Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, Courtauld Gallery - review

Sharp focus on one extraordinary year — in which Picasso turned 20, painted some 120 pictures, held his first major show in Paris, grieved over the suicide of a dear friend and entered his Blue Period — gives rise to an intense and moving exhibition
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21 February 2013

Pablo Ruiz Picasso, born in provincial Malaga in October 1881, was the son of a painter with an inclination to teach his prodigiously gifted boy. When, in 1895, they moved to Barcelona, where the flourishing local economy had stimulated an astonishing artistic boom, young Pablo was already a master of both caricature and the academic conventions of portraiture and genre figures, and a month before his 14th birthday he enrolled in the senior courses offered by the School of Fine Arts. Barcelona was no backwater; English and French influences were readily available, and Picasso was soon as aware of Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Decadence as he was of Goya and Velázquez, of Burne-Jones, Beardsley, Munch, Forain, Steinlen, Kollwitz and a host of others. In his ranging artistic dialogues with these and local artists, the precocity of the boy, constantly growing in independence, tasting and discarding half-digested influences, must have scared the wits out of the Zarzuela world of fin-de-siècle Barcelona.

He was aware too of Munich as an art centre; when he was only 16 he wrote that painting could be studied there “without such fixed ideas as Pointillism and all the rest” — a precocious rejection by a boy who had never been to Paris but was soon to pick up something of Fauve colour and brushwork. It never occurred to him to paint with the fashionable realism of the 19th century, but always to work at the idea, occasionally adopting a style, but always generalised and timeless, and never the particular; when from other painters he acquired stylistic shorthands, it was not to imitate, but to speed change in his own work. His emotional development was hastened by the political atmosphere of Barcelona — Catalan anarchy brought intellectual turmoil and bomb outrages, and the second War of Independence with Cuba (1895-1901) filled the streets with blind and maimed soldiers. In broader intellectual terms the city was brimming with Nietzsche, Strindberg and Wagner, and was obsessed with all things Northern.

In 1897-98 Picasso was in Madrid studying old masters in the Prado, particularly El Greco, and in the autumn of 1900 he was, at 19, in Paris for the first time, to see the great international Exposition Universelle for which one of his paintings had been selected, travelling there with his close friend Carles Casagemas. It was also an opportunity to taste the bohemian life of Paris — a “dirty Arcadia”, as Casagemas put it — to absorb the influences of Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and to establish commercial links that might (and did) result in sales and exhibitions.

Early in January 1901 Picasso returned to Madrid, staying, perhaps, until the first days of May, there to establish the journal Arte Joven (Young Art), and then, via Barcelona to collect all the paintings he could carry (many were very small), returned to Paris to mount an exhibition of some 64 works in the gallery of Ambroise Vollard (Cézanne’s dealer), who remained a supporter until his death in 1939. It was immediately after this show that Picasso abandoned his repertoire of subjects drawn from contemporary urban life and entertainment (with so many “Spanish characters” that he was nicknamed “le petit Goya”). In an abrupt change of mood, from confidence to melancholy, the Blue Period began, the tender ethereal palette complementing his compassion for the pathos of love and death. “It was thinking about Casagemas,” Picasso said many years later, “that got me started painting in blue.” Jilted in love and, it seems, impotent, his close friend in dirty Arcadia had returned to Paris and shot himself in the right temple in February 1901.

The tricks and affectations of Impressionism and its sequels firmly rejected in favour of plastic form and emotional subject matter — foundations for the rest of his development — Blue paintings were far from an immediate success and, penniless, early in January 1902, Picasso returned to Barcelona to lodge in his old room in the apartment of his parents.

It is on 1901, the year in which he trimmed his signature to “Picasso”, the extraordinary seminal year of formidable output (even of three paintings in a day) and, for a first exhibition in an alien country, undoubted critical and commercial success, immediately risking both with his Blue pictures, that the Courtauld Gallery concentrates in its new exhibition, Becoming Picasso. The implication of this title is that between the Januaries of 1901 and 1902, the fluctuating brilliance of his palette with its stark chromatic contrasts, the brushwork broken in a thousand stabs and strokes, or thickly laden to obscure an earlier image on a canvas re-used for the sake of economy (or to conceal too obvious a rejected borrowing), the entertaining freaks that were his Spanish subjects and the references to Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Munch were all abandoned (“Each influence is transitory, set free as soon as caught,” observed a critic of the day) for the Blue Period in which he became the first of the dozen Picassos we all know. In 1904, when Picasso at last decided to settle in Paris, Blue drifted into Pink; in 1906 Pink drifted towards Cubism; and in 1907, grasping the twin inspirations of crude Iberian sculpture and Negro masks and totems, he produced the great Demoiselles d’Avignon, and with this one picture, larded with the new look of Congo barbarism from which Cubism was to develop, he stormed into the 20th century.

This “Becoming” is demonstrated in only 18 paintings, in most of which we see an unsteady progression from quirky Post-Impressionist images with the flavour of Barcelona, the short brushstrokes either a mosaic of colour or swirling to communicate the energetic movement of dancers, to subjects reflecting a mind deep in melancholy, in which the paint ranges from pastel thin to trowel thick, the palette constant in its mournful blues.

The “Becoming” is announced with supreme self-confidence in a portrait of himself painted in Paris for the Vollard exhibition. It is inscribed “YO” in big capitals — I — and signed below in script; it is thus always called I — Picasso, but I think the YO and the signature were not intended to be read together. This defiant YO bellows the ego of the analyst far earlier than Freud. Looking us directly in the eye, Picasso’s YO challenges not only us but the great Raphael portrait of Castiglione in the Louvre; make the comparison, this YO demands, my crude immediate brushwork against Raphael’s delicacy, my jarring chromatic contrasts against his tone, my furious energy against his calm, the work of half an afternoon triumphant over the work of weeks of craft and contemplation. Even the palette is not logically laid out as we might expect, but stabbed with the short strokes of colour characteristic of a finished painting — particularly of La Nana, which may be its immediate contemporary. Picasso’s was a YO about to trample all conventions.

The smaller first room of the exhibition (to be reached, with eyes tight shut, through the second — this is important if the visitor is to begin at the beginning) is devoted to paintings executed early in 1901 in Barcelona, Madrid or on reaching Paris still governed by his Spanish style. His Spanish Woman on a couch is less an evocation of Velázquez than an episode from a Zarzuela operetta seen from a box in any one of the half-dozen theatres where operas were performed at the time; the Spanish Dancer shows the influence of Japanese prints, the French Can-Can is the clearest possible response to Toulouse-Lautrec and At the Moulin Rouge a less obvious response to Degas. Picasso is at his most knowing and most YOish in La Nana, a burlesque dancer who in age, maquillage, mocking stance and costume owes nothing to Degas and deliberately subverts his graceful and pretty idiom.

In the larger room we move on to paintings quite certainly executed in Paris in hasty preparation for Ambroise Vollard, among them the small portrait of a man with the air of influence and power, not Vollard but perhaps a critic, seated against a wall on which hang eleven paintings, some identifiable as painted in Spain and included in the exhibition; other paintings stand stacked. All are small, some very so, and as a document the portrait may tell us something of Vollard’s careless methods of display; it also suggests that it may not have been difficult for young Picasso to bring half the exhibition with him from Barcelona, particularly if the paintings were not framed.

In Paris he added more female figure subjects, some drawn from the broad category of loose women of the stage and street, and of the women’s prison (to which he had easy access) where infants were confined with their mothers. That he was intrigued by the subject of mother and child as de-sanctified Madonnas is evident in two paintings on board (a support that he favoured because paint dried more quickly on it), one a domestic pairing that has about it something of Vuillard, the other in the tragic mode of Daumier.

From then on the exhibition drifts into the very early Blue paintings, the first of the Harlequin-cum-Pierrot subjects and the absinthe drinkers. “Picasso believes that art emanates from sadness and pain … sadness lends itself to meditation … grief is at the well-springs of life,” wrote a sympathetic critic well within his lifetime. Months after the exhibition was over and Picasso was, in spite of its success, living hand-to-mouth, he returned to the suicide of Casagemas, and from the well-springs of grief sprang three post-mortem imaginary portraits of his friend and an idea for an apotheosis — this last and the most beautiful of the portraits mark the conclusion of the exhibition. The apotheosis, The Burial of Casagemas and his translation to a heavenly brothel, is easily taken for a deplorably crude and clumsy joke mimicking the ancestral Renaissance formula of holy ascensions and assumptions, its various zones ill-fitting, its drawing coarse, the brushwork slapdash, interesting only in that its compilation of ideas for mourners offers a foretaste of so many figures in later paintings of the Blue Period. The portrait, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly imbued with feeling, the extraordinary profile affectionately recalled in heavy outline, the bullet wound in the temple conspicuously omitted to maintain the memory, the shroud a mass of flickering brushstrokes, blue and white; here art does indeed emanate from pain and sadness.

This is a formidable exhibition, didactic, intense and moving. The ground is not new, but the particularly sharp focus on it is. The quality of the exhibits is uneven — the Disneyish Child with a Dove is properly described by one of the essayists as “sentimental fluff”, the woman bathing in a tub, The Blue Room, is recklessly distorted (to be forgiven only for the warm sunlight on her belly), and The Burial, if not in poor humour, is a pompous failure — but this reflects the madcap pace of a year in which we know Picasso painted some 120 oil paintings and many others lost, destroyed or painted over, to say nothing of pastels and drawings; the quality of the best is astonishing, even sublime. On October 25, 1901 the 19-year-old genius celebrated his 20th birthday — he had become Picasso.

Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 is at the Courtauld Gallery, WC2 (020 7848 2526, courtauld.ac.uk) until May 26. Open daily, 10am-6pm. Admission £6 (concs available)

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