Pablo Picasso by Marius de Zayas

PABLO PICASSO

LET me say at the beginning that I do not believe in art criticism, and the

more especially when it is concerned with painting.

I grant that everyone bas the right to express their opinion in art matters,

to applaud, or disapprove, according to their own personal way of seeing

and feeling; but I hold that they should do so without assuming any authority,

and without pretending to possess the absolute truth, or even a relative one;

and also that they should not base their judgments on established rules, upon

the pretense th.at they arc consecrated by use, and by the criterion of high

authority.

Between a civil or a penal judge and a critic there is a great difference. The

judge judges according to the law, but does not make the law. He has to

submit himself to the fetter and the spirit of the law, though it might conflict

with his person.al opinions, because that law is an absolute rule of conduct,

dictated by society, to which all have to submit. But art is free, it has never

bad, it has not, and will never have a legislature, in spite of the Academies;

and every artist has the right to interpret nature as he pleases, or as he can,

leaving to the public the liberty to applaud or condemn theoretically.

Every critic is a priest of a dogma, of a system; and condemns implacably

what he finds to be out of his faith, a faith not reasoned but imposed.

He never stops to consider the personality of the artist whose work be is judging,

to investigate what his tendencies are, what his purpose is, or what efforts

he made to attain his object, and to what Point he has realized his program.

I have devoted my life to the study of art, principally fainting an<l sculpture.

I believe I have seen all that is worth seeing, and have never dared

pass sentence on a work declaring it good even if signed by the most renowned

artist; nor declare it bad, though it bears the name of a person totally unknown.

At the most, I dare s-ay that at please. or displeases me, and to express the

personal motives of my impressions.

Scholastic criticism has never profited anyone; on the contrary, it has

always restrained the spirit of a creator; it has always discouraged, humiliated,

and killed those who have bad the weakness to take it into consideration.

Each epoch has had its artists, and must have its art, as each also has its

men of science and its science; and any one who intends to oppose a dike to

the flood-tide of human genius is perverse or a fool.

This love for the dogma, the tendency of the academy to enchain to

suffocate and to vilify, has greatly damaged the countries in which it has

prevailed. This has been the cause of delay in the progress of art in Spain;

and on account of this system we see the Spanish artists, those of persona

inspiration and haughty spirit, perish there, or emigrate to Pans, looking for a

better atmosphere. For, though it is true that there is in Paris also an

academic sect that suffocates; one which proclaims ·that outside of itself there

is no salvation, nevertheless art bas succeeded in conquering an independence

which permits all sorts of attempts at new expression.

Art has not died in Spain, or not at least among Spaniards. What is

beginning to die it the old tradition, or rather the intransigent traditionalism.

And the best proof of it is the notable number of Spanish painters living in

Paris, who prosper there, gaining enviable fame, and who at the end will

figure among the French glories, instead of adding illustrious names to the

already extensive Spanish catalogue.

I intend to make these artists known to the American world, describing

the work of each one of them, not as I see, feel, and understand it, but as each

one of them has conceived it.

I want to tell at present of Pablo Picasso, from Malaga, who finds himself

in the first rank among the innovators, a man who knows what he wants and

wants what he knows, who has broken with all school prejudices, has opened

for himself a wide path, and bas already acquired that notoriety which is the

first step towards glory.

I do not know if he is known in Spain, and if he is, whether they appreciate

his efforts and study his works. What I know is that be is a Parisian personality,

which constitutes a glorious achievement.

I have studied Pitasso, both the artist and his work, which was not

difficult, for he is a sincere and spontaneous man, who makes no mystery of his

ideals nor the method he employs to realize them.

Picasso tries to produce with his work an impression, not with the subject

but the manner in which he expresses it. He receives a direct impression from

external nature, he analyzes, develops, and translates it, and afterwards executes

it in his own particular style, with the intention that the picture should be the

pictorial equivalent of the emotion produced by nature. In presenting his

work he wants the spectator to look for the emotion or idea generated from the

spectacle and not the spectacle itself.

From this to the psychology of form there is but one step, and the artist

has given it resolutely and deliberately. Instead of the physical manifestation

he seeks in form the psychic one, and on account of his peculiar temperament,

his physical manifestations inspire him with geometrical sensations.

When he paints he does not limit himself to taking from an object only

those planes which the eye perceive&, but deals with all those which, according

to him, constitute the individuality of form; and with his peculiar fantasy he

develops and transforms them. And this suggests to him new impressions,

which he manifests with new forms, because from the idea of the representation

of a being; a new being is born, perhaps different from the first one, and

this becomes the represented being.

Each one of his paintings is the coefficient of the impressions that form

bas performed in his spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the

realization of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the ab$tl'3ct sensation

they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered into the composition of the final result. As it is not his purpose to perpetuate on the canvas

an aspect of external nature, by which to produce an artistic impression,

but to represent with the brush the impression he has directly received from

nature., synthesized by his fantasy, he does not put on the canvas the remembrance

of a past sensation. but describes a present sensation.

Picasso has a different conception of perspective from that in use by the

traditionalists. According to his way of thinking and painting, form must be

represented in its intrinsic value, and not in relation to other objects. He does

not think it right to paint a child in size far larger than that of a man, just

because the child is in the foreground and one wants to indicate that the man

is some distance away from it. The painting of distance, to which the academic

school subordinates everything, seem.t to him an element which might be of

great importance in a topographical plan or in a geographical map, but false

and useless in a work of art.

In his paintings perspective does not exist: in them there are nothing but

harmonies suggested by form, and registers which succeed themselves, to compose

a general harmony which fills the rectangle that constitutes the picture.

Following the same philosophical system in dealing with light, as the

one he follows in regard to form, to him color does not exist, but only the

effects of light. This produces in matter certain vibrations, which produce in

the individual certain impressions. From this it results, that Picasso's painting

presents to us the evolution by which light and form have operated in

developing themselves in his brain to produce the idea, and his composition

is nothing but the synthetic expression of his emotions.

Those who have studied Egyptian art without Greco-Roman prejudices,

know that the sons of the Nile and the desert sought in their works the realization

of an ideal conceived by meditation before the mysterious river and by

ecstasy before the imposing solitude, and that is why they transformed matter

into form and gave to substance the reflection of that which exists only in

essence. Something of this sort happens in Picasso's work, which is the artistic

representation of a psychology of form in which he tries to represent in essence

what seems to exist only in substance.

And, likewise, just as when we contemplate part of a Gothic cathedral we

feel an abstract sensation, produced by an ensemble of geometrical figures,

whose significance we do not perceive and whose real form we do not understand

immediately, so the paintings of Picasso have the tendency to produce

a similar effect, they compel the spectator to forget the beings and objects which

are the base of the picture, and whose representation is the highest state to

which his fantasy has been able to carry them through a geometrical

evolution.

According to his judgment, all the races as represented in their artistic

exponents, have tried to represent form through a fantastic aspect, modifying

it to adapt it to the idea they wanted to express.

And at the bottom, all of them have pursued the same artistic ideal, with

a tendency similar to his own technique.

Marius De Zayas