Pablo Picasso

“ Picasso is a born chef d'école. His is one of the most inventive minds in Europe. Invention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensibility is that of Matisse. His career has been a series of discoveries, each of which he has rapidly developed. ”

“ I am not sure now that she was not merely being nice to me, and that, anyhow, she is not all wrong, and that the heartier point of view is the courage which can front life unashamed, which sees the divinity of fact and of beauty in the utmost seeming tragedy. Picasso’s grim presentation of decay and degradation is beginning to teach me something—the marvelous perfection of the spirit which is concerned with neither perfection, nor decay, but with life. ”

“ In Matisse it manifested itself in the reduction of form and colour to their simplest and most personal expression, and was therefore a step toward a pure art. With Picasso synthesis went still further. It became almost basic. We know that the curved line stands for life, colour and movement; that the straight line represents the dead, the sombre and the static. A solid dark is conducive to peace, while quickly succeeding light and dark promote liveliness. Bearing these fundamental postulates in mind we can easily analyse Picasso’s quality of synthesis. ”

“ Vida protested. "Anyhow, don't you agree it's a fine drawing?"
"Sure, but one drawing in years doesn't make you an artist to consider." Clem felt better, thinking of Vermillion's meager output, and, looking again at the Picassos, discovered a clue for his next exhibition. Picasso was right about one thing, one had to change one's style from time to time to attract attention. City streets or industrial architecture could be done in flat bright colors, off perspective. One could be modern and American. ”

“ It seems to me that Picasso shares a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of reality—a number, a button, a few capital letters—with a surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict of impressions, which differ essentially in quality. One trend of modern music is towards realism of sound. Children cry, dogs bark, plates are broken. Picasso approaches the same goal from the opposite direction. It is as though he were trying to work from realism to music. ”

“ An intellectual artist is one who feels first—a peculiar state of emotion being the point of departure for all works of art—and goes on to think. Obviously Picasso has a passionate sense of the significance of form; also, he can stand away from his passion and consider it; apparently in this detached mood it is that he works. In art the motive power is heat always; some drive their engines by means of boiling emotion, others by the incandescence of intellectual passion. These go forward by intense concentration on the problem ”

“ Indeed, it is doubtful if they will lead to important results so long as255 the geometrical phase of Cubism is adhered to, and so long as the Cubists ignore the dynamic possibilities of colour. In its present status Cubism can only continue striving toward a style that goes deeper than tonal prettiness and lyric immobility. Already Picasso has passed out of painting altogether. An artist with his extraordinary gift to do anything superficially well could not remain anchored to an idea after the novelty of its method had worn off. ”

“ Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a moment apparently he wished to be—a chef d'école.
Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried to be anything of the sort, is the paramount influence in modern painting—subject, of course, to the supreme influence of Cézanne. All the world over are students and young painters to whom his mere name is thrilling ”

“ The modern artist’s mind, in becoming more self-conscious, was consequently growing more precise in its expression. And since the Cubists were the primitives of a new era, it was natural that this precision should express itself in straight lines and angular forms. The inconsistency of these artists lay in the fact that, while their first desire was to make their art arbitrary, they were so preoccupied with the dynamism of objectivity that the main object of their work was deputised. In the canvases of240 Picasso’s followers naturalism is the first consideration. ”

“ I have suggested that people do what they please about the gay arts, about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is noble or not, or good form or intellectually right. I am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing—something, anything—without arrière-pensée, because they will know what the pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art. Here is Mr Bell’s conclusion, with most of which I agree:
Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual effort. ”

“ Possibly he is attempting something painting cannot do.
The theory is so abstract and so scientific it comes near paralyzing the art. It is too coldly logical and unemotional to produce great art, for great art is and must be fundamentally emotional.
Of Picasso, the founder and leading exponent of Cubism, a sympathetic writer says:
His whole tendency is a negation of the main tenets of the gospel of Cézanne whose conception of form he rejects, together with Monet’s conception of light and color. ”

“ Cubism will pass away, but the spirit of change will not pass away. One enthusiasm will follow another enthusiasm so long as men possess ambition.
Already there are signs that Cubism is passing. Some of the men are calling themselves Neo-Cubists and Post-Cubists, and they are painting in very different manner.
One has but to look at a series of Picasso’s work to see how often and radically he has changed his style in these ten years from drawing and painting with great facility and success in Impressionistic and Neo-Impressionistic manner to the most abstract Cubism ”

“ We know that Picasso is busy converting everyday forms of his own contemporary surroundings into rhythmic shape from which all clichés have been carefully eliminated. We know too that other painters following the epoch-making example of John D. Fergusson are boldly rhythmising the people and affairs of everyday life as though convinced that the big unified rhythmic design is symbolic of the intense movement by which Art moves and expresses itself. We see in their canvases an obvious attempt to give the widest expansion to the fundamental rhythm of each subject treated. ”

“ His influence in the western world and on foreign painters in Paris is as great as ever; but the French, slightly vexed, maybe, at having accepted so long the leadership of a Spaniard, show signs of turning back towards their national tradition. So, though Picasso remains the animator of the doctrinaire school or schools, Lhote may become the master. It is the fashion, I know, not to take his influence seriously. No matter how clever a man he may be, Lhote—they say—is not a big enough painter to be a chief. ”

“ Like Khlebnikov and the Russian Futurists, the Cubists renounced the stand—point of the "I" in art even to the point of repudiating the notion of personal authorship. Picasso is quoted as having said: "People didn‘t understand very well at the time why very often we didn't sign our canvasses. Most of those that are signed we signed years later. It was because...we felt the temptation, the hope of an anonymous art, not in its expression but in its point of departure"—Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso, quoted by Schwartz, op cit p 7. ”

“ They would find that in Paris a painter can have praise enough without stooping for the applause of Mayfair. It is significant that, whereas English painters once they have found a style that hits the public taste, are not much inclined to change it, in Paris such an artist as Picasso, who has taken the fancy of amateurs and dealers in at least three different manners, goes on from experiment to experiment, leaving the public to follow as best it can. ”

“ The power of music to give expression without the help of representation is its noblest possession. No painting has ever had such a precious power. Kandinsky is striving to give it that power, and prove what is at least the logical analogy between colour and sound, between line and rhythm of beat. Picasso makes little use of colour, and confines himself only to one series of line effects—those caused by conflicting angles. ”

“ Poor lovers of the elegant, the late Victorians, belle epoquers. A penny for their thoughts when confronting a Picasso without the vantage of hindsight. If Europe and its child bride, America, grew uneasy in the declining years of the past century. ”

“ I do not presume to judge between one method of creation and another; I shall not judge between Matisse and Picasso; but I do say that, as a rule, it is the intellectual artist who becomes, in spite of himself, schoolmaster to the rest. ”

“ Colour with him became for the first time a functional element capable of producing form. The absolute freedom of subject selection—a heritage from the second cycle—permitted him extreme distortions, and with these distortions was opened up the road to abstraction. Matisse made form even more arbitrary, and Picasso approached still nearer to the final elimination of natural objectivity, though both men ignored colour as a generator of form. They carried forward the work of Cézanne only on its material side. ”

“ His work has to an extraordinary degree that decorative unity of design which distinguishes all the artists of this school.
Between these two extremes we may find ranged almost all the remaining artists. On the whole the influence of Picasso on the younger men is more evident than that of Matisse. With the exception of Braque none of them push their attempts at abstraction of form so far as Picasso, but simplification along these lines is apparent in the work of Derain, Herbin, Marchand, and L’Hote. ”

“ A primitive—innocent. Though Picasso wasn't as innocent as they said! But in New York it was different. New York was a tough place. There a provincial was a yokel from the sticks. It had been a painful surprise to find himself considered a Nebraska painter instead of a Prometheus from Paris by Raymond Figente, a rich society guy who dabbled in sculpture and set himself up as an art judge, dismissing as of no account any but those he called originals.
In Congress a girl who posed for painters was a loose woman. ”

“ In addition to them—in addition, not in place of them—we must have arts which, we feel, are for ourselves alone, which no one before us could have cared for so much, which no one after us will wholly understand. The picture by Picasso could have been admired by an unprejudiced critic a thousand years ago, and will be a thousand years hence. We require, for nourishment, something fresh and transient. It is this which makes jazz so much the characteristic art of our time and Jolson a more typical figure than Chaplin, who also is outside of time.348 There must be ephemera. ”

“ Picasso's admirers hail him, just as this Introduction hails Kandinsky, as a visual musician. The methods and ideas of each rival are so different that the title cannot be accorded to both. In his book, Kandinsky states his opinion of Cubism and its fatal weakness, and history goes to support his contention. The origin of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting pressures. Once abandon reality and the geometrical vision becomes abstract mathematics. ”

“ To ascribe Picasso’s Cubism to so childish an impulse as a desire to square an academic drawing is both untrue and unjust. Some have pointed to Dürer as his artistic forbear merely because Dürer once described a number of curves which he said could be made into a human body and drew a block-diagram of box-like forms which he said was the basis for the body’s construction. ”

“ Spain does not appear to be the country best fitted to lead it. Its history seems to show that while it is ready of acceptance, it is not to be{36} hurried in its advance; nor is it eager to seize upon radical ideas. But this notwithstanding, it has painters who understand and cultivate art of this kind, and it must not be forgotten that one of the outstanding figures in the ultramodern movement is the Spaniard Picasso, who has shown once more that in all phases of artistic effort the Spanish temperament significantly reveals itself. ”

“ The works of even the smallest artists of that age enchant us now, because in that age any man of any talent could make a picture; but doubtless at the time critics and amateurs sighed for the first thrilling years of the movement—for the discoveries of Masaccio and Donatello—and were quite ready to welcome the novelties of the high renaissance when they came. The world moves faster nowadays; already we look regretfully back to the days when Matisse and Picasso were launching the movement, and another high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose. ”

“ No one, I venture to say, is so much to be distrusted as the admirer of Picasso who has not studied Giotto and Poussin, the advocate of Eliot and Joyce who has not studied Milton and Sterne, the enthusiast for the Expressionist Theatre who has not studied Webster and Dryden. And I suggest that there is no better rule for everyone to follow than that of reading, for every new book, at least one old one. ”