MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Iconography of Sustainability

Excerpt from Iconography of Sustainability 3:

Picasso and Sustainability:

(31.8.2022) There once was a time when the subject of bullfight was a most prominent subject in the visual arts. These times may have passed, although recently Ena Swansea has brought the subject back, and although, of course, the metaphor of bullfight might be referred to as being a part of the global imagination: it was chairman Mao who once described his relation with Nikita Khrushchev as a ›bullfight‹ (with Mao himself as the bullfighter and Khrushchev as the bull (see Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, p. 384; contribution of William Taubman). This was probably referring to the Sino-Soviet split after 1956.

Of course it had been Pablo Picasso (working in the tradition of Goya) thanks to whom the subject of bullfight had gained such prominence in the arts of the 20th century. Picasso might have been the lens, but people from his orbit – such as the photographer Lucien Clergue who did produce very impressive bullfight imagery – contributed to the popularity of the subject as well (and one could also name writers such as Michel Leiris and Jean Cocteau).
The tides may have turned. I am writing about the imagery of sustainability, about the art history of sustainability, and this at a time the popularity of this concept is probably at its all-time height – and I am returning to Picasso, and I am returning to the subject of bullfight. Why is that?
I am returning to Picasso for a number of reasons. He does not seem to be the artist one would associate with the concept of sustainability, but on the other hand, if he would live today, given his vast production of occasional graphic design, one might imagine that he would have contributed sheets not only for the peace movement, but also for ecological purposes. Brief: Picasso is an interesting test case. Is the concept of sustainability completely absent from his art and thinking? And of course it is not. But one has to look carefully to find traces of it.
Sustainability in its popularized sense, today, is nothing but a promise (perhaps a bet) that something will go on and might go on forever, since the future of that something is well-secured. Which means that sustainaibility-thinking, on some level, can also turn into or be named to be a kind of religious thinking. It says that, beyond individual death, there is a future (for the next generations). But it has to be secured and it can be secured (not everyone agrees to that today; and the truth of that promise can only be tested in the future – by the next generation, and it is probably exactly this non-committal promise that makes the concept so popular today).
Picasso, as it is well known, was obsessed with death, and to study his bullfight imagery is one way to study this obsession. Rather accidentally I have stumbled over one particular sheet from his 1957 bullfight series: a rather magnificent depiction of bulls, not in an arena, but out at feed (for copyright reasons I am not showing works of Picasso here, but it is easy to find).
I know that one classic argument for the bullfight is that those bulls brought up to fight, the fighting bulls, have a good life before, appropriate for the species as one would say today. In a jargon that would be rather unfamiliar to Picasso, but in his obsession to cover the subject of bullfight in an almost encyclopedic way, which was probably also a search for his own childhood, since his father had brought him to the arena and had attended bullfights with him – in his search Picasso also had turned to the breed of fighting bulls, to the economy, as one might say as well, on which the bullfight is based, and which has to be organized according to the traditional principles of sustainability. To secure the future of the bullfight.
While I am recalling that, during an argument at school, I even have heard the argument of the good life of the bulls myself once, I am also musing about Picasso attending bullfights with his two sons, Paulo and Claude. We have good knowledge that he did so. Especially with Claude he attended bullfights in a father-with-his son manner in the south of France, discussed with him what had happened in the arena, so that Claude Picasso could relate such scenes later, and one could say that Picasso had cared for a pattern to repeat, a tradition to transmit, within his (rather complicated) patchwork-family.
It is true that Picasso is certainly not an artist whose oeuvre would be centered in an abstract concept such as sustainability. But the essence of sustainability is so fundamental that, on the other hand, one could easily imagine Picasso, instead of ›fighting‹ with the Meninas by Velázquez (also 1957), paraphrasing the Water-seller of Seville by Velázquez, which is so obviously about the inter-generational relation, about the transmitting of something from old to young (so that the future of a tradition can be secured).
Picasso may have been an artist whose work was centered rather in the representation of physical, bodily presence of people (as well as in the repercussions of such presence in the viewer/artist), but while we are looking at representations of Jacqueline Roque, for example, we may also recall what Picasso-biographer John Richardson has said: that Picasso also chose Jacqueline as his second wife in the end, because he knew that she would care for his oeuvre. After his death. Which she did. And we realize that the concept of sustainability, the thinking beyond one’s individual death, was not at all absent from Picasso’s thinking.

(Picture: Juan Pablo Zumel Arranz)

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