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Dedicated to The Art of the Pentimento

(Picture: kunstfreunde.koeln; film by Lene Berg)

(15.2.2023) The affair of Picasso’s posthumous 1953 ›portrait‹ of Stalin (a representation rather than an actual portrait) has been told and retold countless times. But never has it been analyzed, as far as I can see, as something having to do with the obvious pentimenti in the picture. The affair is actually demanding to be told in terms of an affair having to do, well, with the art of the pentimento. Of which, perhaps, Picasso was a master (or rather an apprentice?).

One) Reverential or not reverential?

How sloppily many a Picasso is painted! Well, this is a familiar view. Picasso’s art often does look nonchalently sloppy. Some people did like and do like that (the nonchalence rather than the sloppyness); but other people, and also these people are on record, did not like that.
Picasso’s portrait of Stalin obviously shows a certain sloppyness. The beard of Stalin, initially had been bigger; and one still can see, even in reproduction, that the beard once had meant to be decidedly bigger. Is this a pentimento? Well, it depends on how to define a pentimento. If a pentimento is a something that the artist decided to change since it looked wrong to him, then the art of the pentimento would be the art of how to deal with that correction. To have it show (as Picasso decided to do here), or to disguise it (so that it cannot be seen, perhaps, by mere eye anymore), or to mask it. Which would mean, as it seems to be the case here also and especially, to mask the pentimento, the something that had to be corrected – as something that actually had been wanted. Because it, the pentimento, finally did show as being an integral part of the finished work. As something that had its place in the picture. Since it had a meaningful function within the finished work now.
But the question remains: did Picasso actually want to have this portrait look not-reverential, due to the obvious sloppyness showing mercilessly, or would that be an interpretation in hindsight, a view that, somehow, would put Picasso in a better light (since this affair is certainly one of the most embarassing affairs, perhaps even the most embarassing affair in 20th century art)?

Two) The Art of the Pentimento in 20th Century Art

In Matisse the pentimento can have the function of enhancing the appearence of motion, of movement in a picture. The placement, the gesture of a figure, that had to be changed, thus, would show the art of the pentimento: a something that had to be changed, because it did look wrong to Matisse (as we imagine) still remaining to be visible does indicate that Matisse had sought to integrate that something into his picture, so that finally that something did look as being part of the finished work, not looking sloppy, but as something transmitting the appearance of movement and motion.
Edward Hopper had figures appear and then to disappear in pictures, and the ghost-like effect of such figures appearing and reappearing might underscore the general feel of such picture. The art of the pentimento, thus, may also show in Hopper. Even if actually the artist had wanted the something that felt wrong to him to disappear. This variant might be called an unwanted, but in the end: also meaningful application of the art of the pentimento in 20th century art.
And how about Picasso? What do the sources say? Was the portrait of Stalin meant to be a reverential portrait or not?

Three) To Explain Why It Was Right to Be Wrong

Hélène Parmelin said that the portrait had been done without any intention of irony. Françoise Gilot, who had been present, transmitted that she and Picasso had been joking that the portrait looked like the father of Gilot rather than like Stalin. But after the scandal the portrait had caused Picasso showed to be very sensitive as to the portrait not being liked by communists, and he staged himself angrily as someone whose bouquet, whose present, had not been liked. The important thing is that, in 1953, Picasso did not defend himself in terms of wanting to be not-reverential. And this is very important because this had been the time to say: in view of what we already know of Stalin, one cannot do a reverential portrait of Stalin anymore. And this is exactly what Picasso did not say. He had a sense that revelations on Stalin were about to come, but only at the end of the year 1953, with a growing sense in 1954 and 1955, until finally these revelations indeed did come – in 1956, at the XX. Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Did Picasso ever repent of having done a portrait of Stalin in a (more or less) reverential sense? I do think so, yes, but he did never show it. Only to Pierre Daix and at the end of his life, and rather indirectly. By imagining, with Daix, that everything one did know about Stalin now, in 1972, had been already in the portrait of 1952. This, in my view, is an ironical way of saying: we wish it had been in the portrait, but it had not been in the portrait, and it would have been better to never have done such portrait. But this Picasso did not do. Perhaps it was not his nature to look back and to repent publicly. And he did not go as far as defending himself as someone who had been right to be wrong. In Picasso much is, in the end, ambivalence and not decidedness. It is the pentimento which would actually offer the opportunity to say: this had been an not-revenrential portrait. But this line of defence would be feeble. Because this was not the line of defense Picasso took when it had been a brave act to say: no way of doing a reverential portrait of Stalin, in view of what we know of Stalin. In 1953. And this Picasso did not do in 1953.
Still the portrait can be seen as an example of the art of the pentimento: one can see what it could mean to mask a pentimento, even in this particular case the masking would not have worked out, and today shows only as a theoretical possibility that, in the end, would not have made much sense in view of the historical and biographical facts.

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