounding. So then the trapeziform paper at upper right does indeed signify: it “means”—if “means” is the right word— something to draw on, a utility which the support sheet had forfeited when it allowed itself to etherealize. The newspaper plundered for the Stockholm collage furnished one further item—a blank, printless rectangle erected at bottom center: deadpan and down-to-earth like a conjurer’s prop; or like an actor in mufti taking a curtain call; or like a blob of paint on the palette of a painter’s self-portrait. The bare matter of it, stripped of transfiguring magic. A handful of paper scraps. Picasso’s tableau vivant stages five clippings of newsprint, and has them perform five distinct roles to transubstantiate the stuff they are made of. If the careers of these papers all began in the trash where Picasso recruited them, their differentiation has been so managed that now each singleton struts unlike its neighbor, not one doubles another’s substance. The drinking glass next. As an instance of Cubist glassware, this typical specimen exhibits a process usually described as “dissecting” or “taking the thing apart.” Both terms imply the anatomizing of a previous integrity, and both, it seems to me, show a period bias. “Dissection” hints at scientific procedure; “taking apart” suggests a healthy curiosity about the structure of things. But if words like “dissection” applied to Cubism were at first well intentioned, they hardly prevail against the commoner reflex to shrink from Picasso’s alleged lust to destroy. You can imagine yourself toasting a friend with a glass served by Chardin. But who wants to finger the remains of a glass shattered in a Cubist rampage? Many good folks still recoil from the havoc, still view the dismemberment of an unoffending wineglass or fiddle as intentionally destructive. And they condemn as sadistic the similar mayhem Picasso elsewhere inflicts on faces and limbs. How do you pacify this majority of integrity-loving moralists? What is needed, I think, is to see the Cubist

Picasso drive conflicting impulses as one team. Recognize first that his apparent dismembering subserves an overriding will to assemble, to bring things together. If, in one recent description, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907) “explodes in unprecedented, harrowing disjunctiveness,” 7 I observe, without disagreeing, that nothing in this picture is loosed, scattered as in the aftermath of an explosion. Each of these five convening bodies coheres, and the picture contracts like a tight fist, while grappling even the viewer into complicity. Things blown apart can only disperse; Picasso’s implosions consolidate. Is the image, then, strewn or congested— or somehow inexplicably both?8 Why this skewed emphasis? Is it because devastation is more exhilarating than assemblage? Let me halt at this quandary a moment longer. What of the Three Women of the following year (fig. 5.1), impacted almost beyond endurance. Move on to 1909: a unitive energy clenches the Horta landscapes as well as the clinging crags that pack the heads of his companion Fernande (1909; figs. 1.28, 1.29, 5.18, 1.35–1.41). And so in 1910, with Cubism at high tide. Only a compulsion to dramatize cohesion itself—to rethink every entity as a process of consummation— could have envisioned the density, the compression that amassed Picasso’s great portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910; fig. 1.20). It is this same imagination that soon after (spring 1912) wills constructed sculpture into existence, scorning the foregone compaction of monoliths and modeled clay (fig. 3.11). But the craving to watch consolidation in action was unremitting throughout, even in the making of Cubism. Back to the wineglass in the Stockholm collage. Is it useful to think of some prior wholeness which Picasso dismantles to erect in its stead that skeleton of a glass? “Taking apart” implies that we see an antecedent integrity disintegrating before our eyes. But why not reverse? Why not join Picasso in seeing a compound coming together on paper? Suppose him intending a tabled glass as he sets out to draw. How shall he proceed when neither the virgin paper, nor his charcoal, nor the successive moves of his hand share any-

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thing much with the object that wants to be drawn— unless he impute his progressive moves to the object’s gestation. He may have begun at the bowl, thinking its elevation from the top down: a level rim expressible as a straight horizontal; then, dropped from its poles, two inclined parallels. They tilt, as glasses do when they give you to drink. Reaching bottom, the bowl’s level floor subtends an arc, surely to indicate circularity. And it rests on an upright stem—ah! verticality. Down goes a perpendicular stroke, agreeable to both charcoal and paper. But wait. This upright is incidented. Its profile modulates from straight to swerve, and there’s room on the left to declare it, and then to acknowledge the stem’s circular base. Down goes the trace of a flat-footed curve. But curvature here is pervasive way up to the brim, which now yields its full round to the thought of it. What, in sum, has the artist assembled? Lineaments of the object’s four constituent parts seriatim, plus three alternative modes of representation: the top in plan, stem and bowl in elevation, the foot in perspective. An extraordinary agglomeration. All aboard? No, not quite yet, since this improvised pile looks disembodied, schematic. Well, then, let it cast a shadow, the way bodies do. Done! I beg your pardon; I have belabored this fantasy to express my sense that we are not seeing the dismembering of a thing, but a compounding of data fetched from the mind’s eye and from the eye’s meditation. What Picasso in this instance collects is not shards of glass, but select predicates. Whatever is to be predicated of that wineglass enters here as a distinct datum—like a speech act that adds information about an object already named. If the “dissection” misnomer is at all apropos to Picasso’s imagery during this collage phase of Cubism, it is the separation of predicates and their consequent collocation in a manner tentative or provisional. In short, Picasso is not tormenting the objects of his design, but recollecting, gathering their conceptualized portions into a joyous bouquet. Think of the blazons penned by enamored Renaissance poets. When they compliment milady’s eyes, breasts, and feet, no one

protests that she’s been sliced up for a salad of dainty morsels (see p. 31). The separation of predicates, whereby Picasso’s late Cubism approximates the habits of language, is one of his crucial moves. It becomes an activating resource which the violin in the Stockholm collage brings to a spectacular climax. Describe it I can’t. Here is a thicket too dense and a clearance too sudden-bright to be satisfied with a couple of paragraphs. Better resort to rhetorical paraleipsis, leave undescribed the violin’s cresting top, where scroll and pegbox convolve in stately entanglement; where the tuning pegs display differential phases of turning, but without room to revolve in; where the strings, which a truant fingerboard leaves unaccompanied, shoot up- and inward like orthogonals in perspective, while cascading to where their future looms down at the bridge. Daunted by the given complexity, I take only the merest notice of Picasso’s redistribution of predicates: on the right, a “B” sign in faux bois for the violin’s characteristic ex-curvatures, i.e., upper and lower bout, but with their cleavage compressed, which leaves the intervening concave, the reversed middle bout, crossing over to subjoin the stem of the wineglass. A new deal, so to speak. To say nothing of the twin sound-holes, deprived of their sibling likeness to signal, among other things, the availability of degrees of abstraction. But this violin will not be adequately described until we have a quarterly journal wholly dedicated to its discussion. The maiden issue might meditate on the upheave of the soundboard; its indeterminate slope; the way it perplexes its nearest neighbors, lifting off the surrounding whites and forcing the very picture plane to deflate. This high-strung instrument, most triumphantly vertical at the crest, settles in mid-career to comply with the tabletop—then terminates in the sheer drop of a segment shape that recalls the hinged flap of a drop-leaf table.9 The segment or crescent shape which routinely bottoms his violins and guitars must have been especially dear to Picasso. During the autumn–winter 1912–13, it

Touring the Sto ckholm Coll age

keeps turning up, either scaled to the instrument’s body, or else grossly enlarged. The Stockholm collage puts it in proper place, but stretched wide enough to prick the outer edge of the table. Such precise contact suggests that we are seeing this segment shape doubly derived, parented by both drop leaf and violin, which assorts with the geniture of the mongrel at upper left of this picture, the one jointly sired by wine bottle and siphon. Furthermore, at this lower right corner, the sudden dip of the segment restores verticality to the field, reclaims kinship with the upstanding patch of blank newsprint at center, and so back to that introductory bottle, where the grand tour began. If the ride has been bumpy, especially at the right, it’s because here the picture plane as a regulator has proved most unreliable. The heave of the violin’s soundboard we could have forgiven, were it not for the aggravating misconduct of the f-holes within it. The fat one bulks so much closer to us than its starved twin that we must locate the pair of them in oblique recession, whereas the frontality of the system and a decent respect for the picture plane should permit no such violation. Of this disconcerting anomaly, Rosalind Krauss wrote with deep insight in 1992. I quote with a few venial elisions: If Cubism could not produce the illusion of depth as present, collage honored its absence by summoning it as a meaning that would be inscribed on the pictorial surface. . . . The earliest and most abiding form of this inscription is to be found in the f-holes of the collage’s violin. These fs, so blatantly disparate in size and thickness, are what Picasso creates as the suspended emblem . . . of a plane’s turning away into depth, so that, as it turns, its two identical incisions grow steadily unequal within our field of vision. Lifted from the foreshortened surface of a depicted violin to remain . . . a detached and weightless phantom, these wildly mismatched fs take their place on the insistently frontal plane of the collage’s violin, not to dispute that frontality but instead to inscribe it with the pronouncement of a depth nowhere to be seen.10

Nowhere to be seen—except, I would add, in the deepening, square-cornered recess behind the violin’s strings. You can read this arcanum several ways; in my preferred reading, as a pocket of murk breaching the frontality of the picture plane and louring beneath. This sudden entry to a dark, secret cave: how far inward or under? Doesn’t it almost literally undermine what we used to call “the integrity of the picture plane”? But then, what exactly defines this pictorial arena, in which or on which painters deposit their mark? When the Renaissance definition of the picture plane as a virtual window went out of style, what replaced it— inviolable frontality, flat bedrock, “the Cubist grid”? Is this picture plane necessarily homogeneous, or is it irritable and unpredictably fickle, characterized only by reactivity, all things to all people, open wide to all comers? Let’s face it, your picture plane is a whore; to Picasso, a wanton consort to dally and dance with till death do us part.

Appendix: Glass and Bottle of Suze, 191211 The picture (fig. 7.7) displays, against an oval blue ground, which may be read as the sign of a tabletop, a bottle of Suze—an aperitif that never caught on in America—and a glass.12 Though the bottle is presented in flat silhouette—a white tapering strip of pasted paper with a flat label on it—we are assured, four times over, and by four distinct means, that the bottle is round: at the top, by the circularity of the stopper; at the neck, by a black crescent; halfway down, by the black, wraparound shadow—which I find most extraordinary; and at the base, by a semicircular cutout that reads ambiguously as the base of the bottle or as an exposed portion of the surface it stands on. What needs to be seen is the disconnection between the flat shape Picasso gives to the bottle and the separate statements about its being cylindrical. In other words, the bottle’s roundness is given—not to instant sensation, but to the intelligence that connects. Near it stands a glass consisting of the usual three parts: a circular base or foot, and a narrow stem under the cup or bowl. This is the classic Cubist formulation

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Figure 7.7. Glass and Bottle of Suze, Paris, November 1912. St. Joseph, MO, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1946.

Touring the Sto ckholm Coll age

of an object, admirable in logic and deserving better than purely negative terms, such as dismemberment, distortion, or even discontinuity. Obviously, the glass is not meant as an optical analogue to our normal perception of glasses, but as a combination of signs. The third dimension is more than acknowledged; it is insisted on, but never in continuity with the two-dimensional profile. Only if both the twoand the three-dimensional are reduced to signs (Picasso seems to be saying), only then can they achieve parity in the pictorial field. The stem of the glass is a wedge of cut paper pasted down flat, straight-edged at the bottom. But Picasso observes that this upright stem rests on a circular base. So he encircles the stem with a charcoal line that climbs and coils high enough to insinuate that the whole stem is cylindrical. And so we come to the bowl or cup. And because it rises in flat elevation, Picasso feels compelled to add that it too is of circular section, perfectly round; which he does by means of a pasted-on disk. Since this light gray disk overlaps the cup, we understand it to have no independent location. It coexists with the cup in the same place, as an attribute of the cup. Thus we pass from a cylindrical upright support, which is solid, to a body of circular section, larger in radius, and thought to be hollow. The cup itself, made of a piece of shaped newsprint, is off center and with a penchant to lean. I wonder why; is it because a glass is meant to be handled and tipped? So that its obliquity would refer to its willingness to be tilted; the potential use of the object becoming part of its definition? Perhaps. Or else Picasso tilted the

cup the way a capital letter is tilted when set in italics. Since it’s a sign, the letter’s semantic value will not be affected; and Picasso here may be reversing the argument: tilt the cup into italics, and you know it’s not an optical analogue, but a sign. It remains to discourse on the cup’s upper rim. Flattopped in elevation, it would show an ellipse in perspective—a fact so obvious that half the ellipse will do. There is more. Picasso has yet to remark that the glass is light-struck. Hence the charcoal shadow that cascades down the middle. Nor is there need to bring the shadow down all the way. After all, when you say that someone’s cheek is in shadow, you don’t need to add that this shadow runs all the way down to the chin. That would insult our intelligence. Is that all? No, for the cutout blackness behind the glass suggests a cast shadow—another confirmation that this assemblage of signs stands for a solid body. Its roundness is given— not to instant sensation, but to the intelligence that connects. In traditional illusionistic styles, all such data cohere. In the Picasso collage, every reference to the stereometry of the glass is put down as a separate predicate. Five indicators of three-dimensionality are brought into play; a linear coil at the bottom; an open disk; a hatched shadow; a foreshortened ellipse; and a cast shadow—all disjunct, discontinuous, drawn from diverse notional systems and rendered in different materials to forestall any slurring of their requisite isolation. We can say, then, that Picasso has invented, for representational art, the separation of predicates. The intelligible sensible qualities of the object are given discursively—as in language.

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Eight

D

ining out with my new friends Victor and Sally Ganz sometime in 1957, I asked a question so loaded that Victor wondered whether to trust me with a straight answer. I had just seen their apartment at 1175 Park Avenue—four Ganz children in it and an abundance of Ganz Picassos, Picassos on every wall and no other art—not so much as a Braque to blunt the effect (though I would later discover two Matisse lithographs in a bathroom). Most of the vintage years were represented—1907, 1923, 1932; but the parade included unabashed 1940s material as well as a batch from the mid-1950s, when, according to that decade’s critical judgment, Picasso had long been coasting downhill (see pp. 110–12). Victor thought otherwise. A businessman with as yet no personal contacts in the art world, he persisted against skepticism under both kinds—the naive and the informed. His business friends regarded him (and his holdings in what one of them called “his Picassios”) as slightly cuckoo. Readers of Clement Greenberg (described in those days as “a critic who’s just never wrong”) would have thought Victor misguided. Misguided or no, Victor decked his home with ever more paintings and sculptures, drawings, and prints until, as far as the eye could see, no upright surface lacked its Picasso, while temporary excess (anticipating a move to larger quarters) stuffed the maid’s room. For virulent Picassophilia I knew of no case more severe; hence, at our first meal together, my impertinent query: “What’s this with you and Picasso?” Victor consulted his wife: “Shall I tell him?” Sally shrugged, “Go ahead.” Victor, grinning: “I think I am Picasso.”

In the Algerian Room

Then, composing his mouth (Daisy Barr, Alfred Barr’s acute wife, declared that mouth to be the finestchiseled ever seen on a man), Victor confided: “You and I,” he said, “belong to a generation that has always taken Picasso’s genius for granted. But people complained that one couldn’t live with his pictures, whereas all I wanted was exactly that—live with them.” This he did. Intimately. In 1941, he made his first acquisition, the 1932 Dream, for $7,000; and went on to accommodate even the harshest, the most abrasive disturbers of peace. Above Sally and Victor’s bed hung a huge, jagged, somber-toned Reclining Nude of 1942 (purchased in 1956), a female sleeper so remote from conventional loveliness that Picasso himself was impressed— impressed, I suspect, by the love that would admit such a sleeping companion. When Victor and Sally met with Picasso in 1970 and mentioned the wild thing over their bed, old Pablo, then going on ninety, leapt from his chair to impart a dark secret: “And do you know what I do when the two of you sleep?” He doubled over and, arming his temples with makeshift horns, stalked the Ganz couple around the table, a goblin rehearsing his nightly haunt and promoting that Manhattan bedroom to a ménage à trois.

Originally published in A Life of Collecting: Victor and Sally Ganz, edited by Michael Fitzgerald (New York, 1997), pp. 64–67, on the occasion of the sale of the Ganz Collection at Christie’s, New York, November 10, 1997. Steinberg here gives a personal account of his first meeting with Picasso’s Algiers series, which later evolved into “ The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 125–234.

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As Victor was telling me this, Sally recalled the male gaze of those Andalusian eyes: “Try to imagine what it means to a woman my age to be looked at like that.” But this was spoken a generation ago, before the monster misogynist in Picasso was advertised. Or the manipulator. Just how engaged was the artist in managing his financial affairs and his market? From their visit with the old prankster, the Ganzes brought back one other small revelation. It concerns the Femmes d’Alger series of 1954–55, which Victor had bought from Picasso’s dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, at its

first showing in Paris, 1955. The purchase had not been easy, since the buyer, as Kahnweiler explained with regret, had to take all or nothing, all fifteen canvases. The price for this bumper was unaffordably steep, but Kahnweiler swore that he was following orders; it was Picasso who insisted that the crop be sold as one lot. Fifteen years after the sale, artist and buyer now face-to-face, it turned out that Picasso was innocent. The one-lot stipulation—one more Picasso misattribution—was Kahnweiler’s way of ensuring that he would not be stuck with unwanted duds after selling off the prize

Figure 8.1. The Algerian Room at the home of Victor and Sally Ganz, 1997. Canvas H is on the left wall, M foreground right, and K next to it; canvas O is on the back wall.

In the Algerian Ro om

items. Getting the story from Victor Ganz, Picasso, according to Victor, seemed mildly peeved, and amused. (That Picasso’s protestation of innocence might have been less than honest did not occur to me at the time. It becomes thinkable, as film buffs learn to perceive Picasso in the persona of Anthony Hopkins.) Victor and Sally had kept the five Femmes d’Alger pictures which they loved best—one small study and four of the big ones, all hanging together in the “Algerian Room” (fig. 8.1). This is where I came to know them and where, years later, I experienced a minor epiphany. I’d like to share this personal recollection, even though it’s rather long in the telling and perhaps too technical for the present occasion; worse still, the protagonist doesn’t enter until the last act. But that late entry puts Victor Ganz where I want to remember him. A dinner party in the Ganz home, now relocated in a duplex at 10 Gracie Square. Our hosts and most of the company were still at table, while I and an American sculptor of reputation made for Algiers. We sat down facing H, no. 8 of Les Femmes d’Alger (fig. 8.2), the first of the large canvases in the series. The sculptor said it was a very good picture. I disagreed; the sleeping nude at the right had always struck me as an offense. I disliked the way her trunk falls apart, like a butchered carcass. And the drawing was sloppy, perhaps deliberately perverse, especially at the bottom, where the deformations seemed impatient, senseless, grotesque. But even as I was talking, a nagging compunction made me turn around to look at the corresponding passage in the canvas behind us, M, the antepenultimate in the series (fig. 8.3). And then I saw—for the first time after such long acquaintance—what Picasso was actually doing. Comparing the sleeper in these two canvases, it became suddenly clear that Picasso was all along wrestling an impossibility. His chosen problem was to pose the sleeper simultaneously on her back and on her stomach; sunny-side up and turned over—not successively, but both views at once and as one compact body. Put another way: the sleeper’s torso in canvas M shows two left sides and no right—one left side recto, and

the same again verso. Belly and upper breast represent her supine—arms overhead, a blank face above folded hands. The underside of the image shows the girl prone, seen from her left, head resting on folded hands. Most amazing to me was her long rigid base—a black rod and no more; yet one end of it, overlapping a breast, defines the heart side, while its other end, before tucking under, contours her lower back viewed once again from the right. How on earth were these shifts engineered? Could this straight edge be a rotating shaft, turning while I wasn’t looking? The coincidence of opposite aspects—to be seen not in succession, but in solid simultaneity—seems a crazy idea: it is so plainly impossible. As every beach bunny knows, even the sun can’t flatter front and back in one beam. Does Picasso’s eye presume to do better? No doubt, Picasso’s intention here is more easily recognized now than it was thirty years ago. Pictures gradually educate, and one learns to read what had been inapparent or unsuspected. I therefore ask for indulgence if the sleeper’s duplicity now looks self-evident; time was when the “decoding” seemed an exhilarating discovery. It made a new man of me, one who finally understood the design of that sleeper, its bid to compress divergent aspects in convergent form. What I had taken for arbitrary mayhem, for carelessness or provocation, was rather the effort to incorporate simultaneity at any cost. What had looked like disruption now appeared as an impulse to reconcile, to bring disparate aspects together. I learned something, too, about resistance, the need to dispute visual evidence when it upsets. The sculptor with me promptly denied that anything like front-back simultaneity was involved; he thought the figure merely reordered on Cubist lines. Not until he was asked to identify first the upper breast, then the lower, did he concede that both featured the body’s left side, diversely viewed. He then said no more—just kept looking. As other guests filed in one by one, each answering the same question, each at first read the sleeper as on her back, hoisted legs propped on a taboret. Then, asked to consider each breast in turn, they admitted the composite reading—with feelings ranging from initial

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Figure 8.2. Women of Algiers, H, Paris, January 24, 1955. Collection of Helly Nahmad.

Figure 8.3. Women of Algiers, M, Paris, February 11, 1955. Private collection.

In the Algerian Ro om

embarrassment to delight. One famous art expert produced a characteristic reaction. Having first read the posture simplistically, and realizing at last how complex it was, he maneuvered: “Nothing new here; simultaneity had been around ever since Cubism, 1911.” He had vaulted from denying its presence to declaring it commonplace. Wrong on both counts. Then hostess Sally walked in, underwent the same inquisition and the same passage from errancy to enlightenment, but in her case followed by a rueful reflection: “I’m not sure I deserve to live with these pictures if I don’t see what goes on in them.” Enter at last Victor Ganz, whom we asked with feigned nonchalance how he read the pose of the sleeper in figure 8.3—all of us holding our breath. The answer

came calmly delivered: “She lies supine on her back and prone on her belly at the same time.” So he’d known all along, without telling a soul, not even Sally, and who else would have cared? Everybody fell silent and stared at the canvas over the couch. During the first fifteen years of the life of this picture, the sleeper in it had been understood by only two men: by him who had painted it, and by him who desired to live with it. In his attention to what was actually there, neglecting even to label the picture “Cubist,” Victor had been rethinking Picasso’s thought. Perhaps that’s what he meant when he parried my first pertinent question with a quip. I learned a lot in those twenty postprandial minutes; not least, that a collector, a rare collector, deserves the great art he owns.

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September 2, 1968/I. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Reiss-Cohen Inc., 1986.

Figure 9.2. Suite 347, no. 310 (Raphael and la Fornarina XV), Mougins, September 4, 1968/I. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Reiss-Cohen Inc., 1986.

Figure 9.3. Suite 347, no. 311 (Raphael and la Fornarina XVI), Mougins,

Figure 9.4. Suite 347, no. 314 (Raphael and la Fornarina XIX), Mougins,

September 4, 1968/II. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Reiss-Cohen Inc., 1986.

September 5, 1968/I. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Reiss-Cohen Inc., 1986.

Figure 9.1. Suite 347, no. 305 (Raphael and la Fornarina IX), Mougins,

N i ne

W

ithin Picasso’s compendium of prints known as the Suite 347, one group of twenty-two consecutive etchings exhibits a more or less constant combination of elements: a young painter in Renaissance costume copulates with his model, while an older person—pope, patron, or potentate—peers in or looks on (figs. 9.1–9.4). An easel nearby supports an oval canvas depicting the model nude; this feature, as the series unfolds, shrinks continually and disappears from the final plates. Near the end, a new element enters—the wizened face of an old man peeping out from under the couple’s couch (nos. 314, 316, 317; figs. 9.4, 9.6). The twenty-two plates—nos. 296–317 in the Suite— were produced during an eleven-day spurt, August 29 to September 8, 1968—a few weeks before the artist turned eighty-seven.1 Accordingly, their subject matter has been explained as a confession of senile impotence and a recourse to the compensations of voyeurism. But such interpretations, usually offered by potent young men too pressed for time to gather the data, qualify the interpreter only for the iconography of adult bookstores. They remind us of Goethe’s remark that the old forfeit a natural human birthright—the right to be judged by their equals (see p. 188). A recent article on the Suite 347 by Gert Schiff is of another order.2 Its subtitle, “Painting as an Act of Love,” conveys the author’s essential intuition. Our twentytwo etchings are saved from pornography for art by being described as “variations” on Ingres’s painting of Raphael with his mistress-model, la Fornarina (fig. 9.5).3 Whether Ingres’s actual picture inspired the etchings may be open to question. Their cursive line—as if the

A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch

figures were written rather than drawn—brings up other associations. The figures sport an artificial art context, like playing-card characters on a spree. Nevertheless, the invocation of Raphael as artistlover is a suggestive lead. Compare the face of the bucking hero in no. 317 (fig. 9.6) with the picture which the Louvre formerly, when Picasso first lived in Paris, exhibited as Raphael’s self-portrait: the same bland classical profile framed by long hair and beret (fig. 9.7). Picasso may have been moved to join the Old Master relay by his passion for continuity: from Raphael to Ingres to Pablo Picasso—himself in the homestretch, preceded by a couple of forerunners, to both of whom he has compared himself favorably.4 There may have been deeper motives. Raphael is the Old Master who never aged. He is the type of the eternal painter whose place is in the Pantheon, forever exalted by fellow immortals like Ingres. But exalted in his humanity. Vasari reports that “Raphael was very amorous and fond of women, and was continually pressed into their service.” A Raphael in action, then, is the image of the youthful Renaissance genius who loves and paints—paints what he loves, loves what he paints. Still, as one looks at Picasso’s etchings, their supposed derivation from Ingres’s Raphael seems remote. Picasso’s licentious compositions, with their supernumerary attendants, refuse to confirm the connection, and we

Originally published in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (November–December 1972), pp. 102–5. In addition to revisions following Steinberg’s notes, the final two paragraphs incorporate a correction he published five years later.

n in e [172]

conclude that his concept depends not on Ingres’s chaste visualization but on a felt necessity to depart from it. Ingres’s picture—he painted the subject five times between 1813 and 18655—illustrates a romance which Vasari had launched in a few scattered references. We are informed that Raphael’s confidential agent, Baviera, “had charge of a woman whom Raphael loved to death, of whom the master painted a very beautiful portrait, which appeared no less than alive.” Elsewhere, Vasari refers to several portraits Raphael painted of women, “among them his own mistress.” We hear that in his pursuit of diletti carnali, his friends “showed him perhaps too much indulgence”; that “when Agostino Chigi, his close friend, employed him to paint the first loggia in his palace, Raphael neglected the work for one of his mistresses. Agostino, in despair, had the lady brought to his house to live in the part where Raphael was at work.” And, finally: “Raphael, like a good Christian, sent away his mistress before making his will, but left her the means to live decently.”6

Figure 9.5. Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, Raphael and la Fornarina, 1840. Columbus, OH, Columbus Museum of Art; Bequest of Frederick W. Schumacher.

Figure 9.6. Suite 347, no. 317 (Raphael and la Fornarina XXII), Mougins,

September 8, 1968/II.

Figure 9.7. Attributed to Parmigianino, Portrait of a Young Man,

c. 1525. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Formerly considered a Raphael self-portrait.

A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch

How many of those plural mistresses were in fact one and the same is not clear from Vasari, who is concerned more with itemizing Raphael’s works than with his women. But Ingres’s reading took him beyond the anonymity of the historical character to that fanciful eighteenth-century elaboration which fleshed out the lady with a fictitious identity; by 1800 she had become a baker’s daughter, la Fornarina—the title attaching itself to the most sensuous of Raphael’s female portraits, the seated half-nude in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome.7 In Ingres’s picture, the noble painter suffers the beautiful girl to sit on his knee; she dotes on him, he on his art; she, catching our eye as if to say, “look at me, look what I got”; he, saying nothing, drawn back to the unfinished work on the easel. The painter indeed does love, but after his fashion—in conflict. Ingres’s successive takes show the great lovemaker progressively disengaged yet ever further enveloped and interlocked. The message is about the claims of erotic attachment as against the vocation of art. In two of Ingres’s versions, a third party, usually interpreted as Raphael’s brilliant assistant, Giulio Romano, appears in the background.8 Not, I think, as a voyeur, but as a reproach. The assistant is not watching the young master make love, but seeing the work interrupted. If such interruptions continue, the picture says, why then Raphael’s supreme masterpiece, the Transfiguration (visible in the background of fig. 9.5), may never get finished, and Giulio himself may have to complete it! Even the painted figures in the lower right of that giant canvas seem aghast.9 “Povero Raffaello! ” exclaims the Abbé Comolli, whose Raphael biography of 1790 Ingres had used as his text. “Poor Raphael . . . desperately pursuing a ruinous passion.” And again: His passion for beautiful women was ever alive and became his downfall. Indeed, I would almost call it his rage for women had not Raphael often declared that he was not transported by women as such, but by beautiful ones, since it was from their beautiful faces that he derived the beauty of his art; but the end proved otherwise, and his days ended all too

soon from his having succumbed too much to his passion. . . . Oh the humiliation of it! Raphael of Urbino, the foremost painter of the universe, the fairest genius of his century, the most honorable in every virtue, at the pinnacle of his glory, in the flower of his years, behold him brought low by a woman, and such a woman!10

So much for Ingres’s reading. Meanwhile, in his painting, the baker’s daughter furnishes abundant inspiration of beauty. Her appeals to desire, on the other hand, to say nothing of her own appetites, are a distraction. We recognize an old commonplace; the valiant Rinaldo in the bewitching embrace of Armida; Hercules at the Crossroads, caught between duty and dalliance; or the artist between the birdcalls of pleasure and the calling of art.11 Ingres’s temptation morality shows a St. Raphael pinned down between his work and his woman. Choose, man, choose! It’s one or the other. Now watch Picasso—facing the choice— choosing both. Rather than decide between mutually exclusive alternatives, he makes the alternatives merge into one. As usual, he penetrates to his subject by stages. The first three of those twenty-two etchings (nos. 296– 298) present the atelier in a refreshing pause, a moment charged with erotic play, while in two of them the unfinished bare-breasted portrait waits (fig. 9.8). The young artist is taking time out. Palette and brushes are laid aside as he lies with his lady. The painter, we are assured, is also a mighty lover. Behold his resources and the astonishing versatility of him—believe it or not, he can do one or the other. But the real subject has not yet emerged. It evolves in the nineteen prints following, where the painter, no matter how deeply engaged with his ladylove, continues to wield paintbrush and palette as if he were in fact painting. And, of course, it is herself he is painting, which explains why that oval portrait on canvas becomes redundant enough to disappear (fig. 9.6). Painting and coupling at the same time? Yet this is no juggling act, nor a time-saving procedure, nor a case of divided attention—as if the young man continued

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Figure 9.8. Suite 347, no. 296,

Mougins, August 28, 1968/I. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Reiss-Cohen Inc., 1986.

even in coitus to labor his pesky picture. Picasso’s point is that he is not doing two things but one—performing the act of painting as a making of love, as if love and creation were twin phases of a single cycle, perpetually generating each other and most accurately defined when telescoped into one. Lovemaking and making art as metaphoric equivalents. Picasso repeats the theme over and over until the visual equation works out—as it does finally in no. 317, the last of the group (fig. 9.6); the lovemaker in action, gratifying his love, but upright and seen from behind against an extended plane, like one making a fresco.12 Picasso achieves a perfect coincidence wherein neither the sexual nor the creative act predominates over the other. A sublime pun, and so the series ends. But there is more. Why the patron-voyeur, who forms no part of the Fornarina legend? Picasso depicts him as cold, old, and idle, wrapped in ecclesiastical opulence, with a high crown sometimes cresting as a fool’s cap. In four of the plates he is somewhat dethroned— down to a chamber pot (figs. 9.2–9.4). For all his rank and exotic wealth, Picasso observes that he is not much of a maker. Yet he has to be present, because without him the subject is not fully defined; because painting is that exhibition of potency which is done before and

for witnesses; it is that act of love to which the voyeur, the necessary outsider, is party. And the poor dogsbody under the couch (figs. 9.4, 9.6)? Surely he represents nothing so literal as “the jealous husband.” Why show a cuckold, and show him in the shaggy guise of old age, when the legendary Fornarina was not even married? And if she had been, who will believe that Picasso sought to present the artist’s love act as a feat of adultery? There must be alternative readings, better attuned to the graphic data and the iconographic style of the 347 series, to Picasso’s own life situation at near eightyseven, and to his penchant for self-mythologizing. For instance: should the old groundling and the risen youth overhead be seen perhaps as a single cyclic identity, alternately rising and setting about the horizon line of the bed? To convert time into eternity, its linear progress is traditionally bent into a circle, like the emblematic serpent biting its tail. A possible interpretation, but an improbable one. Belief in physical rejuvenation is not the kind of solace Picasso allows. His iconography precludes Fountains of Youth and allows no fairy-tale optimism about survival. His affirmations are addressed only to the lived life, symbolized by the phallus at work. Perhaps the shriveled pruneface under the couch is not a person at all, but a condition—an image of passing

A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch

time or a terrified glimpse of the future. Participating in allegory—all fuzz and wrinkles—that underbed phantasm may be the consciousness of waning manhood, ever aware of the miracle on the couch.13 All through the 347 series, Picasso makes time collapse, anticipates and reverses its sequences. He sees himself bestriding a foreshortened century, sometimes as a venerable old baby; projects himself beyond his own stint of life, commemorated in a herm statue, or sees himself watched by Velázquez and company as he makes his entrance under the form of a laurel-crowned child.14 Picasso is ancient, still and forever haunting the lover’s couch, a contemporary Tithonus, given his immortality but wanting eternal youth.15 The youngest latecomer among the immortals out-aged them all. No. 317 contains yet another new element—the sudden solemnity of the emcee at the left. For the first time in our series, the figure is not exotic, nor aged, nor ludicrous, nor directly engaged in watching the act. When I first published this essay in 1972, I took him to be Picasso’s father, “brought back for a limited engagement and a specific part.”16 But my student Diane Karp didn’t believe it. She doubted that Picasso would disinter the image he had formed of his father in the present context and after seventy years. And since the best way to refute a hypothesis that rests only on facial likeness is to produce a likeness that’s more compelling, she kept looking and came up with a winner. “Picasso’s early images of his father,” she wrote five years later, “show him invariably with a square beard, unlike the curly goatee of the ‘revealer’ in no. 317. I would suggest that . . . the seriously engaged figure represents Piero Crommelynk, Picasso’s printer in Mougins.”17 Crommelynk, who, with his brother Aldo, published the 347 series, was a family friend. In 1966, Picasso had prepared the etchings for Le cocu magnifique by Fernand Crommelynk, the Belgian playwright and father to Piero and Aldo. Karp’s identification rested “on a pair of linoleum block engravings that Picasso had executed on September 21, 1966 [fig. 9.9], profile portraits of Crommelynk

Figure 9.9. Piero Crommelynk, September 21, 1966, Geiser/Baer VI.1849.

and strongly like the curtain figure in no. 317. The presence of Crommelynk is appropriate, and the etching, in consequence, grows more consistent with the entire series. The identification explains the man’s serious demeanor: in pulling the curtain away and revealing the artist’s action to us, he becomes an allegorical reference to the process of printing, the pulling back of the paper to reveal the artist’s action to his audience. Indeed, without the participation of this printer-revealer the artist’s work would remain hidden and thus unfulfilled. Crommelynk’s participation also relates no. 317 to the preceding twenty-one. The ‘revealer’ plays his role in the creation of art, just as the patron-voyeur had done before; but now we, the viewers, assume the role of the ‘necessary outsiders . . . the witnesses whose presence completes the subject.’ ”

Figure 10.1. The Courtesan, Paris, 1901, Z.I.42. Turin, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli.

Figure 10.2. La Gommeuse, Paris, 1901, Z.I.104. Sotheby’s,

Figure 10.3. La Coiffure, Paris, 1905, Z.I.309. Baltimore Museum of

Figure 10.4. Nude on a Red Background, Gósol–Paris,

Art; The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland.

summer–fall 1906, Z.I.328. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie; Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection.

New York, sale N09415, November 5, 2015, lot 26.

Ten

B

egin with a work from near the beginning of Picasso’s career—a painting of 1901 (fig. 10.1). It portrays a handsome young woman, perhaps a courtesan, seated at ease and proud of her outfit, which includes, from top down, a spectacular hat, a high choker, and a flatland of immense scope. Anatomically speaking, this décolletage is improbable. But the picture is not about a physique, nor about the cut of a gown. What comes across is the young woman’s cool in braving the profoundest of possible necklines, where every increment of exposure factors a psychic enormity. This vertiginous plunge, so far from informing us about dress design, seems rather to visualize the wearer’s high-risk insouciance, her right to preen as she chooses. So that even here, in a picture by the twenty-year-old Picasso, the given appearance is not so much the catch of a roving eye as a feeling from inside out. Or consider this other painting of 1901—a naked whore in a brothel (fig. 10.2). Surely, this is not how a woman presents herself to a man, least of all a prostitute to a client. The picture is, I think, the image of a woman in self-reflection as she eyes her insulted flesh, contemplating slippage and ruin. Our position is that of her mirror, and the mirror is the clocking of time. Seven decades later, Picasso will gaze upon his own rutted features in similar self-confrontation (fig. 1.67). Another instance: a painting from the end of 1905 (fig. 10.3). A woman who has never been pretty, no longer young and running to fat, is having her hair done. The hairdresser is mostly omitted; we see no more of her person than registers in the subject’s sensation of

Picasso’s Endgame

hands in touch. And once again, the woman faces her self—joyless, resigned. Even in works dating from 1906, where the impact of Iberian or tribal art intervenes, certain apparent distortions of gesture are better understood as felt awkwardness than as the look of a limb (fig. 10.4). Picasso here accepts a new challenge: to project subjectivity into images of exotic cultures, to appropriate even archaic icons by vicarious inhabitation. Most phases of Picasso’s art show comparable intrusions into selves other than his. I proceed to a small picture of 1932 (fig. 10.5), an image so private and involute that by comparison the pensive young solitaires whom Corot loved to paint seem exhibitionist—they give off so much outward appearance. Picasso’s contemplative is curiously inapparent, as though in withdrawal from visibility. A woman is there, but as a consciousness folded in on itself. A hand

This essay began as a lecture commissioned by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, April 4, 1988, in conjunction with the exhibition Le dernier Picasso. Delivered in English, under the title “La continuité et le passage du temps,” it was thereafter published in French translation in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 10–38, as “La fin de partie de Picasso.” When a similar show was mounted at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in 1993, the article reappeared as “Picassos Endspiel,” in Picasso: Letzte Bilder, Werke 1966–1972. For its publication in English as “Picasso’s Endgame,” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–22, the paper was significantly revised and refocused. This is the version presented here, with minor revisions following Steinberg’s notes; see p. 236 for later translations. In 2007, the English version and a 1996 French translation were posted on the website picasso.fr (no longer available).

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scaling the face hugs her features and molds the binocular profile, the redoubled eye not conducive to sharpened vision, but apt to diffuse it, as is proper to meditation. Two left hands (no active right needed) confirm her condition of meditative inaction. And her breasts are there not as things visible, but as protected places. And there is more: see how a graphic pun conflates the lower lip with a fingernail—a paronomasia induced by an experience of touch. You might try it yourself: press a finger’s length to your lips, gently, and mutual surfaces yield and pulp into each other.1 The coincidence of lip and fingertip is the felt fusion at an out-of-sight interface; it contracts on a solitude that excludes—or that symbolizes the exclusion of—a spectator. We see

Figure 10.5. Bust of a Woman, Boisgeloup, summer 1932, Z.VII.405.

Private collection.

self-existence embodied as an unexhibited state, before becoming appearance. Picasso’s habit of empathy with the othermost sex in situations unobserved and alone ranks him, in this respect, with male artists such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, and James Joyce. And it may be a side effect of this habit that allowed Picasso periodically—at certain moments, as in 1940–42—to visualize women in grotesque personal ugliness. Invariably uncompanioned, these disillusioners flourish in self-absorption or careless preconsciousness; and remain unappealing only because not yet assembled for admiration. The woman alone with her limbs, before the invention of beauty. It seems to me that such figures are often best understood as bodies which the artist’s imagination seeks to inhabit, so as to arrive at the manifest from inside. The result is at first unfamiliar; but Picasso is saying that any apparency—an en face, a profile or three-quarter view, or even the torsion of a figura serpentinata—that all these owe their seeming to the vantage point of a looker. Whereas the mix of aspects in simultaneity can be made to imply unobserved selfhood, the artist identifying his own kinesthesia with the impulse of the depicted.2 The tendency to inhabitation may help explain some familiar characteristics of Picasso’s art: his disdain of foreshortenings; his habit of developing a picture from solid center out toward slackening margins; his intuition of the motor impulses that issue in gestures, whether performed by humans, animals, vegetables, or the population of tabletops; and finally, his freedom to change style within one picture and even within one figure. Let me speak briefly to each of these. There are many reasons why a twentieth-century artist would resist the effects of foreshortening. In Picasso’s figure drawing, that resistance follows not only from indifference to perspectival recession, or from the supposed modernist imperative to avoid illusionism and keep the picture plane flat: foreshortenings in Picasso’s work tend not to occur because they exist at a distance, away from the agent. My outstretched arm, wherever you see it from, does not feel shortened to me; in fact, it feels extra long. And it is this feel—

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the proprioception wherein foreshortenings have no being at all—that Picasso depicts. Distribution of density: again and again, Picasso’s imagery posits a central figure, or one central relationship, and starves the rest of the field; only perfunctory treatment for outlying areas. This characteristic, surfacing periodically whenever figuration was topmost on the agenda, seemed at times to compromise the aesthetic unity of the work. It counted against Picasso in the heyday of abstract painting, when the preeminent concern was the governance of the field. Judged by the pictorial criteria of non-figurative art, Picasso’s privileged center and marginal slack were perceived as a defect. But Picasso has other criteria; and if we accept his determination to think the figure from inside out—to stage

the picture, as it were, in the first person singular—then space is where the “I” is not, and the fading intensity in the outer field becomes but another function of the first person’s centricity. So in the Seated Nude Woman of 1959 (fig. 10.6), none of the corner fillers, from cupboard to canvas, or from the heeled shoes in the lower right to the signature at upper left, match the density of realization that implodes on the telephonic ear and the intertwined fingers. These tight-knotted fingers as a nexus of pictorial energies point to another modality of “inhabitation.” Picasso’s sense of the inner feel of a gesture conditioned his art from its beginnings and never relaxed, regardless of changing styles. Gesture accurately intuited lends distinction and poignancy to his early illus-

Figure 10.6. Seated Nude Woman,

Vauvenargues, February 14–18, 1959, Z.XVIII.308. Collection of Abigail and Leslie H. Wexner.

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trative pictures of performers and absinthe drinkers; it invests with intelligible volition the monsters of the metamorphic-Surrealist period; it animates the flattened victims of Guernica no less than the eager block figures in On the Beach, both works of 1937 (fig. 2.13). And intuition of gesture enables Picasso, as he watches a year-old child, to sense the terrors of learning to walk. In a 1943 painting at Yale University (fig. 10.7), a young mother teaches her baby boy to take his first steps. The child, stiff with awkwardness and ineptitude, stiffens the painter’s hand to produce rigid, angular shapes; while the mother, rendered in pliant curves, backs up and supports and envelops the child like a fluid. Considered as representation, this generational phasing of styles is masterly—far surpassing any purely visual apperception of limbs in motion. Because

what Picasso draws is not the look of an action, but what it feels like to do. The freedom to change styles in mid-picture or in mid-figure—a freedom proclaimed in a first spectacular outburst in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (fig. 4.1)—becomes a resource which Picasso draws upon intermittently, as in the final canvas of the Femmes d’Alger (fig. 10.8). Here the woman at left is comparatively realistic, while the benighted sleeper at right is checkered on Cubist lines. It may be that the disparate realization of these sisters was prompted by their respective levels of consciousness; so that the waking one, being alert to the world, shows it an aspect, a frontage to interface with the world; whereas the woman wrapped in deep slumber, retired from actual space, inhabits a body without aspectual distinction. Sometime in the 1950s, Picasso dropped a remark about the need for stylistic divergence according to subject. He said: When you draw a head, you must draw like that head. . . . Take a tree. At the foot of the tree there is a goat, and beside the goat is a little girl tending the goat. Well, you need a different drawing for each. The goat is round, the little girl is square, and the tree is a tree. And yet people draw all three in the same way. That is what is false. Each should be drawn in a completely different way.3

Figure 10.7. First Steps, Paris, summer 1943. New Haven, Yale University Art

Gallery; Gift of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903.

Each in a different way? Why should this be? It’s not how the Old Masters worked, nor Van Gogh or Cézanne. Why abandon their exemplary constancies for the promiscuity of drawing “like” each fickle thing that turns up? But of course! Because each feels its own way about itself. To draw all in one style would be to confess oneself out of it, looking at things from without, like a camera. It is worth noting that of all the imagemaking techniques available to Picasso—and by him claimed for his own—photography is the one mode he rarely practiced. The habit of imaginative penetration into existences other than his may help to account for two further facts of Picasso’s art: the pleasure he took in impersonating

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Figure 10.8. Women of Algiers, O, Paris,

February 14, 1955. Christie’s, New York, sale 3739, May 11, 2015, lot 8A.

Old Masters, replaying the roles of a Lucas Cranach, a Delacroix, a Manet; and his genius as an animalier, unique in his century (observe his delight—in a photograph taken at Vallauris, 1952—as he watches a praying mantis that has come to perch on his fingers).4 For myself, I now find it helpful to look at Picasso’s imagery of his last two years, roughly from 1970 until his death, in the light of his lifelong habit of empathy. But he has made a U-turn; the long-practiced discipline of projective inhabitation, instead of invading other existences, now recoils on himself. There is, it seems to me, a terrible honesty in these latest works, which retrospectively, from the recess of his nonagenarian vantage, turns all the rest into show. It is as if the potent personae that had served through seventy years to parade his self-image—as harlequin, lover, ravisher, bull, minotaur, monster, artist-creator, or virtuoso performer—it is as if these had been no more than aspects presented to hosts of admirers, himself at their head; as if all these roles, like all aspects soever, had been staged masquerades, spectacles, circus routines—marvelously diverting and partly revealing, yet still misting over a reservoir of dank, sunken feeling. Arrived at the bottom, Picasso discovers a pool of mortal fear and insa-

tiable desire, where the stirring is neither romantic nor splendid nor to his credit, closer indeed to schoolboy smut than to myth; a teeming of fantasy images hardly admirable or fit to be spoken of. I am thinking now of Picasso entering his tenth decade, when his compulsive activity descends upon lower depths to air what he finds below—female infestations of his own underground, for whom we’ll need a new designation. For these elles that dominate his last outpour of drawings and paintings, crowding out almost all other creatures, are no longer persons, but contractions into one specialized function: recourse to them is the activating part of the artist’s psyche at ninety-one. I reproduce a pen-and-ink sketch dated November 5, 1972, a date within the last week of his working life and exactly five months before his death (fig. 10.9). The grounded old man with the wrinkled knee may be drawing, perhaps pondering what to draw, or wondering how. His eyes are open, but with convergent pupils; not looking outward. And he has company of a sort, the kind that besets a solitary, one left to himself. Early Christian anchorites in the desert would have thought her an alien intruder sent by the Fiend, but Picasso knows better—she’s no outsider to him. Twentysix years before, on October 31, 1946, he had made a

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Figure 10.9. Nude Woman and Reclining Man, Mougins, November 5, 1972, Z.XXXIII.530. Private collection.

Figure 10.10. Reclining Man and Standing Woman, October 31, 1946, Z.XIV.258. Antibes, Musée Picasso.

drawing on a similar theme (fig. 10.10): a youth asleep and behind his back, rising, the apparition of a smooth woman of exquisite purity, whose Grecian flanks are the trajectories of intended caresses, and whose sex is a delicate check mark, ticked off with affection. She is a volatile Eve whom this Adam’s sleep dreams into being. Her beauty honors and ennobles her dreamer. In the later drawing, where daylight knits into murk, the companion wench is similarly begotten by fantasy, but uncaressed and stripped of claims to high culture— the idol debased into guttersnipe; no “Grecian flanks” here. Gone are idealism, grace, flattering beauty, to say

nothing of decency. Mocking her dishonored dreamer, she’s not even serious; the very paper she inhabits is stained. I have an old English word for her kind that cavorts in unstable shape across these last-made Picasso drawings (figs. 10.11–10.14). The word, now hardly remembered by speakers of English, is “fizgig”; and I embrace it because its multiple connotations converge with felicity. In sixteenth- and seventeenth- century usage, fizgig can mean a giddy, flirtatious girl, a whipping top (whirligig), a kind of fireworks, or an absurdity. All of these are à propos, since in Picasso’s

Figure 10.11. (top left) Reclining Nude, Mougins,

July 13, 1972/IV, Z.XXXIII.460. Figure 10.12. (bottom left) Reclining Nude, Mougins, July 13, 1972/VI, Z.XXXIII.461. Sotheby’s, Paris, sale PF8019, December 3, 2008, lot 2.

Figure 10.13. (top right) Reclining Nude, Mougins, July 14, 1972/V,

Z.XXXIII.466. Sotheby’s, London, sale L17322, June 24, 2014, lot 16. Figure 10.14. (bottom right) Reclining Nude, Mougins, July 14, 1972/VI, Z.XXXIII.467.

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senectitude and ultimate isolation the graphic flourishes that cause these apparitions to happen are not so much representations as gestural signatures, like paraphs. They introduce a new breed. Not that spreadeagled nudes had been absent from Picasso’s work of the late 1960s—they sport unabashed throughout the Suite 347 series of prints and keep turning up (literally) until spring 1970. But in those prodigal series, the complaisant girls are, in a visual way, socialized. They participate in institutional settings— harem or brothel; stage, circus, or atelier. They are effective professionals and, being young and wellfavored, objects of timeless homage. And so indigenous are they to their appreciative milieu that their naive self- exhibition seems entirely proper, almost,

Figure 10.15. Reclining Nude and Head, Mougins, July 13, 1972/III, Z.XXXIII.459.

one is tempted to say, comme il faut. No matter how freely fantasized their world may be, it domesticates them. In a word, they have not yet become what I propose to call Picasso’s fizgigs. True fizgigs are of another order. Their singleness is absolute, though they may share a space with the craver for whose sake alone they exist—somewhat as unattained fruit shares Tantalus’s space (fig. 10.15). And their being is momentary, quick as a somersault, fleeting as fireworks. With limbs de-boned like a tipsy gymnast’s, their whole, sole existence is vis-à-vis their imaginer, the ninety-year-old recluse of Mougins, who has, with them, departed from conviviality. (I shelve for the present the question of possible outside influences, as from the dissemination of openly published pornography in the late 1960s. One day, perhaps, Picasso scholars will be hunting for prototypes among X-rated films and photos, the way art historians, alert to the inspirational sources of Renaissance painting, delve among antique coins and sarcophagi. But whether, and to what extent, Picasso in 1970 responded to contemporaneous obscenity is more than I know, and I will continue to treat the thematics of his last works as internally generated.) As late as 1968, in the 347 series, Picasso had projected a more or less romantic self-image—as courted artist, acceptable lover, grandee, and associate of Velázquez and Rembrandt. Wherever in these etchings he made his appearance—in the Pantheon of the great or the stews—he was welcome. It was still a relatively public self-image he was manipulating, an image inflected by pride of achievement and groomed for a niche in posterity. After 1971, having passed ninety, all pretense to nobility, any acknowledgment even of sociality, falls away. The lifelong practice of projective inhabitation homes inward, and the depth of this last invasion, this last internality, exceeds in its uncensored candor every previous feat of inhabiting the being of others. What Picasso uncovers at last is unconsenting old age—not burned out yet because still subject to Eros, to Eros as primal engine, the energy of desire. If the old geezer now finds this desire beamed in a single direction, and if the sighting of the

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objective seems less than decent, tant pis. At this brink, the time for gallantry and self-censorship is long past. Leaf through the final volume of the Zervos Picasso catalogue: excluding the numerous, mostly erotic, prints created from March to May 1971, Zervos XXXIII reproduces 532 paintings and drawings, dating from New Year’s Day, 1971, to shutdown, November 12, 1972. A large portion of this body of work displays female nudes advertising their undersides, the perineum or “fundament” (see Webster III, def. 2a: “the part of the body on which one sits”). In many instances, the perineal terrain is articulated in punctilious detail, elsewhere by a composite sign which a great modern ironist, Saul Steinberg, proposes to read as an exclamation mark (!) and as “Picasso’s homage to typography.” The prevalence of these “beaver” poses in Picasso’s ultimate output is overwhelming. During the first six months of the period covered in Zervos XXXIII, the proportion of fizgigs featured by “exclamation marks” runs fairly low—only 14 percent, while single heads, mostly male, account for 60 percent of the work. During the next six-month period ( July–December 1971), the proportion of fizgigs increases to 21.5 percent. Finally,

of the 147 drawings and paintings produced during Picasso’s last six working months (of which only 26.5 percent represent single heads), no less than 43 percent conjure the underside—not in doodling, mechanical iteration, but in strongly drawn figures, spilled, splayed, and toppled with relentless invention, so that no posture repeats and the fundament itself undergoes incessant characterological change—now perfunctory, now meticulous, and then (on a pair of weird sisters) suddenly clinquant, sparkling like tinsel (fig. 10.16). The very drawing, the mode of their realization, confirms the private ontology of these fizgigs who have ousted the odalisque. Their constitution is wildly inaccurate, each is a turbulence whirling about a vagina as about the eye of a storm. No proportional system controls shape or dimension of limb; no rule of style or of preformed anatomy checks the artist’s license to compress or dilate or plug spatial intervals. The impulse is to maintain speed while repleting the field. This mode of drawing the figure, which had been guiding Picasso’s hand increasingly since the late 1960s, seems strangely analogous to handwriting, or better, to the way we “draw” our signatures, when the signing hand

Figure 10.16. Two Seated

Nudes, Mougins, May 1, 1972, Z.XXXIII.372.

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moves to an internalized motor pattern. But with this difference: that the constancies ruling our signatures do not obtain. Fizgigs exist as fluctuous morphologies, each new-invented, yet comparable to signatures in that they issue, without external verification, from somewhere inside, as intimate to the body as breathing. The draftsmanship that begets this scriptorial race thus becomes a kind of informed, private cacography. Which is one reason why the diagnosis of “voyeurism,” often glibly applied to the late Picasso, seems simply wrong. Picasso is hardly ogling; not peeking through keyholes but summoning from inner chambers. Dare we ask what need these images served? Was the proliferation of fizgigs hastened by Picasso’s notice of death at the door? If at this stage he still rejected mortality as a thing external to his person, may we regard his drafts of obliging vaginas as assertions of vital force to stave off an encroaching assault—signing those yonis the way Early Christians signed the cross to keep the Adversary at bay? Projected again and again upon sheet and canvas, Picasso’s functional fizgigs could be construed as protective fortifications, outworks of his inner defenses with safety in numbers. Why else their

continual increase, like antibodies massed against an invasive threat, as if death were a plague, intrusive and foreign-born? Or is it that Picasso at ninety concedes what he has long tried to resist: that death worms within, recognizable in the withering of desire; so that the best defense lies in clinging to lust from out a spent body? They say that Tantalus, down in Hades, is continually reaching for phantom fruit; and keeps straining—not in hopes of success, but in timeless, mythic self-definition. Was Picasso perhaps seeking to overrule his mortality by collapsing his being into one definitive, quenchless desire, that is to say, into the likeness of myth? I see Picasso’s late phantom fizgigs as a kind of selfhelp. They were not meant to embarrass, but to preserve identity against imminent dissolution. Their orientation was inward—not least in the private calligraphy that wills their existence. And exist they must, renewable day after day, lest his manhood, like an unplugged telephone, cease to communicate with its complement. Let go, and you disconnect, dwindle, collapse. The vagina, as Picasso now summons it, becomes apotropaic. It is no longer offered for penetration, as it

Figure 10.17. Reclining Nude and Man with a Mask, September 5, 1969/II, Z.XXXI.414.

Figure 10.18. Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899, Z.I.14. Christie’s,

Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler; Sammlung Beyeler.

New York, November 17, 1989, lot 11.

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still was in the 347 series of 1968, but as a talisman to the mind’s eye. Picasso sees it as a fixed pivot in an ever fluid embodiment, his own “termine fisso d’eterno consiglio.” It is what still draws him on, the pole of wished-for desire, set up to snatch lust from impending calm, keeping him paced, sustained in tension, at work.5 In this final imagery, the loud cunt is an exorcism raised against the extinction of desire, the quietus of unexistence. Picasso’s fizgigs personify that last recess of yearning which Eros still animates, and Picasso finds them, not among womankind, but within. For I take these images to be the inward of a man living on to the utmost of his waning nature, clinging to a private beatitude in the only life he knows he will get. Picasso’s fizgigs are, I suspect, a grave document in the demythologizing of death. And we shall see his end game take rank with other testimonies of death faced without God, those of Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Beckett, King Lear. As late as 1969, at age eighty-eight, Picasso could still fantasize that his old age was a mask pulled over

his real manhood (fig. 10.17). But he lived to accept the senility mask as his proper debris, his remains. With a horrified acquiescence he stares selfward in a now famous drawing in colored pencils (fig. 1.67)—done at a distance of three score and ten years from the cocky self-portrait of 1899 (fig. 10.18). The earlier drawing records the artist’s good looks at eighteen; the latter projects the symbolic form of his dying. Executed on June 30, 1972, it constitutes a rare human icon of death in the first person.6 The 1972 Self-Portrait was drawn within weeks of another image of ghastly novelty—a wilted fizgig with the coiffed head of a hag, a drooling mouth, and a clinical crotch (fig. 10.19). Soon after, in the fall of 1972—Picasso’s last autumn—all his friendly fizgigs drop, one by one, their false frontage of youth. Anile harridans now, coeval—no, consubstantial—with the wizened hands of their maker, their own manicured fingers accosting dry rags of vulva to mock the pretense of desire (figs. 10.20, 10.21).

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Figure 10.20. Reclining Woman, Mougins,

August 18, 1972, Z.XXXIII.510. Sotheby’s, London, sale L03005, June 24, 2003, lot 253.

Figure 10.19. Seated Woman, Mougins, June 3, 1972, Z.XXXIII.406.

ten Figure 10.21. Nude in an Armchair,

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Mougins, October 3, 1972, Z.XXXIII.513. Paris, Musée Picasso, MP1544.

Fizgigs had laced the edge of his retreating virility. And when their vitality fails, when the artist comes to acknowledge that his girlies are shriveled crones; when the vagina itself, his life symbol, reverts to decay; when we reach these admissions that the youth machine he had been driving had long since run in decrepitude, then we know that he knows that the exorcism is no longer working. He stands helpless—a little kid with a shovel, superannuated and trapped in a loutish body (fig. 1.1), like Yeats: . . . sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal. It knows not what it is.7

But these are tentative approximations. It may be that we have not lived long enough to assess the last works of Picasso nonagenarian. Few of us have ever been ninety. The most pertinent comment may have been made by Goethe: that the aged forfeit a fundamental birthright of humankind—the right to be judged by their equals.8

P.S. Fifty years ago, when I first came to this country, I heard someone quote a recent quip from Dorothy Parker. Asked what she thought was the most beautiful word in the English language, she proposed “cellar door.” I was impressed. Mouthing the word, you hear the sheer elegance of the sound override its low connotation. So I nodded my homage to Parker and put the matter to rest; until, decades later and Parker long dead, a friend showed me a just-published dictionary of English slang. Casually flipping the pages and starting as usual at the back, my eye stopped at a catchword printed boldface: Vagina. Page after page of synonyms, weasel words, epithets, sly circumlocutions, and analogues; among them, suddenly leaping to my attention, the word “cellar door”—not really slang, for the source given was John Cleland’s famous eighteenth-century novel Fanny Hill, a work Dorothy Parker had undoubtedly read.9 The most beautiful word in the language? Picasso, though English was not what he spoke, would have liked that.

E l ev e n

“ Belied with False Compare”

Introduction

W

e learn from the “Matisse Picasso” exhibition that the lives and works of the two artists are best understood as a give-and-take, like successive chess moves, both men closely watching each other, sparring and straining to win. Whatever else was intended, in the curatorial revision of the artists’ respective careers, creativity comes reinterpreted as competition. We are bidden to adjust our viewing to the curatorial program, to practice the comparative method, seeing the champs ricocheting, or volleying across a net, or parenthesizing a chessboard. The choice of metaphor hardly matters, so long as it pits the players against one another. Although the show claimed no intent to declare a winner, the selection and arrangement of the works sent a different message. And the New York press responded. The show’s organizers, wrote Michael Kimmelman, “keep insisting it is not supposed to be a contest between the two artists, but who are they kidding? Choosing the winner is the sport of the event and the inevitable outcome of pitting titans, mano a mano.” “One is compelled to take sides” (Peter Schjeldahl); “Is Picasso the champ, or did Matisse knock him out in the last round with that brilliant uppercut?” (Mark Stevens). Most reviewers registered the same message, though Kimmelman wondered, “do artists really work this way?” Jack Flam was also wary: “many have been foolishly seeing [the show] as a kind of championship match for the title of greatest artist of the twentieth century.” Jed Perl went further: “[T]hese paintings finally persuade us through their

singularity; and when they are hung together, although they speak to us, they do not speak to each other. . . . Time and time again in this exhibition, I wished that I could spend a little more time with Picasso or Matisse, and a little less time with the two of them together.”1 So do I. Against the trend to convert artists into competitors, and granted that each, to further his purpose, sometimes seized on possibilities opened up by the other—what I need to hold on to is each man’s self-direction. Matisse and Picasso may have occasionally adopted the other’s means, but their respective Steinberg became involved with the Matisse-Picasso affair when he delivered a lecture entitled “Joining Picasso” on January 29, 1999, at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, on the occasion of Yve-Alain Bois’s exhibition “Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry.” He planned no further work on the subject until “Matisse Picasso” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in February 2003, the last stop in a much-publicized show coorganized by MoMA, the Tate Modern, the Musée Picasso, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. He distrusted the touted pairing of Matisse and Picasso masterpieces as impediments to our understanding of each artist’s achievement. But the promotional literature and wall texts for the MoMA venue and especially the press reception spurred him to interrogate the routine reading of the works as born of a competitive impulse. He drafted a long essay, which never reached completion. Some of this material was used in a lecture for the Morgan Library, March 9, 2005, “The Maticasso Affair: How the Yoking of Matisse and Picasso Influences Perception,” revised for delivery at the New York Studio School, November 30, 2005, under the title “Maticasso-Picatisse Fricassee.” The introduction and three texts in this chapter are extracted from the lecture typescripts and essay draft, one of whose sections was headed with the present chapter title, from Shakespeare’s sonnet 130.

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objectives were different, despite Picasso’s claim, late in life, that “he and Matisse had been following the same paths all along.” Matisse, from the same senescent vantage, declared that “ultimately, there was a reciprocal interpenetration between our different paths.”2 We, caught between “same path” and “interpenetrant different paths,” stray into a fog of metaphoricity where perception is dimmed. But the approved practice of presenting the works as generated by interpersonal rivalry prevailed. The habit of looking at one thing in order to find similarities between that thing and some significant other is universal, as is the habit of comparative ranking. Just now, in art exhibitions and publications, we are under pressure to attend competitive matches, even as corporate management encourages competition among employees.3 The game is to read one artist against another to find analogies, even if the practice encourages false couplings, fractional viewing of the works in play, and fictional scorecards (see the appendix, pp. 204–6).4 In the case of Picasso and Matisse, their rivalrous moves were dramatized in 1996 by Pierre Daix, who had befriended the aged Picasso. Daix imagined the effect on both players of their earliest collision. It occurred at the Paris residence of their first patrons, the American siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein. Daix describes what he thinks would have been Matisse’s dismay on visiting the Steins’ home in November–December 1905, i.e., shortly after the Steins had bravely purchased Matisse’s scandalous Woman with a Hat. Arriving for dinner and expecting to glory in the blaze of Matissean color, he beholds the Steins’ walls bedeviled by an alien intruder. In his eyes, Daix writes: “the young Picasso is doubly foreign: by his [Spanish] tradition and by his painting. . . . Not to mention his bohemian life style, the opposite of Matisse’s bourgeois habits. . . . [Seeing] works of Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods . . . , around his [own] Femme au chapeau, . . . the object of scandal at the Cage aux Fauves and the first purchase of the Steins, [Matisse] couldn’t help feeling ill at ease before this troublesome, virtuoso gamin, who seemed to him to come from another world and of whom he knew nothing. Ill at ease, but not threatened [Daix adds re-

assuringly], because Matisse had already conceived his great Bonheur de vivre, which would put this little Spaniard in his place.” Shortly thereafter, the two painters met at the Steins, who, according to Daix, “deliberately provoked” their encounter, “a fact which could only and instantly spur them to competition before their best patrons.”5 In this posthumous replay, the thirty-sevenyear-old Matisse, leader of the Fauve movement, feels suddenly challenged by the talent of this mid-twenties newcomer. But not to worry, since the radicalism of his projected Bonheur de vivre will put an end to any whippersnapper’s pretensions. The rest is history—as concocted over and over: Picasso, no slouch, counters with the Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), more brazenly modernist than Bonheur. Whereupon Matisse, in 1908, produces the disturbing Bathers with a Turtle, a spacious three-figure group to make last year’s challenger look over-anxious and fussy. (These two were paired in the MoMA show.) Picasso’s riposte is Three Women of the same year.6 And so on and off past the midcentury, restaging their careers as a pas de deux. Shakespeare wrote a delicious satire on this kind of comparison. Following the Battle of Agincourt, the Welsh Captain Fluellen compares his victorious king, Harry of Monmouth, to Alexander of Macedon, surnamed “the Great.” I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is porn. I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the ’orld, I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ’tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both. (Henry V, IV, 7)

But Shakespeare here has an agenda, as pointed out by Harold Bloom. The comparison is made to liken Prince Hal’s (King Henry’s) betrayal of Falstaff to

“Belied with False Compare”

Alexander’s drunken murder of his best friend.7 And so the Maticasso comparisons—a river in each instance, “and there is salmons in both,” serves to advance a preformed conclusion. I shall be told, no doubt, that my comparison of these arguments with Captain Fluellen’s speech employs a comparable rhetoric. Agreed; that’s what happens when you try to make a point.

The 1906 Self-Portraits The Copenhagen Matisse and the Philadelphia Picasso (figs. 11.1, 11.2), self-portraits of 1906, introduced the contenders in the “Matisse Picasso” show. Hung (and frequently reproduced) side by side, they seemed aptly paired, since both date from the year Matisse and Picasso first met. Moreover, both show the face from much the same angle, display an identical hairline, and sign in the lower left. Of course the contrasts are greater: one lives in color, the depicted person made up of paint. The other thinks monochrome as if made of terracotta. Itemize further where they differ, as, for instance, in the left eyebrow: Matisse’s in supercilious hauteur, Picasso’s in absentminded earward extension.8 These left eyebrows look incomparable to me, but compared they must be, since the pictures are served in one deal. The self-image of a twenty-five-year- old adjoins that of a man aged thirty-seven, the elder in confident arrival as chef d’école; the junior in bemused introspection, halting, irresolute, at the brink perhaps of a decision. It is the moment when Picasso humbles his artistry—awkwardness next. But what did Picasso think he would gain when, around 1906, he traded his skill for ham-fistedness, capricious anatomy and ankylosis; fusing the collar bones, producing a forearm as if hacked from raw

Figure 11.1. (top) Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait,

1906. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Figure 11.2. (bottom) Self-Portrait with Palette,

Gósol–Paris, summer–fall 1906. Philadelphia Museum of Art; A. E. Gallatin Collection.

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timber, another that slinks out of the system, lest it be thought to consort with a thumb goring a professional palette. And the ocher face hardly more than a toneless drawing. Whereas the Matisse is militantly three- dimensional. Within and without the truculent blacks of the contours, the field glories in color change—color change at brow, nose, cheek, and socket; color change bending the very eyelids. The result is a kind of internal seething wherein even greens look incandescent. The picture comes on in power, outfacing its callow neighbor. And the respective backgrounds of the portraits are worlds apart. Back of Matisse’s ear, a tricolor ambience of black-violet-blue recedes as recession should; but the blueing green off the other cheek hangs around, close enough to infiltrate most of the face. Or, reading from right to left, facial complexion exudes its own aura. Make of it what you will, the background’s contrasting left/right calls for attention—and it makes the perfunctory monochrome behind the Picasso figure seem formulaic. Unless you interpret symbolically: a warm body alone against chilling gray. Now look at their shoulders: broadly squared on young Pablo, as if sturdy manhood had crept up on unreadiness, waiting for orders. Matisse disproportions the other way, resting his loggerhead on the skimpy frame of a boy. (To take the measure of these shrinking shoulders, watch the bend of the red stripe, lower right.) The mismatch could be inadvertent; the painter may have started too big on a canvas too tight. But suppose it was willed. Matisse would be portraying a manhood that wants, or that thinks itself, younger. Or confesses itself: underneath still a child. Matisse used to fantasize about “looking at life with the eyes of a child.”9 Eyes, he said; but, my skeptic protests, he never said that he wished for immature shoulders or thought the ones he had unequal to bear the burdens of life. The symbolic transfer from eyes to shoulders is not a safe move attributable to Matisse, and there goes another explanatory hypothesis. We are left with an observed ratio of head to shoulders that further alienates these paired portraits of 1906. Hung side by side, they go different ways.

The Harlequin and the Goldfish In the exhibition, Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette of 1914 and Picasso’s Harlequin of the following year (figs. 11.3, 11.4)—both owned by the Museum of Modern Art— were emphatically double-bedded and, it seems, permanently adjoined and “mandated historically.”10 Shortly after Harlequin was finished, Matisse, in late November 1915, saw it at the Paris gallery of Léonce Rosenberg. According to a letter from Rosenberg to Picasso, Matisse declared Harlequin to be the best thing Picasso had ever done—“il était supérieur à tout ce que vous aviez fait.” Finally, Rosenberg reports to Picasso, Matisse “expressed the feeling that his Goldfish led you to the Harlequin”—“que vous ont conduit à l’arlequin.” So Picasso’s best painting ever owes its success to his following the lead of Matisse—says Matisse.11 So these independent creations are delivered to us side by side to demonstrate a dependency, the miracle of a harlequin spawned by two fish. And we, on the authority of Matisse’s remark, are urged to focus on some select pittance and discount what’s left over. But what did Matisse have in mind? Where in the Picasso would Matisse have detected a trailer? Surely not the black background, familiar from earlier Picassos (such as the Cubist Card Player of 1913, MoMA); nor the flat, hard-edged whites, for which the creator of Cubist collage needed no guidance. Was it the white rectangle pierced by a thumb which, in the Matisse, signals the painter’s presence; was it the way this white rectangle plays to the dominant upright panel at center? Or, more abstractly considered, that Matisse’s “newfound austerity” was “echoed” in the Picasso?12 Hard to tell. Or was it, as John Richardson told me in conversation, that both pictures signal the artist’s presence with a painter’s palette at right? The comparison is problematic. In the Goldfish painting, the artist’s thumb really sticks it to her—remember la palette in French is feminine; whereas the harlequin’s teeny white fingers seem inadequate. And is it a palette they rest on? And is this how Picasso, the sovereign creator of Cubism, would be following the lead of Matisse?

“Belied with False Compare”

Figure 11.3. Henri Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, 1914. New York, Museum of Modern Art;

Figure 11.4. Harlequin, Paris, fall 1915. New York, Museum of

Gift and Bequest of Florence M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx.

Modern Art; Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.

Why not reverse the charge? Jack Flam observes that Matisse in this splendid painting—and after years of resistance—incorporates Cubist ideas, lifted from Juan Gris as well as Picasso.13 For Matisse’s abstract black bar there are precedents in Picasso (Guitar, 1913, and Card Player, 1914; both MoMA); as there are for the sudden transparency of the shelf that supports fishbowl, lemon, and potted plant. And look at the way the iron grillwork, running from left to right, stops in midair; unexplained fragmentation, as again in the palette with its synecdoche of a thumb; or the abstract “welter” at upper right, all newly Matissed. This is Cubism with a vengeance, a very personal vengeance.

But for all that, Matisse still offers a material set: a fusion of indoors and out; solid flooring abutting on a blue sky. Matisse’s Cubist devices solidify and grow monumental, leaving Picasso’s meek poverino quite overpowered. Look at this Harlequin alone, unaccosted and uncompared: a figure precariously upright against solid black. Yes, but is it a figure? Or perhaps a harlequin suit with accessories stashed in an attic? The thing disintegrates at a glance, raising a question which Picasso keeps throwing at the objects he represents—a question posed at the start of a Shakespeare sonnet: “What is your substance, whereof are you made?”14

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Here you could answer: of various right-angled flats, with a few curves here and there—such as the sash at his abdomen. It seems assembled from overlapping panels with tilting axes, stacked haphazard three or four layers deep. Up front, the tessellated costume of a harlequin—the painter’s customary stand-in: he— or it—rises on shaky stilts, footless on a tipping white base. Near the top, something like a black swizzle stick simulates a lean neck and head, a pinhead pierced by one silly eye; and that head coupling with its white profile, facing left, or looking jauntily backward; and the twin aspects of that head stapled together by one mordant grin—hence, perhaps, Varnedoe’s “sense of chilling comedy.”15 The whiteness of that high profile shows up again halfway down as more body: a rigid white arm around a quadrant of empty black, fringed by incompetent fingers come to rest on what might be a table. Our problem is to connect this white figment to the leering figure in motley. The two are sundered by a blue slab tipped out of kilter, behind which—on our right—I see a slim, shapely void, like the quadrant under the figure’s right arm. But though this interval opens on vacant darkness, it doubles as the harlequin’s shoulder—neck-toshoulder nicely linked by a dark green wedge of motley, which helps to keep this see-through shoulder consubstantial with the lollipop head; and its wasting arm ends in a tiny paw that just fingers the edge of a panel daubed with white paint, and a reserved shape on it, readable as a man’s head. And the giddiest parts still to come: notice that the whitish profile at top cleaves to a brown scaffolding which, way down, lower left, hints at a table; taken whole, this brown thing has been read as an easel; but it’s ghostly furniture, whose parts disconnect. Up above, the brown rises behind the blue slab; scan downward and it suddenly overlaps, leaving the upstaged slab to cock a Chaplin-like foot from behind. So is the blue slab in front of the brown or in back of it? Trying to sequence it—like a playing card in your hand—is sheer frustration. If this panel recedes behind the black head and neck, how does it get to precede the black shoulder? Perhaps this thing has no substance at

all: an abstract marker of instability, of a penchant to sway and fall out. Same in the bottom half of the picture. At lower left, token furniture passes behind the blue slab—to resurface in front of it at lower right. I once watched a man at a distance walking toward me: no sooner had I registered his right leg in front of the left, than it receded behind; very unsettling to keep watching. Just so in this painting, where the table legs retreat and advance unaccountably. Thus, as the parts of the figure oscillate side to side, they also alternate forward and inward. But these disturbances pass unnoticed most of the time, being disguised by the two whites on our right: the large, paint-smeared rectangle, which conceals the mutation of the brown shaft in its vertical drop, i.e., from behind to in front; and, below this rectangle, an inexplicable segment of identical white, disguising the same switch on the horizontal. As for naming this brown elevation. Before painting the picture, Picasso made numerous drawings, some of which show a man surrounded by contractile furniture that keeps closing in on him, and ends up in the painting so contracted that it becomes pointless to ask whether this domesticity token represents desk, easel, or whatnot.16 Meanwhile, another series of drawings, done in that same winter season, 1915, starts as a dancing couple, translates into late Cubist puppets, with reversal of precedence, gains color as the idea of a painting takes hold—the male partner converting to harlequin—and so distills into the painting we know.17 There’s one more consideration. I believe that Picasso in 1915 found his Cubist idiom exhausted, no longer fertile. His Portrait of a Girl of the previous year (fig. 11.5) is a flirtatious compendium of late Cubist devices, cunningly stratified within flatness, except for an ominous hulking at left, where a somber gray fireplace broods in dogged 3-D. It gives notice that Picasso will soon again embrace plenitude. But not yet, not before painting this bitter send-up of Cubism. As I now see it, the Harlequin is Picasso in sardonic self-presentation, a wry self-assessment deeply engloomed. The picture satirizes as no better than a house of cards the playful insubstantiality of the late Cubist idiom; it comments

“Belied with False Compare”

on that now bygone adventure on which his eminence rests as on a teetering pedestal. But none of this is sure—except only this: that any initial response to Harlequin’s comedy yields to disquiet as one keeps looking; and that such exercise removes Harlequin ever further from the Matisse. I believe that in pairing these pictures, art scholars once again succumb to the irresistible lure of a text. We have it on record that Matisse said, “It was my Goldfish that led him to it.” So, as one thing leads to another, we are invited to contemplate the beauty of cause and consequence, skimming off similarities, if we can find them.

Of Armchairs and Decorative Figures As all the world knows, Picasso married his ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, because she would not otherwise sleep with him. And that’s what he painted in the bridal portrait of 1918—the eyeful she seemed and the withholding she practiced (fig. 11.6). The painting is based on a photograph Picasso took, and it was presumably he who posed her.18 (The picture suggests what a fine society portraitist Picasso might have become with a little less effort.) Looking back with the hindsight gained from Picasso’s later confessions, one detects

Figure 11.5. Portrait of a Girl, Avignon,

summer 1914. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne; Bequest of Georges Salles, 1967.

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further portents in the portrait. Is there not a faint chill about this exquisite lady? Why such contrast with the chair decoration—all that bounty to set off the austerity of her ashen gray silks. Picasso lavishes ripeness and vivid hues on fan and furniture; drains her of color and plenitude. Neck and arms appear cool and polished, fleshed like a China doll. Carved ivory comes to mind, or finely turned woodwork chalked over. Remarkable, too, how the trajectory of Olga’s bare arms—from right index all the way to left thumb—turns consistently at right angles, as though to trace a three-dimensional fret. If Picasso’s post-Olga paintings show him associating the caressable with the curvaceous, then the rectitude of his bride’s portrait murmurs “hands off.”

And this silken bride always keeps her legs crossed, as do almost no other women in Picasso’s vast oeuvre. Yet in Picasso’s many portrayals of Olga made while the marriage was young, the legs almost invariably cross (except when she sits at the piano, footing the pedals).19 This is no trivial matter. We in the West, irrespective of gender, cross legs without second thoughts; not so women depicted by artists who work in a figurative tradition. For them, a woman in cross-legged session— sealing her body off—is a stark symbol of refusal or chastity, applicable to a Susannah, Bathsheba, or even the ever-Virgin Mother of God in Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici; and so at the first appearance of the motif in the Early Classic Penelope.20 As Picasso will

Figure 11.6. Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, Montrouge, spring 1918. Paris, Musée Picasso.

“Belied with False Compare”

be portraying Olga until the mid-1920s, she is no more likely to uncross her legs than open her frigid mouth. Throughout, she charades as a still life, tight-lipped, close-coiffed, leg-locked, and unshakably apathetic. This is how she appears to her mate—a man on fire yoked to a woman bored; until, after ten years of mutual torment and reciprocal alienation, she grows in Picasso’s perception into the monster of the late 1920s. In the New York venue of “Matisse Picasso,” one of these works, the 1927 Woman in an Armchair (fig. 11.7), which I include among Picasso’s exorcisms of Olga, was hung with Matisse’s famous Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground (fig. 11.8).21 A cruel hanging, I thought, unkind to both parties; the pictures don’t

Figure 11.7. Woman in an Armchair, Paris, early 1927. Solinger Collection.

talk to each other. Yet the one paragraph in the exhibition catalogue concerning the Picasso argues that here Picasso “had Matisse in his sights,” referring to a 1925 Matisse lithograph of his model Henriette as a nude odalisque because the decorative pattern of the armchair she sits in and the chair pattern in the Picasso seem “strikingly similar”—as if a patterned chair fabric were adequate ground for declaring this Picasso indebted to or engaged with that Matisse lithograph. Further, that Woman in an Armchair is a “pure travesty” of Matisse, an “anti-odalisque,” “a satire on Matisse’s ‘dream’ of producing a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”22

Figure 11.8. Henri Matisse, Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, 1925–26. Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

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Surely this quintessential Picasso is better seen either singly or within Picasso’s own psyche. The mouth agape, the hair unbound, and the lower members ajar, unlocking hostility. The three-pronged left hand rakes a loose tress, while a huge right draws a forbidding barrier athwart the loins. Try repeating this right-hand gesture; palm out and thumb down. The room this howling freak fills is phantasmal. Moldings at top left and right converge inward to imply an interior corner, but the lines of the baseboard pull away as from a convexity. You can’t build such a chamber; it would have to be dreamt. Next, the engrossing black armchair, near-coincident with the frame: its upholstery appears to be patterned, but the pattern mutates. At upper left, bulbous things seem to spill from a picture, yet the chair’s skirting suggests turbulent waters, as if to recall the incumbent’s aqueous origins. Of course, her sides are discordant, as you’d expect in a creature that carries incompatibility in her every gene. The hands profess different species; as for the legs, while one elephantine thud stomps the floorboards, a dainty counterpart, possibly shod, prepares for outdoors. Though both elbows could well touch down at the armrests, there’s no way she is sitting; she hasn’t the wherewithal. More to be seen: the four-color economy squeezed between black and white; the self-altering blacks—here sliding outline, there local color; or background converting to fore. And the ambiguity of the features: is that another breast or a belly; would the protrusion at the wrist be a thumb or another bone spur; is she showing one eye or two? And is the picture meant to be risible or horrific? There is much to be deeply resented if one imagines a living person so travestied. Whom was he getting at, this merciless painter? Was it Olga, was it Matisse? Or a significant third? The Matisse reference, which judges Picasso from the vantage of the elder’s aesthetic, seems coercive. Matisse’s odalisques of the 1920s, produced in Nice, come close to achieving his dream of an untroubled art as soothing as an armchair, whereas Picasso’s homelife interior is comfy as a snake pit. Is the Picasso best understood as an “anti-odalisque”? If it is designated a trav-

esty, why not see the embittered artist reflecting on his own quondam illusion? If we cannot contain the itch to compare, specifically the chair fabric in this 1927 Picasso with some earlier model, a more bitter comparison can be made with Picasso’s own earlier bridal portrait of Olga: a woman in a patterned armchair, ambiguously seated (fig. 11.6). This, rather than the fabric in a 1925 Matisse lithograph, is more probably what he “had in his sights,” satirizing that erstwhile sheen by way of his latter-day disillusion. The mockery, then, would be selfdirected—“Picasso moves in himself,” observed Werner Spies.23 So, of course, does Matisse—for all the ogling they did. As Matisse said when someone found one of his sculptures reminiscent of a Maillol: “[They] have nothing in common.”24 The 1927 Woman in Armchair replaced a better-known painting installed in the Paris and London venues of “Matisse Picasso,” the work of a single May day in 1929 (fig. 11.9). Here too Picasso could not have forgotten how that bridal picture placed Olga’s right arm on the back of the chair and the hand hanging loose; or how the two arms together trace one ample curve. In the 1929 painting, these bare arms of a much-altered Olga emerge from soft pelvic tissue—shoulders she lacks. In the Musée Picasso, Paris, the work bears the honorific museological title, Large Nude in a Red Armchair, but that’s anodyne; the title tucks a life-size abomination under the comforter of a conventional tag. Why call this creeper a “nude”? Nudity in human experience implies either undress, or else aboriginal receptivity to some kind of clothing. Even now our neonates are designed for adaptability to the diaper. But what sort of article goes with the shapeless ooze of this ghoul? Female she plainly is, but of an aberrant kind, almost too slippery to describe. Here are some sallies to hail the horror of it, or to humor its comic side. Clammy and slithering; limp, flaccid, wet-noodle; gummy and rubbery; icky, squishy and squirmy (candidates all for Virginia Woolf ’s category of “dapper little adjectives”). Appendages that pull out like entrails or taffy. Sluggish and lazing; somnolently rapacious—a parasite predator, ravening at the mouth, or yawning in a stupor of

Figure 11.9. Large Nude in a Red Armchair, Paris, May 5, 1929. Paris, Musée Picasso.

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boredom. Somewhere under the sway of the breasts, two glutinous arms emerge from a doughy matrix, itself flat and patulous, but embossed with round belly and scalloped with buttocks. Then, turning rigid, one jagged pubis, the steel trap of the crotch, soiled and barred. In a word, ugglesome. Ugglesome—a deep shudder long stored in the Unabridged. The word, reeking of ugly and ugh, means “fearful, horrible, gruesome.” Poor Olga devolved into ogre, uggling and ughing. One wonders how she grew so invertebrate. In her deviance from human norms, this housemate outmonsters the teratological cast of, say, Hieronymus Bosch, whose fiends rarely let go of their bodies’ structural frame. Their deformities, be they ever so ugglesome, wrap around bone. And their antics—grimacing where the thighs fork, or jet-farting behind—are site-adapted; they bespook a custom-made pandemonium, so that their sporting, including an admirable display of team spirit, seems appropriate to the locale. Whereas Picasso’s clinger is out of place, bred to ubiquitate in the parlor, her toothed orifice unhinged like a serpent’s jaw, gaping to snap. For sheer odium, we gather, there’s no place like home. A word concerning her operation: with extremities rounding into dysfunctional knobs, one limb adangle, lower legs crossed and crotch closed until further notice, there’s not much she can do. But one incremental left arm climbs and ropes upward to headlock the chair’s helpless top. Is it a chair, no more than unfeeling furniture, that receives these advances? No inert apparatus ever entangled a Lamia.25 The design of this chair is capricious, but suppose we take this fauteuil rouge to stand for a red-blooded he, the contours of a man beset and repelled. There’s his heady summit held in her clutch, the left shoulder and stiffening arm issuing in a coiled fist (scroll of the armrest) pulling away to escape the untouchable. Even the closeness of the chair’s red to the framed yellow speaks of the heraldic colors of Spain, which Picasso habitually twins to signal his personal presence.26 The enforced clutch of female and male, pink against red, mindless aggression versus helpless recoil—this psychic predicament is the picture; to which Picasso at his most perfunctory

adds tokens of domesticity—including flowered wallpaper and assorted accessories of bourgeois comfort—to show just where this horror is housed. Three years after the date of this painting, in a series of pictures that embrace a new mistress as the cuddlesome complement of an armchair, Picasso renders the chair manly and amorous. That the armchair in the 1932 Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (fig. 11.10) is male seems clear. The painting is one of many Picasso produced of the nude Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young girl who had rekindled his sexual passion after his fifteen years in a failed marriage. The girl’s left shoulder is cut away to expose the hinder presence of the red armchair, delivering a pictorial equivalent for one of the oldest commonplaces of amatory poetry—the lover’s envy of whatever has bodily contact with the beloved. We have all read it in one place or another: “Oh that I were a glove upon that hand,” says Romeo, “that I might touch that cheek”; the lover in a Tennyson poem would like to be his lady’s necklace, “And all day long to fall and rise / Upon her balmy bosom.” The topos gets its bathetic inversion in Joyce’s Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom, in the Dublin library, remembering some coeds he had watched that day, thinks “happy chairs under them.”27 A follow-up drawing to the Tate picture shows Picasso’s thought (fig. 11.11). What the girl’s cutaway shoulder reveals are the sequacious upholstery studs running in continuous meander with her necklace, as if what is properly part of the chair stretched forth to encircle her throat.28 The motif of amorous interchange went further in the painting, where half a throat was already red chair. And what the drawing envisages as the nude’s right buttock was ambiguously part of the enveloping chair—a caress that belongs equally to receiver and giver. The eroticized chair bestows and enjoys a delegated touch. The chair as Picasso’s surrogate presence is neither too large nor too small, but life-size. And his beloved admits his attendance because, though she is the main foreground presence, Cubism and its antecedents have taught her not to usurp the whole field, and not to exclude what I have called the backmatter (pp. 64–66), which in this instance is especially ardent. A more subtle

Figure 11.10. Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, Boisgeloup,

July 27, 1932. London, Tate Modern.

Figure 11.11. Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, Boisgeloup, July 30, 1932, Z.VII.394. Private collection.

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visual equivalent for the amatory verbal conceit is The Dream, also of 1932, where Picasso assigns the armchair the red and yellow colors of Spain.29 In 1929, just such anthropomorphism serves under a negative sign to produce an uneasy chair. It appears oddly contoured until you recognize its insinuated manshape. So recognized, the depicted duo becomes a scrimmage, a psychomachia; a more interesting picture, I think. You face the work of an artist ten years into a ruinous marriage, driven to the verge of despair; being the artist he is, Picasso prospects that verge, makes his desperation his subject, strives to give its cause visual form. This is Picasso in solitary, working alone. And the outcome of these vigils is loaded enough to reward full attention.

But whatever attention the painting now gets focuses on the syndrome I call Maticasso. We are not to forget that Picasso paints with “Matisse on his mind”—not all the time, but often enough to recast him in the role of a borrower or dependent antagonist. Since his art is declared to be rife with “Matissean references,” Red Armchair must have been conceived as a “travesty” of one or another of Matisse’s posed odalisques of the earlier 1920s, a “comic parody,” a “summons to Matisse.”30 The relevance of such a dialogue depends on how truly Picasso’s motive in painting his homely ogre has been assessed—his need (and genius) to travel uncensored from formless feeling into the language of form. The comparison with Matisse wrenches the work out of its own long procession of transformational images

Figure 11.12. Henri Matisse, Odalisque with

Tambourine, 1926. New York, Museum of Modern Art; William S. Paley Collection.

“Belied with False Compare”

and diverts it from a home ground ruled by an unloved wife to the terrain of a disliked Matisse. Is it credible that Picasso in 1929 produced his Red Armchair with intent to embarrass Matisse? Or as an effective rebuke of another Matisse cited in the literature, the 1926 Odalisque with Tambourine (fig. 11.12)?31 The Matisse is a work of astonishing energy, at once centering and expanding; its controlled glitter of multicolor, its tonal range touching extremes; and the defiant patch of reckless yellow against the right margin. Tambourine remains lovelier to look at than its alleged reprimand. If Red Armchair had indeed been aimed at the Matisse, then poor misguided Picasso failed absolutely. But such “failure” follows only from the imputed intention invented by critics. Yes, both pictures center an occupied armchair indoors, a sitter’s left arm overhead and, more questionably, a raised knee.32

Does it matter that the doubled leg in the Matisse is being compared to a feature in the Picasso that is not a leg but a flaccid right arm, sprung from a nearest leg, like an octopus limb? Is it worth comparing “the patterned wallpaper,” such as papered every middle-class French apartment? I think it more interesting to observe how Picasso mystifies his picture’s upper right corner, where the canted top of an unexplained panel suggests a perspectival effect, as if we were looking up at a junction of wall and ceiling. Whereas, looking leftward, this “ceiling” becomes patterned wall, part of a space as irrational as the setting of the 1927 Woman in an Armchair. As for the raised arm of Matisse’s model, it frames her own head; the Picasso arm winds about something else. Should this difference be overlooked in the interest of the comparison? Instructed to see direct borrowings, we are lulled into seeing the Picasso as a figure alone, missing its symbiotic aggression and odious dependency (were she to let go of the chair, she’d collapse in a heap on the floor). I am also sorry to see Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground cited as the work against which Picasso’s Seated Bather of 1930 (fig. 11.13), i.e., after a four-year lapse, mounts an “aggressive reaction” by producing “a caricatural transformation of the Matisse figure,” “translat[ing] the pose” into “an image of remarkable ferocity.”33 Seated Bather, a towering menace of unfleshed bone, seems to me independent of Matisse’s Decorative Figure, though the legs of these figures, as in Red Armchair, both strike the same conventional pose— knees parted at ninety degrees; one bent leg up, the other aground. It is an ancient pose and hardly rare, occurring in art from Egypt, China, and Classical Greece, and in earlier works by Picasso.34 More pertinently, it is the posture of Maillol’s familiar La Mediterranée (1902–5). But if anyone had told Matisse that the pose of his Decorative Figure was borrowed from that Maillol, he would again have protested that they have “nothing in common.”

Figure 11.13. Seated Bather, Paris, early 1930. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Mrs. Solomon Guggenheim Fund.

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Appendix: To the Victor Belong the Spoils In the ap- and deprecation of art, the habit of ranking is commonplace. Here is Matisse, as remembered by Leo Stein. He spoke at length of Redon and Manet, with emphasis on the superior merits of the lesser man. . . . He told me that he had seen Picasso earlier, and Picasso had agreed with him. . . . Later on that same day Picasso came to the house and I told him what Matisse had said about Redon and Manet. Picasso burst out almost angrily, “But that is nonsense. Redon is an interesting painter, certainly, but Manet, Manet is a giant.” I answered, “Matisse told me you agreed with him.” Picasso, more angrily: “Of course I agreed with him. Matisse talks and talks. I can’t talk, so I just said oui, oui, oui. But it’s damned nonsense all the same.”35

Picasso (since he “can’t talk”) has not made it clear whether he thinks it’s nonsense to peg Redon above Manet, or whether he finds all such calibration nonsensical. The very terms he has chosen—“interesting painter” opposed to “giant”—discourage direct comparison. The talkative Matisse, on the other hand, keeps handing out grades, though he should have recused himself from this case, seeing that he was friends with Redon. Even a harmless anecdote, such as the following, betrays Matisse’s penchant to distinguish between winner and runner-up. Talking to Pierre Courthion in 1941, he recalls a chance encounter (datable c. 1913) with Picasso’s faithfullest partisan: One day, meeting Max Jacob on one of the boulevards, I said to him, “If I weren’t doing what I am doing, I’d like to paint like Picasso.” “Well,” said Max, “that’s very funny! Do you know that Picasso made the same remark to me about you?”36

On the face of it, this sounds generous on both sides. But a party pooper might wonder: doesn’t Matisse’s re-

mark follow a standard model, one which in those classical days any schoolboy would recognize? The source is Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander the Great” (Lives, XXXIII, 14). Visiting Corinth, Alexander seeks out the famous Diogenes, finds him sprawled by his tub to bask in the sun, but willing enough to dispense wisdom. At length, being asked by the king whether Diogenes has any wish, the beggarly Cynic replies, “yes, please stand out of my sun.” The royal retinue laugh, but are silenced by these immortal words: “Verily, were I not Alexander, I could wish to be Diogenes.” Magnanimous, yes, but with a smack of condescension—and no risk involved, since conversion into the other’s identity is no threat. I suspect that Jacob, sensing the sniff in Matisse’s half-tribute, gave tit for tat, whether or not Picasso ever uttered that “same remark.” Furthermore, Matisse’s benign concession grows insubstantial as one stays to consider it. What would it mean to Matisse in 1913 “to paint like Picasso”? Paint monochrome in the manner of Picasso’s Rose Period, in that of the abhorred Demoiselles, or of his current Cubist confections? The content of the Matisse accolade collapses into its Plutarchian model, which, by the way, fails to tell whether the mighty Cynic ever wished, second best, to be Alexander. Then there’s the story of an English tourist in France befriending a native. Upon parting, the Frenchman avows that, but for his being French, he could wish to have been born an Englishman. The other replies that, had he not been born English, he would still wish to be an Englishman. This retort merits full marks for candor. Matisse bested by Max Jacob must be satisfied with a minus. The polemical declaration of winners and losers traces back to biblical times. How David brought down Goliath, who had baffled the Israelites under the command of King Saul; how this stripling dispatched the armored colossus with a mere pebble cast from a slingshot—all this (as Dickens—Bleak House, ch. 2— puts it in another connection) “everybody knows—or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having been rather frequently mentioned.” Now as young David with his megacephalic trophy strides home in

“Belied with False Compare”

triumph, out come Jerusalem’s women, “And the women sung as they played, and they said, Saul slew his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7). Observe the changed identity of the loser and the gratuitous quantification. It is not David’s courage and skill that are praised, but his tenfold bettering of King Saul’s warlike record—which seems irrelevant. Since the adversary had been Goliath, why drag in Saul? No wonder the king went mad. We are here at the very font and origin of nefarious comparison. What possessed these invidious hags, and oh, how they succeeded. To this day, no citation index touts the victories won by King Saul, whereas David’s feat is “rather frequently mentioned.” The competitive impulse is more easily understood, or identified with, than the je ne sais quoi that drives creativity. This truism may help explain the appeal of anecdotes ancient and modern wherein your hero scores a spectacular win. Pliny the Elder writes about two outstanding painters in ancient Greece. A clever incident took place between Protogenes and Apelles. Protogenes lived at Rhodes, and Apelles made the voyage there from a desire to make himself acquainted with Protogenes’s works, as that artist was hitherto only known to him by reputation. He went at once to [Protogenes’s] studio. The artist was not there but there was a panel of considerable size on the easel prepared for painting, which was in the charge of a single old woman. In answer to his inquiry, she told him that Protogenes was not at home, and asked who it was she should report as having wished to see him. “Say it was this person,” said Apelles, and taking up a brush he painted in color across the panel an extremely fine line; and, when Protogenes returned the old woman showed him what had taken place. . . . [Protogenes], after looking closely at the finish of this, said that the new arrival was Apelles, as so perfect a piece of work tallied with nobody else; and he himself, using another color, drew a still finer line exactly on the top of the first one and, leaving the room, told the attendant to show it to the visitor if he returned. . . . And so it happened; for Apelles came

back, and, ashamed to be beaten, cut the lines with another in a third color, leaving no room for any further display of minute work. Hereupon Protogenes admitted he was defeated.37

Pliny has plenty more on this sort of one-upmanship, but let one further instance illustrate the ranging flair of the critics: “Connoisseurs put at the head of all his works . . . his Artemis in the midst of a band of maidens offering a sacrifice, a work by which he may be thought to have surpassed Homer’s verses describing the same subject.”38 Rather like being told that Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet “surpassed” Shakespeare’s play. Here is Goethe. A dinner guest at his table—it’s Tuesday in Weimar, April 14, 1829—recalls an ordeal by water from his days in Rome. Returning from an art tour of the Vatican, a party of artists and amateurs were being ferried across the Tiber. En route, the question arose as to who was the greater, Raphael or Michelangelo. Opinions being divided, one merry wag proposed that they not disembark until the question had been definitively resolved. Arrived at the opposite bank but at no consensus, they ordered the ferryman to reverse, destination Trastevere, the argument still heating up. And so it went, back and forth, time and again, the contented skipper earning full fare for each crossing, until his nonplussed twelve-year-old asked: “Father, why will these men not go ashore?” “Son, I don’t know,” said the father, “but I think they are mad.”39 Goethe himself, in the memoir he wrote of his years in Italy, recorded the following in July–August 1787. Artists in Rome were arguing the relative statures of Raphael and Michelangelo. “It became the fashion to dispute [who] was the greater genius.” Goethe finds these “conversations with artists and art lovers” unedifying. But, he adds: “One has to forgive in others a fault which one finds in oneself. First it was Raphael I preferred, then it was Michelangelo. One can only conclude that man is such a limited creature that, though his spirit may be open to greatness, he never acquires the capacity to recognize and appreciate equally different kinds of greatness.” Goethe concludes: “It is so difficult to comprehend one great talent, let alone two

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at the same time. To make things easier for us, we take sides: that is why the reputation of artists and writers is always fluctuating.”40 The championship model infects as well the history of music. Of the famed organist-composer John Bull (c. 1562–1628), we read in a text of 1691: [H]earing of a famous Musician belonging to a certain Cathedral, . . . he applied himself incognito as a Novice to him to learn something of his Faculty. . . . This Musician, after some discourse had passed between them, conducted Bull to a Vestry, or Music School joyning to the Cathedral, and shew’d to him a Lesson or song of forty parts, and then made a vaunting Challenge to any Person in the World to add one more part to them, supposing it to be so compleat and full, that it was impossible for any mortal Man to correct, or add to it. Bull thereupon desiring the use of Ink and rul’d Paper, (such as we call Musical Paper) prayed the Musician to lock him up in the said School for 2 or 3 Hours; which being done, not without great disdain by the Musician, Bull in that time, or less, added forty more parts to the said Lesson or Song. The Musician being thereupon called in, he viewed it, tried it, and retry’d it. At length he burst into a great ecstasy, and swore by the great God that he that added those 40 parts, must either be the Devil or Dr. Bull &c. Whereupon Bull making himself known, the Musician fell down and ador’d him.41

Do wordmongers spar in like manner, as vying for the longest periodic sentence, or finding a recondite rhyme for, say, Agamemnon? (Byron writes, “I condemn none”; your move!) No doubt, such contests occurred, but hardly in earnest. Item: Byron tells of the poet Sylvester (c. 1563–1618) challenging Ben Jonson to rhyme with “I, John Sylvester / Lay with your sister.” Jonson counters, “I, Ben Jonson, lay with your wife.” Sylvester objects, “That is not rhyme.” “No,” says Ben Jonson, “but it is true.”42 Who would you say won that bout? At the end of his essay on Dickens (1939), George Orwell thinks of Tolstoy and almost at once rejects the comparison, because “their purposes barely intersect.” I am reminded of Joyce and Proust on the one occasion they met—two originals, modern novelists both, both living in Paris, and both alike missing out on the Nobel Prize, but with otherwise little in common. “Our talk,” Joyce remembered, “consisted solely of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’ Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said, ‘No.’ And so on.”43 As an instance of non-intersection, I find this irrelevant anecdote irresistible.

Not e s

Preface and Acknowledgments 1. A full list of Steinberg’s publications appears on pp. 235–40. 2. Chapter 2 here, “Drawing as If to Possess,” was originally an independent essay, drawn from a section of “The Algerian Women,” then in draft form. Further thoughts on Picasso were presented in the symposium that accompanied MoMA’s 1989 exhibition “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,” published in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1992), passim. 3. See “The Gestural Trace,” Steinberg’s interview with Richard Cándida Smith for the Getty Research Institute’s Art History Oral Documentation, 2001, p. 21. Available online at https://ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/gesturaltraceleo00stei /gesturaltraceleo00stei.pdf. Most of Steinberg’s papers are now on deposit at the Getty Research Institute. Temporarily held back were those needed for these volumes. 4. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 19. 5. Ibid., p. 21. 6. Ibid., p. 27. Steinberg’s several editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, all heavily annotated, are now in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. 7. Richard Shiff, “Our Cézanne,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 31–32 (Summer–Fall 2012), special issue in memory of Leo Steinberg, pp. 27–28. See also Shiff ’s review of Steinberg’s Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, Artforum (May 2001), esp. p. 24; and Yve-Alain Bois’s introduction to Steinberg’s second Norton Lecture at Harvard, October 18, 1995: “his writings reintroduce a dimension of pleasure in the dry and often polemical field of art history—the sheer sensory pleasure of language; as if to compensate, through exquisite linguistic elegance and precise stylistic economy, for the unbridgeable gap between images and words.” 8. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 5. 9. A selection of about seventy drawings, dating from the 1930s to the 1990s, was exhibited at the New York Studio School, January 31–March 9, 2013: The Eye Is a Part of the Mind: Draw-

ings from Life and Art by Leo Steinberg, catalogue with essays by David Cohen and Jack Flam. The drawings were sold to benefit the school’s scholarship fund. Steinberg had long supported the Studio School for its emphasis on primary drawing skills, donating lectures from the 1960s on. 10. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 89, among other places. 11. The quotations are from the revised version of Steinberg’s “The Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After,” Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), in Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2018), pp. 154, 137. 12. Ibid., p. 154. 13. These characteristic passages are from Steinberg’s “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), in Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2019), pp. 164, 162. 14. Steinberg was here speaking of Michelangelo, but the principle abides in all his studies. The quotation is from the preface to Steinberg’s Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (1975), in Michelangelo’s Painting, p. 237. 15. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 1. 16. Ibid. for Steinberg on Merce Cunningham, who never allowed his dancers to improvise on stage, lest they fall back on clichés. 17. Daniele Di Cola’s 2017 thesis has now been published: Arte come unità del molteplice: I fondamenti critici di Leo Steinberg (Rome, 2021). The symposium was organized under the auspices of the Sapienza, the Centre André Chastel, Paris, the Université Grenoble Alpes, the Académie de France à Rome, and the University of Notre Dame Rome. For the program, see https:// international.nd.edu/assets/233718/programma.pdf (accessed August 2021). The proceedings of the symposium will appear as Leo Steinberg Now: Il pensiero attraverso gli occhi, ed. Guillaume Cassegrain, Claudia Cieri Via, Daniele Di Cola, Jérémie Koering, and Sheila Schwartz (Rome, 2022). The publication includes my introduction, which, although based on the present preface, adds further biographical details.

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Introduction 1. Chapter 2, “Drawing as If to Possess,” for example, lists “four ways of harmonizing an ideal of omnispection with the logic of a fixed point of view” (p. 44). I thank Sheila Schwartz for generously sharing her thoughts about Leo Steinberg’s language and John Semlitsch for essential aid in research. 2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to selve is “(to cause) to become and act as a unique self.” The reference to “reciprocal mirroring” is preceded by one of Steinberg’s exhortations to the reader to imitate a figural posture (p. 100). 3. Sex aestheticized is not coitus. The conversion of one sensory syndrome to the other is an especially seductive variant of the classic pathetic fallacy. Carol Duncan’s summation of Steinberg’s argument regarding the Demoiselles is a case in point: “the act of looking at these female figures visually re-creates the act of sexually penetrating a woman.” To the contrary, when Steinberg wrote of a “reciprocity of engulfment and penetration,” it was the painting that was engulfing and penetrating the viewer as much as the viewer might be engulfing and penetrating the scene (human vision projects, scans, circumscribes, averts, recoils). Picasso’s “sexual metaphor” works in more than one direction, as an ambisexed painting solicits an ambisexed viewer. See Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” Art Journal, 48 (Summer 1989), p. 178, n. 11; and Steinberg’s rejoinder, “Letters to the Editor: From Leo Steinberg,” Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. 4. “Cubist simultaneity,” as presented in various publications, was one of many examples of what Steinberg called “the irresistible lure of a text” (p. 195) or “the tyranny of the written word” (p. ix). 5. Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 173, 189. Steinberg’s crucial study has received little extended commentary; an exception is Jonathan Fineberg, “The Sensual Garden of Picasso’s Late Work,” in Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style, exh. cat. (New York, Pace Gallery, 2014), pp. 6–19. 6. Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” p. 189. 7. Sheila Schwartz supplied me with a list of some of these leologisms in Steinberg’s hand. 8. A device of concision and directness: Steinberg intensified verbs by converting intransitive action to transitive, often using intensifiers, such as the prefix be-. In a self-portrait, Picasso is “bethinking the mouth” (p. 67). Here Steinberg finesses the common locutions “thinking of,” “thinking about,” and so on. Such intensification is common in German, Steinberg’s third language; English, his fourth, adopts the practice. 9. As examples of astute commentary, see Rosalind Krauss, “Editorial Note,” October, 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 3–6; Lisa Florman, “The Difference Experience Makes in The Philosophical Brothel,” Art Bulletin, 85 (December 2003), pp. 769–83. 10. Steinberg’s phrasing recalls an unforgettable line: “All that is solid melts into air”; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The

Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, ed. Samuel H. Beer (New York, 1955), p. 13.

One 1. [For a summary of comments on the drawing, with further references, see Susan Grace Galassi and Marilyn McCully, eds., Picasso’s Drawings 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition, exh. cat. (New York, The Frick Collection, and Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 2011), pp. 56–58. —Ed.] 2. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, 1881–1906 (New York, 1991), p. 29. The Picasso quote is from Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Says, trans. Christine Trollope (London, 1969), p. 73. In contrast, see Irving Lavin’s perception of the drawing as “confirmation of (Picasso’s) youthful academic ability”; Lavin, “Picasso’s Bull(s): Art History in Reverse,” Art in America (March 1993), p. 86. 3. “Neither childish behavior nor madness are insulting words,” Klee wrote. “All this is to be taken seriously, more seriously than the art of the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today’s art”; quoted in Rosemary Dinnage, “The Scream behind the Pattern,” New York Review of Books, April 8, 1993, p. 33. By the 1920s and 1930s, respect for “outsider art,” including the drawings of children, was commonplace among modern artists. For Klee and the cult of children’s drawings, see O. K. Werckmeister, “The Issue of Childhood in the Art of Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine, 52 (September 1977), pp. 138–51. 4. Picasso elsewhere remarked, “My first drawings could never be exhibited in an exposition of children’s drawings. The awkwardness and naïveté of childhood were almost absent from them”; quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art (New York, 1972), p. 76, from Brassaï, Picasso and Company (New York, 1966), p. 86. 5. For the possible source of the statuette in a work by Giambologna, see Galassi and McCully, Picasso’s Drawings 1890–1921 (above, note 1), p. 56. 6. The fifty-one-page sketchbook, originally in the collection of Marina Picasso, passed to the Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, by 1983; see Masterpieces from the Marina Picasso Collection and from Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., exh. cat. (Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, 1983), no. 24, pp. 181–89, for the sequence of twenty-nine drawings. Three years later, it was included in Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, eds., Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, exh. cat. (New York, Pace Gallery, 1986), pp. 20–50, as sketchbook 35, the number it has retained. [At some later point, the sketchbook was broken up; individual sheets have appeared at auction. See the captions to figs. 1.9–1.12; another sheet was sold from the estate of Jan Krugier, Sotheby’s, London, sale L14004, February 6, 2014, lot 172. —Ed.] 7. E. A. Carmean, Jr., in Glimcher and Glimcher, Je suis le cahier, p. 13, took these successive views to prove that Picasso was circumambulating a model. But that Picasso’s model was present only to his mind’s eye can be verified by observing the fall of shadow, which right-handed draftsmen tend to throw to their right. So in figs. 1.9 and 1.10, left, the boy’s right side is shaded;

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thereafter his left—and it’s naive to suppose that Picasso not only rose for each sketch to change his own or the model’s position, but kept switching the source of light. 8. Fig. 1.13, the drawing by Hans Bock the Elder, is based on a wax model of a Giambologna Venus Bathing; see Tobias Stimmer 1539–1584: Spätrenaissance am Oberrhein, exh. cat. (Kunstmuseum Basel, 1984), no. 388, p. 514. The inadequacy of mere aspect had troubled the best Renaissance artists—and led to brilliant results. In the pursuit of realism by way of fixed-point perspective, they invented one subterfuge after another, mastering such recondite problems as foreshortening, variable angulation of planes, and fall of shadow; see Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 175–86. 9. Rimbertinus, De deliciis sensibilibus Paradisi (Venice, 1488), p. 16v; Celso Maffei, De sensibilibus deliciis Paradisi (Verona, 1504), pp. A viii v–B ii r, both quoted and translated in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), p. 104. 10. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cubist Epoch,” Artforum (February 1971), p. 32: “I find evidence that in these years Picasso was plagued by a kind of skepticism about vision from which there was more fear than pleasure to be derived—especially for a painter. And the fear seems to have come from the question about whether there can ever be direct access to depth through vision— whether anyone can really see depth.” 11. Not reproduced is a drawing in Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881–1907 (Barcelona, 1985), p. 180, fig. 503, two views of the boat, the top similar to that in figs. 1.45 and 1.46, the bottom, a three-quarter view with the prow at left. Figs. 1.45 and 1.46 are not in the Zervos corpus. 12. Personal communication from William Rubin to the author, 1970s. 13. The other charcoal sketch is Head of a Man, winter 1910–11, Musée Picasso, Paris, MP643, reprod. in Werner Spies, Picasso: Pastelle, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, exh. cat. (Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1986), p. 68, and Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907–1917) (New York, 1990), p. 206, no. 570. 14. Quoted in Émile Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne (Paris, 1926), p. 69. 15. [At around this point in the early versions of the lecture Steinberg referred to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, whose relevance to Picasso’s Cubism had been suggested by a colleague. In a letter to Christine Poggi, December 23, 1985, he reported that in 1976 he plunged into Saussure, reading the book in German, French, and English, and working it into lectures given that year at the American Academy in Rome and the Grand Palais, Paris. The Saussure material remained in the lecture, with revisions, through 1981 (no transcripts of these lectures survive). But by 1985, in the Hilla Rebay Lecture at the Guggenheim Museum, he had “begun to make much less of the Saussure-Picasso connection.” The relevant portion of that lec-

ture reads: “Picasso’s conversion of corporeal things into immaterial signs . . . put him in step, pari passim, with some of the keenest minds of his age. But what painter’s impulse could have guided him to this modernism? He had not read Saussure’s fundamental Course of General Linguistics, which is exactly contemporaneous with Cubism, although published later. And if he had attended Saussure’s lectures, they would have made no more sense to him than, I suspect, Saussure would have made of Picasso. I cannot feel that these Picasso decisions are intelligible until I can understand them as necessary to his artistic integrity, to his sense of himself as a painter of some sort of compelling truth.” Within a few years, Saussure dropped out of the lecture entirely. —Ed.] 16. Oliver Sacks, “In the River of Consciousness,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2004, pp. 42–43. 17. Driving a nail through painted smoke: Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York, 1964), p. 65. Picasso’s description of Matisse is quoted in Matisse Picasso, exh. cat. (London, Tate Modern, and New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 376, from Tériade, “En causant avec Picasso,” L’intransigeant, June 15, 1932. 18. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London, 2003), p. 19. 19. For collage as a sign system, see Rosalind Krauss, “RePresenting Picasso,” Art in America (December 1980), pp. 91–96, expanding on Pierre Daix’s Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907–1916 (London, 1979). 20. While you’re in the linens department at Bloomingdale’s look for the “nasty sheets” described in J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours, ch. 5, “the artificial purity of nasty sheets”—“l’artificelle candeur d’un lit polisson.” And then there’s Alexander Pope in “Eloisa to Abelard,” line 19: “Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees have worn.” Can knees be holy? 21. The illustration, by Christoph Niemann, appeared in Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay “Theatres of War,” New Yorker, January 12, 2004, p. 79. Niemann would not give permission to reproduce his work outside its original context. 22. The two works described are manuscript illuminations, the first Aristotle, De historia animalium, 1470s, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, vat. lat 2094, fol. 8r, reprod. in J. J. G. Alexander, The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450–1550, exh. cat. (London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1994), pl. 38. The second is the title page of Boccaccio, De la ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes, 1476, by the Master of the Boccaccio Illustrations, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 32.458. 23. Picasso to Braque, October 9, 1912: “I am using your latest papery and powdery procedures. I’m in the process of imagining a guitar and I’m using a bit of sand against our awful [orrible] canvas”; quoted in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 31. 24. [At this point in the lecture, Steinberg showed three examples of negative space in commercial graphics, reproductions of which could not be accommodated in the present volume: the North American Van Lines logo, with an arrow ma-

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terializing out of nowhere (http://www.guardiantransfer.com/ guardiantransferwp/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/GT-image -navl.jpg); the US three-cent stamp issued in 2002, where a fivepointed star gives birth to another, fashioned from nothingness (https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2008.2007.182); and the Texaco logo adopted in 1981, a star stealing from the neutral red ground to erect an initial (https://logos.fandom.com/ wiki/Texaco). —Ed.] 25. Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmett (New York, 1993), pp. 368–69, as quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, “Picasso’s Self-Portraits,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., ed. William Rubin (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 170. 26. Daix, describing his own response to the drawing: “I had the sudden impression that he was staring his own death in the face, like a good Spaniard.” Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, pp. 368–69. 27. For the earlier skulls, cf. the 1907 Still Life with a Skull in the Hermitage and Steinberg, “The Skulls of Picasso,” in Other Criteria (above, note 8), pp. 115–23. 28. For “death in the first person singular,” see also p. 179. What is to me truly amazing is the popularity this portrait apparently won in 1988, when its original Japanese owners, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, lent it to the Paris exhibition, “Le dernier Picasso.” It was chosen to advertise the show in a thousand placards scattered throughout the city and the Paris Métro.

Two 1. Cf. the drawing of June 24, 1933, in the Art Institute of Chicago, Z.VIII.112; also the impressive series of etchings of the same year, Bloch 28–31, Geiser 339, 372. The drypoint Embrace here reproduced is Bloch 182. 2. The violence of these “embraces” has misled some to regard them as scenes of rape. But one must look at these women’s hands, which never claw or repel; and at their faces, which never show signs of fear, pain, or revulsion. In fact, the action is never a rapist-victim, subject-object relation. So strong is the projection of bilateral sexual fulfillment that the image may as well represent the woman’s fantasy of transverberation. 3. The secret is aired in several etchings of the Suite 347 series, which equate the act of painting with coitus; see ch. 9. 4. Later graphic folk art popularized the moral antithesis of front and back in the image of Frau Welt—personified worldliness: a fine woman’s face to the fore and a death’s-head behind. Broadsheets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries symbolize front-back antinomy by bisecting the figure along a central divide: the elegant right half depicting the worldly state, the other, the bare bones of death, understood as lurking behind. The visual analogue is with Janus and Annus, personifications of the new year, both of whom are commonly represented with a face fore and aft, as is the figure of Prudence. Common, too, in the late Renaissance is the figure of two-faced Fraud, whose hidden hag’s visage belies the young face in front. We may add that, according to an ancient Hebrew myth,

Adam was originally created androgynous, with a male face before and a female face rere regardant. But God “changed His mind, removed Adam’s backward-looking face, and built a woman’s body from it”; see Robert Graves and Ralph Patai, Hebrew Myths (New York, 1966), p. 66. 5. The full text of Titian’s letter is given in Stefano Ticozzi, Vite dei pittori: Vecellij di Cadore (Milan, 1812), p. 512. 6. See Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1906), vol. 1, p. 101, and vol. 4, p. 98. 7. Federighi’s drawing is inscribed in the artist’s hand: “These women are in the house of the Cardinal of Siena; they are three, I copied them from the front and from the back. They are called the Three Graces.” 8. Bartolommeo Fazio (Facius) in De viris illustribus (1456), discussing Joannes Gallicus ( Jan van Eyck). The lost painting was in the possession of Cardinal Octavianus. For the full text and the Latin original, see Ludwig Baldass, Jan van Eyck (London, 1952), p. 84 and n. 1. 9. A number of drawings made on February 5, 1935 (Z.VIII.248, 250, 252), depict a metamorphic nude sketching before a mirror to portray herself from her realistic reflection; the reflection is evidently something else. 10. The Mirror (private collection, Z.VII.378) is reproduced in Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, exh. cat. (London, Tate Modern, 2018), p. 97; Girl before a Mirror is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 11. “On ferait un joli tableau de ce dernier moment, pris de derrière l’autel”; Delacroix, Journal, ed. Yves Hucher (Paris, 1963), p. 203. 12. Watchers upstage appear in The Dance (Salomé) drypoint of 1905 (Bloch 15) and in La Coiffure, 1906 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art); then again in the Minotauromachy etching (Bloch 111) and in the Blind Minotaur aquatint (Bloch 97). More interesting in the present context is the Drawing Lesson (1925, Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Z.V.421): a boy draftsman peering from behind the distal side of a table tries his hand at a still life—three apples laid out in front. Notwithstanding the general Cubist idiom, the rotundity of the fruit—the very problem of three-dimensional rendering—is symbolized in the convergence of glances, ours and his. 13. Picasso’s great Seated Bather of 1930 (New York, Museum of Modern Art) has been cited for the similarity of its openwork structure. But the comparison also reveals how much more spatial recession Picasso demands in 1937, and how his distanced voyeur contributes to the volumetric effect. 14. Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan, 1957–60), no. CVII, p. 175. 15. Outstanding examples of hairpin or jackknifing figures in Renaissance art are found in Michelangelo’s Brazen Serpent spandrel on the Sistine Ceiling, and in Tanzio da Varallo’s Battle of Sennacherib, Basilica di San Gaudenzio, Novara. The type is anticipated in the Christ figure of Butinone’s Descent from the Cross,

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Art Institute of Chicago. For a type intermediary between jackknifing and spiraling serpentination, but still designed to display front and back at the same time, cf. Rosso’s Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, Uffizi, and the Hercules and Dejaneira woodcut after Jan Gossaert, reprod. in Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), cat. 118. 16. An almost pure Mannerist figure, represented as part of a sculptural group, occurs in Picasso’s etching of March 30, 1933, from the Suite Vollard—Sculptor, Reclining Model and Sculpture of Horse and Youth (Bloch 55). More personal explorations of the jackknifing type occur in Picasso’s numerous drawings, from 1938 to 1944, of women bending over to wash their feet (e.g., Z.IX.200, 322, 331, 338, 382, 383; also Z.XIII.291). These doubled figures are complementary to the backbends developed around the studies for the Crucifixion (1930). The Magdalen’s stricken body is given as the jackknife reversed, with no body landmarks left out of sight. 17. In 1931, Vollard suggested the project to Picasso, who took it up five years later. The book was published in 1942. La Puce was excluded, possibly because Buffon had no entry for fleas, but more likely because Martin Fabiani, who had purchased unpublished book projects from the family of the recently deceased Vollard, found the print in bad taste. It was only included in the thirty-six copies of the deluxe set of the book. [See https://www .johnszoke.com/news/16- eaux-fortes- originals-pour-les-texts -de-buffon-bloch-328358-baer-575605-cramer-37/, accessed May 8, 2021. —Ed.] 18. Quoted in Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), p. 66. 19. Imitating Picasso’s distortions, photographers have repeatedly tried to create images “in the round” by splicing disparate aspects together, or by keeping the shutter open while the model or the camera moved. It seems to me that these attempts fail because the photographer is unable to impose necessity and rightness of shape on the intervals between displaced features.

Three 1. [As of August 2020, Picasso had 91.2 million hits, Einstein 51.5, Hitler 35, Gandhi 12.6, Garbo 3.1: Elvis had 144 million. In 2007, when the hits were first calculated, Hitler beat Picasso. —Ed.] 2. The surgical removal of the cheekline was first performed on a magazine reproduction in 1980 by Edward A. Snow, now Professor of English at Rice University, Houston, during an NEH summer seminar I taught, “The Effects of Art Literature on Perception.” 3. The quotation is from the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53. [For Steinberg’s work on substance in Picasso, see p. 228, note 14 below. —Ed.] 4. Quoted in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, written in 1915 (Munich, 1920; reprint, Stuttgart, 1958), p. 28. 5. As has been observed, nothing in Picasso ever happens for a first time. Everything seems anticipated in earlier work. For

the availability of alternatives as a subject of representation, one might cite, inter alia, the two neck positions in the 1905 drypoint of a young woman’s profile (Bloch 6). But the style in both versions is constant. 6. Why the glass appears in faux bois is an interesting question; perhaps as a hypallage (see p. 31). If that figure of speech is defined as the migration of one object’s proper quality to an object associated with it—as when a skillful gardener is said to have a green thumb—then the woodness of Picasso’s glass would allude to the table, whose substance is not otherwise acknowledged. 7. In Gibbon’s view, this is still unfathomable: “The Perichoresis, or circumincessio, is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss”; Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), ch. 21, n. 59. 8. A superb account of the 1907 Self-Portrait was written by Kirk Varnedoe, master of clairvoyance and of unhurried prose, who died too soon, too young; “Picasso’s Self-Portraits,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., ed. William Rubin (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1996), pp. 136–40. The difference between our respective descriptions is another tribute to the inexhaustible abundance of the Picasso painting.

Four [Steinberg regarded the 1972 publication as “a mangled affair, straddling two issues of ArtNews, with a change midway of format and management”; letter to the editor, Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. For the 1988 publication in October, Rosalind Krauss wrote a brief but penetrating analysis of the essay’s phenomenological position (pp. 3–6). “Retrospect: Sixteen Years After” (pp. 110–16 above) discusses Picasso’s reputation and the critical position of Cubism and the Demoiselles in 1972, when “The Philosophical Brothel” was first published. Similarly dating to 1972 are most of Steinberg’s references to the state of the literature on the Demoiselles and studies for it. Steinberg read a draft of Lisa Florman’s 2003 essay on the Demoiselles with “deep admiration”; letter to Florman, July 8, 2002, copy with the editor. In “The Difference Experience Makes in The Philosophical Brothel,” Art Bulletin, 85 (December 2003, pp. 769–83), Florman draws out the repeated references in Steinberg’s text to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy, while simultaneously exploring its relation to earlier literature as well as the significance of language and “voice” within it. See also Florman’s “Insistent, Resistant Cézanne: On Picasso’s Three Women and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 33–34 (Summer–Fall 2012), pp. 19–26. —Ed.] 1. André Salmon, La jeune peinture française (Paris, 1912), p. 3: “For the first time in Picasso’s work the expression of the faces is neither tragic nor passionate. These are masks almost entirely freed from humanity. Yet these people are not gods, nor are they Titans or heroes; not even allegorical or symbolic figures. Ce sont des problèmes nus, des chiffres blancs au tableau-noir.”

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2. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, written in 1915 (Munich, 1920; reprint, Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 26–27; English ed., The Rise of Cubism (New York, 1949), pp. 6–7. The text runs as follows: “Early in 1907 Picasso began a strange large painting depicting women, fruit and drapery, which he left unfinished. . . . Begun in the spirit of the works of 1906, it contains in one section the endeavors of 1907 and thus never constitutes a unified whole. . . . In the foreground, however, alien to the style of the rest of the painting, appear a crouching figure and a bowl of fruit. . . . This is the beginning of Cubism, the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once. These problems were the basic tasks of painting: to represent three dimensions and color on a flat surface, and to comprehend them in the unity of that surface. . . . No pleasant ‘composition’ but uncompromising, organically articulated structure. In addition, there was the problem of color, and finally, the most difficult of all, that of the amalgamation, the reconciliation of the whole. Rashly, Picasso attacked all the problems at once.” 3. Following are characteristic examples: “The Demoiselles d’Avignon is the masterpiece of Picasso’s Negro Period, but it may also be called the first cubist picture, for the breaking up of natural forms, whether figures, still life or drapery, into a semiabstract all-over pattern of tilting shifting planes is already cubism. . . . The Demoiselles is a transitional picture, a laboratory or, better, a battlefield of trial and experience; but it is also a work of formidable, dynamic power unsurpassed in European art of its time”; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York, 1939), p. 60; the paragraph reappears in Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York, 1946), p. 56. Though the author is sensitive to the “sheer expressionist violence and barbaric intensity” of the work, he makes no attempt to reconcile this aspect of Picasso’s invention with its historic importance as “the first Cubist picture.” Wilhelm Boeck and Jaime Sabartés introduce the Demoiselles as follows: “In the course of 1906 Picasso turned more and more resolutely away from subjective expression and . . . concentrated on objective, formal problems. He thus shares in the general artistic current of those years.” Like the Fauves, Picasso “subordinated subject matter to form conceived as an end in itself. . . . The history of the composition . . . illustrates the process by which form asserts its supremacy over subject matter”; Boeck and Sabartés, Picasso (New York, 1952), pp. 141ff. The authors refer only to one of the preliminary studies, our fig. 4.6. The rest of the discussion concerns the anticipation of Cubism and the sources of the work in Cézanne, El Greco, Iberian and African sculpture. John Golding: “In the last analysis  .  .  . the Demoiselles is related more closely to Cézanne’s canvases of bathing women than to his earlier, less structural figure pieces. Indeed, it would have been quite natural if, when Picasso became more interested in the purely pictorial problems involved in composing and unifying a picture the size of the Demoiselles, he had begun to look with greater concentration at Cézanne’s later figure work”; Gold-

ing, “The Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Burlington Magazine, 100 (May 1958), pp. 156–63. Robert Rosenblum succeeds in evoking the work’s “barbaric, dissonant power,” its “magical force,” and “mysterious psychological intensity”; after which he concludes: “The radical quality of Les Demoiselles lies, above all, in its threat to the integrity of mass as distinct from space. In the three nudes at the left, the arcs and planes that dissect the anatomies begin to shatter the traditional sense of bulk; and in the later figures at the right, this fragmentation of mass is even more explicit. The nudes’ contours now merge ambiguously with the icy-blue planes beside them. . . . [I]t is exactly this new freedom in the exploration of mass and void, line and plane, color and value—independent from representational ends—that makes Les Demoiselles so crucial for the still more radical liberties of the mature years of Cubism”; Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1960), p. 25. Edward Fry: “[Picasso’s] departures from classical figure style [in the Demoiselles] . . . mark the beginning of a new attitude toward the expressive potentialities of the human figure. Based not on gesture and physiognomy but on the complete freedom to re-order the human image, this new approach was to lead to the evocation of previously unexpressed states of mind. . . . The treatment of space is, however, by far the most significant aspect of Les Demoiselles, especially in view of the predominant role of spatial problems in the subsequent development of cubism. The challenge facing Picasso was the creation of a new system of indicating three-dimensional relationships that would no longer be dependent on the convention of illusionistic, one point perspective”; Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), pp. 13–14. Douglas Cooper: “It is not easy to appreciate or judge the angular and aggressive Demoiselles as a work of art today because it was abandoned as a transitional and often re-worked canvas, with many stylistic contradictions unresolved. . . . Thus the Demoiselles is best regarded as a major event in the history of modern painting, where Picasso posed many of the problems and revealed many of the ideas which were to preoccupy him for the next three years. In short, it is an invaluable lexicon for the early phase of Cubism.” Cooper adds that the repainting of three of the heads under the impact of African sculpture “led [Picasso] to inject an element of fierceness into an otherwise emotionally detached composition”; Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), pp. 22–23. And Jean Leymarie: “The Demoiselles d’Avignon, whose heroic genesis and legendary fate are familiar, reversed the direction of modern art by throwing the center of gravity upon the picture itself and its creative tension. All earlier illustrative or sentimental values are dissolved and converted into plastic energy”; Leymarie, Picasso: Métamorphoses et unité (Geneva, 1971), p. 29. 4. Barr, Fifty Years (above, note 3), p. 57. 5. Barr, Forty Years (above, note 3), p. 60, and Fifty Years, p. 57. Picasso’s statement appears to have been made in conversation with Kahnweiler in December 1933, published by the latter in

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“Huit Entretiens,” Le Point (October 1952), p. 24, and translated in Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views (New York, 1972), pp. 153–54: “According to my original idea, there were supposed to be men in it. There was a student holding a skull. A seaman also. The women were eating, hence the basket of fruits which I left in the painting. Then, I changed it and it became what it is now.” The gist of Picasso’s statement must have been known before its late publication in 1952. Barr does not recall whether he heard it from Picasso directly, but his Forty Years catalogue states in the caption for our fig. 4.6: “The figure at the left, Picasso says (1939), is a man with a skull in his hand entering a scene of carnal pleasure.” Concerning the skull in this drawing, see pp. 93–96. 6. Barr, Fifty Years (above, note 3), p. 57; Barr, Masters of Modern Art (New York, 1954), p. 68. 7. “The Demoiselles is in many ways an unsatisfactory painting with its abrupt changes of style, its violence and its suppressed eroticism.  .  .  . Picasso himself considered the painting unfinished. But by posing many of the problems that the cubists were to solve, it marks the beginning of a new era in the history of art. It remains not only the major turning point in Picasso’s career, but also the most important single pictorial document that the twentieth century has yet produced”; Golding in Picasso and Man, exh. cat. (Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1964), p. 11. Cf. Golding’s earlier statement that the picture is “the most important single turning point in the evolution of twentieth-century art so far”; “The Demoiselles d’Avignon” (above, note 3), p. 163. 8. The second is Z.VI.981, Musée Picasso, MP533, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (Paris, Musée Picasso, 1988), vol. 1, cat. 24, p. 27. The three composition studies first published by Barr in Forty Years (1939; above, note 3), p. 60, reappear in the author’s Fifty Years (1946, above, note 3), p. 56; in William Rubin’s Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), p. 196; and in Z.II/1.19–21. Of the thirteen composition studies published in Z.II/2 in 1942, only one has been briefly cited in the literature (by Bandmann; see note 23 below). 9. Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (Vienna, 1931, first published in the Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses in Wien, 23 [1902]). Cf. Juan Gris’s account of early Cubism: “the only relationship that existed was that between the intellect of the painter and the objects, and practically never was there any relationship between the objects themselves”; quoted in Fry, Cubism (above, note 3), p. 169. [Steinberg later commented on his inclusion of Riegl: “As for Riegl . . . I worried about bringing him in. I was, after all, leading a double life—as a trained art historian focused on Renaissance and Baroque, and as a moonlighting critic of 20th-century art. My acquaintance with Riegl came out of the former. On the contemporary art scene no one had heard of him. Hence my fear that any reference to Riegl and his 17th-century Dutchmen might strike ArtNews readers as pretentious, academic, and alienating. Amazing how our attitudes (and Riegl’s recent fortunes in En-

glish) have changed during these past thirty years”; letter to Lisa Florman, July 8, 2002, copy with the editor. —Ed.] 10. The statement may still be correct, but the Prado no longer makes it in brass. 11. [For the most recent version of Steinberg’s work on Las Meninas, see “Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” in Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2020), pp. 195–208. —Ed.] 12. For the present argument it is immaterial whether our “upper deck” is that of a river boat or, as Picasso described it, a “horse-drawn [double-decker] bus going over the Seine”; quoted in Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods (Greenwich, CT, 1967), p. 182; henceforth cited as D-B. 13. To appreciate the boldness of Picasso’s spatial conception in the Upper Deck, I suggest comparing George Caleb Bingham’s treatment of a similar subject in his Raftsmen Playing Cards, 1847, St. Louis Art Museum. 14. The most innocent-looking Picassos may fall into this erotic class. E.g., the Cubist Woman with a Book of 1909, Z.II/1.150 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a seated nude dozing, with a book held open between parted thighs; or the summer 1910 Table de toilette, Z.II/1.220, with the key stuck in the keyhole at lower center; or the collage Au bon marché of 1913 (fig. 1.63), where Rosenblum first observed the sexual pun in the words trou ici at bottom center. More than a boyish joke, such a motif betrays an organic conception of the picture and an erotic relation to it. See Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Anatomy of Eroticism,” in Studies in Erotic Art, ed. Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson (New York, 1970), p. 337, n. 3, and “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism,” in Picasso in Retrospect, ed. Roland Penrose and John Golding (New York, 1973), p. 53. [For gender issues, as well as Steinberg’s comments on the original 1972 publication of “The Philosophical Brothel,” see his correspondence with Carol Duncan, Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. —Ed.] 15. As the form of the table becomes the subject of a separate thought, it suggests a separate painting: the spring 1908 still life called Vase of Flowers at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 16. This canvas of the curtain raiser alone comes closest to our figs. 4.13 and 4.14. 17. An indecorous pose which Picasso invests with almost pharaonic solemnity. For related studies, see Z.II/2.647 (MP1859, fol. 4r), a sketch for the oil, Z.II/2.651 (MP10); the unused two-figure group Z.II/2.650 (MP1859, fol. 40r); and Z.XXII.461, D-B.XVI.20. 18. A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection  .  .  . at Windsor Castle (London, 1949), no. 429, inv. 12771. Cf. also Michelangelo’s study for a rising Lazarus conceived as an uprighting of the Adam in the Sistine Creation fresco, c. 1516, British Museum, inv. 1860,0714.2. 19. Fig. 4.23 is not in Zervos. The theme of the drawing,

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suggesting the externalization of a private fantasy, is sustained through a dozen similar studies, Z.VIII.76–85. 20. Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse (New York, 1971), p. 103; Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca, 1986), fig. 200; Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York, 1984), p. 278. 21. The deliberateness of the arrangement is proved by the preparatory charcoal study, Z.II/2.689. 22. The change from an upturned right hand to a left hand turned down, i.e., from acceptance to repudiation, is traditional in Last Judgments (Giotto, Gaddi, etc.) and is subtly modified in Michelangelo’s Sistine fresco, to which Picasso refers in three separate statements quoted in Ashton, Picasso on Art (above, note 5), pp. 61, 168, 170. On the sexual significance which Picasso assigns to the interchange of right and left feet—in the Dryad and numerous other works—see Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 147– 48. The animalism of his jungle women of the 1907–8 period becomes explicit in a remarkable gouache, Z.II/1.39 (fig. 4.47 and p. 103), where a nude woman’s left leg turns into the hind leg of a quadruped. Her lower body is half satyress. For the traditional formalist interpretation of the Dryad, see Rosenblum, Cubism (above, note 3), pp. 28–29: “La Grande dryade continues something of the constructive fantasies of the nudes of 1906 and 1907, but it also offers a new sense of order and rational exploration that replaces the more impulsive approach of the earlier works. The figure now seems to be studied in a manner that, for Picasso, is relatively dispassionate, for the artist here quietly examines the elementary building blocks of threedimensional form.” See also Jean Sutherland Boggs in Picasso and Man (above, note 7), p. 62: “[Sculpturally conceived] the planes of [the great Dryad] are clear and bold, but this three-dimensional quality is also related to the forceful movement of her body and of our eyes around that body.  .  .  . Picasso simplified her face from a mask, suggestive of African works, to a shape without any associations. The Dryad represents a movement into analytical cubism in its colors and the emphasis upon form; she is also one step further in that direction in the expansive, complicated movement she provides for our eyes.” An attempt to acknowledge the work in its evocative ambiguity was made by Charles Sterling: “The Dryad appears fittingly among the trees of a dense and dark wood. Is she seated? Is she about to leap? She is nothing but the embodiment of converging energies, and, before learning that she is divine, we know that she is indestructible, that she is as fierce as the wild beasts whose faculty of sudden relaxation is also hers”; Sterling, The Hermitage (New York, 1958), p. 194. 23. The figure’s reclining posture was observed at least once before, in Günther Bandmann’s Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 5: “Diese Gestalt könnte auch als Liegefigur

in Aufsicht vorstellbar sein” (“This figure is also imaginable as reclining and seen from above”). The effect of rampant or erected recumbency is anticipated in numerous works of the sixteenth century. Examples: the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s Entombment in the London National Gallery; several Correggio figures, such as the Antiope in the Louvre; Goltzius’s slain Adonis in Amsterdam; or the Joseph Heintz the Elder Amor and Psyche, Galerie Peter Griebert, Munich; reprod. in Burlington Magazine, 114 ( June 1972), p. lxvii. Relevant, too, are those modern pinup photos that produce more or less upright images by taking bird’s-eye views of reclining models. 24. Picasso’s still lifes with porrón are Z.I.342 (Washington, DC, Phillips Collection); Z.I.343 (St. Petersburg, Hermitage); and Z.XXII.458 (cf. also Z.XVII.322, a drawing of 1957). The vessel also occurs in two Matisse still lifes of 1904, Still Life with Purro I and II, both in private collections. [Recently reproduced in Matisse: In Search of True Painting, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), p. 34. —Ed.] 25. The idea was neither subtle nor new. I reproduce James Gillray’s lampoon Ci-devant Occupations (1805; fig. 4.32), wherein two famous ladies dance nude before the fat statesman Barras, while young Bonaparte at the far right draws a curtain aside to look in. The bottle on the table in front of Barras performs the same surrogate function as Picasso’s porrón. No wonder Picasso dropped the motif. The aggressive toss of the horny melon in the definitive version is a subtler device. 26. In figs. 4.13 and 4.14, the sailor at table and the recumbent nude rehearse an established pattern—Picasso himself watching a girl asleep. See the 1904 watercolor Meditation (Contemplation), Z.I.235, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The resemblance suggests that Picasso identified himself fleetingly with the sailor—whereupon he removed him entirely. As a sailor, Picasso reappears in a drawing of 1915 by de Chirico, Picasso Dining with Serge Férat, Hélène d’Oettingen, and Léopold Survage. Picasso’s unbuttoned jacket displays a bare chest tattooed with an anchor; reprod. in Roland Penrose, Portrait of Picasso (2nd ed., New York, 1971), p. 45; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, 1907– 1917 (New York, 1996), p. 363; sold at Sotheby’s, Paris, December 9, 2009, lot 63. 27. See note 5 above. Barr himself refers to the figure as simply a “man”; Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York, 1958), p. 127, calls him “a sailor”; others (Leymarie, R. de la Souchère, et al.) “a student.” 28. Barr, Fifty Years (above, note 3), p. 57, and Masters of Modern Art (above, note 6), p. 68. 29. Picasso’s youthful Flight into Egypt of 1895 includes a datebearing palm, which the photographer David Douglas Duncan, who first published the picture, understood as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. The painter corrected him. The dates are there for the Holy Family, he explained, “because they really had to eat something!”; see Daix and Boudaille, Picasso (above, note 12), p. 27. See also p. 110 above.

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30. To identify those suggestible authors who saw a death’shead in fig. 4.6 would serve no purpose; their name is legion. 31. For the present first publication of six of these drawings I am indebted to three parties: to Picasso who, after sixty-five years of negligence or perversity, remembered or consented to let them out; to Mila Gagarine; and to William S. Rubin, who obtained the photographs from Mlle. Gagarine and turned them over to me. Some of Rubin’s thoughts on these drawings, which, before learning that the present article was nearing completion, he had planned to publish himself, are acknowledged below. 32. The sketchbook, now at the Musée Picasso, Paris, MP1861, is published, along with the other Demoiselles sketchbooks, in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 1. MP1861 is carnet 3, pp. 144–64. 33. Communication to author, June 1, 1972. 34. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 168. On Nietzsche’s relevance, cf. note 39 below. 35. Picasso’s conversation with Kahnweiler (above, note 5) begins: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, how this title irritates me. Salmon invented it. You know very well that the original title from the beginning had been The Brothel of Avignon. But do you know why? Because Avignon has always been a name I knew very well and is a part of my life. I lived not two steps away from the Calle d’Avignon where I used to buy my paper and my watercolors and also, as you know, Max’s grandmother came originally from Avignon. We used to make a lot of fun of this painting; one of the women in it was Max’s grandmother, another Fernande, and another Marie Laurencin, and all of them in a brothel in Avignon.” 36. Quoting from Rubin’s communication of June 1, 1972: “The earliest sketch for the Student [fig. 4.34] shows a short stocky man of Picasso’s build and hair style. The proportions of this figure change immediately afterward [fig. 4.38]. His costume, a well-tailored suit, remains more or less characteristic throughout; it identifies an upper middle-class personage who is set against the casually-dressed (as we see later) lower-class sailor. This contrast is emphasized by the fact that while the Student is standing in profile at the margin of the field, the sailor is seated, frontal and central. Picasso is here implicitly contrasting and weighing the life of the senses (the sailor is surrounded by flesh, food and drink) and the mind (the book held by the Student), poles between which his own work will oscillate. . . . The sailor . . . represents Picasso’s instinctive sensuous side, as established during childhood (sailor suit, surrounded by women in the home), while the Student represents Picasso’s mind and intelligence (book and skull). . . . At the same time, the skull is a studio prop of the artist (Picasso says he had a skull at the time, and it appears not long afterward in the Hermitage still life of his studio). Thus the medical student may be assimilated to that side of Picasso whose science will anatomize the visual world.” See also Rubin’s 1988 essay on the painting, pp. 423–24, cited in note 69 below. 37. For the personality of Max Jacob, see especially Robert Guiette, “Vie de Max Jacob,” La nouvelle revue française, no.

250 ( July 1, 1934), based on interviews with the poet; and LeRoy C. Breunig, “Max Jacob et Picasso,” Mercure de France (December 1957), pp. 581–96. In Guiette’s “life,” the poet tells of his first love affair with a woman—one of the two moments in his life which he would relive if he could (the other being a vision of Christ, six years later, which led to his conversion and ultimate retreat to a monastery). The affair with Mme. Germaine Pfeipfer, the eighteen-year-old wife of a drunkard, began when Max was twenty-five—“mais, je crois, quinze pour la raison et pour le coeur.” Many years after their separation, in 1907 or 1908, he saw his first love again, and found her grotesque. Not so the two friends who were with him, Picasso and Braque; they pronounced her “très belle.” Picasso’s imaginative susceptibility to the sexual character of his intimate friends is confirmed in an article by Josep Palau i Fabre, “1900: A Friend of His Youth,” in Homage to Pablo Picasso, special issue of XXe Siècle, trans. B. Wadia (New York, 1971), pp. 3–12. The author discusses another of Picasso’s early companions, the melancholy writer-painter Casagemas, who killed himself over a woman in a Paris café on February 17, 1901. For some months previously, “Casagemas’ behavior mystified his friends more and more. One day, they were just going into a brothel in the rue de Londres, when Casagemas slipped away explaining that he was suffering from intestinal trouble.” Two years after the suicide, when Picasso was again occupying the Barcelona studio he had formerly shared with his dead friend, he painted La Vie (1903, Cleveland Museum of Art). In the painting, the figure of Casagemas replaces the Adam-Picasso of the preliminary sketches. Palau concludes: “As Picasso, he is completely nude. Casagemas in the painting wears an odd sort of slip. The ambiguity of this slip is significant. . . . The slip states and, at the same time, hides the truth behind the drama, a truth that Picasso never wished to reveal. But we know from the post-mortem of Casagemas that he was impotent.” 38. The repetition of the skull-holding motif on three pages of the MP1861 sketchbook (see also fol. 15v) is interesting. In all the drawings the inner line of the index finger coincides with the cranium. In fig. 4.37, this double functioning is extended to the thumb, whose outline is adjusted to coincide with the skull’s cheekbone. The single descriptive contour which seams two contiguous forms is a general principle of Picasso’s draftsmanship. The recto of our fig. 4.35 shows several unpublished studies for the central nude. Fig. 4.36 faces our fig. 4.38. Fig. 4.37 bears the impress of the drawing on the facing page: Picasso’s study for the flower vase in the foreground of the Basel drawing, fig. 4.6. A more elaborate study for this vase, hitherto unrecognized and misdated, is reproduced in Z.VI.807. 39. The Nietzschean quotations are drawn from The Birth of Tragedy (1871), a work avidly read by the artists and poets of Barcelona and Paris at the turn of the century. Picasso’s early connection with the spirit of Nietzsche is discussed in Phoebe Pool’s “Sources and Background of Picasso’s Art 1900–06,” Burlington Magazine, 101 (May 1959), p. 180. I wish to thank Mark Rosen-

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thal for his early insights into the Picasso-Nietzsche relation. For a further discussion of Nietzsche in the context of the Demoiselles, see Lisa Florman, “The Difference Experience Makes in The Philosophical Brothel,” Art Bulletin, 85 (December 2003), esp. pp. 772–73. 40. For postscripts to the Two Women, see especially Z.I.349, Three Nudes, in the Barnes Collection, BF211, and Z.XXII.461 (D-B.XVI.20), formerly in the Berggruen Collection, Paris—the latter projecting a four-figure group in a setting of curtains. An interesting transitional thought is embodied in a conté drawing of 1906, where a nude figure, shaped like one of the Two Women, approaches like the incoming demoiselle, from behind a curtain in three-quarter front view; see Z.VI.814, Musée Picasso, Paris, MP1858, fol. 48r, reprod. in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 1, p. 115. 41. “Je veux faire un tableau de ce dessin que je t’envoie (Les Deux Soeurs). C’est un tableau que je fais d’un putain de St.Lazare et d’une soeur”; letter to Max Jacob, Barcelona, 1902, in Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents iconographiques (Geneva, 1954), no. 70. 42. See Z.VI.822, now Musée Picasso, Paris, MP1858, fol. 41r, reprod. in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 1, p. 113; Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881– 1907 (Barcelona, 1985), nos. 1403 and 1409; and Musée Picasso, MP522. Fig. 4.44 is from the Zervos reproduction. At some point, the drawing was split in two. The lower half was sold at Christie’s, London, June 30, 1992, lot 125; the upper half, in a private collection, is handled through the Galerie Daniel Malinque, Paris. 43. See, for instance, the opening chapter of Baltasar Gracián’s allegorical novel El Criticón (1651–57). The shipwrecked Critilo, who personifies the critical intelligence, reaches a desert island where he meets the lone Andrenio, “the human one,” who has never before seen a fellow man and who personifies man’s instinctual side. Asked who he is, Andrenio offers this remarkable answer: “Thou, Critilo, askest who I am, and I desire to know that of thee; for thou art the first Man that until this day I have seen, in whom I find my self more perfectly delineated, than in the silent Chrystals of a Fountain, which oftimes my Curiosity carried me unto, and my Ignorance applauded”; trans. Paul Rycaut, The Critick (London, 1681), p. 7. [For Gracián and Velázquez, see Steinberg, “Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” in Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2020), pp. 201 and 276, n. 11. —Ed.] 44. Z.VI.803 and 805 are reproduced in color in Palau i Fabre, Picasso (above, note 42), nos. 1332 and 1333. 45. Salmon, La jeune peinture française (above, note 1), p. 43. The painting was first exhibited as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1916 at the Salon d’Antin; see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 2, pp. 568 and 570, with full references. 46. See the discussion of the chronology in Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907–1914 (Boston, 1968), pp. 52–55, and the chronology published in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 2, pp. 548–58. [Suzanne Blier’s recent

proposal to push back the present state of the right-hand figures to the beginning of the project, in March 1907, is primarily based on the questionable redating of a blurry photograph of Mrs. Van Dongen and her daughter in Picasso’s studio; see Blier’s Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Durham, NC, 2019). —Ed.] 47. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York, 1972), p. 16, referring to Joyce’s “The Holy Office” of 1904. 48. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, section 7. 49. A sketchbook of 1907 contains several drawings which explore this regressive metamorphosis of female legs; see Picasso Cubista 1907–1920: Collecció Marina Picasso (Barcelona, Fundación Caixa de Barcelona, 1987), p. 46, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 1, p. 217, sketchbook 7, fols. 27r and 27v (Z.XXVI.220, 221). 50. For the jokes Picasso and his friends used to make about the Demoiselles, see note 35. For the Fénéon incident, see Ashton, Picasso on Art (above, note 5), pp. 110–12. The last two quotations are from Penrose, Picasso (above, note 27), p. 125, and Barr, Masters of Modern Art (above, note 6), p. 68. 51. The word “earliest” is always a risk when discussing Picasso. His beginnings are like the beginnings of myth. As soon as one identifies a novel theme and starts searching for its earliest occurrence, the impression arises that there is never a starting point: nothing ever happens for the first time. In my own study of Picasso’s lifelong obsession with the problem of simultaneous front-and-back representation (“The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria [above, note 22], pp. 167–68), I cited the 1907 drawing (fig. 4.48) as the first systematic instance of this preoccupation; but I pointed to earlier drawings of 1904– 5, where figures appear successively recto and verso, as evidence of an earlier concern with the problem. I would now cite even earlier evidence in a sheet of nude studies dated 1902 (D-B. D.VII.5). The third figure from the left is a female back view but with arms and head ambiguously outlined for a possible frontal view. 52. Subsequent studies for this figure (e.g., fig. 4.49) confirm Picasso’s interest in the figure’s ambivalent orientation. She displays her rear from the waist down, while her upper torso is perversely frontalized, as indicated by the overlapping contour of the breast at the armpit. Note also that the thumb of the hand holding a parasol does not reappear; its elimination in fig. 4.48 was definitive. 53. In the original publication of the present article, I followed Zervos’s erroneous designation of the figure as a Nu debout (Z.II/2.685). The error is corrected in Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, 1981), p. 84. As pointed out to Tinterow by Douglas Cooper, to whom Picasso had given the drawing in 1959, the figure is dressed in a riding habit. Cooper continued: “after abandoning the Demoiselles [Picasso] intended to paint a large composition of equestrian figures and horses in the Bois de Boulogne. The present work must be a study for the painting which was never executed.” That Picasso did entertain such a project is now con-

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firmed by three studies in MP1862, fols. 20v, 36v, and fig. 4.49, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 1, pp. 195, 200. But Douglas Cooper’s recollection in 1981 of what Picasso had told him in 1959 about a sequence of events in 1907 is questionable on two counts. Cooper (as reported by Tinterow) has Picasso intending to paint the Bois de Boulogne composition “after abandoning the Demoiselles.” Yet, according to Tinterow’s footnote 2, examination of the sheet proved that the verso drawing preceded the recto drawing, on which the Demoiselles composition appears in its comparatively early six-figure phase. Therefore, the Bois de Boulogne project must have been entertained and discarded before the Demoiselles painting was begun. This patent inaccuracy throws further doubt on Cooper’s assertion— which he imputes to Picasso—that the Demoiselles painting itself was “abandoned.” Such indeed was Cooper’s opinion (see note 3, above), as it had been Kahnweiler’s; but nothing in Picasso’s own references to the Demoiselles d’Avignon indicates that he ever considered the picture less than achieved. 54. As in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1959), figs. 2 and 201. 55. It is a misunderstanding of Picasso’s intention to rationalize his deliberate befuddlements into an analytical exposition of the three-dimensional form—e.g.: “in the squatting demoiselle Picasso had dislocated and distended the various parts of the body in an attempt to explain it as fully as possible, without the limitations of viewing it from a single, stationary position”; Golding, Cubism (above, note 46), p. 62. 56. Rosenblum, Cubism (above, note 3), p. 25. 57. Quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso: Women, Cannes and Mougins, 1954–1963, trans. Humphrey Hare (Amsterdam, 1964), p. 135. Why juxtapose a goat and a little girl? A distant answer may lie in a drawing of c. 1896, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, inv. 110.702R, reprod. in Juan-Eduardo Cirlot, Picasso: Birth of a Genius (New York, 1972), p. 212, no. 507. 58. See Breunig, “Max Jacob et Picasso” (above, note 37), p. 595. 59. Penrose, Picasso (above, note 27), p. 124. The information goes back to Leo Stein, who “remembers visiting Picasso’s studio that fall and finding there a huge canvas which, before he had painted a stroke, the artist had had expensively lined as if it were already a classic work”; Barr quoting Stein in Masters of Modern Art (above, note 6), p. 68. In Barr’s text the words “that fall” refer to 1906, which must be a memory lapse on Leo Stein’s part. Picasso insists that he did not embark on the painting of the Demoiselles until the following spring. It would be strange for him to produce a score of preliminary composition studies of which not one corresponded to the dimensions of the canvas already stretched. 60. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; New York, 1960), p. 50. 61. But Greenberg is inconsistent, since the two versions of Three Musicians (1921) persuade him, as does Guernica, that Picasso “could not make a success of a large canvas with cubistically

flattened forms.” In Greenberg’s judgment, then, Picasso could fail to “lead toward his strengths” by 1921. 62. Clement Greenberg, “Picasso since 1945,” Artforum (October 1966), p. 31. 63. Eugeni d’Ors, “Epístola a Picasso,” D’aci i d’alla (Summer 1936); English translation in Marilyn McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (London, 1981), p. 202. 64. Rubin, Picasso (above, note 8), p. 11. 65. Lawrence Gowing, in “Director’s Report,” The Tate Gallery Report 1964–65 (London, 1966), pp. 7–12. 66. Around 1970, the criticism of Cubism began to attain a new level of sophistication, but this is too large a subject for now. 67. John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Harmondsworth, UK, 1965), p. 43. 68. Mary Mathews Gedo, Picasso: Art as Autobiography (Chicago, 1980), pp. 78–80. For William Rubin’s development of the medical theme, see p. 94 above. 69. William Rubin proposed that Picasso’s fear of syphilis and a brush with venereal disease underlie decisions made in the Demoiselles project; “La genèse des Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exh. cat. (above, note 8), vol. 2, pp. 418–24. Lisa Florman, however, noting the “orgiastic immersion and the Dionysian release” of my interpretation, argued that Nietzsche and Attic tragedy imply the death theme more fundamentally than Picasso’s fear of venereal disease; Florman, “The Difference Experience Makes” (above, note 39), pp. 772–73, including a refutation of Rubin. 70. My earlier essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” (above, note 51) included a short account of the Demoiselles that closed with a passage suggested to me by the contrasting thought of the “Zeuxis” tradition. The Demoiselles, I wrote, stares down three founding rules of Western art: the rule of idealization, which justifies picture-making as an ennobling pursuit; the rule of a viewpoint fixed at a measured optical distance; and the correlative requirement of psychic detachment in the representation of nudes— tradition having made the kept distance mandatory for the posture of art. Renaissance figure painting would not have flourished in Christendom as it did had the sex appeal of the painted nude been confessed. The justification of art depended on the profession of erotic disinterest, on the distinction between engaged prurience and the contemplation of formal beauty whereby the erotic will to possess was assumed into admiration. It was into this noble tradition that Picasso entered his Demoiselles. It remains an uncanny event. . . . Even at our distance of sixty-odd years, the immediacy of the revelation appalls. . . . In their absolute presence Picasso’s ominous whores stage a terrifying desublimation of art. The picture breaks the triple spell of tradition—idealization, emotional distance, and fixed-focus perspective—the

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tradition of high-craft illusionism which conducts the spectator-voyeur unobserved to a privileged seat. (p. 173)

Five 1. William Rubin, “Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism,” in Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1977), pp. 151–202. 2. “Picasso’s first Cubist painting” was a title traditionally accorded the Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Gertrude Stein, however, placed the beginning of Cubism two years later: “Once again Picasso in 1909 was in Spain, and he brought back with him some landscapes which were, certainly were, the beginning of cubism”; Stein, Picasso (London, 1938). Cf. Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; New York, 1960), p. 91, referring to these same Horta landscapes: “This, then was really the beginning of Cubism.” Her view is seconded by later authors, including John Elderfield, who calls the Horta landscapes “the first mature statements of Analytic Cubism”; Elderfield, European Master Paintings from Swiss Collections, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 80. Now, in the essay discussed below, William Rubin splits the difference to locate the critical turn in the Three Women of 1908. Evidently, these authors, when they say “Cubism,” have different criteria in mind. Not unlike Picasso himself, for whom “El Greco’s pictures were already cubist in structure.” 3. Toklas and Stein first saw the Three Women together with the Demoiselles: “Against the wall was an enormous picture, a strange picture of light and dark colours, that is all I can say, of a group, an enormous group and next to it another in a sort of a red brown, of three women, square and posturing, all of it rather frightening. Picasso and Gertrude Stein stood together talking. I stood back and looked. I cannot say I realised anything but I felt that there was something painful and beautiful there, and oppressive but imprisoned”; Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (above, note 2), p. 22. 4. Morgan Russell’s Study after Picasso’s “Three Women” has been shown twice in exhibitions organized by its finder Gail Levin: in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Morgan Russell’s Synchromist Studies 1910–1922”; and in 1978 at New York’s Whitney Museum. The drawing is reproduced in Gail Levin, “Morgan Russell’s Synchromy in Orange: To Form,” Gallery Studies I (Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1977), fig. 7; and in the same author’s Synchromism and American Color Abstraction 1910–1925, exh. cat. (New York, Whitney Museum of Art, 1978), fig. 60. Levin observes (p. 14) that Three Women “may be the source of the triangular ‘pie-wedge’ shapes that [Russell] utilized so frequently in his abstract Synchromies.” 5. The remark of Berdyaev, the religious philosopher, is quoted in Margaret Betz, “From Cézanne to Picasso to Suprematism: The Russian Criticism,” Artforum (April 1978), p. 35. The full Tugendkhold passage, for which I am again indebted to Betz, runs in her translation: “When painting the nude, Picasso gives full rein to his love of earthy ocher, to the condensation of the world, to powerful weight: his nude women seem built of stone,

united by the dark cement of the contour. Such are the ‘Three Women’ of brick-red color in whom is the heaviness and relief quality of a monument. In truth, one can go no further in reaction against Renoir’s and Degas’s nudes, against the painterly sensuality of the Impressionists; here is the self-confident triumph of the chisel over the brush, of touch over the eyes! One may disparage these brick graces—but one cannot fail to recognize in them a memorial of our time, which seeks the ‘organic’ and the ‘statuesque’—a time of faltering intellectuals, enamored of strength and sport, but, alas, powerless”; “Frantsuskoe sobranie S.I. Shchukina” [“The French Collection of S.I. Shchukin”], Apollon, nos. 1–3 (1914), p. 33. 6. Picasso’s status in Communist Russia was described in Alfred M. Frankfurter’s editorial for ArtNews (November 1953), p. 13: “[Picasso is] a member of the French Communist Party, an active member, which is to say a loquacious one and a financial contributor to it. Lately he has had a little trouble with the front office in Moscow. Pravda has repeatedly called him an example of decadent international-intellectual cosmopolitanism and his pictures . . . have been forbidden exhibition in Soviet Russia.” But, the editorial continues, “the new conciliatory propaganda line of the Malenkov regime in Russia appears to include, among other reversals of the old Stalin line, a new wooing of world intellectuals and artists. . . . So the prodigal may be home again and welcome, at least for a while.” 7. In 1953–54, Three Women was among the Picassos released by the Soviet government for Picasso exhibitions in Milan and Rome; see C. Castelfranco, “Mostra di Picasso,” Bolletino d’Arte, 39 (1954), p. 186, and L. M., “Note e commenti, Picasso a Milano,” Emporium, 119 (March 1954), pp. 133ff. 8. Edward Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), p. 18. 9. “Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family.” The only thoughtful reaction to Three Women in the exhibition reviews came from John Elderfield, “The Language of Pre-Abstract Art,” Artforum (February 1971), pp. 46–47. 10. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), pp. 186 and 187. The meaning of the word passage in discussions of Cubism is examined in ch. 6. 11. Rubin here takes a position which has been steadily gaining ground during the past twenty-five years. It rests on a threepart argument: (a) that Braque was the first to adopt certain elements from Cézanne; (b) that these elements suffice to define early Cubism; and (c) that Picasso’s contribution to early Cubism is therefore secondary, even expendable. The argument seems to me syllogistic rather than historical. It assumes that the definition of Cubism is fixed and stable and that Picasso’s pre-Cubist concerns with expressive means are necessarily incompatible with the rational, systematic approach to nature allegedly characteristic of Cézanne, Braque, and early Cubism. Both assumptions are problematic. Meanwhile, the following quotations show the gathering trend. Christopher Gray in Cubist Aesthetic Theories (Baltimore, 1953), p. 52: “Though Picasso

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showed an interest in Cézanne as early as 1906 . . . , he did not consistently follow up the ideas but continued searching far afield for expressive elements in other forms of art. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon reveals itself as essentially Fauve in its sketches, and the final addition of Negroid faces to some of the figures seems strongly to indicate that, instead of following any new rationale in his approach to nature, Picasso was still discovering new expressive means in various exotic sources. On the other hand, Braque, in 1906, seems very definitely to be working toward a new approach to nature according to lines laid down by Cézanne. . . . By the summer of 1907, which he spent at L’Estaque, the evidence of the influence of Cézanne is unmistakable.” Jean Leymarie, noting that Braque’s adoption of Cézannism preceded Picasso’s, suspects that the showing of Braque’s L’Estaque pictures at Kahnweiler’s in November 1908, “in retrospect has become perhaps the exhibition of the century” (quoted in Rubin, “Cézannisme” [above, note 1], p. 180). John Golding is “tempted to wonder whether it was not through Braque’s enthusiasm and example that Picasso was led to a deeper appreciation of Cézanne”; Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907–1914 (Boston, 1968), p. 69. Finally, René Jullian: “During this time [summer 1908], Braque is at L’Estaque, and the landscapes he paints there, haunted by the memory of those which Cézanne had lately painted in this same location  .  .  . proceed farther than those of Picasso on the road that would lead to Cubism. . . . For both artists, the outstanding fact is the influence of Cézanne, as it is also the outstanding fact for the advent of Cubism; but Braque draws from it more exclusive and more profound consequences than does Picasso. At this moment, then, he takes first place on the road to Cubism; one may even say that with his L’Estaque pictures he creates Cubism”; Jullian, “Les contacts entre Braque et Picasso et les débuts du cubisme,” in Travaux IV, Le Cubisme (Université de SaintÉtienne, CIEREC, 1973), p. 36. To which my friend Telegrin Bose responded in verse: When a landscape produced at L’Estaque Reveals modernist trends in Georges Braque, It takes but a minute To find something in it For the anti-Picasso Braque claque. 12. Of the known composition studies for the Three Women, the oblong five-figure watercolor in New York must be the earliest (fig. 5.4), followed by the Philadelphia gouache (fig. 5.5)— both done before the design found its square format and before the cast was reduced to three. The large oil in Hannover (fig. 5.6), where the three figures lift off sharply against the ground, falls into third place. It is followed by the Centre Pompidou study (gouache, fig. 5.7), where figure and ground close in on each other and the treatment of planes approaches the final conception. Last in the series is the gouache in Moscow (fig. 5.8), which for the first time shows the right-hand figure in its definitive form. 13. The corresponding Cézanne figure recurs between c. 1875 and 1895 in no fewer than fourteen of Cézanne’s Bather pictures.

In addition to fig. 5.9, see, for example, Group of Bathers and Large Bathers in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Bathers in the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Bathers lithograph, small plate; also S. Orienti, L’opera completa di Cézanne (Milan, 1970), nos. 293, 549–54, 557, 641, 643–44, 646, 649–50. [Lisa Florman proposes a connection between Cézanne’s Bather paintings, particularly Large Bathers, and the Demoiselles, followed by Three Women; see her “Insistent, Resistant Cézanne: On Picasso’s Three Women and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 33–34 (Summer–Fall 2012), pp. 19– 26. —Ed.] 14. Discussing Cézanne’s nude bathers, Theodore Reff notes “their total estrangement from each other.” “ There is an air of tension and unsociability in Cézanne’s bathers which seems utterly foreign to the occasion”; Reff, “Cézanne: The Enigma of the Nude,” ArtNews (November 1959), p. 28. 15. On the right-left interchange, see Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 147–48 and n. 13. To which Jonathan Swift contributes the information (in Memoirs of the Life of Scriblerus) that a woman wishing to conceive a man-child should, during coitus, lie on her right side. And this from Joyce’s parody of Thomas Huxley (Ulysses, “The Oxen of the Sun”): “regarding the future determination of sex. Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary (the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth of males or,” etc. 16. Examples of Picasso’s symbolic use of the right-left interchange, beginning in 1902, are listed in Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” (above, note 15), p. 147 and n. 13. For a similar shift in Picasso’s Guernica studies, see Reinhold Hohl, “Die Wahrheit über Guernica,” Pantheon, 36 (1978), p. 51. 17. Sigmund Freud, “The Differentiation between Men and Women” (1905) in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, translated in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York, 1989), p. 287. 18. The photographs are reproduced in Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 186. 19. To my knowledge, the exposed axilla as a posture of brazen provocation finds mention in the Cézanne literature only in Theodore Reff, “Cézanne, Flaubert, St. Anthony, and the Queen of Sheba,” Art Bulletin, 44 ( June 1962), p. 121. Cf. also Reff ’s “The Enigma of the Nude” (above, note 14). The motif first appears in Cézanne’s Satyr and Nymphs, 1864–68, Venturi 94 [Sotheby’s, New York, May 15, 2018, lot 392. —Ed.], where the central figure derives significantly from Rubens’s Ixion Deceived by Juno, Louvre. It recurs—again in a context of erotic aggression—in Cézanne’s Temptation of St. Anthony, 1869, Venturi 103 (and its later version of 1873–77, Venturi 240). Then again in Don Quichote on the Banks of the Barbaria, 1870, Venturi 104, and in the Courtesans, 1871–72, Venturi 122. The provocative Nude Reclining on a Bed, 1873–77, Venturi 279, seems derived from Goya’s Maja desnuda. Thereafter, the motif occurs in more than forty paintings of harmless bathers. As

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Meyer Schapiro suggested, in the work of the maturing Cézanne the Temptation and related erotic themes turn into idyllic scenes of relaxation and pleasure without episodic significance. Aggressive undress—self-exposure as an act of hostility—is discussed in N. M. Penzer’s English translation of Benedetto Croce’s edition of The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile (London, 1932), vol. 1, p. 12, “Nudity as a Sign of Anger”: “The power temporarily held by a person who is naked has been recognized in many parts of the world.” 20. For Degas’s copies of the Dying Slave, see the pencil drawing mislabeled “St. Sebastian” in Catalogue des tableaux: Pastels et dessins par Edgar Degas, auction cat. (Paris, Galerie George Petit, July 2–4, 1919, 4me vente, no. 130; p. 124; and no. 99, from another angle). Cézanne’s drawing after the Dying Slave is reproduced in Reff, “The Enigma of the Nude” (above, note 14), fig. 3 and p. 68. In Matisse’s large oil sketch on canvas, Intérieur à l’Esclave, 1924, in the Musée Matisse, Nice, the androgyny of the original sculpture is emphatically polarized toward the male. Cf. Matisse’s Pianist and Checker Players, 1924, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the Dying Slave as a large statuette on a dresser, reprod. in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York, 1951), p. 439. 21. El Greco’s Agony in the Garden must have been known to Picasso, since well over a dozen versions of the composition exist; see Harold E. Wethey, El Greco and His School (Princeton, 1962), vol. 2, nos. 29–35. 22. Perfunctory references to the “almost identical subjects of the two pictures” (e.g., A. Dubois in Travaux IV, Le Cubisme, above, note 11, p. 82) are not statements about the pictures but confessions of habitual indifference to meaning. 23. Levin, Synchromism (above, note 4), p. 25. Cf. Russell’s painting and two drawings after the Dying Slave, her fig. 18, pls. 63, 64. For the use of the Michelangelo figure by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Thomas Hart Benton, see figs. 19, 24, 29. 24. The answer to the first question—whether our interpretation is supportable by the artist’s declared intention—is no, because artists, even those who occasionally pontificate on art in general, shy away from explaining a particular work. They avoid verbalizing its meaning, lest the thing itself be accused of ineloquence. But this does not rid the rest of us of responsibility. An original work of art left to speak for itself is a message that’s not been deciphered. It sits amid stupefied unconcern, until discussed and interpreted this way or that. Hence the near total oblivion of the Three Women through its first seventy years. And to leave the picture in that condition is not a mark of respect but of sloth and indifference. The answer to the second question—whether the present interpretation is necessarily the best of all possible interpretations— must wait until alternatives are proposed; so long as these refrain from separating Picasso’s formal invention from his iconography. No need to perpetuate the methodological fiction that a spirited artist pulls form and meaning from separate files. 25. “Picasso 1930–1935,” Cahiers d’Art, nos. 7–10 (1935), p.

42: “Ce n’est pas ce que l’artiste fait qui compte, mais ce qu’il est. Cézanne ne m’aurait jamais interessé s’il avait vécu et pensé comme Jacques-Émile Blanche, même si la pomme qu’il avait peinte êut été dix fois plus belle. Ce qui nous interesse, c’est l’inquiétude de Cézanne, c’est l’enseignement de Cézanne, ce sont les tourments de Van Gogh, c’est-à-dire le drame de l’homme. Le reste est faux.” Partly quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York, 1946), pp. 273–74: “What forces our interest is Cézanne anxiety—that’s Cézanne’s lesson.” 26. Quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art (New York, 1972), p. 40. 27. See Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, My Galleries and Painters (1961; New York, 1971), p. 55; and Brassaï, Picasso and Company (Garden City, NY, 1966), p. 79. 28. Quoted in Ashton, Picasso on Art (above, note 26), p. 161. 29. Ibid., p. 167, quoting Picasso’s 1936 statement to Kahnweiler. 30. Picasso’s little speech is quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso: Women, Cannes and Mougins, 1954–1963, trans. Humphrey Hare (Amsterdam, 1964), p. 135; see also p. 217, note 57. Elderfield’s words, cited in the preceding paragraph, are taken from his excellent article “Drawing in Cézanne,” Artforum ( June, 1971), p. 53. 31. The provoking occasion of this remark is described in Brassaï’s Picasso and Company (above, note 27), p. 79. 32. See pp. 53, 55, and Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” (above, note 15), pp. 189ff., for a fuller analysis of the work and the large enterprise of which it forms a part. 33. William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), p. 48. 34. Ibid. 35. A rhetorical exaggeration designed to invert a notion we have cherished ever since Wölfflin: that artists are relatively free to choose subject matter, but not free to choose styles. On Picasso’s conviction that form or style are determined by subject, cf. the following from his famous “statement” of 1923: “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them. . . . Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression”; Ashton, Picasso on Art (above, note 26), p. 5. 36. The uninhabited look of the Horta landscapes is not, I feel, a comment on human absence or desolation. All of Picasso’s forms tend to be metaphors of humanity: his still lifes and silent townscapes make actors of bowls, bottles, and houses. 37. My choice of the word arris (= sharp edge) for what Elderfield calls “the forward edges of volumes” needs justification. The comparative unfamiliarity of the word distresses me, but it is the only word I know that means exactly “the line, edge, or hip in which the two straight or curved surfaces of a body, forming an exterior angle, meet” (Century Dictionary, 1889). In the descriptive vocabulary of classical architecture, the word refers to the projecting ridge between the adjoining flutes of a column. And no other word designates so precisely what I regard as the hallmark

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of Picasso’s proto-Cubist and Cubist vision. If, in the language of heraldry, a cube placed catercorner is said to be set arriswise, we could say, with only mild exaggeration, that Picasso looks arriswise at every surface in the Three Women. I prefer arris to corner or angle, both of which may denote a mere point; I prefer arris to edge, which may lie at an outer margin or rim; I prefer arris to ridge, fold, or crease, none of which need refer to abrupt changes of gradient, as attested by the ridges in corduroy, the folds and creases in a spread tablecloth, freshly ironed. I prefer arris to crest, which insists (irrelevantly to my purpose) on a lofty, more or less horizontal position. Finally, I prefer arris to watershed—a useful word, but too geological—it is hard to think of watersheds in the modeling of even a tear-stained cheek. And mathematical terms derived from calculus, or topology, or catastrophe theory are too technical. In the text, I use most of the above words interchangeably, context permitting, for variety’s sake. 38. The statement needs to be modified, and the modification modified back again. While it seems to me true that Three Women’s major anatomical units begin in a kind of charting of the original field, it is also true that this principle ceases to operate in small units, such as the female croucher’s left arm. The planes of the arm and hand are surely determined by Picasso’s acquaintance with their anatomical modulations. And the same holds for the featuring of the two lateral faces. But then again, Picasso can break down even a human visage like a terrain, as he does in the primitive simian head at the center. Picasso knows that the human face has not only right and left sides, but that in classical theory, it comes in three horizontal zones, corresponding to forehead, nose, and the rest. In the present instance, he establishes all these divisions, both down and across, with a single boomerang slash that sets off one shaded side of the face while trisecting it horizontally. We are at the furthest remove from the face conceptualized as a disk. That one terrible gouge converts the face disk into a boulder that yields only to massive excavation. (Cf. Picasso’s tentative approaches to this single-slash articulation of the human head in Z.II/1.48, 51, 53, 93, culminating in the studies for the Three Women, Z.II/1.101–107, including my figs. 5.4–5.8.) But let’s stay with this face one more moment. On its lighted side, between brow and cheek, the overall terracotta is interrupted by a yellow diamond, a flat lozenge shape not adapted to the mold of the eye socket but designed to articulate the lump of the head by one further facet. In this case, then, the head is surveyed, segmented, and subdivided almost as if anatomy did not exist. 39. Two early Picasso critics, the Russian Ivan Aksenor and Gertrude Stein, analogized Picasso’s works of these years to aerial photographs; see Betz, “From Cézanne to Picasso” (above, note 5), pp. 35–36. 40. Émile Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne (Paris, 1926), p. 69. 41. For the role of the point culminant in Cézanne’s visual thinking, see Lawrence Gowing’s “The Logic of Organized Sensations,” in Cézanne: The Late Work (above, note 1). I omit any

page reference since the essay is of such deep intelligence that it should be read whole, more than once.

Six 1. William Rubin, “Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism,” in Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1977), pp. 151–202. Both my original article and the present sequel were shown to Rubin before publication. Where he persuaded me that my formulation was less than fair, I made appropriate changes; and agreed to hold up the publication of this second part so that his rebuttal, which he in turn showed me, could appear along with it. [The Picasso-Braque issue reemerged in 1989 at the Museum of Modern Art’s “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” exhibition, organized by Rubin, along with a symposium in which Steinberg participated. The proceedings were published as Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York, 1992). —Ed.] 2. The quotations are from Rubin, “Cézannisme,” pp. 152, 166, and 165, respectively. The Braque painting, reproduced by Rubin in black-and-white on his p. 164, was sold at Christie’s, London, sale 7243, June 20, 2006, lot 120, as Maisons à L’Estaque. 3. Cf. the Art Bulletin, passim. 4. The quotations from Rubin in the above paragraph and the next are from p. 194 of “Cézannisme.” 5. Even the savage croucher in the lower right corner of the Demoiselles—often described as a reflex to the first irresistible impact of African art—was meticulously transferred to canvas from a precise crayon sketch, Z.XXVI.101, Musée Picasso, Paris, MP1861, fol. 1r. 6. John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907– 1914 (Boston, 1968), p. 63. Cf. René Jullian, “Les contacts entre Braque et Picasso et les débuts du cubisme,” in Travaux IV, Le Cubisme (Université de Saint-Étienne, CIEREC, 1973), p. 38, discussing Picasso’s progress through 1909–10: “La progression suit une sorte de logique intérieure, bien que Picasso soit plus instinctif que raisonneur.” The habit of attributing great artistic solutions to some primitive faculty rather than to intelligence does not stop at Picasso studies. Of Cézanne, Golding tells us that he “was obviously very much aware (if only instinctively) of the purely formal or abstract side of painting” (p. 67). And further on: “Cézanne had intuitively evolved a means of explaining the nature of solid forms in a new, very thorough way” (emphasis added). This notion—that artists (even as they “explain” things “in a thorough way”) do what they do by intuition and instinct— must be profoundly appealing to certain writers, regardless of the oeuvre discussed. I remember a standard work on Guercino describing the Baroque master’s first thought for an altarpiece as “Guercino’s instinctive idea for the composition”; Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London, 1947), p. 101. And as I write, I read in Pierre Schneider’s review of the Burghers of Calais exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Paris, that Rodin found the pyramidal form of traditional public monuments “unsuited

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for a democracy, where all men are equal. Seeing the burghers of Calais as forerunners of the democratic system emerging in his own time, Rodin was driven to search for a new compositional scheme befitting their status. And, quite instinctively, he found it: he substituted a rectangular cube for the cone”; Schneider, New York Times, July 6, 1978, p. C16. Now, if Guercino contrived a great composition by instinct; if Cézanne’s awareness of the formal factor in painting was a matter of instinct; if Rodin’s decision to substitute a cube for a cone in the design of a public monument was instinctive; then it is not surprising that the innovations in Picasso’s Demoiselles, despite the hundred-odd studies that went before, were “instinctively hit upon.” But one can’t help wondering about the writers; how do they know? By instinct? [The Guercino altarpiece to which Steinberg referred above is the St. Petronilla in Rome. In 1980 he published an essay on the work, including a discussion of Guercino’s supposed instinctiveness; in Steinberg, Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2020), pp. 144–61. —Ed.] 7. Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 125–234. 8. One reviewer of Other Criteria commented as follows on this part of my study: “The two of them, the artist who proliferates and the writer who detects the endless twists of bodily entanglement, really wear you out . . . one asks why an author would wrestle with it”; Max Kozloff in Artforum (February 1973), p. 78. 9. The observation does not apply to Rubin’s Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), where the format of the catalogue imposed other standards. 10. The quotation comes from Rubin’s “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 196, n. 27. The next quotation is from p. 194. 11. Discussing Picasso’s Reservoir (fig. 1.29), Rubin sees “the technique of passage grasped  .  .  . with a conceptual clarity that distinguishes it from its intuitive Cézannian origins”; Rubin, Picasso (above, note 9), p. 56. The next two quotations in the paragraph come from “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), pp. 151 and 178. 12. The structural use of close-valued color planes is most prominent in the great Russian pictures—Still Life with Skull, Woman with Fan (fig. 1.22), Dryad (fig. 4.26), Woman with a Mandolin, and Three Women. But even here, where the planes often function in a Cézannian manner, they tend to appear in concert with radical tonal contrasts; see p. 139 above. 13. Describing Picasso’s powerful Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (1909, Kunstmuseum Basel), John Elderfield rightly notes the negation of both passage and close-value modeling: “Forms are severely drawn with firm, unbroken contours. The shading emphasizes the separate three-dimensional identity of each object and . . . is entirely a matter of lights and darks and not (as was the case with Cézanne) of different hues”; Elderfield, European Master Paintings from Swiss Collections, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 80. 14. Ibid. Even before 1906—and quite independently of

Cézanne—Picasso introduced the bas-relief effect as a pictorial resource midway between barren flatness and illusory depth. Consider the immense seated figure in that major work of 1905, Young Acrobat on a Ball (fig. 1.17). A sketch for the painting (fig. 1.16) shows the figure properly spaced and drawn three-quarter back view; in the painting, lone leg, trunk, and head are laid out like a transplant from an Egyptian relief—no inward aspect imaginable. Yet the rest of the picture propounds an alternative system: a slender girl against a deep landscape balances on a ball. The two together, the strong bas-relief presence contemplating an emblem of vivid flowering instability, must be seen as another of Picasso’s deliberate psycho-stylistic disjunctions. Unmatched elements in collocation; the crust at right being outflanked from the left by loose-jointed forms in recession—fairly typical of Picasso’s dualistic approach to structure; see also ch. 1, pp. 7, 9. Cf. pp. 131–32, fig. 5.17, the 1908 Still Life with Fruit and Glass: disregarding the obvious differences between the Still Life and Acrobat, we find a like confrontation in both of the bas-relief mode with the recessive; but the relative distribution of these antagonist elements has been inverted in the bas-relief ’s favor: instead of a slablike body intruding at right upon a picture essentially open, the still life, essentially closed, injects a suggestion of permeability at upper left. 15. Thus Rubin’s first example of passage in Reservoir is a “shaded wall [that] elides with a diagonal plane diving downward to the left of the door”; Rubin, Picasso (above, note 9), p. 56. But that diving diagonal is one of several expansive space makers. 16. Ibid. 17. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 160; the next quotation in the paragraph comes from p. 165. 18. The solid backdrop which for Rubin “closes the space” is a factor totally independent of whether the forms advance or recede. Things can fade into open distance, or emerge out of it; things can project from a solid backdrop, or run up against it. 19. Golding, Cubism (above, note 6), p. 67. Though the sensation of a hithering spill is not objectifiable in Cézannist landscapes, it is unambiguous in many Old Master paintings, where the narrative action permits only one directional reading; when, for instance, a Christ in middle distance, seen against a closed sanctum, drives a gaggle of moneychangers out into our world— Stradanus, Cleansing of the Temple, 1572, Florence, Santo Spirito; cf. also Raphael’s so-called Self-Portrait with Fencing Master, Louvre; Velázquez’s Aquador; or Rembrandt’s etching of Jan Cornelius Sylvius Preaching. 20. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), pp. 178, 179, and nn. 111, 112. 21. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1885, part 4, “Epigrams and Interludes,” no. 75. It is more than a century since that noble sentence was written. But though it strikes most of us with the ring of truth, our critical methods are quite unable to put that truth to work in dealing with Cubism—a movement which has been almost totally assimilated to the repressive frigidity of formalism. I am therefore pre-

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paring, for the centenary of Nietzsche’s book, some corroborative material drawn from Picasso’s Cubist arcana. The material would include observations already made on the Demoiselles and the Dryad; and new matter on the eroticization of the woman-withbook motif—which culminates in Picasso’s Analytical Cubism in the theme of the nude female reader asleep with her book open between parted thighs, as in Woman with a Book, Z.II/1.150, now in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The antecedents go back more than three hundred years and include Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Une Lecture, 1822, lithograph (Goncourt 7); Charles Chaplin, Le Rêve, 1857, Marseilles, Musée des Beaux-Arts; and, with reverse but dependent meaning, Cézanne’s tragic females—tight-lipped, wrapped up, both hands protecting a closed book on a sealed lap, as in Seated Woman in Blue, 1902–6, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Even Picasso’s cool Cubist still lifes—conceived in exquisite cerebration at “the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit”—can accommodate a key slyly stuck in the keyhole of La table de toilette, 1910, Z.II/1.220, private collection; and allow him to paste the naughty words TROU ICI into a vertical slit under a box of Bon Marché lingerie (fig. 1.63), as first observed by Robert Rosenblum; see p. 213, note 14. Let these be boyish jokes, but they are jokes Picasso plays on himself, on his bent to confound the canvas he labors over with the body of woman—a sustaining fantasy whose outward expression is the composition that wants to be entered. Not until the end of his life did Picasso give that secret away: a group of seventeen etchings in his Suite 347 series (1968) celebrates a young painter simultaneously painting and possessing his model—the acts of creation and love rolled into one; see ch. 9. [Steinberg continued to investigate the woman-with-book motif. It became the first M. Victor Leventritt Lecture at Harvard in 1985 and was delivered several times over the years, with ongoing revisions, until 2005, when he gave the most recent version for the twentieth anniversary of the Leventritt Lectures, titled “Woman with Book, or The Interrupted Reading”; an earlier subtitle spelled out the subject: “how men perceive women reading from the fifteenth century through modern advertising.” The theme begins with the Virgin, followed by the penitent Magdalen; from the seventeenth century on, it is trivialized and eroticized or expressive of sociocultural attitudes toward female literacy and gender relations. “Woman with Book” is primarily a pictorial study, abetted by ample literary quotations and conceived before the spate of literature on the construction of gender stereotypes. Its more than three hundred images put paid to the thought of publication. The lecture typescript, slides, and other visual material, as well as research notes, are now among Steinberg’s papers at the Getty Research Institute. —Ed.] 22. The use of passage by French critics is not binding for us since they are using an indigenous word which, like the equivalent English in, say, Northwest Passage, may refer to any transit from point to point. 23. Rosalind Krauss supplied this small item of information, which I acknowledge here in token of the many large benefits I

have derived from our conversations. Her article on “The Cubist Epoch,” Artforum (February 1971), pp. 32ff., anticipated my subsequent thinking in one fundamental insight: that there lies, at the heart of Picasso’s Cubism, a compulsion to know “whether there can ever be direct access to depth through vision—whether anyone can really see depth.” 24. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936), p. 42. 25. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York, 1946), p. 73. 26. Golding, Cubism (above, note 6), p. 71. 27. Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), p. 14. 28. I don’t know how many relish the kind of hairsplitting on which we are now engaged—which one of my dear friends has already diagnosed as maniacal. But those who care about how we conceptualize our Cézanne (no other kind being available) may want to ponder the intermittency principle for this further reason: that it throws a somewhat different light on the so-called non-finito, the “unfinished” in Cézanne’s paintings. That so many of Cézanne’s pictures were left with patches or tracts of bare canvas showing has long been a puzzle; and various explanations have been proposed. But now, in view of Cézanne’s commitment to intermittency at every stage of his process, his non-finito appears as an organic outgrowth of his whole method. As it is in the nature of his sensations to register in discrete acts of attention; as his brushwork in consequence suggests a becoming more than a steady state; and as passage serves everywhere to intermit formulations that threaten a false finality—so an inward necessity may demand that at certain points formulation cease altogether. Cézanne’s non-finito, then, differs from the incompletion of those sad artifacts which, from external reasons, remain unfulfilled. In his canvases, the unworked parts are the silences that are parts of speech—breathers, cautions, quandaries or measured pauses, denials occasioned by second thoughts; not non-finito at all, but rather continuous with a process that conceives of depiction as by necessity halting—even from the first strokes of the brush. Picasso may have had something like this in mind when he said of Cézanne: “From the moment he puts down a stroke of paint, the painting is already there” (p. 129 above). For to say that a painting is “already there” (i.e., complete) after a stroke or two is to say, in effect, that it can never thereafter be unachieved, no matter how much untouched canvas remains. 29. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 187, for this and the next quotation in the paragraph. 30. Ibid., p. 182. 31. Ibid., p. 165, for this and the next quotation in the paragraph; p. 202, n. 153, for the third quotation. 32. It is instructive at this point to examine the face of Braque’s disappointing Large Nude of 1907–8 (fig. 6.6). Obviously, the human face concerned Braque very little, while Picasso made it is his primary subject. Therefore, no comparative judgment on Braque’s cartoon character is intended. But disregarding the question of quality, it is interesting to observe what it is Braque is doing in

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plotting the facial features of his Nude; for these features betray a characteristic of Braque’s formal thinking which, I believe, also governs his early Cubist syntax and sets it apart from Picasso’s. The woman’s features are indicated with eight strokes of the brush: one makes the nose; another, an eyebrow; two pairs make blank eyes; one pair, the lips. The lines themselves are banal, lending the face neither substance nor character: they are conventional marks, loosely strewn on the field, never anchored to structure; and (except for one narrowed eye) they are left purposely “open” to remain linear incidents. (Much the same would hold for the hooked double curve that describes the right shoulder, or the pseudo-anatomical articulation of the lower leg.) Return now to Braque’s Landscape with Houses, whose precocious use of Cézannean passage renders it, in Rubin’s view, of extraordinary historical importance. The two pictures are nearly contemporaneous, and though Rubin writes the Nude off as “something of a ‘sport’ in the unfolding of [Braque’s] art during this period” (“Cézannisme” [above, note 1], p. 155), we learn subsequently that this sport occupied Braque for six months—following hard upon Landscape with Houses. And indeed, I tend to recognize in the Landscape’s passages the same hand and mind that cast those structureless linear signs adrift on the face of the Nude. 33. References for the above quotations: Clement Greenberg, “Picasso at Seventy-Five” (published in 1957, reprinted in Greenberg’s Art and Culture, Boston, 1961), p. 63; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, written in 1915 (Munich, 1920; reprint, Stuttgart, 1958), p. 26; Golding, Cubism (above, note 6), p. 48; Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), p. 22; André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask (New York, 1976), p. 11. 34. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 154. 35. Before leaving the subject of stylistic unity, I must briefly return to Picasso’s Three Women, because its patent disunities seem to have been overlooked. As Fry had admired the painting for being more “unified” than the Demoiselles, and Leymarie for its “stylistically unified” homogeneity, so Rubin applauds its “consistent system of passage” and the “total consistency of the illusory bas-relief space,” which contrast with the “inconsistent grasp of Cubist syntax in Picasso’s preceding work” (“Cézannisme” [above, note 1], pp. 186–87). Thus it is the syntactic coherence Rubin imputes to Three Women that qualifies the picture for its prominent role in the creation of early Cubism. Yet there are enormous stylistic inconsistencies—some left over, others deliberately injected. The buckling and folding planes that model the central and right-hand figures give way to incongruous flatness in the male torso at left. The two lateral masks bear black linear features, wholly at odds with the carved-sculpture conception of the simian head in their midst. And if Rubin’s exemplar of closevalued color system is an interstitial green between head and arm of the left-hand figure (“whose value hardly differs from that of the planes of the terra-cotta arm and shoulder”), the picture has blacks aplenty to spoil the rule: shreds of sheer black behind the

woman’s left shoulder and under her breast; blacks that streak clefts and edges; and a black triangle near bottom center—seal and certificate of Picasso’s contrariness. Such stylistic discrepancies would be gravely faulted in an art class even today. For Picasso they are the breath of life. 36. Rubin, “Cézannisme” (above, note 1), p. 194. Cf. p. 154, where the author commends Douglas Cooper: “Cooper is quite right in pointing out that Picasso would only ‘catch up’ with this stage of Braque’s accomplishment in the summer of 1909.”

Seven 1. See also Umberto Boccioni, Still Life with Glass and Siphon, c. 1914, Yale University Art Gallery; Juan Gris, The Siphon, conté drawing, 1917, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and charcoal drawing, 1917, The Art Institute of Chicago. 2. “Amphora space” is Elisabeth Ayrton’s term for the intercolumniation between close-set columns. See her fine book, The Doric Temple, with photographs by Serge Moulinier (New York, 1961), from which fig. 7.6 is taken. 3. The reclamation of the void in both Picasso and Matisse is a topic of immense promise. For example: Picasso’s sketches for the ballet Mercure, 1924, include trios of ecstatic dancers, each drawn with a single line. In a page in the sketchbook now at the Musée Picasso, Paris (Z.V.201; MP1990, fol. 5r), watch the third figure, whose hyperactive head drops to her chest. What exactly compounds her invertible summit? The effect is somewhere between a marvel and a sleight of hand, or both in one blink; reprod. in Picasso: Une nouvelle dation, exh. cat. (Paris, Grand Palais, 1990), no. 103. See also Picasso’s stencil print Pierrot and Red Harlequin, Standing, c. 1920, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other instances. 4. “A sign for rising bubbles,” Rosalind Krauss calls it in her Picasso Papers (New York, 1998), p. 49. 5. See Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso and the Typography of Cubism,” in Picasso in Retrospect (New York, 1973), p. 60, and Natasha Staller, who reads the texts in the Stockholm collage even more closely; Staller, A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven, 2001), pp. 264–67. 6. Picasso to Braque: “I am using your latest papery and powdery procedures. I’m in the process of imagining a guitar and I’m using a bit of sand against our awful [orrible] canvas”; quoted in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 31 and n. 58. 7. Staller, A Sum of Destructions (above, note 5), p. 1. 8. Inexplicably both? I quote Robert Rosenblum’s comment on Picasso’s famous charcoal drawing of 1910, titled Nude, bequeathed by Alfred Stieglitz to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 6.5): “The impulse toward fragmentation of surfaces into component planes is now so strong that the very core of matter seems finally to be disclosed as a delicately open structure of interlocking arcs and angles. Yet paradoxically, if this form appears to dissolve outward into the openness of the surrounding void, it also appears to coalesce inward into a strangely crystalline

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substance”; Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1961), p. 60. Let these sage observations stand here in homage to a departed friend (1927–2006). 9. A drop-leaf table occurs in Picasso’s Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (early 1909, Basel) and often thereafter. Cf. Pierre Daix in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York, 1992), p. 88: “The little black crescent, in other papiers collés, designates a table. Here [in La Bataille s’est engagé, 1912, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas] it is impossible to know if it represents part of the guitar or the table, and I think the ambiguity is entirely willed.” 10. Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (above, note 9), p. 263. 11. [The text of this appendix, related to the discussion of the Stockholm collage, is taken from Steinberg’s sixth Charles Eliot Norton Lecture at Harvard, May 1, 1996, entitled “Picasso’s Collages—Where Image and Word Regain Common Ground.” —Ed.] 12. [The French aperitif, made from gentian root and introduced in 1889, was not available in the US when Steinberg began to study Picasso’s collage in 1991. I brought a bottle back from Paris and continued to do so on my annual visits there. Suze became Steinberg’s first drink offering to guests (few of whom liked it). A Paris friend alerted the company to the existence of the Picasso. In 1992, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the work, a reproduction of it replaced the traditional Suze bottle label for the course of the year. —Ed.]

nine 1. I exclude nos. 318–320, which, absent a brush or palette in or at the artist’s hand, no longer define the lover as painter. 2. Gert Schiff, “Picasso’s Suite 347, or Painting as an Act of Love,” in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), pp. 239–53; revised and reprinted in Schiff, ed., Picasso in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976), pp. 163–67. 3. [The Picasso prints in this group are now usually titled or subtitled Raphael and la Fornarina, followed by sequential numbers, running from I (no. 296) to XXV (no. 320). —Ed.] 4. “In a painting by Raphael it is not possible to ascertain the distance from the tip of the nose to the mouth. I want to make pictures in which this would be possible”; quoted in DanielHenry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, written in 1915 (Munich, 1920; reprint, Stuttgart, 1958), ch. 3. Gertrude Stein recalls: “Picasso said to me once with a good deal of bitterness, they say I can draw better than Raphael and probably they are right, perhaps I do draw better but if I can draw as well as Raphael I have at least the right to choose my way and they should recognize it”; Stein, Picasso (London, 1939), p. 16. Hélène Parmelin reports overhearing Picasso’s advice to a painter: “When you draw a head, you must draw like that head. . . . Ingres drew like Ingres, not like the things he drew”; quoted in Parmelin, Picasso: Women, Cannes

and Mougins, 1954–1963, trans. Humphrey Hare (Amsterdam, 1964), p. 135. 5. [Updating Steinberg’s 1972 note concerning the five versions of Raphael and la Fornarina, which he based on the catalogue in Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa di Ingres (Milan, 1968), nos. 72a–72e. Reproduction references are to Sarah Betzer, “Artist as Lover: Rereading Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina,” Oxford Art Journal, 38 (December 2015). Betzer also locates the present essay within the later literature. 1. 1813, formerly in the Riga Museum of Foreign Art, disappeared during the German invasion in 1941; Betzer, fig. 9. 2. 1814, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.252. 3. c. 1814, American private collection; Betzer, fig. 22. In Camesasca’s 1968 catalogue, no. 72C, this version is credited to the Kettaneh collection in New York. 4. 1840, Columbus Museum of Art, fig. 9.5. 5. c. 1860, private collection, unfinished. Formerly collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., on loan to the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; sold at Sotheby’s, New York, June 1, 1989, lot 113; Betzer, fig. 13. —Ed.] 6. For a discussion of the historicity of la Fornarina, see Eugène Müntz, Raphael, His Life, Works and Times (New York, 1882), pp. 605–6. 7. The sitter is not identified in Angelo Comolli’s Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino (Rome, 1790); nor in J.-D. Passavant, Raphael d’Urbin (Paris, 1860), vol. 2, p. 98. But she is named “la Fornarina” on three engraved copies cited by Passavant, dated 1772, 1777, and 1797. 8. Giulio Romano appears in fig. 9.5 and in the version now in an American private collection, no. 3 in note 5 above. 9. Whether Raphael himself finished the Transfiguration, and whether Giulio completed it after Raphael’s death, has been a matter of doubt since the sixteenth century—an issue of which Ingres was well aware. Vasari declared that Raphael finished the work himself. But in 1790, Comolli had to argue the point again, the disparity between the upper and lower parts of the picture being too great to allay doubts; Comolli, Vita inedita (above, note 7), p. 59, n. 70. Cf. also Passavant, Raphael d’Urbin (above, note 7), vol. 2, pp. 290 ff.; Müntz, Raphael (above, note 6), pp. 540–41; and John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael (London, 1971), ch. 2. 10. Comolli, Vita inedita (above, note 7), pp. 88–92. The author follows Vasari’s account of Raphael’s death: “Meanwhile Raphael secretly gave in too much to his passion, and one night indulged himself so much that he was taken by a fever and much weakened; so that the physician, who thought he could cure him by bleeding, hastened his death, because Raphael, being a modest man, had not disclosed his sin to the physician; for whereas he needed restoratives, he was instead enfeebled and thus came to his death.”

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11. Cf. Cennini’s advice to the young painter in Il libro dell’ arte (c. 1390; ch. 29): “Your life should always be arranged just as if you were studying theology, or philosophy, or other theories, that is to say, eating and drinking moderately, . . . saving and sparing your hand, preserving it from such strains as heaving stones, crowbar, and many other things which are bad for your hand. . . . There is another cause which, if you indulge it, can make your hand so unsteady that it will waver more, and flutter far more, than leaves do in the wind, and this is indulging too much in the company of woman.” For Leonardo, “in order that the well-being of the body may not harm that of the mind, the painter ought to be solitary. . . . If you are alone, you will be all yours. . . . Two masters cannot be served”; Philip McMahon, trans., Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinus Latinus 1270) by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton, 1956), vol. 1, no. 74. The American artist Washington Allston, upon arriving in London in 1801, writes to a young artist friend, Charles Fraser: “In the meantime, let me advise you to beware of love. Love and painting are two opposite elements; you cannot live in both at the same time. . . . Let it not be said . . . that Mr. Fraser promised much . . . but love, alas! . . . had set a seal upon his fame. His soul  .  .  . is now imprisoned within the bosom of a girl”; Jared Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (New York, 1892), pp. 47–48. 12. Cf. Suite 347, no. 268, later titled La démesure du peintre. 13. The poet Raphael Alberti, Picasso’s friend who wrote a cycle of sonnets on this portion of the Suite, identified the figure under the bed as Michelangelo—an association that Gert Schiff rejected as “perhaps too much poetic license”; see Schiff, Picasso in Perspective (above, note 2), p. 167. A remote ancestor to the shriveled old man under the couch is worth mentioning here. The fifteenth-century block book Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) offers advice on dying in the arms of the Church. The accompanying eleven woodcuts show a dying Everyman surrounded by figures representing inspiration and temptation. The latter take the form of grotesque demons swarming around and under the bed. Does Picasso’s figure suggest the temptation to surrender to old age, to stop making love and art? Even if Picasso never saw the Ars moriendi, the pictorial sequence remains intriguing. See especially the eighth woodcut in the edition of c. 1450, The Ars moriendi: A Reproduction of the Copy in the British Museum, ed. W. Harry Rylands (London, 1881); later engraved by the Master E. S. (Lehrs 182). 14. Cf. Suite 347, nos. 47, 342, 111. 15. By the prayers of Eos (Dawn), who loved him, Tithonus obtained from the gods immortality but not eternal youth, in consequence of which he completely shrank together in his old age. 16. Beryl Barr-Sharrar discusses the appearance of Picasso’s father (and mother and sister) in the Suite 347, specifically those prints “which have relevance to Picasso’s work before he left Spain for Paris  .  .  . in 1900”; no. 317 not among them. Barr-Sharrar,

“Some Aspects of Early Autobiographical Imagery in Picasso’s Suite 347,” Art Bulletin, 54 (December 1972), pp. 516–33. 17. See Leo Steinberg and Diane Karp, “Picasso’s Revealer,” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 8 (November–December 1977), pp. 140–41, for this and subsequent quotations.

ten 1. Cf. Z.XXXIII.43, a lengthier pun to induce the sensation of kissing; and, in the Suite 347 series, nos. 307 and 308. 2. For the simultaneity of aspects, see esp. ch. 2 and Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 192–223. 3. Quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso: Women, Cannes and Mougins, 1954–1963, trans. Humphrey Hare (Amsterdam, 1964), p. 135; see also p. 217, note 57. 4. The photo of Picasso and the praying mantis, taken by Robert Doisneau, is reproduced in (among other places) Picasso, preface by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., commentaries by Roland Penrose (Basel, 1967/68), p. 13. 5. “He begins to die that quits his desires,” wrote George Herbert; from Jacula Prudentum or Outlandish Proverbs, in The Poems of George Herbert, preface by Ernest Rhys (London, 1889), p. 243. “Termine fisso d’eterno consiglio” is from Dante’s prayer to the Virgin, Paradiso, canto 33, line 3. 6. For further discussion of the 1972 Self-Portrait, see pp. 38–40. 7. William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 1927, stanza 3. 8. “Der Alte verliert eins der grössten Menschenrechte, er wird nicht mehr von seines Gleichen beurtheilt”—“Old age forfeits one of the greatest of human rights; it is no longer judged by its equals”; Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa (Stuttgart, 1840), vol. 3, p. 191. 9. For the aesthetic properties and history of “cellar door” (without mention of its anatomical associations), see Grant Barrett, “Cellar Door,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2010, p. 16.

eleven 1. Michael Kimmelman, “Old Rivals, Immortal but Still Competing,” New York Times, February 14, 2003, pp. E39, 50; Peter Schjeldahl, “Twin Peaks: Matisse Meets Picasso,” New Yorker, March 3, 2003, p. 84; Mark Stevens, “The Two Towers,” New York, February 24, 2003, p. 59; Jack Flam,“Twin Peaks,” New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003, p. 26; Jed Perl, “Hash of the Titans,” New Republic, March 3, 2003, p. 35. John Russell, reviewing the London venue and speaking of 1907, took the same tack: “[T]heirs became in short order a competitive situation. . . . Picasso knew that if he was ever to rank as No. 1, . . . Matisse was the man to beat. And the way to do it was to paint a big picture of a kind that no one had ever seen before. It had to be—in boxing terms—an incontestable knockout”; Russell, “Rival Geniuses Who Struck Sparks Off Each Other,” New York Times, June 30, 2002, p. AR 29.

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A few years later, John Richardson noted that “on both sides of the Atlantic, crowds flocked to see the show under the misapprehension that it was a wrestling match with a winner and a loser. This is not at all what the organizers had in mind”; Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 3, 1917–1932 (New York, 2007), p. 441. 2. The Matisse quotation: as translated in Jack Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective (New York, 1988), p. 152, from André Verdet, Entretiens, notes et écrits sur la peinture: Braque, Léger, Matisse, Picasso (Paris, 1978). The Picasso quotation is from the MoMA wall texts and promotional material. [Despite consultation with Picasso scholars, the original source for this late-life quotation remains elusive. —Ed.] 3. Among other publications concerned with artists’ competitiveness: Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, 2002); Paul Robert Walker, The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World (New York, 2002); Modigliani, a 2004 biopic by Mike Davis, which imagines and exaggerates a rivalry with Picasso. [To which may now be added Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (New York, 2016), pairing Matisse/Picasso, Manet/ Degas, Pollock/de Kooning, and Freud/Bacon. —Ed.] The cult of competition within corporations in the 1990s is discussed in James Surowiecki, “Team Players,” New Yorker, May 10, 2004, p. 41. Rather than be bound by a common goal, management gurus argued that “people in a corporation should compete as hard against each other as they do against other companies.” When Alberto Vitale became chief executive of Random House in 1989, “he added to the competition [between Random House and Knopf, part of the group] by playing imprints against each other, sometimes encouraging more than one to bid for the same book”; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Literary Family Feud,” New York Times, January 15, 2001. A new fashionable ethos. And it was just then that artmaking got to be reinterpreted as a competitive enterprise. How strange that this corporate aberration coincides with a fashion in art historiography. Credit for inventing the concept of rivalry in art history probably goes to Vasari who, in his life of Leonardo claimed that “There was no love lost between [Leonardo] and Michelangelo Buonarroti, so that the latter left Florence owing to their rivalry”; or, in his life of Botticelli: “on the screen of the Ognissanti . . . he painted a St. Augustine . . . in which he endeavored to surpass all his contemporaries, but especially Domenico Ghirlandaio, who had done a St. Jerome on the other side.” Three centuries later, in the age of modern art history, we find, among other titles, Eugène Müntz, “Une rivalité d’artistes au XVIe siècle: Michel-Ange et Raphael à la cour de Rome,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 25 (1882), pp. 281–87 (part 1); pp. 385–400 (part 2). [For Heinrich Wölfflin and the reflexive perception of Michelangelo’s Doni Madonna as a competition piece with Leonardo’s lost St. Anne cartoon, see Steinberg, “Disconnections: The Doni Madonna and Leonardo’s St. Anne,” in Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2019), ch. 1. —Ed.]

Comparative exhibitions pop up regularly in the twenty-first century. Not all deal with purported conflicts, but all reinforce the habit of seeing one artist’s work through the lens of another’s: “Matisse, Villon: The Richard Harris Collection” (Maastricht and New York, C. G. Boerner, 2003); “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting” (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003); “Beckman-Picasso/Picasso-Beckmann” (New York, Richard L. Feigen Gallery, 2004); “Picasso Ingres” (Paris, Musée Picasso, 2004); “Gwen John and Augustus John” (London, Tate Britain, 2004); “Bacon Picasso: La vie des images” (Paris, Musée Picasso, 2005). 4. The 2007 preface to the second edition of Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. xv–xvi, recapitulates the practice. Concerning the eponymous essay, which reflects on America’s nervous traffic with art, I wrote: “What my 1972 essay did not anticipate is a move I should have seen coming by May 29, 1964, when LIFE magazine titled a feature on Giacometti ‘Champ of the Prize Winners,’ a champ being one who beats out all competition. That, truly, was avant-garde. It ushered the presentation of art as but another triumph of the competitive impulse. By now, artworks themselves may be fielded as rivals, so that, seeing them juxtaposed, we attend a spectator sport, watching them ‘perform’ as they vie for top place. The arcane incentive behind the making of art is deftly domesticated. Stripped of romantic cant, creativity turns out to be, at bottom, the downing of challengers. Not art but Contest.” 5. Pierre Daix, Picasso, Matisse (Neuchâtel, 1996), pp. 8–9. 6. The sequence is recounted in John Golding’s introduction to Matisse Picasso, exh. cat. (London, Tate Modern, and New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002), pp. 13–14. 7. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, 1999), p. 294. 8. Kirk Varnedoe’s essay in the Matisse Picasso catalogue (above, note 6), pp. 27–28, announces the two portraits as “parallel explorations” in which the artists are “testing splices between an imagery of youth . . . and a ‘primitivism’ grounded in archaic, untutored or non-Western art.” “Their self-portraits that autumn were appropriately opposed.” What they share, despite the welldescribed differences, are “paradoxical splices of head and body.” 9. Matisse, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child,” Art News and Review (London), February 6, 1954, p. 3, translation of a 1953 French text; see Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, rev. ed. (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 217–19. Cf. also Matisse quoted in LIFE, August 28, 1970, p. 42: “After an entire life of a harried laborer,” he wrote, he was able at last “to sing like a child . . . at the top of a mountain he had climbed.” 10. The words are those of Kirk Varnedoe in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 131. 11. For the full text, see Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 350, n. 13, November 25. The catalogue chronology on p. 368 mistranslates, adding the qualifier “may have led you.” For a more measured and broader discussion of the two paintings, see Yve-Alain

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Bois, Matisse and Picasso, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 1998), pp. 11, 15. 12. From the MoMA wall text: “Matisse was convinced that his Goldfish and Palette had exercised a strong influence on Picasso’s Harlequin of 1915. This seems true: the use of black and the newfound austerity do echo Matisse’s picture.” 13. Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 104. 14. [Steinberg treated the subject of “substance” in Picasso, the artist’s lifelong wonder at the stuff things are made of, the presumed substance of the objects and characters he depicts, in a sidebar to his 2005 lecture, “The Unloved Wife.” That lecture, minus the sidebar, will appear in the next volume in this series. Steinberg’s large file and notes on substance have been deposited with the rest of his papers at the Getty Research Institute. —Ed.] 15. Varnedoe in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 135. Cf. Jack Flam’s description of the picture as “bitterly comical”; Flam, Matisse and Picasso (above, note 13), p. 105. William Rubin found the picture “disquieting,” infused with a “hostile spirit,” and the harlequin’s “toothy smile almost sinister”; Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), p. 98. 16. Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907–1917) (New York, 1990), nos. 1372 and 1375, Z.II/2.880 and Z.VI.1224, respectively. 17. The dancing couple: Z.VI.1278, Z.VI.1328, Palau i Fabre, nos. 1376, 1379; the idea of painting: Z.II/2.558 and 559, Palau i Fabre, nos. 1380, 1381. The transition from a couple to a single figure may have roots in Picasso’s affaires du coeur of the moment. Picasso painted the picture in late 1915 as World War I grew ever more murderous, and his four-year companion, dear Eva Gouel, “Ma Jolie,” the muse of his robust Cubist years, lay dying of cancer; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, 1907–1917 (New York, 1996), pp. 277, 363–67. Day after day, Picasso rode the Métro to her clinic on the outskirts of Paris, then worked through the nights on this Harlequin, a smirking hobbledehoy, helpless and desolate. But as Eva lay sick, Picasso took up with Gabrielle Depeyre, known as Gaby, a cabaret performer, singer or dancer. At some point, Gaby and Picasso made a short trip to the south of France, recorded next year in some sweet little watercolors that spare her his Cubism, keep protesting his love, and show his name copulating with hers (six of these drawings are now in the Musée Picasso, Paris, MP1996-1 through MP1996-6). The affair with Gaby may be relevant, since most of the early studies for Harlequin display not one figure but two; and they, like the furniture I just mentioned, eventually coalesce. 18. For the photograph, see William Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 217, and Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris, 1997), p. 164. 19. For Picasso’s Olga portraits of the later teens and earlier twenties, drawn and painted, including many with legs crossed,

see Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture, pp. 42, 46, 102, 217, 296, 308, 312, 315, 316. 20. [The history and significance of the cross-legged posture in art is discussed in Steinberg’s essay “Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna,” in Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2018), pp. 96–128. —Ed.] 21. Woman in an Armchair, then in a private collection, was only shown in the New York venue of the “Matisse Picasso” show. In Paris and London, the comparative work was Large Nude in a Red Armchair (fig. 11.9). Woman in an Armchair is nowhere identified specifically as Olga. But it surely fits in among the anti-Olga portraits of the period, such as those where Picasso inserts himself as a shadow profile; see Kirk Varnedoe, “Picasso’s Self-Portraits,” in Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture (above, note 18), pp. 147–53. On the Picasso-Olga relationship and its resonance in Picasso’s art, see Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 3 (above, note 1), pp. 333–34 and 369–72. Richardson, however, captions Woman in an Armchair as Marie-Thérèse Asleep in a Patterned Armchair (p. 330, reprod. p. 331). He offers no evidence for the identification, save for an association with a sketchbook dated December 1926, in which he assumes that “Picasso envisions his new girl as a monster—a pinheaded, elephant-legged buttock-breasted specter of erotic menace.” Neither the painting nor the sketchbook is elsewhere identified with Marie-Thérèse. The entire sketchbook is reproduced in Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso, Carnets: Catalogue des dessins, vol. 2 (Paris, 1996), cat. 34 (MP1873). 22. Elizabeth Cowling, ch. 23 in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 223, for the quotations. Matisse’s remark, from his 1908 “Notes of a Painter,” reads in full: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue”; as translated in Flam, Matisse on Art (above, note 9), p. 42. The Matisse lithograph, Nude with Blue Cushion beside a Fireplace, 1925, is reproduced in Matisse Picasso, p. 354, fig. 60. 23. “Picasso bewegt sich in sich selbst”; Werner Spies, Das Auge am Tatort: 80 Begegnungen mit Kunst u. Künstlern (Munich, 1979), p. 57. 24. Quoted by Cowling in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 22. 25. Lamia, as defined in Webster I (1925), “1. class.myth. One of a class of man-devouring monsters, commonly represented with the head and breast of a woman.  .  .  . They were believed to assume the forms of beautiful women to allure young men. 2. Hence a vampire; witch; sorceress. 3. In Keats’ poem of this name, a bride who reverts to her original serpent form.” 26. For the national colors of Spain in Picasso’s work, see his self-representation at left in the 1921 Three Musicians; and Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso as Surrealist,” Artforum (September 1966), p. 22; Rosenblum, “Picasso’s Blond Muse: The Reign of Marie-

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Thérèse Walter,” in Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture (above, note 18), p. 344. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 3 (above, note 1), p. 371, takes the red armchair rather than its female inhabitant to be “intentionally menacing,” even though he’s just described the woman as “hideous,” with “the darkness of Goya,” with whose Time Picasso’s Large Nude shares “malevolent distortions” and “ominousness.” Richardson quotes Picasso on the use of the armchair to “envisage his subjects . . . caught in the trap of these armchairs like birds caught in a cage. I want to chart the trail of flesh and blood through time.” In a second quotation, Picasso has the armchair “imply[ing] old age or death” or it’s there “to protect her.” Richardson may have been beguiled by available texts, disregarding the visual lack of menace in the seat of Red Armchair or Picasso’s contradictory interpretations. The quoted passages raise some contextual problems. The first passage is from the French edition of Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake’s Life with Picasso (New York, 1964; Vivre avec Picasso, Paris, 1965; ed. 1973, p. 278, in a section not in the English edition). Picasso, according to Gilot, is discussing the shift from anecdotal subject to “grands thèmes” in the work of the Impressionists and Cubists. Gilot objects that he has painted thousands of canvases without themes or subjects, which are only “de la peinture, comme toute la série des femmes assises dans un fauteuil.” Against such formalist inference, Picasso responds, “vous ne comprenez pas que ces femmes ne sont pas tout simplement posées là comme un modèle qui s’ennuie.” Then follows the quote where the women are “caught in the trap of these armchairs.” Which armchair works he refers to remains uncertain; equally uncertain is whether these unrecorded conversations, transcribed from memory years later and inserted between quotation marks, represent mot à mot what Picasso actually said. Similarly, the second passage, where the armchair implies old age, death, or protection. The source is André Malraux’s Picasso’s Mask (French ed. 1974; English, New York, 1976), p. 138, a memoir of his meetings with Picasso. In the 1937 Weeping Woman, Picasso explains to Malraux, he first saw Dora Maar as a weeping woman. Again elevating a subject to “grands thèmes,” he continues: “And it’s important, because women are suffering machines,” adding that “You shouldn’t have too clear an idea of what you’re doing. When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair implies old age or death,” etc. 27. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II, ii; in Antony and Cleopatra, I, v, Cleopatra exclaims: “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” The Tennyson quotation is from “The Miller’s Daughter,” and the Ulysses passage from episode 13, “Nausicaa.” In the same episode, Bloom, spying Gerty McDowell, “would like to be that rock she sat on.” In the ancient Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe, Daphnis “kissed the pipe in the places where [Chloe’s] mouth had been”; The Pastorals of Longus, literally and completely translated from the Greek (Athens, 1896), p. 22. In a fourteenth-century life of Mary Magdalen, the heroine envies the cross, “that my Lord had been crucified in my arms.” In an early Michelangelo sonnet, written,

I suspect, to try his hand at an approved poetic form, the learning poet professes to envy whatever snugs closer to the lady than he—i.e., her wreath, dress, necklace, girdle: What joy hath yon glad wreath of flowers that is Around her golden hair so deftly twined, Each blossom pressing forward from behind, As though to be the first her brows to kiss! The livelong day her dress hath perfect bliss, That now reveals her breast, now seems to bind: And that fair woven net of gold refined Rests on her cheek and throat in happiness! Yet still more blissful seems to me the band Gilt at the tips, so sweetly doth it ring And clasp the bosom that it serves to lace: Yea, and the belt to such as understand, Bound round her waist, saith: here I’d ever cling.— What would my arms do in that girdle’s place? Translation John Addington Symonds, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti (2nd ed., London, 1904), no. 20; Girardi no. 4. In Picasso’s art, the equation of what touches with what is being touched need not be amatory. In Three Musicians, the hand of Max Jacob on the keyboard at right has two fingernails running continuous with the round knobs of the keys. 28. Fig. 11.11, reproduced by Zervos as a study for the Tate painting, fig. 11.10, is dated at upper left July 30, 1932, whereas the painting is dated July 27, 1932, on the stretcher. If the stretcher is original to the canvas, it suggests that Picasso continued to explore variations on the sequence of necklace-upholstery studs. See also the painting Z.VIII.69, Nu au collier, inscribed “Boisgeloup juillet-octobre XXXII,” where the studs climb over the shoulder to morph into the necklace; Christie’s, London, sale 6590, June 25, 2002, lot 12. Picasso began the year 1932 with at least three other paintings of seated women leaning against a yellow-studded red panel of a chair back, but sans necklace: January 6, The Yellow Belt, Z.VII.357; January 9, Reading, Z.VII.363; January 10, Young Woman with Mandolin, Z.VII.359. [All three are reproduced in Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, exh. cat. (London, Tate Modern, 2018), pp. 47–49. —Ed.] 29. In Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 249, The Dream again “evokes associations with Matisse’s odalisques.” 30. Cowling, in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 223; YveAlain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (above, note 11), p. 244, n. 89. For Françoise Gilot, the picture sets out to annihilate Matisse—along with Olga: “He symbolically killed two birds with one stone” (Bois, ibid.). Bois reads Red Armchair as an aggressive swipe at those lush Matisse odalisques, but deplores the motive as well as the outcome, since a contentious will, the impulse to “smother” a rival, rarely brings out the best in an artist. 31. The comparison is Bois’s, Matisse and Picasso (above, note 11), pp. 18, 21, cited with approval by Cowling, in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 355, n. 19.

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32. Bois, Matisse and Picasso (above, note 11), p. 18, Picasso “directly borrows the pose”; Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso (above, note 13), p. 145, cites Odalisque with Tambourine as among the Matisse paintings whose poses Picasso refers to in Red Armchair. 33. The first and third quotations are from Flam, Matisse and Picasso, p. 146, the second from Bois, Matisse and Picasso, p. 221. 34. Among the examples in ancient Egypt: the female guests at a banquet being attended by maidservants in the paintings in the tomb of Rekhmire, Western Thebes, c. 1430 BC (see also the modern copy of one of them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 30.4.78), and, later, the coffin panel with the Goddess Nephthys, 644–332 BC, in the Brooklyn Museum, inv. 37.1529E. The posture in Chinese art can be found in sculptures of the Buddha Shakyamuni as an ascetic as early as the Ming dynasty; among other instances, three in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, inv. B60P1145, B60B189, and B60J13. In Greek art, the posture emerges in the early Classic period, as in the crouching youths flanking the reined horses in the left half of the east pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The posture is common in Picasso, as two books conveniently at hand reveal: Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881– 1907 (Barcelona, 1985), nos. 759, 891–896, 1141, 1266 (The Harem, 1906); Ulrich Weisner, ed., Picassos Klassizismus: Werke 1914– 1934, exh. cat. (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1988), pp. 110, fig. 9; 112, fig.

11; 129, fig. 22 (variants, pp. 130–31, figs. 24, 29); 226, cat. 27 (a drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1984.433.281), and two drawings of 1931, cats. 73 and 74. 35. Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose (New York, 1947), p. 171, as quoted in Matisse Picasso (above, note 6), p. 363. 36. From Bavardages (Matisse in conversation with Pierre Courthion), 1941, unpublished manuscript, as quoted in Matisse Picasso, p. 367. 37. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV, xxxvi, 81–83, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1968), pp. 281–83. 38. Ibid., XXXV, xxxvi, 96, p. 333. 39. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzen Jahren seines Leben (1836), vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1902), pp. 467–68. 40. J.W. Goethe: Italian Journey 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York, 1968), pp. 368–69, 378. 41. From Anthony Wood’s Comments on Composers, 1691–92, reprinted in Morrison Comegys Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism (Philadelphia, 1940), pp. 318–19. 42. The anecdote is recounted in Paul Elmer More’s notes to The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Cambridge, UK, 1905), p. 1033, note to canto I, XI, line 88, p. 746. 43. Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 524.

Leo Steinberg: Chronolo gy

A

summary of biographical events, personal and professional, with emphasis on the lesser-known formative years through the early 1960s. The rest of Steinberg’s career encompassed prolific publications and hundreds of public lectures, complemented by various appointments and awards, briefly encapsulated here. A complete list of publications appears on pages 235–40. 1920

Born July 9, Moscow, USSR, to Isaac Nachman (1888–1957) and Anyuta Esselson Steinberg (1890– 1954); given name, Schneur Zalman Ariyeh Lev Steinberg. Older sister, Ada (1917–1956). His father, a member of the Left Social Revolutionary (LSR) party, had been People’s Commissar of Justice in Lenin’s first, coalition cabinet, but resigned after four months (December 1917–March 1918).

1923

1933

The Soviet government refuses to allow his father to return from an LSR conference in Germany. The family flees to Berlin, where his younger sister, Shulamit (1923–2000) is born. With them is his maternal aunt, Esther Esselson (1892–1947), who always lived with the family. May, while his father is in London, the Gestapo searches their house for evidence of Communist affiliation. The family flees to London. Steinberg had already been thrown off his school’s track team as the Nazis gained power. USSR refuses to renew the family’s passports. The British government issues him a Certificate of Identity as a Russian national, though “Russia” no longer exists.

1933–36

1935

Attends King Alfred School, an independent progressive school. Initially speaks little English; reads English classics in German translation for school assignments.

seeks a secure, culturally autonomous home for Jews outside of Palestine. 1936–40 Attends the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London; wins prizes in drawing and sculpture. Receives diploma in Fine Art, 1940. 1940–41 Lacking British citizenship, is ineligible for military service. During the Blitz, serves as a warden for the ARP (Air Raid Precaution, later Civil Defence Service). Works for the British Council as part of cultural propaganda campaigns; publishes articles on music, art, and political history. 1942–44 1942, for the Ministry of Information, delivers fifteen talks for BBC Empire on the history and geography of Russia. Publishes a series of three articles for the Ministry in Persian Quarterly: “Art and War: The Past, Present, and Future of British Art,” in conjunction with the War Artists Advisory Committee. Four months on the staff of the Associated Press of Great Britain, in charge of the photographic library while working at the night news desk of the British Press Association. Fall 1942, hired by the weekly News Review; spends eighteen months in the foreign news department, specializing in France and the French Empire; also writes feature articles on art, film, and books.

Studies philosophy with his uncle, Aron Steinberg (1891–1975).

1944, joins Picture Post as staff writer and layout artist.

Isaac Steinberg cofounds the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, an organization that

Most of these wartime publications are written under the pseudonyms John Avon and Vladimir Baranov.

L e o St e i n be rg : C h ro n olo g y

Thinking of studying philosophy, takes summer course with philosopher Paul Henle at Columbia University on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

During these years, maintains a small studio where he continues to draw and sculpt. At the request of his father, who is stranded in Australia during the war, speaks about the Freeland League at meetings of British Zionists.

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1945

January, emigrates to New York with his mother, aunt, and younger sister. His father and older sister are already in New York. Becomes contributor to and managing editor of This Month, a pocket journal founded by his sister Ada, devoted to politics, current events, and culture, until it folds in 1947.

1947

Translates Jacob Pat’s Ashes and Fire, an early report on surviving Jews in postwar Poland, from Yiddish (New York: International Universities Press).

1948

Begins teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, New York (until 1960).

1949

Translates Sholem Asch’s novel Mary, from Yiddish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s).

1950

Naturalized as a US citizen under the name Leo Zalman Lev Steinberg. Audits classes at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (through 1953).

1951

Begins to teach art history at Parsons along with life drawing (through 1960). Gives lecture courses for the cultural programs of the 92nd Street Y (Young Men’s Hebrew Association, New York) on art and aesthetics (through 1955).

1952

Publishes his first extended critical essay, “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism,” in the Sewanee Review. Writes to his father in May: “I find that I delivered 37 lectures in 6 months [at Parsons and the 92nd Street Y]. . . . Chronologically I ranged from 30,000 BC to current exhibitions. Geographically, I ranged from Japan to the Congo to New York. My subjects included Oriental philosophy, medieval scholasticism, classical and modern physics, the history of photography, the physiology of the eye, the evolution of archaeology, esthetics, art history, and the formal analysis of art works.”

1953

Teaches course at Cooper-Union, “Theory of Modern Art.” Publishes “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” a now classic essay, in Partisan Review.

1954

Receives BS in Education, New York University.

Enrolls in the graduate program of the Institute of Fine Arts. 1955–56 Writes “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art, in Arts Magazine. The columns win him the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. 1957

Delivers first of several lecture courses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium (into the 1960s); subjects range from Egyptian to Baroque art.

1960

February, delivers “Three Lectures on Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” at the Museum of Modern Art; published in 1962 and revised and reprinted in Other Criteria. Receives PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, with dissertation on “Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism.”

1961

Begins collecting Old Master prints, discovering a pictorial world then generally unstudied by art historians. Realizes that prints played an essential role in the transmission of images.

1961–75

Appointed associate professor, then professor of art history, Hunter College, City University of New York. Teaches half-time to give himself freedom to write.

1962

Marries Dorothy Seiberling, art editor at LIFE magazine (later divorced).

1962–65 Art history lecturer, Sarah Lawrence College summer sessions in Paris. 1968–72 Serves on the Board of Directors, College Art Association. 1970–75 While still teaching at Hunter College, begins giving courses on modern art and criticism at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, art history program, which he had created with Milton Brown. 1972

Publication of Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art.

1975

Delivers convocation address at the College Art Association conference, “The Baldness of God and Other Ills.” Appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of Art History and University Professor, University of Pennsylvania.

L e o St e i n be rg : C h ro n olo g y

1976

Art historian-in-residence, American Academy, Rome.

1978

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1979

Elected Fellow, University College, London.

1981

Receives Honorary Doctorate in the Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art. The first of six such awards, the last from Harvard, 2006.

1988

Scholar-in-Residence, J. Paul Getty Study Center. Honored as Literary Lion, the New York Public Library.

1991

Retires from the University of Pennsylvania; teaches one semester in the Meyer Schapiro Chair, Columbia University.

1995

Delivers Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University, “The Mute Image and the Meddling Text.”

1982

Delivers A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting.”

1996

Publication of the second, enlarged edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

1983

Publication of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

2002

Named Samuel H. Kress Foundation Distinguished Scholar, College Art Association. His collection of more than three thousand prints is transferred to the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.

Receives Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first art historian to be so honored. 1984

Receives College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism.

1986–91 Receives MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

2011

March 13, dies at home, after years of being “afflicted with longevity.”

[233]

Leo Ste i nbe rg : Publications (1947– 2010)

The Selected Essays series includes unpublished lectures and texts. Among the published works listed below, many appear in the series with revisions. They are indicated with the following abbreviations: Michelangelo’s Sculpture (2018), UCP1; Michelangelo’s Painting (2019), UCP2; Renaissance and Baroque Art (2020), UCP3; Picasso (2022), UCP4; Modern Art (forthcoming), UCP5.

books Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Encounters with Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture). Houston: The Menil Foundation; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. UCP5 Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Originally published in October, no. 25 (Summer 1983), pp. 1–222. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Italian translation: La sessualità di Cristo nell’arte rinascimentale e il suo oblio nell’epoca moderna. Translated by Francesco Saba Sardi. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1986. French translation: La sexualité du Christ dans l’art de la Renaissance et son refoulement moderne. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine, preface by André Chastel. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Spanish translation: La sexualidad de Cristo en el arte del Renacimiento y en el olvido moderno. Translated by Jesus Valiente Malla. Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1989. Polish translation: Seksualność Chrystusa. Zapomniany temat sztuki renesansowej. Translated by Mateusz Salwa. Krakow: Universitas, 2013. Excerpt: In Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader, edited by S. Brent Plate, pp. 73–80. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. Revised and expanded from 1960 dissertation. Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace. London: Phaidon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. UCP2 Excerpt: “Michelangelo’s Last Painting.” Smithsonian Magazine (December 1975), pp. 74–85.

Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 2nd ed., with new preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Portuguese translation: Outros Critérias. Translated by Celia Evualdo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008. Chinese translation: Translated by Shen Yubing, Fan Liu, and Gu Guangshu. Edited by Shen Yubing. Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2011. Russian translation: Translated by Olga Gavrikova. Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2021. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963. Revised and expanded from the essay in Metro, nos. 4–5 (1962). Later revised as “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” for Other Criteria. French translation: “Jasper Johns: Les sept premières années de son art.” In Regards sur l’art américain des années soixante, edited by Claude Gintz, pp. 21–32. Paris: Éditions Territoires, 1979. Reprint: Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli. Edited by Susan Brundage. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993.

Articles “What I Like about Prints.” Art in Print, 7 ( January–February 2018), pp. 3–28. Based on a 2003 lecture. “Christo’s Over the River: An Act of Homage.” NYR Daily, December 3, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/ dec/03/christos-over-river-act-homage/. “L’Autoportrait de Prague et l’intelligence de Picasso” / “The Prague Self-Portrait and Picasso’s Intelligence.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 101–17. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. UCP4 “Un tour dans le collage de Stockholm” / “Touring the Stockholm Collage.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 165–75. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. UCP4

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Statement in The Ironic Icon: A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of William Anthony, p. 6. Copenhagen: Stalke Gallery, 2004. “With Perrig in Mind.” In Re-Visionen: Zur Aktualität von Kunstgeschichte, edited by Barbara Hüttel, Richard Hüttel, and Jeanette Kohl, pp. 1–2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Comment in Harvey Quaytman, exhibition catalogue. New York: David McKee Gallery, 2000. “An Incomparable Bathsheba.” In Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, edited by Ann Jensen Adams, pp. 100–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. “In the Algerian Room.” In A Life of Collecting: Victor and Sally Ganz, edited by Michael Fitzgerald, pp. 64–67. New York: Christie’s, 1997. UCP4 “The Michelangelo Next Door.” ARTnews, 95 (April 1996), p. 106. UCP1 “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–22. UCP4 Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Adams Verbrechen.” In Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod, exhibition catalogue, pp. 166–74. Vienna: Graphische Sammlung Albertina, 1995. “Leon Battista Alberti e Andrea Mantegna.” In Leon Battista Alberti, exhibition catalogue, edited by Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel, pp. 330–35. Mantua: Palazzo del Te, 1994. UCP3 “This Is a Test” (concerning a scandalous picture by Max Ernst). New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, p. 24. UCP5 Italian translation: “Max Ernst blasfemo.” La Rivista del libri, September 9, 1993, p. 21. Follow-up letter to the editor: “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg” (appendix to “Jasper Johns” essay in Other Criteria). In Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli, edited by Susan Brundage, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993. UCP5 “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation.” Art Bulletin, 74 (December 1992), pp. 552–66. UCP2 “All About Eve” (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 75 ( June 1993), pp. 340–44. “Steen’s Female Gaze and Other Ironies.” Artibus et Historiae, no. 22 (1990), pp. 107–28. UCP3 “Deciphering Velázquez’s Old Woman.” Manhattan Inc. (October 1989), pp. 156–59. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After.” Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), pp. 480–505. UCP1 “Addendum to Julius Held’s Paper” (on a Rubens picture in Pasadena). Source, nos. 8–9 (Summer–Fall 1989), pp. 77–79. “La fin de partie de Picasso.” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 10–38. German translation: “Picassos Endspiel.” In Picasso: Letzte Bilder. Werke 1966–1972, exhibition catalogue, edited by Ulrich Weisner. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1993.

Revised English version: “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–22. UCP4 French translation of 1995 version: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Italian translation of 1995 version: “Il finale di partita di Picasso.” In “Pablo Picasso,” edited by Elio Grazioli, special issue, Riga, no. 12 (1996), pp. 285–318. Portuguese translation of 1995 version: “O fim de partida de Picasso.” Ars (Universidade de São Paulo), 5, no. 9 (2007), pp. 24– 35. https://www.scielo.br/j/ars/a/ctTFYJkPZTwSXrjzLJp V4rc/?lang=pt. “The Philosophical Brothel” (revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Retrospect”). October, no. 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–74. UCP4 Excerpt: “Las señoritas de Avignon.” Revuelta: Revista latinoamericana de pensamiento, no. 7 (2007), pp. 44–45. “Le Bordel Philosophique” (French translation and revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Post-Scriptum”). In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exhibition catalogue, pp. 319–66. Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988. “‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London.” Artibus et Historiae, 7, no. 116 (1987), pp. 25–44. UCP3 “Art and Science: Do They Need to Be Yoked?” Daedalus, 115 (Fall 1986), pp. 1–16. Reprint: In Art and Science, edited by Stephen Grabaud. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Daedalus Library, 1988. “Some of Hans Haacke’s Pieces Considered as Fine Art.” In Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exhibition catalogue, edited by Brian Wallis, pp. 8–19. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. UCP5 Reprint: In Hans Haacke, edited by Rachel Churner. October Files 18. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. “The Case of the Wayward Shroud.” In Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, edited by William W. Clark, Colin Eisler, William S. Heckscher, and Barbara Lane, pp. 185– 92. New York: Abaris Books, 1985. “A New Michelangelo.” Art & Antiques (October 1985), pp. 49– 53. UCP2 “The Seven Functions of the Hands of Christ: Aspects of Leonardo’s Last Supper.” In Art, Creativity, and the Sacred, edited by D. Apostolos-Cappadona, pp. 37–63. New York: Crossroads/ Continuum, 1983. “Essay: On Signs.” Send: Video and Communications Arts, no. 8 (Fall 1983). “Michelangelo and the Doctors.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (Winter 1982), pp. 543–53. UCP1 “Velázquez’s Las Meninas.” October, no. 19 (Winter 1981), pp. 45– 54. UCP3 Spanish translation: “Las Meninas de Velázquez.” Kalías, 3 (October 1991), pp. 10–15. Also in Otras Meninas, edited by Fernando Marías, pp. 93–102. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1995.

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Italian translation: “Las Meninas di Velázquez.” In Las Meninas: Velázquez, Foucault e l’enigma della rappresentazione, edited by Alessandro Nova, pp. 75–88. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. German translation: “Velázquez’ Las Meninas.” In Las Meninas im Spiegel der Deutungen: Eine Einführung in die Methoden der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Thierry Greub, pp. 183–93. Berlin: Reimer, 2001. Polish translation: “Las Meninas Velazqueza.” In Tajemnica La Meninas, edited by Andrzej Witko, pp. 151–61. Krakow: Wydawnietwo, 2006. “A Picture by One Jacob Pynas.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 11 (November–December 1980), pp. 171–74. “A Corner of the Last Judgment.” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), pp. 207–73. UCP2 “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting.” Critical Inquiry, 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 411–54. UCP2 Reprint: In The Language of Images, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, pp. 85–128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. “Remarks on Graduate Education.” Arts Magazine, 54 (February 1980), pp. 132–33. “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla.” In Studies in Italian Art and Architectural History, 15th through 18th Centuries, edited by Henry Millon, pp. 207–34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980. UCP3 “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women” (part I). Art in America (November–December 1978), pp. 114–33. UCP4 Japanese translation: Tokio 1920s, vol. 32, no. 467 ( July 1980). German translation (partial): “Cézannismus und Frühkubismus.” Translated by Reinhold Hohl. In Kubismus: Künstler, Themen, Werke, 1907–1920, exhibition catalogue, pp. 59–70. Cologne: Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, 1982. French translation, with revisions:“La résistance à Cézanne: les Trois Femmes de Picasso” /“Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 71–101. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. Due to a publisher’s error, the revised version appears only in the French edition. “The Polemical Part” (part II of “Resisting Cézanne”). Art in America (March–April 1979), pp. 114–27. UCP4 “The Glorious Company.” Introduction to Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art, exhibition catalogue, pp. 8–31. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978. UCP3 “Picasso’s Revealer” (with Diane Karp). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 8 (November–December 1977), pp. 140–41. “Eve’s Idle Hand.” Art Journal, 35 (Winter 1975–76), pp. 130–35. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy.” Art in America (November–December 1975), pp. 48–63. UCP2 “Remarks on Certain Prints Relative to a Leningrad Rubens on the Occasion of the First Visit of the Original to the United States.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 6 (September–October 1975), pp. 97–102. “Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici.” Art in America ( January– February 1975), pp. 62–65. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo.” Vogue (December 1974), p. 130.

“Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel,” Art Bulletin, 56 (September 1974), pp. 385–99. UCP3 “An El Greco Entombment Eyed Awry.” Burlington Magazine, 116 (August 1974), pp. 474–77. UCP3 “Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Art Quarterly, 36 (Winter 1973), pp. 297–410. “A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (November–December 1972), pp. 102–5. UCP4 “The Philosophical Brothel” (Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon). ARTnews, 71 (September 1972), pp. 20–29 (part I); (October 1972), pp. 38–47 (part II). See above, 1988. “Other Criteria.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 55–91. Spanish translation: “Outros Critérios.” In Clement Greenberg e o debate crítico, edited by Glória Ferreira and Cecilia Cotrim de Mello, pp. 175–210. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1997. Italian translation: “Altri criteri.” In Alle origini dell’opera d’arte contemporanea, edited by Claudia Zambianchi and Giuseppe Di Giacomo, pp. 95–138. Bari: Laterza, 2008. Excerpt: “The Flatbed Picture Plane.” In Art in Theory, 1900– 1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, pp. 948–53. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Reprint of excerpt: In Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, edited by Steve Yates, pp. 197–206. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. German translation of excerpt: “Andere Kriterien.” In Kunst/ Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 2, pp. 1169–74. Berlin: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998. “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 125–234. Excerpts: “What about Cubism” and “Who Knows the Meaning of Ugliness.” In Picasso in Perspective, edited by Gert Schiff, pp. 63–67 and 137–39. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Excerpt: In Picasso & les Femmes d’Alger, exh. cat., edited by Gabriel Montua and Anna Wegenschimmel. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, 2021, pp. 78–111. Swedish translation: “Kvinnorna i Alger och Picasso i stort.” In Pablo Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 121–205. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1985. “Reflections on the State of Criticism.” Artforum, 10 (March 1972), pp. 37–49. Reprint: In Robert Rauschenberg, October Files 4, edited by Branden W. Joseph, pp. 6–37. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. “Art/Work.” ARTnews, 70 (February 1972). “Rubens’ Ceres in Leningrad.” ARTnews, 70 (December 1971), pp. 42–43. “Mantegna’s Judith in Washington.” ARTnews, 70 (November 1971), pp. 42–43. “The Skulls of Picasso.” ARTnews, 70 (October 1971). Included in Other Criteria. German translation: “Die Totenschädel Picassos.” In Picassos Todesthemen, exhibition catalogue, pp. 89–94. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1984.

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French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. “Picasso: Drawing as If to Possess.” Artforum, 10 (October 1971), pp. 44–53. Reprint, with revisions: In Major European Art Movements, 1900–1945, edited by Patricia Kaplan and Susan Manso, pp. 193–221. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. UCP4 “Salviati’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist.” ARTnews, 70 (September 1971), pp. 46–47. UCP3 “The Water-Carrier of Velázquez.” ARTnews, 69 (Summer 1971), pp. 54–55. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici and Related Works.” Burlington Magazine, 113 (March 1971), pp. 145–49. UCP1 “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs.” In Studies in Erotic Art, edited by Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson, pp. 231–335. New York: Basic Books, 1970. UCP1 “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self.” Daedalus, 98 (Spring 1969), pp. 824–36. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Critical Reading and Writing across the Disciplines, edited by Cyndia S. Clegg, pp. 564–73. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988. “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers.” LIFE, December 27, 1968. Included in Other Criteria. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg.” Art Bulletin, 50 (December 1968), pp. 343–53 (incorporated into “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs,” 1970). On Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà and Madonna Medici (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), pp. 410–12. “The Water-Carrier of Seville (by Velázquez).” In Man and His World, International Fine Arts Exhibition, Expo ’67, Montreal, 1967. UCP3 “Paul Brach’s Pictures.” In Paul Brach: New Paintings, exhibition brochure. New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1963. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Toward a New Abstraction, exhibition catalogue. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963; Art International, 8 (April 1964). Reprint of excerpt: In Art in Process, exhibition catalogue. New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1965. “Pop Art Symposium at The Museum of Modern Art, December 13, 1962.” Arts Magazine, 37 (April 1963), pp. 36–44. Publication of participants’ remarks at the symposium; Steinberg’s remarks are on pp. 39–41. “Rodin.” Introductory essay to Rodin: An Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings, exhibition catalogue. New York: Charles E. Slatkin, 1963. Revised for inclusion in Other Criteria. French translation: Le retour de Rodin. Paris: Éditions Macula, 1992.

“Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public.” Harper’s Magazine, 224 (March 1962). Included in Other Criteria. Swedish translation: “Samtidens Konst och publiikens dilemma.” Bonniers Litterara Magasin, no. 6 (Summer 1962). Translated into several Eastern European languages in Ameryka and Pregled, US State Department publications, 1960s. Spanish translation: “El arte contemporáneo y la incomodidad del público.” Otra Parte [Buenos Aires], Autumn 2004. Reprint: In The New Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966, 1973. Reprint: In The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader, edited by Milton Albrecht, James Barnett, and Mason Griff. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, 1976. “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel.” Art Bulletin, 41 ( June 1959), pp. 183–93. UCP3 Introduction to The New York School: Second Generation, exhibition catalogue, pp. 4–8. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1957. “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind.” Partisan Review, 20 (March–April 1953), pp. 194–212. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Reflections on Art: A Sourcebook of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, edited by Susanne K. Langer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958, 1961. Reprint, with revisions: In Modern Essays in English, edited by Joseph Frank. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism.” Sewanee Review, 60 (Summer 1952), pp. 418–44.

Book Reviews “Shrinking Michelangelo.” Review of Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images, by Robert Liebert. New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984, pp. 41–45. UCP1 “Leonardo by Carlo Pedretti.” Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1975), pp. 86–89. “Velázquez: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Oeuvre by José Lopez-Rey.” Art Bulletin, 47 ( June 1965), pp. 274–94. “The Berenson Collection.” Harper’s Magazine, 230 (March 1965), pp. 154–55. “Art Books, 1961–62.” Harper’s Magazine, 225 (December 1962), pp. 103–10. “Art Books, 1960–61.” Harper’s Magazine, 223 (December 1961), pp. 87–91. “Four about Rembrandt.” Art in America, no. 4 (1961), pp. 88–91. “Art Books of 1960.” Harper’s Magazine, 221 (December 1960), pp. 106, 110, 112, 114, 116–20. “Professor Janson’s Donatello.” Arts Magazine, 32 ( June 1958), pp. 41–43. “Monuments of Romanesque Art by Hanns Swarzenski.” Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), pp. 43–45. “Caravaggio Studies by Walter Friedlaender.” Arts Magazine, 30 (October 1955), pp. 46–48. “Le musée imaginaire, c’est moi!” Review of André Malraux. Art Digest, 29 (April 15, 1955), p. 16.

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“The Alphabet of Creation by Ben Shahn.” Commentary, 20 (March 1955), pp. 310–12. “Modernity from Tombs and Temples” (recent books on Egyptology). Art Digest, 29 (December 1, 1954), pp. 20–21. “The Synagogue’s New Look: An American Synagogue for Today and Tomorrow.” Commentary, 17 (August 1954), pp. 170–72. “Undying Antiquity.” Review of The Survival of the Pagan Gods, by Jean Seznec. ARTnews, 52 ( January 1954), pp. 53, 73–74. “Marino Marini by Umbro Apollonio.” Art Digest, 28 (October 1, 1953), pp. 22–23. “Egypt in New York: The Scepter of Egypt by William C. Hayes.” Art Digest, 27 (September 15, 1953), p. 23. “Sculpture Since Rodin: Sculpture in the 20th Century by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie.” Art Digest, 27 (August 1953), pp. 22–23. “Isaac Kloomok’s Marc Chagall.” Judaism, 1 (April 1952), pp. 190–91. “Perspective Drawing” (animated short). Film News (April 1952), p. 6.

Exhibition Reviews “Deliberate Speed.” ARTnews, 66 (April 1967), pp. 42–59. “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art in Arts Magazine, 1955–56: Twelve Americans. Arts Magazine, 30 ( July 1956), pp. 25–28. Raoul Hague included in Other Criteria. Fritz Glarner and Philip Guston. Arts Magazine, 30 ( June 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Recent Drawings USA. Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), p. 66. Included in Other Criteria. Franz Kline et al. Arts Magazine, 30 (April 1956), pp. 42–45. Included in Other Criteria. Julio Gonzalez. Arts Magazine, 30 (March 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Spanish translation: In Kalías (October 1990), pp. 97–101. Monet’s Water Lilies, Metropolitan Museum Fountain. Arts Magazine, 30 (February 1956), pp. 46–48. Included in Other Criteria. UCP5 Goldberg, Mitchell, Rivers, Rauschenberg. Arts Magazine, 30 ( January 1956), pp. 46–48. Revision of comment on Rauschenberg as letter to the editor: “Footnote.” Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. Pollock’s first retrospective, Jules Pascin, Picasso’s Suite Vollard. Arts Magazine, 30 (December 1955), pp. 43–46. Pollock and Pascin included in Other Criteria. Reprint of Pollock: In Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews, edited by Pepe Karmel, pp. 81–83. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. De Kooning, Modern Sculpture, Morris Graves. Arts Magazine, 30 (November 1955), pp. 46–48. De Kooning included in Other Criteria. “Bible-Age Relics and Jewish Art.” Commentary, 15 (August 1953), pp. 164–66. “Metropolitan Offers Modern Americans.” New Leader, February 5, 1951, p. 26.

Letters to the Editor “The King’s Cross.” New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, p. 62. “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. UCP5 “Your Teeth Are Showing.” New York Review of Books, March 29, 2001, p. 53. On Pacheco and Velázquez. Art Bulletin, 73 (September 1991), pp. 503–5. Letter re: response to Carol Duncan on the Demoiselles d’Avignon. Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. “What Did Cato Mean?” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1990, p. 53. “Saving the Last Supper.” New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1985, p. 162. “A Close Shave” (re: beardless angels). ARTnews, 80 (April 1981). Reprint: In ARTnews, 91 (November 1992), p. 97. In support of Christo’s Gates project for Central Park, New York. New York Times, October 24, 1980, sect. A, p. 32. “Gerontophilia.” Art Journal, no. 3 (Spring 1973), p. 370. “Read Kolnik for Kollwitz.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (September–October 1972), pp. 81–82. “Debate with George Steiner.” Daedalus, 98 (Summer 1969), pp. 726–29, 791–93. “Footnote” (re: Rauschenberg). Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. “Apropros Huntington Hartford.” Art Digest, 29 ( July 1, 1955), p. 4.

Other Interview for Jasper Johns audio guide, for “Jasper Johns: Gray” exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007–8. “False Starts, Loose Ends” (publication of talk given at the CAA Distinguished Scholar Award, 2002). Brooklyn Rail ( June 2006), pp. 16–20. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/06/art/leo. “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting” (synopsis of 1982 A. W. Mellon Lectures). In A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, pp. 135–40. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/CASVA, 2002. “Jacob Kainen” (obituary). Art on Paper, 4 (November–December 1999), pp. 29–30. “Meyer Schapiro” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, May–June 1996, pp. 3–4. “Albert Elsen” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, November–December 1995. Response to “What Is the Meaning of Making a Painting Today with No Recognizable Image?” Tema Celeste, nos. 32–33 (Autumn 1991), p. 65. Statement re: “The Power of Art.” Art Newspaper (October 1990), n.p. Reply to Paul Gardner, “What Would You Ask Michelangelo?” ARTnews, 85 (November 1986), p. 102.

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Double dactyl published in the second edition of Jiggery-pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, ed. Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, p. 119. New York: Atheneum, 1983. “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun.” October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 101–2. UCP5 Reply to John Gruen’s questionnaire, “Far-from-Last Judgments, or Who’s Overrated and Underrated.” Art News, 76 (November 1977), p. 120. “Ten Irreverent Rimes” (limericks on Old Master prints). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 5 (October–November 1974), p. 85. UCP5 “The Symbolic Process: A Colloquium.” Proceedings of the American Psychoanalytic Association colloquium, December 11, 1969. In American Imago, 28 (Fall 1971), pp. 206–7. Transcript of 1968 New York Studio School panel with Milton Resnick, Mercedes Matter, et al. In Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, pp. 213–32. New York: Middlemarch Arts Press, 2003.

Tribute, in Leo Castelli: Ten Years, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1967. “The Cappella Paolina.” One-hour TV program on Michelangelo’s last frescoes, filmed in the Sistine and Pauline Chapels. Broadcast on CBS-TV, Lamp unto My Feet, June 26, 1966, and February 26, 1967. “The Year Gone By: Part 1.” CBS-TV panel discussion, moderated by Ilka Chase. Broadcast December 20, 1959.

Translations Mary, by Sholem Asch. Translated from Yiddish. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1949. Ashes and Fire, by Jacob Pat. Translated from Yiddish. New York: International Universities Press, 1947.

Photo graphy Credits

All Picasso works © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Figs. 1.8, 1.14, 1.15, 1.16, 1.25, 1.51, 2.5, 2.6, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, 2.16, 2.17, 2.19, 2.20, 2.23, 2.25, 4.4, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13, 4.17, 4.18, 4.19, 4.22, 4.29, 4.44, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, 10.15, 10.16, 10.19, 10.20, 10.21, 11.11. Éditions Cahiers d’Art Figs. 1.3–1.5. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photo: Gasull Fotografia Fig. 1.13. Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler Fig. 1.26. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Inc. © 2004 Fig. 1.28. bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB, Museum Berggruen / Jens Ziehe Fig. 1.29. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Fig. 1.31. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022 Fig. 1.58. © Cathy Hull. Published in the New York Times, December 12, 2003, p. E6. Fig. 1.64. Photographer: Paul Hester. The Menil Collection, Houston, V 203. Fig. 2.13. Bridgeman Images Fig. 2.14. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022 Fig. 2.22. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Figs. 3.7, 7.5. © & TM. Mouron—AM.Cassandre. Lic 2020-11-10-01 www.cassandre.fr Figs. 3.3, 4.24, 11.1, 11.3, 11.8, 11.12. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Fig. 4.14. Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler Fig. 4.21. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Fig. 4.23. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images Fig. 4.26. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Pavel Demidov, Konstantin Sinyavsky Fig. 4.33. bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB, Museum Berggruen / Jens Ziehe Fig. 4.41. Repro-photo Thierry Le Mage. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY Fig. 4.52. © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY Fig. 5.7. Photo: Adam Rzepka © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY Fig. 5.8. HIP / Art Resource, NY Fig. 5.9. Photo by Mitro Hood. Fig. 5.12. Photo: Raphael Chipault © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY Fig. 5.13. Photograph courtesy The Pace Gallery Fig. 5.16. Bridgeman Images Figs. 6.2, 6.8. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images Fig. 7.4. © Estate of Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Fig. 7.6. Elisabeth Ayrton, The Doric Temple (New York, 1961), fig. 75 Fig. 8.1. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images Figs. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.8. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY Fig. 10.1. © Gilles Mermet / Art Resource, NY Fig. 11.3. © Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Fig. 11.4. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

I n de x

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations.

Abstract Expressionism, 114 Action Painting, 106 Adam, in Hebrew myth, 210n4 Aksenor, Ivan, 221n39 Alberti, Raphael, 226n13 Allston, Washington, 226n11 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, Midday Slumbers, 114–15, 115 anthropomorphism, 200, 202, 229n27 Apelles of Kos, 205 Aretino, Pietro, 48 Aristotle, De historia animalium, 32, 209n22 Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), 226n13 Augustine, St., xii, 227n3 Ayrton, Elisabeth, 224n2 Baker, Josephine, 111 Bandmann, Günther, 214n23 Barr, Alfred H., 71, 73, 93, 94, 101, 104, 110, 146–47, 165, 212n3, 214n27, 217n59 Barr, Margaret Scolari (“Daisy”), 165 Barr-Sharrar, Beryl, 226n16 Baudelaire, Charles, 67 bead from a rosary or chaplet, 1500–1550, 41, 43, 43, 45 Beckett, Samuel, 187 Bedoli, Girolamo Mazzola, Portrait of Anna Elenora Sanvitale, 47 Beham, Hans Sebald, Man of Sorrows Appearing to Mary, 47, 47 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 119 Berger, John, 114 Bingham, George Caleb, Raftsmen Playing Cards, 213n13 Bloom, Harold, 190 Boccaccio, Giovanni, De la ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes, 32, 209n22 Boccioni, Umberto, Still Life with Glass and Siphon, 224n1 Bock, Hans the Elder, Four Views of a Nude Woman, 6, 7 Boeck, Wilhelm, 212n3 Boggs, Jean Sutherland, 214n22 Bois, Yve-Alain, 189, 207n7, 227n11, 229nn30–31, 230n32 Bosch, Hieronymus, 200 Botticelli, Sandro, 227n3 Braque, Georges, 37, 113, 120, 127, 141–46, 149–50, 151, 152, 158, 218n11, 224n6

Château at La Roche-Guyon, 136 Houses at L’Estaque, 120, 120, 146 Houses at L’Estaque (Landscape with Houses), 120, 140, 141, 143–44, 145, 149–50, 223n32 Large Nude, 149, 223n32 La Roche-Guyon works, 145 L’Estaque landscapes, 127, 136, 144–45, 218n11 Port in Normandy, 141–42 Road near L’Estaque, 144, 144 Viaduct at L’Estaque, 144, 144 Brassaï (Gyula Halász), 129 Browne, Thomas, vii Buffon, Comte de, Natural History (Vollard edition), 49, 211n17 Bull, John, 206 Butinone, Bernardino, Descent from the Cross, 210n15 Byron, George Gordon, 206 Cambiaso, Luca, 137, 138 Canova, Antonio, Creugas, 3, 4, 24, 39 Caravaggio, Entombment, 114 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 112 Casagemas, Carles, 215n37 Cassandre, A. M. Normandie, 62, 62 Restaurez-vous au Wagon-Bar, 37, 155, 157 Cennini, Cennino d’Andrea, Il libro dell’arte, 226n11 Cézanne, Paul, 6, 34, 53, 73, 107, 114, 120, 122–25, 127–36, 139, 141–42, 144–50, 219n19, 222n11, 222n13, 223n22, 223n28 Bathers, 122, 123, 219n13 Courtesans, 219n19 Don Quichote on the Banks of the Barbaria, 219n19 Mont Sainte-Victoire, 17, 123 Nude Reclining on a Bed, 219n19 Satyr and Nymphs, 219n19 Seated Woman in Blue, 222n21 Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit, 26–27, 27, 68 The Temptation of St. Anthony, 114, 125, 219n19 Chaplin, Charles, Le Rêve, 222n21 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon, 159 Chesterton, G. K., 153

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Chigi, Agostino, 172 Chirico, Giorgio de, Picasso Dining with Serge Férat, Hélene d’Oettingen, and Léopold Survage, 214n26 Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, 188 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, Le mystère Picasso, 111 Cocx (Coques), Gonzales, Sight, 41, 42 Coetzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello, 29 Color Field painting, 110 Comolli, Angelo, 173, 225nn9–10 (ch. 9) competition, cult of, 190–91, 227nn3–4 Conceptual art, 110 Conrad, Joseph, 146 Cooper, Douglas, 151, 212n3, 216n53, 224n36 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 177 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da, 214n23 Courthion, Pierre, 204 Cranach, Lucas, 181 Croce, Benedetto, The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, 219n19 Crommelynk, Aldo, 175 Crommelynk, Fernand, 175 Crommelynk, Piero, 175, 175 cross-legged posture, 196–97, 228nn19–20 Cubism, xiv–xvi, 12, 55, 84, 107, 113–14, 119, 127, 133, 136, 139, 141–52, 155–56, 193, 200, 213n9, 222n21 See also Picasso, Pablo, Cubism and Cunningham, Merce, 207n16 Daix, Pierre, 40, 190, 210n26 Dante Alighieri, 226n5 Daphnis and Chloe, ancient Greek romance, 229n27 David and Goliath, 204–5 Degas, Edgar, 220n20 Delacroix, Eugène, 181 Femmes d’Alger, 114 Massacre at Scio, 114 Delaunay, Robert, 45 Depeyre, Gabrielle, 228n17 Derain, André, 21, 60, 60 Bathers, 114 Dickens, Charles, vii; Bleak House, 204 Diogenes, 204 Doisneau, Robert, 226n4 d’Ors, Eugeni, 112 Duccio, Noli me tangere, 67, 67 Duchamp, Marcel, 110 Dufy, Raoul, 136 Duncan, Carol, 208n3 (introduction) Duncan, David Douglas, 214n29 Dürer, Albrecht, 129, 137, 137, 138 Dying Niobid, 125, 126 Eastman, Max, 113 Elderfield, John, 129, 145, 218n2, 218n9, 222n13 El Greco, 114, 218n2 Agony in the Garden, 125, 127, 220n21 The Opening of the Fifth Seal, 114

Farinati, Paolo, Perseus and Andromeda, 49, 49 Farnese Bull, 45 Fauvism, 107, 152, 190 Fazio, Bartolommeo (Facius), De virus illustribus, 210n8 Federighi, Antonio, Three Graces, 45–46, 45, 210n7 Fénéon, Félix, 104 figura serpentinata, 48–49, 178 Flam, Jack, 189, 193, 230n32 Flaubert, Gustave, 178 Florman, Lisa, 208n9, 211n (ch. 4), 217n69, 219n13 formalism, in art history, xii, 114, 116, 123, 152, 214n22, 222n21 Fraser, Charles, 226n11 Fraud, personification of, 210n4 Frau Welt (personification of worldliness), 210n4 Freud, Sigmund, 124 Friedlaender, Walter, vii Fry, Edward, 73, 119, 125, 147, 148, 151, 212n3 Gagarine, Mila, 93, 215n31 Ganz, Victor and Sally, 165–69 Algerian Room in home of, 166, 167 Gauguin, Paul, 6, 45, 107 Gedo, Mary, 114 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 227n3 Giacometti, Alberto, 64, 227n4 Gibbon, Edward, 211n7 Gide, André, 113 Gillray, James, Ci-devant Occupations, 92, 214n25 Gilot, Françoise, 114, 229n30 Giorgione, 44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 171, 205–6, 226n8 Golding, John, 71, 146, 147, 151, 212n3, 213n7, 218n11 Goltzius, Hendrick, Dying Adonis, 214n23 González, Julio, 156 Gossaert, Jan, after, Hercules and Dejaneira, 210n15 Gouel, Eva, 228n17 Gowing, Lawrence, 112–13, 221n14 Goya, Francisco, Tres de Mayo, 114, 219n19 Gracián, Baltasar, El Criticón, xii, 101, 216n43 Gray, Christopher, 218n11 Greenberg, Clement, 111–12, 151, 165, 217n61 Gris, Juan, 113–14, 193, 213n9, 224n1 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), 221n6 Handel, George Frideric, 31–32 Heintz, Joseph the Elder, Amor and Psyche, 214n23 Hera Argiva, Temple of, 155, 158 Herbert, George, 226n5 Hess, Thomas B., 115 Hippopotamus, Egyptian, Middle Kingdom, 31, 31 Holbein, Hans the Younger, 16, 16 Homer, 205 Hull, Cathy, Handel, 31–32, 31 Huysmans, J.-K., 209n20 hypallage. See Picasso, Pablo, separation of predicates

Inde x Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 129–30 Comtesse d’Aussonville, 47 Raphael and la Fornarina, 171–73, 172, 225nn5–8 The Turkish Bath, 114 Jacob, Max, 96, 97, 100, 108, 204, 215n37, 229n27 Jacobsz., Dirck, A Group of Gentlemen, 74–75, 75 Johns, Jasper, 116 Jonson, Ben, 206 Joyce, James, vii–viii, xii, 94, 103, 151, 178, 200, 206, 216n42, 219n15 Jullian, René, 218n11 Jung, Carl, 110 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 23, 23, 64, 71, 96, 106, 114, 129, 146, 151, 166–67, 212n2, 215n35 Kandinsky, Wassily, 114 Karp, Diane, 175 Kessel, Dmitri, 117 Khokhlova, Olga, 195–98, 200 Kimmelman, Michael, 189 Klee, Paul, 2, 208n3 (ch. 1) Krauss, Rosalind, 14, 161, 208n9, 209n19, 211n (ch. 4), 223n23, 224n4 Last Judgment Christs, 87, 214n22 Laurencin, Marie, 96, 215n35 Lavin, Irving, 208n2 (ch. 1) Léger, Fernand, Le siphon, 155, 157 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 45 Leonardo da Vinci, 226n11, 227n3 Christ Child with a Lamb, Studies for the, 4, 4 Ginerva de’ Benci, 4–5 Mona Lisa, 122 Levin, Gail, 128, 218n4 Leymarie, Jean, 212n3, 218n11 life magazine, 117 Maffei, Celso, On the Sensible Delights of Heaven, 7 Magritte, René, The Seducer, 31–32, 31 Maillol, Aristide, 45, 198 La Mediterranée, 203 Maison de la Pensée française, Paris, 119 Malraux, André, 151, 228n26 Manet, Édouard, 181, 204 Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 114 Mannerism, 48–49 Mantegna, Andrea, Christ Harrowing Hell, 47 Master P. M., The Women’s Bath, 44, 45 Matisse, Henri, 6, 29, 37, 45, 104, 110, 156, 220n20, ch. 11 André Derain, 21, 60–61, 60 Bathers with a Turtle, 190 Blue Nudes, 39 Le bonheur de vivre, 104, 190 Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, 197–98, 197, 203 Goldfish and Palette, 192–93, 193, 195 Harlequin and Goldfish, 192–95 Intérieur à l’Esclave, 220n20 Joie de vivre, 104 Odalisque with Tambourine, 202, 203, 230n32

Osthaus Triptych, 86, 86 Pianist and Checker Players, 220n20 Self-Portrait, 191–92, 191 Still Life with Purro I and II, 214n24 Woman with a Hat, 190 metonymy, 31, 66. See Picasso, Pablo, separation of predicates Metzinger, Jean, 55 Michelangelo, 205, 227n3, 229n27 Brazen Serpent, 210n15 Dying Slave, 86, 125, 126, 128 Entombment, 214n23 Madonna Medici, 196 Punishment of Tityus, 86 Raising of Lazarus, study for, 213n18 Michis, Pietro, Zeuxis and the Maidens of Cortona, 115–16, 116 Milton, John, vii Mondrian, Piet, 114 Monroe, Marilyn, 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii, 98, 103, 138, 211n (ch. 4), 215n39 Olivier, Fernande, 96, 215n35 at Horta de Ebro, 14, 19 portraits of, 9–10, 9, 12, 13, 16–19, 20, 21, 23, 62–64, 64 Orwell, George, 206 Palau, Josep, 215n37 Pareja, Juan de, Calling of St. Matthew, 74, 74 Parker, Dorothy, 188 Parmelin, Hélène, 225n4 Parmigianino (attributed to), Portrait of a Young Man, 171, 172 passage, 120, 127, 133, 135–36, 141, 144, 145, 146–50 Penelope, Greek sculpture, 196 Penrose, Roland, 104, 112 Perl, Jed, 189 Picasso, Pablo, 97 African/Iberian art, influence of, 59, 73, 75, 103, 114, 115, 120, 151, 152–53, 177, 212n3, 219n12, 221n5 all-sided vision/simultaneity of aspects, xiii–xvi, ch. 1, ch. 2, 64–66, 105–6, 107, 130–33, 143, 167–69, 200, 210n15, 211n16, 216n51 anthropomorphism, 200, 201 arris, 17, 19, 21–26, 60–63, 136–39, 220n37 Braque, and Picasso’s Cubism, 113, 120–21, 127, 128, 133, 136, 141–46, 149, 151–52, 154, 218n11 Cézanne, attitude toward, ch. 5, 141–42, 218n11, 223n28 childhood art, xiii, 1–2, 2, 208n4 (ch. 1) critical reputation, xii, 110–16, 165 Cubism and, xiv, 55–57, 71, 73, 84, 87, 89, 98, 107, 109, 113–14, 117, 119–20, 133–36, 136–39, 142, 143, 149, 151–54, 158, 159, 160, 161, 192, 194–95, 212nn2–3, 213n7, 218n2, 218n11, 221n21, 223n23 density-transparency, 26, 65 horizontal-vertical simultaneity/rampant gisante, 83, 85–90, 107, 214n23 on Ingres, 129–30 Matisse, alleged rivalry with, 6, 21, 29, 37, 46, 47, 59–61, 86, 104, 112, ch. 11, 226n1 (ch. 11), 228n12 projective inhabitation, xiv, xv, 177, 178–81, 184–88 on Rubens, 129

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Picasso, Pablo (continued) separation of predicates/habits of language/semiotic space, 26–39, 65–69, ch. 7 spectator, relationship to, 73–75, 82, 98, 109, 116, 127 stylistic disunity and multiplicity, 66–67, 73, 104, 106–8, 111, 124–25, 129–30, 151–52, 178, 180, 222n14, 224n35 wit, 35, 37, 104 See also passage Picasso, Pablo: works The Absinthe Drinker, 37, 157 Amitié, 123 L’Aubade, studies for, 46, 47 Au bon marché, 33, 34, 213n14, 222n21 Back View of a Nude Woman, 23, 23, 62 Bather, xv, 53–55, 54, 130–31 The Bathers, 49, 85, 85 Blind Minotaur, 210n12 Bottle, Glass, and Violin, 35–37, 36, 39, ch. 7, 156 Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table, 28–29, 28 Bottle and Glass on a Table, 33, 34 Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 26, 141–42, 222n13, 225n9 (ch. 8) Bust of a Woman, xi, 177–78, 178 Card Player, 192, 193 Chère Mademoiselle Suzanne, 96, 97 Child with a Shovel, 1, 1 La Coiffure, 176, 177, 210n12 The Courtesan, 176, 177 Crucifixion, studies for, 211n16 The Dance (Salomé), 210n12 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 23, 23 Demoiselles d’Avignon, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, ch. 4, 72, 119, 120, 125, 127, 142, 151–52, 159, 190, 218n2, 221nn5–6, 222n21; studies for, 16, 18, 73–75, 76–81, 83–85, 87, 90–97, 93–95, 101, 103, 104, 105–7, 108, 109 Disinherited Ones, 19 Doña Maria, 2 The Drawing Lesson, 210n12 The Dream, 165, 202 The Dryad, 19, 87, 88, 214n22, 222n12, 222n21; study for, 19, 87, 89 The Embrace, 41, 42, 210n2 Factory, 133–35, 134, 136, 159 Female Nude, 19, 20, 138 Fernande (Massive Head of a Woman), 64, 64 First Steps, 180, 180 Fishing Smack at Cadaqués (figures 1.45–1.48), 24, 24, 25 Flight into Egypt, 214n29 Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread Loaf on a Table, 26–28, 27 Girl before a Mirror, 46 Girl with a Mandolin, 153, 154 Girl with Bare Feet, 2 Glass, Pipe, and Lemon, 34–35, 35, 67–68 Glass, Study of a, 4, 5 Glass and Bottle of Suze, 161, 162, 163, 225n12 Glass on a Table, 30–31, 30, 32–33, 68–70, 69, 211n6 La Gommeuse, 176, 177 Gósol Landscape, 150, 150 Guernica, 180 Guitar (sculpture), 65, 65, 159, 193 Harbor at Cadaqués, 24, 25

The Harem, 90, 91 Harlequin, 192–95, 193, 228n17 Head, 153, 153 Head of a Girl, 66, 66 Head of a Man (fig. 1.50), 26, 26, 65 Head of a Man (fig. 3.4), 60, 60 Head of a Woman (fig. 1.30), 16, 16 Head of a Woman (fig. 2.5), 43, 43 Head of a Woman (Fernande) (fig. 1.23), 12, 13 Head of a Woman (Fernande) (fig. 1.32), 16, 17, 64, 138; study for, 16, 17 Head of a Woman (Fernande) (fig. 1.35), 17, 18, 64, 138, 159 Head of a Woman (Fernande) (fig. 1.37), 17, 19, 19, 62, 138, 159 Head of a Woman (Fernande) (fig. 1.41), 20, 21, 23, 63, 64, 65, 138, 159 Head of a Woman in a Chignon (Fernande), 9–10, 9, 64 Hercules, 1–2, 2 Houses on the Hill, 14, 15, 135–36, 135, 145, 159 Jacqueline (figs. 1.59, 1.60), 5, 32, 33 Landscape, Horta de Ebro (photograph), 14 Landscape with Aqueduct, 136 Large Nude in a Red Armchair, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 228n21, 228n26, 229n30, 230n32 Large Nude Woman, xiv, 56, 57 La Lola, 44, 45 Man in a Bowler Hat, 12, 13 Meditation (Contemplation), 214n26 Las Meninas, variations on, 108 Mercure, sketches for, 224n3 Minotauromachy, 210n12 The Mirror, 46 Nessus and Dejaneira, 53, 53 Nu au collier, 229n28 Nude Girl Asleep, 52–53, 52 Nude in an Armchair, 187, 188 Nude in Profile, 84, 85, 213n16 Nude on a Red Background, 176, 177 Nudes Embracing, 87, 90 Nude with Raised Arms, 103, 103, 214n22 Nude Woman, 19, 20, 138 Nude Woman and Reclining Man, 181, 182 Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (figs. 11.10, 11.11), 200, 201, 228n28 Nude Woman Serenaded by Harlequin and Pierrot, 84, 85 Nude Woman with Raised Arms (figs. 2.16, 2.17), 49, 50 L’Ombre, 83, 83 On the Beach, 48, 48, 180 On the Upper Deck, 82–83, 82, 213nn12–13 The Painter and His Model, 86, 86, 213n19 Pierrot and Red Harlequin, Standing, 224n3 Pitcher and Bowls, 131–32, 132 Portrait of a Girl, 194–95, 195 Portrait of Ambrose Vollard, 10, 10, 56, 113, 159 Portrait of Fernande, 9–10, 9 Portrait of Josep Cardona, 2 Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 195–97, 196, 198 La Puce, 49, 51, 211n17 Reading, 229n28 Reclining Man and Standing Woman, 181–82, 182 Reclining Nude (1942), 165 Reclining Nude (fig. 10.11), 182, 183, 184

Inde x Reclining Nude (fig. 10.12), 182, 183, 184 Reclining Nude (fig. 10.13), 182, 183, 184 Reclining Nude (fig. 10.14), 182, 183, 184 Reclining Nude and Head, 184, 184 Reclining Nude and Man with a Mask, 186, 187 Reclining Nude with Figures, 86–87, 87, 214n21 Reclining Woman (fig. 1.14), 7, 7 Reclining Woman (fig. 10.20), 187, 187 Repose, 130, 131 Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, 14, 15, 136, 145, 159, 222n11 La Ronde, 49, 51, 52 Sailors on the Town, study for, 82, 83 Les Saltimbanques, 97 The Sculptor, 41, 42 Sculptor, Reclining Model and Sculpture of a Horse and Youth, 211n16 Seated Bather, 203, 203, 210n13, 230n34 Seated Nude (fig. 2.23), 55–56, 55 Seated Nude (Z.IV.454), 46 Seated Nude Woman, 179, 179 Seated Woman (fig. 1.21), 10–11, 11 Seated Woman (fig. 1.36), 17, 18, 64, 138 Seated Woman (fig. 10.19), 187, 187 Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899 (fig. 3.8), 62, 63 Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899 (fig. 10.8), 186, 187 Self-Portrait, Barcelona, 1899–1900, 60, 61 Self-Portrait, Montrouge, 1917–18, 63, 63 Self-Portrait, Mougins, 1972 (fig. 1.67), 38, 40, 177, 187 Self-Portrait, Mougins, 1972 (fig. 1.68), 39, 40, 210n28 Self-Portrait, Paris, 1907, 20–23, 22, 58, ch. 3, 61, 211n2 Self-Portrait with Palette, 191–92, 191 Self-Portrait with Wig (Self-Portrait as an 18th-Century Gentleman), 59, 59, 66–67 sketchbook pages, heroic figure, c. 1900, 2–4, 3 Sleeping Nude, 57, 57 Standing Female Nude, 146–47, 147, 224n8 Standing Nude and Faun, 102, 102, 103 Standing Woman, 104–5, 105, 216nn51–52 Standing Woman in Suit, 105 Still Life with Coffee Pot, 13, 14 Still Life with Fruit and Glass, 131, 132–33, 132, 222n14 Still Life with Skull, 222n12 Suite 347, Raphael and la Fornarina, ch. 9, 170, 172, 174, 210n3, 222n21, 226n1 (ch. 10), 226n13, 226n16 Suite Vollard, 211n16 S.V.P., 87, 89 Table, Studies of a, 13, 14, 143 La table de toilette, 213n14, 222n21 Three Dancers, 111, 111, 112–13 Three Dutch Women, 45 Three Figures Speaking and Still Life, 33, 33 Three Musicians, 217n19, 228n26, 229n27 Three Nudes, 91–92, 91, 216n40 Three Nudes in an Interior, 85–86, 85 Three Women, xvi, ch. 5, 118, 140, 141, 142, 145, 149, 159, 190, 219n12, 221n38, 222n12, 224n35; studies for, 120, 121, 122–24, 125, 219n12, 224n35 Two Nudes (fig. 4.42), 100, 100; studies for (figs. 4.44, 4.45), 100–101, 101

Two Seated Nudes, 185, 185 Two Sisters (The Meeting), 100 Two Women, 92, 98–103, 99, 104, 142, 216n40 Vase of Flowers, 213n15 Woman in a Chair, 125, 126 Woman in an Armchair, 197–98, 197, 203, 228n21 Woman Plaiting Her Hair, 20, 21 Woman with a Book, 213n14, 222n21 Woman with a Mandolin, 222n12 Woman with Fan, 11, 12, 222n12 Women of Algiers (Les Femmes d’Alger), 108, 110, 166–69, 168, 180, 181 The Yellow Belt, 229n28 Young Acrobat on a Ball, 7, 8, 9, 222n14; studies for, 5–6, 5–6, 7–9, 8, 39, 222n14 Young Woman with Mandolin, 229n28 Pliny the Elder, 205 Plutarch, Lives, 204 Pollaiuolo, Piero del, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, 45 Pope, Alexander, 209n20 Potter, Margaret, 119 Protogenes, 205 Proust, Marcel, 206 Prudence, personification of, 210n4 Prud’hon, Pierre-Paul, Une Lecture, 222n21 Raphael, 64, 171–73, 113, 205, 225n4, 225n10 (ch. 9) The Transfiguration, 173, 225n9 (ch. 9) Redon, Odilon, 204 Reff, Theodore, 219n13, 219n19 Rembrandt, 184 Denial of St. Peter, 47–48 Painter before His Easel, 48 Richardson, John, 1–2, 192, 226n1 (ch. 11), 228n21, 228n26 Riegl, Alois, 74–75, 213n9 Rimbertinus, Bartholomew, On the Sensible Delights of Heaven, 6–7 Roche, Henri-Pierre, 97 Rodin, Auguste, 221n6 Romano, Giulio, 173, 225nn8–9 (ch. 9) Rosenberg, Léonce, 192 Rosenblum, Robert, 106, 212n3, 213n14, 214n22, 222n24, 224n8 Rosso Fiorentino, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, 210n15 Rubens, Peter Paul, 129, 219n19 Rubin, William, 24, 93–94, 96, 110, 112, 117, 119–20, 127, 131, 132, 141–42, 144–50, 152, 215n31, 215n36, 217n69, 218n2, 222n11, 222n15, 222n18, 224n35 Russell, Bertrand, 113 Russell, John, 226n1 (ch. 11) Russell, Morgan Study after Picasso’s “Three Women,” 117, 119, 128, 218n4 Synchromy in Blue-Violet, 128 Synchromy in Orange, 128 Sabartés, Jaime, 73, 129 Sacks, Oliver, 29 Salmon, André, 71, 102, 211n1 (ch. 4), 215n35 Salon art, 45 Saul, King, 204–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale, 209n15

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Schapiro, Meyer, 219n19 Schiff, Gert, 171, 226n13 Schjeldahl, Peter, 189 Seiberling, Dorothy, 117 Shakespeare, William, vii, viii, xii, 31, 189, 190–91, 193, 200, 205, 211n3, 229n27 Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion, 113 Shchukin, Sergei, 117, 119 Silone, Ignazio, 113 Souchère, R. de la, 96 Spies, Werner, 198 Spinario, 85 Stalin, Josef, 119 Stein, Gertrude, 98, 109, 117, 119, 128, 190, 218n2, 221n39, 225n4 Stein, Leo, 190, 204, 217n59 Steinberg, Saul, 110, 185 Sterling, Charles, 214n22 Sterne, Laurence, vii Stevens, Mark, 189 Stevens, Wallace, 187 Stieglitz, Alfred, 146–47, 224n8 Strasbourg Cathedral, Prince of the World, 41 Swift, Jonathan, vii, 219n15 Sylvester, John ( Josuah), 206 Synchromism, 117

Tithonus, 175, 226n15 Titian, 44, 75 Toklas, Alice B., 98, 117, 119, 218n3 Tolstoy, Leo, 178 Trinitarian doctrine, 69–70, 211n7 Trinity with Symbols of the Four Evangelists, 69, 70 Tugendkhold, Yakov, 119, 218n5

Tantalus, 184, 186 Tanzio da Varallo, Battle of Sennacherib, 210n15 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 200 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 32

Yeats, William Butler, 127, 187, 188

Uccello, Paolo, 137 Van Eyck, Jan, 46–47, 210n8 Van Hemessen, Jan, Judith, 49, 50 Varnedoe, Kirk, 194, 211n8, 227n8 Vasari, Giorgio, 48, 171, 172, 225nn9–10 (ch. 9) Velázquez, Diego, 184 Las Meninas, 47, 73, 75 Rokeby Venus, 47 Venus Callipyge, 49, 51 Veronese, Paolo, 75 Vollard, Ambroise, 10, 10, 49, 211n17 Walter, Marie-Thérèse, 86, 200, 228n21 Wilson, Edmund, 113 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 220n35, 227n3 Woolf, Virginia, 198

Zuloaga, Ignacio, 114