This NY Times article alerted me to Picasso’s last work in oil - Étreinte (1972). It’s part of a travelling show (Picasso: Mosqueteros – late paintings and etchings) currently at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
As the NY Times article says, “Picasso, as usual, painted for his life”, and in this work there’s a level of disarray and possibly even panic at the realisation that this extraordinary life would not continue forever. (Picasso died in 1973, just 10 months after making the work.)
Pablo Picasso
Étreinte (The Embrace) 1972
Oil on canvas
Picasso also said (again, according to the NY Times article) “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good” and there’s a sense here of the man, as always, pushing the limits of what art is understood to be, prepared to take big risks.
There’s also a great NY Times slideshow on the exhibition (audio by Roberta Smith): A Staggering Final Act.
And a comment from the German Atlantic Times on Étreinte:
Blue and rose were the fundamental keys of his art. The playful “rose period” represented the blush of life, while the “blue period” was more melancholic, representing death. Their bodies entwine in the height of passion, their body parts a jumble. A blue wave of death is approaching the couple. The curtain falls. The game is over. The background is white nothingness. But at the same time this painting is the epitome of cubism’s modern perspective.
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Pablo Picasso
I visited the recent Picasso prints show at Rex Irwin Gallery and was taken with this lithograph, letting my eyes wander into the by-ways and nooks of the architected gardens that Picasso depicts, wondering about the energies that were driving him in those moments of making the work, and feeling joy in my journey through his scape.
Pablo Picasso
Jardins à Vallauris 1953
Lithograph on Arches
Picasso seems at times (along the bottom edge, to the right, for example) to move into a symbolic space – at other times I have the feeling of him toying with a littoral zone, between the symbolic and the visual.
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I’ve been reading about Heinrich Anton Muller in Colin Rhodes’ excellent book Outsider Art – Spontaneous Alternatives and am struck by Muller’s preoccupation with the construction of machines of no obvious purpose. (Muller was an inmate of the Munsingen asylum in Switzerland from 1906, for the last 24 years of his life.)
In this NY Times 1995 art review the influence of these machines on Tinguely and Picasso is made clear. Here’s Muller beside one of his fantastic machines, some kind of perpetual motion construction, and in some way useful to him in maintaining some kind of “sane balance” within his insanity (his initial breakdown having been triggered by the theft of his design for a grape harvesting machine, which he had failed to patent).
(Images ©Zentsch/BAWAG FOUNDATION)
The machines he eventually destroyed – in response supposedly to his incarceration. Luckily, his works on paper survived, and these have been a major influence on many artists, including Dubuffet.
Heinrich Anton Muller
Cannonne
colour pencil on cardboard, 31.3 x 49.6 cm
And here’s a note on Muller by Rhodes, one that for me has hints of the poetic, the existential, the humorous and the ubiquitous:
At the hospital Muller spent much of his time standing in a deep hole and in later years he spent hours staring through a large telescope-like object of his own construction at a small object he had made.
By ubiquitous I mean that Muller’s behaviour differs only possibly in degree from what the rest of us do most of the time….looking through mechanisms of our construction at objects we have made, a process well described by phenomenologists. Which leads me to wonder again about that term “insane”, and how convenient it’s been as a protection for those of us not so categorised.
As James Hillman said in The Myth of Analysis (in his essay on psychological language) the construction in the eighteenth century of the psychological language we largely still use was defensive :
Perhaps the immense energy that went into ordering mental pathology was meant to hold mental disorder at bay. Why, we may ask, were the new continents of the psyche not named with more felicity? Irrational and unconscious, like insane, are negative signs, begrudgingly affixed by reason to what it does not comprehend. One might have called Uranus or Neptune “non-Saturn”, Australia “un-Asia”. Even that Kantian-style definition of the unconscious as a negative Grenzbegriff (negative borderline concept) betrays the same perjorative bias toward the speech of the soul, whose expressions are simply imaginative, symbolic, fantastic, mythic – all words standing on their own, requiring no prior terms that are rational, conscious, and sane.
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