Nagy Ildikó szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 1980-1988 (MNG Budapest, 1989)
Perneczky, Géza: PICASSO AFTER PICASSO
negotiable. This was the first time that Picasso remained totally alone with art and he realized that he could laugh at himself and at art only in this situation, if a possible third party (the model, for instance) remained entirely outside the vicious circle. Naturally one should see not only a partner, or partner in life, taken from the private sphere and placed into the pictures, but also the news, the excitement, the creative restlessness arriving in the studio from public life. Eros was again aflame in Picasso and perhaps even more intensely than before, but only because the warm light of artistic life had died away, or at least had stopped being the fire transmitting vital energies to him. If compared to Lyotard's 'great stories', then the burning passion that keeps the sheets of Vie Painter and His Model in motion may appear to be a private affair, or the 'little story' of self-reflection; artistic existence is justified by artistic work, or simply by the artist's existence. Until this existence is capable of emitting light by itself, its effectiveness is undeniable, and until it is effective, it is competitive, it remains alive. One can feel how near we have got to the Post-Modern condition. But the date, the years 1953—1954 are too early, and the drawings are yet too closely linked to the crisis of the personal image of career. Picasso could really make his changed relationship with art (and model) the engine of 'effectiveness' only in the great paraphrase series following the years of Hie Painter and His Model, when he was able to create impersonal works of art, almost revoking the perception of routine from the sarcastically painful question of loneliness. Perhaps nothing interesting remains in the series of painted variations, based on pictures by Delacroix, Velazquez, or Manet for the more superficial spectator but routine, the painter's aptitude in reworking with an almost unequalled elegance. It is understandable that commentators with a profound knowledge of Picasso's oeuvre unanimously speak of the compensating activities of the aged artist, of a creative fervour trying to kill the pangs of death by work, to tilt the sand-timer so as to slow down the flow of the grains. But the knowledge of The Painter and His Model, the overture, may help better understand why this fervour of work was most spectacularly manifest in destroying the natural boundaries of the history of art, of its differences of style and periods. Incidentally, there is something grandiosely symbolic in that Picasso, left alone with art, had mostly been painting the paraphrases of the works of old masters for more than a decade — in other words he was painting the history of art. The great subject was not some Utopia of public life, or of painting, but the identification of the model with painting. The painter's model was painting itself and the most consistent application of this idea was for the painter to regard the already existing pictures to be his models. The artist was left alone with his art, yet concrete art was the art of others, the art of the museums. Hence the eclectic retrospection into the past which was also a kind of forward looking — to the canvas. Distances of centuries disappeared all of a sudden, the mark of the artists of old faded and the large number of styles were amalgamated into a harmony above style. The fact of painting made the differences unnecessary and the painter, in the act of painting, is the embodiment of all previous painters. "Down with style!", he grumbled. "Has God got a style? He has created the guitar. Harlequin, the badger-dog, the cat, the owl and the pigeon. Just as I have. Elephant and whale, that may do, but elephant and squirrel? How come? What a wild mixture! He has created what is non-existent. Like me. He has even created painting. Like myself have!'"" 1 These works were noted down by Malraux, as were the following: "A painter can never do what he is expected to do by the people. Style is the greatest enemy of the painter. Is it so for painting too? — Painting can find its style if you are dead. It always remains the stronger."" The ageing Picasso often surprised the people in his company by inventing strange stories of painters moving among styles and periods. What would happen, for instance, if Rembrandt would suddenly reappear and painted one of his characteristic portraits? Would people regard it as a successful forgery? Or a story from the lunatic asylum? "Not at all", answered Picasso. "This only means that painting determines the dates. And not the dates determine painting." 1 " This universal style relativizing time is effective in the opposite sense as well. "The real Velazquezes were actually those studio interiors which I have painted this year", he turned once to Kahnweiler. "If people could understand this, than they could also see that these pictures, this realism is close to Velazquez." The year in question was 1957, the year of the paraphrases on Las Meninas. I have noted these quotations because, though they originate from his late years, they demonstrate that the ageing Picasso had never become a really old Picasso. We can still see the enfant terrible sniffing for his prey: "I utilize everything I like in my pictures. What becomes of them in between, is their own business, they must submit to it." 13 However, one important difference is undeniable. Earlier Picasso used to build thrown away objects, discarded menus, newspapers, toy cars, baskets or playing cards into his pictures or statues; similarly he had put there moonshine, death's head, bull, horse and mythological monsters. Now, crossing the threshold of artistic omnipotence, he started conversing with God and 'building' worlds, ages, cultures and geniuses into his oeuvre. Was it megalomania? Or blasphemy? One should concentrate upon the second part of the last quotation: 'What becomes of them. . . they must submit to it!' If we consider the series The Painter and His Model to be of crucial importance and we interpret the subsequent eclectic variations and the costumed figures, dwarfs, kings and whores of the late pictures as the cosmic enlargements of the studio series, then we say that Picasso acted logically: the solitude of the artist working in his studio, if enlarged, is similar to the solitude of God playing with his creations. Conversely, just as metaphysical ideas may consider the world to be the selfreflection of a lonely God, so it can also be true that nobody is lonelier than the artist who, no longer arranging individual objects or artistic programmes around himself but by interrogating himself, by reflecting only his own motivations, is facing the task of populating the whole world. In this case the statement that no matter how successful it becomes they have to submit to it, does not refer to the objects. This world is he himself, who is nobody and everybody at once. Therefore the things in it are too big to be found either at an arm's length, or as far as the eye can reach. And the one who is reconciled to it, is by now the artist himself. Hence the trivial grandeur, vitality and clownishness. turning into a blaspheming smile, aquiescing in the result, of
