Souvenirs or Le Mystere Picasso

Souvenirs Or Le Mystere Picasso Henri Clouzot and the contents of Superman’s uberpants

by Mitchell Miller This will do, won’t it? What else should I do? What could I possibly add? Everything has been said.

This is variously an essay, review, polemic, or, to be more honest, a coalescence of false starts. Each emanated from the central point of Pablo Picasso, the archetypal artist-assuperman. Given that Picasso was the ultimate capitalist, with a mark of sale or barter on every work, and that his every word, every painting and every doodle is picked and poked for some remaining scrap of the zeitgeist’s shroud, the collective title of ‘souvenirs’ seem appropriate – for these, unlike his gravestone, can be bought and sold freely between individuals, consensus over his worth irrelevant in the face of market saleability. Thus, there seems no other fitting way of approaching this atomic-age artist who actively and mischievously appeared to resist his establishment than in the most radioactive fashion.

But, whatever the cryogenicists say, death as an individual is an inevitability, for Picasso as much as anyone else. Would a Picasso resurrected from his DNA become a great artist again? Is it possible to be Picasso in any time? Bourgeois sentimentality would certainly have it that the famous ‘faces’ of the arts – Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Homer, Kafka, Dante, Goya – would have secured a firm and sure grasp of any age.

Maybe they would, but is it not true that an artist is fed and is therefore reliant upon his environment as much as his innate genius? Would a Pablo Mk II have any advances to make on his previous work (only being genetically the same person)?

Given the current uncertainties about cloning, such questions are given over to science faction. There is instead the process (industry) of resurrecting and preserving the artist, through portrayal, recording and coveting the things they touched. By this we do not mean what they actually meant for posterity – their work – but them, themselves, which we ourselves, make into an object – let’s subpoena Freud and call it a pathological fetish for the act of loving art.

The psychoanalysis of this is too complicated for the space allowed here, but what can be done is to make some observations on various aspects of the phenomenon – to look at the fashion for understanding the artist, rather than the art, to look at the supreme example of the fetished artist, and then to come to the original starting point of this exercise, George Clouzot’s film, Le Mystere Picasso, in which one rather obscure artist came into touch with one of incandescent celebrity and achieved something that might just rescue us all from dildo-worship.

The Programme Madonna (the pop singer) is an adept crafter of her own image – like any practiced ‘Dandy’ she knows that while some mystique over her persona helps to maintain her appeal, the occasional controlled exposure is essential to maintaining interest in her cherished masterpiece (herself).

In bed with Madonna (1991) was just such an exercise – an on-the-road, supposedly warts-and-all documentary about her life touring and performing. Such a description is surely suspect, given the obvious manipulative undercurrents of the film, shown in the way our lady plays on the discomfort of her lover Warren Beatty, and makes an unsuspecting (and therefore strangely sympathetic) Kevin Costner look like a wanker. The seductive intent of these intimations into her behaviour backstage is to make her seem smart, clever and superior to the idiots and hangers-on her celebrity attracts – and to make these traits she wishes to project seem more reveal by virtue of the documentary format. You either buy into this, or you don’t – a wise audience should identify how dependent the charismatic smart-ass is on her employees in the cutting room. Madonna does not in the least, allow us to see what Erving Goffman would call her true ‘backstage personality’ – she is still front stage, she has just moved the willing audience further in.

Whatever the view on the value of such an exercise, the foul-mouthed chanteuse demonstrated an astute understanding of late modern taste; there seems an incessant demand for expose, forced intimacy and examination of the minutae of other people’s lives – of artists lives in particular, although this has changed somewhat with the advent of ‘reality’ TV. This demand has resulted in many very different products – from our own nation’s obsession with mythology of Robert Burns’ chamber pot and other ties that bind – literally his every movement – to pot-boiler autobiographies listing every whore and mistress for the benefit of middle class consumers in need of titillation with a higher purpose, to cinematic blockbusters that relish the (hopefully) sordid doings of famous artists and

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their loves (but never the art itself). They’re a funny lot, your bourgeoisie.

Analect 1 How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created.

The latest additions to the corpus of cinematic artistblockbuster is the Colin Firth vehicle Girl with a Pearl Earring (Firth plays Jan Vermeer as he was prior to his first tour as roadie with Iron Maiden) and the Gwyneth Paltrow melodrama Sylvia. As with more venerable and arguably entertaining epics, such as The Sound and The Fury, the thesis central to these sorts of film is that the artist is essentially something better, higher and more romantic than the rest of humanity – over and beyond the normal rules. Thus,Vermeer can be an adulterer with his model and tread over the sensibilities of others (and literally – Vermeer is always flouncing purposefully somewhere); hence Sylvia is tortured by the weight of her hyper-sensitivity and therefore licensed to act in a fashion which to most is selfish, idiotic and ungrateful to her blessings and privileges. This is apparently heroic.Take for example, the movie’s tagline: ‘Life was too small to contain her.’

If Rainier Maria Rilke seems to be working for Hollywood via automatic writing, it gets worse when someone in the film tries to describe the relationship and the poet-laureate: ‘You understand each other in ways that other people can only dream about.’

Other people being non-poets, of course – despite the fact that Plato specifically said that he didn’t want any poets in his higher planes, thank you very much. But, as this is surely nonsense anyway, he need hardly worry. In fact, this line is a supreme example of missing the point – if an artist appears sensitive and attuned it is generally because they have taken the time and effort to uncover their impressions and feelings in the medium of their choice, and have let this come out through their work. In short, they don’t resort to suicide, but work it out …

Analect 2 Paintings are nothing but research and experiment. I never paint a picture as a work of art. Everything is research. I keep researching, and in this constant enquiry there is a logical development. That is why I number and date all my paintings.

Maybe one day someone will be thankful for it. Painting is a matter of intelligence. You can see that in Manet. In every single one of Manet’s brushstrokes you can see his intelligence.

And yet in popular perception, nothing distinguishes or marks out an artist more than an early death. As for the supposedly ‘heightened senses’ of the artist, this is surely nothing more than a comic-book superhero fantasy. But at least comic-book superheroes are fun, in an S and M, fascistic sort of way. In a comic we are not being asked to emote with reverence to someone reassuringly mortal yet inspiringly above us – or to stump up a fortune for a

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monogrammed bath-towel that Sylvia once rat-tailed at Fred in a hotel on a dirty weekend in London. A couple of years ago we were told in a very similar sort of film that Iris Murdoch’s greatest gift ‘was for life’. If the old bird had heard this we suspect she’d have laughed until she choked and thus died with dignity. Sylvia we fear would have loved it – though if this film is at all accurate, she did nothing in life but rehearse her own death and therefore her own establishment (alas for Dame Judy, CGI is not that clever, yet … come forth Gwyneth). The Plath family were apparently unamused over director Christine Jeff’s treatment of their relative, as someone whose only value was for dying beautifully.

Nevertheless, establishments have their dividends – Plath’s death gives her poetry more resonance than it merits. Just as the famous wimple of the Madonna would be a relic beyond price today, so too will be the laddered panty-hose of her present-day pop cultural echo – all it needs is someone with more money and less sense than they need who will buy it. We can also, to a lesser degree perhaps, turn the artist into an object and buy them – after all, a man has already auctioned himself on eBay. Of course, others besides myself have documented this peculiarity of high capitalist life – and it has been sent up by the second most infamous of the Saatchi and Serota whiz-kids,Tracy Emin, who put her panty-hose on display alongside her bed in 1998 (entitled My Bed). The arguments, grouses and whys and wherefores of Emin’s style and the whole conceptual movement in art aside, Emin’s installation is an astute exploitation of the larger fascination with the artefacts possessed, rather than created by the artist for the purpose of her own elevation to such a level.

With regard to such fascination, the question has to be – why? There are many discourses attempting to answer this of course – by such as Derrida and the arch-objectmythologist Barthes – but an answer may also lie in a fairly famous gripe of Picasso’s (whose many, sometimes contradictory statements are here, after the MaoistConfucian model, analected): Analect 3 Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the songs of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them?

But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand. If only they would realise above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only an insignificant part of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them.

This is of course, horrifying as an idea to a society in which good money can be made from the belief that the artists’ inner genius is detectable in the yellow stains on his chamberpot (it is appreciated that seeking profundity in an artist’s complaints is also slightly suspect). But it is more than just a matter of the spurious cottage industries that surround the dead artist; Gloss A It is widely believed that Picasso’s works stand at the origin of the whole Expressionist, Cubist and Futurist movements. In fact, Picasso has nothing to do with any of these except that he did provide the initial artistic impulse; nor does he want to have anything more to do with them. What distinguishes him from all of these movements, even at first sight, is that unlike them he has never expressed his artistic intentions in programmes, manifestos or similar pronouncements; that he has never sought to explain his new departures either psychologically or psycholigistically; but that he has just painted.

Heinrich Thannhauser, Munich 1913 History suggests that Thannhauser is only partly right about Picasso; statements from the artist later in life and what is known from reliable sources such as his dealer Khanweiler suggest that Cubism was more self-conscious an invention than the cherished, elemental view of the disinterested genius (most avidly – orgasmically – pedalled by his hagiographer Penrose) suggests. Picasso was enthusiastic about other art, especially from younger artists, and did reflect upon what he did in public (granted,Thannhauser does not have our hindsight). He also did have his own psychologistical approach which he recognised and spoke of often – cyclical movements of create-and-destroy (see below). However, it is true that he was commendably uninterested in over-explanation, never let his inventions bother him too much, and egoist as he was, always moved on where the work (and external events) led him.

As for the artistic programme it is arguably the most fundamental gift of the (largely French) middle classes to the development of art criticism, combining with the foundations laid by the Italians in terms of the artist as hero, and the theorising and categorisation of the Germans (who, let’s remember, opened the first modern museums). Most of the isms in art, prior to the mid-19th century, are the inventions of later critics; bourgeois, industrial-age critics and classifiers – but after this, the invention of movements and programmes was much more closely tied into the activities of the artist.

From David onwards, French painting was inoculated with the power-hunger of the rising third estate – Neoclassicists and early Romantics alike were charged with propagandising and justifying the new order. And like the bourgeois, as some sort of strange echo of the great social movements and programmes of the age, artists coalesced into groups of mutual and indeed, self-interest to share ideas, paint and

exhibit – all the while, as the critic Michael Levey points out, turning the eye away from the miserable and squalid byproducts of the bright new industrial age to cornfields and lilies that spoke of an arcadia safely limited to history. It may be too much to speak of an artistic class, but the sense of a self-conscious elite was palpable. There was no longer the feudal relationship of patron and painter, but a rationalist agenda of programmes, organised exhibitions and a mercantile division of dealers and critics. The Impressionists are arguably the most obvious root of this phenomenon.

Analect 4 People want to find a ‘meaning’ in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.

Even the impressionists, however, were given their name – a sense of who they were was based on the actual response of the public to the art objects they created. Gradually however, the gap between the production of artworks by groups of painters and sculptors and the classification of them has shortened – the Germans of the early 20th century being precocious in this respect, expressionist artists being adept writers of manifestos and pamphlets. But it would go further than just explaining motive – the artisticindustrial complex would seek to control how their audience should be moved. This is no better exemplified than in the now ubiquitous ‘essays’ that accompany the artworks in modern art galleries – explaining not only who the artist is or what prompted them to create it, but what it is supposed to mean, and what the viewer is supposed to see in it. This is ‘truth’ expressed via revelation, the A-B-C of how to emote. It is important for the meaning of the commodity to be manifest so that we can get our fingers right in to the nail-holes and sell it with more conviction. One could almost term it artefactualism.

Analect 5 … I don’t see why the whole world should be taken up with art, demand its credentials, and on that subject give free rein to its own stupidity. Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

This brings us back to the fetish – of using something inappropriate (words) to access what is desired – an amenable artistic experience. Is this the supreme expression of the control now exerted by the over forms of art via the obsession with the artist? – fetishise, programme, control and then the Grail of the project – own the response. Before we even look the work is explained in words (academic words) of a predestined nature. Are we not being schooled to respond through the media of institutions, rather than as a complete individual – quasi-autonomously, through gallery and academy? Perhaps the term ‘Quango-criticism’ should be added, along with artefacutalism, to the Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms.

Of course, it is fair to ask whether there ever is an entirely individual response to an artist – are we not all beholden to our contexts? Of course we are, but there is a great deal of difference between acknowledgment of context and submission to it. The institutionalisation of experience is a

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vibrant contemporary trend – press is theatre ever seriously discussed except through the institutions and companies who stage plays? Is that why so many Scottish playwrights over the past few years have been occupied in doing versions of other people’s work rather than their own? The programme dictates that all that there is to be said has indeed, been said? Discussions on ‘British film’ often relate not to what is being cultivated or produced, but who is running what, how much money there is, how much it brings in, and the importance of owning a film-industry, no matter how vapid, ramshackle, or rotten it is. It resembles nothing so much as the unheeded consequences of the vanitas satirised by the 1950s ‘funk artist’ Bruce Conner, who left his sculptures composed of industrial raw materials to rot in the Californian sun, and his spiritual successor Edward Kienholz, who took the finished bric-a-brac of civilization and turned it into savage, almost over-the-top indictments of the trust in the institution and the bewitchment of the artefact.

Analect 6 I have often used pieces of newspaper in my collages, but not to produce a newspaper.

The bewitching object-commodity underpins the sensibility of the British ‘conceptual artists’. A recent book by Mike Smith, the star fabricator of many famous British conceptual artworks, suggests they might represent the end point of the programmatic in art – for if he is to be believed (and there is plenty of evidence for it), many of those artists played no actual role in the fabrication of the works (which differentiates this entirely from truly collaborative disciplines such as filmmaking – there are few directors of any worth who have not thought long and hard about where the cameras should be set, even if it’s not their eye squeezed against the piece). It was Smith who worked out how to and put the sheep in the tank, to ‘make the physical expectation of that image [envisioned by the artist] real.’

Is the separation of the concept from the actual fabrication a problem? Do the public schoolboys that many of the conceptual artists enrage have a point? What happens when the concept need take no heed of the materials? Does this dislocation explain why so many of the ‘concepts’ in conceptual art are puerile, boring and often depressingly unoriginal?

Analect 7 … I was criticising just now, that [manner] of playing with artistic resources. You can never produce a real work of art if its conception is based on pure ideas and nothing else.

It seems that the artists (or maybe just the people who buy their work) believe so much in their super-sensitivity that no

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working out their ideas, thoughts and expression through the material is even necessary. We believe they are artists purely because they say they are, are told they are and they sell their work – the fabrications turned towards themselves, not the materials, not the world. Their reputation is one built on words rather than images, forms or colours. Has anything more ascetically and aesthetically bourgeois appeared out of the Impressionists’ ars than this?

And, because the concept is held superior to all other aspects – materials, form, theme – spectatorship of the object is thus further confined. A piece of art touches at the infinite – infinite responses, infinite reactions, infinite understandings – nevertheless individual to each onlooker.

But, the advent of the programme, of the essay beside the artefact, the greed of the concept to be the be all and end all, is one of the most audacious acts of bourgeois controlfreakery – of killing the infinite – imaginable. Ironically, this is currently termedas avant garde – but then, in the Jacobin sense, it probably is. One more victory for the Third Estate.

And if independent spectatorship is squeezed out, what then?

Because the relevance of a piece of visual art is sustained by the act of seeing the object, coming to terms with it subjectively, and if you so please, talking about it afterwards – then the removal of the possibility of this process – that is, working out a meaning for yourself – removes the actual work of art from public debate (life) into establishment. Why actually read Homer when everyone talks about him anyway?

It has been decided upon, defined, identified and thus successfully guillotined. Is there nothing left for the public to wonder about, except for the head of the artist held up by the hair in the executioner’s fingers?

Perhaps we can find something – perhaps a blurry photographic image, leaked to the press – of Madonna, snuggled beneath the covers with Tracey, favouring the allegedly hidden camera with a knowing, puckish wink.

Gloss B ‘That was neat’ Kevin Costner The Superman Picasso is often condemned to be an artistic superhero. It is true that Don Pablo did have a tendency to parade seminaked in shorts so skimpy they may as well have been his underwear. There is more of a whiff of the self-mystifier in his many photographic portraits – Pablo stares mysteriously from a mirror, or turns his hypnotic (and slightly psychotic) gaze, plus weathered, grainy skin, direct to the viewer. There is also no doubt he mucked about, played to his celebrity and bedded a lot of women, a Latin lover to bring any AngloSaxon reader schooled on Carmen and Antonio Banderas out in a hot flush (Roland Penrose alas, never really learned to cool his ardour and thus sweated all over the pages of his Picasso biography).

And yet, Picasso has successfully (unlike the eternal borecum-wanker Dali) avoided being separated from his work.

This may be because there’s so much of it, or perhaps

because it is so diverse, but may have more to with his own obsession with it. Like Van Gogh, whose letters are arguably some of the finest writings by any artist, it is hard to find an aspect of Picasso’s which is not actually about painting and trying to be better at it. He also lived a long and it seems fairly happy and prosperous life (unlike poor Van Gogh). Like Beckett, his image is instantly recognisable, but seems mute unless connected with his art. Yet his sayings about painting, even when made in complaint, are numerous, intelligent and insightful.

They can also seem contradictory – at times, Picasso acknowledges the sentience behind the creation of Cubism, at others, he claims to be undistracted by attempts to analyse what he does. The impression is of a man playing chicken with the artistic lepidopterist’s pin – imbued in his work as a constant tension between movement and classical, static forms that fill the canvas and inhabit dimensions of their own. At any point Picasso could have happily settled into a style of his making and still have been a master of great distinction. He did not choose to however, but rather continued to work through the paint. This summation, no doubt, has a panegyrical excess to it, but is still fairly true.

The result of this constant tussle of movement versus style is to dramatise his body of work – a drama that the artist embraced and thrived upon Analect 8 There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.

Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions eventually end up as prisoners in his work. Whatever they do, they can’t escape from the picture. They form an integral part of it …

As well as being credited as a Don Zarathustra, Picasso has also been posited as a Platonist by critics such as Huntly Carter and John Middleton Murry. For them, Picassoism was the first significant advancement upon Platoism – note that this is not Platonism, but the real deal, the original Idea of the Good. Murry in fact, was of the opinion that: Gloss C … Picasso must needs wait for another Plato to understand, but the world will never have the strength to follow.

Whether or not Murry overstates, we will probably never know (unless Plato’s bone marrow is found and the Greek government decide to clone him). In Murry’s awe-struck words are perhaps the rationale for the essays tacked by the frames of the paintings – it is simply assumed the observer will not have the strength to follow the artist, and thus needs a narrative to placate them and keep them company in the dark of the cave. As to Picasso’s stated views on abstraction, they do point at someone trying to work their way back to ideal states – that the subject of the painting, whether human or otherwise, is patiently worked back from its apparent form to something that is similar to the ‘real world’ source.

Analect 9 I keep doing my best not to lose sight of nature. I want to aim at

similarity, a profound similarity …

There are two examples of Picasso’s work that initially add weight to this argument that the artist’s career was one long crawl along the well-worn path to reach the mouth of that cave yet which, on closer inspection, ultimately serves to refute the claim for him as an out and out Platonist.

The first is The Bull, a lithograph(s) created over roughly a month between December 1945 and January 1946. It shows the stages in Picasso’s working on the print, from mockprehistoric to a grotesque representational phase, to something resembling Durer, to various Cubist, surrealist and schematic stages to a final, pure schema of lines. This seems to capture the struggle of the artist to work his way back to the Platonic dimension and achieve purity at any cost. It is not an entirely inaccurate position either.

Analect 9 When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy it. Do it over several times. With each destruction of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it but transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial.

But the sense of motion between phases can be too easily confused with evidence of a grander movement. True, the lithograph it is somehow summative of the artist’s work – but it does not condemn him to definition. Another value that can be taken from the work is that it has, in a sense, escaped the boundaries of the painting as commodity – only the prints from the lithograph’s previous phases exist, the original represents only the final, delicate form. The sense is of seeing the ideal of a piece – its concept – escape the bounds of materialism (and capitalism) without denying its debt to the material, physical state in which it was contrived.

In short, Picasso created a form of conceptual art that escaped the fatuousness of which the UK movement is so often accused.

Analect 10 You can only ever really work against something. Even against oneself. That is very important. Most painters get out their little cake tins and then they start making cakes. The same cakes, again and again. And they are very happy with them. A painter should never do what people expect of him. Style is the worst element of the painter. Art does not find its style until they are dead. It is always stronger.

But as stated, this lithograph indicates motion as much as movement towards a goal – at no point is it definite that Picasso would have necessarily stopped beyond the 11th state (though it is hard to see how much more minimal the bull could become). Another way of looking at it is that Picasso’s performance was instead spent by the 11th state. Do we not have here the destruction/reconstruction, a refusal to accept stasis until interest in working any more has gone?

Usually these valuable and fascinating stages in the drama are lost – with the lithograph was the chance for Picasso to somewhat crudely capture his own performance.

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Gloss D By this, he also expresses the thought that the instant is commensurable with eternity, because the instant of destruction expresses at the same instant eternity … The effect of sculpture is due to the fact that the eternal expression is expressed eternally; the comic effect, on the other hand, by the fact that the accidental expression was eternalised.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Freeze of the Mime Kierkegaard identifies the crucial role of performance in any creative process, its satisfying, yet strangely tragic quality of discovery and necessary obliteration of that moment. In theatre and in some other performing arts it is possible to understand this – in painting, only careful x-rays will often tell you what the artist went through in creating a piece.

Painting and sculpture are both blessed and cursed because what is presented is only the final ‘accidental expression’ – the freeze of the mime.

Analect 11 … the different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made is for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present.

The Bull is an indication that Picasso long sought ways in which the freeze of the mime could be overcome – or put in the context of his whole performance.To put another way – to be always seen in the present, not as a relic for the museum or, for that matter, as some intellectual trust saved over until the future. Thus, this laying bare can be distinguished from the voyeurism of the mere expose of the artist in his underwear (or skimpy shorts) into something much more interesting (and certainly far less puerile). It can also serve to countermand Murry’s statement on Picasso’s aim and direction – Picasso is close to the mouth of the cave, but he’s not trying to leave it as a Platonic philosopher might – instead he’s using his light to perform with. It is hard to look at The Bull without concluding that whatever Picasso’s affinities with Plato – his constant striving to distil the real-world object into a ‘similar’ form and essence – he was no automatic writer from the Platonic dimension. His most famous painting, Weeping woman, is the clearest indication of his love of drama – and something as visceral – theatrical – is evident in The Bull.

Analect 12 As my pen and my paint do happen to be weapons, I wanted to use them to penetrate deeper and deeper into a knowledge of the world and of people, so that this knowledge might set all of us more and more free each day.

Le Misanthrope The second example alluded to previously is of course the opportunity Picasso got to realise the potential of cinema and show himself as the Harlequin he forever painted, Le Mystere de Picasso.

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It is perhaps curious that the engineer of this opportunity should be Henri-Georges Clouzot. An amateur painter himself, Clouzot was Picasso’s neighbour and struck up a friendship over the years. As a director, Clouzot’s reputation has been in direct inverse to Picasso’s – France had vilified Clouzot for working during the Nazi occupation, and by the time he was able to work meaningfully again, Godard and the new wave were overtaking ‘the collaborator’. His signature film, The Raven, a superb study of paranoia and persecution in an occupied French town, was vilified for its seeming slandering of the French national character under the Nazi yoke. As Shane Danielsen, who last year programmed a Clouzot retrospective at the Edinburgh International Film Festival of 2003 pointed out in the catalogue, Clouzot’s attitude stemmed more from his general misanthropy and pessimism than any desire to buy into the Nazi regime or attack his country. The film shows the behaviour of the villagers stemming from their common humanity rather than their essential Frenchness. Clouzot is in truth, a misanthrope, not a fascist.

This did not stop Clouzot from being forced into nearobscurity. As an artist, Clouzot is far from ingratiating – all of his films, especially Les Diaboliques, Les Espions and The Wages of Fear maintain a cold, somewhat callous aloofness to their characters’ fates as they pay the cost of human folly. But there is no doubting his mastery of technique, his understanding of the image or his ability to uncover the ugliness beneath the surface. He was neither interested nor concern with healing nor consensus, and this did not help his case much after the war.

Setting Clouzot against Picasso is thus an interesting exercise, for Picasso, even when psychomorphically fragmenting his subjects such as in Weeping Woman, found a simple beauty and dignity in the drama, whereas Clouzot would see corruption and human weakness – something seeming in greater abundance in his times.

Analect 13 Never will you make an ape of me like [Matisse].

But it was the misanthropic analyst who would provide the enthusiastic Picasso with the chance he coveted to explore the possibilities of art on film. Penrose recounts how he and Picasso saw Matisse on film in 1950. Most of the film peered over his shoulder as he worked, or showed his paintings – often in complete isolation to the creative process, or as a crude ‘before and after’. At one point the filmmaker swivelled the camera directly onto Matisse, and forced the artist to attempt to explain himself. The artist, caught unawares, faltered in finding words and looked somewhat foolish – hence Picasso’s statement when the same film producer approached him. The artist mixed a fascination with the medium mixed with wariness over how it could

distort. If we take Penrose at his word, his experience in 1950 resulted in a determination never to become involved in the standard ‘art-documentary’.

Analect 14 … this work of intelligence can also be seen in the film on Matisse where you can watch him draw, hesitate and then express his thoughts in the form of a bold stroke.

And yet, it seems that aspects of the Matisse film excited him – namely the opportunity to capture the performance of painting. Here in cinema was the potential to make something observed in retrospect – the painting – ever present. But it was always from over the artist’s shoulder, as a presence obtrusive, awkward and no doubt uncomfortable for both artist and observer, with no sense of the filmmakers trying to accommodate or take their subject into account. Such shots are also profoundly unsatisfying, showing little other, as Barthes might say, the sign of the artist at work, rather then the process of the work itself. Picasso was keen to find a way to overcome this problem and show the painting process in the most open way possible, and this was the basis of many conversations with Clouzot, as they worked out how to approach the problem.

The gift of a bottle of American Ink literally provided the solution – because the colours seeped right through without blotting or losing definition, suddenly the camera could find its optimum position – behind the canvas, watching the ink seep through to a perfect mirror image.

Clouzot thus set up a camera behind a very thinly stretched canvas, and induced Picasso to work – not easy given the heat of the lights and the crowds of technicians.The painter produced over 80 canvases from July to September 1955, and destroyed them at the end in order that the film itself be the work of art, a monument to his creative processes, rather than an extended advert for him and his wares (although this film does Picasso’s market value no harm whatsoever).

Gloss E We hear from Montrouge That our friend Picasso Is making a moving picture Just like this cradle Guillaume Appolinaire With Clouzot’s aid Picasso has surpassed the lithograph of 10 years previous. This is still a film about painting – we have presaged, but not reached film or video as the art itself – but the filmmaking is almost entirely given over to it as a subject, and because Picasso denied the museum and the dealer their artefacts this time, the only art-object to speak of. Although accompanied by Georges Auric’s astonishing score, the music

of the piece seems to be all in the visuals, seeping through, bold, clear and simple. With the painter himself hidden behind the white of the canvas, the provenance of the images matters much less – it is their qualities that captivate or repels us.

Some of the paintings emerge, stroke-by-stroke. Some of the more complex and mechanical pieces are revealed through stop motion photography. Verite is only compromised in that certain sequences were speeded up – for it can look as if Picasso is truly superhuman, knocking out masterpieces in minutes – the fluidity of his line and economy of his strokes are indeed awe-inspiring. The static camera allows Picasso to be the mover, makes us the fixed point as the painter works – a very different situation to that in which we usually encounter painting, where we can move around and backward and forth. There is a touch of the tyrannical here – we have no choice but to watch this creation in the way Clouzot’s camera has selected – but then, cinema is the bourgeois artform. Some things we cannot escape too readily. Nevertheless, for his part, Clouzot utilises the most democratic of shots – squarely in front of the subject at a distance which allows it to fill the screen and be seen as it is.

Analect 15 One has to kill oneself if one wants to keep on accomplishing things.

Nor are we forced into ingesting any explication – Picasso, successfully avoiding Darwin, does not stop in between to instruct the audience as to his intentions. Instead we only have his brush to indicate his thought processes. This really is a film, not a programme.

Picasso’s process of killing his creations to make way for new ones is shown well in a painting of a goat (echoing The Bull) in which several perfectly good paintings are created, only to be undone and redone in differing styles. Kill, establish, move on; we can start to see at the same time the richness and the poignancy of Picasso’s refusal to arrive at a style and make this process into a movement – no ‘before and after’.

Instead there is only motion – in Augustinian terms, a presence.

Each painting is therefore a sequence, and certainly not flattened into an image, with a sense of time, space and depth.The effect is symphonic, the painting-sequence composed of movements that in this case are those of the brush. Overtures can be timid, or chaotic, tone changes from Picasso’s celebrated child’s innocence to mischief, to irony. Through the camera, we can cohabit with Picasso as a real audience.

Some of the performances do fail – the penultimate painting is dramatically worked, rubbed out and reworked repeatedly, the artist turning back after each idea has worked itself out, before admitting defeat. In such instances, we see the fragility of the creative urge and how sometimes no fabrication of the desired expression is possible. It is the most moving part of the film, in which emoting with the artistic endeavour requires no cheap tricks, nor any exaggerated sense of knowing the artist as a person.

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Sometimes the artist moves – flounces – without purpose or import.

For this, the credit must go to Clouzot who subordinates himself to the work. He is the fabricator here of course – who allows the concept to be enacted, and it is only proper that we understand this collaborator in those terms. His contribution is great, but he understands what it is, does not allow the concept to be alienated from the materials (the film!) and never seeks to impose himself.

He does appear in the film, very briefly in the mid section, where we see him and Picasso talk, and get a chance to look over the painter’s shoulder. This does not appear to be a capitulation to the traditional art-documentary, nor is it an attempt by Clouzot to grasp at reflected glory. What the viewer sees is the intelligence of Picasso’s strokes – his hesitation before each, his ‘thinking’ with his hand. There is no Platonic premeditation here. Rather, the impression is much more visceral and profane – that same viscerality we see him reach for in The Bull; the brush perched in the nook between the base of the thumb and the fingers, circles over the canvas, each oscillation considering a possible permutation of the final form before deciding on one that feels right. It is a fundamentally human and humane process of hard graft – we can gratefully dispense with Picasso the Superman, creator (and possessor) of sacred artefacts, and celebrate instead the excitement of turning raw materials into art. Clouzot’s gift for rooting out human weakness uplifts us all rather than demoralise us. In the end, the misanthrope is the one able to unfreeze the mime and impart Picasso’s enthusiasm rather than just his Homeric legend, and for this the audience finds itself much indebted.

Le Mystere Picasso/Henri-Georges Clouzot/France/1956/78 mins.

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