|
The Camera and the Classicist
1916-1924
|
|
In the USA, photography was soon an art form in its own right. The
line of pure photography is linked with Edward Steichen, Walker Evans
and Edward Weston. But painters such as Charles Sheeler also tried to
use photographic forms in their art. The nearest European equivalent
was Germany's "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity). From 1920 on,
Dadaists, Surrealists, Soviet Constructivists and artists at the
Bauhaus were all trying to bring new ideas to visual art with the help
of experimental photography.
And Picasso was trying to do the same. All of his figure drawings
after 1916 were constructed according to the basic principles of
photography - and for that reason they lack something we usually find in an art drawing: variability of line. Lines can be thick or
thin, deep black or pale grey, and the gradations chosen can make the
visual rhythm of a picture by emphasizing certain portions and not
others. Not so in Picasso. From his portraits of composers Satie and
Stravinsky to his copy of Renoir's portrait of "Sisley and
His Wife", the lines are almost mechanically even. It is an
astonishing effect, at once cold and utterly stylish.
Picasso was not only adopting the photographic contour. His
paintings and drawings also borrowed the characteristic overemphasis
of light-dark contrasts in defining volume, the juxtaposition of the
linear and the spatial, even the distortions of perspective. He still
used the visual artist's conventional methods, thus often mixing
forms. In the Stravinsky portrait, for example, the composer's limbs
are outsize, combining photographic distortion with the cartoonist's
technique. In such works as "The Reading of the Letter" or the
great nudes of 1921-22, photographic harshness in the contrast of
light and shadow is combined with a sculpturally modelled
three-dimensionality, adding a slight distortion of perspective.
|
|
|
Portraot of Igor Stravinsky
1920
|
|
|
The Reading of the Letter
1921
|
|
|
Seated Nude Drying Her Foot
1921
|
|
These massive figures with dark eye sockets and seemingly
machine-made bodies are the result.
Other pictures present linear figures seen against neutral,
non-representational areas of colour. In these, Picasso blended the
techniques of Synthetic Cubism with the kind of mimesis he was
borrowing from photography. The combinations produced new formal modes
such as we see in "The Lovers". Paintings such as this
represent an intermediate position which the artist tested for its
functional values by using it in his theatre designs -for instance, in
his work for the 1924 ballet "Mercure". But Picasso was a man to test
his results over and over again. This he did by copying from
photographs once more. In 1923 he painted "Paul, the Artist's Son, on
a Donkey". The accentuation of different textures in the
photo prompted a delightful composition. Picasso runs the gamut of
visual methods, opposing lines to surface areas, smooth surfaces to
textured ones, spatial depth to depthless zones. The shaggy fell of
the donkey is a continuous fabric of dark
and light greys with white and black brush-strokes too. The boy's
clothes are an irregular linear outline that defines a patch of colour
and is economically detailed with a few more lines for folds.
|
|
|
The Lovers
1923
|
|
|
In 1919 Picasso had already used a 1916 Ballets Russes publicity
photo in order to combine dancers' poses and various techniques of
creating three-dimensionality. In the first of these
works he rendered the photo's shadow areas as hatching of the kind
commonly used in engravings and etchings. In others he changed the
photo's horizontal format into a vertical, tightened up the
composition, even cut the number of figures and changed their poses. A
dreamy gaze, fingers to chin, or upraised arms to keep a balance - to
Picasso the attitudes were interchangeable.
In 1923 Picasso returned to the use of emphatic linear outline
together with hatching for his portraits of the painter Jacinto Salvado
in a harlequin costume Cocteau had handed on. In the
unfinished version we can see how Picasso was aiming to unite the
linear elements and the colouring of areas in a new synthesis. It was
an experimental phase in his work, as the range of subjects indicates.
He was using almost exclusively motifs drawn from his stock
repertoire: harlequins, mothers with children, nudes, still lifes,
studies of bullfights, portraits. New motifs were the beach scenes and
bathers. These gave Picasso the chance to test his nudes in contexts
of action.
|
Seated Harlequin (The Painter Jacinto Salvado)
1923
|
Seated Harlequin (The Painter Jacinto Salvado)
1923
|
Seated Harlequin (The Painter Jacinto Salvado)
1923
|
Seated Harlequin (The Painter Jacinto Salvado)
1923
|
|
|
He was also looking back to art history. Since his youth Picasso
had copied from other originals. This predilection now peaked in
multi-layered visual quotations and variations, copies, and
borrowings. In 1917 he painted "The Peasants' Repast",
conspicuously using a stylistic device he had been highly interested
in during his earliest real period of artistic identity: the
multitudinous dots and dabs of pointillism. But "The Peasants' Repast"
is a product of combination, of synthesis, the composition not the
artist's own but taken from a painting by the French artist Louis Le Nain, done in 1642 and now in the Louvre. As in the variations on the
Ballets Russes publicity photos, Picasso altered his original,
transforming the wide format into a concentrated vertical and adapting
the proportional relations of the figures as he chose.
|
|
|
The Peasants' Repast (after Le Nain)
1917
|
|
Similarly in "Three Women at the Spring" he has adopted
the technique suggested by photographic three-dimensionality, as the
preliminary studies plainly show. On the other hand, though, his
composition of figures clad in the garb of ancient statues is a
variation on a portion of a work by the French baroque artist Nicolas Poussin.Picasso's arresting motion study, "Women Running on the Beach", uses motif details from Raphael's Vatican frescoes and from
an ancient Medean sarcophagus in the National Museum in Rome, both
works Picasso saw in 1917. In "Three Dutch Girls", painted in
1906, Picasso had already done a variation on the ancient sculptural
group of the Three Graces, and he now did a number of etchings based
on the same famous original. He stepped up his work in printed
graphics because the medium suited his new linear style. As well as
doing illustrations for books by his friend Max Jacob - "Le Cornet a
Des" in 1917 and "Le Phanerogame" the following year - which continued what he had begun in 1913 with three etchings for Jacob's
"Le Siege de Jerusalem", he mainly did variations of motifs he had
drawn or painted, such as "Three Women at the Spring".
|
|
|
The Women at the Spring
1921
|
|
The range of different techniques Picasso was using all shared a
concern with identity of craftsmanship and form. As well as painting
in oil on canvas, he painted on wooden panels as in centuries gone by.
He even transferred pastel to canvas and combined it with oils: the
"Country Dance (Dancing Couple)" and "The Reading of the Letter" are fine examples. The textural effect of pastel
chalk on a rough canvas ground curiously reinforces tonal contrasts.
As in earlier periods, the experiments were all subsumed into one
major work recapitulating his experience throughout this period: "The
Pipes of Pan" (1923).
|
|
|
Country Dance
1921
|
|
|
The Pipes of Pan
1923
|
|
Over fifty studies in sketchbooks and on single sheets have
survived, but the number, of preliminary studies for the painting must
have been far greater, for Picasso also used his 1920-1921 pencil and
pastel drawings of bathers on the beach for his new purpose. The variously posed women, most of them naked, were
clearly originally meant to be part of an ambitious composition using
a merely hinted-at landscape setting. But the artist broke off his
work without managing to bring his ideas together satisfactorily.
However, he had settled on the idea of tightly ordered groups of
standing and seated figures. He returned to this idea in 1923, linking
it to bacchanalian motifs from antiquity. The figure of a faun playing
the Pan-pipes, in particular, was based on ancient sculpture. Little
by little his physical posture evolved - a kind of compromise between
sitting, running and squatting. The youth is half-kneeling
on his left leg while his right is bent at the knee too. With both
hands he is holding the pipes to his lips. At an intermediate stage in
his work on this composition, Picasso added a woman to the scene, and
a boyish Eros, doubtless with a historical picture of
amorous content in mind. But then he tautened the compositional
concept, dropped the erotic content, and again accentuated the motif
of bathing, admittedly not entirely jettisoning the erotic
suggestiveness.
The result was the final big painting completed in summer 1923. The
Pan-pipes player is posed as in the preliminary studies. Beside him, in a frontal pose turned slightly to the right, also in
bathing trunks, stands another youth. His right leg is casually bent
at the knee. Between them we see the vast blues of sea and sky. The
different shades emphasize the spatial depth. Rough brown, beige and
sandy areas provide a backdrop to the youths, foregrounding them
through the contrast, accentuating the spatiality, and rounding out
the centripetal composition. The two figures illustrate Picasso's
methods of three-dimensional modelling: darker and lighter shades,
variously contrasting, to indicate a range of volume qualities from
flat to round, together with the natural proportions of the bodies,
heighten the picture's evocativeness.
|
|
|
Three Bathers
1920
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reclining Bather
1920
|
|
|
Three Bathers
1920
|
|
|
If Picasso seems to have eased off the violation of natural
proportion seen in other nudes from this time, this is due to a more
subtle approach to the problem. Like classically-minded 19th-century
artists such as Ingres or Anselm Feuerbach, he combines an arbitrary
elongation of bodily proportion with questions of posture and bearing,
so that his figures balance each other out and establish a strong
sense of harmony. The noticeable departures from ideals of beauty
underline this; for in reality the violations are considerable - the
pipes player, if he were to stand upright, would be taller than the
other youth and would occupy the entire height of the canvas.
Like Picasso's entire output from 1916 to 1924, this picture was a
variation on others, uniting in one place subject-matter with shades
of antiquity, classical models, a classicist mode of composition, and
a style derived from photography and blended with Synthetic Cubism.
|
Guitar
1916
|
Man Leaning on a Table
1916
|
|
Woman in Spanish Costume (La Salchichona)
1917
|
Olga
1917
|
Bowl of Fruit
1917
|
Figure with Bowl of Fruit
1917
|
View of the Columbus Memorial
1917
|
Seated Woman in an Armchair
1917
|
|
Harlequin and Woman with Necklace
1917
|
|
|
|
