Pablo Picasso:The Painter as Proteus

By ROBERT HUGHES

All this century, critics have been writing about Pablo Picasso in the present indicative. He was 91 years, six months and 17 days old when the tense changed and "is" finally became "was." It seems like a malfunction of language itself. But by now the doors of the pantheon are sealed, the first wave of reminiscences has rolled by, the wreaths are laid. The dealers have gone down to their storage racks to rewrite the price tickets. The last Picassos have been painted, drawn, etched, cast, welded, thrown or glazed, and the most generous display of creative exuberance in several hundred years has stopped. Picasso's death has closed the period of history known as modernism.

That is not an easy fact to grasp. The world has taken Picasso's presence for granted for so long, in the 50 or more years since he became, or was made into, a culture hero, that it seemed natural to assume that he would not die. So might Tibetans take the daily sight of Anapurna as routine. The gap left by Picasso is not immediately measurable. Since the best of his long life's work survives, very little is physically lost; not even the paintings of his last years, most of which--to judge from what has been exhibited--would not be much of a loss in any case. But a myth has vanished.

The Self. Like some pharaoh taking his goods with him into the winding darkness below the sand, Picasso in dying has removed an idea of artistic activity from the West--an idea of which he was the last great exponent. It has to do with a passionate omnivorousness, a scale of experience not limited by a priori definitions of what painting or sculpture can carry; with an energetic and Mediterranean humanism. The life springs from the appetites, and the art from both. Or now, "sprang"; for no artist left alive has been able to rival Picasso's cultural embodiment of the self. The confidence in which Picasso lived --that everything really pleasurable or painful to the senses or central to one's social experience could be rendered in painting and sculpture--has disappeared. That certainty about the inclusiveness and eloquence of art was shared to some extent by every figure in the heroic years of modernism from (roughly) 1900 to 1940, by Joyce no less than by Picasso, by Matisse and Breton as well as by Stravinsky, Braque, Pound and Magritte. When it faltered, art suffered a slow leakage and underwent that loss of possibility and (worse) necessity that nearly everyone involved with its production, inspection, distribution and consumption feels today.

The image for this owl-eyed, leathery stump of wrinkled vitality was Proteus: the Odyssey's old man of the sea, whose power was to assume any form --beast, wave or tree--at will. He is the tutelary saint of virtuosos, and Picasso's virtuosity is the one fact of modern art that everybody knows something about. Stories about it begin in his early childhood. It is said that his father, a provincial art teacher in La Coruna, Spain, turned over his own brushes and paints to this alarming offspring, confessing that little Pablo had already surpassed him as a painter and that he thus could work no longer. This Oedipal story (the child castrating the father) crops up often in the legends of genius, but it is possibly true of Picasso; he was almost as remarkable a child prodigy as Mozart. The precocity continued, through his studentship in fin de siecle Barcelona, into the Blue and Rose periods, with their dystrophied and consumptive clowns, absinthe addicts and acrobats. By 1907, Picasso's combativeness and his goading sense (which never entirely left him) of being up against history's wall resulted in the wrench of imagination that provoked Cubism and provides an arbitrary point of departure for all that is most convulsive in Picasso's art and modernism generally: Les Demoiselles d'A vignon. His eclecticism --another of the virtuoso's traits--produced incessant raids on other styles, from Pompeian murals, 17th century Dutch etchings and Ingres drawings to Dogon masks and Mogul miniatures. Few great artists since Rembrandt had amassed, and used, such a hybrid pile of objects from art or nature as Picasso; variety was his sauna. He had a mysterious capacity, now documented through an almost limitless range of motifs and graphic flourishes, to become whatever caught his attention.

But Homer's Proteus was more than a quick-change artist. Once pinned down--and the problem was in the pinning--he would revert to his original shape and utter prophecies. So with Picasso; and some of the deepest and most durable work he produced was made when he was, if not pinned down, at least constrained by shared responsibility. Thus his co-invention, with Braque, of Cubism: that system of anchoring and interlocking forms in space that proved to be the first workable (though less systematic) alternative to Renaissance perspective in modern art.

Eros. The view that Picasso's main contribution to modernity was Cubism is not, however, just. Cubism was an inexpressive system, and therein, admittedly, lay much of its beauty. But Picasso was also a master of expression. He could give a bronze skull a terrible, impacted and bulletlike solidity, the very reductio of death; or paint a jug so that it seemed distended with anxiety; or confer on the rounded limbs of his mistress in the '30s, Marie-Therese Walter, a rhythmic and sensuous languor that might otherwise have vanished from the nude after Ingres. No modern artist has been able to pack more sensation into a form than this Spaniard, engaged in his lifelong conversation with Eros and Thanatos.

The full sweep of Picasso's effect on modern art will probably never be documented--not because it is unapparent, but simply because nobody, for 30 years or more, has been untouched by him, so that the lesser details involve meaningless talents and run out in peripheries and shallows. He established collage as a formal device. His Cubist constructions steered the course of modern sculpture away from mass and toward open forms and rigging. His sheet-metal Guitar of 1912 was as prophetic of future sculpture as Demoiselles had been of later painting. His combination of found objects with metal, wood or string, such as his Figure of 1935, gave cues to later junk assemblers-such a summary could go on for pages.

Picasso's effect on the sociology of art was in no way less radical. That restless inventiveness provoked in collectors the expectations about stylistic "turnover" that, now built into the market, are such a strain on more single-minded talents. It is to Picasso that we owe, in no small way, the oppressive image of the artist as a superstud that only now is coming under attack. He has even had a degree of political effect: Guernica, the mural canvas he painted in protest against the fascist ruin of Spanish democracy, is certainly the most disseminated work of political art made in this century.

Picasso's wealth created a flamboyant archetype of success that has affected every creative life for the worse, though nobody expects to be as rich as Picasso. Not even the conspicuous earners of the past, like Rubens or Titian, made that kind of money. Thus out of the production of one year, 1969-70, he exhibited 167 oils and 45 drawings; in all, the gross market value of that fragment of his output was probably about $15 million, and the value of Picasso's whole estate has been guessed at $750 million or more. Although Picasso had long since parted with it, his Nude Woman of 1910 recently fetched a reported $1.1 million from the National Gallery. That is believed to be the highest price yet paid for a Picasso and a clue to future price tags.

By 1940 Picasso was the most famous artist in the world; by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived, in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven major women in his life, Jacqueline Roque, 47, whom he married in 1961. The old man made his final dive into the pre-classical past, becoming more than ever the inaccessible Triton or satyr, Homo Mediterraneus padded in nymphs; that myth was his official interface with an insatiable and by now meaningless public, and the work went on behind it.

Now that Picasso is dead, his life achieves a fleeting equality with the massive profile of the work. Whatever the verdicts on Picasso's achievement may be (there could be no single judgment on his stupendous diversity), his life was epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such daemonic intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants." There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now homeless dybbuk may next descend. "

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