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The Old Savage
1963-1973
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In September 1958 Picasso bought the chateau at Vauvenargues.
Increasingly it became a refuge from an inquisitive public that
veritably besieged La Californie. The 14th-century chateau was near
Aix-en-Provence at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, featured in many
of Cezanne's paintings. Then in June 1961 Picasso moved into
Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a villa near the village of Mougins, in the hills
above Cannes. It was to be his last residence and place of work. He
had long been a classic of modern art, but still attempted to
influence the public reception of his work. For instance, when the
Museu Picasso in Barcelona was opened in 1970, prominent members of
the Franco regime tried to use the occasion as a means of legitimation.
However, their plans for a state ceremony were brought to nothing by
Picasso, who vetoed all such ideas, wary of affording political
enemies any purchase.
Picasso had long taken a special interest in the work of the
Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar. In the Fifties, Nesjar had engraved
Picasso studies in concrete with the help of a sand-blaster. Now, in
the 1960s, he developed a method of making immense concrete casts of
Picasso's sculptures. For Picasso it was the fulfilment of a lifelong
dream - ever since the Twenties he had been fired by ideas for
large-scale sculptural work. From 1962 to 1964, commissioned by
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an American architectural firm, he
designed the maquette for a 20-metre sculpture. As in the 1928
memorial for Apollinaire, Picasso established an interplay of volume
and surface in this "civic" work, and created linear effects by using
wires. The final work was done in Corten steel and installed at the
Chicago Civic Centre in 1967.
The art scene had undergone a complete change. The Sixties were a
period of great upheaval and transition in the Western world, not
least in the visual arts. The total international hegemony of abstract
art waned, as its shortcomings became increasingly, painfully
apparent. Everywhere, voices were raised in opposition to a
non-representational art felt to be sterile, uncommitted, escapist.
The new departure of the Sixties was dominated by Pop Art and the New
Realism. Both schools made uninhibited use of every conceivable visual
idiom, particularly advertising and comic strips.
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Portrait of Jacgueline
1965
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The continued evolution of classical Modernism played a decisive
part in this. Assemblages, collages and ready-mades were now being
used to expose social taboos and brand societal mistakes. Thus
everyday objects such as soup cans or washpowder boxes became icons of
mass society's consume-and-dispose mentality. They were made in series
format, or presented in monumental autonomy. The best-known works are
those of the American Pop artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy
Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, whose assemblages and other
artefacts matched what French artists such as Arman and Cesar had been
doing. The new departure also constituted an end to creative
one-sidedness - even the actionist legacy of Surrealism was continued
in new socially critical forms such as the happening. And in the train
of such developments came conceptual art.
Picasso's attitude to contemporary art was divided. Most of its
formal repertoire had been familiar to him for years - indeed, he had
invented some of the techniques himself. Time seemed to be coming full
circle in the oddest of ways. Picasso, who had at one time set out to
revolutionize art and articulate the contradictions inherent in the
creative act, found himself viewed as the Establishment and bracketed
with Salon artists such as Bernard Buffet, who appropriated the
achievements of Modernism to manufacture snappy arts and crafts. Thus
Picasso, at the end of his life, was squeezed right out to the
periphery. On the one hand media acclaim, on the other withdrawal from
public life; old age and its physical frailty, an art scene that made
uninhibited demands on him and his art - he was facing formidable
challenges. And to capitulate would have been tantamount to throwing
in the towel for good.
Instead, he riposted with an art of revolt. The art of Picasso's
old age articulates the will to survive. From 1963 on, conflicts
within and without became ever more visible in his work. He did
several hundred studies and paintings on his old subject of "The
Artist and His Model". An intense, indeed obsessive preoccupation with
the subject of the artist's identity followed; this was not new in
Picasso, but the single-mindedness and energy with which he pursued
his subject was unusual even for him. Contemporaries were staggered by
the sheer bulk of his production, and the statistics are indeed
astounding. For example, from 16 March to 5 October 1968 he did 347
etchings, from January 1969 to the end of January 1970 no fewer than
167 paintings, and from 15 December 1969 to 12 January 1971 194
drawings. 156 etchings followed from January 1970 to March 1972, 172
drawings from 21 November 1971 to 18 August 1972, and a further 201
paintings from 25 September 1970 to 1 June 1972. These figures
represent only the works published to date. And all this by a man aged
87 to 91!
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This formidable productiveness is obviously eloquent of fantastic
vitality. The public was amazed at the world's most famous artist's
undiminished activity. But behind that amazement lay a damningverdict:
logically, it implied that productivity itself was being ranked above
quality, as if the aged Picasso's heroic performance required the
astonished applause that might greet a circus act. The reason for this
lay in the work itself. If we consider the endless portrayals of the
painter and model scene, of nudes, of sex, or the portraits and so
forth, we are confronted with an art plainly at odds with aesthetic
ideals of creating beauty. Overhasty painting, blotches and dribbles,
mock-primitive figures dismembered beyond recognition, colours that
can be genuinely painful to look at, all guarantee that these pictures
come as a shock. The praise they earned for the physical endurance
they attested was no more than an expression of helplessness before
their formal character.
And yet it is impossible to ignore the evocativeness of that
character. Picasso forces us to enter into a dialogue with his art;
and, true to himself, he does so with consistent, unremitting logic.
If his work now dispenses with subtlety, casts nuanced colours to the
winds, and is brutally unambiguous in form and content, it does most
certainly prompt unmistakable reactions. There is nothing
monolithic about this last phase in Picasso's work, though. True, the
1963 series of artist and model paintings makes a homogeneous
impression on first inspection, consisting of slight variations on a
repeated constant in terms of the group composition and motifs. All
the paintings look spontaneous, as if the artist had deliberately
avoided pausing for thought and the whole meaning resided in a
spur-of-the-moment quality. But paintings such as these, several of
which might often be done in a single day, were accompanied by others
that might be worked on in several stages, sometimes with month-long
interruptions.
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In 1964, working with great concentration over a number of days,
Picasso painted a portrait of his wife Jacqueline. In preliminary
works he had tried out effects of colour blocks, paint and line. Now,
in the portrait, he combined the principles he had gleaned from those
experiments. Then in May he took the painting as a point of departure
for a variation in which he played off painting and draughtsmanlike
elements more contrastively against each other. Both procedures -
rapidly painting a spontaneous artist and model scene, or patiently
evolving and adapting a composition - were typical of Picasso's
lifelong method of working. But now he intensified his labours in a
way that went far beyond his norm.
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Jacqueline, Seated with Her Cat
1964
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Jacqueline, Seated with Her Cat
1964
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On 30 March 1963, for example, he painted an artist at work. From
10 to 24 October 1964 he then did 29 variations on the theme, changing
the artist's headgear or facial features, making him bearded or
wrinkled, old or young, in a broad range of transformations. In these
revisions of a single subject, the point of departure always remained
clearly in sight. It is, in fact, always the same picture: he was
using 29 original-size reproductions of his own oil of 30 March 1963
which a French publisher had sent him. In overpainting in this way, he
was emphasizing the contingent, temporary status of an individual
work.
This repeated work on a reproduction highlights the heart of
Picasso's concerns in his late work: he was out to destroy the concept
of the finished work. Series were no longer intended as attesting
evolution towards a work, as his extremely sketchy oils of male faces
indicate. Here, he was performing an equivalent to the over-painting
of reproductions: it was only the context of a sequence that produced
meaning in an individual work. The constituents underwent little
variation but their juxtaposition changed, underlining the infinite
possible ways of combining formal fundamentals (left and above). These
pictures are not finished products; they merely document the basic
options available to creative work. Alluding directly to the textbook
character of the series principle, Picasso uses rudimentary, indeed
childlike forms of expression. The pictures seem the kind of scrawl
that anyone could do. Technique has been pared to a minimum; caprice
reigns triumphant. We are witnessing a creative spirit free of
technical constraint and asserting that the traditional concept of art
is null and void.
Consistently enough, Picasso does not communicate content in his
pictures now. There is no narrative or representational statement; his
art has become a kind of performance. The questionable status of form
is in the foreground (as it had been for years). Thus an irregular
line may zigzag down the bridge and ridge of the nose, the upper lip,
the mouth and the chin. The line may be an unnatural green, but it is
in the right place. Then it is joined by a similar, yellow line which
implies a relation with the physical human face but does not coincide
with its natural lines. The overpaintings of reproductions proceed
similarly. On 30 March 1963 Picasso painted a male face, economically
established with a few generous brush-strokes in blue and white, seen
simultaneously from the front and in profile. With so Spartan a
starting point, there was ample scope for variation. What counted was
the act of painting itself. The surface area, after all, could be
obliterated and repeopled with altogether different figures. Thus the
oils done in the late Sixties and early Seventies, too, were merely
variations on a few elementary motifs, stripped of technical
sophistication.
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The Artist and His Model
1964
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The Artist and His Model
1964
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The Artist and His Model
1964
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The Sculptor
1964
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The Artist
1963
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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The Artist
1964
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However, the principle of metamorphosis and costume transformation
is illustrated, especially in paintings from 1963 and 1969. In
"Rembrandt and Saskia" (13/14 March 1963). Picasso has done the lower
part of the male figure two-dimension-ally, providing a strong block
of black in the centre of the painting. On 18 and 19 February 1969 he
varied the same pose in two paintings showing men smoking, with a
small Cupid (pp. 654 and 655). The brushwork has undergone radical
change. In the 18 February picture, linearity of form is foregrounded,
and the colour blocks are therefore filled with broad brushstrokes. In
that of 19 February, the blocks of colour are themselves stressed once
again - though with the crucial difference that now the act of
painting, the imprecise movement of the hand, is being emphasized. The
two paintings are complementary. While the motifs in that of 18
February are linear and the colours of secondary importance, Picasso
proceeds in that of 19 February in exactly the contrary fashion. He
fills the canvas with undefined bright colours, then, the good
draughtsman, indicates forms that translate the colour composition
into a figural painting. The vigorous brush-work and the seemingly
expressive style are masks, to deceive us: they are there to confuse,
to subvert perception. There is next to no systematic orchestration of
colour aimed at heightening of impact. Instead, paint squeezed
straight from the tube onto the canvas has triumphed. Indeed,
Picasso's use of paint is distinctly sloppy, leaving blotches and
inchoate breaches wherever we look.
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Musketeer and Cupid
1969
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Rembrandtesque Figure and Cupid
1969
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