MAKING A MASTERPIECE

By Paul Gray

The first volume of John Richardson's biography of Pablo Picasso, published in 1991, took the artist from birth to the brink of a masterpiece. In the second volume, A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917 (Random House; 500 pages; $55), Richardson begins with the painting that revolutionized 20th century art and goes on to portray the most productive and aesthetically innovative decade of his subject's life. Reading this story is akin to being allowed behind the scenes at an apotheosis.

"The filthiest studio I have ever seen," said a 1908 visitor to the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, where Picasso worked and lived with his mistress-model Fernande Olivier. Indeed, Picasso's ramshackle tenement had no gas or electricity and only one water tap and a rudimentary toilet. But the studio was an often riotous gathering place for "la bande a Picasso," a self-dubbed group of poets--including Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob--attracted to the Spanish artist's creative orbit. Picasso showed these friends his paintings. One--a large work that absorbed him for six months--elicited only embarrassed silence.

That reaction was better than some others. Leo Stein, Picasso's wealthy American patron, called the painting a "horrible mess." Henri Matisse, with whom Picasso maintained an edgy rivalry, doubled up in laughter when he saw the work in Picasso's studio. Andre Derain, a painter who was becoming friendly with Picasso, warned an acquaintance: "This can only end in suicide. One day, Picasso will be found hanging behind the Demoiselles."

Richardson's account of the origin and initial responses to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a masterful combination of narrative and art criticism. He traces Picasso's inspiration back to an 1863 essay by Charles Baudelaire in which the French poet declared, somewhat arbitrarily, that carriages in the Bois de Boulogne and brothels were the two acceptable subjects for the "painter of modern life." The five female figures nakedly displaying themselves in Les Demoiselles are fairly obviously in a brothel, but Picasso, characteristically, was not content simply to do something that others had done before him. ("You've got to make what doesn't exist," he once said; "what has never been made before. That's painting.") Picasso's original contribution stemmed from his first viewing, earlier in 1907, of African masks and fetishes at a Paris museum. He imposed such masks on the face of two of his demoiselles, thereby rendering these commercial temptresses both alluring and monstrous. Richardson writes, "Familiarity has inured us to the horror that these dog-faced demoiselles caused when they were first unveiled, almost a century ago. It was as if Picasso had unleashed a new race of gorgons on the world."

The world was not yet ready for these apparitions--because of the negative or risible responses elicited in his studio, Picasso did not allow the painting to be exhibited until 1916--but a breakthrough of artistic vision had been achieved. Picasso produced a work that did not resolve tensions and contradictions but flaunted them. And the flattened perspective and angular, almost geometric shapes of Les Demoiselles contained the seeds of Cubism.

Richardson is particularly informative on this movement, which Picasso and the slightly younger painter Georges Braque co-invented. "Henceforth," Richardson writes, "everything had to be tactile and palpable, not least space. Palpability made for reality, and it was the real rather than the realistic that Picasso was out to capture. A cup or a jug or a pair of binoculars should not be a copy of the real thing, it need not even look like the real thing; it simply had to be as real as the real thing."

Cubism could not contain Picasso's restless energies for more than a handful of years, and the latter part of Richardson's second volume shows the artist moving toward a mining of classical images for his own work, trying, as always, "to cannibalize the art of the past and remake it in his own image."

Richardson knew Picasso in the last decade or so before the artist's death in 1973, and his account has a firsthand authority that subsequent biographies will lack. Those casually interested in Picasso may be advised to start their reading elsewhere; Richardson is not teaching Picasso 101 here but a postgraduate seminar that brilliantly corrects and fills in small details of a big picture that students are expected to know. It is a pleasure to see Picasso, his lovers and friends and rivals in the heady days when art mattered more than anything and greatness was only a passionate dream.