Picas-so-what?

Pablo Picasso, The Blue Room (The Tub), (1901), image courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington

I’ve always had my reservations about Picasso. His expansive and changeable – or I would even argue, shaky – style is difficult to pigeon hole. It’s not so much that we’re spoilt for choice looking at his oeuvre, but that he was so spoilt for choice deciding in which manner to work. So, it appears, he simply doesn’t. I get the overwhelming sense with Picasso not of adaptability, versatility, creativity or innovation, but indecision.

This is, worrying, what one critic (Félicien Fagus) also identified in Picasso in 1901. “Picasso’s haste has not yet given him time to forge a personal style” he said in response to Picasso’s very first solo show. To be fair to the fella, Picasso was just 19. He was young, fearless, but… he was unfounded. Yet, I still have this sense looking back over his whole career.

The Courtauld make the claim that this is where – 25th June-14th July 1901 – Picasso finds himself. ‘Discover the remarkable story of Pablo Picasso’s breakthrough year as an artist’ – they’ve proclaimed as the show’s slogan. Of course they have, it’s a convenient conviction to make: the gallery were able to collate around 30 paintings all from this year and give them significance – despite their eclecticism – under the rubric that this miss-mass of styles is evidence of the artist finding himself. But my question is: how can we say at 1901 he had become himself – when over his long life and prolific career he turned to so many different styles aside from these? Can he have become himself, and later produce work that bares no correlation to what he had established?

This is a modestly sized exhibition; a fact and not a criticism. For, with such an overwhelming oeuvre, I believe a larger collection of works could present an artist who is too difficult to conceptualise. Therefore, it is good and right to define a period, approach, subject matter or art historical style and select works accordingly. It is just that, if this exhibition is intended to be an exaltation of the artist – which I believe it must be, because the Courtauld is not an institution to go against the conventions of artistic genius – it is not a good sign that I saw only one painting in this exhibition that was evidence of the artist becoming himself. However much I salute them for their brave endeavour to discover who Picasso was, I believe it was both a life-long endeavour for the artist, and consequently it is a quest that will consume art lovers beyond the parameters of this exhibition – beyond 1901.

Having said all that, the ‘Becoming Picasso’ exhibition is a cosy fit with the Courtauld. Not only in size but also in content, the show sits politely with the Courtauld collection, which illuminates the exact reason I am critical of Picasso’s early works. In one painting, he is Degas; in another he is Toulouse-Lautrec; in another, he is Seurat – the artists that dominate the Courtauld’s collection. If it weren’t for Picasso’s insistent signing, you’d find it hard to identify the Picasso amongst the works, which so obviously pay homage to their artistic source, and the bohemian life of Montmarte that the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of 20 years earlier so revelled in.

But Picasso wasn’t French. He was a Spaniard. He had only moved from his homeland that year (1901), and in his youthful desperation to impress, he had become so easily impressed by the tradition of the area in which he inhabited. My point is then, that he let this happen with such haste. Attempting to find himself in the work of others and producing only shadows of the originals. He didn’t give himself time to breathe…

And then, very suddenly, something quite terrible happened. Picasso’s good friend Carles Casagemas shot himself that February. From that moment, his painting drastically changed, but in this haste, Picasso failed to notice that the world had immediately become tainted by blue. He had entered his Blue Period.

Everyone finds a beguiling attractiveness to his Blue Period. It’s definitive, its causal – it’s an artistic idea that is easy to grasp and easy to attribute. Mostly, because it’s human. It affirms the almost universal feeling that we have that blue is the colour of melancholy. It’s an expansive colour known to us by the sky and the sea, and as a product, it’s a colour we feel we can get lost in; that it has a depth, which is inescapable. Picasso’s blue paintings represent all these things – a deep, seemingly never-ending despair – an irreplaceable loss. It’s a pleasing realisation, that emotions can be so clearly painted in just one colour. An example of which – only blue – is Picasso’s painting of Carles on his dead bed.

However, it is surely that idea of the blue paintings that captures our imagination most, not, their aesthetic appearance. To me, the unadulterated blue paintings are flat. He hasn’t worked with the colour in Casagemas in His Coffin, he has just applied a blue-wash. I think The Blue Room is far more beautiful. As the title tells, the blue still dominates, however it belongs, it is not superimposed. It is integrated into a delicate balance of warm and cool – mostly cool – that is charming. Surprisingly, it is warming. The accents of flesh, or fiery dragon reds and terracotta, light up the blue. They, by complementary contrast, give the blue warmth, an illumination, that we wouldn’t expect, but is far more dynamic, effective, depth-inducing.

Evidence of this confidence of colour amongst this personal crisis, is seen also in his acclaimed self-portrait, Yo Picasso, which as I aforementioned, reveals a Picasso not practicing what he would later produce, but pertaining the potential necessary to do so.

Against a midnight blue background, a compelling face stands out, which has been painted like a fire. Character and colour are matched with vigour. The portrait is daringly bold. His forehead is bald, knowingly exposed. Directly beneath his leading eye, Picasso has swept a loaded brush of salmon paint, which, unrivalled in brightness elsewhere on his face, enhances this right eye that stares right through us. The overshadowed side of which is marked by a vivacious oceanic teal, that, paired with the salmon-coral, is a daring take on the warm-cool antithesis, and is evidence of an evolving genius.

This brilliance is met in many places across the picture, but is especially the case in the use of a mid-register yellow to mark the shadows on his chemise. The overall effect is unrivalled in the exhibition, as is the sense of an artist I can believe in – that his inconsistencies are explorations not exercises in imitation and desperately missing inspiration.

In conclusion, it’s a small exhibition – that’s OK – just don’t come thinking you’ll have any better idea of who Picasso is coming out as you did coming in. It’s a deviously enticing title, for an illusive, maybe even indescribable artist.

But the great news is, it’s free for students, so why not?
Becoming Picasso: 1901 is open until 26 May 2013. Click here for more information.