Confrontation does not necessarily mean a battle, though Picasso, supreme egoist that he was, often regarded his encounters with the art of the past as just that. Throughout his long life, his relationship to history, as well as to his contemporaries, was combative. He also understood from early on that he could only play his own game, and could not be Goya, Velázquez or El Greco; there was no point in trying to paint like them. He could not compete on their terms, however much he recognised them, borrowed, quoted and stole from them, however much he looked at them, admired and - if truth be told - sometimes envied and hated them.
As absent, honorary director of the Prado, Picasso said he was director of a "phantom museum". In a sense, all artists are. Each has a head full of other people's works, talismans and obsessions. The Prado show takes us through key periods of Picasso's career, from beginning to end, along the length of the Prado's spine, in groupings, juxtapositions, collisions. First of all, pink and blue period Picassos are greeted by El Greco's Holy Trinity. The sallow skin of El Greco's dead Christ and the pained, angular distortion of his limbs finds its echoes in the pose of Picasso's 1904 Woman Ironing; El Greco is somehow in the feet of the Adam and Eve figures in Picasso's 1903 La Vie, and there in the 1906 Boy Leading a Horse.
As the show progresses, affinities and confrontations develop, are sublimated, and become a matter of the fall of a bit of drapery, or a look, a shared subject, a touch, a question. There are moments when paintings appear to be having wonderful conversations. Picasso's 1908 Carafe and Three Bowls hangs with a deceptively simple Zurbarán still life of a row of pots and vessels, and another, by Luis Egidio Meléndes, depicting a basket and jug, herrings and a hunk of bread. Each painting is in a completely different register. Their differences, and what they share, is a beautiful game of reciprocation.
This grouping is not about Picasso and the past, so much as a conversation between three paintings, each of which is present; three psychological spaces, three ways of looking. Each has its own weight. Oddly, it is the Zubarán, rather than Picasso's proto-cubist composition, that seems the most radical and stripped down, the most modern.
Playing up differences is as significant as pointing out affinities, although echoes abound: the roundedness of a bare shoulder in a Veronese against the uninflected solidity of a 1920s figure by Picasso; the blank stare of Picasso's son Paolo, dressed as a harlequin, against the leer and bright eyes of a Velázquez drunk. Sometimes the connections are a strain, and some comparisons are odious. Picasso could not compete with Velázquez. He knew there could be no contest when, in 1957, he embarked on a long series of playful transcriptions and variations on Las Meninas, Velázquez's masterpiece.
Las Meninas is unsurpassable and profoundly complex, and hangs at the Prado some yards from Picasso's variations on it. Velázquez stares out of the painting, over the heads of the tourists and students, and through the doorway opposite sees his own distant reflection, his painting's distorted, parodic double. What, one wonders, would Velázquez have thought, to see himself and the scene he was busy depicting in Las Meninas, treated so summarily by Picasso? What would the drowsing mastiff in Las Meninas have thought, turned into Picasso's silly, scampering dachshund?
Sometimes, the only way out for Picasso is parody, comedy, buffoonery. As well as having Velázquez glowering at him from a distant wall, Picasso also has to contend with being stared down by a large, full-length portrait of La Infanta doña Margarita de Austria (who also appears in Las Meninas, and Picasso's versions of it). Until recently attributed to Velázquez, this portrait is now thought to be by Juan Bautista del Mazo. So good is it, one might add, that it kills most of what's around it. Picasso is suddenly caught out here, between the real Velázquez and another possible pretender - one as good as Velázquez. The problem of Picasso's reworkings is that they appear somehow glib and inauthentic exercises in style.
But a big, bouncy, wonky-arsed late Picasso nude can and does work next to Goya's oddly boneless and neckless Maja Desnuda. Both paintings succeed in sexiness where they fail in anatomy. In the final confrontation at the Prado, Picasso's oafish 1967 Musketeer, crude, corpulent, slovenly attired and slovenly painted, somehow stands his ground against an impeccable nobleman by El Greco. It is almost a before-and-after pairing: before and after drinking, before and after the madness of modern art.
The madness of modern art is one thing, the awfulness of the world another. The merits or otherwise of Guernica as a painting are less important than its status as an icon. For a long time in Madrid, this huge cartoon was shown behind a thick and distorting layer of bulletproof glass, and flanked by two Guardia Civil.
Even now, calls for the painting to be shown in the Basque region are sidestepped or ignored. The glass and the guards have gone, and the rope barrier in front of the painting has been inched closer to Guernica's surface, but is it more approachable?
It is very difficult to look at Guernica without the weight of its symbolism, its intended resonances and the painting's history, the meanings that have accrued to it in the 69 years since it was painted, getting in the way. One thing is certain. Neither Guernica, nor Picasso's later Charnel House or his feeble Massacre in Korea, can compete with Goya's Third of May (nor, come to that, can Manet's stilted 1869 Execution of the Emperor Maximilian). None can cope with Goya's image in terms of human feeling, which, as much as it might be to do with our identification with the victims in the painting, is also about the suddenness of the image, its immediacy, the palpable sense of shock and fear Goya has orchestrated in it.
Guernica is somehow too elegant to encompass tragedy. Nearby stands a peculiar 1933 sculpture, Woman With a Vase, that is much more disturbing. The bronze figure, more than two metres tall, is like a woman made of cloaca. It is an obscene and deathly shadow. Strangely, it was placed at Picasso's grave. She seems to have returned, to stand before Guernica as a rejoinder from the past. Somehow, here, Picasso confronting himself is a more severe test even than history.
There are great Picassos, good Picassos, bad Picassos, and, worst of all, mediocre Picassos. Good; Picasso was vulnerable and flawed, as an artist as well as a man. This is a great show, and a great lesson in what John Berger once - and at the time notoriously - called the success and failure of Picasso. Picasso's real failure, if we can call it that, was a matter of his period, what Harold Bloom would call his "belatedness", a condition we inevitably share. It is inescapable.
[More links: Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofia]
1 comentário:
Just for the record, HOME for Pablo Picasso should be Malaga, but Madrid will just do this time...
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