Saura & Picasso. The weight of history: PARIS

 

Picasso is a seminal figure in 20th-century art, both for the general public and for the world of artists; not so much for those from his own country, except for those who were exiled and accompanied him in Paris, including Francisco Bores, Pancho Cossío, Luis Fernández, Óscar Domínguez, Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja, Xavier Valls, etc. In Spain, between the end of the Civil War (1936-39) and the new stage of the 1978 Constitution, Picasso was only admired by a few until Tomás Llorens organized the exhibition entitled “A Century of Picasso”, which opened at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art (8 October 1987 - 3 January 1988) and was transferred to the Sabatini Building, before it became the Museo Nacional, in Madrid (29 January - 13 March 1988). 

 

The exhibition “A Century of Picasso” brought together a selection of works from the Spanish avant-garde produced by 34 artists between 1910 and 1970, the majority from overseas collections. Overall it presented 130 paintings, 44 sculptures and 40 graphic art pieces. Picasso was the common thread between the different chapters of the exhibition with 52 works. The show was part of the exhibition programme “Five Centuries of Spanish Art”, whose journey began in Paris. It was divided into five chapters linked to important historical events and also included two sub-chapters to take in other significant historical phenomena.

 

A few years earlier, in 1971, on the occasion of Picasso’s 90^th birthday, a group calling itself the Warriors of Christ the King issued a statement repudiating the tributes to the painter: “Picasso, a Marxist, Spanish Communist Party militant, antipatriotic pimp, homosexual, pornographer and bastard. If another 18 July is needed [referring to the uprising against the Republic in 1936 which gave rise to the Civil War] to save Spain, we are willing to accept it with all the consequences, fighting against internal and external enemies, most of all against the traitors who, like whores, flirt with the enemy to be able to save the carrion and venom in which they find themselves”. It was published on 28 October 1971, three days after Picasso’s birthday. 

 

In Spain there were few celebrations of the birthday of the Spanish artist, who lived in France, and they were not well received. The Theo gallery in Madrid was attacked on 21 November 1971, shortly before the opening of an exhibition of 27 etchings by Pablo Picasso belonging to the well-known Vollard Suite. A group of hooded individuals threw red paint and acid on the works which were already on display, breaking the glass and tearing some of them. They left graffiti identifying themselves as the “Anti-Marxist fight commando”. In 1971, the Theo gallery, which was opened five years earlier by Elvira González and her husband, Fernando Mignoni, was one of the most important and modern in Madrid. In Barcelona, there was a more open climate in relation to Picasso and Miró, although there were also attacks by vandals. On the day after the attack in Madrid, another group used petrol bombs to set fire to the Barcelona art gallery known as “Taller de Picasso”, which was opened in January of that same year by Jordi Costa (1949-2015), with an exhibition of Picasso’s works. The building housing the art gallery, located at number 5 Calle de la Plata, was where Picasso had his first studio, in which he lived from the age of 14 to 18. This young artist and gallery owner convinced the mayor at the time, José María de Porcioles, to place a commemorative plaque on the outside of the building, indicating that Picasso lived there. This took place on 25 October, in the presence of the Viscount of Güell, president of the Reial Cercle Artístic, and the painter Manuel Pallarès, who in his youth shared the studio with Picasso.

 

Two days later, another group threw incendiary bombs at the bookshop Cinc d’Oros, in the window of which were displayed books dedicated to Pau Casals, Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda. This shop was opened in 1969 by Jaume Farràs and Carmen Aizpitarte. The fire caused serious damage to the premises.

 

In Franco’s Spain there were of course also people who knew about the greatness of Picasso and his importance in the history of 20^th-century art, from when the artist was introduced in Paris in 1901, in an exhibition with the Basque Francisco Iturrino at the Vollard gallery. Spanish artists have always survived thanks to their enthusiasm and the strength of their individuality, even during Franco’s dictatorship. Eduardo Chillida and Pablo Palazuelo were able to open up to the world of 20^th-century sculpture. Antoni Tàpies, working from home, invented povera —following in the footsteps of Paul Klee and Julius Bissier— before the Italians. Luis Gordillo recreated pop in the inner world, in his gastric and tumorous configurations, and the Equipo Crónica group used the language of pop to create splendid paintings with political and cultural criticism. Antonio Saura gave meaning to the informal, in parallel with De Kooning’s Women.

 

In this introduction I do not want to follow the discourse of socio-political contextualization, that of the transition from the Franco regime to democracy (the false social consensus of the press critics) or the discourse of merchandising (which establishes itself in an open field, but is indebted to four or six foreign galleries). I simply want to recall that one of the artists who structured his thinking around Picasso the most was Antonio Saura (1930-1998), a highly educated and cultured painter with a huge critical capacity.

 

Saura dedicated several texts to Pablo Picasso which give us some keys to a new vision of the artist. Most of them had never been translated into French until the publication of Sur Picasso. This book brings together these texts, which include Against Guernica, a critical analysis on how he was received and what he represented in Spain, in addition to the Imaginary Letter to Pablo Picasso. The analysis of Picasso’s work by Saura is carried out from a critical and original perspective, since Saura was one of the artists who understood Picasso the best and who magnificently overcame the difficulty of painting during and after Picasso.

 

Years later, the professor of aesthetics at the University of Madrid José Jiménez indicated, referring to the last exhibition by Tàpies in 2006 at the Soledad Lorenzo gallery in Madrid: “There is a turning point in the work of great artists. A moment when there is nothing left to demonstrate, when they achieve full creative freedom. They accept risk like in early youth, but with the maturity of someone who has lived a whole life in art”. This can also be applied to Chillida and to Saura. In Chillida, in Tàpies and in Saura, despite their age, there is jovial vitality, continuity and coherence.

After the Second World War, there was a pessimistic theme about human action which came from the discovery of the concentration camps, the damage caused by the technology represented by the atomic bomb, and the new arms policies of the Cold War. Subjects of Christian crucifixion again appeared in painters as different as Graham Sutherland and Renato Guttuso. The latter wrote that “these images had a profound impact on me. (...) The destroyed bodies in the photos seemed to me to be figures taken down from the cross”. The British Graham Sutherland, who had a great influence on Francis Bacon, produced several paintings on the subject of crucifixion.

Saura’s references, as well as the series of crucifixions by Picasso, can undoubtedly be found in Fautrier and the informal. The relationship with the infernal suggests, apart from questioning the resurrection, the appearances and disappearances of the figure as an “anomalous” presence and yet, in Saura’s own words, they are “individual and powerful”.

Saura has called himself a “painter of monsters”; like Goya and Picasso, he is a coherent painter with intense artwork, between the black of Spanish painting and African masks, between the carnival and Lent. In his work there are matrix themes, like in that of Manolo Valdés, that is to say of “thematic appropriation” of the history of painting, themes generally treated as series of paintings. In Saura we have Damas (Ladies), El perro de Goya (The Goya's Dog), Multitudes (Crowds), Crucifixiones (Crucifixions), Retratos Imaginarios (Imaginary Portraits), Dora Maar, Brigitte Bardot, etc.

 

This is the tradition of Spanish painting, the grotesque of Goya which is in the wall of Tàpies, in Saura’s imaginary portraits, in Gordillo’s portraits or in the burlaps of Valdés. In the words of Valeriano Bozal, “to remove any emphasis not from the themes of painting but from painting itself, to reach banality not in puppets, but in the plasticity of puppets, is to reach more intense levels of the grotesque. A grotesque, however, similar to the daily media, to the mass media, a grotesque which offers a different side of our visual heritage: an anti-heroic side”.

 

The grotesque, whether the Musketeers of Picasso’s last period, or Saura’s Écorché, submerged or signalled by a pessimistic vision not so much of life as of the cultural situation of Spain. This pessimism already comes from Francisco de Goya’s painting, both his more public and his more private works, for his own home, the country house (Huerta de Goya or Quinta del Sordo), located on a hill in the former municipality of Carabanchel Bajo, on the outskirts of Madrid. In 1814, the year of Ferdinand VII’s return to power, he produced the two paintings of Los Fusilamientos (The Executions), of 2 and 3 May 1808. In 1816 he published the Tauromaquia (Bullfighting) and in 1820 he finished the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War). In 1819 he moved to the Quinta del Sordo, where in 1823 he finished his Pinturas negras (Black Paintings), a series of 14 murals painted using the dry oil technique (on walls covered with plaster). Goya shows what is ugly, terrible; the pathos and the awareness of displaying all the aspects of human life without excluding the most unpleasant. Saura calls Goya’s enigmatic painting of a dog sinking in a marsh, or in the canvas of the painting, “the most beautiful painting in the world.

 

At the end of the 19^th century we go from Goya to Darío de Regoyos (1857-1913) and other Spanish artists, such as Adolfo Guiard and Francisco Iturrino, who come to Paris, attend the same schools, the Académie Julian or the Académie Colarossi, visit the same galleries and the same exhibitions, such as the posthumous retrospective of Édouard Manet at the École des Beaux-Arts, in January 1884. Most of them also see Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1, the portrait that James Whistler painted of his mother in 1871 (purchased by the French government in 1891, now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris). Regoyos visited Whistler in London in 1885, and the latter made a portrait of him. Shortly afterwards, Regoyos published the book España Negra, as a result of a trip he took in 1888 with the poet Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916).

All of Saura’s figuration tries to disintegrate volumetric planes, from the setting, in order to show another scene, that of the view without a perspective, frozen, that of representing, and especially of“synthesizing a vision of reality”, which is what art is all about. There is vital scepticism, like in Goya, but not scepticism about the world of the image, the destruction of the history of images or of the history of art, at the heart of history. His painting is based on spontaneity, on synthesis and on speed of analysis. This is the opposite, from a visual viewpoint, of what, for example, Paul Klee produced, but with the same starting philosophy and with similar musical gifts: simplicity as a cognitive base, as the final point of arrival of all European plastic rhetoric. His images appear as if meaningless, without structure, without the transparency of figurative narration, but his voice, his “duende”, is recorded on our retina, and this incantation, like all plastic discourse, helps us to understand and to see other phenomena of our existence.

 

All this is brought together in this corpus of images which have arisen from his pen and ink: the stoppage of life seen from a peculiar shore, with mist and damp, with people and landscapes which slip from our hands and from our sight, with beings which appear and disappear in their own shadows, but which are there, which Saura collects and stores in the network of his imagery.

 

The 1985 oil painting Écorché I (195 x 300 cm) responds to this same treatment of the human body, based on traces, a certain expressionism on the one hand, with a certain linear dynamism on the other. It is a frontal image, like a Byzantine image, with the pain represented by the background black ink. The very title Écorché refers to this gloomy imagery of black Spain; the French term écorcher literally means “to skin”. Skinned figures, both human and animal, were used in the academies to teach drawing, above all starting from the 16^th century and from the engravings of the book De humani corporis fabrica (1543), by the doctor Andreas Vesalius. They were the first to study cadaveric dissection and the details of internal anatomy. In 1902, in his youth, Constantin Brâncuşi also produced an écorché. It is such a precise study of male anatomy that it is still used in the faculty of medicine of Bucharest.

 

Saura produced these écorchés/skinned figures between 1956 and 1985, with this dynamism and figurative fragility, between the black Spain of Picasso and the primitive linearity of Jean Dubuffet. He also worked on his series of portraits, such as the Retrato imaginario de Felipe II (Imaginary Portrait of Philip II), from 1990 (100 x 81 cm), in which the strength of the character lies in the gesture and in the look. The eyes which have gone astray express the pain of disillusionment, while the strokes and the tension between the black, the white and the ochre give the face corporeality. These eyes shooting off into no space, or into the beyond, the mouth and the neck connected to the starch of the black habit, make this portrait more true to Philip II than any melancholic description of history. In actual fact it is a self-portrait by Saura, just like each of Picasso’s musketeers is Picasso himself. The portrait becomes the complete argument of the artist’s pictorial narration. In the field of literature this is what is called the “literature of myself”. The author explicitly confronts their own experiences to then discover to what extent they are connected to those of others and, of course, to those of the viewer. This is the legacy of the tragic feeling of Goya’s painting.

 

Quite fittingly, here Mayoral presents some of Picasso’s ceramic pieces, tomettes, with fauns, satyrs, etc. Cabeza de fauno (Head of a Faun), from 1956, is painted on a tomette or tile (20 x 20 cm), where the clay acts as an unprinted canvas, as the background where the face appears through four black brushstrokes with an outline of yellow on shoulders which are supported by six vertical blue lines. I already explained elsewhere that Picasso uses ceramic not like a ceramicist, but as one more medium for the painter, and that he took advantage of the Vallauris workshops after the war for his work, painting or sculpting with this medium as a natural support. With 30 small black brushstrokes, Picasso creates the magic of the portrait. And where he dates it “27 56”, he lets it fall vertically, giving the figure depth as if it were a curtain.

 

The human figure was always one of the main reasons for Picasso’s artistic work, on all media, with a tendency to seek the individual, the characteristic in distortion, the grotesque and the picaresque, as occurs in a considerable part of great Spanish literature. The representation of the picaresque acts not so much as criticism as an attempt to understand the reality around us. It is the strange, exaggerated, convulsive, tumultuous elements which provide the individual portrayed with the characteristics of their personality. This is the case of the 1939 portrait Buste de femme au chapeau, in iron gall ink, probably a portrait of Dora Maar, his partner at the time. The portrait is formed by geometrical and spiral bodies, but with those fast gestures of the wrist and command of the pen of those who have the gift of caricature. Picasso handles a nib as if it were a brush; we see this in the impasto, metal tip strokes.

 

All the drawings from the last years, like his graphic work in the last suites, show Picasso’s virtuosity with the graphic media. For example, the drawing from 7 June 1972, Trois personnages, in India ink with pen and brush on paper, two women and a portrait of a man in a space in perspective, rather than linear in perspective. The go-between, the young prostitute and the small client, gentleman or Rembrandt in frontal position, differ in size. The gentleman looks at the viewer, while the other figures hold a dialogue, from the older to the young woman, with these anarchic brushstrokes, with this interplay of ink wash, the detail of the female organs and the brocade of the clothes. The face of the go-between is divided on different planes like the transparencies of Picabia, while her bra looks like brocade, whereas the portrait of the man with Rembrandt’s face is positioned like Velázquez’s dwarfs.

 

Picasso draws like someone who engraves on copper: these three characters arise on thinking of ink wash and of the acid biting into the copper; also in the above-mentioned 1939 drawing, Buste de femme au chapeau, with bistre ink and pen, an interplay of the movement of the pen which he now imitates with the brush and on another scale, but this elasticity of the figure looking at the viewer, occupying the full plane of the representation, is also present in Saura’s écorchés.

 

The work of both Picasso and Saura expresses a commitment to the human condition, from tenderness to irony, from anguish to compassion. Saura takes an in-depth look at this “tyranny of freedom”, this force which pushes us and prevents us from stopping, this fearless impulse which leads us to seek new paths in life and which he converted into one of the sources of his work. The work of both artists is “a bestiary of figures” of the grotesque and of deformed monsters, but in the end they appear to us as innocent and friendly. Saura portrayed the numerous facets of the human being with great sincerity, starting from the easy line of Picasso, but contributing or burdening it with informalist existentialism, always with social commitment.

André Malraux said that all masterpieces carry within them the “voices of silence” which call us, which talk to our gaze. Their voice, the voice that we call style, becomes specific when we compare Picasso’s drawings with Saura’s unequivocal black paintings. All the pieces in this exhibition explain the world of each of these artists and their command of all graphic media, of their personal iconography.

 

 

-Kosme de Barañano