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

Perneczky, Géza: PICASSO AFTER PICASSO

times had; thus the memory of the earlier decades come up in a different light too. Now, through the sheets of Hie Painter and His Model, it is conspicuous, for instance, how much the acrobats of the period were asexual creatures and how their activities were restricted to outlining the contours of this magnetic neutrality and perfection on the landscape, while they appeared in front of the glimmering backdrop. There is no doubt that if Picasso attempted to involve them in conflicts such as those he depicted through the secret rites and catastrophe-images of the inter-war period, then the mirage-like transparent figures would have been put off at once and their ascetically floating contours, sustained only by a poetic force, would have vanished. The enormous female figures of the neoclassic period would have proved to be insufficient to represent real conflicts because of their robust, one-sided build and not because of their fragility. They are mountains much more than women, they are theses which have learned to sit, stand, or rush along the seashore. The only contradiction that they could accommodate, had also filled them; this was the monumentality of a past that demanded respect, as contrasted to the brutality of an artistic radicalism turning against it. Thus the poetic classicism of the pink period and the radicalism of the neoclassic figures have something in common, because they fall short of a complete human dimension. The young Picasso was trying to dream of the totality of the painting of the past in his pink period. At the time of the neoclassical pictures he knew that is was better to lift totality into frightening perspectives since this past was dead, the robust women were Golems run by engines: there were antique props outside and avant-guarde machines inside. As if Picasso had accurately analysed the situation during the exciting years of cubism, between the two periods. But now, at the threshold of his old age, it is as if even this appeared to be insufficient. The situation has made Picasso redundant, and the artist could for the first time cry out in the same way as the classics centuries earlier. And it is as if the perspectives of the studio could change at last upon this cry. We do not see the abandoned old man anymore, the justly, or unjustly raging Picasso, but we may glimpse the personified destiny of myths sustaining art. recalling the setting of the stories of antiquity. These myths were subjected to a severe test in Picasso's studio, he utilized a number of them and he also created some. But there is the final scene at the end of the play: the death of the myths of art. Only the artist and his art survive. But how? Picasso's figures have long been familiar: it is not they themselves but their condition which has changed. This is why only the text they recite is new. They no longer continue to narrate the myth, but they do make a myth out of asking where the myth is. This changes their appearance as well, we see them from a different angle and through a different lens. They do not draw strength from the myths so as to be able to deal with the affairs of the world; having been diverted of this respectable role, they simply remain on stage. Thus, all of a sudden, they come to resemble the audience closely, who were also brought to the theatre by their very existence and curiosity, and who are also not justified by the myth that is already absent from the theatre repertoire. Thus the figures of the play look at the play as the audience do. They have nothing further to do, only to continue playing despite everything. Their role culminates in justifying the play by the fact of it; if this is insufficient, they have to increase the intensity of performance. This is possible even if there is no script anymore, if the prompt-box is empty. Art can even live on performing the comedy which points out the empty prompt-box. Yes, this is a comedy, a vicious circle, from which it is impossible to break out, and though even the increase of efficiency may be consumed once, yet there is the opportunity for the artist to ask why is an increase of efficiency always being effective. If it is not anymore, is that also effective? The vicious circle emerges periodically and moves in a direction we usually call the Post-Modern age. THE MYTHS OF THE MODERNS AND THE (POST-MODERN?) OPPOSITION The question which can be read in Picasso's series The Painter and His Model received a similar formulation in philosophy only 25 years later. I refer to Lyotard's much disputed, yet repeatedly quoted theses by which he prepared the PostModern debate of the eightees.' The central question of this work is also where the myth is. And if there is no myth, how can we use this situation for a myth? Lyotard's voice is just as light and frivolous, his conduct of line is just as sharp and 'offensive to good taste' as Picasso's was in The Painter and His Model. Many people see nothing in him other than a caricature of philosophical sclf-rcflection cultivated since the Enlightenment. For Lyotard was also preoccupied with the issue of the artist and his model, but for him the artist was replaced by the philosopher, whereas the model was human knowledge and the recognition of the value of knowledge. In fact it is possible, according to Lyotard, that our knowledge is still 'old', it is the sum total of the disciplines of natural science accumulated since the Enlightenment, but our comprehension of it is something entirely new. In brief, this comprehension is that whatever we know, we do not consider true anymore, therefore we do not comprehend what we know. Actually our knowledge has been justified and put into operation by two 'great' modern 'stories' ever since the decades of Enlightenment. One has been the idea of social emancipation (the French Revolution), and the conviction that came from it, namely that the sciences should be cultivated so as to make them accessible to everybody. The other 'great story' advocated the cultivation of the sciences for their beauty and truth, in keeping with German idealist philosophy and Humboldt's ideal of erudition. This line of argument began with Hegel's speculations (The Dialectics of the Spirit) and led to the acknowledgement of the rank of knowledge. However, Lyotard's analysis convincingly shows that both 'great stories' have lost their validity in the second part of the 20th century. The views advocating human emancipation gathered a kind of encyclopaedia of knowledge, but this encyclopaedia has collapsed under its own mass and weight; today it would be perfidious to argue for the cultivation of this or that branch of science in order to make the totality of mankind more clever. By our times even the language of science has become so much of a meta-language that even scientists themselves