The Success of The Success and Failure of Picasso

Abstract

The Success and Failure of Picasso appeared in 1965, three years after John Berger left England for Switzerland. By the time of the move he was established as a combative art critic, but for the next few years he concentrated on writing fiction. His biographer Joshua Sperling describes ‘the quiet of exile’ – ‘projects unfurl with greater patience’, ‘a séance with the past becomes easier’, ‘voices a metropolis would drown out can be heard’.¹ It cannot have been a period of uninterrupted contemplation, though, since Berger and his partner Anya Bostock, employed in Geneva at the United Nations, had two children in 1962 and 1963.

Written against the background of the early years of parenthood, the book often proceeds in a straightforward, stern manner redolent of the twilit gruffness one feels in the presence of small children and tries hard not to inflict on them. Berger argues that Picasso was a thrillingly rebellious visionary, but only for about ten years of his long life (1881–1973). In 1907, he ‘provoked Cubism’² – the italics are Berger’s, indicating his view that the artist was far from being this iconoclastic movement’s architect or philosopher-in-chief. But Picasso exulted in the spirit of the moment, becoming the most energetic driver of ‘a revolution in the visual arts as great as that which took place in the early Renaissance’.³

It was in 1907 that Picasso produced Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, an angular and aggressive painting of five naked prostitutes, not exhibited till 1916. Berger describes this large oil as ‘clumsy, overworked, unfinished’, yet acknowledges that its sheer brutality is astonishing. It constituted a ‘frontal attack’ on ‘life as Picasso found it – the waste, the disease, the ugliness, and the ruthlessness’. Berger likens the witchy women in the painting, three of whom glare at the viewer, to ‘the palings of a stockade through which eyes look out as at a death’.⁴ This is art as insurrection.

The next few years, during which Picasso found himself fruitfully participating in a group that included Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and André Derain, were ‘a period of great excitements, but also a period of inner certainty and security’. This was ‘the only time when Picasso felt entirely at home’,⁵ and it is when Berger is most at home with Picasso, finding him purposeful, attuned to others’ minds, desires and needs.

He locates the best of the artist in a work such as Still-life with Chair Caning (1912). This small oval piece may seem an odd choice for high praise, and he misses its playfulness. What he most explicitly admires is its clarity: ‘Nothing comes between you and the objects depicted’, and ‘the substance and texture of the objects is freshly emphasized’.⁶ He finds in the painting an invitation to unpick the logic of how we look at it.

In this context it’s worth noting that Berger dedicated The Success and Failure of Picasso to three people: the first two were Anya Bostock and his friend Ernst Fischer, whose staunchly Marxist The Necessity of Art Bostock had two years earlier translated into English. The final dedicatee was Max Raphael, a ‘forgotten but great critic’ who had died in 1952. In an essay published in 1969 and included in The Look of Things (1972), Berger would provide an arresting summary of the main idea he had absorbed from Raphael: ‘The function of the work of art is to lead us from the work to the process of creation which it contains.’⁷ To quote Raphael’s The Demands of Art, not published till sixteen years after his death: ‘It is the nature of the creative mind to dissolve seemingly solid things and to transform the world as it is into a world in process of becoming and creating. This is how we are liberated from the multiplicity of things … [and] instead of being creatures we become part of the power that creates all things.’⁸

Berger focuses more intently on the period that began with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and on its philosophic significance, in his essay ‘The Moment of Cubism’. Published in New Left Review in 1967, and two years later revised for inclusion in a book (The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays), it is freighted with the revolutionary possibilities of its own cultural moment. Berger rightly identifies the years from 1907 to 1914 with vast technological and scientific flux. At the same time as ‘the aeroplane promised to make the dreams of Icarus real’, developments in physics, chemistry, engineering, radio and cinema looked set to transform the planet. ‘The process of the secularization of the world was at last complete’, and humankind ‘took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist’. A new syntax of experience seemed to be emerging.⁹

In the late 1960s, and above all amid the upheavals of 1968, there was the same sense that, in the words of the Cubist critic and poet André Salmon, ‘All is possible’ and ‘everything is realizable everywhere with everything’.¹⁰ Yet at the time Berger was writing The Success and Failure of Picasso, he was in less expansive mode, and the book dwells poignantly on the snuffing out of the Cubists’ spark of hope. He reflects that their ‘way of seeing’ – yes, that phrase –– was optimistic: ‘They painted the good omens of the modern world.’¹¹ But in 1914 the group broke up, as war shattered both old empires and new affiliations, and when its members reunited after the war, they could not recover the audacious spirit of progress that preceded it.

Berger argues that during the war Picasso suffered a ‘failure of revolutionary nerve’.¹² This was most evident in his work on the ballet Parade. Created by Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau and Léonide Massine for Serge Diaghilev’s fashionable Ballets Russes, the piece premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, a mere two days after the Battle of Arras, which had caused 300,000 casualties, ended in stalemate. It was meant to represent the speed, commercialism and mechanical inhumanity of life in the metropolis. Picasso designed the sets and costumes, which in itself seemed a betrayal of the Cubists’ principles, since they had regarded ballet as, in Berger’s words, ‘a pretentious and bourgeois form of entertainment’. Worse, Parade was frivolous – ‘not because it ignored the war, but because it pretended to be realistic’.¹³

The project was, as Berger plausibly tells it, a wrong turning for Picasso. Yet he would design three more ballets for Diaghilev, which fostered a new public image of him as an ‘exotic magician’,¹⁴ a performer given to oracular pronouncements. He became one of the very people he had set out to shock – a celebrity, fêted by the beau monde. When he eventually tired of fashionable sycophants, he retreated into introspection. The prisoner of his own virtuosity, besotted with his own prodigious creativity, he had no interest in the ideas of others, with the result that his endeavours felt increasingly hollow and solipsistic, before eventually, in the 1940s, turning towards sentimentalism.

This account, with its at times obituary tone, sounds like the archetypal story of the perils of artistic success: recognition, wealth and fame blunt the creative acuity that made them possible. I don’t use the word ‘story’ casually; Berger’s critical method is to construct a narrative. Although his Marxist convictions inevitably give rise to a political reading of an aesthetic project, it is one defined at least as much by attentiveness as by assertiveness. The story is persuasive because he infers from the paintings a sense of the artist at work and thinking about his work – Picasso toying with an idea, summoning up memories of his youth, seeing himself most fully when reflected in what he is depicting, applying highly personal imagery to subjects that are not immediately anything to do with him, tasting disappointment, impersonating himself rather than simply being himself.

But at the time of publication, the book seemed an off-key assessment of an artist who was both alive and revered. Broadly representative are the statements which appeared in a Guardian editorial in 1973, the day after Picasso’s death: ‘In a real sense, Pablo Picasso was the last Renaissance man’, and ‘He was hugely prolific and his genius left its imprint everywhere. His influence can never be precisely stated, but the world would look different had his cradle not rocked in Barcelona twenty years before the new century dawned: architecture, sculpture, theatre design, poster design – the whole man-made environment – basked in the sun king’s light.’¹⁵

Berger, who I think would have been appalled by the half-truth of those last few words, chooses to begin with details of the artist’s material wealth. He notes, for instance, that Picasso’s collection of his own work might be worth as much as £25 million.¹⁶ That’s perhaps £350 million in today’s money, though the figure may strike us as almost comically low, given that Picasso has become the top-grossing artist at auction and individual works of his can sell for over $100 million. The point nevertheless stands: by the 1960s the distinction between collecting works of art and investing in them was beginning to blur, and Picasso benefited immensely, in material terms, from the emergence of art as an institutionally recognised asset class.

In Berger’s view, an obsession with art’s value as property is sure to smother the potential for it to have other kinds of value. But for many critics, his decision to dwell on such matters and chastise Picasso for expensive habits was tactless and insolent. John Richardson, later the author of a four-volume biography of the artist, wrote in the New York Review of Books that Berger was ‘by turns astonishingly naive and disingenuous’.¹⁷ In the Times Literary Supplement the often quarrelsome art collector Douglas Cooper, who like Richardson was friends with Picasso, considered Berger’s account ‘in many respects perverse, misinformed and misguided’.¹⁸ In the Listener Edward Lucie-Smith, who shared Berger’s distaste for Picasso’s more recent work, found it ‘infuriating’, stuffed with Marxist dogma ‘of rather a shallow and unsubtle kind’.¹⁹

Of the hostile reactions, the most detailed came in the Burlington Magazine from Andrew Révai, a well-connected art publisher, who balked at Berger’s taste for ‘inverted syllogisms, first arriving at a conclusion and thereafter elaborating premises which in many instances have to be distorted in order to fit his case’.²⁰ It is more likely that in Berger’s head the syllogisms worked in the usual way, with the premises coming first. But, having arrived at his final view, Berger then, in writing up his ideas, began with it. The Success and Failure of Picasso was, of course, a polemic, rather than a work of cool, measured appreciation. As much as it presented a critique of Picasso, it was an antidote to the kind of art writing – insular, patrician, impersonal, pedantic – that delights in finding sophisticated ways to say very little.

Berger says a lot: about art as a luxury item, the nature of the male gaze (though not till the 1970s did he use that specific term), the moral importance of art (or the possibility, at least, of its being morally important), the intensity of Picasso’s vision (‘He has been able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse’s head than many artists have found in a whole crucifixion’²¹), the implications of an artist’s choice of subject matter and Picasso’s lack of good subjects in his later years. He wants criticism to be rooted – in seeing, in experience, in beliefs. He also wants it to make a case. In this instance, the thrust of the case is announced in the book’s title (perhaps in Révai’s eyes its first churlish inversion?), and what follows is argued in a style that is direct and highly personal, as he fixes the reader with the full glare of his intelligence.

In one of the most revealing sections, Berger declares that many of Picasso’s paintings ‘will eventually be seen to be absurd’. Indeed, they ‘are already absurd, but nobody has had the courage to say so for fear of encouraging the philistines’.²² While it’s hard not to be struck by the arrogance of the claim that he alone is willing to tell the truth, and of the certainty that he’ll in the end be proved right, he is shrewd about the psychological climate of criticism. For so much criticism occupies itself with keeping philistinism at bay, at once tyrannical and twitchy as it postulates the indispensability of its own explicatory function.

Most long-form writing about art – as opposed to the critical pasquinades that appear in newspapers – is grounded in the assumption that the work under consideration is, even at its most immature or wayward or geriatric, of high quality (even holy). It’s an assumption that produces a forbiddingly descriptive kind of writing, white-knuckled in its emotional continence and sure to encourage the philistines. Berger breaks with this, violently; elsewhere he accords similar treatment to, for instance, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. Instead of being content to look closely at the work and write about it in commensurately celibate terms, he must look at it and write about it feelingly.

One manifestation of this in Berger’s prose is an unusual repetitiveness (not the same as repetitiousness, and more pugnacious than liturgical). Thirteen times in The Success and Failure of Picasso he refers to its subject as a ‘vertical invader’. He borrows the term from the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset – who, with his unapologetic elitism, was an unlikely source of even fleeting inspiration. Ortega y Gasset glossed the term as ‘a primitive man, a barbarian appearing on the stage through the trap-door’; Berger explains that Picasso ‘came up from Spain through the trap-door of Barcelona on to the stage of Europe’.²³

Though ‘invader’ is the more emotive of the two words, it’s ‘vertical’ that is of greater interest. Verticality has obvious associations with intrusion, ambition, power, the concrete and the monumental. We are also likely to associate it with the portrait, not the landscape. The language of morality is vertical (an upright person, ‘that was low’, etc.). The horizontal, on the other hand, is associated with conformism, the prostration of religious devotion, that which can readily be grasped, impotence, and being dead. I’m reminded of W. H. Auden’s lines ‘Let us honour if we can/ The vertical man/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one.’²⁴