There is no denying that Pablo Picasso – who died forty
years ago this week – was an extraordinarily talented young man. His dedicated
museum in Barcelona reveals that he could appropriate the great masters like Michelangelo
and Vermeer whilst still a teenager, and the fact that he never stuck to one
style for very long is testament to the versatility of his abilities. A new
exhibition at the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House in London offers a focus
on his output from just one year, 1901, and presents an interesting transition
from appropriation to an uncertain individuality.
In 1901 Picasso moved to Paris, having been promised an
exhibition by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in his gallery on the Rue Laffitte.
He took a studio in Montmartre and set to work producing paintings for this
show: the final number exhibited was 75 and media from the time reports that
Picasso worked at immense speed, sometimes painting three canvases a day. These
works can be found in the first room of the exhibition ‘Becoming Picasso, Paris
1901’, and show an incredibly talented painter, with a striking sense of colour
and form, but with few ideas of his own. The nineteen-year-old Picasso had
absorbed so much of contemporary art – as well as works from the art historical
canon – and was creating work that constantly referenced other people’s
ideas. One work (which actually is in
the second room), called ‘The Blue Room (The Tub)’ illustrates this well. In it
the rug belongs to Vuillard, the bath to Degas, the female figure to Vlaminck
or Matisse, and the poster on the wall in the background to Toulouse-Lautrec.
All these pieces of iconography are – of course – likely to recur in art of
this time, but it is not just the theme that Picasso appropriates, it is the
style.
Picasso was good. Really good. But he knew it, and
unfortunately confidence and assurance do not often – in my opinion – make extraordinary
art. It is the fragility, the nervousness in works that make them so thick with
thought and feeling. It is often where something is very hard – either literally
in terms of difficultly drawing, or in terms of expressing an emotion – that the
artist end up recording more of themselves in the artwork, making it infinitely
more absorbing for us, the spectators.
With this in mind, to me, the second room is infinitely more
interesting. This is the room of paintings done after the summer exhibition at
Vollard’s gallery, and it seems that without the pressure of needing to produce
works to display, impress and sell, Picasso felt able to explore the more
private and personal ideas within him, and in this we have the birth of the ‘blue
period’.
If you are only familiar with Picasso’s brilliant and
distorted paintings from the middle of his life, or with the cubist pieces from
the 1910s I would urge you to familiarise yourself with his ‘blue’ and ‘rose’
periods. These works are devastating in their anguish and deep sadness.
Ordinary people caught in a moment of thought form the basis for many of his
works in this period, and this subject may have been a direct result of the impetus
for this aesthetic: was he really exploring the inner sadness of someone else
as he drew his models?
In the beginning of 1901, Carlos Casagemas – a friend of
Picasso’s – shot himself in front of a group of friends in a cafe in Paris.
Picasso was in Spain at the time (something that he may have carried guilt
for), and felt the loss of his friend keenly. Interestingly, though Picasso was
open about many biographical details concerning his friendships and lovers, he
did not reveal that the death of Casagemas caused the change in his style in
1901 until the 1960s. We know that the young Picasso was quite secretive (when
his monumental ‘Demoiselles D’Avignon’ met with shock from a few of his friends
he hid it away for six years), but there is a sense that in this case, he might
have felt regret or shame in not being able to help his friend. He searched the
souls and hardships of others, in the way he perhaps should have done with
Casagemas.
All this is speculation, but several works from the Courtauld
exhibition see Picasso playing out his grief in his work. The most obvious of
these is ‘Casagemas in his Coffin’, in which the head of a man lies enveloped
by white sheets with darkness surrounding. This is an extraordinarily powerful
work, in which Picasso reduced the palette entirely to blues, browns and white.
The blues are rich and electric; there is a strong intensity of feeling in the
work, and the paint is layered in thick empasto which is fairly unusual for
Picasso in this period. We feel the energy and desperation in each brushstroke,
and yet the subject is cold and still. Picasso exaggerates the upper lip of his
friend, in the way that he would go on to exaggerate fingers and chins in other
blue period portraits. Here we find the beginnings of Picasso using physiognomy
to draw out expression and character.
In this second half of the exhibition we find ourselves
forming a portrait of the teenaged ‘genius’. As well as the works that directly
reference Casagemas and the melancholy harlequins – who recurred frequently in
his blue and rose periods – we find a recurring theme of care. Two works (which
appropriate the style of Daumier) show a mother and child, and the famous ‘Child
with a Dove’ drives the point home as a fragile and awkwardly positioned young
girl stands, carefully cradling and protecting a dove. Surely these are unusual
subjects for an ostentatious, 19-year-old man?
Two self-portraits give us a greater sense of his
personality. Both named ‘Yo – Picasso’ (‘I – Picasso’), one is large and
confident in presentation, while the other offers just Picasso’s face, almost
shyly etched onto a canvas. In the first of these, he appropriates Velasquez,
depicting himself as the Romantic Artist with a billowing white shirt and
orange cravat. The rich blues of the background are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s palette,
and the unusually wide ear might be a reference to Van Gogh’s powerful late
self-portraits (done after the severing of his ear). However, in the face of
this portrait, and in the smaller one, there is a distinct anxiety and
unsureness. He is wide-eyed and open: a young soul in an older body.
This exhibition is small with just 20 pictures, and is perhaps
not worth the £6 entrance fee (though it is free for full-time students), but
if you already hold some level of information about Picasso and an interest in
who he was then I would recommend a visit. Picasso does not often reveal to us
his fragility, but a display of a talented painter struggling to find his
brilliance is an extraordinary thing to behold.
