Maxwell Carter
PICASSO AND THE PAINTING THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD
By Miles J. Unger
Illustrated. 470 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32.50
By Miles J. Unger
Illustrated. 470 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32.50
In
biography, struggle is invariably more interesting than success. The
most irresistible memoirs prefigure celebrity entirely, from Moss Hart’s
“Act One” and Emlyn Williams’s “George” to David Niven’s “The Moon’s a Balloon” and Dirk Bogarde’s “A Postillion Struck by Lightning.” These are tales of lightness, possibility and wonder. It was in this spirit that I welcomed Miles J. Unger’s
“Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World,” which traces the
artist’s childhood in Spain through the creation of “Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon” in 1907, to the otherwise heaving shelves of Picasso
literature.
Picasso’s pre-1900 work is marked by his father’s art-school conservatism, as seen in the dark, unpainterly “First Communion” of 1896 and “Science and Charity”
from the following year. Picasso was liberated from the 19th century’s
heavy-handed conventions in Paris, which he first visited with his
friend and fellow aesthete Carles Casagemas in October 1900. There he
found inspiration in the Louvre, in the retrospectives of the flickering
Impressionist generation, in his acquaintance with would-be painters
and poets and, it appears, in the invigorating camaraderie of la Vie
Bohème.
On the way to the hothouse, proto-Cubist summer of the “Demoiselles,” the shocker of his book’s title, Unger ably covers the El Greco-influenced “Blue” and “Rose” periods; the patronage of the Steins; and Picasso’s path-altering discovery of African art in the collection of the Trocadéro museum, the precise dating of which has divided scholars.
Unfortunately,
insistent platitudes and pigeonholing tend to mar Unger’s efforts.
Picasso is “bathed in the dazzling aura that surrounds all famous men”;
Montmartre is the “ground zero of the worldwide avant-garde”; Picasso is
compared to “an athlete before the big game,” an actor on “the stage of
history” and “an ingénue making her way to Hollywood.” In one passage,
Picasso’s rivalry with Matisse is described as an aesthetic “game of
thrones.” Elsewhere, Picasso and Braque are said to knock Matisse “from
his perch atop the leadership of the avant-garde,” imbuing painting with
all the nuance of Flywheel. Unger plays up the “tortoise-and-hare”
caricature of the contest of Matisse and Picasso, “the plodding striver
against the facile genius, the introvert against the extroverted
gadfly.” In his view, “Picasso was a born rebel, Matisse a rebel through
circumstance, and a reluctant one at that.”
When it comes to Montmartre and the “making of” the “Demoiselles,” Unger’s book pales next to the first installment of John Richardson’s three-volume (and counting) life of Picasso, Roger Shattuck’s delightful history of the prewar avant-garde, “The Banquet Years,” and the artist’s former mistress Fernande Olivier’s reminiscences, which were published in “Loving Picasso.”
On the other hand, Unger appreciates Picasso’s boyhood talent without
overegging its merits. He’s good on the Steins (particularly Leo’s
insufferable condescension). And certain of Unger’s details were new to
me. I had never, for instance, heard the rumor that Puvis de Chavannes
was Maurice Utrillo’s biological father.
“Have
you ever known a famous man before he became famous?” So begins Herman
Wouk’s 1962 novel, “Youngblood Hawke.” “It may be an irritating thing to
remember, because chances are he seemed like anybody else to you.” The
young Picasso — with his otherworldly precocity and hypnotic mirada fuerte
— was perhaps the exception. Writing in 1906, the year before the
“Demoiselles” was conceived, the novelist and critic Eugène Marsan took
his measure. An imagined interlocutor marveled at “a compelling picture”
on the wall of the Lapin Agile: “‘The young artist who painted that in
two hours will become a genius, if Paris does not destroy him. …’ ‘The
painter of this Harlequin,’ I said, ‘Monsieur, already has a reputation.
… You might call him, to help you remember, the Callot of the
saltimbanques, but you’d do better to remember his name: Picasso.’”
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