Book review
Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography by Patrick O'Brian
published by Collins, London 1976 (511 pages, $16.00)
Reviewed by ROSS FRASER
Anyone might be forgiven for believing it impossible to write a book that had anything fresh to say about Pablo Ruiz Picasso. And yet Patrick O'Brian, in his recent biography of that title, seems to have done it.
Mr O'Brian is particularly informative about Picasso's early years. In a few chapters of readable narrative he brings you from Malaga, where Picasso was born in 1881 - sketching in the atmosphere, the mixed culture of an ancient, essentially Mediterranean city in the far South of Spain (with its natural harbour a great port for centuries before Barcelona was ever heard of) - up to the Barcelona period, the Quatre Gats, the years of male comradeship, on to what was to prove Picasso's definitive removal to Paris and the 'Blue Period'.
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| Picasso the 'insider': with his first wife Olga (Popperphoto) |
If the Romantic doctrine of the dominating influence of the impressions of childhood on the life of the imagination holds true, it is in Picasso's early years that we might expect to find the seeds of that lifetime of staggering productivity. O'Brian provides in his early chapters ample food for thought. He was acquainted with Picasso over a number of years and had access to some first-hand information.
O'Brian's view of Picasso differs to some extent from all those with which one is familiar - with that of Brassai, for instance, whose book Picasso and Company is required reading, and was recommended by Picasso himself. O'Brian saw him not only as a great rebel, but as a man who had, and always retained, a deep, indeed an obscure, religious sense. Picasso rebelled against the Church of course - the deep rooted Catholicism of his childhood - as he rebelled against everything else. On the other hand, O'Brian draws attention to his well-attested sympathy with mystics such as El Greco and St. John of the Cross 'his sense of unseen worlds just at hand, filled with forces of good and evil, a sense so strong that he said it was nonsense to speak of religious pictures - how could you possibly paint a religious picture one day and another kind the next?'
Following from the above, one of the most interesting pages in this long book is that on which O'Brian brings forward as evidence of how vividly present the immaterial world was to Picasso's mind the extraordinary conversation with Andre Malraux (related in his La Tête d'Obsidienne) in 1937, at the time that he was painting Guernica. Picasso was telling Malraux of when, out of mere curiosity, he first walked through the door that led to the Musée d'Ethnographie in the Musée de Sculpture Comparée in the Trocadero and came face to face with African sculpture!
'It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me, right? . . . Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren't the Egyptians or Chaldees? We hadn't understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors - that's a word I've known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown threatening spirits. I kept on staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me - I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing... Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way? After all they were not Cubists. Because Cubism did not exist. . . all these fetishes were for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people not to be ruled by spirits any more, to be independent. Tools. If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them. Spirits and the subconscious (in those days we weren't yet talking about the subconscious much) and emotion - they're all the same thing. I grasped why I was a painter. All alone in that museum, surrounded by masks, Red Indian dolls, dummies covered with dust. The 'Demoiselles' must have come that day: not at all because of their forms, no; but because it was my first exorcizing picture - that's the point.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 6 June/July 1977