John Berger’s exploration of Pablo Picasso was first published in 1965 when the painter was still alive. The 1989 edition, which I read, contains a short opening chapter and a concluding one both written following the artist’s death. I found it helpful to keep the internet close at hand while reading because the black and white reproductions in the book are dark and dreary while the paintings themselves are often filled with jovial detail and lively color.
I am not myself an artist or a devoted student of art history but I found much that was interesting and inciteful in these pages. Picasso possessed remarkable energy and he lived, it seems, only to create. In a way the man was a shell through which surged an unrelenting urge to translate passions, obsessions, and traumas into forms and images. Burger uses the Spanish word duende to name this force. Once a painting was complete, he tells us, Picasso lost interest in it as a creation, though not as an object that possessed value. As a result he became enormously rich and celebrated, surrounded by idolizers but also isolated and tormented. What we have left is the artwork and with Berger’s guidance, the opportunity to judge it for ourselves.
Picasso lived a long life and was relentlessly active. He produced art in a variety of media and passed through numerous “styles” or “periods.” Everyone has their favorite and least favorite of these periods, I suppose. Berger dismisses as “absurd,” for example, the painting First Steps which I loved. I personally grow weary of the endlessly disjointed breasts and buttocks. Berger favors Picasso’s cubism period early in his career, while I, being an old man, found particularly poignant his analysis of the drawings Picasso produced at the end of 1953. These drawings feature beautiful young women and the aging artist in various guises such as a clown or an old man hiding behind a mask, often with a monkey mocking him nearby. Berger writes: “Picasso is confessing his horror at the fact that the body ages and the imagination does not.” How true.
