Nagy Ildikó szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 1980-1988 (MNG Budapest, 1989)

Perneczky, Géza: PICASSO AFTER PICASSO

regard the sheets of the scries The Painter and His Model as Picasso's variant of the calligraphic 'tachism' fashionable at the time. However, the suggestive content of the drawings hardly allows this and, it should be immediately added, such a view pulls the drawings far away also from the aristocratically elegant tracing of the Vollard Suite. The Picasso of the early thirties represented an artist working in his studio yet with the attitude of the mature man and successful artist, almost with the halo of a demi-god. In contrast to this representation bathed in a mythical light, the male figures of The Painter and His Model are all old, cripled, deformed, fat or dwarfish. This gallery of artists is complemented by a deplorably stupid company of snobs, critics and amateurs visiting the studio. In some sheets the role of the artist is taken by an ape, but even the drawings where the model's partner is a cat and the female nude is playing with a kitten are not more consoling, for it is only the models who retain their purity and beauty. Though they are no longer placed beside artist-heroes, dignity still radiates from them. The radiation of the female body is the sun that conjures light into the world of art so sarcastically represented. It is plausible to seek for the difference in content between the Vollard Suite and Tlie Painter and His Model in the conditions under which they were created. Picasso's happy liaison with Maria-Theresa Walter extended over the years when the Vollard Suite was made. TJie Painter and His Model was born right after Françoise Gilot had left Picasso taking her children with her (the first such break in Picasso's life that he had not initiated himself)- It is obvious that this disappointment greatly affected the artist, now past his seventieth year. After the break Picasso behaved badly, almost cruelly towards Françoise." yet he did not take vengeance on the female figure of the drawings. All his bitterness went into the representation of the ageing and ugly figure of the artist. Through the series there is no direct hint of self-portrayal in the artist's figure, no similarity whatsoever. Only the basic situation betrays defeat. Often the male figure is physically dwarfed beside the female model, who is apparently beyond the reach of the perfidy of the environment: her beauty comes through almost with the indifference and invincible power of nature. Apparently Picasso was acting with much greater sincerity and self-mockery, perhaps with self-knowledge, in his work than in his human relations with his environment. Everything which had been silenced by his hurt pride, was turned into obvious complaint, mockery and self-derision in the drawings. Therefore the meaning of Hie Painter and His Model can also be interpreted as if it were a series of self-mockery, almost of caricature on the first level, that of the direct meaning of the pieces, which was subsequently supplemented by a number of turns already known from his earlier works. Even the circus artists dreamed of as spotless in the pink period (as women acrobats dressing or the clowns watching them or strongmen showing off their strength), and the artists represented with heroic traits in the earlier decades (now only as a swarm of locusts sponging on the beauty of the female body) were included in the cycle. The new motif of the series is the 'civilian' world penetrating the domain of art, the representation of critics and friends of art. As if the artist himself were not dilettante enough, these priggish figures emphasize the awkward impudence of the work being done in the studio. All in all this series shifts towards a mocking vulgarity and a mean incompetence when compared to the earlier works. The acrobats of the pink period were the inhabitants of a fabulously cheerful suburban desert; the figures of antique beauty of the Vollard Suite were the inhabitants of a closed world inaccessible to them; here, in Hie Painter and His Model the hermetic caul is ruptured. The scenes are represented at arm's length, as if we were spying upon them, and the artists themselves figuring in the drawings are presented as if their art had been exhausted by recording what they had seen while watching. The role of action has also grown. Earlier the figures had represented conditions rather than events; now the narrative content of the scenes has become so colourful and suggestive that the sheets of Hie Painter and His Model may even be described as full of gossip. Naturally this had an effect upon the atmosphere surrounding the female figures too. These women — though they are still beautiful — do not possess the aura of Olympian beauties anymore. Not only do their features show occasionally surpisingly individual characters (as in the sheets dated 3.1.54; 5.1.54; or 10.1.54.III.) but their bodies have also lost the calm of antiquity that could be still felt in the Vollard Suite. These women — particularly in the dressing scenes, or in poses that repeat circus spectacles — are female bodies different from canonized beauty, radiating warmth, offering strange perspectives due to chance movements and appearing almost vulgar, sometimes resembling the intimate paintings of the Impressionists (the sheet marked 10.1.54. XVI., for instance, recall Manet's Olympia, and the sheets dated 6.1.54. of the toilette scenes of Degas). And wherever the cool indifference of the earlier periods, or the diamond-near calligraphic hardness of the lines is retained, Picasso lends a new meaning to this distance-keeping technique. In such cases the beauty of the female figures produces a sharp contrast to the mediocrity of the company engaged in various activities around them. In some sheets the painters and critics are so involved in the study of some detail of the painting that they completely ignore the spectacularly beautiful model, the starting point of the picture itself. It was not accidental that the first reactions they drew emphasized the humour in these sheets. The blindness of the critics and the victorious radiation of reality offered a farcical near-caricature situation but it also appeared as if Picasso had treated the struggles of studio work, its emotional and intellectual torture as prey for the first time in his career. As if the entire avant-garde appeared as dwarfs and cripples or as a society of apes accepting the teasing play of female models. One often has the feeling that Picasso was actually more preoccupied with these distorted figures than with the female models, because he presented them with a greater force of conviction and in a greater variety than the female figures who resemble one another in their beauty. It is with these impressions that the more indirect meaning of the series begins to unfold, a grotesque world which no longer reflects the personal frustration of the ageing Picasso anymore. It is as if the pathos of the earlier 'Parnassist' periods and of the decades spent in the struggles of the avant-garde were reversed. Even if Picasso himself may not have changed, the