Inscription and Castration in Picasso's the Painter and His Model, 1927
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Inscription and Castration in Picasso’s The Painter and His Model , 1927* JEREMY MELIUS Tout l’intérêt de l’art se trouve dans le commence - ment. Après le commencement, c’est déjà la fin . —Pablo Picasso, 1932 1 In the spring of 1927, Picasso produced a large painting known as The Painter and His Model , now in Tehran. 2 Perhaps because of its current location, the work has, until recently, gone largely unremarked in the literature on the artist. 3 Nonetheless, * This essay began as a qualifying paper written at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 under the supervision of T. J. Clark, whom I wish to thank for his advice, example, and continued encouragement in all matters related to Picasso. An early version of the present text was presented in 2007, with incisive responses by Hal Foster and Garrett Stewart, at the conference “Picasso in the Late 1920s,” convened by Clark at Berkeley. In addition to Foster and Stewart, I am grateful to Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Elizabeth Cowling, Whitney Davis, Lisa Florman, Michael Fried, James Glisson, Christopher Green, Charlie Miller, Anne Wagner, and Sebastian Zeidler for their helpful sug - gestions then and since. 1. Eftratios Tériade, “En causant avec Picasso,” L’intransigeant , June 15, 1932; repr. in Pablo Picasso, Propos sur l’art , ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Michael Androula (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 28. 2. The work was reproduced under this title— Le peintre et son modèle —in Christian Zervos’s cat - alogue raisonné, most likely with Picasso’s approval: Pablo Picasso , ed. Christian Zervos (Paris, Cahiers d’Art, 1932– ), vol. 7, no. 50. (The painting seems also to have passed through Zervos’s hands: See the provenance printed in Picasso by Picasso: His First Museum Exhibition 1932 , ed. Tobia Bezzola [Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich; Munich: Prestel, 2010], p. 178.) In the pages of the “Hommage à Picasso” issue of Documents, the work appeared under the title L’Atelier du peintre . See Documents 2, no. 3 (1930), p. 148. 3. Within the last fifteen years, the painting could be seen in two important Swiss exhibitions: Picasso Surreal: 1924–1939 , Fondation Beyeler, Basel, June 12–September 12, 2005, and Picasso: Die Erste Museumausstellung 1932 , Kunsthaus Zürich, October 15, 2010–January 30, 2011. Even more recently, it has been the subject of “Lecture 4: Monster,” in T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 147–92. Clark presents a searching account of the picture in terms of his larger claims about the fate of “room space” in Picasso’s art since the advent of Cubism, and as part of a dialectic between what he takes to be two paradigms governing the relation between figure and space within the artist’s work of the 1920s and ’30s: the aggressive irruptions of the “monstrous,” on the one hand, and the reparative, or at least less violent, spatial organization of the “monumental” on the other. For Clark, The Painter and His Model thus proves to be a signal instance of the way Picasso’s art of the later ’20s “ha[s] no confidence in any totality not derived, contingently, from some accidental touch of the Other,” and therefore “proposes that worlds —space, difference, identity, substance— come out of figures, not the other way around ”( Picasso and Truth , p. 228). Given the larger ambitions of his extraordinary book, which these remarks can only begin to suggest, Clark’s OCTOBER 151, Winter 2015, pp. 43 –61. © 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00211 by guest on 02 October 2021 44 OCTOBER it stands as his most arresting single canvas of the late 1920s—perhaps the strangest period of the artist’s production—and indeed as one of the supreme achievements of his career. In ways we have yet to grasp fully, the late ’20s marked a crucial turning point for Picasso: a moment of crisis, which seemed to require a total reexamination of his means. Over the course of 1927 in particular, his work took on a troubled, Pablo Picasso. The Painter and His Model. 1927. © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. almost desperate air as Picasso reengaged with Cubism’s most difficult lessons, and constantly courted—at times even willed—aesthetic failure. At no time had the artist worked against himself with such intensity, or with such bewildering results. This can best be appreciated visually: Take a painting and a drawing from the summer of 1927, completed in the wake of The Painter and His Model. Picasso had always, of course, employed a variety of pictorial modes—by the ’20s, this had already become the dominant cliché of Picasso criticism—but by 1927, their disjuncture and variety posed newly difficult problems. For once platitudes about the multiplicity of Picasso’s genius are put aside, the difficulty lies in saying something concrete about what the differences and similarities between such works actually are, and what they might have meant. What, that is, might the exaggerated three-dimensionality of the emphases ultimately differ from my own. Nonetheless, in general terms, as I hope will be clear, as well as in their shared sense of the importance of Picasso’s sketchbook materials for making sense of the painting, our accounts of The Painter and His Model remain in sympathy. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00211 by guest on 02 October 2021 Inscription and Castration in The Painter and His Model 45 one—the pseudo-solidity of its tor - pedo breasts, the self-shadow clinging to each strand of hair—have to do with the fierce, diagrammatic preci - sion of the other? There are superficial connections between them, of course (the strange business about the hair would be a place to start); but can these works be said to function together within some larger system of pictorial difference? Or do they scatter hopelessly apart? The longer one looks, moreover, the clearer it becomes that whatever they might share, it is not some “real” body that has been deformed and pulled into shape from one configuration to the other. If each image carries on a flirtation with the phenomenal world—and one can find this even in the relentlessly flat Figure , where each eye, dislocated but not detached from the other, seems to shelter its own affect—it does so with a sense of provi - sionality and self-awareness that also refuses to recognize that world as nec - essary for picturing. “Naturalism,” if that’s what such effects should be called, seems to function as a game or a tool, not a foregone conclusion. In this especially, Figure and its compan - ion look directly back to The Painter and His Model . Their divergent pictor - ial strategies find a kind of fulcrum in the earlier painting. Rearticulating, revising, and refusing aspects of its configuration, both later works begin to suggest the sheer productivity and extremism of the Tehran canvas, and the way it would go on being a prob - lem for Picasso: a continual, perhaps at last unanswerable, provocation. Picasso. Top: Bather by a Cabin. 1927. Bottom: Figure. 1927. Both images © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photos © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN- Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00211 by guest on 02 October 2021 46 OCTOBER * The Painter and His Model stands as the key term among a series of paintings, drawings, and prints Picasso made between 1926 and 1928 that depict the relation between painter and model. 4 The sheer ubiquity of this subject in the artist’s later career has made the specificity of this first set of works difficult to retrieve. 5 The Tehran canvas brings them into electrifying clarity. In the first place, The Painter and His Model proposes to show the work of picturing and the body it pictures simultaneously. The body is both there and not there, both actual presence and ghostly potential. This enables Picasso to interrogate one of painting’s deepest fic - tions: that the body exists, out there in the world, and can therefore be depicted. Picasso’s engagement with this fiction throughout his career was conflicted and intense. Leo Steinberg has offered the most powerful account of it. 6 As Steinberg describes it, the work of picturing for Picasso consists of the imaginative deforma - tion of a body already there in the service of eroticized visual interest. The con - stant, at times violent, reconfiguration of bodies across the surfaces of Picasso’s works, then, seeks to present some maximum of simultaneously visible aspects for the painter-viewer’s pleasure—a simultaneity, moreover, that would not “sacrifice” any of the body’s “real presence,” on which that pleasure is based. 7 “The quest,” Steinberg writes, “was for the form that would be at the same time a diagram and an embrace.” 8 With its emphasis on how certain paradigms of desire became, for Picasso, a powerful set of formal impulses, this account has tremendous explanato - ry power. Nonetheless, the very power of Steinberg’s account risks eliding a sec - ond, and perhaps even more necessary, fiction driving Picasso’s art of the later ’20s—a fiction to which The Painter and His Model draws attention and seeks to give allegorical form. The painting calls on us to recognize the primacy of mark- making, figuring the body not as precedent for, but as product of, painting’s operations. It asks us to see the “real presence” of the model not as body restaged but rather as fully a creature of painting, her figure instantiated in and as the material configuration of a surface.