Chapter 9: A Survey
of Picasso’s Prints, Continued
There are several salient features of these two series. They generally comprise etchings, aquatints, or some combination of the two. Though they vary greatly in size, they tend to be dominated, often hilariously so, by the subject of sex. Brothel scenes and sex between individual couples are common. The former often contain a portrait of Degas, whose sketches of brothel scenes Picasso had recently acquired. These brothel scenes contain a delightful assortment of consenting adults and voyeurs, including a priest in the latter category. Whereas the brushstrokes of Picasso’s paintings of the period are the largest of his life and the depictions are similarly among the sparest of his long career, the prints in contradistinction involve as fine a line as ever. Picasso seems to have been saying through these prints that even as a nonagenarian he still had a razor-sharp gaze and steady hand—if his paintings tended toward abstraction, it was by choice and not as a product of his old age. His advancing age did of course take its toll in other ways. But although his virility is believed to have waned a decade prior to his death, clearly his mind delightfully remained in the gutter! John Richardson, Picasso’s principal biographer, describes the themes of Picasso’s late drawings and prints as follows. Though chiefly writing about a raft of drawings that Picasso gave to his chauffeur Maurice Bresnu, this passage characterizes the late Picasso prints just as well: “As a result of an ulcer operation in November 1965, Picasso had given up traveling and become something of a recluse. Except for his wife Jacqueline, her daughter Catherine, the Bresnus [his chauffeur and the chauffeur’s spouse] and a few professional associates (notably the Crommelynck brothers who worked on his prints), he saw very few people. To extend the cast of characters in his imagery, Picasso was obliged to invoke figures from his past as well as from his pantheon of favorite painters. Hence, former mistresses, Barcelona whores, harlequins and circus folk from the Rose period rub shoulders with personages from the work of Raphael, Rembrandt, Goya, Ingres, Degas and van Gogh, and sometimes the artists themselves. Thanks to these revenants, Picasso managed to merge the past with the present. The studios at Nôtre Dame de Vie, his villa at Mougins, became a microcosm of his universe-what Gert Schiff called Picasso’s Teatrum mundi…. “Just as Mendelssohn came up with Songs without Words, Picasso came up with stories or plays without texts. He provides only the illustrations; it is up to us to discern the plot and guess at the hidden links. Old age is the principal theme of these dazzling drawings, in which the sardonic artists allegorizes ruefully but never self-pityingly the humiliating plight of an eighty-nine year old Lothario with a burnt-out libido. The resultant images are dream images. As in a dream, everything—time, place, identity—is in a state of flux. Especially relevant to this sketchbook is the fact that at the age of fourteen, Picasso took as his first mistress on equestrienne called Rosita del Oro, and that, a lifetime later, she reappears in different guises, first of all in his prints and then, as here, in his drawings…. “Another ghost from the past is Celestina, the procuress immortalized in Fernando de Rojas’s famous fifteenth century novel, which Picasso had illustrated two years earlier. In this sketchbook he portrays not only Celestina and others of her ilk as wrinkled hags, but the courtesans who work for her and the clients she serves—gap-toothed, singing or laughing cavaliers, out of Franz Hals as well as Rembrandt. (These terrible teeth suggest that Picasso himself was having dental problems)…. It is typical of the artist’s shamanism to exorcise the aging process by depicting its symptoms. “Picasso’s sexual powers may have waned—impotence is thought to have set in around his eightieth year—but sex was still very much on his mind. ‘We don’t do it any more, but the desire is still with us,’ he told Brassai. To compensate for his loss of libido, Picasso came to see sex and art, the brothel and the studio, as metaphors for each other—the sexual act standing for the creative act, and vice-versa. Hence the explicitly erotic nature of so many of these late drawings.” (Cavaliers and Courtesans: A Collection of Picasso Master Drawings and Ceramics, Christie’s NY, 1998, pp. 6-7.) “As he dwelled on the image of the older artist Picasso in his last twenty years also sought to fraternize and contend with a pantheon of painters of the past…. Certain of the generic busts and images of artists took on costumes or features that associated them with particular painters from history…. The practice began in greater earnest…after Picasso’s illness and surgery in 1963, and seems to have centered most tellingly on the disparate figures of Rembrandt and van Gogh. “As Richardson has pointed out, these two artists may have been special cases for Picasso precisely because they are so strongly identified with self-portraiture. Rembrandt, particularly, had set the standard for charting each rise and fall of his fortunes in a self-image, continuing through the most unflinching confrontations with his flabby features and ebbing vitality in old age. The ageing Picasso apparently felt a strengthening bond with the great Dutchman's secular materialism, which fostered an earthy realism about all the body's functions and its weaknesses; but he also found an affinity in Rembrandt's contrary penchant for lavish costumes and theatrical masquerades" (Kirk Varnedoe, "Picasso's Self-Portraits," Picasso and Portraiture, Representation and Transformation, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1996, pp. 162-3).
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