MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
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Dedicated to Watching Traffic

(9.-10.3.2023) When Pablo Picasso arrived at Basel in September of 1932, he arrived in his Hispano-Suiza automobile, which was driven by a chauffeur who was wearing white gloves. Picasso was on his way to his 1932 retrospective at Zurich, and he did stay, with his wife Olga and his son Paulo (and probably also with chauffeur Marcel Boudin) at the Hotel Les Trois Rois for one night.
It was the period when Picasso looked very bourgeois, and, as one must add, somewhat pompous, vulgar and arrogant, brief: like a newly rich, ostentaciously smoking a cigar, or like his own vulgar art dealer (if not to say: like a 1930s fascist). This is as far as looking is concerned.
Yet Picasso sounded – as far as we can know, since, at Zurich, Picasso spent some time with artist Hanns Welti, who transmitted what Picasso said –, Picasso sounded as Picasso always, or very often sounded: as someone who loved to speak half-jokingly, as someone who was thoughful, polite, open, but not too intellectual (and this very deliberately so).
What did Picasso do at Basel? He did very little, but something that, much later, he recalled: from the terrace of the hotel he watched the river Rhine, and he did watch the tramways, brief: he watched the traffic. And perhaps he recalled that much later, because he had stayed up all night, after watching the tramways into the night, to see the tramways reappear at dawn. Thus we might say that Picasso witnessed a blue hour at Basel, and that he showed, and this also much later, as someone who was enjoying watching traffic. Which is, thus, the subject of our new visual essay.

1) Watching Traffic – Picasso at Basel (1932)

(Picture: Mattes)


Front of a 1930s Hispano-Suiza automobile

One might say that Picasso, from his room at the Hotel Les Trois Rois (see picture of the front of the hotel looking to the Rhine; on the left), had at least a two-bridges view, as far as the traffic of tramways was concerned. Tramways, in 1932, were apparently passing via the Mittlere Brücke, the central bridge, and the Johanniterbrücke. So Picasso could look to the right, as we imagine, from his room, or from the hotel terrace, towards the Mittlere Brücke, as well as to the left, towards the Johanniterbrücke, to see tramways move, tramways that for 21st century eyes, look very tiny, almost reminding model railways. And Picasso was obviously fascinated by, and he was enjoying the rhythm of tramways, while he was also, and at the same time, looking at the river flowing. This continuous flow must have, on some level, interacted with the continuous, but interrupted rhythm of tramways passing. And one can easily imagine that both rhythms combined might have had a meditative effect on the artist, who showed motivated (or at least said so, since, perhaps, there were other reasons) to stay up all night.
We can show pictures of period tramways here, a postcard, which, however, is somewhat earlier (c. 1910), but shows a tramway on the Mittlere Brücke and shows what Picasso would have seen, if from the other side of the bridge, from the hotel terrace, if he, then, had had a camera with a zoom. And we have found an aerial view which shows the whole topographical situation, because on the right margin of the picture (below), we can see the hotel front (compare with the picture on the left), and we also see the Mittlere Brücke, with just a tiny tramway passing. So that we can easily imagine Picasso being there and looking at the bridge with the tramway, while we are looking on the whole situation from a plane.

(Picture: Postcard, c. 1910)

(Picture: Walter Mittelholzer; ETH-BIB-Basel)

2) Basel – 2023

A Man Watching Traffic (picture: DS)

Looking Back at the Hotel (new building) (picture: DS)

Architecturally the Hotel Les Trois Rois is a composite and combines, today, a relatively new building (originally conceived as a bank) with the classic old hotel tract. If Picasso had stayed in a room facing the old city of Basel, and perhaps in the new building, he would also have been able to watch the traffic, but without the organ point, as one might say, of the river (which was, in the old days, probably much louder than it is today).
We might be inspired to confront the period views with views of today. And this is what I did: providing pictures which I did while looking into the ›opposite direction‹, towards the old city, respectively the ›Fish Market‹, and while ›watching traffic‹. And this is how the scenery looks today, if we look towards the city, with the hotel in our back, and as a barrier between us and the Rhine, and if we only know that the river is there and that it flows…:

Towards the ›Fish Market‹ (picture: DS)

Basic Colors of a City (picture: DS)

3) Playing Traffic

At the time Picasso recalled that, once, at Basel, he had been watching the traffic of tramways, and that he had stayed up all night to see the traffic start in the next morning (he recalled that while speaking with Ernst Beyeler, and also while speaking with Werner Spies), the Swiss board game manufacturer Carlit had already published a board game classic which is called Traffic (see my photo of a box which, accidentally, I saw in a second hand store today).
While talking to Ernst Beyeler Picasso recalled more detail, but Werner Spies describes Picasso, living in Mougins nearby Cannes in the 1960s and early 1970s, watching the traffic on the highway nearby, which makes a sort of landscape scene, but a landscape with the element of passing time, flowing, continuously into the future, with cars indicating the flow (Spies 2012, p. 415).

(Picture: Guy Lebègue)

»1962 war Picasso nach Mougins gezogen, in einen Ort auf halbem Weg zwischen Cannes und Grasse. Sein Haus liegt gut sichtbar über der Stadt, und man erkennt es deutlich, wenn man sich auf einer kleinen Strasse am Fuss des Hügels dem weitläufigen Mougins nähert. Einige hundert Meter weiter, dem Meer und Cannes zu gelegen, verläuft eine Autobahn, die man vom Haus aus genau sehen konnte. Picasso liebte, wie er erzählte, das Hin und Her der flitzenden Autos: ›In Basel im ›Trois Rois‹ habe ich von meinem Hotelzimmer aus den Strassenbahnen zugeschaut. Ich blieb am Fenster, bis der Verkehr nachts aufhörte. Da man mir gesagt hatte, es würde frühmorgens wieder losgehen, ging ich gar nicht ins Bett, sondern blieb die paar Stunden auf.‹ Oft hatte ich das Haus voller Sehnsucht von Ferne wie eine Gralsburg erspäht. Bis 2 Uhr in der Früh konnte man von der kleinen Strasse aus, die von der Autobahnausfahrt Cannes nach Grasse führte, oben im Hügel das Licht sehen, unter dem Picasso urbi et orbi seine Faunsköpfe, seine Atelierszenen, sein erotisches Marionettentheater zu Papier brachte. Die Vehemenz, mit der der Einsiedler an der Côte d’Azur die Zeit ausschöpfte, erschien beispiellos.«

(Picture: DS)

4) Musing on Traffic – a Model Railway

I am fascinated that, in the very same second hand store where I photographed the board game, I also found two objects in a very telling, but somewhat surreal combination: a station clock was for sale here, not a Swiss one but a German one, and a model railway – without actual trains, but – with many lovely details (a tennis court, people waiting at a bus stop, even a small lake, and also a church with a graveyard):

(Picture: DS)

(Picture: DS)

And it is becoming more and more obvious that the main actor of our little visual essay is actually absent, and that it, the main protagonist, is time. While playing a game we may exist outside normal time and daily routine, and happiness might be associated with such state of being. Watching traffic might be a doing which could be situated somewhere between any distraction from daily routine and actual playing, and certainly it, the watching of traffic, is not daily routine. It is distraction (from normal time), perhaps also awareness of passing time, and it is being/existing in time, while not actually experiencing passing time painfully, but rather inhabiting it peacefully, feeling the various pulses of life, and not forgetting about it (which might be a condition for experiencing happiness). A model railway, if it is to be found in a second hand store, can be seen as an embodiment of all these aspects of watching traffic: it is an embodiment of playing, as it is reminding childhood and youth; it is an embodiment of contemplation (and can have even include figures contemplating something within the scenery), and perhaps it is also an embodiment of musing about time and passing time, and in the end it, the model railway, is a painful reminder that, for someone (who had loved it, living with it), time had passed, as well as it is a joyful reminder of time continuing flowing into the future, experienced painfully, perhaps nervously, but occasionally also happily, or at least peacefully – while watching traffic, and while life, felt intensely, still goes on.

5) Watching Traffic Nervously or Joyfully – User Statistics (2010-2015)

Still from The Intern (2015) (picture: DVD The Intern)

Still from The Social Network (2010) (picture: DVD The Social Network)

The principle of ›the more, the better‹ (or also: ›the less, the better‹, ›the more fluent, the better‹) is not compatible with watching traffic peacefully. But it can be linked with joyful emotions, if success (growth or also: degrowth) is experienced (and celebrated) in a team. Various movies display such iconography of watching traffic, which Picasso never got to know und probably would not have enjoyed. At least it is hard to imagine Picasso rejoicing due to his website being sucessfull according to numbers of visitors hitting his site or becoming members of his social network. The traffic being watched should not be linked to one’s projects and status in life, if to reach peace of mind should be a goal. It is a precondition that the traffic being watched is nothing but the given flow of things around an individual, into which the individual may immerse. And it is to be remembered that, what Picasso experienced at Basel was not only traffic, but a traffic itself being framed by, or immersed into the basic rhythm of day and night – while also a river was flowing, endlessly, continuously. Into the future.

Further Reading:
Marc Fehlmann / Toni Stoos (eds.), Picasso und die Schweiz, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern 2001 [with memoir of Erns Beyeler, p. 121ff.];
Werner Spies, Mein Glück. Erinnerungen, Munich 2012 [with Picasso recalling having watched traffic at Basel, p. 415]

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