Picasso from the waist down

THE NEW YORK SUN
October 31, 2007

'Sketching A Portrait Of Picasso'
BY JAMES PANERO

John Richardson's multitivolume "Life of Picasso" has become an institution. Mr. Richardson, who has even set up his own foundation — the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research — has been researching the life for 25 years, and his work has certainly resulted in our more exhaustive study of the artist. "Volume I: 1881–1906" was published in 1991; "1907–1916: The Painter of Modern Life" came out in 1996. The new, third volume of his study, "The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932" (Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages, $40) surveys the midpoint of the career of Picasso, who was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Though this period is not Picasso's most engaging one (we can rank it after the Blue Period, after Cubism, before "Guernica"), Mr. Richardson still knows how to deliver his subject matter. In his hands, Picasso remains the priapic visionary who translated the sexuality of Andalusia to canvas, the mystical shaman who fought evil with evil, the sadistic lover who admired the Marquis de Sade, and the superstitious clown who refused to give old clothes to the gardener for fear that "some of his genius might rub off on the wearer."

Picasso, as Mr. Richardson explains, came from sybaritic stock: He was a "Peeping Tom like so many Andalusians," Mr. Richardson writes, who "suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male." For an Andalusian faced with a virtuous fiancée, Mr. Richardson continues, "regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response." Mr. Richardson's explanations would not exactly hold up in divorce court, indeed they can be downright silly, but his passion can come as some relief to the cooler and detached voice of much contemporary biography.

Yet for all that virility, the Picasso we find at the start of this new volume seems oddly emasculated. While his Cubist collaborator George Braque and the poet and friend Guillaume Apollinaire fought at the front, Picasso escaped to the safety of Rome. He settled into the world of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, accompanied by the composers Erik Satie, the choreographer Leonide Massine, and the dramatist Jean Cocteau, whom Mr. Richardson belittles as a "pampered, high-society homosexual … trying to gatecrash the avant-garde."

Picasso soon translated his accomplishments on canvas into tableaux vivants onstage. For his first production, "Parade," he designed innovative Cubist costumes. He also drew inspiration from the Farnese Hercules in Naples, inaugurating a classical period in his own painting. Finally he fell for a petite Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova, who became his first wife and who lifted Picasso out of his bohemian milieu.

Picasso painted the first portraits of Olga in the reverential style of the beaux arts. For this future minotaur, who would one day plunge "his monstrous, taurine penis," as Mr. Richardson delicately puts it, into a lover's "tumescent folds," his visions of the early 1920s were rather staid. Olga's transformation into a vagina dentata was still half a decade away.

Picasso never had much of a personality outside of the studio or the bedroom, and the glamorous society that surrounded him during this period clearly sucked up the artistic air. Picasso could paint remarkable work — there is "The Dance" of 1925 — but such achievements were rare, and Picasso can seem, in Richardson's telling, almost somnambulant. Picasso's friends, including Braque, were likewise left wondering what had become of the great artist: "Picasso's all too evident absorption into Diaghilev's effete world," Richardson reports, "left Braque worried about the state of his old friend's integrity."

This all changed, Richardson writes, on a "propitious" evening in January 1927 — propitious for the biographer, certainly, and propitious for anyone who prefers Picasso from the waist down. While cruising for love along the boulevards of Paris, the 45-year-old artist came upon Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was 17, "an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body — big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus." Ever the willing accomplice, Mr. Richardson is never at a loss for words when it comes to Picasso's bed games. After a brief attempt at domestic normalcy, "For the rest of Picasso's life sex would permeate his work almost as cubism did … As he once joked, he had an eye at the end of his penis." Mr. Richardson excels at writing from this point of view.

Picasso's mistress for nine years, Marie provided a counterbalance to "skinny Olga." She encouraged an avalanche of work and inspired Picasso "to unleash his sexuality and harness it to his imagery," which was often wickedly brutal. Picasso felt free to paint the most memorable work of the period, including "The Dream," now in the possession of the Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn (who in 2006 put his elbow through it), and the whimsical "Bather with a Beach Ball," now at the Museum of Modern Art: "In this glorious work," Richardson writes, "Picasso has pumped Marie-Thérèse so full of pneumatic bliss that she looks ready to burst." For Picasso this was as sweet as it got.

In his book "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy," Peter Gay takes stock of Picasso's achievement: "Of course, obviously, for any painter major or minor — or any poet or playwright — sexuality and aggression are indispensable raw material. What distinguishes Picasso was the animation, at times the brutality, with which he fixed love and hate on canvas and paper."

At issue, however, is how literally we should interpret Picasso's translation of emotion to paint. The poet and critic Roland Penrose once warned, "It would be too mechanical to read [Picasso's] portraits as a direct paraphrase of his troubles with one mistress or another; he was too imaginative for that." Richardson has build a great biography out of great gossip, but by looking for genius between the bedsheets, his ribald "Life" never quite credits the artist's imagination with the autonomy it deserves.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'

THE NEW YORK SUN
Books

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'
BY JAMES PANERO
March 14, 2007

The problem with art biographies is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, art biographers toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink — the models and the mistresses, the comrades and the critics. But without direct contact with the work — the reason we are reading the biography in the first place — can an art biography ever really describe the heart of its subject's life? And I'm not talking about including a few color reproductions.

In just more than 200 pages of "Marc Chagall" (Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95), Jonathan Wilson solves this problem with an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist's life. It is a book that looks out from the artist's work — the literalization of an oeuvre.

"The man in the air in my paintings ... is me," Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. "It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I'm not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own." In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist's life, that's where Mr. Wilson finds Chagall.

Mr. Wilson filters his story through a Jewish lens. His biography is just one of several dozen new and forthcoming books on "Jewish Encounters" published by Schocken/Nextbook in a series edited by Jonathan Rosen. Rather than limiting the narrative, Mr. Wilson's focus reveals Chagall in high relief. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the "twilight of a Jewish world."

In life, as in his art, Chagall floated over adversity. He skirted the race laws of Imperial Russia to study art in St. Petersburg. He made his exit of the Iron Curtain just as Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Academy" was moving in on his Vitebsk Free Academy. He took his last step on Vichy soil, with the help of Varian Fry and other American supporters, just as the Reich was sealing up the French borders.

Chagall also floated over distinctions that might have hemmed in more Earth-bound personalities. "His work and his life both reveal a reactive desire to be a Russian to Russians, a Jew to Jews, and a Frenchman to the French," Mr. Wilson writes. In his paintings Chagall often incorporated the figure of Jesus, whom he saw as the embodiment of Jewish suffering as a stand-in for the artist and, after the war, the Shoah. "[T]he Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there." Mr. Wilson argues that as a Jew working in Christian iconography, Chagall was like Irving Berlin, his painting "White Crucifixion" like the song "White Christmas." For Chagall, this meant imagining a "pre-Christian Jesus" who was "a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the modern world," as the artist said to Partisan Review in 1944.

In subject matter, Chagall drifted between the ascetic parameters of high modernism and the nostalgic sentimentality for a lost home. For art purists, this has been the one fact that grounds Chagall's reputation. The critic Robert Hughes once called Chagall "the Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism." But Chagall was more than a mere Jewish Surrealist, as Mr. Wilson writes, "preserving it in schmaltz." A novelist and literary critic, Mr Wilson himself floats above the etiquette of art biography to write magical paragraphs like this one:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality ... has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desper ately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists — think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Mr. Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that "sophisticated art aficionados weren't supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark." Two hundred pages later, Mr. Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skies above Vitebsk, where Chagall belongs.

'Like the good guys winning a shoot out'

James writes:

Sorry if I'm riding a little high today. Over at the Social Affairs Unit blog, published out of London, Christie Davies has written a stellar review of The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent, the anthology I edited with Stefan Beck.

The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent is the inspiring story of a conservative student journal that took on the oppressive left-liberal administration at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, an American Ivy League University founded in 1769, and won. It is a very American story, rather like the good guys winning a shoot out in a western. It couldn't happen in supine Britain because we lack America's free institutions, confidence in private initiative and willingness to fight. Once upon a time we had all these good qualities but now we are hollowed out.

You can catch the entire review here. Christie well captures the spirit of the newspaper. It's a quirky publication. Dara and I just spent the weekend in Hanover, New Hampshire and had dinner with the Review's 40 or so undergraduate editors and staffers--plus a certain Jeffrey Hart. I am pleased to report that the newspaper is thriving. (You can check out the Review's website here). Love it or hate it, the newspaper remains strong after over 25 years. You've got to respect that. (And I think it's even earned Dara's respect.)

One of the surprises of the evening came out of a conversation I had with Professor Hart, Dartmouth's most famous conservative academic. It's well known to readers of this weblog that Hart has fallen out with the Bush administration and the evangelical wing of the conservative movement. If you haven't done so already, you can read my profile of Hart from the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

Anyway, the big surprise of the evening came out of Hart's comments on the presidential primaries. Who would Hart be supporting in 2008, I wondered? McCain (whom he backed in 2000)? Giuliani, perhaps? No, the answer is Obama, followed by Edwards. In fact, Hart says he will support any Democrat candidate who has the ability to unseat a Republican. That also goes for the Senate and House. Even if (birthday boy) Abraham Lincoln were running, Hart says, he's voting Democrat until Republicans dissociate themselves from their evangelical base.

Strong words from a one-time speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan.