In the jubilation that followed the liberation of Paris in 1944, journalists zeroed in on a Spanish artist who had lived quietly through the occupation. “Picasso is Safe” trumpeted a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. In the ensuing months, the 64-year-old Picasso became a cultural symbol. He was visited by so many American soldiers that the artist told his friend, the photographer Brassai, “Yes, it’s an invasion! Paris is liberated, but I was and I remain besieged.”
Throughout the war, few people outside the city knew what Picasso was doing. Various rumors had circulated – that he had sold out to the Nazis, that he had been thrown into a concentration camp, that he had worked in the resistance – but none was true. Picasso had done what he had always done – he had painted. Branded a “degenerate artist” (as the Nazis referred to all modernists) and with little opportunity to show, the paintings had accumulated in his studio, year after year.
And what kind of pictures were they?
“I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of a painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict,” Picasso said. “But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done. Later on, perhaps, the historian will find them and show that my style changed under the war’s influence.”
In shying away from outright depiction of war, Picasso was no different from most artists of his time. War has made a great subject for novels and for movies, but rarely for art. The Greeks and the Assyrians delighted in battle scenes, and Goya exposed the atrocities of his time, but in recent centuries artists have left images of war’s horrors to photography and newsreels.
With “Guernica” (1937), his response to the bombing of a Basque town by the forces of Franco, Picasso had already created the century’s greatest war picture. But it was not a typical work for him. We think of Picasso as an artist immersed in the game of pure painting, as more interested in exploring form than in connecting to current events.
That’s what’s intriguing about the current show at the Guggenheim Museum, “Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945.” Its thesis is that Picasso responded to the war much more than is usually acknowledged, that it cast a long shadow over his work – in still lifes of skulls and pieces of meat, in the repeated theme of weeping women, and in pictures of dimly lit, claustrophobic spaces. All these paintings can be seen as oblique references to the war -as Picasso put it: “You see, a casserole, too, can scream.”
There are no casseroles in this show, but there are lots of inanimate objects that project a mood of menace or despair. In “Still Life With Blood Sausage,” a picture rendered in greasy tones of gray, a table exhibits a huge knife, a pair of artichokes that look like hand grenades, an open drawer bristling with upright knives and forks, and the length of sausage, itself, suggesting human carnage.
There is no mistaking the allusion to war and fascism in the 1939 “Cat Seizing a Bird.” The cat stands stiffly upright with none of the naturalistic grace or beauty of a cat. Its legs are as straight as pants legs from beneath which long white claws protrude. Its head is as hard and as sharp as steel and its mean little mouth tears the wing off the struggling bird.
Picasso’s weeping women have been connected to his personal relationships, to what some say was a sadistic attitude toward women. And yet, in this exhibit, it’s not hard to see them as victims of war. With their contorted faces and the tears literally flying out of their eyes, their grief seems too profound to be purely personal.
The exhibit also tries to argue that Picasso’s distortions of women’s faces reflected the disintegrating effect of war. Here, it’s on shakier ground. Inspired by African masks and his experiments in cubism, Picasso had been doing this kind of thing for decades by the time of the Second World War. And many of these distorted faces are actually rather lovely. Picasso had discovered a way to rearrange a woman’s features – sticking noses on the sides of faces, misaligning eyes – and still make a beautiful face.
This is not true of all of them, however. And it’s reasonable to suppose that some of them, the truly brutal and ugly ones, had to do with the war. “Woman With an Artichoke,” for example, projects an attitude of threatening power. The sharp fingers on one hand are like the claws of an armored glove, and the artichoke has more the look of a spiked club.
Picasso’s monumental masterpiece, “Night Fishing at Antibes” (1939) from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, is another one of those double-edged works. On the one hand, it can be seen as a lyrical evocation of fishermen working in their boats at night, spearing fish lured to the water’s surface by the bright lanterns. However, there’s another mood as well. The lights around the boat don’t just glow, but explode with light, like bursting shells. The two fishermen, one leering over the edge of the boat and the other poised, about to drive his four-pronged spear into a fish, have a savage, menacing quality. Suddenly, we are identifying not so much with the fishermen, but with the fish, for whom death comes from above, as it did for so many people during wartime bombardment.
Curiously, Picasso’s two greatest paintings that were explicitly about the war bracket those war years. “Guernica” was made in 1937. The similarly designed “The Charnal House,” about the concentration camp victims, was painted in 1945. Both are black-and-white, suggesting news photos, and both are rendered in a spare, graphic style.
“Guernica” was a particularly seminal work for Picasso. Its emblematic images – the crying woman, the bull’s head, the pointed tongue as a sign of anguish, the distorted hands and feet – have had long afterlives in other works.
To be sure, there are also works of hopefulness here, such as “First Steps,” in which a wobbly but determined child is being helped to walk by a protective mother. And, there is optimism in the sculpture and studies for “Man With a Lamb.” In some of the drawings he made for this piece, the man seems to be protectively holding a playful lamb, while in the finished piece, the lamb is trussed as if being readied for sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice in a positive sense, like the sacrifices people make in war, a sacrifice for the common good.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1999
