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ART SOURCES FOR PICASSO'S WORK

AN ARTIST'S SEARCH FOR SOURCES IN THE WORK OF PICASSO

by

John Warren Oakes

A.B., M.A., M.F.A., C.A.A.

Introduction

“What fundamentally is a painter? He's a collector who wishes to obtain a collection by making himself the paintings of others he likes. It's like that, and then it becomes something else”

--Pablo Picasso (qtd. in Lucas 37).

Picasso's definition of a painter recreating the artwork of others describes a process he used throughout his career as he adapted and transformed the work of artists whom he admired. In fact, he borrowed compositions, themes, and ideas from other artists. He used his fertile imagination and memory to generate images from forms and figures he saw in the work of both his contemporaries and his predecessors. Picasso's friend Maurice Raynal wrote that "Picasso looked for the essence of things in other works of art, and he realized that in order to distill this essence himself, the most advanced starting point was not reality and nature but the work of others” (Raynal qtd. in Blunt 5).

Many of Picasso's innovations can be explained by this procedure. Throughout his long career, from the early influence of Spanish painting, French Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism prior to 1900 to Picasso's late studies based on the "Maids of Honor" by Velazquez and the "Women of Algiers" by Delacroix, there is a continued utilization of art which he studied and esteemed. In addition to being cognizant of trends and involved with other writers and artists in his own time, Picasso was strongly attracted to the art of the past. He had in his personal collection works by Cezanne, Courbet, Degas, Gauguin, LeNain, Matisse, and others. To him, true art was timeless, as he said in 1935: “To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was” (qtd. in Barr 272-73).

Susan Grace Galassi commented “His many remarks on copying the works of others give insight into his understanding of this paradoxical relationship and its importance to him.” (Galassi 20). For an artist to be influenced by the work of others is not unusual; most artists know the work of the past and participate in their own milieu. This aspect of Picasso's career has been previously discussed by many scholars, among them Sir Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool in Picasso: The Formative Years: a study of his sources, Sir Roland Penrose in Picasso: His Life and Work, and Susan Grace Galassi in Picasso's Variations on the Masters: Conversations With the Past. It is my contention, however, that Picasso went far beyond influence and immersion, what we might think of as ordinary give-and-take among artists, to finding the very source of his inspiration and the raw materials of form in the works of others.

However, to be clear from the start, Picasso was no mere copyist. In working from the paintings of other artists, he made them his own by absorbing and transforming them, in the process often generating a new style or image.

In speaking about his artistic process, Picasso was open about this way of working. “The laws of composition,” he said, “are never new, they are always someone else's” (qtd. in Penrose 336). In the same vein, in 1952 he made this comment about his debt to Velazquez “Suppose you just want to copy "Las Meninas." If I were to set myself to copying it, there would come a moment when I would say to myself: Now what would happen if I put that figure a little more to the left? And I would go ahead and try it, in my own way, without attending anymore to Velazquez. This experiment would surely lead me to modify the light or to arrange it differently, from having changed the position of a figure. So little by little I would proceed to make a picture, "Las Meninas", which for any painter who specialized in copying would be no good. It wouldn't be the "Meninas" as they appear to him in Velazquez's canvas. It would be my "Meninas”” (Picasso qtd. in Leymarie 273).

For Picasso, the art of the masters even replaced living models. In fact, he rarely worked from the live model. There are numerous works in this book containing a figure or a group of figures, the models for whom are found in the work of the masters. Leo Stein, who was a close friend of Picasso's during these years, recalled that Picasso did not use models during the Iberian period, and he implied that this had been Picasso's practice for a long time (Stein 174).

Picasso researched or used from memory art of the past in order to help him express the present. In his "Guernica" of 1937, Picasso combined subjects, shapes, and areas from numerous sources to help him develop his solution. This research insured the inclusion of elements related to the finest works of art as part of his compositions. He was a master of mixing all this together so that his work was created on a solid foundation.

Perhaps Picasso (qtd. in Barr 273) explains it best “We must pick out what is good for us where we find it--except from our own works. I have a horror of copying myself. But when I am shown a portfolio of old drawings, for instance, I have no qualms about taking anything I want from them.” Helene Parmelin (Picasso qtd. in Parmelin 43) quoted Picasso as saying, “What does it mean, . . . for a painter to paint in the manner of so-and-so or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch . . . . And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.”

Picasso told us what he was doing. Have we ignored his comments?

What this Art from Art series does is examine Picasso's debt to the masters that goes beyond influence. I will show how he, throughout his career, created art from art, how he looked for compositional structure with which to frame his subjects. He followed suggestions of imagery in other works, building on what his imagination saw. “I try to paint what I have found, not what I sought,” he said (Picasso qtd. in Picasso ). In him the physical world around him and the world of art in which he lived in his imagination, which included the art of the past, merged into one.

Picasso has been the subject of much investigation, with each year more books being added to the already vast number. My aim is not to repeat the documented history about Picasso. I have been a practicing artist for over fifty-five years. My purpose, as an artist, is to examine his working methods and the result. I am interested in his imagination as he interacted with the art of others. I don't see his content; I see form. Just as a bicycle seat can be a bull's head, many things from other artists' work undergo a metamorphosis in his imagination.

I have been researching art sources for his work since 1965, when I wrote my thesis at the University of Iowa on the sources in Picasso's early work 1900 -1906. I have done extensive research on Picasso's complete production focusing on sources. The comparisons presented in this book are my observations based on my understanding as an artist on how Picasso worked. I have relied on the writings of Picasso himself along with what his friends and art historians have written about this topic to augment my findings.

I believe that the comparisons presented in this book reveal and demonstrate what a master Picasso was at grounding his art in art history. Admittedly, some of the relationships I present in this study are subtle; if they were obvious, they would be like his variations on Velaquez's “Infanta Maria Theresa.” My focus is not on subject matter but his magical transformation of forms and structures he gathers from the masters.

This book presents the work of Picasso together with the works of the masters who served as models. He did not enter the twentieth century alone but brought with him the art and culture of past centuries.

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