Original Gangster
At some point it occurs to everyone who hopes to make sense of the Picasso phenomenon what he must have been like as a person. A plethora of clues are provided in a new publication titled "Picasso the Foreigner" (2021), written by Annie Cohen-Solal, and translated by Sam Taylor in 2023.
I count it a blessing that I am not naturally a celebrity hound. The lives of creative people are always a disappointment to me. I would not want to be one. I, personally, have had to come to terms with this reality. Not with the fact that I am not a celebrity, but with the reality of Human Nature (as such).
Painting bums, as I do, would not be possible if I had not come to terms with the reality of human nature. Picasso, like a bum, is only human. Some bums are more human than others and we must forgive the exceptions on account of their genius. That which would be rottenness in an ordinary human being is tragic flaw in a genius. Picasso is one such genius.
Annie Cohen-Solal's ingenuity is to have discovered a police file on our subject (Picasso) in a Paris gendarmerie. Unless I missed something there is no proof he spent a single night in jail. What is shocking is not so much that a rascal like Picasso would be a police suspect, but that his police record is still on file.
Most astonishingly of all, Picasso was never charged with making subversive art. L'État français was, at that time, preoccupied with politically motivated anarchism corresponding to what we now call terrorism. We feel (just a touch) of disappointment. Picasso was not the bomb throwing kind of anarchist, unlike, say Bakunin.
It is not difficult to see how Picasso might easily have been suspected of anarchism. He was a Spaniard in France, and therefore, an immediate outsider. His predicament might be compared by analogy to that of an undocumented alien in the United States today, one who speaks bien Spanish, poco English, and finds himself accused of vandalism.
Picasso was so good that one finds oneself comparing artist contemporaries of his day to him -as if he were the measure of artistic excellence. Possibly, but for me, Picasso adulation reached a peak and then declined. He may have been the best -but he couldn't be all things to everybody. Something in Picasso's mature style was missing, or as I supposed, abandoned by him.
What is missing, lost, lacking, or as I prefer to put it abandoned, in Picasso's peak artistic achievement is that very humanity that makes genius tolerable to the rest of us. With Picasso's showing of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," we all agree, Picasso turned a corner. To me that was the moment Picasso sold his soul.
And wasn't Matisse outstanding playing the part of Mephistopheles? And also trite is how worn-out the "sold his soul to the devil" theme is. If only it were not so apt! Hear me out. What I miss in Picasso post-Demoiselles is the gentle humanity of his pre-Demoiselles art, the Bohemians of Mont Martre.
It is a historical truth that the torch of liberty was kindled in Picasso's heart by France. He was a true "working class hero" -but for a day. In the melee of 20th Century art that followed the torch fell from his grasp. I pick it up where he left it.