When I lived in New Hampshire, I acted in a play with a community theater group called The Fifth Wall Company of Players entitled "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" by Steve Martin (Yes, that Steve Martin).
Until then, I had never really paid much attention to Picasso and his works, which always struck me as odd. But I have since developed a new appreciation for his mastery of shape and form.
Another artist I rarely paid much attention to until recently is Andy Warhol.
The cavalcade of exhibitions marking the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973 did little to return him to the exalted position he long held as visionary, truth-teller, and troublemaker. I was not only that some observers believe that the Spanish artist - dismissed now as an elitist, a sexist, a sadist, or merely one artist among a great many others - never deserved that lofty reputation. It was also that the idea that any creative individual can almost single-handedly define the ambitions, ideas, and ideals of an era has been abandoned. Some say good-bye and good riddance - let a thousand flowers bloom.
But this has not happened. Picasso, a titan among the makers and shapers of modernity, has been eclipsed by a very different vision of the visual arts, with Andy Warhol now the defining figure for several generations that conceive of art as appropriation and replication. Warhol mocked and effectively dismissed the idea of the visionary genius embodied in figures as diverse as Picasso, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf with the quip that “in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.” But Warhol’s fame - 36 years after his death - is only rising.
That is not to say that Picasso is no longer a figure with which to be reckoned.
The focus of Picasso as a cultural phenomenon points to what I would call the Warholization of Picasso - a process that in ways both subtle and not so subtle has dramatically altered our understanding of the artist, his work, and his place in the world.
The shift of Picasso out and Warhol in began a generation ago in the 1980s at no less an institution than Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso had by many estimates been the dominant figure since the late 1930s. In 1980, seven years after his death, the museum said good-bye with a retrospective that filled the entire museum. Then, in 1989, two years after Warhol’s death, the museum embraced the new dispensation with a retrospective that filled two floors and was, The New York Times reported, “the most ambitious solo show at the Modern since the Picasso retrospective in 1980. The scale is not so much a canonization as a recognition that the canonization has already taken place.”
It is looking more and more like Warhol has overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century.
Warhol’s sky-high status now has an aura of historical inevitability, as if the brute facts (exhibitions, sales, attention) are what really matter, and whatever one thinks about the intricacies of artistic practice and philosophy is of secondary importance. Warhol’s supporters are inclined to go further. From the brute facts they derive aesthetic arguments. Because he is outrageously famous, it follows that he is profoundly original. That is what aesthetics come down to in the Age of Warhol.
At the core of all artistic activity there is an act of transformation, and one of the great masters of transformation is Warhol. A generation ago members of the educated public may have found themselves daunted by the fractured forms of Picasso’s Cubism - or the babel of language in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or the astringencies of Stravinsky’s Agon - but they accepted the titanic transformations those works involved as a challenge to be explored, debated, approached with a healthy skepticism. For members of the educated public there may be some relief in the immediacy of Warhol’s effects, which a museumgoer can grasp without thought, reflection, or struggle of any kind. After Warhol, confronting Picasso’s enigmas may seem as retro as taking a car trip without GPS.
This is not to say that I do not believe that Warhol has a place in the Great Tradition.
Picasso, in the mid-1950s, only a few years before Warhol began making his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, dollar bills, and movie stars, confronted the old masters with two groups of paintings. The variations that Picasso produced on Delacroix’s "Women of Algiers" in 1954–1955 and Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" in 1957 may not be among his very greatest works, but they are among the 20th century’s greatest examinations of the possibilities and perils of artistic transformation. Picasso struggled to wrest something of his own from a 17th-century masterwork and those struggles involved what is referred to as the grammar of construction.
The grammar of construction is essential to understanding the difference between an operation and a transformation. The grammar of any art - whether visual, literary, or musical - is a system of signs, symbols, and relationships that is always subject to reshaping and renewal. Picasso was aiming to explore and maybe even reconceive Velázquez’s approach to pictorial grammar when he turned his attention to "Las Meninas"; over a period of four months, he produced almost five dozen meditations on it.
"Las Meninas" is a house of mirrors of a painting, and Picasso in the first and largest of his variations magnifies the mirror - at least certain aspects of it. Velázquez painted himself in the process of painting Philip IV and his queen, Maria Anna of Austria (who are seen in a mirror), while the king’s daughter, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, and her entourage take center stage, simultaneously subjects and spectators, seeing and being seen. Picasso - by recalibrating lights and darks and foreground and middle ground, which are among the rudiments of a painter’s grammar - shifts the focus from the infanta to the artist himself. But he refuses to leave it at that. He utterly transforms the figure of the painter, whom Velázquez conceived as a dark, sobering sight, into an explosion of sharp edges and shifting shapes that reaches from the bottom to the top of the canvas. Picasso’s slashing chiaroscuro, which suggests a grammatical extension of Velázquez’s painterly touch, climbs higher and higher, until the 17th-century master becomes a saturnine jack-in-the-box lording it over the royal family. Picasso is telling us that the artist is king.
Picasso is always navigating between a then, what he knows of earlier art and culture, and a now, his own moment. There was hardly a time or a place - ancient Greece and Rome, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands, the brothels of 19th-century Paris and Tokyo, the icons and idols of Africa and the South Seas - that did not engage him and embolden him, but everything he touched he reconceived. In a collection of the lyrics of the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, Picasso stays close to the dramatic naturalism that Velázquez adopted for his own portrait of him, while to accompany the sonnets he time-travels, reimagining Góngora’s beloved as a woman of his own time and place. Perhaps most extraordinary are Picasso’s renderings of the poems in his own calligraphic hand. He dug deep into an earlier visual language and found himself speaking it with new accents and new implications.
Warhol’s supporters, perhaps arguing that he rejected the grammar of construction as hopelessly old-fashioned, will say that he was responding to everything that was artificial, dissociated, impersonal in our world.
Warhol’s slightly off kilter, Day-Glo brilliant pictures change the way we look at celebrity and consumer culture. His work, at its best, transforms us.
Even if we accept that Warhol is a provocateur, is it not naive to imagine that he’s telling us much that we did not already know? Warhol’s admirers believe that he is bringing out the ironic undercurrents of popular culture when he produces repetitious, revved-up images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Troy Donahue. But have we not always known that the appeal of the Hollywood stars is layered, paradoxical, complex? They are doubles - both individuals and icons.
Monroe’s greatness has everything to do with the comic complexity - the shadings and ironies - that she brought to her natural beauty. Warhol understood her genius. In his best early paintings, he underscored it, bringing an easygoing wit to some of his Marilyns. But those who claim that Warhol brings fresh insights to our experience of celebrity are underestimating how layered the appeal of popular culture has always been.
Hamilton Easter Field, an American painter whose prosperous family owned a large house in Brooklyn Heights, moved in some bohemian circles in Paris in the years before World War I. It was probably in 1909 that he commissioned from Picasso a series of paintings to decorate the library of the house at 106 Columbia Heights, apparently eager to see how Picasso’s fractured forms and kaleidoscopic arabesques would look as domestic décor.
Never have materiality and immateriality confronted each other with more poetic brinksmanship than in the paintings that Picasso was making in the years leading up to World War I. The known world dissolves, but the palpability of our experience remains, restored through dramatic brushstrokes that echo the painterly sfumato of Corot and even Rembrandt. Picasso risks shredding art’s grammar but pulls back, the language shaken but intact.
Picasso was still pursuing the discoveries of the Cubist years but now pushing them in divergent directions. In certain paintings, Cubism’s atmospheric grisaille is abandoned in favor of hard-edged, clearly colored elements. In other works, the Cubist monochrome remains, now reimagined with a pre-Cubist solidity to create a neoclassical monumentality.
The Château of Fontainebleau, in the town not far from Paris where Picasso spent the summer of 1921 and made numerous paintings, had become in the 16th century under Francis I a creative center where Italian and French artists and craftsmen forged new variations on the Greco-Roman tradition. Picasso was emboldened by what he saw and more generally by the history that Fontainebleau represented.
But the stylistic range that Picasso embraced in the summer of 1921 has not always found a receptive audience. In the years around 1920 there were critics who worried that he was abandoning the rigors of Cubism in favor of an easygoing eclecticism calculated to appeal to a growing public for modern art. Some of Picasso’s old friends saw a rejection of the avant-garde in his marriage, his move to an elegant apartment on the rue la Boétie on the Right Bank, and his appearances at fashionable soirées.
Over the years Picasso became more and more interested in using his genius as an attention-grabber. He is the typical artist of the middle of the 20th century because his is the success story par excellence. Art, and especially experimental art, has now become a prestige symbol, taking the place, in the mythology of advertising, of limousine cars and ancestral homes. Art is now the proof of success.
There is always a sense in which the conditions of the present color the past, and at a time when contemporary art has become a business bringing in billions of dollars a year, Picasso’s willingness and even sometimes eagerness to put himself before the public can seem Warholesque. The aging artist who in 1958 allowed the photographer David Douglas Duncan to put together a book of pictures, The Private World of Pablo Picasso, in which he puts on funny masks and dances around his studio, might be said to be halfway to the Warhol world. Certainly it is true that there were times when Picasso’s hunger for a public - a public that had been denied to so many avant-garde artists when he was young - became something closer to a hunger for publicity.
An art that comes from the outside is by its very nature socially driven and socially defined. Fifty years after Picasso’s death a lot of people are inclined to see all art in those terms. The transformative power of Picasso’s oeuvre has an engine that has nothing to do with the objects themselves. The seed of Picasso power lives in his self-manufactured mythology.
Picasso always aims to engage us, to convince us, and that can feel like an imposition if not an embarrassment to an audience that has become comfortable with Warhol, whose images are meant to be taken with a “whatever…” informality. There is a lot of comedy in Picasso, sunk deep in the work, but there is no irony.
Warhol, too, is all irony - a deadening, depersonalized irony. You might imagine that the liberals who make up most of the audience for contemporary art would cringe at Warhol’s gleeful presentation of Mao, a totalitarian murderer. But no. The glib chic of Warhol’s images lets Mao - and Warhol, and maybe even us - off the hook. Who could be offended by what amounts to a colorized version of a photograph?
There is no danger of offending in the way that Picasso can offend with his impassioned draftsmanship. That was what happened in 1953, when Picasso made the horrible misstep of producing a gently sympathetic portrait drawing of Stalin shortly after his death. People are still arguing passionately about Picasso’s drawing of a man who slaughtered millions. The impersonality of Warhol’s work puts his Maos beyond the reach of such discussion. Since Warhol has kept Mao at arm’s length - all he has done is crop and color a photograph, more or less exactly what he has done with Campbell’s soup, Marilyn, and Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince - nobody can imagine that he is making any kind of judgment.
Warhol’s output, celebrated by his admirers for holding up a mirror to our consumer society, has left too many sophisticated museumgoers imagining that all artists are essentially social animals, not only in their careers but also when they are in their studios. Warhol’s insistence that art not only ends but also begins in the public sphere has altered, perhaps irrevocably, the understanding of earlier art, and certainly of Picasso. Art has been externalized; it is now a matter of branding, marketing, consumption. And Picasso, in our Me-Too era, is regarded as a compromised brand.
The fact that Picasso embodies our image of the genius is not an accident - or maybe it is an accident of history. Picasso’s rise was contemporaneous with the explosion of mass media. Picasso became the image of art itself. His image and his persona were perfectly matched to the moment.
Genius is nothing more than a social phenomenon. But there are risks involved in focusing on the consumers of culture rather than culture itself. Genius is not a social contract. Genius is an extraordinary quality of mind and imagination. We recognize genius not through a person’s conduct in the world but through the quality of the work that the person produces, whether Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or Picasso’s "Ma Jolie".
Some fundamental unwillingness or inability to distinguish between the artist’s career and the artist’s work now shapes much of our intellectual life, and that can be true even where it is clearly not intended.
Picasso could be almost diffident when it came to advocating for his work, though some of that was obviously the slyness of a salesman who was a brilliant self-publicist when it served his purposes. Picasso was a manipulative man - there is no question about that. That is because so much of Picasso’s manipulation had to do with protecting himself. What really mattered to him were the transformations that were taking place in the privacy of his studio, not out in the world.
For Warhol it was easy, but that was because he was not changing anything, was not transforming anything. Each Picasso is a work of art to which Picasso gives a life of its own. As for the Warhols - the Campbell’s soup cans, the Marilyns, the Maos - they are all the same. They are just Warhols.
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