Picasso Pablo - Pablo Picasso

Arthur C. Danto

The lives of heroes can take the form of chronicles of high deeds of the memorable victories and the great overcomings, and, of course, if the hero is tragic, of defeat and death. If the heroes are artists, the available alternative form might be the retrospective exhibition, in which the great works the masterpieces define, like the profile of mountain ranges, the peaks and valleys of breakthrough and achievement, failures if there were failures, and recoveries. But neither form tells us much about the life of the hero as something lived what it was like to have been him or her. Heroes are human, after all, or, to use Nietzsches phrase, human, all too human: composites of body and soul, with needs and dependencies: parents and siblings, teachers and mentors, friends and enemies, lovers and rivals, children, doctors and retainers, even horses and dogs. We can imagine a life told through the medium of habitations birthplaces and resting-places, and the gazetteer of countries and cities that left their marks on the heros evolving soul. Picassos biography, ideally, is a library of each kind of volume where he lived, when and with whom, as well as all the sketches and masterworks, the influences upon him and his impacts on others, and the differences it made that he lived and created what he did when he did it. It is hard to imagine a nutshell format, in which it can all be told at once. A volume of misperceptions can tell us as much as one consisting only of the truth and nothing but the truth.

Mary Ann Caws has wisely chosen the format of the bande Picasso the group of copains that formed the Picasso circle early on, which for that reason differs from the gallery of his women, who replaced and succeeded one another, and could not have formed a company, since they came on the scene at different stages of the artists life, bringing into it different families and, as women will, different styles of life. I say wisely, for the hero with his band already has the aura of a myth of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Socrates and disciples. What is striking is that the bande Picasso had no painters in it, as well as no women, though painters and women were certainly part of Picassos life at every stage. The band was made of up of poets, the studio in the legendarily rickety architecture the Bateau-Lavoir on Montmartre was a gathering place for poets, and said as much on its door. Picasso and his art were their subject as well as their criterion, and it is fair to say that Picasso and their relationship to him was the substance of their life as thinkers and writers. They were Max Jacob, Andr Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire, although others came and went. One can think of the life on the model of an opera, with Picasso as hero surrounded by a chorus of poets. The setting is a studio. Paintings lean against the walls. The company eats a frugal repast in front of Les Demoiselles dAvignon. A dog sleeps under the improvised table. Fernande Olivier sleeps under Moroccan blankets. As the opera plays itself out, the scene changes. In Act II, perhaps, Guernica has replaced the Demoiselles, Dora Maar has replaced Fernande, Cocteau has joined the chorus, Picasso is bald, there is a new dog. But the form of life is essentially unaltered. The Bateau-Lavoir was the default condition of Picassos life, the place, as he later acknowledged, where he was happy, the place, finally, where he was Picasso.

Cawss operatic choice, as I think of it, was astute, for it enables her to bring into the discussion her unmatched knowledge of French poetry and literary movements. And it makes evident for the readerhow, more than the life of any major artist of modern times, Picassos was a life of literature. In addition to the poets of the Bateau-Lavoir, there were Blaise Cendrars and Gertrude Stein, Ren Char and Andr Breton. Nothing remotely like this was true of Picassos only true peer as a painter, Henri Matisse. Bloomsbury was a mix of painters and writers, but not even Virginia Woolf was the solar centre of others, following their own orbits. The New York Poets formed a circle around Fairfield Porter, who lacked a heroic dimension. In the end, the chorus defined the hero in the operatic life of Picasso, and Mary Ann Caws has written its protolibretto. It is a life of the artist unlike any other.