Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World by Miles J. Unger

Author:Miles J. Unger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Village Above the Clouds

Pablo is quite different in Spain. He’s more cheerful, not so wild, more sparkling and animated, and he takes a calmer, more balanced view of things. He seems at ease. He glows with happiness.

—FERNANDE OLIVIER

In retrospect, it’s clear that 1906 was a transitional year for Picasso: a year dividing youth from maturity, promise from fulfillment. During these months of intense work a painter of late-nineteenth-century sensibility was reborn as a prophet of modernity, one whose utterances seemed to ring with both the promise and the peril of the new age.

The transformation was largely invisible, not least to Picasso himself. He took the crucial steps on the path to an artistic revolution with no clear destination in mind. All he knew for certain was that he had to take his art in new directions if he hoped to rise to the challenge posed by Matisse and his Fauve colleagues. With the benefit of hindsight his progress seems purposeful, the outcome inevitable, as if he knew where he was headed all along. But this is a misreading of history caused by our need to weave a coherent narrative out of events that were contingent, unpredictable, and unforeseen. As the distinguished art historian Robert Rosenblum noted, the very magnitude of the change Picasso brought about in the collective consciousness distorts perception, “warp[ing] our approach to the ‘BC’ Picasso, whose life presumably came to an end in 1906 before the curtain came up on the twentieth century.”

The dawning of a new age was announced in a single monumental work, as shocking as any in the history of art. To quote Robert Rosenblum once more: “Like the apocalyptic visions by El Greco that helped spark its flickering, hallucinatory intensity, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon seems to proclaim, together with the Lord in the Book of Revelation, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega.’ Carrying the destructive force of an earthquake, the Demoiselles splits art historical time into an old and new epoch, BC and AD, as if in 1907 Picasso and, with him, all of art were reborn. What he did before this watershed year might belong to another era.” The story of how he arrived at this breakthrough is no less fascinating for being a tale of false starts and circuitous detours, more a case of a man feeling his way tentatively in the dark than of a hero striding boldly toward the light.

• • •

In the spring of 1906, Picasso had never been more confident in his own powers. This confidence was well earned. He’d grown considerably as an artist in the two years he’d been in Paris, weaning himself from the sentimentality of the Blue Period to compose works that were thematically complex and crafted with a more supple touch. His achievements were ratified by the small circle of men and women whose judgment he valued. He was gaining recognition as a leader of the avant-garde, and increasing numbers of collectors were making the trek to the summit of the Butte

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