Dietrich / PicassoIn20232

MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

---

Dedicated to Picasso in 2023

A Chinese Conjuror (or Two). Picasso and Showbusiness (Picasso in 2023 2)

(16.5.2023) It is not that easy to write on Picasso in 2023, fifty years after his death. Why? Because art has become something else: it has – largely – become showbusiness. Pop. Pop radio, with easy tunes. Immediate response, and as little thinking as possible.

1) Picasso and Showbusiness

Picasso’s art had an element of showbusiness, but it was – rarely ever – entirely showbusiness. Yes, he did work with many photographers, posing, and he knew how to stage himself. Yes, he did cooperate with a French movie magazine and allowed that Brigitte Bardot paid him a visit – for market purposes (they both had done movies, and both movies had to be promoted).
And yes, Picasso cooperated with other artists, Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev and Leonide Massine, in a ballet called Parade, whose subject was – showbusiness. But the idea of this avantgarde ballet was not only to be avantgarde for its own sake. Avantgarde meant that one was eager to find an aesthetic that was adequate for reflecting contemporary realities, be it showbusiness or something else. It is not the question here, if Cubism was an adequate aesthetic for anything. And it is not the question if reflecting means here: to think about, to question anything, or simply: to show something (as something); there is probably an element of reflection in mere reflection (even if it passes without much thinking), but again: in 2023 art, or better: the art world with its predominating ideas about what the purpose of art is or might be, is not the art world Picasso knew and in which he predominated the scene.

2) To Make People Interested in Picasso

To put a Picasso painting on a handbag is an interesting statement, an art work in itself. Since, at least on some level, the mere act of putting a Picasso painting on a handbag raises many questions: is a handbag the right place to reflect something, to reflect on anything? Perhaps. Is it the purpose of art to be an incentive, for whatever behaviour? To buy something, to reflect on anything? And is a visual configuration whose author might be Picasso (or an artificial intelligence emulating him) a visual configuration of the same type as a mere stripe configuration, an accessory, or some leather trousers?
It might be provocative to handle Picasso like some kind of accessory, but for someone knowing that the art of Picasso could be address anything, could be about anything, or at least be seen in the context of many things, it is a bit boring. But what could be the alternative?

3) A Chinese Conjuror (or Two)

The dress of the Chinese conjuror Picasso provided – as a costume designer – for the ballet Parade is interesting in itself. How did Picasso make that dress? Where did he find inspiration to make that dress?
The answer is complex and would lead us to various settings. I’ll give an more adequate answer to the question elsewhere, but for the moment I can say that: Picasso found inspiration in the showbusiness of his day. And this showbusiness of Picasso’s day encompassed Chinese conjurors who had their appearances in shows, circusses, or a ballet (like Parade, whose artistic purpose, on a metalevel, as one has to say, was to address the realities of showbusiness: its setting, its idea was to show how showbusiness lured people to come to see a show, by giving them tiny bits of that show in advance). Now, in reality, there was a Chinese conjuror who was famous at the day of Picasso: a conjuror named Chung Ling Soo. But in reality Chung Ling Soo was an American who had modelled himself after an actual Chinese conjuror, whose name was Ching Ling Foo. It appears that Picasso’s inspiration for the dress of the conjuror was, among other things, the dress of Chung Ling Soo, who was, actually, but no one knew that, except a few people, an American. Ching Ling Foo, the Chinese, knew that, and tried to do something about his follower/epigone, but to no effect. I am surprised that the story of this rivalry has not yet made into a movie, although there is already a movie about the rivalry of two conjurors, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a movie that has also appear Chung Ling Soo. But it seems to me that such stories that are only marginal stories from the Picasso cosmos would be more adequate – to make Picasso interesting again, to lure people into the Picasso cosmos (learning from how showbusiness did do that). Because the story of these two conjurors shows Picasso in view of the showbusiness of his day. And to handle Picasso, in 2023, only as if Picasso was only, and one-dimensionally, showbusiness in itself, is, as it seems to me, not adequate, not doing justice to Picasso, and it is, again, a bit boring.

(PS: Below I am reproducing my first reflection on Picasso in 2023, written at the end of 2022.)

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

---

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

---

Dedicated to Picasso in 2023

(30.12.2022) For French writer Jean Cocteau as well as for Pablo Picasso, in 1956, it might have been unimaginable that, in 2023, and as far as the state of the arts as such may be concerned, not necessarily Pablo Picasso might appear as still being the towering, the most influencial figure, but rather Marcel Duchamps (and for some, perhaps not even few, even Cocteau might appear as being more important than Picasso, in representing the more dilettante, but inventive, transdisciplinary cross-media artist, who seems to have been a hero for Andy Warhol, for example). In 1956 the faith cultured people had in painting might still have been quite solid. And the tradition could be seen as represented and continued by Picasso. The writers Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau, in that same year, recorded a conversation on the Dresden picture gallery, and could do so – the conversation was published in the next year as a book – confident in believing that Picasso, to whom the two referred to, more than a few times, represented that tradition at their time. Today such faith might seem rather exotic, the skilled artist – and perhaps Picasso might be referred to as one of the most skilled generalists ever – has, in tendency, be replaced by the ingenious dilettante, and painting has, largely, lost its importance as a guiding medium. Still three observations may be named here that seem also to appear as reasons to still come back to Picasso, in 2023, as well as reasons to raise a few further questions as to the status of painting, in 2023.

One) Three Political Gestures

While preparing my two books on Picasso in 1956 (The Difficulty of Seeing as well as Picasso’s Chinese Summer) I have learned that of the three important political gestures Pablo Picasso made in the decisive year of 1956, a crucial year in the history of the Cold War, two seem to be completely unknown, even to specialists, and one is not rarely misunderstood or misrepresented. Is it true again that the seemingly best known figures are, in fact, the least known ones, since everybody only seems to know them (while in fact everybody only knows the myth, which is a transfiguration of the actual historical figure)?
The three gestures Pablo Picasso made in 1956 are these:
1) While remaining a member of the French Communist Party Picasso publicly distanced himself from Stalin in an interview conducted by Carlton Lake at the end of the year of 1956. But due to a lack of historical knowledge, as far as the dynamic of the year of 1956 is concerned, nobody in Picasso studies ever seems to have realized that this public statement on Stalin by Picasso was of any relevance.
2) Picasso did not protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary on occasion of the so-called Hungarian Uprising (as an important popular book on Picasso has it), but only signed an open letter asking the leadership of the French Communist Party to help communists to solve problems of conscience, regarding the matter. And this is fundamentally something else than protesting against the invasion. The French communists around Picasso framed the invasion as a legitimate act to fight counterrevolution in Hungary.
3) The perhaps most important political gesture Picasso made in 1956 was not a public one. After the Soviet leadership had agreed to allow a Picasso exhibition in Moscow and Leningrad – thinking that it was only about a small one – Picasso simply sent a large number of pictures to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Who did not refuse these paintings (as well as other works of art), so that the 1956 Picasso exhibition in the Soviet Union actually displayed a large number of works by Picasso, who could be seen, and also in the Soviet Union, as an embodiment of subjective freedom, since the paintings that could be seen do represent an aesthetic that is built on the subjective creative freedom (of the artist) – in painting. And such freedom, such aesthetic, can be seen as being incompatible with the Soviet regime as such.

At a time the visual artist is, not rarely, staged as, or stages him/herself as an activist, it seems worthwhile to look at the nature as well as at the effect political gestures of artists might have had in the past, and for example in Picasso.

Two) Guernica in 2022/23

While Guernica might be one of the most famous paintings in the world, few people seem to know the early biography of that painting. Which involves, in contrast to the general belief that Guernica is transmitting a pacifist message (this has become an interpretative convention in the postwar era), a tour to the UK, aiming at mobilizing people to support the fight against Franco. And this is, obviously, not a pacifist cause, but one of resistance.
During the year of 2022, in the context of the War against Ukraine, the diarist Sergei Gerasimov has referred to Guernica, comparing sceneries seen at Charkiv with what the painting Guernica is displaying.
The interpretation of Guernica as a pacifist one might be a legitimate one, but not necessarily the only legitimate one, and in various contexts (in a postwar context, for example) changing context may seem to demand to see a painting in a different light (and also Picasso may have seen Guernica in a different light). Be it as it may, but also the history of one of the most famous paintings in the world might not be as all-known as many people seem to think.

Three) The Picasso of Françoise Gilot – Inscribing a Critical Perspective into the Picasso Myth

The aforementioned aesthetic of subjective freedom, a freedom that takes the liberty of also representing the human figure in whatever deconstructed way the artist might think as being relevant or truthful should not be mythologized. And thanks to Françoise Gilot a critical perspective on that aesthetic has been inscribed also into the Picasso myth:
When Picasso, in 1954, painted a series of pictures inspired by Sylvette David, Picasso, according to Gilot, seems to have expected that Gilot would become jealous, not seeing her face in Picasso’s art, but that of Sylvette David. But Gilot seems to have replied to Picasso: ›it is not my face that I am interested in, but yours‹, and I am interpreting this statement as taking the aesthetic of subjective freedom seriously. It says, in other words: let’s look at what you are providing us with, let’s question the implication that such aesthetic is praiseworthy as such (and not its specific merits or results in individual piantings, that, indeed, may seem as more true than common realist representation, but not necessarily are so, just because a certain aesthetic is being perceived as being ›modern‹).

While, in 2023, we may probably encounter exaggerations of the critical perspective on Picasso Françoise Gilot has to be thanked for (because Picasso has become an embodiment also of toxic masculinity), it is to be hoped that a) a substantially critical perspective on Picasso as an artist, taking his aesthetic seriously, might still be seen as relevant; and b) that simplifications (due to exaggeration) might be countered with substantial, multi-faceted biographical writing, which is aware of the ugly scenes as well as of the Françoise Gilot of later years, being on record stating also that, on the whole, living with Picasso had been more positive than negative.

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

---

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

---

© DS