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The Presence of the Past
1954-1963
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Starting from a single original, he would produce entire series of
variations. In a sense, this process began in 1947 with thevarious states of his lithograph after Lucas Cranach's "David and
Bathsheba". In the winter of 1954, in his Paris studio in the
Rue des Grands-Augustins, he established paraphrase as his new working
principle. From 13 December 1954 to 14 February 1955 he did fifteen
oil variations on Delacroix's "The Women of Algiers",
accompanied by a number of drawings, etchings and lithographs. Picasso did not retain the composition, colours or style of the
original, but drew freely upon its formal repertoire to suit himself.
Delacroix's painting shows three harem women and a servant woman seen
from behind. It is a striking picture, deriving its impact from the
contrast of dark interior and highlighted figures bright against the
dusk.
From the outset, Picasso made changes in this basic pattern,
transposing one seated figure from the original right to the left
side, placing the servant in the foreground, or introducing new
figures. In January 1955 his concept was in place. He could go on.
Now, the composition was dominated by the polarity between a clothed woman seated at left and a nude reclining at right. The servant,
turning away, and a further nude at the rear completed the group. The
changes were not entirely the product of caprice; Picasso had taken
the foreground grouping from a picture of odalisques by Jean-Auguste
Dominique Ingres.
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Women of Algiers (after Delacroix)
1955
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Women of Algiers (after Delacroix)
1955
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Women of Algiers (after Delacroix)
1955
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The seated figure at the rear was also taken from an Ingres, the
"Turkish Bath", which Picasso had already been importantly inspired by
in his work on "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". He was deliberately
juxtaposing Ingres and Delacroix in a new context, the combination
attesting his considerable insight into art history. In their day, the
two painters stood for the opposing aesthetic positions of Romanticism
and Classicism, but met in their presentation of oriental subject
matter. This common ground was introduced by Picasso, both formally
and in terms of the motifs, into his series of paraphrases - to great
and unifying effect. The series peaked in the picture painted on 14
February 1955. The exotic brightness of the Orient is handled
contrastively and colourfully, the seductive eroticism of the two main figures nakedly presented. Picasso has
combined subtle illusionist approaches with abstractive methods. His
new articulation of a traditional theme also alludes to the odalisque
paintings of Matisse.
Over the next few years he extended his paraphrase series
considerably, but the quantity of output was not always matched by the
quality. In 1957 he did over fifty variations on Velazquez's "Las
Meninas". They were followed by over 150 sketches and drawings, and 27
paintings, done after Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" from 1959 to
1962. Finally, he did a number of larger works adapting Jacques-Louis
David's "Rape of the Sabine Women.
Manet's famous painting, which shocked its 19th-century audience
and prompted a scandal when first exhibited, shows two naked or
near-naked women with two clothed men in a country setting. Manet had painted his work as something of a pastiche, drawing
on Giorgione's "Concert in the Country" (in the Louvre) and a detail
from a copper engraving by Raimondi after a design by Raphael. The figure group of the "Dejeuner" had begun to interest
Picasso in June 1954 because his own treatments of painters and models used a
similar grouping. At that time he did a number of sketches after Manet,
returning at the end of the Fifties to more concentrated work on the material.
He did variations on the composition of the "Dejeuner" in oils, graphics and
drawings, emphasizing the contrast between the female nudes and the male
figures, which he subjected to greater or lesser degrees of deconstruction. In most of the pictures, he used only one man with the women -
transparently a version of his own painter and model theme. He tried to
harmonize form and subject by translating the motif's undisguised eroticism into
an intensified expressionism of style, rendering the figures and the landscape
as interpenetrating, dynamic equivalents. The range in his variations, the
formal concentration, are slighter than in "Women of Algiers", without a
comparable intellectual depth or unity. Most of the "Dejeuner" paraphrases
repeat the same superficial version of the same scene. There was manifestly no rigorously thought-out concept underpinning
Picasso's work on the series.
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Study for "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" (after Manet)
1960
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1960
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1960
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1961
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1961
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1961
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1961
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Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (after Manet)
1962
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And the variations on "The Rape of the Sabine Women" are similarly
one-dimensional. There was a pre-David treatment of the subject by Nicolas Poussin
on which Picasso drew for his own work, borrowing the emotionalism of the
figures and stressing the fight, the brutality, and the suffering of the women,
as his principal factors in form and content. After trying out the poses in
monochrome versions he tested colour contrasts in order to
establish which intensified the emotional impact best before finally
painting a simplified, cropped version in vertical format that uses only four
figures: two warriors, a dead mother, and her screaming child. The allusions to Picasso's own war
paintings, from "Guernica" through "Massacre in Korea" to "War" and
"Peace", are unmistakable.
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The Rape of the Sabine Women (after David)
1962
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The Rape of the Sabine Women (after David)
1962
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The Rape of the Sabine Women (after David)
1963
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The difference to earlier periods in Picasso's work is striking, to
say the least. Taking his bearings from the art of the past, for
Picasso, always implied locating incentives and ideas - be it the
odalisques of Ingres for early Cubism or ancient sculpture and baroque
paintings for the late Rose Period and his so-called Classicism. This
ongoing and extremely fruitful process peaked in Picasso's late years
in his ceramic art of the Forties and Fifties. His ware, and the
artwork with which it was decorated, was no imitation of a classical
original. It was not a copy of ancient storage, cultic or drinking vessels, nor did the decorative style have
anything in common with the technique or form of black and red vase
paintings. Picasso varied the first principles and translated into a
modern idiom whatever was capable of analogy. His thick-bellied vases
with sheer conical necks were decorated with figures organically
adapted to the shapes of the vessels. Maenads, nymphs and fauns,
generously and tellingly outlined and economical in detail, people the
surfaces of the ware. In its modernity, Picasso's ceramic art was one
of classical harmony, in compositions of great beauty.
Picasso did other variations of old masters in the Forties. Even as
the fighting was raging around Paris in 1944, he was at work on an
adaptation of Poussin's "Bacchanal". In 1947, among other things, he
modelled a lithographic series on Cranach's painting "David and
Bathsheba". In 1950 he painted versions of Gustave Courbet's "Women on
the Banks of the Seine" and El Greco's "Portrait of a Painter". These
were followed between 1955 and 1957 by portraits of Jacqueline as "Lola of Valence" (after Manet's
painting), an etching copy of Rembrandt's "Man in the Golden Helmet",
an India-ink drawing after Cranach's "Venus and Cupid", and a painting
after portraits of El Bobo, the court dwarf, by Velazquez and
Murillo. Essentially these works remained within the parameters laid
down in 1917 with "The Peasants' Repast" , after Le Nain's
original, adapting compositions and subjects by concentrating
attention on particular aspects of them. The variations are modern in
that they bring the past works up to date, and in this Picasso was
entering a tradition stretching from Delacroix's copies of Rubens to
van Gogh's paintings after Gustave Dore: one early 20th-century
masterpiece of this kind was Matisse's 1915 "Variation on a Still Life
by Jan Davidsz de Heem". The paraphrases do, however, have the effect
of highlighting the increasingly tautological and almost autistic
tendency of Picasso's collage-guided art to repeat itself in the late
Fifties. Simply to metamorphose a picture was not in itself invariably
adequate as the informing concept behind hundreds of works. The high
standard Picasso had set in matching form and content could not always
be maintained. In many of the paintings and studies of the period, he
was plainly satisfied with having filled the canvas. It was a trivial
reversal of the priorities of the artist: what ought to have been the
sine qua non had become the raison d'etre.
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Bacchanal (after Poussin)
1955
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Bust of a Woman (after Lucas Cranach the Younger)
1958
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El Bobo (after Velazquez and Murillo)
1959
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Woman with Hat (after El Greco)
1963
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