THE CHISEL AND THE LENS:
PICASSO, BRASSAÏ, AND THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURES: 1933– 1948
By
Alma Mikulinsky
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of PhD
Graduate Department of Art
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Alma Mikulinsky (2011)
The Chisel and the Lens: Picasso, Brassaï, and the Photography of Sculpture: 1933–1948.
Alma Mikulinsky
Doctor of Philosophy Department of Art University of Toronto 2011
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
While Pablo Picasso internationally exhibited his paintings, he chose to expose his sculptures only through photographs. Picasso’s commitment to the photographic display of his sculpture comes to light through his fifteen year collaboration with Brassaï, the first photographer to collaborate regularly with the artist and the only one to engage thoroughly with Picasso’s sculptural oeuvre. This collaboration culminated in hundreds of images published largely on two occasions – a photo essay published in the avant- garde Journal Minotaure in 1933 and a catalogue covering almost fifty years of Picasso’s sculptural production published in French in 1948 and in English in 1949. These photographs, as well as unpublished prints, uncropped versions of the published photographs, and the contact sheets Brassaï assembled as he was photographing Picasso’s oeuvre are contextualized in light of contemporary theories regarding the presentation, representation, and dissemination of art. This case study sheds light on the way in which strategies of display shape art’s meaning, as well as the artist’s public image, reputation, and legacy.
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Acknowledgments
While writing a dissertation often feels like a solitary project, this particular thesis
was a transatlantic, collective endeavour. First and foremost I would like to express my
immense gratitude to my dissertation supervisor, Dr. Elizabeth Legge, who graced me
with her guidance, advice, knowledge, incredible wit and charm. She patiently read
incomplete drafts, listened to half-baked ideas, and graciously offered feedback. She
taught me many invaluable lessons on both 20th century art and life in the academia. I am
fortunate to be her student. Since my first day in the Department of Art, Dr. Mark
Cheetham, once my DGS and now a committee member and a fellow yogi, provided me
with an exceptional model to emulate. I am grateful for his unwavering support. Dr.
Alison Syme generously offered her help at the impossible stage of beginning to write
and at the even more challenging final stages of dissertation. I am always amazed by her intellectual capacities and her unrivalled sense of humour.
This project was developed during eight months research trip to Europe made possibly by the generous support of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and The Peter H.
Brieger Fellowship for Research Travel. The Hungarian Helicon Foundation (Ontario)
Graduate Grant allowed me to return to Paris to view materials essential to the
completion of this dissertation. I am grateful to Alexis Sornin and Genevieve Dalpé for welcoming me to Montreal for two-month residency at the Canadian Centre for
Architecture. My year at the Jackman Humanities Institute was a period of intellectual growth thanks to my fellow fellows. I was fortunate to be a part of such a wonderful and diverse group of people. My thanks to Bob Gibbs, Kim Yates, Cheryl Pasternak, the dear
iii Monica Toffoli. A special token of gratitude to my neighbour at the institute, my dear friend Shami Ghosh, who always asks me to aim at the profound.
In Paris I benefited from the help of Sylvie Fresnault and Jeanne Sudour at the
Picasso archives who were never tire of answering questions and assisting. I thank
Quentin Bajac at Centre Pompidou for his help with the Brassaï materials. I am grateful
to Prof. Marta Braun who assisted me in gaining access to what I thought were
inaccessible materials. I gained from the generosity of Prof. Elizabeth Cowling, who
shared her vast knowledge of Picasso with an aspiring Picasso scholar.
This dissertation would not have been written without the friendship of Carolina
Mangone. Carolina, I always felt that we wrote our dissertations hand in hand; thank you
for never letting me go. I owe Margo Beggs the introduction to the fascinating field of the
photography of sculptures; thank you Margo for the inspiration, and conversations. My
colleagues at the department of art, and especially the members of the dissertation writing
group, have provided emotional and intellectual support as well as excellent feedback.
Thank you to Jann G. Marson. At the Department of Art I thank the crew of great women
who light up the 6th floor with their smiles and charisma: Vicky Dingillo, Margaret
English, Peggy Haist, Louise Kermode, Joanne Wainman, and Ilse Wister. Special
Thanks to Gaby Spark for always listening.
My friends in Israel and Canada formed an important support group: I am grateful to Sara Angel, Daphna Attias and Kuku Junior, Trina K. Hiscock, Rachel Johnson, Adi
Loria Hayon, Noa Saliternik, and Aiden Selsick. Since my first day at university Leah
Abir read, listened, commented, and asked wonderful questions. Thank you for being my best friend.
iv I owe thanks to my one and only Sherman. Sebastian waltzed (ok, salsa) into my life as I completed my full draft and made sure that I laugh every day during the process of revisions; thank you for teaching me to dream long term. I am grateful for my family in Canada, and especially for my aunt and friend Varda Feiner. I am fortunate to have the support of my brothers: thank you Shay for being there at especially rough patches. To my sister and biggest supporter, Romi, I thank for having faith in me even at times that I didn’t. To my parents, Margalit Mikulinsky and Yankale Kol, for giving me the freedom to pursue my dreams and for their love, I dedicate this dissertation.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii Table of Contents vi List of Figures vii
Introduction 1
Chapter I Picasso’s Palette and the Photographic Construction of the 14 Artist’s Persona
Chapter II Brassaï’s 1933 Minotaure Photo Essay of Picasso as an 43 Ethnographic Exploration
Chapter III Assigning Value in the Catalogue Les Sculptures de Picasso 73
Chapter IV Contextualizing Picasso’s Sculptures and their Photographic 115 Display
Chapter V Other than Brassaï – Contemporary Photographers and 145 Picasso’s Sculptures
Conclusions 168
Bibliography 173
Figures 197
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List of Figures
1.1 Man Ray, Surrealist Chessboard, 1934. Collage, gelatin silver print, 46 x 30.2 cm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. 1.2 Man Ray, Picasso, 1933. Gelatin silver print. 35.2 x 27.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1.3 Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Man Ray, 1934. India ink on paper, 34.5 x 24.8 cm. The Kantor Collection, Beverley Hills, California. 1.4 Man Ray, Hands painted by Picasso, ca. 1935. Gelatin silver print. 20 x 30.5 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. 1.5 Man Ray, Still life, 1933. Three-color carbon transfer print. 30.6 x 23 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 1.6 Brassaï, Picasso’s Palette, 1932–3. Minotaure, 1.1, (January 1933): 8. 1.7 Man Ray, Dust Breeding, ca. 1920. Gelatin Silver Print. 9.2 x 12 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1.8 Brassaï, Uncropped Print of Picasso’s Palette, 1932. Gelatin silver print. 23.5 x 18 cm. Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. 1.9 Man Ray, Uncropped Print of Dust Breeding, 1920, printed later. Gelatin silver print, 30.4 x 40.3 cm. Private collection, courtesy Galerie 1900–2000, Paris. 1.10 Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head, 1942. Bronze casting from bicycle saddle and handlebars. 42 x 41 x 15 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 1.11 Pablo Picasso, Painter and Model, 1928. Oil on Canvas, 129.8 x 163. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1.12 Brassaï, Picasso’s Palette, 1939. Gelatin silver print, 32.6 x 27.3 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1.13 Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Octopus, 1912. Platinum print. 41.8 x 31.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum, New York. 1.14 Man Ray, Transatlantic, 1921. Collage, 29.3 x 23.7 cm. Private collection, New York. (detail) 1.15 Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain, 1917. Gelatin silver print. 11 x 17.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. 1.16 Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s Studio at 33 West 67th Street, New York, 1917–18. Photograph, 6.5 x 7.8 cm. Succession Marcel Duchamp. 1.17 Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s Studio at 33 West 67th Street, New York, 1917. 6.5 x 7.8 cm. Succession Marcel Duchamp. 1.18 André Kertész, Chez Mondrian, 1928. Gelatin silver print. 11.4 x 7.9 cm. The Paul J. Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 1.19 Pablo Picasso, Still life with a Butterfly, 1932. Fabric, wood, plants, string, thumbtack, butterfly, and oil paint on canvas, 16 x 22 x 2.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 1.20 Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas. 24.1 x 33 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1.21 Jacques-André Boiffard, Flies on Fly Paper, 1930. Documents 8 (1930): 488.
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2.1 Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, West African Hut Pinnacles, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 19. 2.2 Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, West African Hut with Pinnacle, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 18. 2.3 Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, The Bani River, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 18. 2.4a Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, a Sacrifice of a Bull in Gondar, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2, (January 1933): 32. 2.4b Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, a Sacrifice of a Bull in Gondar, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 32. 2.4c Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, a Sacrifice of a Bull in Gondar, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 33. 2.4d Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, a Sacrifice of a Bull in Gondar, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 33. 2.4e Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, a Sacrifice of a Bull in Gondar, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 34. 2.5 Brassaï and Salvador Dalí, Involuntary Sculptures, 1933. Minotaure 1.3–4 (December 1933): 68. 2.6 Brassaï, Picasso’s Object, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 14. 2.7 Brassaï, View of Picasso’s rue de La Boétie Studio, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 12. 2.8. Brassaï, View of Picasso’s rue de La Boétie Studio, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 13. 2.9 Brassaï, Picasso’s Wood Sculptures, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 23. 2.10 Brassaï, Picasso’s Palette, 1932–3. Minotaure, 1.1, (January 1933): 8. 2.11 Brassaï, Picasso’s Boisgeloup Heads, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 26. 2.12 Brassaï, Picasso’s Welded Iron Sculptures, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 20–21. 2.13 Brassaï, Picasso’s Plaster Sculptures, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 18–9. 2.14 Brassaï, Entrance to Picasso’s Boisgeloup Studio. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 15. 2.15 Brassaï, Picasso’s Model for the Apollinaire Monument, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 22. 2.16 Brassaï, View of Picasso’s rue de La Boétie Studio (Top: L’étagère, bottom: La Fenêtre), 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 27. 2.17 Brassaï, Boisgeloup after Dark, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 17. 2.18 Member of the Dakar Djibouti Expedition, Mothers of Masks as found in a Cave in Mali, 1930–2. Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 10.
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3.1 Brassaï, Picasso’s “The Crane,” 1942. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 119. 3.2 Brassaï, Picasso’s “Death Head,” 1943. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 162. 3.3 Brassaï, Picasso’s “Man with a Sheep,” 1944. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 193. 3.4 Brassaï, Picasso’s Paper Sculpture, 1943. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 135. 3.5 Brassaï, Picasso’s “Cigar” 1941. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 87. 3.6 Brassaï, Picasso’s Engraved Pebbles, 1937–40. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plates 100, 101, 102. 3.7 Brassaï, Picasso’s Crumpled Paper Sculpture, 1943. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne,1948, plate 176. 3.8 Brassaï, Boisgeloup after Dark, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 17. 3.9 Alfred Stieglitz, Picasso’s Fernande’s Head, 1911. Camera Work: Special Number Matisse-Picasso (August, 1912) : 13. 3.10 Émile Delétang, Picasso’s “Glass of Absinthe,” 1914. Gelatin silver print, Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. 3.11 Brassaï, Picasso’s Sculptures 19, Contact Sheet number 19, 1946–9. Five contact prints, no. 51 to no. 51d: Glass of Absinthe, bronze and absinthe spoon, 1914; Two contact prints no. 52 to no. 52a: Metamorphosis II, bronze, 1928; Two contacts from no. 53 to no. 53a Metamorphosis I, bronze 1928; Three contact prints no. 30 to no. 30 b: Vertical Hand, bronze, 1943. Gelatin silver proofs pasted on cardboard and annotated by the photographer, 24 x 32 cm. Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 3.12 Brassaï, Picasso’s Sculptures 1, Contact Sheet number 1, 1946–9. six contacts no. 11 to no. 11e: Death’s Head: bronze, 1943. Gelatin silver proofs pasted on cardboard and annotated by the photographer, 24 x 32 cm. Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 3.13 Brassaï, Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, cover. 3.14 Brassaï, Picasso’s “Hand,” 1943, Proof of a Gelatin silver contact, 27.8 x 19.3 cm. Contact sheet 24, (1946–9). Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 3.15 Pablo Picasso, Study of the Artist’s Hands, 1919. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents iconographique. Paris, Pierre Cailler, 1963, p. 124 3.15a Pablo Picasso, Study of the Artist’s Hands, 1919. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents iconographique. Paris, Pierre Cailler, 1963, p. 125. 3.16 Nick de Morgoli, Picasso’s Hands, 1938. Jaime Sabartés , Picasso: Documents iconographique. Paris, Pierre Cailler, 1963, p. 156. 3.16a Nick de Morgoli, Picasso’s Hands, 1938. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents iconographique. Paris, Pierre Cailler,1963, p. 157. 3.17 Marcel Duchamp and Enrico Donati, Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Prière du toucher),
ix 1947. Modified Readymade: collage of foam-rubber breast and velvet mounted on board, 23.5 x 20.5 cm. Museum of modern Art, New York. 3.18 Brassaï, Pablo Picasso’s “Fist,” 1948. Les Sculpture de Picasso. Paris, Chêne,1948, plate 216. 3.19 Brassaï, Picasso and the Orator, 1939. Les Sculpture de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, p. ii.
4.1 Henri Matisse, Jeanette V, 1913. Bronze, 58.0 x 20.8 x 28.7 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. 4.2 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman, 1931. Bronze, 87 x 30 x 45 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.3 Pablo Picasso, Head, 1928. Painted brass and iron, 18 x 11 x 7.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.4 Constantin Brancusi, Kiss, 1909. Stone, height 89.5 cm. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. 4.5 Brassaï, Picasso’s Cigarette Box Construction at his Studio, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 13. 4.6 Constantin Brancusi, Self Portrait with Endless Columns, 1920/3. Gelatin silver Print, 16.5 x 20. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 4.7 Brassaï and Constantin Brancusi, Photographs of Sculptures by Brancusi, Despiau, Giacometti, Lipchitz, and Maillol. Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933): 40–41. 4.7a Brancusi, Photogrpah of Newborn[?], 1933. detail of 4.7 4.8 Brassaï, Boisgeloup after Dark, 1932–3. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 17. 4.9 Constantin Brancusi, Photographs of Brancusi’s Sculptures and Studio. Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933): 42–3. 4.9.a detail of 4.9. 4.9.b detail of 4.9. 4.10 Brassaï, Picasso’s Palette, 1932–3. Minotaure, 1.1, (January 1933): 8. 4.11 Brassaï, Maillol’s Studio. Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933): 52–3. 4.12 Pablo Picasso, The Orator, 1933. Bronze, 183.5 x 66 x 27 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.13 Pablo Picasso, Woman Leaning on Her Elbow, 1933. Bronze, 62.2 x 42.5 x 28.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.14 Pablo Picasso, Woman with Leaves, 1933. Bronze, 37.9 x 20 x 25.9 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.15 Pablo Picasso, Etchings of “The Sculptor’s Studio” from The Vollard Suite. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 24. 4.16 Brassaï, Lipchitz’s Studio. Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933) 50–51. 4.17 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman, 1931. Plaster, 71.5 x 33 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 4.18 Brassaï, Giacometti’s Studio. Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933): 46–7. 4.19 Sculptures by André Breton, and Gala Éluard. La Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 1 (December 1931): 20. 4.20 Sculptures by Valentin Hugo, and Salvador Dalí. La Surréalisme au
x Service de la Révolution 1 (December 1931): 21.
4.21 Photographs of L’Exposition Anti-Impérialiste: La Vérité sur les colonies, reproduced in La Surréalisme au Service de la Revolution 4, (December 1931): 40. 4.22 Pablo Picasso, Figure (“The Christmas Tree”), 1931. Les Sculptures de Picasso. Paris, Chêne, 1948, plate 22. 4.23 Brassaï , Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman, and Sumerian Figure (photographer unknown). André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art: La Musée Imaginaire. Paris, Skira, 1948, p. 126. 4.24 Sumerian Figure, upper left corner (unknown photographer). André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art: La Musée Imaginaire. Paris, Skira, 1948, p. 28. 4.25 Detail of figure 4.23, 4.24. André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art: La Musée Imaginaire. Paris, Skira, 1948, p. 29. 4.26 Jean Fautrier, Large Tragic Head, 1943. Bronze, 34.8 x 17.2 x 21.1 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 4.27 Pablo Picasso, Head, 1943. Stone, 32.8 x 34.7 cm. Private collection. 4.28 Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head, 1942. Bronze casting from bicycle saddle and handlebars. 42 x 41 x 15 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
5.1 Pablo Picasso, Photograph of Head of a Woman and Bust of a Woman in the Studio in Boisgeloup, 1931. John Richardson with the Collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life with Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, New York: Knoff, 2007, p. 446. 5.2 Pablo Picasso, Photograph of Head of a Woman and Bust of a Woman in the Studio in Boisgeloup, 1931, in John Richardson with the Collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life with Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, New York, Knoff, 2007, p. 447. 5.3 Pablo Picasso, Photograph of Head of a Woman and Bust of a Woman in the Studio in Boisgeloup, 1931, in John Richardson with the Collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life with Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, New York, Knoff, 2007, p. 446. 5.4 Pablo Picasso, Wall arrangement of papier collés in the boulevard Raspail Studio (No. 1), Paris, winter 1912. Gelatin silver print, 3.5 x 4.625 cm. Private collection. 5.5 Brassaï, Head of a Woman in Picasso’s Boisgeloup Studio, 1932. Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 25. 5.6 Brassaï, Picasso’s Sculpture 5, Contact Sheet Number 5, 1942–6. Four contact prints no. 43 to 43c: Head of a Woman, bronze, 1931. Five contact prints no. 44 to no. 44d: Bust of a Woman, bronze, 1931. Four contact prints no. 23 to no 23c: Head of a Woman, bronze, 1931. Gelatin silver proofs pasted on cardboard and annotated by the photographer, 24 x 32 cm. Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 5.7 Lee Miller, Picasso and the Photographer in Picasso’s rue des Grands Augustins Studio, 1944. Gelatin silver print.23 x 20.1 cm. Lee Miller’s Archives, England. 5.8 David Douglas Duncan, Man with a Sheep, Esmeralda the Goat and Lump the
xi Dachshund in the Garden of Picasso’s Villa La Californie, 1957. Gelatin silver print, 23 x 20.1, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas. 5.9 Brassaï, Picasso’s Head of a Woman, Man with a Sheep, and Cat in Picasso’s rue des Grands Augustins Studio, 1943. Proof of Gelatin silver contact, 29.9 x 20.2 cm. Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. 5.10 Brassaï, Sculpture de Picasso, Contact Sheet Number 2, 1942–6. Six contact prints no. 40 to no. 40e: Man with a Sheep, plaster 1943. three contact prints, no. 16; no. 22; Woman with a long Dress, bronze 1943. two contact prints no. 1a and no. 1: Man with a Helmet, bronze 1933. Gelatin silver proofs pasted on cardboard and annotated by the photographer, 24 x 32 cm. Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 5.11 Dora Maar, Picasso’s Standing Woman, 1941. Proof of Gelatin silver contact, 6 x 6 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. 5.12 Brassaï, Contact Sheet Number 15, 1942–6. Nine contact prints, no. 37 to no. 37h: Standing Woman, bronze, 1941. Two contact prints from no. 36 to no. 36a: Standing Man, bronze, 1942. Gelatin silver proofs pasted on cardboard and annotated by the photographer, 24 x 32 cm. Brassaï files, Photographic archives, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 5.12a, 5.12b Brassaï, Details of 5.12 also in Les Sculptures de Picasso, 1948, Paris, Chêne 1948, plates 114, 115. 5.13 Brassaï, Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Dora Maar), 1941. Les Sculptures de Picasso, 1948, Paris, Chêne 1948: 116. 5.14 Robert Capa, Picasso with his Woman with a Long Dress and Head of a Warrior, 1944. “New French Art,” Life Magazine (November 13, 1944): 76. 5.15 Brassaï, Picasso’s Woman with a Long Dress in front of L’Aubade, 1946. Proof of Gelatin silver contact, 25.6 x 17.9. Picasso archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.
6.1 Brassaï, The “Museum” in Picasso’s rue des Grands Augustins Studio, 1943. Proof of gelatin silver contact. 3.5 x 4.625 cm. Picasso archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.
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Introduction
While Pablo Picasso exhibited his paintings regularly and internationally, he did
not employ the same strategy for his sculptures. Considering the size of Picasso’s
sculptural oeuvre and the rarity of its public display makes it clear that Picasso
deliberately avoided exhibiting these works, so to speak, in the flesh.1 Instead, Picasso
consciously chose to renounce the unique experience of the original artwork, in galleries
and museums, in favour of display mediated through black and white photographic prints.
My dissertation analyzes the artistic partnership between Picasso and the
photographer Brassaï (the pseudonym of Gyula Halász), who worked together
intermittently for a period of fifteen years. Their collaboration culminated in hundreds of
photographs of Picasso’s sculptures, published on two occasions – the first issue of the
avant-garde journal Minotaure in 1933 and a catalogue covering almost fifty years of
Picasso’s sculptural production, published in French in 1948 and in English in 1949.2
This dissertation is positioned at the intersection of two growing fields within Picasso studies, namely, analysis of the artist’s sculptures and of his relationship to photography.
1The first exhibition devoted solely to Picasso’s sculpture took place at the end of the artist’s life, between 1966 and 1968, and travelled from Paris to London to New York. Leymarie, Jean, ed. Hommage à Pablo Picasso: Peinture: Grand Palais; Dessins, Sculptures, Céramiques: Petit Palais. (Paris: Minstère d’État affaires culturelles, 1966); Roland Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967). Picasso: Sculpture, Ceramic, Graphic Work: at the Tate Gallery, 9 June – 13 August 1967 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1967). 2 Brassaï took other photographs of Picasso during this time period, most notably in 1939 for Life Magazine, which depicted a day in Picasso’s life. These photos fall outside the scope of my thesis since they do not depict Picasso’s sculptures.
1 2
After the initial disparaging response to Picasso’s sculptures, 3 the works have been gaining more visibility in art historical narratives in the past two decades. This change was marked by a series of exhibitions of Picasso’s sculptures, such as the Tate 1994 retrospective Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, which examined the links between the two media in the artist’s work; the 2000 comprehensive sculpture retrospective at Centre
Pompidou; a 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. that championed Picasso’s 1909 sculpture Fernande’s Head; and, most recently, the 2009
MoMA exhibition of Picasso’s sculptures from the museum’s collection. 4 This resurgence is also reflected in academic articles, scholarly books, and the forthcoming release of a definitive catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s sculptures.5
3 John Berger, in a text that represents the point of change in Picasso’s reception, describes Picasso’s sculptural work in different media as exemplary of what he calls Picasso’s vertical invader’s nature. According to Berger’s analysis, Picasso’s short-lived experimentation with various techniques shows disrespect to those media’s rules: “It is as though, in principle, he is frightened of learning… He is prepared to learn a new skill – pottery, lithography, welding – but as soon as he has learnt the technique, he needs to overthrow and disprove its laws.” John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (London: Granta Books in association with Penguin Books, [1965] 1992), 32–33. Rosalind Krauss’s work is another example of the generally low opinion of Picasso’s sculptures. Even though Krauss gives Picasso’s early constructions a central role in the development of modern sculpture in her seminal Passages in Modern Sculpture, she heavily criticizes his sculptural work from the 1930s onward in her later essays. For example, when compared to Julio Gonzalez’s work, Picasso’s decision to make bronze copies from his iron sculptures “violates the conceptual uniqueness of the original; for it is born of a unique perceptual moment for which the specific process of direct-metal is the technical equivalent.” Rosalind Krauss, “This New Art: To Draw in Space” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 128. 4 Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (London: Tate Gallery, 1994); Werner Spies, in collaboration with Christine Piot, Picasso, The Sculptures (Ostfildern-Ruit: H. Cantz, 2000); Jeffrey Weiss, Valerie J. Fletcher, and Kathryn A. Tuma, Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Princeton, N.J.: Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); The MoMA exhibition, entitled “Focus: Picasso Sculptures,” took place in the summer and fall of 2008, was curated by Leah Dickerman, and does not have a catalogue. 5 Of these it is worth noting the recent exhibitions of Picasso’s sculptures exploring Picasso’s work by focusing on a single material, such as the Guggenheim’s Picasso and the Age of Iron (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1993) or the traveling exhibition Paul Bourassa’s Picasso and Ceramics (Paris: Hazan, 2004). Spies organized an exhibition devoted to Picasso’s sketchbooks, in which his ideas for sculptures were developed. Werner Spies, Pablo Picasso on the Path to Sculpture: The Paris and Dinard Sketchbooks of 1928 from the Marina Picasso Collection (Munich; New York: Prestel, 1995); for information on the forthcoming catalogue compiled by the artist’s great-granddaughter see Hillarie M. Sheets, “Heads and Tales,” ArtNews (June, 2008): 56–7; Clare Finn, “Picasso the Sculptor: a Granddaughter's Tribute,” Apollo (October 28, 2008): 345.
3
Academic interest in Picasso’s photographic project has also increased. Paul
Hayes Tucker’s 1982 “Picasso, Photography, and the Development of Cubism” was the first paper to examine the role of photography in Picasso’s work. Tucker suggested that photography was used to construct Picasso’s cubist paintings done in Horta in 1909.6
Anne Baldassari, who unearthed Picasso’s large collections of photographs in the artist’s archives, is responsible for much of the recent interest in the topic. Insisting on the centrality of photography to Picasso’s work, this scholar traced the changes in the artist’s approach to the medium from a source material for painting to a surface on which to paint, to a source for stylistic revitalization, and so forth.7 Rosalind Krauss denies the
existence of such a photographic project in Picasso’s career, but at the same time
interprets Picasso’s interwar neo-classical style as an attempt to draw in a mechanized,
robotized, deskilled fashion as if he were himself a camera.8
My analysis of the collaboration between Brassaï and Picasso builds on earlier
work on the topic. Marie-Laure Bernadac curated an exhibition of Brassaï’s photographs
of Picasso in 1988, and in 1999 Anne Baldassari organized a more comprehensive show, which implied that the collaboration between these two men was more than an
6 Paul Hayes Tucker, “Picasso, Photography, and the Development of Cubism,” The Art Bulletin 64.2 (June 1982): 288298. Tucker explores Picasso’s interest in photography for the creation of his paintings and highlights those qualities that make photography suitable as a catalyst for cubism: “its ability to create ambiguous spatial relationship through the blending of dark and light planes; the ease with which forms could be lost in the shadows or bleached in the light; the way it produced lines solely through tonal gradation; the way it could suggest shimmering light or totally disregard local color and texture; and finally, how it could achieve an unrivaled simplification” (288). 7 Anne Baldassari, Picasso photographe: 1901–1916 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994). Anne Baldassari, Picasso et la photographie: “à plus grande vitesse que les images” (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995). Anne Baldassari, Le Miroir noir: Picasso, sources photographiques, 1900–1928 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997). The three exhibitions were turned into a single traveling show. See Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997). 8 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Picasso/Pastiche” in The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1998), 127–8.
4 assignment, that the two artists were influenced by each other’s work.9 More recently Jon
Wood’s unpublished dissertation examined Brassaï’s photographs for Minotaure,
illuminating the new approach to the studio in interwar Paris as exemplified in
photographs of Picasso’s, Giacometti’s, and Brancusi’s studios.10 These ideas were the
basis of articles and an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.11 While these
texts explore some important aspects of Brassaï’s and Picasso’s working relationship,
none of them concentrates on the full range of the collaboration through a systematic, monographic study as this dissertation sets out to do. My emphasis on questions of display, the shift from exhibition in galleries or museums to the printed pages of
magazines and art books, and the examination of the effects of this mediated display on
the reception of Picasso’s sculptures distinguishes this study from previous explorations
of the topic.
***
In choosing to photographically display his sculptures, Picasso participated in a
vibrant theoretical discourse about the effects and consequences of new representational
technologies. Debates concerning the documentary photography of art, flourishing during
the first half of the twentieth century, explored the public status of the work of art
9 Marie-Laure Bernadac, Picasso vu par Brassaï (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987). Anne Baldassari, Brassaï/Picasso, conversations avec la lumière (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999). In the year 2000 Centre Pompidou organized a large-scale Brassaï show, which devoted some attention to his photographs of other artists’ work. Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, Brassaï (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2000). 10 Jonathan Michael Wood, “The Materials and Metaphors of the Sculptor’s Studio: Brancusi, Picasso and Giacometti in the 1920s and 1930s” (PhD diss, Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1999). 11 Jonathan Wood, “Magie blanc. Boisgeloup et la presentation des sculptures de Picasso vers 1930-1935,” Revue de l’art 154 (2006): 49–56; Jon Wood, with a preface by Penelope Curtis, Close Encounters: The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Cinema (Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation, 2001).
5 including its role, meaning, consumption, and circulation. Even though photographed artworks dominated catalogues, newspapers, and illustrated magazines during this period, this means of experiencing art was not yet naturalized and its novelty was conducive to investigations of the meaning of these new techniques of reproduction and of the transformations that they initiated.
A few years after the publication of Brassaï’s first photographs of Picasso, Walter
Benjamin wrote one of the most influential texts on photography of art – “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” 12 Written from a Marxist
perspective and in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe, this text examined the
irreversible effects of technological reproduction on the original artwork. As mechanical
technologies replaced hand-made reproduction, photographs of artworks became
substitutes for actual encounters with the originals. Benjamin observes that even the most
accurate photographic image changes the essence of the reproduced artwork because it
severs the work from the time and place of its creation from its historical purpose and
meaning. What is thus lost is the artwork’s ‘aura’ – “the unique apparition of a distance,
however near it may be.”13 Benjamin argues that what shatters the aura is the shift from
cult value to exhibition value: for the former is typified by “uniqueness and permanence”
while the latter reflects “transitoriness and repeatability.”14
12 Benjamin began writing the text in the fall of 1935 and kept revising it until 1939. I will be using the second version of the text, which was translated into French by Pierre Kloswsski and appeared in 1936 as “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mechanisée,” Zeifschrift fur Sozialforschung 5.1 (1936): 40– 68. This version, translated into English, appears in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. For a full discussion of the differences between the versions see Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room for Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 3–45. 13 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 23. 14 Ibid., 23.
6
André Malraux, writing about the “museum without walls” in 1937, follows a similar trajectory to Benjamin.15 Benjamin was cognizant that the “urge … to get a hold of an object at close range in an image, or, better, in a facsimile, a reproduction” might lead to the impression that “all … is the same in the world … extract[ing] sameness even from what is unique[.]”16 Malraux, on the other hand, encouraged this sameness for, from the writer’s humanistic viewpoint, it erases cultural, temporal, and national differences which in turn “change the tenor of the debate by suggesting, then imposing, a new hierarchy.”17 The reproduction of artworks also erases social and economic divisions by making cultural assets available to all; photography is “an unpretentious means of making known acknowledged masterpieces to those who could not buy engravings.”18
Malraux is cognizant of the fact that even the most accurate photograph changes the artwork it depicts. For example, some media do not reproduce well (stained-glass windows) while others are more photogenic (sculpture). He acknowledges that photographs rely on diverse variables, and that with each change of these parameters – such as focus, exposure time, camera angle, position of the object, viewpoint, cropping, darkroom manipulation, and size of print – a different image emerges.19 As this last point
15 André Malraux, “La Psychologie de l’art,” Verve 1.1 (Winter 1937): 4148 – the same issue that included a photograph of Picasso’s Guernica; “La Psychologie de l’art,” Verve 2 (Spring 1938): 2125; “De la representation en orient et en occident,” Verve 3 (Summer 1938): 6972; “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinema,” Verve 8 (Summer 1940): 6973. These texts were expanded and turned into the three-volume series published between 19479. The quotes are taken from the following version of the text: André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: le musée imaginaire (Paris: Skira, 1947). The book is part of a trilogy published on the next two years: André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: La création artistique (Paris: Skira, 1948). André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: La monnaie de l'absolu (Paris: Skira, 1949). It has been argued that Malraux knew Benjamin’s text. See Mary Bergstein, “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,” The Art Bulletin 74.3 (September 1992): 479. 16 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 2324. 17 Malraux, Psychologie de l’art : le musée imaginaire, 19. 18 Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: le musée imaginaire, 18. 19 “The angle from which a work of sculpture is photographed, the manner in which it is framed and centered, and, above all, a carefully studied lighting of some famous works is beginning to share a degree of attention that once was granted only to film stars – may strongly accentuate something that previously
7 shows, Malraux did not perceive photography merely as a documentary medium, which supplies perfect substitutions for the actual works of art; he understood photography as a technique of display with a rhetorical power that could be used effectively and persuasively to promote his humanist agenda.
Both Benjamin and Malraux examine the relationship between an original work of art and its reproduction in light of the tension between documentation and interpretation. The same juxtaposition looms large in recent scholarship concerning the epistemology, meaning, and theorization of the photographic medium.20 The study of the
photography of art, however, is not haunted to the same extent by these burning questions.
In an introduction to a collection of essays devoted to the photography of sculptures,
Geraldine A. Johnson explains that the emphasis on the transparency and objectiveness of the photographic image is particularly relevant in art photography, even if it is clear that the three-dimensionality of sculptural media is eradicated through these images.21 In her
Art Bulletin essay “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,”
Mary Bergstein argues that due to the central role of reproductions in the study and
teaching of art history, art historians have turned a blind eye to the contentious status of
the photographs of art.22
has been only suggested. In addition to this, black and white photography imparts a family likeness to objects that have actually but slight affinity. … another consequence … [is that] in an album or an art book … the works reproduced lose their relative proportions. … the enlargement of seals, of coins, of amulets, of figurines creates truly fictitious arts. The unfinished quality of the execution, resulting from the very small scale of these objects, now becomes style.” Ibid., 234. 20 The prominence of these debates presents itself clearly in the articles (“starting points,” “afterwards,”) transcribed conversations (“the art seminar”), and responses (“assessments”) in the recent publication from the series The Art Seminar devoted to rethinking photographic theory. James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York, London: Routledge, 2007). 21 Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Envisioning the Third Dimension: Photography and Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 22 Mery Bergstein, “Lonely Aphrodites: On Documentary Photography of Sculptures,” 479.
8
Current research, however, reflects a more critical approach to the study of art photography that emphasizes its interpretive qualities.23 One such example is Wendy
Grossman’s study of the changing conventions in African sculpture photography. She argues that together with the ontological shift from ‘artifact’ to ‘art’ undergone by
African objects, there occurred a corresponding alteration in the style in which the sculptures were photographed. For example, Man Ray’s photographs of African artifacts
“draw attention to the artifice of the image, challenging conventions of object photography that veil the photographer’s subjective engagement under the guise of allegedly objective or documentary neutrality.”24
In an oft-quoted paragraph, Picasso criticizes Brassaï’s attempt to create a
humorous portrait of the artist:
It’ll be an amusing photograph, but it won’t be a “document.” Do you know why? Because you moved my slippers. I never place them that way. It’s your arrangement, not mine. The way an artist arranges the objects around him is as revealing as his artworks. I like your photos precisely because they are truthful. The ones you took on rue La Boétie were like a blood sample that allows you to analyze and diagnose what I was at those moments.25
My study asks the reader and viewer to maintain the tension between photography as
document and as artifice. While my approach to photography incorporates suspicion of
23 Many of the essays in Johnson’s volume also do not take at face value the documentary quality of art photography. This is especially clear in those texts that emphasize the performative nature of art photography. See Anna C. Chave, “Striking Poses: The Absurdist Theatrics of Eva Hesse,” Photography and Sculpture, 166–180; David Green and Joanna Lowery, “Splitting the Index: Time Object and Photography in the work of Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein,” Photography and Sculpture, 148–165; Joan Pachner, “Private views/Public Images: David’s Smith Photographs,” Photography and Sculpture, 131–147; Alex Potts, “The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image,” Photography and Sculpture, 181–198. 24 Wendy Grossman, “From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculptures and the Rhetoric of the Image,” Visual Resources 23. 4 (December 2007): 312. These ideas were recently expanded into a traveling exhibition. See Wendy A. Grossman, with Ian Walker (et al.), Man Ray, African art, and The Modernist Lens (Washington, DC: International Arts & Artists, 2009). 25 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price, pref. Henry Miller, intro. Roland Penrose (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 133. Originally published as Brassaï, Conversations avec Picasso (Paris : Gallimard, 1964). A new translation of the text came out in 1999: Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IlL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
9 its truth claims, the two main figures in my study were invested in reinforcing the objective status of art photography. As suggested by Picasso’s words above, the artist’s trace is found in everything that he touches. If one changes the arrangement of the objects surrounding the artist, as Brassaï did, then they will no longer hold the artist’s trace, but the interloper’s. According to this viewpoint, photography does not lie; the mechanical eye of the camera does not alter reality but captures it accurately. This assertion concerning the documentary status of photography is examined – as a rhetoric and not as a truth claim – throughout my dissertation. The first chapter engages with the indexical qualities of the photograph Picasso’s Palette as substitutes for the artist in the scene. The second chapter investigates the documentary role assigned to photography in ethnographic discourse as its conventions are implemented in Brassaï’s photographs of
Picasso’s studio. The third chapter analyzes Brassaï’s definition of a successful photograph, which is tied to the belief that photography can accurately communicate its subjects, as long as the photographer is skilled in his or her craft.
Together with his photographs of Picasso’s sculptures, Brassaï’s written account of his work with Picasso plays a central role in my dissertation. Compiled from notes written at the time of the collaboration, Brassaï’s Conversations avec Picasso was published in 1964 by Gallimard and translated into English two years later under the title
Picasso and Company.26
Similar claims are often made concerning the truthfulness of photographs and of
biographies. Picasso’s recorded statements in various memoirs,27 usually given in the
26 See previous footnote. 27 Brassaï is one of many writers who published their recollections about Picasso. This trend started with the publication of Fernande Olivier’s Picasso et ses amis (Paris: Stock, 1933), which describes Picasso’s days at the Bateau Lavoir. For other memoirs see, in chronological order of publication: Jaime Sabartés,
10 form of direct speech as if coming directly out of the artist’s mouth, are widely accepted as a reliable source of information.28 The academic embrace of these sources results from the fact that Picasso did not write manifestos, never compiled his thoughts into full-length texts,29 and shunned official interviews. Accounts like Brassaï’s are therefore the closest thing art historians have to the artist’s thoughts on his own craft, and are used extensively in the scholarship as a way to expose the artist’s “intentions.”
Since the 1980s art historians became suspicious of the centrality of biographical readings in the study of Picasso’s art. 30 The tendency to study Picasso through a biographical lens was notably criticized by Rosalind Krauss, who condemned Picasso scholars, especially William Rubin, for explaining artworks with biographical information.31 John Richardson’s A Life with Picasso, the “definitive” biography of the
Picasso: an Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores (London: W. H. Allen, 1949); Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents Iconographiques (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1954); Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (London: Gollancz, 1958); Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Plain: an Intimate Portrait, trans. Humphrey Hare (London: Sucher and Warburg, 1963); Francoise Gilot with Carton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 28 As I will show shortly, the scholarly use of these recorded statements has been criticized. Nevertheless, they are still used by eminent scholars: one such example is the work of T. J. Clark, for example, in his first of six Mellon lectures on the topic of “Picasso and Truth” at the National Gallery of Art, characterized Francoise Gilot as an “accurate transcriber” of Picasso’s words. Such belief in the transparency and accuracy of these memoirs (always transcribed from memory sometimes years after the conversation took place) is essential for their use in scholarship. 29 The only exception is “Picasso Speaks: A Statement by the Artist,” The Arts, New York, May 1923, reprinted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A selection of Views (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 7–13. 30 The genre of the artist’s biography has been recently redefined not as a document but as a cultural artifact. Recent studies have presented biographical texts as author-driven accounts that reflect a wide range of art historical issues and not merely fact. See Matthias Waschek, “Introduction: Les ‘vies’ d’artistes, une fiction? ” in Les “Vies” d’artistes: Actes du colloque international organisé par le service culturel de musée du Louvre, ed. Matthias Waschek (Paris: Musée du Louvre et École nationale supérieure des beaux- arts, 1996), 1324. For groundbreaking studies in early modern art history see Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays, eds. Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven F. Ostrow (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). On the genre of biography in general, see Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1978); Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, ed. Paul john Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 31 Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” in The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1985), 23–40. Originally published in October 16 (Spring
11 artist – to use the words of the publishing house has been criticized for setting back
Picasso studies by reinscribing the bias for biographical explanation of the art.32 In recent years, art historians have argued that the centrality of this methodology results from the artist’s own emphasis on biography from the 1930s onward and his promotion of the trope of painting-as-diary.33
The same awareness I bring to Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s sculptures viewed not only as documents, but also as rhetoric I apply to Brassaï’s text. The narrative is in the form of transcribed conversations that have gained an important status in Picasso’s scholarship, as they apparently offer unmediated access to Picasso’s thoughts.
Even though Conversations avec Picasso is the only available written account of this collaboration – there are no contracts, letters, or other commentaries on the events – it does not mean that Brassaï’s text should be taken at face value. I often rely on Brassaï’s version of events, but because of Brassaï’s vested interest in writing himself into history,
I qualify and contextualize these statements.
1981), 5–22. In this essay, which is devoted to a semiotic analysis of Picasso’s collages, Krauss disparages the idea of the “autobiographical Picasso” and “History of the proper name.” For an analysis of Krauss’s criticism of Rubin through a case study of the surprising link between formalist art history and biographical art history, see Aruna D’souza, “Biography Becomes Form: William Rubin, Pablo Picasso, and the Subject of Art History,” Word & Image 18.2 (April–June 2002): 126136. 32 As expressed by Adam Gopnik in his review of the second installment of Richardson’s biography: Adam Gopnik, “Escaping Picasso,” New Yorker, December 16, 1996, 92–99. For a review of John Richardson’s third installment of A Life with Picasso, analyzing the different approaches to biography in the study of Picasso’s work, see C. F. B. Miller, “Of Picassology,” Oxford Art Journal 32.1 (2009): 156–162. 33 Elizabeth Cowling claimed that “the habitual references he made to his biography were a useful smokescreen for Picasso permitting him to evade probing questions about his artistic intentions or affiliations which he did not want to answer.” In Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London; New York: Phaidon, 2002), 29. See Christopher Green for a discussion of the origins of the painting-as- diary trope on the pages of Cahiers d’art and the Picasso catalogue raisonné. “together Picasso and Zervos worked from the late 1920s to shape not only a critical image of Picasso’s work with him as its revealed inner content, but to lay the foundations for a future image too.” Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4.
12
***
The first chapter of thus study explores a single photograph by Brassaï entitled
Picasso’s Palette. This picture allows me to introduce the different players in this story and the power relationship between the young and inexperienced photographer and the established artist. Moreover, the style, subject matter, and themes of the photograph enable me to ask a significant question: namely, why Brassaï, and not Man Ray, was
chosen for this task. I compare Palette to Man Ray’s Dust Breeding – two photographs of
artist’s studios and argue that Brassaï engaged with an existing photographic discourse
on visually redefining modern artistic creativity.
My second chapter looks at Brassaï’s photo essay published in the first issue of
the avant-garde journal Minotaure. I argue that the photographs of Picasso’s studios
follow the conventions of ethnographic photography as it was defined in the second issue
of the same journal. By adopting these discursive principles, Brassaï’s photographs
engage with the multiple definitions of the ethnographic photographic document.
Chapter three examines the photographs taken for Picasso’s sculpture catalogue of
1948. In it I analyze the different devices used to present Picasso’s sculptural work as
part of the canon. The effects of Brassaï’s method of photographing, coupled with the
catalogue’s chronological and comprehensive display, fashion Picasso’s idiosyncratic
body of sculptural work as an “oeuvre,” illuminating the reasons for preferring
photography to display in exhibitions.
The fourth and fifth chapters are devoted to contextualizing Picasso’s sculptures
and Brassai’s photographs. Chapter four looks at the key players in the sculptural art
13 scene in the 1930s and 1940s and positions Picasso in relation to these artists. The final chapter reads photographs of Picasso’s sculptures taken by photographers other than
Brassaï during the same period that Picasso and Brassaï collaborated. This comparative exercise highlights the distinctive features of Brassaï’s rendition of Picasso’s sculptures.
The conclusion returns to the question of alternative display as I explore another photograph by Brassaï that depicts “the museum,” a glass cabinet in Picasso’s Rue des
Grands Augustins studio with a permanent display of Picasso’s sculpture and other found objects curated by Picasso himself. By analyzing the display case depicted in the photograph, I offer other ways of contextualizing Picasso and Brassaï’s collaboration, as a possible starting point for future research.
Chapter One: Picasso’s Palette and the Photographic Construction of the
Artist’s Persona
In the early 1930s Pablo Picasso’s reputation reached a new high point. His first large-scale retrospective opened at the prestigious Galérie Georges Petit in Paris on the
16th of June 1932, and the first volume of his catalogue raisonné was also released.1
Cahiers d’art, the most prominent art journal in Paris, was devoted to celebrating
Picasso’s genius while circulating a clean, “art book” image of the artist.2 This campaign, masterminded by Picasso’s gallerist Paul Rosenberg, had significant financial results: despite the Great Depression, Picasso’s paintings maintained their unprecedented high prices.3
At the same time that he was branded as a modern classic, Picasso kept his status as a leader of the avant-garde. Two facets of the surrealist movement sought to appropriate him: André Breton identified Picasso as the ultimate surrealist painter in his
“Surrealism and Painting” in 1928, and two years later Georges Bataille devoted a whole
1 Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso – First volume (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1932). 2 In the four years between the journal’s inauguration and the Picasso retrospective, Picasso was discussed in thirty-eight articles. The only artist to receive this much attention during the same period is Matisse, but as Yve-Alain Bois mentions in his book on the two artists, “from 1932 onward the scales had shifted and Picasso became the centre of attention.” Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion; Forth Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1998), 37. 3 Michael F. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth Century Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Fitzgerald describes the increase in the prices of Picasso’s work from 7,500 Francs in 1921 to 19,000 in 1925 for a canvas the same size. (156) Later on the author recounts the purchases of Chester Dale from Paul Rosenberg in 1931 and argues that “these transactions suggest that the tough economic times did not so much lower the prices as improve the quality of pictures offered to Dale.” (Ibid., 198)
14 15 issue of Documents to the artist.4 In the early thirties Picasso also gained celebrity status: the publication and commercial success of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas5 and Fernand Olivier’s memoir on the Bateau-Lavoir years,6 both offering less- than-flattering glimpses of Picasso’s personality, suggest that the interest in Picasso’s public persona extended beyond artistic circles and surrealist polemics.
Concurrently with Picasso’s retrospective and the release of the first volume of the catalogue raisonné, the young and inexperienced photographer Brassaï was commissioned to photograph Picasso’s two studios for the opening issue of the new avant-garde journal Minotaure. The forty-two published photographs made Picasso’s private workspaces public and introduced the artist’s unknown body of sculptural work to the world.7 The decision to photograph the sculptures in the artist’s studios heightened the viewer’s sense of exclusivity of access while intensifying the impression of discovery of the sculptures’ existence.
This commission set Brassaï’s career in motion, making the photographer an integral part of the surrealist movement. Following studio photographs in the journal’s first issue, Brassaï’s images dominated Minotaure, and the journal became a regular
4 Hommage à Picasso, Documents 3 (1930). André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting” in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: MacDonald, 1972), 1. 5 In the chapter entitled “19071914,” the development of cubism is described alongside gossip such as Picasso’s arguments with Fernande Olivier, his competitiveness with Braque, his dislike of Marie Laurencin, the tricks he played on his dealers, and so forth. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1933), 86142. 6 Fernande Olivier first published her memoirs in four successive installments in the popular newspaper Le Soir during the month of September 1930. Paul Léautaud, the editor of the Mercure de France, arranged that more of it would be published in his magazine. He also wrote the introduction to her memoir when it was published in book form in 1933. Fernande Olivier, Picasso et ses amis (Paris: Librarie Stock, Delamain et Boutelleau, 1933). Picasso tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the publication of the memoir in France in the fear that it would affect his image. See John Richardson with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life With Picasso: The Cubist Rebel 19071916 (New York: Random House, 1996), 221233. 7 Picasso’s sculptures up until this point were rarely exhibited. According to the 1932 retrospective catalogue, only seven sculptures were presented in the retrospective, in comparison to the 225 paintings. This asymmetry is also found in the first volume of the catalogue raisonné, where among the 384 works reproduced, only three are sculptures.
16 platform for him. In the following issue, Brassaï contributed photographs of an extensive series of Parisian sculptors in their studios,8 of metro stations for Salvador Dalí’s text on
Art Nouveau, of ‘involuntary sculptures’ for a photo essay of the same title, and one for
Dalí’s photomontage Le Phénomène de l’extase, in addition to an essay on Parisian graffiti.9
Brassaï, in his book devoted to his working relationship and friendship with
Picasso, describes the proposition that brought him to Picasso’s door as follows:
One day, having made sure no one was listening to us, he [E. Teriade] took me aside and, in a few cryptic works, confided a proposition […] to me: ‘something was about to happen…’… ‘Someone was going to…’ ‘It may just be that…’ It was an important mission, he said; he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t say anything just yet; I should remain at the ready and alert, and above all, I should keep quiet about everything he had just said and should promise him not to tell anyone about it. … Finally zero hour sounded, the veil was torn away. I was carried off in a cloud, which deposited me at 23, rue La Boétie, in Pablo Picasso’s studio.10
In this description Brassaï plays up the excitement and mystery surrounding the
proposition, but he fails to address the most burning question in regard to the commission:
why was Brassaï chosen for this prestigious task in the first place?
The choice of Brassaï to photograph Picasso’s sculptural works seems strange in
light of the photographer’s career prior to the commission. Brassaï was anything but the
obvious candidate, or the most qualified one for this job. He had arrived in Paris in 1924,
was hardly established, and his artistic affiliation was still with Hungarian and German
artistic circles and not Parisian ones. Prior to Minotaure he only published in foreign
8 This series will be discussed in chapter four. 9 Brassaï, “Du Mur des cavernes au mur d’usine,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 67; Maurice Raynal, “Dieu-Table-Cuvette,” Minotaure 1:34 (December 1933): 3953; [Salvador Dalí], “Sculptures Involontaires,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 68; Salvador Dalí, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible, de l’architecture modern’style” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 6976; Salvador Dalí, “Le phénomène de l’extase,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 77. 10 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 3.
17 magazines, and mainly as a journalist. The lack of critical response to Brassaï's work prior to 1932 attests to his marginal position in the art world. The first article about his visual work was published in September 1932 in a Hungarian newspaper.11 Brassaï was
also new to the photographic medium: he had begun to take photographs only two years
before the Minotaure commission. He had only exhibited in one group show
“Photographes d’aujourd’hui” at the Librairie-galerie de la plume d’or in 193112
before becoming acquainted with Picasso and the surrealist crowd. In the early thirties,
Brassaï’s only photographic project was an exploration of the city of Paris, a popular
exercise among émigré photographers in the French capital at the time.13 These
cityscapes, as impressive as they are, do not necessarily indicate the required skills for documenting an artistic oeuvre. Yet, as he was compiling his nocturnal photographs of
the city into the book Paris de nuit in December 1932,14 he was approached by the
Minotaure editors.
The importance of the commission is made clear by the prominent place Picasso’s
work occupies in the first Minotaure issue. Brassaï’s photographs are accompanied by
other of Picasso’s works including the journal’s cover, etchings from The Vollard Suite,
the artist’s studies of Mathias Grünewald’s Crucifixion, and a series of drawings entitled
Anatomy. Brassaï’s photo essay is the longest, most comprehensive piece in the issue, and
11 Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, Brassaï: “No Ordinary Eyes” (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000), 237. 12 There is no record of how many or which photographs by Brassaï were included in the exhibition. 13 Christian Bouqueret, Des années folles aux années noires: la nouvelle vision photographique en France: 1920-1940 (Paris: Marval, 1997), 149153; Sarah Kennel, “Fantasies of the Street: Emigré Photography in Interwar Paris,” History of Photography 29. 3 (2005): 287300. 14 There is some temporal correlation between Paris de nuit and the Minotaure commission: even though it is not clear whether the book was released prior to the commission (it was launched in December 1932), the fact that the first issue of the journal was published on February 15th suggests that the two events overlapped. That said, since the book had been in the making since 1930 or 1931, it is safe to assume that the photographs circulated and were seen by prominent members of the avant-garde before they were actually bound and published in book form.
18 its content is the most ambitious, as it aims to alter the image of Picasso from a painter to an artist whose work encompasses all media. The essay is best understood as an exposé or a journalistic scoop, revealing the expanse and intensity of Picasso’s sculptural production.
The new journal clearly intended to compete with other art periodicals. Minotaure imitated the look of Cahiers d’art, with its extensive use of reproductions and high production standards,15 while its innovative commitment to surrealist subject matter
located it in relation to ‘late’ surrealist journals such as La Révolution surréaliste, which ran from 1924 to 1929; Documents, which ceased to exist in 1931; and Surréalisme au
service de la révolution, which published its last issue in May 1933. Picasso was already
strongly affiliated with Cahiers d’art: from the journal’s inauguration in 1926, Christian
Zervos published thirty-eight articles on Picasso’s work, as well as a special issue
devoted to the artist on the occasion of the 1932 retrospective. As already mentioned,
Zervos also began publishing Picasso’s comprehensive catalogue, signaling his lifelong
commitment to this artist’s promotion. The choice of Picasso to dominate Minotaure’s
inaugural issue was thus a competitive act. Albert Skira and E. Tériade, the editors of
Minotaure, were making their new journal noticeable by consciously crossing boundaries and staking a claim for their publication as a new force in the 1930s Parisian art world.
The question ‘Why Brassaï?’ can be framed in another way: ‘Why not Man Ray?’ as Man Ray was all that Brassaï was not. From the 1920s onward, Man Ray had established himself as the most prominent photographer in the Parisian art world. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1921, he quickly forged connections with the leading figures of the
15 For a general comparison between the two periodicals, see Valerie Holman, “L’artiste dans son élément: Minotaure et les arts visuels,” in Regards sur Minotaure: La Revue à tête de bête, ed. Claude Gaume (Genève: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1987), 4378.
19 avant-garde by taking photographs of artists’ works and making portraits of artists free of charge. In addition to his huge success as a portraitist and a fashion photographer, his photographs also dominated avant-garde journals. Man Ray is often referred to in the scholarship as the official photographer of La Révolution surréaliste,16 but his texts and
photographs also appeared prominently in other avant-garde publications, including
Minotaure – that is, on Brassaï’s turf.17 Man Ray’s work was also the subject of many
publications including the 1930 monograph Man Ray with a text by Georges Ribemont-
Dessaignes, and the more comprehensive Photographs by Man Ray 1920 – Paris 1934
with texts by Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Rrose Sélavy (Marcel
Duchamp’s alter ego). Man Ray’s central position in the art world and his extensive
experience place him as a worthy counterpart to Picasso, and as the obvious candidate to
photograph Picasso’s sculptures. And yet, Brassaï got the commission.
The likelihood that Man Ray would be considered for the Minotaure commission
is increased if we consider the photographer’s direct ties to Picasso: upon his arrival in
Paris, and with an introduction from Henri-Pierre Roché, Man Ray contacted Picasso in a
letter dated February 12th, 1922.18 Man Ray stated in his personal memoir that he
photographed Picasso’s work as well as the artist’s wife Olga, son Paulo, and Picasso
himself in the early 1920s.19 Man Ray occasionally photographed Picasso’s work and
16 Jane Livingston, “Man Ray and Surrealist photography,” in Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston, and Dawn Ades, L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, DC : Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 115. 17 In the same Minotaure issue in which Brassaï extensively published, Man Ray also contributed many photographs, including the only colour photograph and an essay: “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 6976, with photos by Man Ray and Brassaï; Man Ray, “L’age de la lumière,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 14; Tristan Tzara, “D’un certain automatisme du goût,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 814. 18 From the chronology published in Anne Baldassari, The Surrealist Picasso (Paris: Flammarion; London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 18392. 19 “My first meeting with him was for the purpose of photographing his recent work, in the early Twenties. As usual when I had an extra plate, I made a portrait of the artist… I was invited for lunch, and brought my
20 made several portraits of Picasso, integrating one into his 1934 Surrealist Chessboard
(figure 1.1), while another opened the 1935 issue of Cahiers d’art devoted to Picasso
(figure 1.2). To the same special issue of Cahiers d’art, Man Ray also contributed an essay on Picasso.20 Picasso, on his part, drew a portrait of Man Ray in 1934, as a frontispiece to the photographer’s aforementioned album of the same year (figure 1.3). In
1937 the two collaborated on a joint project in which Man Ray photographed a female model’s hands painted by Picasso (figure 1.4). The two also had many mutual friends and regularly vacationed together in the latter part of the 1930s.21
Several hypotheses can be proposed with respect to the choice of Brassaï over
Man Ray for the Minotaure photo essay. Possibly Picasso did not want his work to be overshadowed by the artistic imprint of a well-known photographer; or perhaps Man Ray was not interested in being at the service of another artist’s work, given that in the 1930s he conceived of himself as a multifaceted artist, as seen in the photograph published in the 3-4 issue of Minotaure in 1933 (figure 1.5).22
camera and made some pictures of his Russian wife, Olga, the ex-ballet dancer, and his little son Paulo.” Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1963), 223. I was not able to find these photographs at the comprehensive photographic archives of Man Ray at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. However, a Man Ray photo of Picasso from the Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, dated to 1922 (Accession number: B98.0138), supports Man Ray’s story, since the photograph was taken after Paulo Picasso’s birth in February 4th, 1921 as well as the date of the introduction letter. Elizabeth Cowling reproduces a photograph of Olga and Paulo Picasso by Man Ray that dates to 1923, which could be the one described by Man Ray. See Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon, 2002), 477, fig. 435. 20 Man Ray, “Dictionnaire panoramique de Pablo Picasso,” Cahiers d’art 10 (1935): 69. 21 In Mougins and Antibes in 1936, for example, together with Ronald Penrose, Dora Maar, and others. See Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso – The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 2528. 22 On the cover of the aforementioned 1934 catalogue of Man Ray’s photography, a similar photograph appeared, which also presents a collection of Man Ray’s sculptures introduced by his student/model/lover Lee Miller. This photograph functions in a similar manner to the Minotaure one– declaring that Man Ray is more than a photographer. Also, consider Man Ray’s resentment towards Gertrude Stein who never took him as seriously as she did her “first attachments.” Man Ray, Self Portrait, 147.
21
The question ‘Why not Man Ray?’ echoes in Brassaï’s Minotaure photographs from 1932, most clearly in Picasso’s Palette, the opening photograph of the photo essay
(figure 1.6). I will demonstrate that Brassaï engaged in a dialogue with Man Ray’s Dust
Breeding from 1920 (figure 1.7) published in Littérature in October 1922 together with an essay on Duchamp by Breton (who also wrote the text accompanying Brassaï’s photographs in Minotaure)23 and again in 1936 on the cover of Minotaure as the backdrop to Duchamp’s Rotary Demisphere when constructing Picasso’s Palette so it invites a reading of its striking thematic, formal, and conceptual relationship to Dust
Breeding. The allusion to Man Ray, and more specifically to Man Ray as Marcel
Duchamp’s photographer, positions Brassaï as an equal of more experienced
photographers who were working dialogically on an updated, modern, photographic
image of the process of art-making. The second part of my argument follows this strand, as I argue that both Pica sso’s Palette and Dust Breeding examine the production of art through the inevitable simultaneous production of waste.
***
At the centre of Brassaï’s Picasso’s Palette a number of squeezed, used-up paint
tubes are haphazardly scattered in front of an unfinished canvas. Two paintbrushes rest in
one of the three painting pails directly placed on the floor. Adding to the general disorder
23 Even though this hypothesis cannot be proven, Breton must have played a seminal role in bringing Man Ray’s Dust Breeding to Brassaï’s attention since Breton wrote the texts to accompany the photograph on its first public appearances. See André Breton, “Marcel Duchamp,” Littérature 5 (October 1922): 710. André Breton, “Picasso dans son élément,” Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933). For an English translation, see André Breton, “Picasso in his Element,” Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: MacDonald, 1972), 101114.
22 are the drips of paint covering the ground an amalgam of streaks, veins, and blots that create irregular patterns on the floor. This is an image of an artist’s studio that binds together labour and product as it focuses on the how as well as the what: the signs of artistic production and its tools are presented in connection to its product – the painting seen at the corner of the photograph.
Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (in French Elévage de poussière) portrays Marcel
Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) under a thick layer of dust. The work is barely recognizable in this photograph: instead of its usual vertical and frontal position, the piece is inverted, and photographed from an oblique elevated angle. The image offers a fragmented view of the lower part of the work when reversed; the soldered lines comprising the bachelors’ domain turn into a dust-made relief.
The points of connection between the two images, separated by more than a decade, are too many to ignore. Both Dust Breeding and the later Picasso’s Palette depict dirty artists’ studios. There was no attempt to clean up the studios, or cover up the messes, in preparation for the photographers’ arrival. On the contrary, Man Ray explains that
Duchamp invited him especially to photograph the dust and Brassaï goes to great length to describe his surprise upon entering Picasso’s studio and encountering “an apartment turned pigsty.”24 A comparison of the published prints with the original negatives of both
Dust Breeding and Picasso’s Palette (figures 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9) furthers this point: the
24 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 33.
23 tighter views offered by the published prints make clear that the cropping intentionally accentuates the mess, placing dirt at the centre of the photograph.25
In Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that dirt does not
exist in a vacuum (so to speak); it can only be grasped relatively as part of a system:
It is a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.26
She exemplifies this idea by describing the relative status of matter within a system:
shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on a dining table. Food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom.27
Brassaï’s photograph demonstrates this definition of dirt as “matter out of place.”28 The paint in the photograph is found in three locations: inside containers (paint tubes, painting pails, mixing boxes), on the canvas, and on the floor. The paint on the
floor, however, is of another order than the two others, since it is there by accident,
having been dropped “on its way” from the containers to the canvas. Whereas the paint
on the canvas is read as calculated marks, filled with artistic intention, the same matter on
the floor is understood as unintentional drips, as leftovers, as dirt.
In a 1929 entry for his “Critical Dictionary” devoted to dust, Georges Bataille
describes dust’s invincible qualities: “in the battle against dust,” he writes, “diligent
maids with their feather dusters and vacuum cleaners are helpless against dismal sheets of
25 Brassaï’s uncropped version is now in the archives of Musée Picasso in Paris (MP 1986.14). The uncropped version of Man Ray’s photo (Gelatin Silver Print 30.4x40.3 cm Private collection, courtesy Galerie 1900-2000, Paris) is printed in Jennifer Mundy, ed., Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia (London: Tate, 2008), 86, fig. 105. 26 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 36. 27 Ibid. 7 28 Ibid. 36.
24 dust [which] consistently invade early habitations and uniformly defile them.”29 Bataille
assumes that the creation of dust is inevitable since its cycle is endless and belongs to the
natural decomposition of matter where there is matter, there soon will be dust. There
are essential differences between dust and dirt;30 dust is less of a ‘culpable neglect’ than
dirt, since dirt needs a producer, whereas dust accumulates naturally without an ‘author.’
In this light, the irony of the title Dust Breeding is revealed the only way to breed dust
is by not doing a thing, by letting dust take its natural course.
Together with its impact on medicine and science, hygiene played a central role in
contemporary political discourses, informing the call for national recovery from the
devastation of the First World War. The French Minister of Hygiene qualified the 1922
hygienic legislation as a “patriotic struggle against depopulation of the French nation.”31
French demographic concerns, often exemplified by the omnipresent pro-natalist voices
and by promotion of agricultural cultivation during this period,32 were also coloured by
Pasteurian hygienic discourse. The quick spreading of infectious diseases in the trenches became proof of the new Pasteurian hygiene,33 leading French hygienists to explain
German demographic superiority by pointing out the disproportionate number of French
29 Georges Bataille “Poussière,” Documents 5 (October 1929): 35. 30 Teresa Stoppani, “Dust Revolutions: Dust, ‘Informe,’ Architecture: Notes for a Reading of Dust in Bataille,” Journal of architecture 12.4 (September 2007): 43747. 31 Quoted in Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, trans. Andrew Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 111. 32 Silver directly links the program for urban reconstruction and the call for procreation after the war: Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War; 19141925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 219298. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 33 For research that links the movement of the French forces with the spreading of the disease, see Joseph Allen Talbert “The French Experience of Pandemic Influenza during the Great War” (PhD Diss., Ohio State University, 2000).
25 deaths from preventable diseases such as tuberculosis.34 Only after a comprehensive anti-
tuberculosis campaign in 1917 did the French health system succeed in reversing the traditional ratio wherein deaths of soldiers due to enemy action outnumbered those due to disease. 35
Feminist, Foucauldian-inspired research has shown how French politicians during
the twenties and thirties understood that public enterprises for the prevention of diseases
such as constructing sewer lines and regulating sanitary legislation must go hand-in-hand with public education concerning personal hygiene. The Ministry of Hygiene invested in a complex network of teachers, nurses, and doctors, who introduced concepts of
cleanliness into the private realms of home and body.36
Significantly, Dust Breeding and Picasso’s Palette seem to avoid these lessons
concerning hygiene and cleanliness. In the two photographs, dust and dirt are not
menaces that need to be carefully controlled and managed but are legitimized by their
association with artistic production. Brassaï’s photograph of Picasso’s studio focuses on the unintentional drips of paint and the carelessly thrown-after-use paint tubes as natural side-effects of the act of painting, and not as unwanted dirt. Man Ray’s photograph
emphasizes the curious effects of the accumulated dust on Duchamp’s work, dust that
was then used as an artistic material in the Large Glass. This promotion of base (subject)
matte r as worthy of photographic representation derives from the same attitude that later
enabled Picasso to make Bull’s Head (1942; figure 1.10) out of an old bicycle seat and
rusted handlebar: the negative associations of garbage are overcome when it enters the
34 Mathew Ramsey “Public health in France,” in Dorothy Porter, History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1994), 45119. 35 Ibid., 8795. 36 Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
26 studio and is recycled into artistic gold. The two photographs therefore identify the studio as a place where ideas and materials accumulate into both art and debris, where mess is redefined as a natural by-product of art making, and where debris can be turned into art.
Man Ray and Brassaï depict wasteful and excessive production. The paint on the floor in Picasso’s Palette characterizes the artist’s work as wasteful and inefficient, and
Dust Breeding shows an over-production of dust. A similar approach is articulated in
Georges Bataille’s writing. In his 1933 Notions of Expenditure Bataille criticizes the capitalist emphasis on utility, “the right to acquire, to conserve, and to consume rationally
[…which] excludes in principle nonproductive expenditure.”37 The author calls for a
return to non-capitalist economic principals, which do not aim at economical production leading to maximal gain and minimal deficit, but aspire to genuine, irretrievable,
nonproductive loss. He argues that in modern society “free forms of unproductive social
expenditure have disappeared… expenditure is no longer the end of economic activity.”38
Bataille’s stance is a reaction against the French post-WWI promotion of efficient, non-wasteful production. In these years when reconstruction and national recovery were urgent priorities, the French favoured systems of efficient industrial production and the scientific management of work. American methods for industrial rationalization were widely implemented in interwar France.39 These systems advanced the radical division of labour through specialized production-line techniques, guaranteeing an increase in
quantity of production and reducing waste to a bare minimum. A utopian vision of labour
37 Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 117. 38 Ibid., 124. 39 Jackie Clarke, “Imagined Productive Communities: Industrial Rationalisation and Cultural Crisis in 1930s France,” Modern & Contemporary France 8.3 (2000): 345357.
27 also slipped into artistic discourses. In their 1920 essay “Purism,” Le Corbusier and
Amédée Ozenfant, the founders of the Purist movement, promoted the same values: “one finds the tendency toward certain identical aspects, corresponding to constant functions, functions which are of maximum efficiency, maximum strength, maximum capacity, etc. that is maximum economy. ECONOMY is the law of natural selection.”40
Dust Breeding and Picasso’s Palette problematize the ideal of efficient production,
presenting nonproductive loss that occurs either by overproducing, or by producing
wastefully, in a Bataillian vein. But the two photographs actually resist Bataille’s ideas to
the extent that they put waste to use by turning junk, dirt, and dust into the vehicles that
render artistic process visible.41 Picasso’s Palette is an image of undivided labor: it ties
together painting tools – palette, brushes, and paint tubes and the products of the act of
painting mess and dirt as well as the marks on the canvas. Dust Breeding too captures
artistic processes: the photograph documents the dust accumulated on The Large Glass
during a period of several months when Duchamp was away from his New York studio,
which was later wiped from all but key elements of the work. Duchamp invited Man Ray
to photograph the ‘crop’ of dust, and the photograph captured this excess in ‘farming’
when The Large Glass was still almost completely covered.
The portrayal of the dirty studio as a sign of artistic production is relatively
unconventional. Brassaï and Man Ray both avoid the readily available trope for
40 Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Amédée Ozenfant, “Purism,” L’Esprit Nouveau 4 (1920): 36986. For an English translation, Art in Theory: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 240. For a compelling reading of Purism’s call for rationalist, economical art-making and the surrealist response to a non-economical approach to art making see David Lomas, Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 2730. 41 Bataille does describe artistic production as an example of the principle of loss, calling it “creation by means of loss.” Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 118.
28 representing creative procedures – the artist holding a brush suspended in mid-air as it approaches the canvas. This formula of artist-brush-canvas was immortalized in an infinite number of paintings, prints, and photographs, until it became the representational epitome of – and visual shorthand for the creative moment. This image was used by
Picasso himself in the 1928 Painter and Model, and by Brassaï for the depiction of
Picasso in a 1939 photograph (figures 1.11, 1.12).42 By avoiding the existing visual idiom,
the two photographers reveal the failure of this trope to accurately describe Duchamp’s
and Picasso’s creative efforts, and modern artistic processes at large.
In André Breton’s “Picasso dans son élément,” which accompanied Brassaï’s
photograph when it was published in Minotaure in 1933, Picasso is described
discursively in terms similar to those visually set out by the photograph. The artist differs from his contemporaries in his casual approach to his working space, and his disinterest in the social demand for cleanliness relates to the radical nature of his art:
The pots … lying pell-mell in various stages of emptiness and obviously treated with no more ceremony than are the other working tools scattered among them, with no ceremony, rather, than the floorboards that have been freed absolutely from any obligation to be clean and shiny … at the disposal of a man for whom the problem has ceased to be the unconditional reproduction of the colored image – the painter at the school of parrots.43
Similar dismissal of the popular call for hygiene-maintenance is found in Breton’s text on
Marcel Duchamp from 1922, published together with Dust Breeding in Littérature. In
this earlier text, the issue of cleanliness is also raised, but in a more Duchampian tongue-
in-cheek manner. The text ends with a sexual pun with a gastronomic overtone disguised
42 For a discussion of this tradition see Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 43 André Breton, “Picasso in his element,” 103.
29 as advice for personal hygiene offered by Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s alter ego: “Conseil d’hygiéne intime: il faut mettre la moelle de l’épée dans la poil de l’aimée.”44
In the two photographs, not only do Man Ray and Brassaï avoid the traditional
image of the artist and his painting tools, but they altogether exclude the artists whose
works they represent in the photographs, thus arguably disassociating them from their
own labour. In Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, this strategic decision reads as a gesture
towards the photographed work and Duchamp himself, considering that Duchamp denounced painting in 1918. Duchamp pokes fun at traditional artistic production by removing some of the dust from the right-hand side of The Large Glass, partly exposing the work underneath it, in a manner that echoes floor-sweeping: the structural resemblance of the broom to a brush allows Duchamp to substitute sweeping for artists’
traditional brushwork. Therefore the old formula fails to describe Duchamp’s artistic
practice. Duchamp’s deconstruction of the values of authority, authorship, and originality
in his work the incorporation of chance and passivity required for breeding dust, and
his undoing of this passivity by the minimal, humorous intervention of sweeping is
echoed in Man Ray’s decision to photograph The Large Glass without Duchamp standing
beside it and physically marking it as his own.
Picasso is absent from the photograph of his studio in a manner reminiscent of
Man Ray’s image of Duchamp. But unlike Dust Breeding, Brassaï’s photograph is still
engaging with the old trope of the artist with a brush. Representing the modern artistic
creativity of an artist who is still very much a painter perhaps the modern painter
Picasso’s Palette refers to tradition as well as to Man Ray’s intervention, reflected in the
44 Rose Sélavy’s pearl of wisdom might be loosely translated to a piece of hygienic advice: it is necessary to put the bone[r] in the feminine lover’s cooking pot. André Breton, ‘Marcel Duchamp’ Littérature 3 (1922): 10.
30 fact that the artist is absent. The brushes are present but resting in a pail; the palette, instead of the traditional hand-extension that painter’s palettes usually are comfortably adjusted to human scale is enlarged to a monumental scale such that the whole room is used to mix and test paint.
Instead of the overtly painterly image of a painter with a brush, the two photographers thus employ indexicality, an inherently photographic quality, to represent the work of each artist. In Picasso’s Palette, a series of indexical signs stand in for the absent artist, pointing back to his prior physical presence: the paint tubes were contorted by his fingers; the drips of paint trace the movement of his body and hand (while holding a colour-filled brush); the empty triangular space between the improvised palette and the unfinished painting delineates the place that formerly held his body; and finally, the unfinished painting at the photograph’s corner is not an only icon (a figurative image in
Picasso’s distinguished 1930s style) but also an index (a trace of presence) as it outlines
Picasso’s movement in front of the canvas. The photograph is saying univocally:
“Picasso was here.”
Man Ray’s photograph is also an index of an index, but it functions differently.
Accumulated dust registers the passing of time, as it renders invisible The Large Glass. It is thus an index of time – specifically, of the duration of Duchamp’s absence from his studio.45 In the making of Dust Breeding, Man Ray emulates the lack of intervention required to breed dust, turning the image into a self-reflexive account of his own
45 In Formless Yve-Alain Bois describes the photograph as follows: “Dust is, semiologically speaking, an index. In this, it is like photography, but its trace is of duration. Duchamp puts his finger on this indexical quality quite precisely, when he lets dust accumulate in layers of differing thickness (and thus different durations) on his Large Glass (191523) in order to obtain degrees of transparency and of varied colors once a fixative was applied.” Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: a User’s Guide (New York; Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1997), 226.
31 photographic practice. When telling the story of the making of the photograph in Self
Portrait, Man Ray emphasizes his passivity as an image-maker, in a manner evocative of his Rayographs from the same period. Man Ray and Duchamp were not present when the photograph was taken: they went to lunch, leaving the camera behind with its shutter open.46 The image was mechanically registered on the plate with no intervention on the
photographer’s part. It slowly, passively accumulated on the photographic glass in a
process similar to the accumulation of dust on the Large Glass. Through this method,
Man Ray echoes as well as records Duchamp’s working process, for he too avoids the
mark of his own artistic authorship, pushing forward the agency of the camera and the
mechanical registration of photographic image.47 The photograph is saying, “Duchamp
and Man Ray were not here.”
Another echo of Duchampian working strategies is found in the choice of a
bird’s-eye view for photographing The Large Glass. This angle was associated during the
teens and twenties in America with the photographic discourse on heights and
architectural urbanism exemplified in Alvin Langdon Coburn’s 1912 The Octopus
(figure 1.13).48 Robert Rosenblum describes Dust Breeding as a “view from an
46 “With the camera fixed steadily on its tripod and a long exposure, the result would be satisfactory. Looking down on the work as I focused the camera, it appeared like some strange landscape from a bird’s- eye view. There was dust on the work and bits of tissue and cotton wadding that had been used to clean up the finished parts, adding to the mystery. This I thought, was indeed the domain of Duchamp. Later he titled the photograph: Elévage de Poussière – Bringing up Dust or Dust Raising. Since it was to be a long exposure, I opened the shutter and we went out to eat something, returning about an hour later, when I closed the shutter….” Man Ray, Self Portrait, 91. 47 My reading differs from the commonly used explanation which foregrounds the poor lighting conditions in the studio as the reason for photographing the work through a long, slow exposure. See for example, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, and Alain Sayag, eds., Man Ray: Photography and its Double (Corte Medera, CA: Gingko Press, 1998), 233. 48 Meir Wigoder, “The ‘Solar Eye’ of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (2002): 152169.
32 airplane,”49 and reads the photograph through the iconography of aerial photography. He
links the photograph to other dadaist works that represent New York City as the epitome
of urban modernity. It is worth considering in this context Man Ray’s Transatlantic
(figure 1.14), initially entitled New York, a photograph depicting the contents of a
dropped ashtray from a bird’s-eye view.50 David Hopkins has suggested another source
for the choice of an elevated point of view in Dust Breeding, contextualizing the work in
terms of contemporary surveillance strategies. The text in Littérature refers to the role of
photography in aerial reconnaissance during the First World War.51
These interpretations do not, however, exhaust the possible significance of the
elevated angle in Dust Breeding. More than consciously alluding to current photographic
trends or to the use of photography for surveillance, Man Ray’s employment of the
bird’s-eye view brings the photograph even closer to Duchamp’s work. The elevated
point of view from which The Large Glass was photographed evokes the change in
orientation of the mass-produced object when turned into the readymade: The Fountain
(1917) is placed upside down in Alfred Stieglitz’s photo published in The Blind Man and
suspended in midair in Henri-Pierre Roché’s photograph of Duchamp’s studio; in another
photograph of Duchamp’s studio the coat rack entitled Trap from 1917 is seen nailed to
the floor (figures 1.15, 1.16, 1.17). As Duchamp’s regular chess partner, Man Ray must
have noticed the chessboard that was fastened to a wall of Duchamp’s studio.52 In Dust
49 The full text goes as follows “Voici le domaine de Rrose Sélavy Comme il est aride Comme il est fertile Comme il est joyeux comme il est triste! Vue prise en aéroplane Par Man Ray 1921.” 50 Robert Rosenblum, “A Dada Bouquet for New York,” in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, eds. Francis M. Naumann and Beth Venn, (London: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 259265. 51 David Hopkins, “‘Art’ and ‘Life’ ... and ‘Death,’” in Neo Avant-Garde, eds. David Hopkins and Anna Katharina Schaffner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 3123. 52 For a reading of the shift in orientation and the readymades as visual puns, see Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), 75120. For a reading of Duchamp’s play in orientation as an engagement with contemporary physics, see Herbert
33
Breeding the inversions are multiple: Man Ray’s camera hovers above the face-down, horizontally placed Large Glass, in an obliquely elevated angle. In choosing an extreme viewpoint that calls attention to the camera’s position, Man Ray evokes the readymades’ shift in orientation and creates a photograph that adopts Duchamp’s concerns and artistic strategies.
Man Ray’s homage was perhaps too successful since by borrowing Duchampian strategies he actually created a “Duchamp,” later seamlessly incorporated into
Duchamp’s oeuvre. Even though Man Ray was identified as the photographer of Dust
Breeding when it was first reproduced in Littérature, Duchamp included the photo in his
1934 Green Box as well as his Boîte-en-Valise, thus turning it into one of his readymades.53 Brassaï’s photograph of Picasso’s studio has a more obvious authorial
status; it was Brassaï’s initiative to fetishize Picasso’s palette.
Brassaï asserts his status as the photographer by employing the same point of
view used by Man Ray in Dust Breeding to erase his position in front of The Large Glass:
the bird’s-eye view. Brassaï’s use of this device is, however, quite different from that of
Man Ray, as the scale of his photograph does not evoke the distance from a skyscraper or
an airplane. Instead, the mechanical gaze of the camera is one that anthropomorphically
invokes the body of the photographer. This collapse between the camera and the
Molderings, “Objects of Modern Skepticism,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 243- 266. 53 Due to the readymade’s challenge to ideas of artistic authorship, it makes no difference whether the readymade was bought in a hardware store or photographed by Man Ray before appropriated. See also De Duve’s argument concerning Duchamp as the mastermind behind The Fountain’s scandal. Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 116120. I would continue this line of thought and argue that Duchamp is the photographer of the photo of The Fountain that was published in The Blind Man, even though he didn’t take the photograph himself.
34 photographer’s own vision54 infuses this photographic point of view with the narrative of
Brassaï’s visit to Picasso’s studio where he encounters the floor-size palette.
To further understand Picasso’s Palette and Brassaï’s engagement with an
existing photographic discourse concerning the nature and look of artistic production, I
introduce a third photograph into the discussion: André Kertész’ Chez Mondrian (1926).
In choosing Man Ray’s Dust Breeding as a model for photographing Picasso’s sculptures,
Brassaï avoided this other potential photographic precedent, which redefined artistic
creativity through an empty studio (figure 1.18). Even though Chez Mondrian was not
disseminated in the printed press until the 1940s, it was exhibited in France and Brassaï
would have known the photograph through his personal and professional relations with
Kertész.55 The two Hungarians became friends upon Brassaï’s arrival to Paris, and the older photographer is often credited for initiating Brassaï’s interest in their shared craft, even though Brassaï later played down the importance of Kertész to his development.
André Kertész’s Chez Mondrian, like Dust Breeding which preceded it, and the later Picasso’s Palette, also captures artistic creativity without referring to the artist in the flesh or to the traditional trope of an artist holding a brush in the midst of the act of painting. Chez Mondrian is a clear image of the artist’s creation in its repeated, yet unsystematic, articulation of Mondrian’s space into dark and bright planes so that it
resembles one of his own compositions from the 1920s onwards. This consistent but
irregular play of bright and dark – the uneven distribution of light (the dramatically dim
54 In his article about cinematic point of view Aumont touches upon this collapse in relation to other media, here painting: “The indefectible solidarity between the painting and the viewer, and more precisely, the symmetry between them, this impossible intersection of gazes this crossing of looks between spectator and the painter.” Jacques Aumont, “The Point of View,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11:2 (1989), 1. 55 David Travis, At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography and Photographers, on Talent and Genius (Boston, MA: Black Sparrow Books, 2003), 47.
35 indoor space against the bright corridor), the paint (the corridor wall is divided horizontally into black and white rectangles), and materials (the dark wood against the whiteness of the wall) functions metaphorically in this photograph as it imitates
Mondrian’s signature style.
But even though the two photographs present the same approach to artistic creativity without an artistic author, Picasso’s Palette diametrically opposes Chez
Mondrian. The most striking difference is in the studios: whereas Picasso’s studio is dirty and messy, Mondrian’s space is so organized and clean that it seems uninhabited. The centrally located doormat at the threshold to Mondrian’s apartment designates a specific site for dirt in Mondrian’s sphere, creating a barrier between the exterior world, where dirt is found, and the interior world, where dirt is not allowed in contrast to the all-over mess in Picasso’s studio. Chez Mondrian is possibly emblematic of the sensitivity to hygiene and cleanliness that dominated France in the interwar period. Even the single white tulip at the centre of the composition is an artificial one, in a reference to and disavowal of Kant’s definition of beauty as a “wild tulip,” as Mondrian did not think any natural form could bring forth the idea of universal judgment.56
It is important to note that Kertész’s photograph does not represent an artist’s studio. It presents the entrance to the apartment while the space in which Mondrian
painted another room at the back of the apartment is located opposite the door and
behind Kertész and his camera.57 The photograph’s identification of a non-working space
56 “It is a fact that any judgment of taste we make is always a singular judgment about the object. The understanding can, by comparing the object with other people’s judgment about their liking of it, make a universal judgment, e.g.: All tulips are beautiful….” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 148. I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Legge for bringing this point to my attention. 57 Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work (New York: Abrams, 1956), 158.
36 with Mondrian’s work further reinforces the differences between Mondrian’s, Picasso’s, and Duchamp’s artistic productions. Chez Mondrian brings forward an image of efficient, non-wasteful production as non-production, an image of work that is so conceptual, so theoretical, so abstract that it has no material traces. Instead of Picasso’s littering hand,
Kertész evokes Mondrian’s cleaning hand, which removes all traces of work, dirt, and accumulated dust. The lack of any signs, or indexes, of the creative subject, caused by the act of cleaning, award the photographed space with an iconic relationship to Mondrian’s visual language, and a conceptual link to his work.
***
In his attempt to forge an image of the modern creative subject, Brassaï articulates the particularities of Picasso the extent of his talent, and his enormous creativity as tied to his status in the art world and beyond. Brassaï had the insight to fashion an image of
Picasso that foresees the artist’s economic future. The photograph gives equal importance to the calculated application of paint and to the arbitrary presence of paint on the floor, since both share the same direct, indexical relationship to their author. This articulates the path that Picasso’s career will take, for Picasso will be a demiurge; everything he touches will become artistic gold.58 The position of the unfinished canvas at the photograph’s top
58 The comparison between Picasso and the mythological figure of Midas was articulated by Cocteau, who praised Picasso’s cubist work for the artist’s ability to magically change everyday materials like newspaper and rope into works of art equivalent to gold. Jean Cocteau, Picasso (Paris: Stock, 1923), 23. Roland Penrose also used the same metaphor: “He is the scavenger who unearths from the mud abandoned riches, and the magician who can produce a dove from an empty hat. He was born with the philosopher’s stone in his hand. There is literal truth in attributing to him the touch of Midas since in recognition of his powers,
37 right corner above the dirt alludes to this notion of transformation the muck will be transmuted into the purified painting, like an ascension of matter into art.
The final pages of my analysis in this chapter are devoted to the conceptualization of Picasso’s power to turn base materials into art. This view of the artist is central to
André Breton’s text “Picasso dans son élément,” which accompanied Picasso’s Palette in
Minotaure. I contextualize this view of Picasso within the Breton-Bataille polemics, a contemporary debate concerning the spirit of surrealism. The two thinkers differ in their definition of the surrealist experience: where Breton saw sublimation, Bataille aimed at transgression.59 Breton’s interpretation of Picasso from 1933 evokes Bataille as the terms for thinking about Picasso’s studio are shifted from waste to human waste – an overtly
Bataillian territory.
As already noted, Breton qualified Picasso’s domestic disorder as a sign of the artist’s talent, unlike those “painters in the school of parrots.”60 His approach culminates in this description of an unfinished work he saw in Picasso’s studio:
My attention was suddenly caught by a small, unfinished painting… the centre of which contained simply a large impasted lump. After checking that it was dry, Picasso explained to me that this painting was intended to represent a piece of excrement, as, indeed, would become quite evident once he had placed the relevant flies in position. He only deplored the necessity of using color for want of a suitable durable genuine dried excrement, and regretted especially the impossibility of reproducing one of those particularly inimitable excrements that he sometimes noticed in the country at the time of year when children eat cherries without bothering to spit out the stones. The deliberate taste for cherry stones in
every time his pencil touches paper the slightest scribble has its market value.” Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York: Harpers, 1959), 377. 59 On the Breton-Bataille polemic see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: the Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 98114; Jean-François Fourny, “À propos de la querelle Breton- Bataille,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 84.3 (1984): 4328; Marie-Christine Lalla, “Bataille et Breton: le malentendu considerable,” in Surréalisme et philosophie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992), 4961. 60 See my discussion on pages 1617.
38
this situation seems to me, I must say, to provide the most objective proof possible of the very particular interest which the relationship between the unassimilated and the assimilated should arouse: a relationship whose variations, in terms of the benefit of mankind, may well be considered the essential motivation force of artistic creation. Any slight and passing repugnance that might have been aroused by this solitary lump around which the painter had not yet started to weave his magic was more than exorcised by such considerations. I even caught myself visualizing the shiny, brand-new flies, which Picasso would conjure up. Everything suddenly seemed bright and gay. Not only did my eye have no recollection of having dwelt upon anything disagreeable, but I was elsewhere, in some place where the weather was fine, life was pleasant and I was surrounded by wild flowers and morning dew: I plunged gladly into the woods. 61
Breton describes how in his dirty studio, Picasso showed him a “dirty”
scatological painting. The base nature of the work existed as yet only in Picasso’s
description: the non-representational lump of paint would eventually stand for a piece of
excrement, which would be made more obvious when Picasso added flies.
The reference to flies brings the reader back to the beginning of the essay where
Breton praises the seemingly minor work Still Life with a Butterfly (figure 1.19), calling it
the clearest example of Picasso’s talent due to the integration of a real butterfly into the
composition. The power of Still Life results from the complete assimilation of the
butterfly into the image without causing the whole composition to “crumble immediately
into dust.” 62 Still Life with a Butterfly illustrates “the passage from the inanimate to the
animate, from objective to subjective life”63 since the real butterfly maintains its status as
a dead insect while also seamlessly blending into the representational world: it is
simultaneously a visual representational sign and the thing-in-itself.
Returning to Picasso’s description of his work-in-progress as recounted by Breton, this paragraph also emphasizes the dialectical status of its two comprising elements: paint
61 Breton,“Picasso in his Element,” 113114. Breton’s emphasis. 62 Ibid., 101. 63 Ibid., 102.
39 and flies. The lump is both paint and excrement. When Breton sees the work in Picasso’s studio, the lump of paint is still just paint. But after Picasso “weaves his magic” and includes “shiny, brand new flies,” the lump is to become waste matter. The flies are simultaneously the thing-in-itself and a device: they are the artistic vehicle by which the paint will transform into excrement, but when this transubstantiation occurs and paint turns into excrement, they will also function as the proof that it is real.
Instead of using actual feces, Picasso substituted paint. This choice characterizes the work as representational and the inclusion of flies links it to the tradition of trompe- l’oeil, with which Picasso experimented in his cubist work. Flies are an important trope in this artistic strategy adopted by generations of painters as a way to deceive their viewers and add realism to their paintings: Giorgio Vasari famously recounts an anecdote about
Giotto who, when he painted a realistic fly on the nose of a figure, fooled his teacher
Cimabue so completely that he tried to flick off the insect.64 Another well-known
anecdote refers to the baroque sculptor Bernini who experienced great frustration when a
humble fly passed by his bust of pope Alexander VII, reminding him that even the most
lifelike sculpture can never be as lively as the smallest of creatures.65 The real flies in
Picasso’s piece function differently: instead of reinstating art’s failure to imitate life, they
aim to infuse life into the lump of paint and turn it into excrement.
Flies also function as a motif in surrealism, though less in terms of visual trickery
and more as a sign of death and decay. Dalí used flies and ants in his highly realistic
compositions. As seen in The Persistence of Memory from 1931, which contains multiple
64 Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, et al. Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’oeil Painting (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), 21. 65 Maarten Delbeke, “The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor, and the Fly,” Bulletin de l’institut historique belge de Rome 70 (2000): 179223.
40 ants as well as a fly, the insects are used to signify the effect of time on objects and to mark their putrefaction (figure 1.20). Another example of a work that utilizes flies is
Jacques-André Boiffard’s photograph of flies trapped on flypaper from 1931, a variation on the memento mori still life tradition. (figure 1.21).66
According to Breton, however, Picasso did not aim to create a playful trompe-
l’oeil; he regretted that his lump of paint was only a substitute holding merely an iconic
resemblance to those particular feces he often saw in the countryside. But if Picasso
intended to add real flies, why did he compromise and substitute the “real, genuine, dried
excrement” with a lump of dry paint? If indeed these “particularly inimitable” feces
intrigued the artist, there was no reason for him not to collect one of them, as a found
object, or to ‘produce’ one himself, and use it in his art. The substitution definitely did
not occur due to a lack of the desired material: there is never a shortage of excrement. Yet
the artist used paint as a sculptural material to create a three-dimensional, textured blot, a
transposition he deplored even at this early stage of his work.
Considering that the work was never completed, and that there is no other record
of it but Breton’s text, the art historian William Rubin has suggested that Picasso’s
elaborate description is merely a hoax designed to push Breton’s buttons.67 Breton was
known to be squeamish when it came to scatological matter; he named Bataille “the
excrement-philosopher” and accused him of “love of flies” in the second surrealist
66 For a discussion of the use of trompe l’oeil, and flies especially in Surrealism for the creation of images “that truly touch us, [that] must no longer be the soothing physic that beauty deceitfully promises. […] Images [that] devour us […] like an approaching swarm of flies,” see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Paradox of the Phasmid of Contact Images,” in Tympanum - Journal of Comparetive Literature Studies 3 (1999). http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/3/contactimages.html. (Accessed in April 10, 2009). 67 David Lomas in his chapter on Picasso gives this information without referencing the source of Rubin’s hypothesis. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis Subjectivity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 106.
41 manifesto.68 Breton’s aversion to Bataille’s scatological interpretations surfaced during
the dispute surrounding Bataille’s reading of Dalí’s Jeu Lugubre, a text which
emphasized the figure whose pants are soiled at the foreground of the painting. Breton so
objected to this interpretation that he prevented the reproduction of the painting next to
Bataille’s essay when the text was published in Documents in 1929.69 Breton’s sensitivity
became a source of entertainment in avant-garde circles when Dalí circulated rumours
concerning his culinary ‘interest’ in feces in order to disgust Breton. 70
Breton swallows Picasso’s bait, so to speak, but instead of the appalled response
that is expected of him, he accommodates Picasso’s fecal work and incorporates it into
his interpretive system. He even makes a playful reference to coprophilia when
describing Picasso’s “deliberate taste for cherry stones.” In this instance and this instance
alone, Breton changes his approach to scatology from vehement disapproval and
repugnance to metaphoric escapism and admiration. Picasso’s trickery puts Breton’s
critical skills to the test, demonstrating his own rhetorical ability to turn flies into butterflies and excrement into art.
The author’s reaction to the paint-made-excrement holds an obvious relationship to Bataille’s thought, while radically diverging from it. The concluding paragraph of
“Picasso dans son élément” is the clearest example of the repeated references to
Bataillian ideas, tropes, and metaphors in the text. Breton’s engagement with Bataille’s
writing, however, is highly instrumental he only borrows Bataillian terminology to turn
68 “M. Bataille loves flies. Not we: we love the miters of old advocators, the miters of pure linen to whose front point was affixed a blade of gold and upon which flies did not settle, because they had been purified to keep them away.” André Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1966), 184. 69 Instead of the painting, Bataille drew a schematic diagram of the painting to accompany his essay. 70 This story is recounted by Gauthier who also suspected that the story was a hoax: Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 216.
42 it on its head. Bataille, in his last surrealist text, criticizes the tendency to lose oneself in metaphors and substitutions, which materializes in the exchange of “the grandiose image of decomposition” in “its negative form … the soap, toothbrushes and … pharmaceutical products.” 71 Breton, on the other hand, makes metaphors and substitutions into the
essence of surrealism. When the writer looks at would-be excrement in Picasso’s painting,
his original aversion disappears (“any slight of passing repugnance that might have been
aroused by this solitary lump … was more than exorcised”) and he is carried away to sublimated terrain where “everything … [was] bright and gay. The weather was fine, life
was pleasant and I was surrounded by wild flowers and morning dew.” Breton rejects
Bataille’s ideas altogether when he defines transposition as the reason for all artistic
creation and the source of happiness.
To conclude, Breton’s text becomes the theoretical counterpart to Brassaï’s
photograph Picasso’s Palette as they both hold a similar relationship to waste and to the
creative process. Both text and photograph correspond with the contemporary interest in
all things Picasso whether it is a monumental painting, found object, dirty floor, or
lump of paint-as-excrement. According to this view anything Picasso touches holds the
trace of his genius and is therefore worthy of documenting, collecting, and admiring. This
interpretation, however, cannot be applied to Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s dusty
studio because of the different qualities of dust and dirt: the former denies an author
whereas the latter necessitates one. The wide array of literary and philosophical texts and photographs that were considered in this chapter reveal the general fascination amongst
71 Georges Bataille, “L’Esprit moderne et le jeu des transpo sitions,” Documents 8 (1930): 17. For the English translation see Georges Bataille, “The Modern Spir it and the Game of Transposition,” in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richarson (London: Hayward Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2006), 242.
43 the avant-garde during the interwar period in the link between creativity and base materiality.
Second Chapter: Brassaï’s 1933 Minotaure Photo Essay of Picasso as an
Ethnographic Exploration
In his influential essay “Ethnographic Surrealism,” James Clifford promotes
surrealism and ethnography as historically, disciplinarily, and procedurally parallel phenomena.1 He argues that the surrealist movement and the emerging discipline both
adopted a view of the world as inherently fragmented and shattered, characteristic of the
interwar period. Clifford claims that the two employed modernist artistic strategies for their own purposes: abstraction, collage, and fragmentation were used both in surrealist artistic production and in practical ethnographic fieldwork and research. The method of taking indigenous objects out of their original contexts and piecing together fragments of gathered data resonates with Lautréamont’s famous metaphor of the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table. Clifford thus proposes the term ethnographic surrealism which he defines in part as “the corrosive analysis of a reality now identified as local and artificial [and the…] supplying of exotic alternatives [… as well as] taking delight in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms” 2 for
understanding both surrealist art and ethnographic work in the 1920s and 30s.
The site of hard-core ethnographic surrealism, according to Clifford, is Georges
Bataille’s Documents, a short-lived avant-garde journal on whose editorial board many
key figures of the nascent ethnographic discipline and the dissident surrealist group
1 James Clifford, “Ethnographic Surrealism” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11751. 2 Ibid., 1301.
44 45 collaborated3 The journal exhibited a blasphemous disregard for all hierarchical systems,
most clearly revealed in its notorious dictionary, from which the previously quoted entry
“dust” was taken, and in its juxtaposition of heterogonous photographic materials.
Documents’ anti-hierarchical approach complemented the ethnographers’ fascination
with low material culture and their reappraisal of mundane and common artifacts as
suitable objects of scientific inquiry. This new approach to material culture reveals
ethnography’s desire to distance itself from its connoisseurial past, denying the discipline’s roots in the study of primitive art and particularly its aesthetic bias.
Denis Hollier’s “The Use Value of the Impossible” presents the most potent
criticism thus far of the term ethnographic surrealism.4 Hollier agrees with Clifford’s
historical contextualization, but insists on irreconcilable differences between the
surrealists and ethnographers concerning the commodification of objects. According to
Hollier, in turning everyday objects into scientific specimens, the ethnographers were committed to a profane definition of use-value. Whereas the Marxist definition of use- value understands it as “only realized in the consumption, that is, the destruction of the
thing [… which] cannot outlast use,”5 the ethnographic objects were seen as forever holding onto the memory of their use. For the ethnographers, then, use-value does outlast use, as it is permanently attached to the objects, even when they are ‘out of use,’ extracted from their original setting and context, and displayed in the ethnographic museum.
3 Among Documents’ editorial board and contributors, we find the surrealist-turned-ethnographer Michel Leiris, the future leading ethnographer Marcel Griaule, the head of the future Musée de l’homme Georges- Henri Rivière, the founding father of the discipline Marcel Mauss, and the authority on African sculpture, Carl Einstein. 4 Denis Hollier, “The Use-Value of the Impossible,” October 60 (Spring 1992): 324. 5 Ibid., 8.
46
Hollier defines Bataille’s approach to material culture in aesthetic terms in contrast to ethnography, emphasizing that the objects that interest Bataille are those completely devoid of use-value and imbued instead with sacred meaning. The objects to which Bataille attends demonstrate nonproductive use: they are particular, inexchangeable, and irreplaceable to their consumers, as famously exemplified by the useless fetishist’s shoe.6 The unique nature of these sacred objects allows them to escape all economic structures.
The differences between ethnographic, profane use-value and surrealist, sacred or non-productive use-value are crystallized in the formless. For the ethnographers, the formless is a physical quality of an object that can be measured, quantified, and eventually classified.7 The ethnographers attend to low material culture in the context of larger systems of knowledge; the part always points back to the whole. For Bataille, however, the formless is exactly that which eludes all classifications and thus eliminates the possibility of a categorical mode of thinking.8 The low, Bataille’s “base materialism,” cannot be rescued and turned into a useful subject of scientific inquiry, as it declassifies
6 Bataille wrote in his text for the final issue of Documents: “I defy any lover of painting to love a picture as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.” Georges Bataille, “The Modern Spirit and the play of Transpositions,” trans. Kryzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson in Dawn Ades (et al.), Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (London: Hayward Gallery, South Bank Center; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 242. 7 André Schaffner in an article published in Documents, quoted by both Clifford and Hollier, articulated the ethnographer’s approach to the formless, as something that cannot, or will not, prevent classification: “no object designed to produce sound or music, however ‘primitive’ or formless it may seem, no musical instrument whatever its existence is accidental or essential – shall be excluded from a methodical classification.” André Schaffner, “Des instruments de musique dans un musée d’ethnographie,” Documents 5 (October 1929): 248. 8 “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless (informe) is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down (déclasser) in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no right in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.” Quoted in Yve- Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 5.
47 and abolishes all meaning. The formless lends itself to nothing and forever maintains its complete otherness.
These conflicting interpretations result from methodological differences. Clifford performs a methodological intervention, illuminating a standard, but often overlooked, anthropological practice. “Surrealist procedures,” he says “are always present in ethnographic works … in every introductory anthropology course … moments are produced in which distinct cultural realities are cut from their context and forced into jarring proximity.” 9 Hollier is also rewriting intellectual history, as he is invested in
rescuing Bataille’s work from its (relative) oblivion. Hollier abstracts Bataille from the
interwar period’s political and historical context and projects his work onto the present.
His anti-capitalist reading of Bataille turns the philosopher into a valuable tool for
effectively criticizing the late capitalist era.
The relationship between surrealism and ethnography in Minotaure, the surrealist journal published between 1933 and 1939, can be viewed in radically different ways.
Even though Minotaure followed Documents’ interdisciplinary cue in declaring
ethnography among its varied subjects of study, 10 the publication is understood as a luxurious, up-scale journal, more comparable to Christian Zervos’s Cahiers d’art in its appearance and content than to Bataille’s radical Documents. Clifford offers a typical
assessment of Minotaure: “a thing of beauty, Minotaure interspersed no photographs of
slaughterhouses, movietones follies, or big toes among its lavishly reproduced Picassos,
Dalis, or Massons. [...] Modern art and ethnography had emerged as fully distinct
9 Clifford, “Ethnographic Surrealism,” 146. The author specifically refers to the tendency to bring disparate cultural phenomena from remote and distinct areas as a didactic method in entry level university courses. 10 Ethnography is mentioned as one of the fields Minotaure explores, together with plastic art, poetry, music, architecture, mythology, spectacle, psychology, and psychoanalysis..
48 positions.”11 In such assessments, the second issue of the magazine devoted entirely to the return of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition from a two-year ethnographic mission across
Africa is quickly dismissed.
In opposition to this clear-cut evaluation, which sees the Dakar-Djibouti issue as an anomaly in the journal’s editing policy, I argue that Minotaure embodied a flexible and deliberately inconsistent application of ethnographic discourse. This unstable attitude to academic ethnographic methods reflects a broader surrealist tendency to utilize existing scientific discourses while freely appropriating them. 12 This bending of disciplinary rules and irreverent approach to organized systems of knowledge characterizes Minotaure’s surrealism and Brassaï’s contributions in particular. The encounter between surrealism and ethnography in Minotaure thus departs from both
Clifford’s and Hollier’s evaluations: neither the happy meeting nor the great divide, but rather a cynical use of ethnography as a conventional system for representing otherness, as the journal promoted the use of ethnographic language and methodologies for non- ethnographic themes and subjects.
11 Clifford, “Ethnographic Surrealism,” 134. This view is reiterated by many other scholars writing in surrealist journals. See, for example, Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,” in L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 176: “in contrast to Le Surrealisme au service de la révolution, Minotaure, the next major surrealist periodical, was lavishly reproduced and generously illustrated. It appeared to be predominantly a literary and artistic magazine….” See also Susanne Rubin Suleiman, “Between the Street and the Salon: The Dilemma of Surrealist Politics in the 1930’s,” Visual Anthropology Review 7.1 (spring 1991): 43: “despite being dominated by Surrealist work, Minotaure was a luxurious a-political art magazine destined for a wealthy public.” 12 An example of this general trend could be found in Salvador Dalí’s critical-paranoiac system which borrows its terms, while challenging them, from Jacques Lacan’s work on paranoia in his analysis of the murderous Pepin sisters in his Motifs du crime paranoîque both published in Minotaure’s first issue. See: Adam Jolles, “Paranoiac Pictures as Delusional Discourse: The Surrealist Challenge to French Psychiatric Authority,” Chicago Art Journal 8.1 (Spring 1998): 4361.
49
In order to discuss how Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s studios and sculptures
published in the first issue of Minotaure employ ethnographic rhetoric, I will first describe ‘proper’ ethnographic discourse, as it was articulated in the Dakar-Djibouti issue.
I will then consider Dali’s and Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures, also published in
Minotaure, in which ethnographic tools are freely applied, before analyzing Brassaï’s photo essay on Picasso.
Ethnographic Discourse in Minotaure: The Dakar-Djibouti issue
The second issue of Minotaure, devoted to the findings of the Dakar-Djibouti
expedition, was issued in 1933 upon the expedition’s return from its two years abroad.
The choice of Minotaure as the stage for this gathered ethnographic knowledge was
controversial. In selecting Minotaure, Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris, members of the expedition and acting editors of the issue, avoided the obvious professional platform for the circulation of material related to the Trocadéro collections: Le Bulletin du Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro. Jean Jamin suggests that the appeal of Minotaure as the chosen platform for displaying ethnographic materials was in securing a wider readership.13 By assuming that ethnographic research might be of general interest, Griale
and Leiris locate ethnography in relation to the widespread cultural phenomenon of
negrophilia: the French taste, during the interwar period, for all things “black,” encompassing every stratum of cultural production from avant-garde artistic practice through interior décor and fashion design, to jazz music, and popular performances such
13 Jean Jamin, “De l’humaine condition de Minotaure,” in Regards sur Minotaure: la revue à tête de bête ed. Claude Gaume (Genève: Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, 1987), 85.
50 as Josephine Baker, or the eccentric avant-garde version of this, Raymond Roussel’s
Impressions of Africa.14
Yet in the Dakar-Djibouti issue itself neither the desire to communicate as widely as possible nor evidence of the popular negrophilic roots of ethnography are found.
Instead, the expedition’s research is presented in a highbrow manner characterized by dry language and a distant, uninvolved, and objective viewpoint. By choosing this academic discourse the authors shy away from popular approaches to African artifacts and culture – namely aesthetic connoisseurship, with its emphasis on stylistic judgments, and the promotion of the sensational and fictive image of primitive Africa. In other words, the grave and scholarly presentation of the mission’s ethnographic research in Minotaure appears to be in direct contradiction to the reason for choosing Minotaure in the first place.
The Dakar-Djibouti issue begins with an introduction by Paul Rivet and Georges-
Henri Rivière, director and assistant-director of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, and is immediately followed by a methodological introduction by Marcel Griaule, the head of the expedition. 15 Whereas Rivet’s and Rivière’s introduction describes the
expedition in concrete terms its financing, participants, countries visited, number of
objects collected and photographs taken Griaule’s preface does not bother with such
material details. Instead he immediately positions himself as a participant in and a
producer of specialized, academic discourse. He begins with a lengthy description of two
different traditions of ethnographic fieldwork – the extensive approach, in which a large
14 Petrine Archer Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in 1920 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 15 Paul Rivet and Georges-Henry Rivière, “La mission ethnographique et linguistique Dakar-Djibouti,” Minotaure 1.2 (December 1933): 36. Marcel Griaule, “Introduction méthodologique,” Minotaure 1.2 (December 1933): 712.
51 number of cultures are examined, and the intensive approach, which researches a single culture for a long period of time – and gives as an example of the latter Frank Hamilton
Cushing’s five-year stay with the Zuni tribe. Even though Griaule praises Cushing’s study, he argues in favor of the extensive approach, the Dakar-Djibouti expedition’s chosen method, because of the limitations of the ethnographic discipline in France at that moment. To summarize, Griaule’s introduction is a specialized text par excellence in its lengthy evocation of an inner-disciplinary debate, its reference to disciplinary history, and its use of academic jargon. The introduction’s approach, characteristic of the Dakar-
Djibouti issue as a whole, is an embodiment of the contemporary, general fascination with African culture but one that turns its back on its popular origins: a dispassionately modern – that is, scientifically, ethnographically authenticated negrophilia.
The choice of technical-professional discourse in Minotaure’s ethnographic issue is, however, proven to be optional in light of two articles by Michel Leiris: “Masques
Dogon” from the second ethnographic issue of the journal and “Danses funéraires Dogon
(extrait d’un carnet de route)” published in the first Minotaure issue, which also includes
Brassaï’s photo essay on Picasso.16 These articles describe the rites of the Dogon people of Mali in different ways. In the text published in the second issue of Minotaure Leiris uses conventional academic language to buttress his classification of the funerary Dogon masks: discussing when the masks are used, how and by whom, what materials they are made of, how they were painted, and so forth. The latter article, however, stresses the author’s subjective viewpoint as a mystified observer of the funerary ritual. The narrator, instead of describing-analyzing-qualifying the funerary ceremony, does not fully
16 Michel Leiris, “Danses funéraires Dogon (Extrait d’un Carnet de route),” Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 736. Michel Leiris, “Masques Dogon,” Minotaure 1.2 (January, 1933): 4551.
52 comprehend the events that are played out in front of him, and is incapable of making sense of them. I argue that this inconsistent application of ethnographic discourse in
Minotaure reflects the recognition, among surrealists, of the contradictions at the heart of the discipline and the choice to emphasize and revel in such contradictions.
As might be deduced from Leiris’ two articles, ethnographic discourse in the
1930s was mainly devoted to the analysis of material cultures. The Dakar-Djibouti mission’s emphasis on material ethnography was the result of both practical reason and theoretical justification. The expedition’s declared goal was the expansion of the French ethnographic collections in preparation for the impending opening of the Musée de l’homme. This collecting practice was backed theoretically by the work of the man who had taught many of the expedition members, Marcel Mauss, and who framed material culture in relation to larger social, cultural, and economic structures.17
By presupposing a connection between particular cultural products, religious rituals, social structures, and the larger culture that manufactured them, Mauss’
ethnography conformed to a humanist trend of the interwar period, which was
crystallized in Emil Durkheim’s concept “le fait social total.”18 Durkheim conceived of
social reality in its varied embodiments as a comprehensive whole, 19 and therefore
17 Such an approach could be found in Mauss’ comparative analysis of different economies of exchange in archaic societies in his seminal essay on the gift. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form of Reason and Exchange In Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hals (New York: W. & W. Norton and Company Inc., 1990). 18 Jean Jamin, “Ethnographie mode d’inemploi: De quelques rapports de l’ethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilisation,” in Le Mal et la douleur, ed. Jacques Hainard et Roland Kaehr (Neuchâtel: Musée d’ethnographie, 1986), 70. 19 These ideas also inform Michel Foucault’s episteme, which the philosopher defined in his The Order of Things in the following manner: “By episteme we mean ... the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, possibly formalized systems.... The episteme is not a form of knowledge or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the group [ensemble] of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities.” Quoted in Ian Maclean, “Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998): 14966.
53 contradicted the disjointed, collage-like worldview promoted by James Clifford in his essay on ethnographic surrealism.
The collecting practice of the Dakar-Djibouti mission grew out of this comprehensive humanist point of view. The mission collected both rare fetishes and everyday utilitarian objects, from the rare Dogon Mothers of Masks with their cultic meaning and origin in sacrificial rituals,20 to the common, decorative straw hut-pinnacles
of West-Africa. 21 All products of African material culture were assumed to provide
insight into an essence of African culture. Reinscribing the division between
ethnographic and aesthetic discourse by working consciously against Western notions of
art, the Dakar-Djibouti researchers followed Marcel Mauss’s lead and preferred the
frequently occurring, the usual, to the rare, as it was seen as most illuminating of the
culture in which it originated.22
All the varied objects, no matter how elaborate or simple, were scrutinized and
classified using the same tools. First, the objects’ physical properties (size, shape,
materials, and manufacturing techniques) were studied and described in great detail.
Aesthetic judgment was deemed irrelevant. Second, to decipher the objects’ use, their
shapes were considered in relation to the human body. The ethnographers assumed a
anthropocentric stance, which led them to conclude that all objects were intended for
human consumption. An object’s meaning is only apparent in the context of the body that
20 Michel Leiris, “Objets rituels Dogon,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 2630. 21 Michel Leiris, “Faîtes de case des rives du Bani (Bassin du Niger),” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 1819. 22 “une boîte de conserve caractérise mieux nos sociétés que le bijou le plus somptueux ou le timbre le plus rare.” Quoted in Jean Jamin, “Tout ètait fètiche, tout devint totem,” introduction to the reprint of Le Bulletin du Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (Paris: J. M. Place, 1981), xviii.
54 activates it and brings it to life.23 Third, these analytical principles were then employed as
instruments for recognizing broader cultural or religious systems. Following this line of
ethnographic inquiry, all products of material culture on their way to becoming scientific
specimens were considered representational and endowed with the potential to offer
special insight into the society from which they came.
Photography was favoured over other forms of visual notation in the ethnographic
issue. More than 195 photographs appear in the journal’s ninety pages - a small fraction
of the 6000 taken by the mission.24 The editorial board’s preface addresses this extensive use of photographs:
You will notice that as well as setting aside much space for photographs of objects, we have reproduced […] photographs of all types, sites, scenes, and documents of different kinds. Believing that it is more necessary than ever not to separate science from life, we have enforced ourselves to give the reader all the elements that will allow him to situate the published documents in their true atmosphere.25
By incorporating different kinds of photographs, the authors emphasize the non-aesthetic
definition of ethnography: in Hollier’s terms, the photographed objects maintain their
profane use-value. In opposition to the aesthetic approach, which does “separate science
from life,” the ethnographic analysis studies its subjects within their original context
preserved, so it is argued, by photography. The role of the reader, just like that of the
23 This working assumption is not universally true, as cult objects do not conform to human physical standards – they are not designed to be seen, touched, or communicated with. In his introduction, Griaule describes the doubts of the expedition’s members upon seeing the Dogon’s seven-meter long masks. Even though the Dogon people insisted on referring to them as masks the ethnographers refuse to believe them, since the objects’ immense size suggests that they cannot be worn, hence they cannot function as masks. The ethnographers eventually understood the masks through genealogical terms suggested by their name as Mothers of Masks. Therefore, the huge masks whose size does not correlate with the human body, but corresponds to a divine sphere, initially slipped from the ethnographic classificatory system. Marcel Griuale, “Introduction méthodologique,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 12. 24 Paul Rivet and Georges-Henry Rivière, “La mission ethnographique et linguistique Dakar-Djibouti,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 36. Marcel Griuale, “Introduction méthodologique,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 712. 25 “Préface,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): xii.
55 ethnographers themselves, is to actively put together the different pieces of the puzzle and understand the findings - to classify the photographic evidence and situate it within a larger social or cultural whole.
In order to understand Brassaï’s selective borrowing of ethnographic conventions of photographic display, I will first delve into the prevalent photographic strategies found in the Dakar-Djibouti issue. The photographs are treated as “documents,” underlining their purported lack of bias. When photography is described as a documentary tool, it participates in and manufactures the illusion of transparent and unmediated representation, which then lends itself to objective scientific work.26 This approach consciously avoids
the surrealist lessons concerning the opacity of the photographic image, and instead is
highly invested in attributing truthful qualities to photographic products. Photography is
equated with the ethnographer since both are supposed to report impartially their findings
without intervening in the observed environment. This fly-on-the-wall approach is
reinforced by the choice of photographs, the large majority of which present their
subjects absorbed in action, as if the photographer and ethnographers were not present.
Photography also proves the credibility of ethnographic research – the photographs verify
that the collected objects were indeed gathered in Africa, after being used in rituals practiced by indigenous peoples.
All the photographic tactics employed in Minotaure’s ethnographic issue rely on this presupposed indexicality of the medium. The first photographic convention, and the one most prominently used in the issue, is the ‘floating object’ – a photographic formula
26 While Julia Kelly discusses the photographs in the ethnographic issue of Minotaure through their apparent constructedness, my reading differs in its exploration of the rhetoric of the document occupied in the issue. See Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 91117.
56 used when objects are depicted in tight close-up and placed in front of a neutral background under artificial lighting. This term, coined by Elizabeth Edwards in her Raw
Histories, stresses the abstraction of the photographed object from all transient elements, thus generating a vacuum-like effect essential for performing the ontological shift from everyday material objects to scientific ‘specimens.’27 This photographic strategy is then used for introducing the specimens through classification, the preferred working method for ethnographic analysis in the Dakar-Djibouti issue.
Even though the ‘floating objects’ formula appears often in the issue, the editors frequently use another photographic strategy, which depicts the objects in their original context and setting. This method emphasizes the objects’ use-value they are photographed being worn by members of the tribes and being used during ceremonies and rituals – thus demonstrating their original meaning prior to their new status as scientific specimens. Many objects in the issue are displayed through both strategies. In the article “Faîtes de case des Rives du Bani (Bassin du Niger)” four hut pinnacles are photographed separately and through a close-up view, which makes them appear monumental and emphasizes their elaborate thread-work and unique shapes. These decorative objects are also displayed on the previous page in their original context at the summit of West-African huts, thus providing their scale and actual use (figure 2.1, 2.2).28
Another photographic form of contextualization appears in this issue of
Minotaure, in which images of African landscape, such as a photograph of fishermen returning to shore before sunset taken in French Sudan (present-day Mali), are
27 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropologies, and Museum (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2001). 28 Michel Leiris, “Faîtes de case des Rives du Bani (Bassin du Niger),” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 1819.
57 incorporated (figure 2.3). Even though these scenic photographs can only function as contextualizing devices with the help of captions that situate them in a specific location, they reinforce the hypothetical link between products of material culture and the place in which they were manufactured. This presupposition of a connection between all cultural products – including religious rituals, social structures, and artifacts at every level of significance and the culture that manufactured them is in keeping with Marcel Mauss’s teachings.
Another widespread photographic strategy found in the Dakar-Djibouti issue is the serial presentation of photographs in a way that suggests the linear unfolding of a narrative. In the article analyzing the sacrifice of a bull in Gondar, photography’s importance to scientific analysis becomes even clearer, as the thirty-two images that are incorporated into the article artificially break down the elaborate ritual into graspable, analyzable units (figure 2.4a-e). 29 The arrangement of the photographs in succession
allows the reader-viewer to flip through the journal and assume that the images are
expressing a progressing narrative, or, to use Turner’s influential term, ritual process.30
The Dakar-Djibouti model of ethnographic discourse, both rhetorical and photographic, became the basis for the surrealist engagement with ethnography within the pages of Minotaure, exemplified by Brassaï’s utilization of ethnographic conventions for his own projects. Brassaï’s ‘ethnography’ put in quotation marks due to the photographer’s calculated misuse of academic rules was based on the expedition’s assumptions; ideas that he was intimately familiar with due to his participation in the
29 Michel Leiris, “Le taureau de Seyfou Tchenger,” Minotaure 1.2 (January 1933): 7582. 30 This view, even though articulated more than thirty years after the return of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, is useful for explaining its use of photography in analyzing ritual: “It is therefore necessary to begin […] with the basic building-blocks, the ‘molecules,’ of ritual.” Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 14.
58 special ethnographic issue.31 Following in the steps of the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographers,
Brassaï paid close attention to both high and low material culture, insisted on the
documentary nature of his photographic work, was invested in performing classificatory
analysis, presupposed a relationship between products of material cultural and a larger
whole, and manifested these ideas through photography. At the same time, Brassaï was
not engaging with the traditional ethnographic subject of research, but rather projected
this system onto non-ethnographic subjects of study.
Brassaï’s Ethnography: looking at Involuntary Sculptures
In the following section I present Brassaï’s playful approach to ethnography as a
preconceived system that could be freely applied to contemporary French material culture.
In his search for a model for the photographic analysis of the modern artistic genius,
Brassaï borrows directly, even if freely, from the source closest to him, namely the second ethnographic issue of Minotaure. Following the example of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, the photographer defines ethnography solely as material ethnography, thus avoiding the disciplinary branch that studies rituals and religious practices. 32 The documentary nature of the task at hand, that is photographing Picasso’s studios and sculptural oeuvre, allows for this working assumption that perceived photography as a viable tool for collecting visual data on material culture. I will preface my reading of
31 Even though Brassaï’s name is not mentioned in the issue itself, Gilbertte Brassaï, the photographer’s wife who composed the biographical section for the 1988 exhibition Paris le jour, Paris le nuit, credited Brassaï as a contributor to the Dakar-Djibuti issue. This chronology was translated to English and reprinted in the exhibition catalogue, Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, Brassaï – “No Ordinary Eyes” (Thames and Hudson: London, 2000), 3025. 32 Only two out of the thirteen articles in the Minotaure issue concentrate on ritual practice. This ethnographic disinterest in rituals as a subject of study, changing only in the 1960s, is described in Turner, The Ritual Process, 46.
59
Brassaï’s ethnographic fashioning of Picasso with an examination of Brassaï’s and
Salvador Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures, appearing in Minotaure in 1934. Involuntary
Sculptures is a parody of ethnographic discourse – aiming at the discipline’s overly dry rhetoric, its obsession with classification, and especially its dependence on photography for endowing its objects of inquiry with a scientific guise.33
Involuntary Sculptures is a collaborative project created by Brassaï, Salvador Dalí,
and the anonymous manufacturers of the photographed objects. The essay presents a
series of curious objects typified by their morphological strangeness (figure 2.5). These exotic, unidentified sculptures are actually everyday objects (bus tickets, soap, bread, and
a toothpaste’s extrusion) that undergo great transformation as a result of distracted and
unintentional human touch. Since the objects-turned-sculptures no longer reveal their
functional role within economies of exchange and everyday actions – each object’s
identity is only revealed by its title – the photographs actually depict the distance between
their original appearance and function and their current, used form. The title of the essay
marks the objects as ‘involuntary sculptures,’ which locates them within a surrealist
aesthetic discourse, evoking automatism as well as the sculptural strategy of the found
object.
However, unlike the qualities of the surrealist object trouvé, which seem to
indicate its finder’s innermost secret desires, the involuntary sculptures’ descriptive texts
do not allow such desire to ignite. In their employment of academic tone, the texts erase
any possibility of viewing the sculptures in the same light as Breton’s Slipper-Spoon, the
ultimate example of object trouvé, whose shape manifests the unsatisfactory structure of
33 Another example of Brassaï’s intentional misuse of ethnographic discourse that will not be analyzed here is his essay on graffiti. See Brassaï, “Du Mur des cavernes au mur d’usine,” Minotaure 1.34 (December 1933): 67.
60 desire.34 Fashioned by the conventions of ethnographic scientific discourses, the texts
identify the objects (“bus ticket,” “toothpaste,” “bread”), note where they were
discovered (“vest pocket,” “bathroom”), classify the action performed on the objects
causing the diversion from their normative form (“rolling,” “smudging”), recognize the
style of the objects (“modern style,” “ordinary”), and assume their producers’ identity
(“bureaucrat,” “mentally retarded person”). The tone employed in the captions aims at
deflating the strangeness of the objects by insisting on the ability to pin down the objects
through classification (“stereotyping”). The photographs’ style also participates in the
alleged scientific nature of the project. Brassaï’s photographs employ the ‘floating
objects’ formula, which dominates the ethnographic issue of Minotaure. The attention
given to a sole object, the loss of scale, and the use of dramatic directional light and
shadow are devices that conventionally mark the scientific “look.”
The author of the texts, recognized in the scholarship as Dalí, refers directly to the
conventions of ethnography, by analyzing material objects as an expression of general
cultural structures. The author employs the cold analytical style of ethnographic language,
focuses on material artifacts resulting from involuntary, ritual-like action, and borrows
ethnographic categorical tools such as classification, thus referencing the previous
ethnographic issue of Minotaure.
Jennifer Conley evaluates Involuntary Sculptures as a collapse of boundaries
between surrealism and ethnography, thus conforming to Clifford’s ethnographic
surrealism. 35 The relationship between the photographs and the quasi-ethnographical
discourse, however, can be assessed in different terms. Even though the artists are greatly
34 Breton’s Slipper-Spoon exists only in photographic form, in a photograph taken by Man Ray, reproduced in Breton’s L’Amour fou in 1934. 35 Jennifer Conley, “Modernist Primitivism in 1933,” Modernism/Modernity 10.1 (2003): 12740.
61 invested in employing these scientific tools and language, the end result is a parody of ethnographic conventions since they emphasize ethnography’s inability to reach stable conclusions concerning its object of research and the general whole it aims to designate.
Dalí’s short texts stress the impossibility of systematically applying ethnographic tools for the purpose of classification (“stereotyping”): when one object presents “the most frequent characteristics of stereotyping,” another object “does not escape the delicate and ornamental stereotyping,” whereas a different example completely “escapes from limp stereotyping.” This instability reveals the failure of academic discourses and systems of knowledge. 36 The same could be said about the confusing definitions of style and
stereotyping, in both of which the term “modern style” is employed, leading to the
question of how this single term can refer to both the appearance of the sculpture and the
system used to categorize it.
Brassaï’s 1933 Photo Essay on Picasso as Ethnographic Exploration
Found in the opening issue of Minotaure in 1933, Brassaï’s photo essay on Pablo
Picasso is an extensive publication containing forty-three photographs of Picasso’s
hitherto unknown body of sculptural work, stored in the artist’s working studios. The
photo essay is a prime example of Brassaï’s engagement with ethnographic conventions.
Involuntary Sculptures and the Picasso photo essay differ greatly since the description of
an artistic subject in ethnographic terms subverts some of academic discourse’s basic
36 Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique phantome, written during his two-year expedition to Africa and published in 1934, reveals similar hesitation in regards to the possibility of ethnography to teach others about the encountered indigenous cultures. For a reading of Leiris’ diary as a critical text on ethnographic working methods see Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, 4090.
62 assumptions. I argue that when Brassaï uses ethnographic means to an aesthetic end, he actually confronts ethnography with its bête noire – namely its connoisseurial roots. The analysis of Picasso through an ethnographic lens does not conclude by attributing primitivist qualities to Picasso’s work, but rather results in giving a quasi-scientific
‘boost’ to traditional art historical tools such as visual and stylistic analysis, while reinforcing Picasso’s status as the ultimate creative subject, thus further prompting the personality cult surrounding the artist at that period.
Christopher Green was the first to draw connections between the two issues of
Minotaure, recognizing the affinities between Brassaï’s representation of Picasso and the ethnographic photographic conventions used in the Dakar-Djibouti issue. 37 Green recognizes a visual kinship between the first and second issues of Minotaure, noting a stylistic resemblance between Picasso’s sculptures and the African artifacts as well as between Brassaï’s photographs and those illustrating the Dakar-Djibouti issue. My reading builds on Green’s ideas, while furthering the analysis of the ethnographic fashioning of Picasso, and examines the implications of such a framework for Picasso,
Brassaï, and the ethnographic discipline itself.
Brassaï’s decision to employ photographic conventions borrowed from ethnographic fieldwork seems appropriate to the style and material of several of Picasso’s sculptures. The 1931 Object, an example that was not considered by Green, reveals a serious engagement on Picasso’s part with African fetishes.38 Object, an assemblage of a
37 Christopher Green, “Zervos, Picasso, Brassaï, Ethnographers in the Field: A Critical Collaboration,” in Malcolm Gee, ed., Art Criticism since 1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 11639. These ideas were further developed in Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 38. 38 My use of the word fetish in this text refers to a cult object used in religious ceremonies and understood as a material embodiment of a deity. For the purpose of my argument I avoid deliberately other definitions of the term, such as the Freudian or the Marxist one.
63 flowerpot, dried-up roots, a goat’s horn and a feather duster, which only survived through
Brassaï’s photograph (figure 2.6), was described by André Breton in the photo essay’s accompanying text “Picasso dans son élément” in terms of its latent animism: the dead roots are depicted as coming to life as they, mantis-like, “thrust up out of the earth, straddling each other, intertwining inextricably in a supreme convulsion, which is nothing more than the twisted grin of a mortal embrace;” and the feather duster metamorphoses into a monstrous sculpture-plant.39 The assemblage’s materials oscillate between their inanimate present and animate past: the roots of the tree are now long dead, the animal was slaughtered for its horn, the bird’s feathers were used for a mass-produced cleaning tool. Such tension between the dead and the living alludes to the structures of African
ritual fetishes, objects accorded a magical or cultic quality, which were arriving in great numbers to France from colonial Africa, and systematically collected by ethnographic
missions such as the Dakar-Djibouti expedition. 40 The allusion to African fetishes,
through the choice of materials with a latent animism, marks Picasso’s sculpture as a sort
of European version of the fetish.
Brassaï constructs Object as available for scientific analysis by repeating the
ethnographic formula of ‘floating objects’. In this photograph Picasso’s sculpture is
singled out and placed in front of a neutral background and under dramatic artificial
lighting. After the initial staging, Brassaï photographed the work while employing an
extreme close-up technique, which increases the sense of abstraction. This series of steps
creates an immediate loss of scale that makes the work seem monumental. The objects
39 André Breton, “Picasso dans son élément,” Minotaure 1.1 (January 1933): 14. 40 The prime example of such a fetish collected by the mission is the altar figure (boli) from French Sudan (present-day Mali), whose photograph dominated half of the twelfth page of the Minotaure ethnographic issue and the Dogon Mothers of Masks that are celebrated throughout the issue, for example in Marcel Griaule, ‘Introduction Méthodologique,’ 12; Michel Leiris, ‘Objects rituels Dogon,’ 2630.
64 are staged as if inhabiting a vacuum, typified by qualities that are considered to be non- qualities, thus most appropriate for scientific study.41
This example presents a correlation between the ‘primitive’ qualities of Picasso’s
sculptures and the manner in which they were photographed as objects designed for
ethnographic research. The photographic convention of ‘floating objects’ is, however,
used throughout the essay, including the presentation of objects whose appearance,
materials, and structural logic have nothing to do with African artifacts. This observation
is key for the understanding of Brassaï’s approach to ethnographic principles: namely, an
intentionally inconsistent working method that is based on selective borrowing and
arbitrary application.
The shift to an artistic subject of study, Picasso, while still operating within an
ethnographic system, renders many of the disciplinary working assumptions irrelevant,
particularly those used to separate ethnographic methods from artistic ones. First, the
ethnographic attention to use-value as the prime factor for evaluating objects becomes
irrelevant when dealing with aesthetic objects. This point comes across forcefully in
Picasso’s cigarette-boxes construction, which appears twice in the photo essay (figures
2.7, 2.8): only once the boxes were emptied were they able to become the artistic building
blocks of the sculpture.
Another key difference is Brassaï’s interpretation of the contemporary
ethnographic attitude to low material culture. As I argued earlier, the ethnographers
participating in Documents shunned the aesthetic as the main site of their exploration and preferred the mundane, the common, and the quotidian. Such an anti-aesthetic attitude to
41 In the next chapter we will see how certain traits of this formula would become Brassaï’s dominating strategy for depicting Picasso’s sculptures.
65 material culture is also found in Brassaï’s photographic exploration of Picasso’s work: anything touched by Picasso, including the cigarette-boxes assemblage (figures 2.7, 2.8), the crude wood sculptures (figure 2.9), and the contorted paint tubes appearing in the opening photograph Picasso’s Palette (figure 2.10) is assumed to be worthy of interpretive attention. However, Brassaï’s democratic approach to material culture, when attached to a single creative subject, now celebrates the myth of Picasso’s genius.
Brassaï’s use of ethnographic conventions, therefore, does not demonstrate straightforward ethnography but is a creative interpretation, or an intentional misinterpretation, of the discipline. As concrete readings of strategically chosen photographs from the publication reveal, the simple act of substituting the disciplinary conventional subject – African material culture – with another subject – Picasso’s sculptures enables Brassaï’s subversive engagement with ethnography.
Taxonomy, the ethnographic mode of analysis so prominently rehearsed in the
Dakar-Djibouti issue, is also commonly found in Brassaï’s photo essay. This scientific guise appears to be Brassaï’s updated version of visual connoisseurial analysis. Many of the works in the photo essay are arranged according to a classificatory principle implicit in visual comparative evaluation, as the objects are strategically grouped so that their relationship to one another may be assessed. The terms of apparent concern to Brassaï are material, stylistic, or thematic categorizations, revealed through the reciprocal effect and mutual enhancement of the exhibited objects. Thus, in Brassaï’s hands classification becomes a tool for comparative display, and not, for example, to illustrate cultural or technological development.42
42 For a detailed description of the tradition of evolutionary classification see William Ryan Chapman, “Arranging Ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition” in Objects and Others:
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A relatively straightforward example of Brassaï’s use of ethnographic classification to make an aesthetic evaluation is seen when four photographs of different sculptural versions of Marie-Thérèse’s head are put together, thus defining her facial traits as a ubiquitous motif in Picasso’s work (figure 2.11). Categorical analysis is also found when three welded metal sculptures are juxtaposed on a double-page spread (figure
2.12). Taxonomy is used here to emphasize the stylistic possibilities embedded in the new sculpting technique, invented by Picasso and Julio Gonzales in 1929.
In the two previous examples, when either the objects’ style or subject matter was analyzed, photography functioned as a documentary device presenting the taxonomic terms. In my next example, however, Brassaï turns the process of photography into a taxonomic system in itself as he invents the photographic counterpart of the classificatory act (Figure 2.13). This series of eight photographs, in addition to depicting plaster sculptures, are images of a repeated point of view: the sculptures seem negligible and interchangeable in comparison to the set of photographic decisions used in their reproduction. Typical of Brassaï's working procedures, the conditions for the making of these photographs were decided upon prior to the actual act of photographing, so that the sculptures become simply the media for Brassaï’s scrutiny. The system: place a sculpture on a plinth. Rotate the object to the right. Use a single oblique light source. Shoot the sculpture while employing a close-up technique. This could be indefinitely repeated and adapted.
Brassaï, by closely following this photographic system and then assembling the photographs, is effectively insisting that the sculptures should be grasped as a group. An
Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 1548.
67 argument could be made that Brassaï’s formula actually discloses the oppressive nature of taxonomic systems, when the uniqueness of each one of the sculptures is pushed aside.
But such ‘policing action’ prevents the understanding of this Minotaure spread on its own terms. This photographic classification occludes the particularity of the different objects
for example, differences in size: The Bather, found at the top row to the right of page nineteen, is twice the size of the rest of the sculptures. Also elided are the varying poses of each sculpture, some of the works’ relation to serial production (the abstract figure at the bottom row of page eighteen is a variation on the Marie-Thérèse theme). These traits are secondary to the sweeping logic of the comparison.
In the process of making this classificatory evaluation, however, Brassaï also pushes aside the individuality of his own photographs as works in their own right. Unique compositions become irrelevant, and the different settings in which the sculptures were photographed become petty details in terms of the greater task, that is, turning the act of photographing into a classificatory tool in itself.
Another example of Brassaï’s employment of ethnographic representational formulas for his aesthetic needs is the photograph on page fifteen that signals the transition from Picasso’s painting studio to the artist’s sculpture studio in Boisgeloup.
The second part of the photo essay begins with an image of the entrance to Picasso’s studio (figure 2.14) – the château’s large barn that was transformed into the artist’s working space thus prefacing the photographs of Picasso’s sculptures. This image, as a prelude to the actual photographs of the sculptures, infuses the second part of the essay with a narrative of linear progression in space movement from outdoors to indoors, which adds a sense of suspense before “we” enter Picasso’s private workspace by means of
68 photography. This strategy recalls the organizational principle prominent in the essay on the sacrifice of a bull in Gondar from the second Minotaure issue, in which photographs emphasized the procedural structure of the examined ritual as a temporal narrative.
Classification is not the only tool that Brassaï borrows from ethnographic research when photographing Picasso for the opening issue of Minotaure; he is also influenced by the scholarly demand for contextualization expressed in the Dakar-Djibouti issue. Many of Picasso’s sculptures appear multiple times throughout the publication, thus repeating the formula that first singles out and isolates the object for classification before situating it in its broader context. This accords with the Dakar-Djibouti issue’s credo and call for introducing multiple frameworks, asking the readers to perform their own ethnographic evaluation of the scientific data.
Figure from 1931 appears twice in Brassaï’s photo essay of Picasso: the sculpture is photographed according to the ‘floating object’ formula, which abstracts the object from all variable conditions and fixes it in isolation (figure 2.15). It then appears for the second time in a photograph entitled L’étagère, where it is visible on a shelf in Picasso’s studio at Rue de la Boétie (figure 2.16 - top). In this context, Figure is located next to other iron and metal objects, alongside brushes and bottles of varying sizes and shapes also on the same shelf. This second photograph literally puts the sculpture ‘in proportion:’ the monumental appearance caused by the extreme close-up of the other photograph is removed completely, as Figure’s actual scale is revealed. Secondly, the frontal view from which the object is photographed in L’étagère reduces the dramatic effect of the former photograph. Thirdly, in the context of the other works on the shelf,
Figure’s compositional resemblance to the human form is accentuated, an aspect of the
69 sculpture that was played down when photographed under the austere conditions of the photographic equivalent of the scientific gaze.
Brassaï makes another broader contextualization by employing ethnographic framing devices when, on the same page, L’etagère is juxtaposed with La fenêtre (figure
2.16 – bottom). The underlying principle uniting these two different photographs differs completely from the classificatory logic analyzed before. Instead of a straightforward connection between the different objects, a more elusive link is established, thus following one of the formulas used in the Minotaure ethnographic issue.
The two photographs at first seem to be utterly different from one another: while
L’étagère presents an indoor space and the objects that occupy it, La Fenêtre depicts a view from Picasso’s studio window of the city’s rooftops and chimneys with the iconic
Tour Eiffel vaguely seen in the background. However, when the two photographs are placed together on the same page, an immediate compositional resemblance arises: both photographs share a comparable rhythm caused by the central horizontal division and its articulation by multiple repeated vertical elements. The rooftops become, like the shelf, a surface on which varying upright objects are placed. The bottlenecks and caps resemble the chimneys’ shapes. Picasso’s choice of welded iron is similar to the iron construction of the Tour Eiffel, and the tower’s geometric language can be seen as relating to the style of some of the sculptural objects as well.
The links between the two photographs can be read as indicative of the traditional paradigm of artistic mimesis: art as a window onto the world. However, when comparing this pairing to that of the photograph of a village hut from Sudan with a photograph of a sunset view found in the Dakar-Djibouti issue (figure 2.3), Brassaï’s chosen ethnographic
70 framework scientifically updates the Renaissance metaphor and transforms it into an essentialist assessment concerning Picasso’s work, and its environmental and temporal origin as a product of its time. The underlying assumption of this pairing is rooted in an ethnographic humanist worldview, which constructs reality as a comprehensive whole.
By linking contemporary objects to their makers and users, as well as to the environment they inhabit, the elements are assumed to echo – and reveal each other’s logic.
In the photograph known as Boisgeloup after Dark (figure 2.17) the physical conditions of the studio with no electricity, a single artificial light source, and the crowded organization of sculptures, generate a dramatic, mysterious atmosphere of heavy shadows as the sculptures appear to be creeping out of the dark. The apparently haphazard arrangement of sculptures in this photograph generates the impression of no order, as if we are looking at a corner of the studio that was chosen at random. Upon closer inspection, one observes that what was first seen as unorganized actually follows a strict compositional logic: the sculptures are arranged in a semi-circle around the abstract figure at the centre, facing it. The clues to the staged nature of the composition are verified through comparison with other photographs of the studio from which we learn that the sculptures’ positions were changed for this photograph.
As all the sculptures were seen in previous photographs, then systematically classified, the only novel factor here is the light, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The dramatic chiaroscuro effect specifically refers to a long-standing painterly tradition seen in the work of Caravaggio and later in that of Georges de la Tour, characterized by a transition from strong light to complete darkness (very often with the inclusion of the light source itself within the painting, seen here in the lamp hidden behind the watering
71 can.) 43 The reference to this painterly tradition also brings to mind the conventional
representation of the Nativity, which, according to the New Testament, took place at
night in a barn with animals. Remembering the biblical allusion and its pictorial
representational tradition, the conditions in which the photograph was taken, together
with the arrangement of the sculptures in a semi-circle and the presence of animal
sculptures (Picasso’s The Rooster peeking behind the abstract figure), the photograph
gains a symbolic overtone. When comparing Brassaï’s photograph to representations of
the Nativity scene on a thematic and compositional basis, the Christian reference plays a
central role in the image’s interpretation. The abstract figure gains importance due to its
placement at the centre of the semi-circle: all the other sculptures are looking at it,
perhaps adoring it, as the nascent abstraction is implicitly compared to the newborn
Christ.
The dimness of the photograph echoes also the ethnographic framework
prominently used by Brassaï. The tenebrous photograph suggests that the sculptures gain
the status of cult objects, not only of Christian but also of pagan origins. The importance
of darkness to African religious rituals was expressed in Negerplastic by Carl Einstein, a
writer who influenced the surrealist movement in his role as a member of Documents’
editorial board. Twice in the section on the ceremonial function of African art, Einstein
insists that the objects’ worship is performed in the dark, which allows the devotee to be
“totally consumed by the god.”44 Also, the prized Mothers of Masks, collected by the
43 The rediscovery of Georges de la Tour began in 1915 with the scholarly work of Hermann Voss, which led to the acquisition of de la Tour works by the Louvre. This renewed interest culminated in the exhibition Peintre de la réalité at the Orangerie in the 1930s. See: S. M. M. Furness, Georges de la Tour of Lorraine 15931652 (London: Routledge, 1949), 113. 44 Carl Einstein, “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004): 130.
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Dakar-Djibouti ethnographers in Mali, were kept in a dark cave out of reach and out of sight before being purchased by the ethnographers (figure 2.18). Placing Picasso’s work amidst the shadows, thus attributing it with qualities of African ritual objects, adds another layer of meaning to the sacrilegious statement, colouring the Christian reference in the pagan light of idolatry.
This analysis of Brassaï’s depiction of Picasso’s sculptures reveals the photographer’s serious, even if playful, engagement with ethnographic photographic conventions. This choice of framework and its creative application indicate a conscious interest in alternative forms of presentation and representation of artistic materials, which in turn comments both on art historical traditions of display and on ethnographic ones.
The success of these photographs led to further collaborations between the two artists, all devoted to Picasso’s sculptures while exploring the visual possibilities that were open to artworks during the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter Three: Assigning Value in the Catalogue Les Sculptures de Picasso
Picasso claimed that the decision to cast his 1930 plaster sculptures in bronze resulted from the constant nagging of his secretary, Jaime Sabartés: “They really were more beautiful in plaster,” Picasso said, “at first I wouldn’t even hear of having them cast in bronze. But Sabartés kept saying, plaster is perishable… You have to have something solid… Bronze is forever…”1 If we believe this, and Picasso was not attributing his own
wishes to Sabartés, then at least sixteen sculptures were cast in bronze between 1933 and
1943 as a result of his secretary’s persuasion.2 Sabertés’ logic is simple: the shift from
plaster, identified with process and incompleteness,3 to a more traditional and durable
sculptural material would yield a shift in reception by enabling the works to address
posterity. The casting process instantly adds value to the sculptures: although they do not
become better artworks Picasso actually thought that they lost aesthetic points in their
new form they are deemed worthy of immortality.
The matter-of-factness of this evaluation stands in opposition to the conventional definition of artistic value as separate from a work’s concrete manifestation. The
1 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price (New York: Doubleday and Company, inc., 1966), 50. 2 Sixteen sculptures that appear in the Minotaure publication were cast between 1933 and the catalogue’s photo shoot. The identification of the sculptures will be following Spies’s cataloguing see Werner Spies, in collaboration with Christine Piot, Picasso, The Sculptures (Ostfildern-Ruit: H. Cantz, 2000). The sixteen sculptures are Spies, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, and 137. 3 For an analysis of the meaning of plaster and the School of Paris, see Jonathan Michael Wood, “The materials and Metaphors of the Sculptor’s studio: Brancusi, Picasso and Giacometti in the 1920s and 1930s” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1999). Wood argues that plaster became the material for sculptural experimentation for three prominent 20th-century Parisian sculptors (Brancusi, Giacometti, and Picasso). These sculptors disassociated the material from its traditional connotations with the academic sculpture and instead “re-appropriated the sculptural surface, the smoothness to the roughness of the material, and …[privileged] the poetic over the empirical.” Ibid., 47.
73 74 conventional view holds that the cost of materials plus the artist’s hourly wage does not equal the price of an artwork. Jonathan Crary has aptly described the “unfathomable abyss separating … [the artwork’s] physical existence from the apparent boundlessness of its exchange value.”4 Economic capital, however, was not the goal of the bronze- casting of Picasso’s sculptures, at least not its immediate purpose, since the works were never put to the market’s test during Picasso’s lifetime and consequently had no proven exchange-value. 5 I argue, therefore, that the change in material and its impact on reception infused the work with a different kind of value.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu speaks of four distinct yet related kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. Unlike economic capital, which can be clearly reckoned through the total sum of the social agent’s material possessions, cultural capital is harder to calculate. It is a set of skills that marks the social agent as someone who can identify and enjoy cultural objects. Bourdieu defines it as “a form of knowledge, an internalized code, or a cognitive acquisition, which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for, or competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artifacts.”6 The possibilities that Sabartés foresaw in casting Picasso’s sculptures are akin
4 Jonathan Crary, “Capital effects,” October 56 (Spring 1991): 127. 5 There are two exceptions to this rule: in 1910 Picasso sold his dealer Ambroise Vollard five sculptures and all rights of reproduction: Woman combing her hair, Head of a Man, Head of a Jester, Head of Fernande, and the cubist Head of a Woman. See Valerie J. Fletcher, “Process and Technique in Picasso’s Head of a Woman,” in Jeffrey Weiss, The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 171–2. There are still debates concerning exactly how many editions of these works were made; see Fletcher, ibid., 166–91; see also Diana Widmaier Picasso, “Ambroise Vollard et les sculptures de Picasso,” in Anne Roquebert et al. De Cézanne à Picasso: chefs-d’oeuvre de la galerie Vollard (Paris: Musée d'Orsay: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2007), 194201. The second example is the sale of the wax original of Glass of Absinthe to Kahnweiler in 1914, from which 7 editions were cast. After Dora Maar’s death in 1998, her entire collection of Picasso’s work (including many sculptures) was sold at auction. Picard Audap Solanet and Associés, Les Picasso de Dora Maar: Succession de Madame Markovitch (Paris: Maison de la chimie, 1998). 6 Randal Johnson, Introduction to The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature by Pierre Bourdieu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 7.
75 to those that the process of cataloguing facilitates.7 Both bronze-casting and cataloguing
can be p erceiv e d as a tt empts to boos t the mon etary as well as the symbolic value of the
object as recognized by the social agent. This chapter traces the different tactics by which
works are presented and framed in the 1948 catalogue Les Sculptures de Picasso. Such
processes turn the works into cultural artifacts that can be recognized, valued, and
understood by all types of social agents – institutions, private collectors, critics, and
historians.
I examine the process of cataloguing from multiple viewpoints. After reviewing
the main players, I analyze the editorial selection, or rather, the lack of a strong editorial
hand; compare the final product’s intentional adherence to the format of a catalogue
raisonné in the context of Christian Zervos’s previous example; and explain how
Brassaï’s photographs shape the works’ reception. I consider instances in which the
catalogue abandons chronology, an apparently purposive deviation that serves its
objectives. I then look at the introductory essay that Picasso’s friend, interpreter, and dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, composed for the catalogue, considering the
intellectual and rhetorical mechanisms used to shift the sculptures’ reception. Finally, I
examine a contemporaneous review of the catalogue that demonstrates how the
sculptures’ reception was affected by it.8
7 The International Foundation for Art Research has devoted a two-day conference to the relationship between the scholarly process of authentication and its relationship to the forces of the market. See Sharon, Flescher, ed., “Catalogues Raisonnés and the Authentication Process: Where the Ivory Tower Meets the Marketplace,” IFAR Journal 8.34 (2006). 8 This discussion is informed by the feminist critique of the canon. As Griselda Pollock writes: “The canon thus not only determines what we read, look at, listen to, see at the art gallery and study in school or university. It is formed retrospectively by what artists themselves select as their legitimating or enabling predecessors. If, however, artists – because they are women or non-European – are both left out of the record or ignored as part of the cultural heritage, the canon becomes an increasingly impoverished and impoverishing filter for the totality of cultural possibilities generation after generation. Today the canons are settled into well-known patterns because of the roles of the institutions such as museums, publishing
76
***
In the fifteen years separating the Minotaure publication and the catalogue’s release, Picasso’s sculptures received some attention in the printed press. In “Picasso
1930-1935,” a special issue of Cahiers d’art released in 1936, among the hundreds of paintings, etchings, and sketches reproduced, fifteen photographs of Picasso’s sculptures by the photography studio Barnès and Marouteau were included.9 Later that year the same journal also published a short essay by Julio Gonzáles entitled “Picasso-sculpteur” with several photographs of Picasso’s sculptures.10 In 1937, again in Cahiers, the article
“Picasso, Photographe” by Man Ray was published with four photographs by Dora
Maar.11 In the summer of 1942 Picasso’s Bull’s Head adorned the cover of La Conquête
houses and university curricula. We know these canons … through what gets hung in art galleries, played in concerts, published and taught as literature or art history in universities and schools, gets put on the curriculum as the standard and necessary topics for study at all levels in the educating – articulating, assimilating – process.” Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. I am certainly not arguing that Picasso has been insufficiently examined in histories of modern art. My aim is to bring to play the awareness of the constructed nature of canon-making to our examination of the catalogue. 9 The overwhelming majority of the works in the special issue are credited to the studio of Bernès and Marouteau. Several photographs, however, are reproduced without the name of a photographer: two sand reliefs executed in the summer of 1930 in Juan-les-Pins, the photograph of Picasso in his Boisgeloup studio, and that of the messy, cluttered Parisian studio. See Christian Zervos, ed., Picasso: 1930-35, Cahiers d’art 3–5 (1936). 10 Julio Gonzáles, “Picasso Sculpteur,” Cahiers d’art 6–7 (1936): 189–91. Gonzáles collaborated with Picasso from 1928 to 1932 as the two experimented on the technique of welding iron as a viable sculpting technique. This four-year collaboration had a huge impact on the history of sculpture both on Picasso’s and Gonzáles’ contemporaries such as Jacques Lipchitz and future practitioners such as David Smith. 11 Man Ray, “Picasso Photographe,” Cahiers d’art 6–7 (1937): 165–75.
77 du monde par l’image.12 1942 is also the year in which the second volume of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné was released, including nine photographs of his early sculptures.13
In the thirties and forties, a small number of Picasso’s sculptures were displayed in exhibitions: the George Petit retrospective of 1932 included seven and the 1936
“Exhibition of Surrealist Objects” in Charles Ratton’s Gallery displayed two cubist works.
Two versions of the Boisgeloup Head of a Woman were exhibited at the 1937 Spanish
Pavilion at the World’s Fair, mostly known as the original site of Guernica, and Yvonne
Zervos’s Galérie Cahiers d’art held an exhibition in 1936 dedicated to Picasso’s sculptures.14 Finally, the 1944 Salon d’Automne (also known as Salon de la Libération) included five sculptures amongst a selection of seventy-nine paintings. None of these various presentations, however, expressed the size, complexity, and variety of Picasso’s sculptural oeuvre. The catalogue Les Sculptures de Picasso, published by Éditions du
Chêne in 1948, aimed to do exactly that; covering fifty years, it consists of 205 photographs depicting 218 works. During the war, the editor-in-chief of Éditions du chêne, Maurice Girodias, established his publishing house to specialize in the history of
French art, craft, and design. 15 In 1943, two years after it was founded, its focus
12 La Conquête du monde par l’image (Paris: La Main à Plume, 1942). The sculpture was entitled Object, instead of Bull’s Head. The photograph is so blurry that it is impossible to recognize that the work is made of bicycle parts. The photographer’s name is not mentioned. The photo was accompanied with a quote from Goethe speaking of the power of creative artistic forces to transform the world. 13 Christian Zervos, ed., Pablo Picasso, vol. 2 (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1942), 2668. 14 With the exception of the aforementioned Gonzáles article in Cahiers, there are no other mentions of the exhibition in the press, and one can therefore only estimate which works participated in this show. The exhibition “Picasso sculpteur. Sculptures récentes,” which took place during the month of June 1936, was immediately followed by an exhibition of both Picasso and González’s work (closing in July 20th). From the listing of Galerie des Cahiers d’art the works of the artists were displayed in separate exhibitions. The lack of exhibition reviews or any critical response whatsoever, suggest just how under-the-radar Picasso’s sculptures were. 15 Some examples of this multiple-volume series are André Lejard, La Tradition française: Le Meuble (Paris: Éditions du chêne, 1941); André Lejard, La Tapisserie (Paris: Éditions du chêne, 1942); André Lejard, ed., Le Livre: Les plus beaux exemplaires de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Éditions du chêne, 1942).
78 expanded into the field of contemporary art, and the press simultaneously released albums devoted to Matisse’s and Picasso’s recent paintings.16
In September of the same year, Picasso asked Brassaï to photograph his sculptures for the Chêne catalogue. Brassaï was not the only possible photographer as Picasso was at the time working with several others.17 The most obvious candidate for the task was not Man Ray, as it had been in 1933, 18 but Dora Maar, who had special access to
Picasso’s work at the time even Brassaï acknowledged that she was “in a better position than anyone else to photograph Picasso and his work.”19 Maar had taken a celebrated series of photographs of Guernica, published in 1937 in Cahiers,20 and her 1936 images of the Picasso sculptures that were in her possession were published in Zervos’s journal with the aforementioned Man Ray essay, 21 and were also included in the 1948 catalogue.22 Maar continued to photograph Picasso’s work until the early 1940s.23
16 Both albums included sixteen high-quality colour reproductions of recent works by the artists. Henri Matisse, Matisse: Seize Peinture 1939-1943, intro. André Lejard (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1943). Pablo Picasso, Picasso: Seize Peintures 1939-1943, intro. Robert Desnos (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1943). 17 Images of Picasso’s sculptures by photographers other than Brassaï will be examined in chapter five. 18 See chapter one. 19 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 47. 20 The photos were published in a special Guernica issue: Cahiers d’art 13 (1937): 14654. 21 See footnote 10. 22 See Plates 96 to 104 in the 1948 catalogue. These works were in Maar’s possession until her death in 1998. Picard Audap Solanet & Associés, Les Picasso de Dora Maar. This does not mean that all works owned by Maar were photographed by her in the catalogue; Brassaï photographed other works by Picasso that were in Maar’s possession, like the dog-shaped paper sculptures (Spies, 247, 252). 23 In the late 1930s and early 1940s Maar photographed Picasso’s work quite regularly. Among her photographs we find images of Picasso’s studio and his artwork, often of his paintings that depict her (AP PH 1383, MP 1998-181, MP 1998-194, 121. P. DM, 43.P. DM and 42.P. DM) which I analyze in the final chapter. In an intriguing set of photographs from 193940, Picasso shows to Maar and her camera the content of his vault at Banque nationale de Crédit industriel (BNCI), perhaps as a means of documenting his property during the war. MP 1998-195 to MP 1998-199. The photographs are reproduced in Anne Baldassari, Picasso|Dora Maar: il faisait tellment noir… (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 206, 215, 235, 238, 272.
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Maar was, however, never really considered for the catalogue photography possibly since by the 1940s she was more invested in her painting career. 24 The publishing house assigned another photographer to the project Brassaï, who fails to mention his name, tells us that this photographer had begun documenting Picasso’s sculptures;25 however, Picasso’s dissatisfaction with his work led him to commission
Brassaï instead. Brassaï recounts Picasso’s complaint that the Chêne photographer’s
image of his Death’s Head made it “look like a walnut” – distorting, one can deduce, the
work’s scale and erasing its massiveness, a fact to which I will return. These photographs
may no longer exist.26
With the exception of Brassaï’s version of the story, there are no other documents
that shed light on these events. Brassaï’s clear bias impels him to write himself into the pages of history and to eliminate some important details – most crucially, his elaborate
ties with the decision-makers at Chêne. Brassaï was no longer the unknown photographer that he had been when first commissioned to document Picasso’s work in 1933; rather, his position in the Parisian art scene was, by this point, well-secured due to his regular contributions to surrealist Journals in the 1930s. The editor-in-chief at Chêne, Maurice
Girodias, had inherited the rights to Henry Miller’s bestseller The Tropic of Cancer, as
24 In the 1930s Dora Maar participated in several exhibitions as a photographer (perhaps the most famous was the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London). After the war, however, she was mainly known as a painter. The first instance in which her paintings were publicly exhibited was in the spring of 1945 at the Jeanne Boucher’s gallery. See the chronology in Anne Baldassarie, Picasso|Dora Maar, 308- 312. 25 The publishing house employed several photographers at the time. In the 1942 book on the history of French tapestry alone there are six different photographers mentioned M. Bovis, E. Bignou, Bulloz, Ecce, Giraudon, Jahan as well as many other unaccredited photographs. Perhaps the photographer suggested by the publishing house to photograph Picasso’s sculptures was E. Bignou, who also photographed The Inspiration, a tapestry executed by Marie Cuttoli, after Picasso’s design. 26 I was unsuccessful in finding these photographs in the archives of Musée Picasso in Paris while working closely with its archivists. I believe that they no longer exist as even the director of the museum Anne Baldasarie, who has unrivaled access to these materials, substituted these particular images with an image from 1914 of Glass of Absinthe in her essay on Brassaï and Picasso.
80 well as to the author’s future books.27 Since Henry Miller had been a close friend of
Brassaï since the early thirties, and had written famously and favourably about him in the thirties,28 it is reasonable to assume that Miller might have had some influence with his
publishers. Further, Girodias’s artistic director from 1941 to 1947, André Lejard, had
previously worked as the editor-in-chief of the journal and publishing house Arts et
métiers graphiques – the same firm that released Brassaï’s Paris de nuit in 1933. Finally,
in 1949 Chêne released a book of photographs entitled Études de nus, which included twenty-four photographs by Brassaï. These facts further emphasize Brassaï’s connections to Chêne.29
***
Brassaï reports recurring debates between Picasso and the editor at Chêne about works to be included in the catalogue.30 Looking at The Crane, a sculpture of a bird made
from a child’s scooter, the editor told Brassaï not to bother photographing what he
deemed to be too much an object and not enough a sculpture.31 When Picasso heard this
comment, he ranted against such an old-fashioned distinction and argued that it is
27 Girodias inherited the rights to Miller’s work from his father, Jack Kahane, the founder of Obelisk Press. Maurice Girodas, The Frog Prince: An Autobiography (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 1117. 28 Henry Miller, “The Eye of Paris” [1933], Globe (Chicago), November, 1937. Valentin Nieting [Henry Miller, pseudo.], “L’oeil de Paris,” The Booster (Paris) 7, September 1937. 29 Brassaï, Études de nus (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1949). 30 The editor’s name is not mentioned in Brassaï’s text, Girodias’s autobiography, or the sculpture catalogue, but from the prominent place enjoyed by André Lejard, the publishing house artistic director and motivating force behind many projects, one can safely assume that he was assigned to work on the catalogue. 31 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 58.
81 precisely the artist’s role to break down the boundaries between aesthetic and everyday objects.32
The Crane (figure 3.1) did eventually find its way into the catalogue along with many
other “objects.”33 The catalogue consists of two kinds of works: large, monumental ones
from durable materials such as iron, bronze, or copper (such as Death’s Head, [figure 3.2]
and Man with a Sheep [figure 3.3]) that fit comfortably into a more traditional definition
of sculpture, and small-scale objects made from ephemeral materials using techniques
that intentionally avoid the demonstration of conventional sculptural skill (such as six
paper napkins with cigarette burns crudely depicting a face [figure 3.4]).34 In another
example, the artist places an untouched piece of wood beside a box of matches and
transforms it into a cigar by association (figure 3.5).35 The series of found pebbles, to
which Picasso added incisions to create figurative images, is a third example (figure
3.6).36
The catalogue, then, includes many pieces that would not usually find their way to
the public eye, such as the crumpled ball of paper that, instead of being chucked into the
wastepaper basket, is made into a mould (figure 3.7). What makes a singed paper napkin
an artistic object? It is not so much their “objectness” that makes so many of the
sculptures inappropriate, but rather the constellation of their sketchiness, roughness,
seemingly unfinished look, and the minimal intervention required for their execution.
32 Picasso’s speech repeats a conventional understanding of the role of the artist, although it has been attributed to Picasso for decades now. André Salmon argued in response to the question of whether Picasso’s Guitar (1912-14) is a sculpture or a painting, that these distinctions are no longer relevant: “we are liberated from … the stupid tyranny of the genres.” Quoted in Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 156. 33 See plate 119 in the catalogue and Spies, 201. 34 Spies, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252. 35 Spies, 199. 36 Spies, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 188, 189, 190, and 191.
82
Artists without Picasso’s privileged stature would have omitted the works that seemed to belong more to an atelier’s drawing board, drawer, or garbage can, than to a museum’s display case or to a photographic catalogue.37 Distinctions between big and small, labour-
intensive and non-labourious processes, cheap or improvised materials and more
expensive metals, sculpture or object – to use the editor’s terminology do not exist in
the catalogue. Instead, all the objects receive their value from the catalogue’s title: they
are all “Picasso’s sculptures.”
The democratic editorial approach typifying Les Sculptures de Picasso is also the
principle trait of catalogues raisonnés. As noted by Alex Ross, such catalogues “attempt
to establish the oeuvre of an artist” by systematically listing his or her complete body of
work.38 The intended outcome of this approach is comprehensiveness: the presentation of works is not based on aesthetic criteria but rather on the principle of attribution.
Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s painting is no exception it too aims at displaying the artist’s entire oeuvre and reflects Zervos’s life project from
1932 to 1978. The reason for the project’s extended duration was the editor’s oxymoronic desire to catalogue the life work of a living artist. Zervos was not the only one to attempt this; in the same year that he released the first volume of the Picasso catalogue, Bernard
Geiser’s catalogue of the artist’s prints and engravings, Picasso Peintre-graveur, was
37 The discovery of hundreds of sculptures and sculptural fragments after Edgar Degas’s death attests to this process of self-censorship, with which Picasso did not comply. Even though today Degas’s sculpture is extolled, he only exhibited one piece during his lifetime. After the artist’s death in 1917 more than 150 wax sculptures and fragments were found in his apartment. For information about the reception of this posthumous discovery see Joseph S. Czestochowski, “Degas’s Sculptures Re-examined: The marketing of a Private Pursuit,” in Joseph S. Czestochowski, Anne Pingeot, et al., Degas Sculpture (Memphis, TN: International Arts, 2002), 1127. 38 Alex Ross, “Catalogue” in Grove Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T014856?q=catalogue+&hbutton_search.x=31 &hbutton_search.y=9&hbutton_search=search&source=oao_gao&source=oao_t118&source=oao_t234&so urce=oao_t4&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed on February 26, 2010.)
83 also published, but the Swiss project was more limited in scope as it was devoted to a medium in which Picasso was far less prolific. 39 Picasso’s growing body of work presented many challenges to Zervos as the the editor and publisher of the catalogue raisonné. Even though Zervos closely collaborated with Picasso in compiling the catalogue,40 he was never able to catch up with Picasso’s rate of production and the project was only completed after the artist’s death.41
Following the conventions of catalogues raisonnés, Zervos had the goal of comprehensiveness in mind from the very beginning. In the catalogue’s first volume, the editor included anything he could lay his hands on, without making any aesthetic judgments or conforming to the hierarchies of media and genres. He reproduced the
39Bernhard Geiser, Picasso peintre-graveur, Catalogue illustré de l'œuvre gravé et lithographié, 18991931 (Berne: Editions Kornfeld, 1933). Like Zervos’s cataloguing project, the engraving catalogue also continued to grow and today it consists of seven volumes in total. 40 Christopher Green analyzes this collaboration and argues that Picasso helped shape the presentation, reception, and interpretation of his own work. “Together,” he determines, “Picasso and Zervos worked from the late 1920s to shape not only a critical image of Picasso’s work with him as its revealed inner content, but to lay the foundations for a future historical image too.” Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 4. 41 The release of the first volume of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné, devoted to the first ten years of Picasso’s career, was announced in an advertisement published in Zervos’s magazine Cahiers d’art, in the same issue that celebrated Picasso’s work on the occasion of his 1932 retrospective (Cahiers d’art 7, no. 35, 1932.) In the ad, Zervos outlines his plan for the whole project. The catalogue raisonné, which concentrates on Picasso’s work in oil, gouache, aquarelle, and pastel, will include five volumes in total. From this information one can deduce Zervos’s timeline for the project: if he followed the format of the first volume, and each volume covered a decade in Picasso’s career, then by 1945, in thirteen years time, Zervos would catch up with Picasso and the five volumes would summarize fifty years of Picasso’s artistic production. This plan, however, did not materialize as conceived. Firstly, the momentum of the series was lost as the release of the second volume was held back for a whole decade; it was finally published in 1942. Secondly, the format was changed. Both the first and the second volumes covered a decade of Picasso’s work, but the second volume was divided into two parts, each dedicated to five years in the artist’s career. Thirdly, the number of works reproduced in the second volume was much larger than the first the first volume presented 384 works and the two-part volume reproduced 946 plates. Lastly, the third volume, published in 1949, marks the abandonment of the original plan for a five-volume series. The third volume was not only released four years after the initial deadline; this volume also concentrates only on two years of Picasso’s career, 1917 to 1919, with a total of 465 works. The originally planned five volumes eventually swelled into thirty-three volumes, and the amount of reproductions each volume kept growing with every reprint, as Zervos continuously updated his catalogue. The project was finally completed in 1978, five years after Picasso’s death, only to be deemed incomprehensive Picasso’s death allowed access to his private collections of his own work, which contained many works that were not included in Zervos’s catalogues. For a discussion of Zervos’s publishing career, see Rainer Rochlitz, “Les Paris esthétiques de Christian Zervos,” in Christian Derouet, Cahiers d’art, Musée Zervos a Vézelay (Paris: Hazan, 2006), 2177.
84 artist’s large-scale oil paintings next to preparatory drawings, as well as quick sketches, studies of body parts, animals, and caricatures of Picasso’s friends. This approach is found throughout all the volumes and reflects the catalogue raisonné’s intention of providing a complete visual record of an artist’s career in order to settle questions of attribution and dating, thus encouraging historical study of the work.
A different approach can be seen in a 1944 catalogue published by the Musée
Rodin, which classifies the sculptor’s oeuvre chronologically.42 The text was compiled
by the conservator of the museum and functions as an inventory of its collection. The
book consists of 437 items captured in small photographs. The works are dated, their
dimensions are given, and they are briefly described. In contemporary narratives of
sculptural history Rodin’s work is often praised for its introduction of fragments as sculptural wholes and its engagement with repetition as a site of originality.43 The Musée
Rodin catalogue does not show any of the works reflecting this paradigm, but highlights the sculptor’s portraits; assembled, large-scale works; mythological sculptures; and so
forth, therefore favouring “sculptures” over “objects,” and wholes over parts.
Unlike Zervos’s painting catalogue, however, Les Sculptures de Picasso is not a
catalogue raisonné. While it presents a democratic editorial approach and is largely
chronological, it does not comply with the catalogue raisonné’s strict demand for
comprehensiveness. It includes only one work from the 1890s, six from the first decade
of the twentieth century, five works from the teens, and three from the 1920s. The
number of works from the thirties and forties eighty and one hundred and thirteen
42 Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin: I Hôtel Biron: Essay de classement chronologique des oeuvres d’Auguste Rodin (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1944). 43 Most notably Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” in The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 15170.
85 respectively is overwhelming in comparison to those from the earlier decades. By contrast, Werner Spies’s catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s sculptures lists twenty-six works from the first decade of the twentieth century and forty-two from the teens. The most glaring omission from the 1948 sculpture catalogue is of Picasso’s cubist constructions: whereas this catalogue includes only three of these works, Spies reproduces twenty- nine.44
Yet, despite these numbers, Les Sculptures de Picasso gives the impression of a catalogue raisonné by alluding to its conventions. Its claim to comprehensiveness and non-hierarchical display led to the inclusion of both large-scale sculpture and unfinished, experimental sculptural objects, and to the legitimization of the latter. It aims at making creative processes and artistic development visible through chronological presentation.
Picasso’s sculptures are thus introduced into the canon as an “oeuvre,” a complete body
of work.
***
The differences between Brassaï’s photographs for the catalogue and his earlier
Minotaure shots are striking. The 1933 photographs of Picasso’s sculptures were incredibly heterogeneous, reflecting the conventions of ethnographic photography, which ostensibly presented a more truthful account of its subjects. Brassaï’s “different kinds of photographs” fit the credo of the ethnographic issue of Minotaure by depicting Picasso’s
44 For the purpose of this argument, I consider as cubist constructions the wood and carton constructions representing still lifes (the guitar is a common subject) and not, for example, Picasso’s Parade costume designs, or the different versions of Glass of Absinthe.
86 works through multiple representational systems, thus stressing their diversity as well as the space in which they were created, stored, and displayed: Picasso’s studio.45
Whereas the young Brassaï was a risk-taker in his photographic practice, fifteen
years later he employed a more systematic working procedure that gave the catalogue
photographs an identical look. For the catalogue, Brassaï chose a single photographic
convention and applied its logic indiscriminately to all of Picasso’s sculptures. The
differences between Brassaï’s Minotaure and catalogue photographs the Boisgeloup
Heads in plaster versus bronze are worth considering. The arrangement of sculptures
and the light employed in the photograph of Boisgeloup at night, as has been discussed,
generates an enigmatic scene that alludes to traditional depictions of the Nativity (figure
3.8). This complex mise-en-scène is not apparent in Brassaï’s catalogue photographs, in
which all external conditions that might distract from the sculptures are eliminated. The
highest priority is the clear display of the sculptures, as opposed to a more poetic,
“artistic” representation.
Brassaï describes his working process in his book Conversations avec Picasso
through a staged dialogue between himself and the artist, in which the latter is cast as an
admiring listener eager to learn about photography. It is a contrived paragraph that allows
Brassaï to emphasize his own role, under the guise of a technical discussion. A
description of the challenges inherent in photographing sculptures and Brassaï’s solutions
45 A difference between the 1933 and the 1948 photographs is the deliberate omission of the studio from the latter. Even though Brassaï was photographing in Picasso’s rue des Grands Augustins studio, it was completely edited out of the photographs. Picasso’s messy studio, the constant flow of visitors, and the other works that cohabit the space are absent. Instead of the emphasis on the sculptures in situ, the works in the later photographs were extracted from their original location (the storage room, display case, or the shelf) and placed on a pedestal in front of an empty wall. Brassaï's use of a tight close-up view for photographing the sculptures only enhances these carefully constructed conditions.
87 to them occurs in the context of Death Head –not a coincidental choice, for, as Brassaï reports, Picasso’s disappointment with the Chêne-nominated photographer’s image of
Death’s Head had secured Brassaï’s contract.46
Brassaï recounts his actions before taking the photographs of Death’s Head
(figure 3.2). He arranges the set without the camera, beginning with a visual and manual
examination of Death’s Head. Brassaï does not encircle the sculpture in order to see it
from all sides; instead, he “turns and re-turns” the work.47 He tells us that Picasso was
surprised by this peculiar working process and especially baffled by what he perceived as
the photographer’s inability to determine how the final photograph would look.48 Brassaï
replies that the final result is known to him since he “figure[s] it out in … [his] head,” a
statement that marks him as a professional photographer familiar with his craft and
contests Picasso’s assumption that there is an element of chance involved.
Brassaï then moves to a highly technical description of his choice of lighting sources including the advantages of flash as opposed to floodlights that has a
defensive tone, as if it is intended as a response to his critics.49 The discussion of the use
of flash is in implicit response Picasso’s comment regarding chance, since the flash adds
another variable to the making of the photograph. Because the flash is only activated
when the photographer clicks the shutter, its effects are only perceived after the fact,
when the photograph is developed.
46 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 50. 47 “I turn and return it, studying every angle… I rarely look into the frosted-glass viewer, I measure distances with a piece of string, and I sometimes use magnesium powder flashes for lighting.” Ibid., 53. 48 “I don’t understand… how do you know what the results will be? You have no way of judging the effect of your lighting.” Ibid. 49 “Why don’t I use floodlights? Because multiple sources of light throw conflicting shadows. I like light from a single source, and I soften the shadows by using screens to reflect it.” Ibid.
88
When Picasso’s character expresses his generally low opinion of the photographers of sculptures,50 Brassaï uses the opportunity for self-promotion:
… there’s always been a stupid tradition that says that a light-colored statue – marble, plaster, or something like that – should be photographed against a dark background and a dark statue against a light ground … [but] it kills them. They look as if they had been flattened out, and no longer have room to breathe. For a piece of sculpture to retain all of its original dimensions in a photo, the lighted parts of it should be lighter than the background and the shaded parts darker. It’s so simple ….51
Brassaï is partially correct in his assessment of the photography of sculpture.
Some of his contemporaries did in fact shoot pieces against a contrary background, as
seen in the few photographs of Picasso’s sculptures published in the second volume of
the catalogue raisonné from 1942.52 But Brassaï and others such as Alfred Stieglitz in
his photograph of Picasso’s Fernande’s Head for Camera Work (figure 3.9) did not
contrast the tone of the sculpture and the background. Their choice of grey tones for the
background ensures that the directly lit areas are lighter in shade than the background,
while the most shadowed ones will appear darker than the background. The background
tone thus becomes a median or mediating point that ties together the play of light and
shadow within the sculpture itself. Brassaï’s technical discourse reveals his views
concerning the purpose of his work: he aims to recreate the original, sculptural, three-
dimensional play of volumes in the dark-light values of photographic language.
Brassaï defines a good photograph as one that accurately renders the sculpture;
this echoes Picasso’s own views. In a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler from July 21st,
1914, Picasso expresses his dissatisfaction with a photograph of Glass of Absinthe,
50 “But why is that sculpture is so rarely photographed well?” Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso – Second Volume (Paris: Éditions Cahiers d’art, 1942).
89 criticizing its illegibility: “one cannot understand a thing,” he wrote.53 Picasso
characterizes a bad photograph (“vraiment très mal”) as one that distorts the object
appearing in it. The murky photograph of Glass of Absinthe by Émile Delétang (figure
3.10), taken the same year as Picasso’s letter, is indeed incomprehensible. The photographer’s choice of angle accentuates the strong torquing sensation that causes the
sculpture to seem to fall apart, to lose its wholeness. Brassaï did not make the same
mistake (figure 3.11). All five photographs of Glass of Absinthe are taken from exactly the same angle, marked by the real spoon on top of the glass, with minor variations in lighting and the glass’s position on the plinth. This angle highlights the sculpture’s relationship to the ideas expressed by Gleizes and Metzinger in their manifesto Du
Cubisme, in which they defined cubism as capturing reality from multiple viewpoints.
Glass of Absinthe reveals Picasso’s interest in representing the glass’s transparency by exposing both the inside and outside of the glass, its rim and bottom.54
While Brassaï’s written text generates a particular image of his working process
and aims, a more nuanced understanding of his process emerges upon examining the
contact sheets he compiled at the time he was systematically photographing Picasso’s
work.55 The forty-four contact sheets include photographic proofs from the original negatives including 403 gelatin silver proofs together with, usefully, those
53 “J’ai reçu encore quelques photos et j’attends les autres elles ne sont pas mal […] Mais les petits verres sont vraiment très mal on ne comprend rien.” Quoted in Anne Baldassari, Brassaï/Picasso: Conversations avec la lumiére (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), 178. 54 For example “To establish pictorial space, we must have recourse to tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties. It is our whole personality which, contracting or dilating, transforms the plane of the picture. … The forms which are situated within this space spring from a dynamism which we profess to command.” Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, “Cubism [1912]” in Herschel Browning Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 2123. 55 The contact sheets were exhibited for the first time in Brassaï/Picasso: Conversations avec la lumière at the Musée Picasso in Paris. They were then reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. Anne Baldassari’s insightful essay on Picasso and Brassaï’s working relationship refers to the contact sheets but does not systematically analyze them. Anne Baldassari, “Une Théorie de la lumière,” Brassaï/Picasso: Conversations avec la lumière, 168–83.
90 photographs that did not end up in the catalogue.56 Brassaï’s handwritten inscriptions also
appear on the contact sheet, furthering our knowledge of the making of the catalogue and
alluding to the existence of additional photographs that the photographer did not include
in the contact sheets. 57 According to my calculations, 554 photographs were taken for the
catalogue, 403 were included on the contact sheets, and 205 were published.
Initially, Brassaï began collating the proofs in an organized fashion, devoting one
contact sheet to each sculpture, but as the project moved forward he pasted photographs
of several different sculptures onto a single sheet.58 No photographs of a single sculpture
appear on two separate contact sheets, however, suggesting that Brassaï was trying to
find the best point of view for each piece, one at a time, by comparing the photographs.
The contact sheets teach us more about Brassaï’s work for the catalogue than his
written account. They stress the direct link between the selection of works to be included
in the catalogue and the method of photographing them. Of the 214 objects appearing on
the contact sheets, only seventeen sculptures do not appear in the final book. This small
number confirms that in the large majority of the cases the decision about whether an
object would appear in the catalogue was made prior to the act of photographing, and not
upon seeing the photographs, since the rejected photographs do not present any apparent
56 The contact sheets also include photographs of Picasso’s sculptures that Brassaï took in the 1930s, during his first excursion to Picasso’s studio: some of these photographs were recycled and used also for the Chêne catalogue. See contact sheet 21 with the same photograph of Still-life with a Butterfly that appeared in the Minotaure essay, contact sheet 22 with six photographs from the 30s, and contact sheet number 23 with four photographs taken in 1932. It is worth noting that the nine photographs by Dora Maar that were included in the catalogue do not appear in the contact sheets. 57 Brassaï often writes on the sheets “x fois la même” or “y fois le différent” indicating that more photographs existed. 58 Technological advances undoubtedly facilitated the large number of photographs. While Brassaï used glass plates for the Minotaure photo shoot, he used photographic film in the late 1930s. The weight of glass plates and the elaborate preparation process of each plate limited the number of photographs taken in a single shoot. Photographic film, on the other hand, facilitated a faster working process, which enabled more photographs to be taken. Brassaï described the cumbersome glass plate process in Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 19.
91 flaws. After deciding that an object would be included, the only question was which photograph of it should be reproduced in the catalogue.
Brassaï’s text gives the impression that his meticulous and attentive staging puts an end to all experimentation. The confident statement “I figure it out in my head” implies that the final photograph is conceived by the photographer before it is actually taken, but the existence of multiple photographs of the same object indicates a more improvisational approach. As seen repeatedly in the contact sheets, Brassaï had to take more than one photograph to get the best, most accurate image of Picasso’s sculptures.
The first contact sheet displays six photographs of Picasso’s 1943 Death’s Head numbered and lettered by Brassaï 11A to F (figure 3.12). The sculpture is placed on a surface in front of a wall, and is photographed with slight modifications in lighting conditions: 11D is bathed in light so that the skull’s carved-out eye sockets and sinus cavity seem shallow; the heavily shadowed 11B and 11C create the opposite effect as the sockets become deep pits. In the two photographs chosen for the catalogue 11 and 11C
the lighting is more nuanced; the play of shadows emphasizes the sculpture’s volumes instead of enhancing the drama.
All six photographs impart monumentality to the sculpture. Five of the six depict it from a frontal view and only 11C shows Head’s profile. In all the photographs Brassaï employs a dramatic close-up view. In print 11D the camera was placed slightly below
Head’s eye-level for an even tighter close-up, making the monolithic work seem even more overpowering, but this photograph was not chosen for the catalogue. Brassaï’s photographs make it impossible to estimate the precise scale of the work the sculpture seems much larger than its actual height of twenty-nine centimetres.
92
This close analysis of the contact sheet emphasizes the gap between Brassaï’s rhetoric concerning the accuracy of his photographs and the way they actually distort
Picasso’s sculptures. Brassaï’s photographic technique prevents the viewer from gauging the sculptures’ actual size. He does not distinguish between large and small sculptures; instead, his photographs give the illusion that all the works share the same monumental scale. This is especially striking because the majority of Picasso’s sculptures are minute in size about fifty percent of the works in the catalogue are less than twenty centimetres tall.
S usan Stewart writes about the effect and appeal of shifts in scale in her book On
Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. She argues that scale is “established by means of a set of correspondences to the familiar”59 achieved through a comparison with the viewer’s body. Picasso created several sculptures whose actual size could be estimated through an association with familiar objects – for example, the real butterfly in Still-life with a Butterfly, the pebbles used as a sculptural material, and the box of matches next to his wooden cigar give viewers keys to deciphering the works’ small size.60
59 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 46. 60 See plates 78, 96104, and 117 respectively in the sculpture catalogue. This discussion of the strategies Picasso used to evoke the works’ inherent smallness is indebted to Michael Fried’s exploration of Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures where Fried raises the question, “How was he to go about making sculptures whose modest dimensions would strike the viewer as intrinsic to their form – as an essential aspect of their identity rather than as merely a contingent, quantitative fact about them?” Michael Fried, “Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures, 196677,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 204. In his latest book on photography Fried re-engaged with the theme of scale to explicate the developments of the photographic medium in the 1980s: “two significant developments “within” the realm of the photographic were already taking place: digitization… and a considerable increase in the size of art photographs, which already by 1980 was enabling works such as Wall’s lightbox transparencies and Bustamante’s Tableaux to address more than a single beholder at the same time. Intimately related to the increase of size was the display of those photographs on gallery and museum walls, or rather the fact that photographs like Wall’s and Bustamante’s were made with the intention of being displayed.” Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale
93
But the sculptures’ relative scales are not communicated in Brassaï’s photographs.
In the section devoted to the gigantic, and to the cultural fascination with exaggerated scale, Stewart quotes Barbara Rose on the topic of the mechanical reproduction of art objects. In this passage the photographs of Picasso’s sculpture are discussed:
Our idea of the monumentality of Picasso’s works is not dependent on actual scale; in fact, in my case an appreciation of their monumentality was largely a result of never having seen the originals, but having experienced them as slides or photographs. In this way, the comparison with the human body never came up, so that the epoch-making 19289 Construction in Wire, although a scant twenty inches high in actuality, was as large as the imagination cared to make it… The photograph … permits a blowup to any scale, even the most gargantuan.61
This comment, taken from a 1968 text on the monumentality of contemporary sculpture,
suggests that the author changed her perception of Construction in Wire (also known as
model for the Apollinaire Monument) after encountering the piece at the first
retrospective of Picasso’s sculptures in 1967. While Rose does not name Brassaï as the photographer responsible for her misconception of the model’s scale, it is obvious that she is referring to his photographs of Picasso’s sculptures, since it is his work that was largely responsible for their dissemination prior to the retrospective.62
This response to vague scale is not unique to Barbara Rose; Rosalind Krauss made similar claims about the same sculpture in the 1960s. In her essay on failed sculptural monumentality, Krauss refuses to accept that Construction in Wire was
University Press, 2008), 1067. Fried’s discussion of scale in photography differs from my own, as he focuses on the technological advancements that enable the enlargement of the negatives and prints, while I focus on the representation of size inherent within the image. 61 Barbara Rose quoted in Susan Stewart, On Longing, 9192. Rose’s article (“Blowup – The Problem of Scale in Sculpture,” Art in America 56 [1968]: 8091) discusses the return to monumentality in sculpture from the 1960s after a long period when “modern civilization had produced virtually no monumental sculpture to rank with the great sculptural creation of the other high civilizations.” Ibid., 80. The comment about the photographic representation of Picasso’s sculpture results, I assume, from the writer’s physical encounter with Picasso’s sculptures at the 1967 Picasso’s sculpture exhibition at the MoMA. 62 Brassaï’s photographs of the model for the Apollinaire monument were the ones to introduce the work to the world.
94 conceived as a model, arguing that it was not intended for larger execution. The author criticizes Picasso’s decision to materialize the potential for monumental scale of his model in the 1960s, claiming that the enlargement ruins the piece’s success.63 Both of
these responses point to the sculpture’s monumentality as abortive, on which Brassaï’s
misleading photographs capitalize.
The flexible size of the photographic print enables Brassaï to favour monumentality.
Picasso’s Hand (figure 3.13), a highly detailed and realistic plaster cast of the artist’s palm, is a prominent example of this. Even though Picasso’s Hand is reproduced on the cover in life-size, the scale of the sculpture seems closer to the hand of the colossal statue of Emperor Constantine than to that of the viewer. This impression is caused by the close-up view as well as the cover’s black background. The original photograph appearing on contact sheet 24 (figure 3.14) displays the sculpture against a neutral background, which has a different impact on perceived scale. The falsification of scale is mentioned once in Conversations with Picasso, when Brassaï noted Picasso’s dissatisfaction with the work produced by the previous photographer, who made Death’s
Head “look like a walnut.”64 Picasso’s statement makes it clear that when it came to
photographic distortion of scale, only enlargement was acceptable in the case of his
sculptures.
The contact sheets confirm Brassaï’s uniform treatment of Picasso’s sculptures.
The works are all carefully staged and lit, and are photographed multiple times from
63 “…tout ce qu’il pouvait y avoir d’émouvant, de convaincant, dans l’original, est entièrement annulé par cette rigidité, ce durcissement mécanique, que l’on trouvait déjà dans les agrandissements monumentaux et quelque peu monstreux des mobile de Calder.” Rosalind Krauss, “Échelle/ monumentalité – Modernisme/ postmodernisme – La ruse de Brancusi,” in Margit Rowel, Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne? (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1986), 246. 64 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 50.
95 different angles, with no regard for expense or for the paper shortage of the war years.65
Brassaï withheld his aesthetic judgment when photographing the sculptures, giving the impression that all works were of the same importance and worthy of being transmuted into a good photograph.
Brassaï’s systematic approach is of special importance in light of the
heterogeneity of Picasso’s sculptures. The consistent, homogenizing, and monumentalizing representation of Picasso’s diverse body of sculptural work enabled the
introduction of these works into the canon. In this respect Brassaï’s photographs
participate in the process of assigning value to the sculptures. If reproduction is in itself a sign of approval, then the manipulation of effects of scale is a further operation of enhancement.
***
The next stage in my argument returns to the conventions of the catalogue raisonné, as I examine how the question of attribution and the chronological display of
work are used in Les Sculptures de Picasso. While the catalogue largely follows
chronological order, this arrangement is abandoned in order to emphasize the works’ attribution to Picasso. One of the purposes of a comprehensive catalogue is perscisly to prevent errors in attribution. Picasso, as Brassaï remembers it, was engaged with the authenticity of artworks and Conversations avec Picasso recalls discussions on
65 For the effects of the paper shortage on the publishing industry see Valerie Holman, “Framing Critics: the publishing Context,” in Art Criticism Since 1900, Malcolm Gee, ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 6881. See also her unpublished dissertation: Valerie Holman, “Albert Skira and Art Publishing in France, 1928-1948” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1987).
96 attribution as well as encounters with fake works. Picasso considered himself a connoisseur of art such as Rousseau’s, El Greco’s, Cézanne’s, and of course his own, and claimed to recognize several fakes in a recently published album of Douanier Rousseau.66
He also argued that a signed Cézanne presented to him was forged, basing his assessment on his close familiarity with the painter’s works.67
Picasso, unlike Rousseau or Cézanne, of course, cannot be associated with a
single identifiable painting style.68 He also used multiple sculptural styles: Kahnweiler
notes the influence of Gauguin’s sculptures; the agitated surfaces69 of his work in the
1940s perhaps as a response to Jean Fautrier’s sculptures;70 and the gradual abstraction of
the works in plates 157161 recall Brancusi. Finally, the influence of Matisse’s two
sculptural series Jeanette and Henriette on Picasso’s Boisgeloup Heads is well
established.71 Since stylistic consistency was not applicable as a measure of his works’
authenticity, Picasso used other means to guarantee his works. From the 1930s onward he
methodically signed and dated his paintings, a fact that assisted Zervos’s cataloguing
effort as well as future generations of historians.72 These signatures were a means of verifying the work’s attribution, defining its completion, and raising its value. But since
66 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 117. 67 Ibid., 79. 68 Elizabeth Cowling’s thorough research leads to her argument that Picasso moved between styles for the creation of effects and evocations of meaning usually preserved for subject matter. Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: New York: Phaidon, 2002). 69 Plates 1834. 70 Fautrier had three one-man shows in Paris between 1942-1945, including the 1945 exhibition in Galerie René Drouin of his Otages series. The links between Picasso’s Head from 1943 (plate 184 in the catalogue, Spies, 218) and Fautrier’s 1943 Head of Hostage are numerous: both depict an abstracted image of the human head, whose heavily textured surface exceeds the basic shape of the head. 71 Anne Baldassari, “Chapter 27,” in Elizabeth Cowling, et al., Matisse:Picasso (London: Tate Publications, 2002), 265–271. Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion; Forth Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1998), 76–127. 72 Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 3–17.
97 the majority of Picasso’s sculptures were not signed, and those that were do not reveal this fact in Brassaï’s photographs, signature was not a guarantee.
I argue that in Les Sculpture de Picasso the artist replaces his signature, and its evocation of the self through the play of presence and absence,73 with a performative
evocation of his own hand. This point comes to the fore when the actual book diverges
from the conventions of the catalogue raisonné. While the sculpture catalogue is largely
organized in chronological order thus lending itself to narratives of progression and
development there are a few important deviations. One such divergence is the explicit
appearance of Picasso’s hand on the cover and in the first and last images. The hand of
the maker thus becomes a trope, the interpretive lens through which the objects in the
catalogue are understood. It is by this reference to the hand that issues of attribution,
authenticity, and artistic genius are addressed in the catalogue.
The cover image is the only example in the catalogue of a sculpture reproduced to scale (figure 3.13). The catalogue’s title, Les Sculptures de Picasso, cues us to the fact that this right palm is Picasso’s. The open palm appears as if available for inspection: the five fingers are extended and held without space between them, turning the hand into a continuous surface over which the eye can travel while exploring its shape, fingerprints, lines, creases, and mounts. The decision to reproduce this highly detailed and realistic image in life-size stimulates the viewer to engage with the work not just visually but also
73 Jacques Derrida describes the signature as essentially related to the rhetoric of Austin’s performative speech: “By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But it will be said, it also marks and retains his having been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctuality, always evident and always singular, in the form of a signature…” Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20. Derrida’s definition has greatly influenced the field of performance studies. See for example: Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Margaret Iversen, “Following Pieces: On Performative Photography,” in Photography Theory, James Elkins, ed. (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 91–108.
98 physically, by placing one’s hand on top of the master’s, virtually touching it, entering into some wishfully intimate social transaction with the artist.74
From the Renaissance onwards, the artist’s hand was associated with signature style and understood as an agent of individuality and subjectivity.75 During the modern period the association between artists and their craft has been greatly reduced, if not completely eliminated, by Marcel Duchamp’s invention (or intervention) of the readymade. 76 Louis Aragon argued for the obsolescence of artists’ manual skill in his text for the 1930 exhibition La peinture au défi: “One can imagine a time when the painters who no longer mix their own colo[u]rs will find it infantile and unworthy to apply the paint themselves and will no longer consider the personal touch.”77 But even though Picasso’s collages were essential to Aragon’s argument against dexterity, the trope is still relevant to the artist, and it is invoked repeatedly in the catalogue.
The trope of the artist’s touch, or hand, is made literal on the catalogue’s cover:
Picasso’s sculpture of his own hand functions as a metonym for artistic creativity, and for
74 This photograph was reproduced in Life Magazine in 1944 as the opening image of an article about French post-war art. In this instance, the photograph appeared together with a text by an “orthodox palmist” who read Picasso’s hand and a schematic sketch of the main lines of Picasso’s hand. “New French Art,” Life Magazine, November 1944, 72. This article is analyzed in chapter five. 75 The origins of the trajectory which links mana (hand) and maniera (style) are traced in Philip Sohm, “Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style,” Res 36 (Autumn 1999): 100–124. Carlo Ginzburg offered an interpretation of this tradition in the context of the late 19th century when connoisseurship began to define the quest for recognizing personal style in terms similar to detective work. Ginzburg makes modern the trope of the artist’s hand as a site of individual style as he links Morreli’s work to contemporary developments in surveillance – the creation of a fingerprint database at the end of the 19th century. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980): 5–36. 76 The scholarship on this theme is vast. Among the secondary sources the followings are relevant: Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, “The Readymades and Life on Credit,” in Marcel Duchamp (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 146–170. Thierry De Duve, “Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism,” in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 93–130. David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Helen Molesworth, “Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades,” Art Journal 57.4 (Winter 1998): 51–61. 77 Louis Aragon, “The Challenge to Painting [1930],” in The Surrealists Look at Art, ed. and trans. Pontus Hulten (Santa Monica, CA: Lapin Press, 1990), 5556.
99 the fetishized authentic touch, here celebrated as an icon. According to Jaime Sabartés,
Picasso’s confidant and secretary, the artist associated the hand with individuality, considering it a symbolic self-portrait.78 Over the years Picasso created multiple drawings of his hands (figure 3.15a,b) and in the 1930s he sculpted several works on the
same theme;79 his fascination is also evident in a series of photographs from 1937 by
Nick de Morgoli (figure 3.16a,b).
The details of skin in the first hand sculpture show that it was not modelled in plaster or clay, but rather cast directly from the flesh. The specific technique was described in a conversation with Kahnweiler from 1933: “Picasso tells me that in order to avoid casting from the model … he is going to make concave sculptures in clay. Then he will pour the plaster into these ‘moulds.’ [The] result: plaster sculpture in relief.”80
Indeed, the direct imprint of Picasso’s hand was made into a mould, which was then
turned back into a three-dimensional, freestanding object. The result blurs the distinctions
between Picasso’s real hand, the trace it leaves behind, and the sculpture. Unlike any
other image in the catalogue, the reproduction of the photographic print to scale that is
to say a life-sized photograph of a life-sized object accentuates this categorical
confusion. The imprint-sculpture-photograph allows for a fluctuation of real presence and
trace. But even though the sculpture is highly realistic, and the photograph is life-sized,
the impression that the photograph of Picasso’s Hand generates is also, paradoxically,
78 That is how Sabartés understood Picasso’s repeated statement, “in the hand, one sees the hand,” which Picasso learned from his father. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Documents Iconographiques (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1954), notes for plates 123125. This phrase could also refer to the hand as the site of the artist’s genius and dexterity, again a trope that was evoked in relation to Picasso in Gjon Mili’s 1949 photographs of Picasso painting with light pencil or Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso from 1956. 79 Spies 168A, 220, 220A, 220B, 220C, 221, 222, and 224. 80 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “Huit entretiens avec Picasso [19331952],” Le Point: Revue Artistique et Litteraire (October, 1952): 24. (translation mine).
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highly abstracted. The image on the cover seems simultaneously life-sized and also a
photograph on a reduced scale of a monumental object. Detached from the rest of the
body and set against a black background, the fragment-hand looks larger than life.
The cover’s invitation to interact echoes that of the exhibition catalogue Le
Surréalisme en 1947 designed by Marcel Duchamp with Enrico Donati (figure 3.17),
which includes a prefabricated foam rubber breast appearing next to the verbal invitation
to grope the ‘falsies.’81 The fragmented body parts on both covers are set against black backgrounds, separated from any context or surroundings. Both images employ realism as their main device to lure the viewer to experience them physically: Duchamp’s rubber prosthesis was coloured in different shades of pink to visually signify the distinction between the nipple, the areola, and the breast itself; similarly, the photo of Picasso’s
Hand is a highly detailed rendering, distinguishing every detail of the hand but not, of course, in colour. Both Picasso’s Hand and Duchamp’s breast are reproduced to scale, but the similarities end when one accepts the invitation to touch the covers: when the seduction to feel the breast arises, the cover’s claim to realism dissolves due to the breast’s rubbery texture. The cover of Les Sculptures de Picasso, on the other hand, sustains the tension between presence and trace since it is impossible to interact in a tactile way with Picasso’s “hand,” or with his genius in making things. The photograph evokes Picasso as simultaneously within reach and completely inaccessible.
The catalogue’s closing image is a forearm ending in a clenched fist (figure 3.18).
Unlike the hand on the cover, it extends past the wrist, emerging from a sleeve. The
81 Adam Jolles recognizes a rhetorical shift in surrealist artworks during the interwar period from the optical to the tactile as a reaction against contemporary cultural imperialism and French colonial expansion. This phenomenon exists also, he argues, in Picasso’s sculptural production. Adam Jolles, “The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Postcolonial Aesthetic in France,” Yale French Studies 109 (2006): 17–38.
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communist symbol of the clenched or raised fist changes its meaning when its orientation is altered.82 The crude, uneven surface of the sculpture suggests that the fist was modelled and not cast or imprinted in malleable clay. The different manner of execution
allows for an interpretive mise-en-abyme: whereas the catalogue’s last sculpture was
modelled by the moving fingers of the artist, Picasso’s hand was passive and immobile
during the process of making the sculpture on the cover leading to a precise impression.
The open palm and the fist alpha and omega, if you will, due to their strategic positioning at the catalogue’s beginning and end come to represent the full range of finger movement required for modelling sculptures. In this light, all the sculptures appearing between the cover and last page, the full range of Picasso’s work, are the varied manifestations of these movements, their results.
The theme of the artist’s hand is further developed in the opening photograph of the catalogue (figure 3.19), taken by Brassaï in 1939 the only one in the catalogue that includes Picasso himself, and not just his sculptures. In this image, Picasso stands next the sculpture known as The Orator. The photograph invites comparison of the two figures: they are the same height, have the same posture, hold their right arms in a similar position, and Picasso’s checked tie even echoes the texture of the sculpted figure’s torso. But man and sculpture were not created equal: the photograph asserts a clear hierarchy. The figure’s outstretched arm, originating in Greek sculptural tradition, functions symbolically to mark it as a public speaker. Picasso’s bodily posture declares his position
82 For an analysis of Picasso’s complicated links to the French Communist party see Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). It is worth noting that in preliminary drawings of his 1937 Guernica, Picasso depicted the fallen soldier with his raised fist, evoking the communist symbolism. Yet, in later stages the artist changed the position of the arm and hand. For an analysis of this decision in light of contemporary politics see Robin Adèle Greeley, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 147188.
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as the sculpture’s owner and creator. While Picasso casually holds a cigarette in his left
hand, his right arm, the one that adorns the catalogue’s cover, is now clenched in a fist
and squeezes the throat of the sculpture. Traditionally the physical presence of an artist next to a work marks the piece as his creation. But Picasso takes this gesture one step further as he marks the work as his own by cutting off in a cynical reversal of the
Pygmalion myth the sculpture’s air supply. He gave the sculpture life, and, his gesture implies, he can also take it away.
The method Picasso employed to make The Orator combines the two poles of sculptural techniques represented by the two hand sculptures. The figure’s face and hand were clearly modelled, like the catalogue’s final image of the fist, whereas its body and garment were made through the same imprinting technique used for the image on the cover. The figure’s torso is imprinted with a hexagonal pattern and its garment was made with corrugated paper, standing for the Greek toga’s folds. The authoritative pose Picasso occupies in the photograph, together with the sculpture’s deliberately gauche style of execution vis-à-vis the finesse of classical sculpture, make it possible to argue that both the handmade and the mechanical are both introduced in the photograph as products of
Picasso’s hand.
This photograph asserts that all the objects in the catalogue – whether they were actually modelled, imprinted into a mould, put together into an assemblage, or the result of everyday, mundane actions are products of the artist’s hands. In the context of the catalogue, then, there is no distinction between the amount of labour that went into
Picasso’s sculptures, what materials were used, or what size the final works are; all of
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Picasso’s actions are affiliated with artistic process, and everything he produces should
be accepted as an aesthetic object.83
But the photograph of Picasso with The Orator also reflects the artist’s
ambivalent approach to the display of his sculptures. By comparison, Brassaï’s Picasso’s
Palette, analyzed in the first chapter, generates an uncompromisingly monumental image
of the artist’ creative processes. Picasso’s homicidal gesture could be read as expressing
the artist’s dissatisfaction with the final sculptural product; in this respect the
photograph’s position at the beginning of the catalogue seems inappropriate.
This ambivalence is also echoed in the catalogue’s opening essay, written by
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, which begins,
Sculpture has received little attention in the vast amount of literature published on Picasso’s career. It seems to be generally perceived as little more than the hobby of a brilliant artist.84
This statement apparently reiterates the general view that Picasso’s sculpture was not a
serious professional engagement. Kahnweiler might have been answering a concrete
critique,85 or he might have anticipated a particular response from the catalogue’s readers
and preemptively addressed it. Alternatively, it is possible he was inventing a critique to
make his argument polemical, and to set up Picasso’s sculpture for “serious” attention. In
any case, the need to assert the artistic merit of Picasso’s sculptures suggests that the
83 The artisticness of Picasso’s gestures is pushed even further in a series of photographs taken in 1949 by Gjon Mili and published in Life in 1950. The photographs of Picasso painting with a light pencil suggest that it is the hand that creates the art, not the materials. Picasso is creating a conceptual artwork, made out of light and not out of a concrete substance. 84 Translation taken from the English edition of the catalogue published a year after the French edition. Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, “Introduction,” Picasso’s sculptures (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1949), iv. 85 I was unable to locate a negative assessment targeting Picasso’s sculpture specifically dating from before the catalogue’s publication. That said, Picasso’s name appears in Adolphe Basler’s 1928 Le Sculpture moderne en France among other painter-sculptors (Matisse, Derain, Modigliani) who are criticized for their abandonment of classical sculptural principles in favor of cubist pretension. Quoted in Christopher Green, Art in France, 1900- 1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 49.
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process of canonization was still taking place in 1948 and that the few previous public appearances of Picasso’s sculptures among which are the Minotaure photo essay and
Breton’s “Picasso dans son élément”86 had not convinced the public of the significance
of these works.
Kahnweiler and Picasso had worked together long before the publication of Les
Sculptures de Picasso. After their first meeting in front of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in
Picasso’s studio in 1908, Kahnweiler began to purchase and sell Picasso’s paintings. In
1912 Picasso signed a three-year exclusive contract with Kahnweiler, a working relationship that was cut short due to the Great War when Kahnweiler as a German was unable to stay in France.87 Upon his return to Paris after the war ended, Kahnweiler
resumed his professional connections with all of the artists he had previously represented,
with the exception of Picasso, who was then working exclusively with Paul Rosenberg.88
Only after the Second World War ended did Kahnweiler begin representing Picasso again,
through Galerie Louise Leiris, managed by his niece. By the time Les Sculptures de
Picasso was published, Picasso was represented exclusively by Kahnweiler, who won out
against his competitors Louis Carré and Sam Kootz after a bitter argument with
Picasso.89
86 See the first and second chapters this dissertation. 87 For a discussion of the dealer’s relationship with Picasso and the other cubists before WWI see Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, and Francis Crémieux, My Galleries and My Painters, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Viking, 1971), 37–49. For an analysis of Kahnweiler’s shrewd marketing strategies, see Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981); David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 88 For an analysis of Rosenberg and Picasso, see Michael Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth Century Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 47–80. 89 The dynamics between Picasso’s post-WWII dealers is described in Pierre Assouline, An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler, 18841979, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 328-331. The biographer precisely dates the moment in which Kahnweiler gained the exclusive rights for
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As a writer, Kahnweiler facilitated the understanding of the artists affiliated with his gallery in numerous texts, which cemented their place in the history of art.
Kahnweiler’s The Rise of Cubism90 is considered to be the earliest example of a lucid interpretation of Braque and Picasso’s cubism.91 After the Second World War,
Kahnweiler began writing more regularly on art: he published about eighty percent of his written work, seventy-three essays, between 1945 and 1964. The introduction to Les
Sculptures de Picasso therefore falls into this category of Kahnweiler’s later writing.92
After the Second World War, then, Kahnweiler occupied a double position in relation to Picasso’s work: he was both a dealer who had clear economic interest in
Picasso’s success, and a writer who influenced the reception of Picasso’s work.
Kahnweiler noted the problematic nature of this position several decades earlier in a letter to his close friend and fellow art critic Carl Einstein in 1924:
I no longer wish to publish because I am an art dealer again; it no longer seems appropriate. As for my own conscience, I could publish because I buy only things that I love, but the public would see nothing but commercialism in it. Therefore I am silent.93
representing Picasso, but the events leading to this agreement are described in a series of letters to Curt Valentin at the end of January 1947. Ibid., page 385, n. 14, 15. 90 The text was originally published in German as Der Weg zum Kubismus in 1920, and then translated to English in 1949 and to French in 1958. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, trans. Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, 1949). The text was originally published as article in the Swiss Die weissen Blätter in 1916, and reissued in 1920 as a book. 91 “Kahnweiler was the only critic … to understand what was crucial in the evolution of cubism. He was the only critic to perceive that Pitcher and Violin … and The Portuguese … both by Braque, were essential moments in cubism’s history; and he was the first to comprehend that a rupture had occurred for Picasso at the time of his stay at Cadaqués during the summer of 1910….” Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 69. 92 For a complete bibliography of Kahnweiler’s writing, see Pour Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ed. Werner Spies (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1965), 287–295. 93 “Je ne veux plus rien publier puisque je suis de nouveau marchand de tableaux: cela me paraît plus correct. Devant ma propre conscience, je pourrais le faire, car je n’achète que les choses que j’aime mais le public n’y verrait qu’une publicité commerciale. Alors je me tais.” Quoted in Werner Spies, “Vendre des tableux: Donner à lire,” in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: Marchand, éditeur, écrivain (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1984), 33. Translated in Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” 66.
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Yet Kahnweiler’s self-consciousness about occupying the roles of critic and dealer in the twenties did not prevent him from publishing twenty texts on Picasso between 1945 and
1964, when he also represented the artist.94
Before analyzing the devices Kahnweiler uses to frame and evaluate Picasso’s work in this 1948 text, it is important to note that the text is inconsistent in its quality.
The first part of the essay closely follows Picasso’s artistic development and offers a compelling reading of the artist’s early career. The second part of the essay devoted to
Picasso’s later sculptural work does not have the insight and rigour of its beginning. The difference between the two parts is marked by the author’s transition from concrete examples and careful analysis to general and florid language. The reason for these differences is the author’s intimate knowledge of Picasso’s early career, particularly
94 After the publication of the introduction to Les Sculptures de Picasso, Kahnweiler published the following essays, introductions to catalogues, and interviews with Picasso (given here in chronological order): “Note about the exhibition of the recent works of Picasso at the ‘Maison de la pensée française,’” Transition Forty-Nine 5 (1949): 18–19; “Le Sujet chez Picasso,” Verve 7.2526 (1951): 1–21; Pablo Picasso: Radierungen und Lithographien, 1905 bis 1951 (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1952), 7–16; “Huit entretiens avec Picasso, par Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,” Le Point (Soulliac) 7.42 (October 1952): 22–30; “Picasso et le cubisme,” in Picasso (Musée de Lyon, Festival de Lyon Charbonnières, 1953), 9–11 ; “Préface,” in Picasso: Dessins 1903–1907 (Paris: Berggruen and Cie. in collaboration with Galerie Louise Leiris, 1954), 1–2 ; “Petite histoire des toiles,” in Picasso: oeuvres des musées de Leningrad et de Moscou et de quelques collections parisiennes (Paris: Éditions cercle d’art, 1955), 17–20; “Entretiens avec Picasso au sujet des Femmes d’Alger,” Aujourd’hui art et architecture 1.4 (September 1955): 12–13; “Foreword,” in Fifty-five Drawings by Pablo Picasso, 19531954 (New York: Saidenberg Gallery, 1956), 2–3; “Introduction,” in Picasso: Guernica, avec soixante études et variantes (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1956), 3–8; “Entretiens avec Picasso,” Quadrom (Bruxelles) 2 (November 1956): 73–76; Picasso: Keramik. Ceramic. Céramique (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, Schmidt-Küster G. M. B. H, 1957), 127; “The Sculptures of Picasso,” in Picasso Sculpture: Part I (New York: Fine Arts Associates, 1957), 1–4; “Pour Saluer Pablo Picasso,” in Picasso Peintures 1955–56 (Paris: Galerie Louise Leiris, 1957), 1–2; “Introduction,” in Picasso: pintura, escultura, dibujo, ceramica, mosaico (Barcelona: Sala Gaspar, 1957), 4–5; “Voice of the Artist – 3: Picasso: ‘Ours is the Only Real Painting,’” The Observer (London) Sunday, December 8, 1957, 8–9; “Introduction,” in Picasso: An Exhibition of Lithographs and Aquatints 19451957 (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1958), 1–3; “The Content of Picasso’s Art,” in Picasso at Vallauris (New York: Reynal and Company, 1959), 1–3; “Gespräche mit Picasso,” in Jahresring 59–60 (1959): 85–98; “Preface,” in Obra Grafica de Pablo Picasso (Madrid: Museo nacional de arte contemporáneo, 1961); “Préface,” in L’Oeuvre gravé de Pablo Picasso (Jerusalem: The Israeli Museum, 1961), 1–2; “For Picasso's Eightieth Birthday,” Art News 60.6 (October 1961): 34–36, 57–58; “Préface," in L'Oeuvre gravé de Pablo Picasso (Tokyo: Art Friends Association, 1961); “Préface,” in Picasso: gravures- céramiques (Lyon: Musée de Lyon, 1962), 1–5; “Introduction,” in Picasso (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 16–19. This bibliographic list was compiled from Spies, Pour Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 287–295.
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cubism, which he could not bring to bear on Picasso’s later work. In the first part of the
essay, Kahnweiler reiterates the insights already expressed in his earlier book, The Rise of
Cubism (1920). Similarly, the author evaluates Picasso’s encounter with African art and
the development of synthetic cubism, as he had done in “L’art nègre et le cubisme” from
1948.95
Kahnweiler’s choice of examples reflects his relative ease with Picasso’s early
work. Throughout the essay, the author engages with twenty-six sculptures of the 216 works reproduced. While being selective is necessary when accounting for a body of
work on this scale, Kahnweiler’s choices reveal his interests and biases. He discusses
almost every work from before 1930 individually.96 Even though they comprise the bulk
of the catalogue, the later works receive less attention. Kahnweiler’s discussion moves
freely between the catalogue’s plates: he starts by describing plates 32 and 29 then moves
to plate 187, retraces his steps to plates 162, 163, and 116, leaps to plate 193 and ends his
discussion in plate 216, the last figure of the catalogue.
Kahnweiler opens by situating Picasso’s work in the history of modern sculpture.
The writer understands Picasso’s sculptures from the first decade of the century as going
against the leading sculptural tendencies of the period in particular the heightened
facture and agitated surfaces meant to generate flickering light in the work of August
Rodin and Médardo Rosso – and offers Paul Gauguin’s sculpture with its solid, heavy
forms and crude carving as their source of inspiration. This historical trajectory might indeed be appropriate for understanding Picasso’s early sculptural work but it does not
95 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “L’art nègre et le cubisme,” Présence Africaine 3, 1948; reprinted in Kahnweiler, Confessions esthétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 223–36. 96 Kahnweiler only skips three works, plates 4–6, and addresses plates 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 in their order of appearance.
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account for his pieces from the 1930s onward, which often display excessively textured
surfaces.97
The visual properties of Picasso’s early sculptures paved the way for the artist’s next artistic adventure: cubism. Kahnweiler characterizes Picasso’s painterly work of the
first two decades of the century by a consistent engagement with “sculpturality,”98 that is
to say by the works’ commitment to volume and three-dimensionality. He even goes on
to call cubist painting “sculpture in paint” thus highlighting the concern with the ways
volumetric objects occupy space and, the way sculpture provides the key to
understanding it. At this point Kahnweiler repeats his arguments in The Rise of Cubism,
which used semiotic theory of the arbitrariness of language in the interpretation of the
cubist endeavor.99 In his view, cubism changed the terms through which art is evaluated.
Picasso and Braque, he argues, changed the face of modern art by moving away from a realistic representation of the world. Verisimilitude, Kahnweiler argues, is no longer the measure of successful representation; Braque and Picasso embraced the lessons of
Gauguin’s sculpture and African artifacts as they avoided the traditional painterly solutions of chiaroscuro and foreshortening for manufacturing illusionistic effects.
Instead, cubism formed a new kind of relationship to reality, one that is not based on
97 For example, Spies, 218. 98 His ideas concerning the sculpturality, three-dimensionality, and volume echo Carl Einstein’s “Negro Sculpture,” where the latter spoke of an “unmediated experience of the third dimension.” Carl Enstein, “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Sebastian Zeidler and Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 127. Kahnweiler is known to have been deeply impressed by the text and said that it is not a study of African sculpture but of “sculpture as such.” Quoted in Sebastian Zeidler, “Introduction to Negro Sculpture,” in October 107 (Winter 2004): 122. 99 Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1920), trans. Henry Aronson (New York: Schultz, 1949). Also see Yve-Alain Bois’s essay on the dealer: Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s lesson”, 65100. It is unclear why Bois sees Kahnweiler’s Les Sculptures de Picasso introduction as the place where the writer makes most explicit his disagreement linking cubism and African art, since in this essay Kahnweiler expresses views similar to those found in The Rise of Cubism.
109 superficial visual appearance but on deeper structural properties – a resemblance similar to that of a word to the thing it signifies.100
Kahnweiler’s analysis of Picasso’s later work builds on his argument about cubism’s disavowal of realistic representation. He goes on to claim that the lessons of cubism continued to be essential to the artist’s sculptural production from the 1930s on, as they allowed the artist to attain creative freedom. At this point, however, Kahnweiler’s argument loses its force, as he discusses Picasso’s more recent work in very general and unclear terms. The notion of freedom is presented as the key to all of Picasso’s post- cubist sculptural production: “We can see there is no strict system in the work of Picasso; he was genuinely a free man who did not rule out any means of expression.” The sculpture Man with a Sheep is described as “the first step towards … absolute freedom;” the works executed during the war are characterized as “spontaneous and free;” and since
Picasso followed his own artistic path he is said to have “discovered freedom a degree of freedom that no artist had ever achieved before.” The essay concludes with the statement, “in the end, Picasso’s art was a proclamation of freedom, and freedom alone.”101
Freedom is the means by which Kahnweiler’s theory about the arbitrariness of the sign (or in his words the transition that cubism facilitated from “seeing” to “reading”) is updated to fit contemporary tendencies in France while encompassing all of Picasso’s later creations. The association of Picasso’s work with creative freedom in particular and
100 “Picasso did not imitate Wobé art, but its lesson encouraged him to bring about a total revolution in Western sculptural art, and with Braque, to renounce all forms of imitation. … These painters turned their backs on imitation once they discovered what, for them, was the true nature of painting and sculpture: they are a form of writing. … Wobé masks display the characteristics of these ‘signs’ with absolute clarity. The human visage ‘seen,’ or rather ‘read,’ does not coincide in any way with the details of the sign.” Kahnweiler, Les Sculptures de Picasso, x. 101 Ibid., xiiixv.
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with freedom in general resonated widely in post-war France. Artistic creativity and the
French liberation from Nazi occupation were compared in the aforementioned 1944
L’Humanité article, which announced that Picasso, “the greatest living artist,” had joined
the communist party. Following Picasso’s statement about his discovery of the “true”
party, the article concludes with a nationalist and romantic reference to freedom.102
Kahnweiler’s descriptions of Picasso’s sculptures as expressions of personal and artistic freedom, as clichéd as they might be, must therefore be contextualized in the atmosphere of post-war France and the attempts to regain French nationalist pride.103
Kahnweiler’s repeated evocation of freedom in describing Picasso’s later work
must also be contextualized within philosophical thought. Even though Kant is not
quoted directly in the text, an examination of his notion of freedom is in order, since
Kahnweiler often refers to the German philosopher’s writing both directly and
indirectly.104 In his Critique of Practical Reason, as a part of his discussion of ethics,
Kant distinguishes between two forms of freedom – transcendental and practical.
Transcendental or empirical freedom is theoretical in its essence and refers to the
possibility of accepting contingency and our inability to control any course of events, a
necessity when considering the fictive nature of causality. Kant’s practical concept of
freedom, inevitably tied to the transcendental one, refers to the possibility of detaching
oneself from the impulses of our senses and examining the world without our sensory
biases. The importance of The Critique to Kahnweiler’s thought has been noted in the
102 “La patrie spirituelle, le climat de grandeur, qui rendent d’autant plus chères à chacun de nous les terres de liberté où nous sommes nés.” L’ Humanité, October 5th 1944, 1. 103 For an analysis of the way in which Picasso was constructed as a national asset after the war, see Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, 1225. 104 Kahnweiler quotes Kant directly only once in The Rise of Cubism, and more often in his earlier text (published only in the 1970s), Der gegenstand der Aesthtik, which deals with similar territories as the cubist text. For an analysis of Kahnweiler’s theoretical sources, see Arnold Geheln, “D. H. Kahnweilers Kunstphilosophie,” in Pour Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 92–103.
111 scholarship,105 but Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” also fits with Kahnweiler’s account of Picasso. In this text Kant argues that the possibility of reaching intellectual freedom is directly tied to independence from the tyranny of religion and the state:
there is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself. This is indeed almost certain, if only the public concerned is left in freedom.”106
In the philosopher’s view, civic repression impedes progression to a higher level of intellectual enlightenment, but he asserts that there will always be
a few who think for themselves even among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Such guardians, once they have themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty of all men to think for themselves.107
The privileged position that Kant gives a selected few during times of civic repression could illuminate Picasso’s sense of his own role in the context of France’s recent liberation from German oppression.
Khanweiler’s evocation of the term freedom could also be positioned in light of post-war existentialism, and the idea that the real essence of man is in his or her loneliness. Sartre described a state of epistemic loneliness, where the desire to find meaning in one’s existence is repeatedly refuted by the meaningless of living in a world without a God. Accepting this paradox is the essence of human condition.108 Kahnweiler, on the other hand, turns this loneliness into a single man’s quest for self-accomplishment.
As a conclusion, I present the only contemporaneous review of the Chêne catalogue, published in 1948 in the Swiss magazine Formes et couleurs: Le Revue
105 Yve-Alain Bois, “Khanweiler’s Lesson,” 281, n. 16. 106 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, trans. and ed. Hans Siegbert Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55. 107 Ibid. 108 On the topic see, for example, John McGraw, “Loneliness, its Nature and Forms: an Existential Perspective,” Man and World 28.1 (1995): 4364.
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internationale des arts, du goût et des idées.109 The review offers a glimpse of the
immediate reception of Picasso’s sculpture; it also allows one to assess the effectiveness
of the catalogue in shaping Picasso’s sculptures as his paintings’ equals. The text is found in the journal book review section, which covers books on an array of topics such as local architecture, American cinema, North African sculpture, contemporary European art, and historical art. The reviews were written by André Kuenzi, a Lausanne-based writer who published both in Formes et couleurs and Gazette de Lausanne.110 From the 1950s
onward, he became a prominent figure in the Swiss art world, writing several books including a text on modern tapestry as well as books on local art world figures.111 In 1986
he organized a large Giacometti exhibition and wrote its catalogue.112
Kuenzi’s review of Les Sculptures des Picasso begins with praise for Brassaï and
Kahnweiler for facilitating the understanding of Picasso’s sculptures; Brassaï’s photographs are lauded for their beauty, while Kahnweiler’s text is considered
indispensable to the task of situating Picasso’s works in a larger narrative. Picasso’s sculptures, on the other hand, do not immediately receive similar praise: the author
describes the difficulty he experienced while leafing though the catalogue (“it is with
great difficult that we go through this strange museum” he writes.113) He qualifies the
works as incomprehensible and bizarre, compares them to “monsters of radiating beauty
109 André Kuenzi, “Les Sculptures de Picasso, par Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Editions [sic] du Chêne, Paris)” in Formes et Couleurs 56 (1948): 9192. 110 Anne-Lise Delacrétaz, and Daniel Maggetti, Schriftsellerinnen und Schrifsteller der Gegenwart=Ecrivaines et écrivains d’aujourd'hui = Scrittrici e scrittori d’oggi = Scripturas e scripturs da noss dis: Schweiz-Suisse-Svizzera-Svizara, (Aarau: Sauerländer, 2002): 218. 111 Such as the Swiss artists Louis Sutter, Charles Chinet, and Casimir Reymond. 112 The exhibition took place at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny. 113 “…avec peine cependant nous avançons à travers ce musée étrange.” Kuenzi, “Les Sculptures de Picasso,” 91.
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comparable to the devil’s pupils,114” describes them as “human debris,” and argues for
their utter foreignness (“these invented signs, of certain novelty, no longer speak our
language, but a different one, that of another place”).115 The reviewer’s difficulties end
when he adopts the same interpretive language used by Kahnweiler in the catalogue’s
introductory essay. Kuenzi recites the dealer’s statement concerning the artist’s great
freedom, which allowed for a truly original artistic creation. But Kuenzi also emphasizes
the loneliness to which such freedom inevitably leads.116
Kuenzi perhaps accepts Kahnweiler’s interpretations, but he also sees through the
efforts to change the reception of Picasso’s sculpture, and exposes the mechanisms that
were intended to shape the works’ appreciation. When the writer abandons his original
negative reaction to the sculptures and claims that the oeuvre is of unequal value, he credits Brassaï’s photographs for the change. It is the photographs that impose order on chaos; that is to say, they create an oeuvre out of disparate works in different styles and from different periods.
The final sentence of the review continues in the same vein as it shifts the status of “genius” from Picasso to Brassaï. Kuenzi praises the photographer for his ability to
turn Picasso’s fragile artifacts made of fragile materials into durable objects and Picasso’s
“scrapings” into sublime artworks. The author laconically describes one of the works in
the catalogue, emphasizing Picasso’s simple actions and choice of low materials,117 and attributes the transformative powers to Brassaï, whose lens turns the broken matchstick
114 “…monstres de beauté rayonnant comme les prunelles du diable.” Ibid. 115 “…ces signes inventés, d’une nouveauté certaine, ne parlent plus votre langage, mais l’autre, celui d’ailleurs….” Ibid. 116 “Le destin a rèjeté Picasso dans la solitude,” Ibid. This comment could be framed, like Kahnweiler’s discussion, in existential discourse. Kuenzi here might be also referring to the concept of existential loneliness, the paradoxical state of existence in a God-less world, articulated by Sartre in his Being and Nothingness. 117 “Une allumette pliée en deux sur un mouchoir.” Ibid., 92.
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into what the author describe as a miraculous masterpiece, to use the writer’s words. The
review echoes the ideas with which this chapter opens, but here it is not the change from plaster to bronze that raises the value of the sculptures, but their appearance in a photograph.
Kuenzi’s review exposes the catalogue’s agenda. The reviewer deems the
canonization of Picasso’s sculptures successful, even if he never forgets the artificiality
of canon formation. The writer acknowledges both his initial response to the works as
monstrous, and his final, more educated appreciation of the sculptures as masterpieces,
while always remembering those responsible for this shift – namely the critic who
provides the historical framework and the photographer who stages the sculptures as
artworks. In choosing to use the Formes et couleurs review as my conclusion, I hope to
show that at the time of the catalogue’s release similar questions to those I raise in this
chapter were on the minds of the catalogue’s readers and that awareness of the apparatus
of canon-making was as apparent then as it is today.
Chapter Four: Contextualizing Picasso’s Sculptures and their Photographic
Display
Following the Picasso photo essay, Brassaï produced a series of photographs of
sculptors in their studios for the third issue of Minotaure. These photographs were
published in December 1933 as the visual companions to Maurice Ranyal’s essay Dieu-
Table-Cuvette.1 While Brassaï’s previous photo essay for Minotaure was devoted to a
single artist, this second photo essay brings together the studios of Charles Despiau,
Alberto Giacometti, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, and Aristide Maillol, that is to say,
heterogeneously abstract, classicist, surrealist, and cubist artists.2 The essay also includes
photographs of Constantin Brancusi’s studio taken by the artist himself. This more diverse presentation of the Parisian sculptural scene may be used to contextualize
Picasso’s sculptures, thus complements the analysis of Brassaï’s first Minotaure photo
essay through an ethnographic lens. I will begin, however, with a discussion of the work of a painter-sculptor who was not included in the Minotaure survey, Henri Matisse.
Picasso’s and Matisse’s relationship has been the subject of several large-scale exhibitions that engaged with the relevant biographical information as well as providing
detailed formal analysis. In the catalogues of the 1998 Matisse and Picasso and the 2002
1 Minotaure 3–4, (December 1933): 39–53. For an English translation of Raynal’s text, see Maurice Raynal, “God-Table-Basin,” trans. Charles Penwarden in Jon Wood, Close Encounters: The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Camera (Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute, 2001), 92–3. In this exhibition catalogue (Ibid., esp. 15–24) Wood returns to some of the ideas expressed in the first chapter of his dissertation, devoted to Raynal’s essay and Brassaï’s photographs in Minotaure. See Jonathan Michael Wood, “The Materials and Metaphors of the Sculptor’s Studio: Brancusi, Picasso and Giacometti in the 1920s and 1930s” (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1999). 2 Brassaï notes that Breton was displeased by the decision to include sculptors who were not affiliated with surrealism. Brassaï, Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 12– 13.
115 116
Matisse/Picasso, the artists are described as friends, colleagues, collectors of each other’s
work, and rivals.3
Even before Picasso publicized his commitment to sculpting, comparisons
between the two artists were common in the art press. Christian Zervos regularly referred
to Picasso when writing about Matisse, and vice-versa, deliberately fueling the implicit
competition between the two.4 Zervos published a short essay on painter-sculptors in
1928 illustrated with works by Braque, Derain, Dufy, Gris, Matisse, and Picasso. The
only artist directly discussed in the essay is Matisse, who is seen as the prime example of
a successful painter-sculptor and an inspiration to his peers. But when Zervos
inaccurately describes Matisse’s sculptures as “cubist,” he encroaches upon Picasso’s
territory and encourages the rivalry between the two artists. Indeed, reproductions of both
Picasso’s and Matisse’s sculptures dominate the article other painter-sculptors are
represented by one or two, Matisse by ten, and Picasso by seven thus furthering the
comparison between the rivals.5
The large majority of the photographs in Zervos’s 1928 essay depict their subjects
on a pedestal or in front of a wall, employing the convention of displaying artworks
without context. The two photographs of Matisse’s Large Seated Nude, however, present
the sculpture in the artist’s studio. Although Picasso photographed his studio long before
1928, these photographs were not released to the press, and it could be argued that
Matisse’s photographs of his studio affected Picasso’s decision to open his workspace to
Brassaï in 1933.
3 Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion; TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1998); Elizabeth Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso (London: Tate Publishing; New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 4 Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 36-40. Anne Baldasarri, “Chapter 27,” in Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso, 264–81. 5 Christian Zervos, “Sculptures des peintures d’aujourd’hui,” Cahiers d’art 7 (1928): 276–89.
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Matisse’s sculpture did influence Picasso’s from the time Picasso first
encountered it in Galerie Pierre in the summer of 1930.6 The exhibition is described as a
watershed in Picasso’s sculptural production, explaining his renewed interest in
modelling after years of experimentation with welding techniques.7 Arguments about the
influence of Matisse’s sculpture on Picasso concentrate on the latter’s choice of serial
production and the undeniable formal similarity between Matisse’s Jeanettes from 1910-
13 and Picasso’s Boisgeloup Heads from 1931.8 Bois points out the affinities between
Matisse’s and Picasso’s work, comparing Picasso’s Head of a Woman and Bust of a
Woman to Matisse’s Jeannette series, particularly Jeannette V (figure 4.1 and 4.2).9
Both Matisse and Picasso took an interest in photographing their sculptures. Just as Picasso chose to expose his sculptures through photography and assigned Brassaï to this task, Matisse had his sculptures regularly photographed by Eugène Druet (who had previously photographed Rodin’s work). Matisse signed a contract with Druet’s gallery in
February 1904, beginning a collaboration that lasted until the 1940s.10 Typically, Matisse
himself dictated the often quite peculiar angles from which his works were to be
6 Before this exhibition (June and July 1930), Matisse presented the sculptures in 1913 at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, exhibiting Jeanette I, II, III, and ten other works. This earlier exhibition lasted only five days. 7 The details of the exhibition are unknown: the exact number of sculptures (between fifteen and twenty) varies from one scholar to the next since there is no record of what exactly was exhibited in the show. It is not certain whether Picasso even attended the exhibition, but the stylistic impact of Matisse’s sculptures on Picasso suggests that he did see the show. 8 Whereas Matisse’s series developed chronologically from a realistic depiction to a more abstracted representation of facial features, in Picasso’s series it is impossible to determine such a linear and progressive production. It is more likely that he was working simultaneously on sculptures in different idioms. 9 Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 67. 10 Oliver Shell, “Seeing Figures: Exhibition and Vision in Matisse's Sculpture,” in Dorothy Kosinski, Jay McKean Fisher and Steven Nash, eds., Matisse: Painter as Sculptor (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art; Dallas, Tex.: Dallas Museum of Art: Nasher Sculpture Center; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 70, n. 78.
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photographed.11 These photographs of Matisse’s sculptures were not circulated in newspapers or magazines, perhaps for the same reasons that they are not reproduced
today: they were characterized as “too difficult to reproduce” due to “too little or too
much contrast” between the objects and the background.12 One can assume that these
photographs were taken for personal use perhaps to create a visual inventory of the
sculptures, and to replace the sculptures themselves as Matisse’s points of reference for
integrating images of his sculptures into his paintings and not for public dissemination.
While the links between Matisse’s and Picasso’s sculptures are well established,
some of the sculptors appearing in Brassaï’s second photo essay do not immediately
come to mind in relation to Picasso’s work. Brancusi, for example, was no match for
Picasso and Matisse in reputation during the 1930s, but it could be argued that his work
also influenced Picasso’s sculptural practice.13 If one accepts that Head was created with
the Apollinare monument in mind, Picasso’s 1929 iron sculpture may arguably have been influenced by Brancusi’s funerary sculpture The Kiss (figure 4.3 and 4.4),14 as both
works depict the fusion of two bodies into one through geometric, stylized language.
While Brancusi uses the carved stone figures to create an image of immortal love
heightened by the funerary context, Picasso’s rendition refers to modern technological
11 Ibid., 62. 12 Yve-Alain Bois, Preface to Henry Matisse: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre sculpté edited by Claude Duthuit, and Wanda de Guébriant (Paris: Claude Duthuit, 1997), 375. 13 According to Richardson, Brancusi and Picasso knew each other in the early 1900s but they “loathed” each other. John Richardson and Marilyn McCully, A Life With Picasso: The Prodigy 18801906 (New York: Knoff, 1991), 210. Picasso might have been aware of Brancusi’s work through the artists’ separate friendships with Jean Cocteau. 14 Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (New York; London: Phaidon, 2002), 510. For general texts on the Apollinaire commission see Michael C. FitzGerald, “Pablo Picasso’s Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire. Surrealism and Monumental Sculpture in France 1918 1959,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987); Peter Read, Picasso & Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), 160205. Originally published as Picasso et Apollinaire: les Metamorphoses de la mémoire (Paris: G. M. Place, 1995).
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devices: the construction on a tripod with a circle in front of the vertically stacked eyes
evokes a camera. Picasso whimsically addresses Brancusi’s work once more in the 1930s.
The first Minotaure photo essay includes two photographs of a cigarette box construction,
compiled out of thirty-six empty boxes ascending in an upward spiral movement (figure
4.5). Picasso’s gathering and arranging of the boxes is informed by a serial accumulative
logic that echoes Brancusi’s Endless Column (figure 4.6). Brancusi worked on different
versions of his sculpture from 1920 on, and the work was materialized on a monumental
scale in 1937 when the artist mounted a thirty-metre version of the sculpture.15 Picasso’s
cigarette-box construction may be seen as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Brancusi’s
project in that it maintains the infinite accumulative logic but uses waste matter for its
execution.
References to Brancusi’s sculptures in Picasso’s oeuvre are few and far between
probably because Picasso resisted abstraction and yet Brancusi’s photographs can be
taken as a precedent for Picasso’s decision to photographically display his sculptures.
Unlike Picasso, however, Brancusi strictly controlled the process by documenting his
own work, creating photographs that were heavily criticized by professional
photographers. Man Ray, for example, described Brancusi’s photographs as “amateurish
attempts” and argued that they were “out of focus, over or underexposed, scratched and
spotty….”16 Art historians, on the other hand, argue that Brancusi’s supposedly bad
technique was a conscious choice on the sculptor-photographer’s part, noting his
commitment to the medium through the sheer size of his photographic oeuvre (around
15 The monumental sculpture is found in Târgu Jiu, Romania. For a discussion of Brancusi’s monumental plans for his Column see Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 250–55. 16 Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), 1656.
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700 negatives and 2000 prints) and his continual investment in new equipment.17
Brancusi used photography to promote his work: he lured potential buyers by sending them photographs of his latest work and supplementing visits to his studio with photographs. He also circulated his photographs in art magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.18
The five photographs of Brancusi’s studio taken by the artist himself, appearing in the December 1933 issue of Minotaure, differ greatly from Brassaï’s contributions to the journal. Brancusi’s photographs are often murky and dark, while Brassaï’s photographs are crisp and always depict their subjects clearly. The difference in the photographers’ use of light and shadow is telling. For example, in an effect that renders the sculpture illegible, Brancusi employs the grainy quality of a photograph to emphasize the object’s rough texture (figure 4.7, 4.7a). Conversely, Brassaï would never compromise a sculpture for photographic effect. Even in the nighttime photographs of Picasso’s studio such as
Boisgeloup after Dark, the sculptures’ contours are still recognizable. The chiaroscuro
17 Since the 1980s interest in Brancusi’s photographs of his own sculptures has grown, with numerous exhibitions and scholarly texts devoted to the topic. Elizabeth A. Brown’s dissertation was the first full- length study of the photographs: “Through the Sculptor’s Lens: The photographs of Constantin Brancusi” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1989). Brown has continued to publish work on the artist’s photographs. See, for example Elizabeth Brown, Brancusi Photographs Brancusi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). I found the following texts to be especially informative and thought-provoking: Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,” in Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi 1876–1957 (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Museum of Art and MIT Press, 1995), 31219; Paula Mola, ed., Brancusi: The White Work (Milano: Skira, 2005); Paul Paret, “Sculpture and its Negative: The Photographs of Constantin Brancusi,” in Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10115. 18 Brancusi’s photographs were reproduced for the first time in 1923 when the American journal The Arts published thirteen of his photos together with four by the established photographer Charles Sheeler. M. M., “Constantin Brancusi, a Summary of Many Conversations,” The Arts 4.1 (1923): 1529. A second publication took place in 1925 when This Quarter published twenty-five of Brancusi’s photographs: This Quarter 1. 1 (1925): n.p. In 1929 fifteen photographs by the sculptor were reproduced in Cahiers d’art, accompanying a text by Roger Vitrac. See Roger Vitrac, “Brancusi, Portrait de l’artiste,” Cahiers d’art 4.89 (1929): 38296.
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resulting from the dramatic lighting only enhances the sculptures’ shapes, delineates their forms, and augments their volumes (figure 4.8). Brassaï’s image employs the light to
isolate certain features of the sculptures – their “sculpturality” but it also renders them
enigmatic due to their unclear interaction.
Brancusi’s two final photographs depict general views of his studio (figure 4.9,
4.9a, 4.9b). The presence of uncarved pieces of stone and wood among the finished
pieces means that there is no clear spatial distinction in Brancusi’s photographs between sculpture and raw material. These images bring to mind the opening photograph of the first Minotaure issue, Picasso’s Palette, which also juxtaposes raw materials and final
product (figure 4.10). Brancusi’s images of his cluttered studio are decentralized, offering
a general view instead of focusing on a single work, which causes the viewer’s eye to
jump from one sculpture to the other and to discover more works hiding among the
clutter.
Picasso’s sculptural production responds also to the period’s favoring of classical
themes and style. The inclusion of two classicist sculptors in the second Minotaure photo
essay is therefore very much in accordance with a leading trend of the period.19 Of the
two classicist sculptors represented in the photo essay, Maillol is the more prominent,
awarded the title Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1932. As an independent sculptor
embraced by French institutions, Maillol was uniquely perceived both as a modern artist
19 For discussions of the interwar classicist revival see, among others: Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), esp. 203–47; Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990); Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art: 1916–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit du Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War 1913–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
122 and a leading classicist.20 From the first public appearance of The Mediterranean at the
Salon d’Automne of 1905, Maillol’s classicism was identified as lacking definitive meaning.21 This open symbolism allowed his works to be assigned different political valences: The Mediterranean, for example, was seen as an expression of pan-Latinism and symbolic of the Catalan movement for political autonomy, while the artist’s later sculptures were associated in the 1930s with reactionary French nationalism.22 During the German occupation of France, Maillol’s neoclassical figures were seen as the female counterparts to the colossal male sculptures of Arno Breker, the official sculptor of the
Third Reich.23
The problematic political status of Maillol’s work is not addressed in the second
Minotaure photo essay. Instead, Brassaï’s five pictures depict his workplace as a peaceful site of artistic production (figure 4.11). Four out of the five photographs show Maillol’s recent sculpture Île-de-France, an idealized female figure gently arching her back and
20 Patrick Elliot analyzes two classical sculptural trends in the period: the first grew out of the academic system and the second out of the independent sculptural scene. Maillol plays an important part in Elliot’s interpretation as an independent artist who was able to overcome institutional barriers. Patrick Elliot, “Sculpture in France and Classicism 1910–1939,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, 283–95. 21 André Gide characterized The Mediterranean as “having no meaning” in a review in the Gazette des Beaux Arts. Quoted in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, 150. 22 Marilyn McCully’s article traces the political associations of Maillol’s early sculptures and links them to the wider phenomena of Mediterranean Classicism fueled by the writing of the right-wing activist and writer Charles Maurras. See Marilyn McCully, “Mediterranean Classicism and Sculpture in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, 324332. See also the analysis of the concept in David M. Thompson, “Making no Portraits: T. S. Eliot, Mimesis and the Politics of Mediterranean Classicism,” Comparative Literature 50.1 (Winter 1998): 3540. Waldemar George’s reading of Maillol’s work as “Neo-Humanist” was also informed by fascist ideology. See Matthew Affron, “Waldemar George: A Parisian Art Critic on Modernism and Fascism,” in Fascist Visions Art and Ideology in France and Italy, eds. Mark Antliff and Matthew Affron (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 170204. 23 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac discusses the plan to couple one of Maillol’s Three Graces with Breker’s Colossi to create a sculptural group. The art historian also recounts the elaborate ties between Breker and Maillol in Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Art of the Defeat: France 1940-1944 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 99109. For an assessment of the links between Maillol’s depiction of the human body and fascist representations see Bernd Nicolai, “Tectonic Sculptures: Autonomous and Political Sculpture in Germany,” in Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliot, and Iain Boyd White, Art and Power – Europe under the Dictators 193045 (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995), 3348.
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holding a cloth behind her body. Unlike the photographs of Picasso’s studio appearing in
the first Minotaure issue, Maillol’s studio is represented as a space of non-work, an island of serenity and order. Maillol’s sculptures are all completed, and the sculpting tools left apparently unused, their relation to the artistic process appearing more abstract than integral. In one photograph Maillol stages sculptural process for the camera; he is seen scraping the already perfectly smooth marble of Île-de-France, casting the artist as a modern-day Pygmalion. Another photograph at the bottom left functions as a mini- retrospective of Maillol’s career: the early work Pomone (190810) is seen from its back, positioned next to Spring (191112) and the 1926 Woman Arranging her Hair, as well as
Holding One Foot from 19201, slightly obscured from sight.
Picasso was also influenced by the contemporary return to classical order.24 As is
typical with Picasso, it is impossible to speak of a single classical strand in his artistic production. The influence of classicism materialized in his oeuvre in multiple and diverse ways in the late teens, early twenties, and thirties; in addition, each period offers a different definition of classicism, with its own associations and set of references. Not surprisingly, even within each one of these so-called classical periods, the artist’s engagement with classicism is forked. I will focus on the period directly pertinent to the
Minotaure publication, examining Picasso’s sculptural work in the classical vein.
Picasso adopted classical subject matter for a series of sculptures created in
1933.25 In a technique reminiscent of Max Ernst’s Frottage, and one that continues the cubist experimentations with “instant” texturing (like the caning of the 1912 Still Life
24 For an analysis of the ties between the two artists see Christopher Green, “Classicism of Transcendence and of Transience: Maillol, Picasso, and De Chirico,” in Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, 267–82. 25 These works do not appear in the first Minotaure photo essay because they were made after Brassaï had taken his photographs of Picasso’s studio.
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with a Chair Caning), Picasso imprinted The Orator, Woman Leaning on her Elbow, and
Woman with Leaves with ready-made textures (figure 4.124.14).26 The artist imprinted
corrugated paper on the surfaces of all three sculptures, a technical shortcut that
substitutes for the meticulously carved folds of classical garments. Picasso also refers to
the Greco-Roman tradition as he draws on the vocabulary of classical sculpture in The
Orator. As in antique representations of public speakers, the figure’s outstretched arm represents speech. Woman leaning on her Elbow was compared to Polykleitos’ rendition
of an Amazon from the 5th century BC: both figures are dressed in short peploses, both extend their arms in a similar fashion, and both expose a single breast as their attribute.27
Woman With Leaves alludes to Ovid’s telling of Daphne’s metamorphosis; her hands, made of leaves, mark her transformation.
Classical influence is evident in the works’ subject matter, attributes, and chosen style of garments, but Picasso’s inaccurate references to classicism suggest that he does not fully participate in the “return to order” phenomenon. The rendition of horizontal folds in both Woman Leaning on her Elbow and The Orator replaces the realistic representation of garments in ancient sculpture. In Woman Leaning Picasso included a column to support the sculpture’s weight a common trait of marble works but unnecessary in plaster. Also, Picasso did not imprint Woman with Leaves with laurels, as an accurate representation of the Ovidian tale demands, but with what seems to be beech leaves.
Another evidence of Picasso’s interest in the classical style during this period can be seen in the artist’s use of the classical idiom to fashion his own image as a classical
26 Spies, 181, 153, 157. 27 Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, 538.
125 sculptor. Among the hundred plates in The Vollard Suite (1932 and 1939), forty-four are devoted to the theme ‘The Sculptor’s Studio,’ three of which were included in the first
Minotaure (figure 4.15). As opposed to the disorder appearing in Brassaï’s photographs, the etchings depict a working space closer in atmosphere to Maillol’s serene and orderly workshop, thus stressing the imaginary, fantastical quality of Picasso’s images.
A male sculptor and a female model, as well as multiple sculptures, reside in the
‘Sculptor’s Studio,’ but the etchings rarely depict the sculptor sculpting and the model modeling. Instead, the two sit, lie down, daydream, or look at the sculptures. Even though the artist and model are naked, their interaction is not precisely sexual; their nudity functions as a classical attribute. This peaceful and non-productive image of the studio is conveyed via an uninterrupted contour typical of red-figure Greek vase painting from the
5th century BC. The forty-four plates lack the irony of the previously discussed sculptural series, demonstrating the diversity of Picasso’s approach to the classical tradition. In the
Vollard Suite Picasso’s self-representation as a classical sculptor reflects the longing to tame desire, to repress emotion, to become a symbol of self-restraint.28
28 Lisa Florman describes the ‘Sculptor’s Studio’ plates in opposition to the plates known as ‘the Battle of Love’ (or less florally, those depicting rape scenes), terms that are applicable to much of Picasso’s work: “Art, as Picasso usually conceived it, had nothing to do with disinterest. On the contrary, most of his paintings and drawings seem explicitly designed for the imaginary satisfaction of desire. Where the majority of artists constrained themselves, like a camera, to a solitary and often distant vantage point, Picasso sought instead the visual equivalent of an embrace; hence the apparent multisidedness of so many of his figures, especially the female nudes. As Steinberg has eloquently argued, to Picasso drawing was a form of “possession” or “inhabitation” – in either case we might say, a kind of phantasmatic projection of both the figure’s and the viewer’s total presence.” Lisa Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2000), 117–8. An approach very different from Picasso’s association of the classical sculptor with physical detachment can be found in Leiris’s Manhood: “Since Childhood I have attributed to everything classical a frankly voluptuous character. Marble attracts me by its glacial temperature and its rigidity. I actually imagine myself stretched on a slab (whose coldness I feel against my skin) or bound to a column. Sometimes it seems to me I could formulate my desire by saying I lusted after a body ‘as cold and hard as a roman building.’” Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26.
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Cubist sculpture is also included in Brassaï’s second photo essay through the
work of Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz, whose approach to form and space stemmed
from Picasso’s and Braque’s cubist work. Both Laurens and Lipchitz gained fame during
the Great War as avid investigators of the instrumental possibilities of cubism at a time
when the movement’s dominance was waning. Since the latter was perceived as the best
known vanguard sculptor of the interwar period, I will focus on Lipchitz’s work (figure
4.16). Lipchitz’s reputation soared as early as 1920 when the critic Paul Dermée argued
that he was successfully carrying out synthetic cubism.29 In 1923 this positive critical
reception was accompanied by financial success, when Lipchitz received the prestigious
and lucrative commission to sculpt bas-reliefs for the Barnes Foundation.30 In 1926 a
flood of essays on the artist cemented Lipchitz as a leading sculptor.31
It may be that Lipchitz and Picasso were aware of each other’s work. According
to Stott, Lipchitz predictably derived much in terms of subject matter, motif and style
from Picasso.32 More recently, Pütz argued that Lipchitz’s interest in organic sculptural forms in the late twenties influenced Picasso’s subsequent Boisgeloup sculptures.33
Green has furthered these ideas, arguing that Picasso’s oblique allusion to sexual themes
29 Paul Dermée, “Lipchitz,” L’esprit Nouveau 2 (November 1920): 174. 30 The circumstances of the commission have been analyzed in Cathy Pütz, “Towards the Monumental: The Dynamics of the Barnes Commission (1922–1924),” in Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York, eds. Josef Helfenstein and Jordana Mendelson (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois, 2001), 3951. 31 André Salmon, “Nouvelles Sculptures de Lipchitz,” Cahiers d’art 3.10 (January 1926): 163; “Jacques Lipchitz” Art d’aujourd’hui 10 (1926): 21–3; “La Sculpture vivante,” L’Art vivant 1 (May 1926): 335; and Waldemar George, “Bronzes de Jacques Lipchitz,” L’Amour de l’art 7 (1926): 299–302. 32 She points out Picasso’s 1915 Harlequin as the source of influence, specifically the painting’s breaking down of the body into geometric planes, the reference to collage methods, and the choice of commedia dell’arte as subject matter. Deborah A. Stott, Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978), 119–22. 33 Cathy Pütz, Jacques Lipchitz: The First Cubist Sculptor (Aldershot; Burlington, VT; London: Paul Holberton Pub., 2002), 31–41.
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from the mid-twenties was made literal in Lipchitz’s The Cry from 19289, an explicit
representation of sexual climax.34
Most of Picasso’s sculptural work championed in the first Minotaure photo essay
does not relate directly to the language of synthetic cubism. While Picasso continued his
collage work in his collaboration with Julio González, he was much more invested in
modelling, perhaps as a consequence of his competitiveness with Matisse. The Woman’s
Head series of the 1930s, which as already shown wavers amongst different styles and alludes to various precedents, includes one work that revisits the syntax of collage. In
Woman’s Head of 1931 (figure 4.17), each one of the comprising elements found in the previous Heads has been assembled in a non-realistic manner, so that it only vaguely
echoes the human face.35 This plaster sculpture engages with the abstract syntax of
collage as seen, for example, in Picasso’s 1912 Bottle, Glass, and Violin in which the depicted objects do not conform to realist conventions of unified space or common scale.
It is also fruitful to compare Picasso’s sculptures from the late 1920s to the early
1930s to surrealist work. Giacometti is the only surrealist represented in Brassaï’s second
Minotaure photo essay (figure 4.18).36 One photograph shows the dramatically lit Palace
at Four a.m., another depicts Woman with her Throat Cut from a bird’s-eye view, and a
third presents a general view of the artist’s studio. The third photograph includes another
34 Green mentions the curious reception of the work in Parisian art journals. The work was first reproduced in Documents in 1930 under the title “sculpture” while almost at the same time it appeared in Cahiers d’art with the title Couple. Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2005), 17683. 35 Bois eloquently described the collage-like qualities of this sculpture: “In … Head of a Woman … collage is loudly trumpeted. A drawing, done in Juan-les-Pins and dated August 11, 1931 spells everything out: the various elements are first drawn separately – each of them assigned a Roman numeral – and then assembled. Picasso treats clay as if it were suitable for assembly blocks, as if he were a mechanic building a motor.” Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 70–1. 36 The artist’s appearance in the essay suggests that his 1932 break from the movement was not so clear-cut as Krauss has suggested. Rosalind Krauss, “No More Play,” in The Originality of The Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1985), 61.
128 view of Woman with her Throat Cut and some ambiguous sculptures whose forms look like a surrealist cross between Brancusi’s abstract sculptures and Cézanne’s depictions of nature through “the cylinder, sphere and cone”37 they could be interpreted as a surrealist return to classical style.38 The three photographs were reproduced together with text by the artist that begins thus: “I can only speak about my sculptures indirectly, and hope to express only a part of what lay behind them.”39
Between 1931 and 1936 sculptural production was resurgent among surrealists.40
The third and fourth issues of La Surréalisme au service de la revolution, released
37 Jon Wood reads Giacometti’s sculptures from this period as self-referencing the sculptor’s working practice in that they “resemble a cast model and its outer mould casting.” According to Wood the sculptures are not abstract but containers for hidden forms. See Jon Wood, “From ‘vue d’atelier’ to ‘vie d’atelier:’ 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron and the Beginnings of Giacometti,” in Julia Kelly and Peter Read, Giacometti: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 17–42. 38 The link between surrealism and classicism can be explained by the contemporary fascination with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and his distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian. For an analysis of the impact the text had on contemporary thinkers, see Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, “Introduction,” in On Classical Ground, 2628. Surrealist art and writing have myriad connections to classicism, as seen by the surrealist retelling and reinterpreting of classical myths. This might have been originated from psychoanalytical discourse, which returns to Greek and Roman narratives and reinterprets them within the context of the nuclear family. Freud’s updating of the Oedipus myth into the “Oedipus Complex” in his 1901 text The Interpretation of Dreams was a favourite subject among the surrealists. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 363–6. The surrealists affiliated with the journal Documents were interested in linking classical tradition and primitivism. See Georges Bataille, “Le Cheval Academique,” Documents 1 (April 1929): 27–8. This text reverses the usual perception of Greek models of representations and allegedly failed Gaelic copies by calling the copies not “failed imitation” but “positive extravagance.” For an analysis of Bataille’s interest in primitivist classicism see Carrie Noland, “Bataille Looking,” Modernism/ Modernity 11.1 (2004): 125–60. See also Michel Leiris’s Manhood, in which the author described his own erotic interpretations of Greco-Roman myths: Michel Leiris, Manhood, 24–37. Another obvious example is the choice of the title Minotaure for the avant-garde journal, which refers to ancient Minos, where the half-man half-bull was kept in Daedalus’s labyrinth. For an analysis of the Documents circle with archeology, see: C. F. B. Miller, “Archeology,” in Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, eds. Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (London: Hayward Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 42–50. 39 For an analysis of the artist’s early writing see Michael Stone-Richards, “Giacometti’s Objects: Poetry, Childhood and the Neurotic Theatre of Projection,” in Julia Kelly and Peter Read, Giacometti: Critical Essays, 43–62. For a reading of the photographs in Minotaure see Jon Wood, Close Encounters, 24–25. 40 Harris pinpoints the beginning of the surrealist interest in the object in the third issue of La Surréalisme au service de la revolution and argues that it reaches its highpoint in 1936 with the Surrealist exhibition of Objects at Charles Ratton Gallery and the special issue of Cahiers d’art as the platform for these ideas. Harris interprets the production of surrealist objects as opposed to finding objects and infusing them with meaning as enabling collective activity, and thus related to the political debates within the surrealist movement during the time. Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s – Art, Politics, and the Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 701.
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together in December 1931, heralded the centrality of sculpture within the Bretonian arm
of the movement. These two issues offer several definitions for the surrealist object,
including Salvador Dalí’s introduced in the context of Giacometti’s Suspended Ball
which designates them as “objects of symbolic functioning” emerging from unconscious
desires and fantasies.41 From this perspective, Giacometti’s work, while still traditional in material and form, diverges from tradition in its iconography.42 Another definition of the
surrealist object was put forward by four examples reproduced in the third issue of
Surréalisme au service de la révolution. These objects – by Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Gala
Éluard, and André Breton – privileged the found over the produced (figures 4.19 and
4.20). All four examples are assemblages made of recycled materials and moving parts.
The fourth issue of Surréalisme au service de la révolution gave a political dimension to
the surrealist objects. The journal reproduced two photographs from the anti-colonial
exhibition (entitled l’Exposition Anti-Impérialiste: La Vérité sur les colonies) curated by
Surrealists affiliated with the French Communist Party as a reaction to the hugely successful Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris of the same year.43 One of these
photographs implicitly compares African and European objects of worship through its
41 Salvador Dalí, “Objets surréalistes,” La Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 1617. 42 In “Objets Mobiles et Muets,” his poetic text reproduced together with seven drawings of sculptures and designs for unrealized works, Giacometti speaks elusively of the effects of memory and lived experiences on the perception of objects. In this text, the concept of objective vision is problematized by the impact of the unconscious on our experience. Alberto Giacometti, “Objets mobiles et muets,” La Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 1819. 43 For an analysis of the two exhibitions see Janine Mileaf, “Body to Politics: Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the Anti-Imperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton,” Res 40 (Autumn 2001): 23954. Mileaf examines how similar strategies of juxtaposing artifacts with modern artworks were used to different effects thus reflecting the different political agendas of the two exhibitions.
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use of the inscription “European fetish,” a term used to undermine the prevalent discourse
promoting racial differences (figure 4.21).44
These ideas and tactics can be applied to Picasso’s sculptures from the period.
The surrealist interest in assemblage is traceable back to Picasso’s cubist constructions, which were included in the 1936 exhibition of surrealist objects.45 This was not the first
time that Picasso’s sculptures were deemed surrealist; the artist’s painted metal Guitar
from 1924 was reproduced in La Révolution surréaliste in the same year.46 The surrealist
interest in incorporating movement into the medium might have influenced Picasso’s iron
Figure, whose structure is disguised by dangling toys and other decorations, earning it
the artist’s title “The Christmas Tree” (figure 4.22).47 These additions call to mind the
hanging sugar lump in Dali’s Scatological object with Symbolic Function from
Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 as well as the suspended ball in Giacometti’s
sculpture of the same name.
***
The second part of the chapter will be devoted to contextualizing the
representation of Picasso’s sculptures and the works themselves in light of ideas and
44 Christopher Green interpreted these kind of visual comparisons that dominated Documents in similar terms to the ones I am using here. The author defines this strategy of display as “open to responses that find unity underlying difference, and in doing so challenge directly the unquestioning belief in the finality of difference….” See Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 224–44. See also Jolles’s description of the display in the exhibition as “explicitly revealing the iconography of colonialism.” Jolles, however, as will be seen shortly, argues that this tactic was unsuccessful: Adam Jolles, “The Tactile Turn, Envisioning a Postcolonial Aesthetic in France,” Yale French Studies 109 (2006): 2728. 45 Among the pieces at the Charles Ratton gallery were Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe, a cubist construction (Spies, 47), and the 1924 Guitar (Spies, 63). 46 Picasso’s Guitar (Spies, 63) was illustrated under the heading ‘Le Reveur parmi les murailles’ of Pierre Reverdy’s text in La Révolution surréaliste 1 (1924). 47 Spies, 74.
131 artworks from the 1940s, since from the 1933 sculptural scene, we move to the 1948 catalogue.
André Malraux’s ideas on the photographic display of art play a role in the comprehensive photographic representation of Picasso’s sculptures in the sculpture catalogue. As already discussed in the introduction, Malraux’s text Psychologie de l’art: le Musée imaginaire, published in 1947, promotes the photography of art objects in the
“image/imaginary museum” as an alternative to museum display.48 As Henri Zerner has pointed out, the musée imaginaire is actually a museum of paper.49 Malraux’s lavishly illustrated book demonstrates how an art book can overcome some of the inherent limitations of the museum.
Instead of the usual museum groupings by national schools, Malraux offers
“style” as the measure of all things.50 The musée imaginaire lends itself to more infinitely open-ended presentations of diverse objects from different times and cultures; an
48 André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: le musée imaginaire (Paris: Skira, 1947). The two other volumes in the series were released by 1949. All three volumes were quickly translated into English as André Malraux, The Psychology of Art, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949–50). A second, revised version of the text was published in 1951. See André Malraux, Les Voix de silence (Paris: Galerie de la Pléiade, 1951). For English edition of this book was published as Malraux, The Voices of Silence: Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Sacker and Warburg, 1954). All the quotes are taken from the 194950 version of the text. 49 Henri Zerner, ‘‘Malraux and the Power of Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson, 118. 50 The dubious nature of style as an analytical category was aptly described in Philip Sohm’s investigation of the concept. The art historian observes in his introduction that “style is a term of convenience with no stable meaning beyond the one that a writer wants to give it for some strategic purpose....” Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. This observation is crucial for understanding the prominence of the term in Malraux’s system as an alternative for the existing mode of classifying artworks based on national and geographic criteria. Malraux never defines the term in his text; he assumes that his pairing of objects according to their visual similarities is self-evident and requires no justification or explanation. At the same time, Malraux identifies style as a site of authorship, arguing that it also connects the creative subject to the culture to which s/he belong. For an analysis of the ambiguities in Malraux’s use of the term style, see John Darzins, “Malraux and the Destruction of Aesthetics,” Yale French Studies 18 (1955): 107113.
132 approach stemming from a humanist viewpoint.51 Since style is offered as the new criterion through which art is examined, western culture is no longer perceived as superior; the musée imaginaire becomes a transnational, cross-cultural system.
While this trait of Malraux’s text has played a significant role in post-modern assessments,52 the scholarship fails to note a second trait crucial to Malraux’s analysis.53
As the writer promotes comparisons between artifacts from different historical periods and varied geographical regions, he also encourages the use of photography for an extensive monographic study of individual artists. He writes that
exhibition of an artist’s work produces the same [comprehensive] effect. But they are limited in duration and, anyhow, no exhibition brings together Rembrandt’s “complete works” as does an album devoted to him. 54
The comparison of two paintings by the same artist, he argues, is more fruitful than a juxtaposition of two works by different artists:
[T]he question whether Rubens was universally admired because he proved himself as Titian’s peer … loses much of its point when one examines an album containing Rubens’ entire output... In it The Arrival of Marie de Medici invites no comparison with any Titian, only with Rubens’ other works.55
51 Malraux was heavily criticized by contemporary art historians such as E. H. Gombrich, who wrote that “there is no evidence that Malraux has done a day’s consecutive reading in a library or that he even tried to hunt up a new fact.” E. H. Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1994), 78. For an analysis of Malraux’s reception see Derek Allen, “‘Reckless Inaccuracies Abounding:’ André Malraux and the Birth of a Myth,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67.2 (spring 2009): 147–58. 52 The promotion of comparisons of art objects with no regard for their origins and context of creation made Douglas Crimp characterize Malraux’s project as humanist in essence. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 5456. Crimp’s analysis of the death of the museum defines Malraux’s use of reproduction as proto-postmodernist. 53 T. J. Demos offers a compelling analogy between Ducahmp’s Boite-en-valise and Malraux’s principles. But since Demos concentrates on the better-known trait of “the museum without walls” (reproduction as overcoming the original), he qualifies Duchamp’s choice of retrospective display as diverging from Malraux’s ideas. “As a mobile museum of photographic reproductions contained in a suitcase, it is also an idiosyncratic enactment of Malraux’s museum without walls. The major difference … is that Duchamp’s museum retains a monographic organization, something Malraux’s model dispenses with in favor of a hypostatization of style.” T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press, 2007), 33. Demos’s interpretation is inaccurate because it avoids Malraux’s favouring of monographic display as described above. 54 Malraux, The Psychology of Art, 19. 55 Ibid., 19.
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It is not surprising then that Malraux, after praising the possibilities of the
comprehensive photographic display of a single artist’s oeuvre, turns to Picasso, whose
complete body of work was catalogued by Christian Zervos commencing in 1932. After
admiring Picasso’s work for its youthfulness and innovation, the author points to
Picasso’s own awareness of comprehensiveness and its impact:
For several years, be it noted, Picasso has been giving not names, but dates to his canvases. “Henceforth authors will write their complete works,” Goethe once remarked. Picasso is painting his Complete Works. And his consummation is not in this picture or that but in the Zervos album, where the headlong sequence of works is more important than any single one of them, even the best.56
With this observation, Malraux links Picasso’s consistent dating of his works to their compilation in Zervos’s catalogue raisonné.57 Both strategies created a wider frame of reference that is, all of the works Picasso ever created. The effect of such an approach is to bypass the “masterpiece” in favour of the complete oeuvre.
Picasso’s work is represented in the first volume of The Psychology of Art by a
Brassaï photograph of his Boisgeloup Head of a Woman.58 This photograph is reproduced next to one of a miniscule Sumerian object (12.5 cm tall) from the third
century BC (figure 4.23). While Picasso’s work is represented only once, the same
Sumerian figurine appears twice more in Malraux’s book: the first image depicts the
whole piece from a frontal viewpoint (figure 4.24), while the next page presents a detail
shot photographed from a worm’s eye-view and a three-quarters angle (figure 4.25). 59
56 Ibid., 53. 57 This point is discussed in Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 34. 58 Head of a Woman is simply titled “sculpture” and is not dated. The photograph is not credited to Brassaï in the illustration list, but to Skira (“cliché Skira”), who most probably owned the rights to the image as the former publisher of Minotaure. The 1967 edition of Malraux’s text does not reproduce this image and instead duplicates three other works by Picasso: the 1937 sculpture The Reaper photographed by Brassaï, and the paintings Portrait of Vollard from 1909 and the October third, 1957 variation of Las Meninas. 59 Malraux, The Psychology of Art, 289.
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The images are so different that they seem to depict two separate sculptures; the first photograph completely washes out the details of the piece, making it appear two dimensional, while the close-up view, with its heightened play of light and shadow, emphasizes the sculpture’s volumes. The third photograph of the same sculpture, reproduced next to Picasso’s work, captures an even tighter close-up of its top from an angle. Dramatic lighting exaggerates the piece’s volumes and the close-up distorts its scale.60 Brassaï’s photograph of Head of a Woman, taken also from three-quarter angle,
accentuates the same qualities as the third photograph of the figurine: the object’s
volumes, the stark transitions between light and shadow, and its abstracted features.61
Malraux explicates this juxtaposition of an ancient figurine and a contemporary
sculpture by arguing that modernist sculptures by artists like André Derain and Picasso were influenced by non-western sculpture.62 But the comparison between modern art and non-western objects goes beyond this particular reasoning; it also underpins the pan- humanist rhetoric dominating the whole book. Malraux aimed at demonstrating through
his strategically chosen images that the comparative method of the musée imaginaire has
the power to erase cultural hierarchies by abolishing the alleged superiority of western culture and its artistic production. Picasso’s sculpture from the 1930s and the prehistoric
60 Malraux was cognizant of photography’s ability to change the depicted piece’s appearance: “The angle from which a work of sculpture is photographed, the manner in which it is framed and centered, and, above all, a carefully studied lighting of some famous works is beginning to share a degree of attention that once was granted only to film stars – may strongly accentuate something that previously has been only suggested. In addition to this, black and white photography imparts a family likeness to objects that have actually but slight affinity. … another consequence … [is that] in an album or an art book … the work reproduced loses its relative proportions. … the enlargement of seals, of coins, of amulets, of figurines creates truly fictitious arts. The unfinished quality of the execution, resulting from the very small scale of these objects, now becomes style.” Ibid., 23-4. 61 For further reading on Malraux’s layouts: Louise Merzeau, ‘‘Malraux metteur en page,’’ in Les Écrits sur l’art d’André Malraux, eds. Jeanyves Guérin and Julien Dieudonné (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2006), 6579. For an analysis of the author’s choice of reproductions and use of photographs, see Henri Zerner, “Malraux and The Power of Photography,” 116–30. 62 Ibid., 126.
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piece share visual qualities that allow us to extract them from their specific times and
places of origin and examine them through the “timeless” criterion of style. 63
Malraux develops his argument concerning the link between Picasso’s work and
prehistoric or primitive artifacts in his book on Picasso, La Tête d’obsidienne, written
after the artist’s death. As Christopher Green has noted, Malraux read Picasso’s work in
relation to sacred, religious art.64 Malraux describes Picasso’s deep belief in harmful
forces, and explains that his art-making functions as a form of protection from these
unknown forces, having the same purpose as the ritual objects that inspired him.65 But
since the viewers of Picasso’s pieces are not haunted by the same fears as Picasso, it is
ultimately the viewers’ lack of knowledge that links Sumerian art, Negro sculpture, and
Picasso’s work on a deep level. Malraux writes:
His sculptures evoke the multitude of sacred figures, which assault us because we do not know what they signify. The Egyptian kas, or “doubles,” which are no longer among the dead; the Sumerian gods we don’t believe in; the gods of India, of the Far East, and of Mexico; the fighting wild beasts of the nomadic horsemen; the saints to whom we no longer pray; the masks and fetishes that are no longer spirits. …Picasso’s magic creations correspond to the tribal arts, to the Mexican and prehistoric idols….66
It is possible to draw connections between Picasso’s commitment to photographing his sculptures and Malraux’s ideas about the musée imaginaire. Malraux
63 As the controversy surrounding the 1984 MoMA exhibition “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and The Modern” has shown, such emphasis on formal analysis is in itself the product of European priorities and philosophical foundations. For this debate see, among others, James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189214; Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” Artforum 23 (November 1984): 5461. 64 Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 524. 65 Picasso articulated his approach to the material world in his description of his first visit to the Trocadéro. Malraux quotes him as saying: “The Negro pieces were intercesseures, mediators. They were against everything against unknown, threatening spirits… I too was against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy…” Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. June Guicharnaud, and Jacques Guicharnaud (New York; Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 11. Originally published as André Malraux, La Tête d’obsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 66 Ibid., 33.
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and Picasso met in 1937,67 the same year in which Malraux first published on the
imaginary museum in the French magazine Verve.68 Finally, La Tête d’obisidienne shows
how intimately familiar Malraux was with Picasso’s sculptures; Picasso becomes the
ultimate example of an artist who is working within the infinite boundaries of the
“museum without walls,” finding inspiration in culturally diverse sources.69
In contrast to Malraux’s preference for monographic exploration of an artist’s
oeuvre, I would like to contextualize Picasso’s sculptures within contemporary artistic
tendencies. I will reconsider those qualities that were deemed crucial in my earlier
interpretation of the sculpture catalogue (touch as a site of possession and authorship, the
choice of materials) in light of French art of the 1940s. As argued in chapter three, the
layout of the 1948 sculpture catalogue emphasizes the trope of the artist’s hand.
Following Aragon’s call in La Peinture au défi, the artist’s hand is distanced from its
traditional associations with artistic dexterity, skill, or signature style; the artist’s touch is
offered as an alternative autographic method.
The invitation to interact with the photograph of Picasso’s Hand on the
catalogue’s cover reflects contemporary sensibilities promoting the tactile experience of
67 José Alvarez, Bertrand Bordier, and Jérôme Godeau, André Malraux et la modernité: le dernier des romantiques (Paris: Paris Musées, 2001), 117. 68 The writer published four articles about the topic before the book came out. André Malraux, “La Psychologie de l’art,” Verve 1.1 (winter 1937): 41–48. This is the same issue that includes a photograph of Picasso’s Guernica. André Malraux, “La Psychologie de l’art,” Verve 2 (Spring 1938): 21–25; André Malraux, “De la representation en orient et en occident,” Verve 3 (Summer 1938): 69–72; André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinema,” Verve 8 (summer 1940): 69–73. 69 At a certain point in his argument Malraux reverses the relationship between Picasso and those artistic and cultural artefacts, as he describes Picasso’s desire to abolish the musée imaginaire: “Manolo, Maillol, the cubist sculptors even Giacometti believed in ‘sculpture’ and wanted their works to become a part of its Museum Without Walls. Picasso wanted to get there before them; he also wanted to destroy it. All great artists destroy within themselves the works of their direct masters; Picasso’s true master – the rival that was to be destoryed very shortly became the Museum Without Walls.” Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, 35.
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art.70 The emphasis on tactile perception in art of the 1940s came to be identified with a
revolt against the values of western culture, becoming the signature style of “the new
primitivism.”71 This gauche manner of handling materials was aptly described by one of
the principal theorists and practitioners of art brut, Jean Dubuffet, in 1946:
The essential gesture of painting is … not to spread colored fluids around with … a little bunch of hairs, but to plunge your hands in buckets or bowls and to use your fingers and palms to cover the wall with dirt and paste … to knead it, body to body, to leave the traces of the thoughts and rhymes and impulses that run through your nerves and veins.72
The artist’s rejection of tools in favour of unmediated contact with materials resonates
with contemporary anti-technological attitudes. Sarah Wilson has proposed Gaston
Bachelard’s description of pâte as a primordial matter, articulated in his Collège de
France lectures, as the source of this approach.73
André Malraux put forward an alternative explanation for this emphasis on
tactility in visual artwork. In a text written on the occasion of the first exhibition of Jean
Fautrier’s Les Otages, Malraux described the heavily textured paintings as a performative
evocation of the artist’s life and biography. The author claims that modern artworks,
including those of Fautrier, possess their maker’s autobiographical trace and reenact the
inseparable link between the art object and its maker.74 Immediately after stating that
70 Adam Jolles argued that the emphasis on tactile stimulation was pervasive in the 1930s among surrealist artists who resisted the centrality of visual strategies and their role in promoting colonial ideology. He claims that surrealist artworks, such as Man Ray’s 1926 Noire et Blance, engaged with primitivist subject matter by created visual analogies between Europe and its colonies, which failing to address the obvious inequalities caused by colonialism. This strategy was eventually replaced by artwork that address the viewer’s sense of touch, such as Man Ray’s photograph of Méret Oppenheim titled Erotique Voileé from 1933. Adam Joles, “The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Postcolonial Aesthetic in France,” 1738. 71 Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute,” in Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945–1955, ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 26, 33–34. 72 Jean Dubuffet, “À pleines mains (1945)” quoted in Pepe Karmel, “The Would-be Barbarians,” Apollo 155.488 (2002): 19. 73 Sarah Wilson, Paris Post War, 33-34. 74 Butler closely analyzes the appearance and development of this trope in Malraux’s early writing on Fautrier and ties it to the writer’s larger project as articulated in The Voices of Silence. Karen K. Butler
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“just as we are no longer able to see a work of art independent of its historical
ramifications … we like-wise have begun to view some paintings in terms of their
maker’s artistic history,” Malraux mentions Picasso’s commitment to dating his works
sometimes even to the hour of the work’s creation, thus providing chronological, and
sequential context to understanding his works, replacing the singular ‘master piece’ with
an oeuvre; “Picasso is painting his ‘complete paintings,’” he writes.75 These two
statements support the proposed reading of Picasso’s Hand as it appears in the Chêne catalogue.
Other artists of Picasso’s generation participated in this promotion of tactile application of materials, to different ends. From the 1940s onward, Alberto Giacometti created fragile images of the human body through excessive articulation of his sculptures’ surfaces. These works were only exhibited in Paris in 1951 but their photographs appear in print in the 1940s.76 Jean-Paul Sartre described Giacometti’s new sensitivity to matter
as simultaneously creating and disintegrating form. For Sartre the plaster figures existed
“halfway between nothingness and being, still in the process of modification,
improvement, destruction and renewal;” and “assumed an independent, definitive
existence” and “embarked on a social career far beyond [the artist’s] control.”77 While
“Fautrier’s First Critics: André Malraux, Jean Paulhan, Fracnis Ponge,” in Jean Fautrier 1898–1964, eds. Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 359. 75 André Malraux, “Jean Fautrier: Preface to the Fautrier Exhibition catalogue (1945),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 191. Malraux’s preface to Fautrier’s exhibition precedes the publication of The Psychology of Art by two years, but the phrasing of the observation regarding Picasso’s painting his “complete paintings” is identical to what Malraux will write in the latter text. 76 The most comprehensive display of Giacometti’s new work took place in a photo essay published in Cahiers d’art 2021 (194546): 25368. 77 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘The Quest for the Absolute,” in The Aftermath of War (Situation III), trans. Chris Turner (London; New York; Calcuta: Seagull Books, 2008), 338. The text was originaly published as Jean- Paul Sartre, ‘‘La Recherché de l’absolu (1948,)” in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 289305.
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Sartre saw Giacometti’s technique as a “quest for the absolute” or part of a larger process the goal of which is signification,78 the contemporary writer Michel Leiris described the process of disintegration as an end in itself, that is a retreat from material existence and from signification.79
Finally, and crucial to my argument, Brassaï’s interest in graffiti which he had photographed for decades fits into this emphasis on material through highly articulated textures and surfaces. In 1933 a selection of his photographs of Parisian graffiti were published in the first issue of Minotaure; and in the 1940s, he showed various photographs from this series to his artist-friends.80 One of these early vi ewers of
Brassaï’s graffiti photographs was Picasso, whose enthusiastic response was recorded in
Conversations with Picasso. Brassaï argues that the rawness of the graffiti inspired
Picasso; on one occasion he proposed to Brassaï that they should go together – Picasso with his pocketknife, Brassaï with his camera – and photograph Picasso creating graffiti.81 On another occasion, Brassaï commented that the optical effect of some of
78 See Hubert Damisch’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre L’imaginaire on these exact terms, pointing out the philosopher’s evaluation of the visual as first and foremost a signifier: “un portrait, un passage, une forme ne se laisserait reconnaître, en peinture, que pour autant que nous cesserions de viser le tableau pour ce qu’il est, matériellement parlant, et que la conscience prendrait recul par rapport à la réalité pour produire en image l’objet représenté.” Hubert Damisch, “L’Ével du Regard,” in Fenêtre jaune cadmium – ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 67. For this debate see also Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting as Model,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1991), 24649. 79 Michel Leiris, ‘‘Thoughts Around Alberto Giacometti,’’ Horizon 19.114 (June 1949): 41117. Leiris also published an earlier text on the sculptor appearing in Documents: Michel Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” Documents 1.4 (September 1929): 20910. For an analysis of the two writers’ different approaches to Giacometti’s work, see Julia Kelly, “Alberto Giacometti, Michel Leiris and the Myth of Existentialism,” in Giacometti: Critical Essays, 151169. 80 Brassaï’s book Graffiti was published in German in 1960, and the following year it was published in French. For the latest edition of the text see Brassaï, Graffiti (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). 81 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 184.
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these incised faces,82 in which the carved eyes appear both protuberant and receding, was
inspired by his photographs.83
Some of Picasso’s sculptures can be read in light of this current fascination with
the unrefined application of materials and with attention to surface effects. Man with a
Sheep, for example, presents a range of modelling techniques,84 and the influence of
graffiti can perhaps be found in the engraved pebbles whose incisions echo those seen on
Parisian walls.85 Moreover, some of Picasso’s sculptures bear a striking visual
resemblance to Jean Fautrier’s sculpted Heads from the Otages series, both in their
subject matter and in their treatment of material (figure 4.26 and 4.27).86
Many of the works in the sculpture catalogue are made from unconventional
materials. In the 1930s, Picasso continued the boundary-pushing regarding art materials
that originated in his cubist days: examples of such art are the Juan-les-Pins reliefs, and
the cover for Minotaure (assembled from corrugated cardboard, metal foil, ribbons,
printed paper, paper doily, artificial plant, and tacks); but these are merely a preludes to
the plethora of works created from nontraditional materials during the 1940s. Picasso was
not the only artist to use such materials in his work during the 1940s. Like all French
civilians, artists were profoundly affected by the German occupation and by the
overwhelming shortages. These circumstances partially explain the typical
82 Brassaï might have been referring to Bust of a Woman from 1942 (Spies, 205). 83 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 202. While Brassaï attributed this effect to graffiti, this device could be traced back to Picasso’s 1912 Guitar cardboard construction, created under the influence of an African mask the artist owned. 84 Elsen describes eloquently the variety of methods used by Picasso in the work: “Having fixed the salient features, extremities and joints, Picasso improvised in the blocking out of the major masses, sometimes applying slabs of clay-like poultices to the back chest and shoulders, thereby giving the form of a layered look which links the sculpture’s surface to its depth. The construction procedure was partly a matter of mash and slash. Clay ‘bullets’ and slabs were compressed by thumbing. A knife stroke simultaneously removed excess clay fixed the direction of the limbs and the big panes, and created landing strips for light.” Albert Elsen, “Picasso’s Man with a Sheep: Beyond Good and Evil,” Art International 21 (1977): 9. 85 See Spies, 14850. 86 Spies, 218.
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resourcefulness of French art-making during these years. One such example is Le Groupe de Grasse, which included Alberto Magnelli, Susi Gerson, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Jean Arp,
Sonia Delaunay, and Nelly Van Doesburg, who hid in the unoccupied Southwest for the duration of the war. This group worked in an abstract style and experimented with
collective projects.87 Magnelli, for example, showed great resourcefulness by creating collages from readily available and inexpensive materials such as carbon paper, corrugated paper, plants, sand, strings, music sheets, and fabric scraps.88
To supplement the extant argument about material scarcity, I offer another
explanation for Picasso’s approach during the Second World War. In my view, the
sculptures consciously call attention to the problems of artistic “value” under the
pressures of war. Picasso’s sculptural production of course responded to the period’s
political and economic conditions; but the artist was committed to creating artworks that resisted any assimilation into the existing system of financial exploitation.
There is a well-known anecdote about Picasso’s life in the occupied capital.
Picasso’s studio was subject to erratic Nazi inspections and, on one occasion, the German soldiers’ attention was drawn to the artist’s bronze sculptures. The officers were not concerned with the sculptures’ aesthetic value; rather, they were interested in the materials from which the sculptures were made. Cognizant of the motives behind officers’ appreciation of the bronze, and the potential threat they posed to his work,
87 On the Groupe de Grasse see Claude Laugier, “Le Groupe of Grasse,” in Paris-Paris 1937-57: Arts plastiques, littérature, théâtre, cinéma, vie quotidienne et environnement, archives sonores et visuelles, photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 143–4. Brigitte Hedel-Sasmon, “Éloge de la Fuite,” in Côte d'Azur et la modernité (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 67–8. Dominique Forest, “Alberto Magnelli,” Ibid., 70–1. Odile Biec Morello, “Sophie Taeuber-Jean Arp,” Ibid., 72–3. Daniéle Molinari, “Sonia Delaunay,” Ibid., 74–5. For a review of the exhibition see Kenneth E. Silver, “An Invented Paradise” Art in America 83.3 (March 1998): 78–82. 88 For further reading on Magnelli, see Daniel Abadie, Magnelli (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1989); Daniel Abadie and Giovanni Lista, Magnelli: Entre cubisme et futurisme (Paris: Hazan, 2004).
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Picasso exclaimed, “they won’t help you make your big guns.” “No,” one of the Germans answered, “but they could make little ones.”89
Keeping this anecdote in mind, I would like to offer the origin of the 1942
sculpture Bull’s Head as Picasso’s response to such a pragmatic (de)valuation of art.
Assembled from discarded bicycle parts, Bull’s Head was put together in a nonfunctional
manner so that the U-shaped handlebar roughly stands for the bull’s horns and the
triangular saddle for its head (figure 4.28). The result is an economical image of a bull
that still looks like the (now functionless) bicycle from which it was made. Françoise
Gilot tells us that Picasso used to say that this sculpture was transformable:
When I put the [seat and handlebar] together, everybody who sees them says, ‘look, that’s a bull,’ until a cyclist comes by and says, ‘look that’s the seat of a bicycle,’ so transforming it back into a seat and a handlebar. This can go on indefinitely, the demands of spirit and flesh permitting.90
Just as the bronze sculptures can turn into guns, so the bull can turn into a bicycle. The
work’s meaning therefore lies in the infinite oscillation between the bicycle and the bull,
a movement that defines the bicycle’s use-value and the sculpture’s aesthetic value as
mutually exclusive and mutually confounding. It is either a bicycle or a bull, or neither a
bicycle nor a bull.91
In times of peace, the value of an artwork is higher than the price of its materials.
In times of war a different economy prevails. Just as Germany successfully mobilized the
economic resources of the nations it conquered, exploiting the occupied countries’
89 Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 103. 90 Françoise Gilot with Carlton Blake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 19. 91 This terrain was staked out by Marcel Ducahmp’s first readymade Bicycle Wheel, which also examines the relationship between function and form (or uselessness and disassembled form).
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production and utilizing their industries,92 the Germans also used art objects to finance
their war effort. While the Nazi Party actively promoted art that expressed values
consistent with its own ideology, artworks that did not conform to the party line faced a
different fate. Even though Picasso and other modernist artists were defined as
degenerate in the notorious 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst, their work was still of use to
the Nazis. Confiscated modern artworks were sold in public auctions in Paris and the profits were funneled to revive the German economy.93 Beyond that conversion of art to
currency, the Germans’ desperate need for nonferrous metals led them to pillage bronze
sculptures throughout Germany and the occupied countries, and to reuse the materials for
armament production.
Many of Picasso’s wartime sculptures answer to these questions of value:
Picasso’s choice of materials such as driftwood, pebbles, discarded objects, and
disposable objects such as cigarette boxes, tin cans, and paper napkins, reveals his
interest in the ostensibly valueless and useless. If Bull’s Head raises questions concerning
use-value as opposed to aesthetic value, suggesting that the two cannot exist
simultaneously, Woman with a Long Dress, made of a dressmaker’s doll with hand-
modelled face and arm, could still be used as a mannequin – as seen in a Brassaï
photograph that will be analyzed in the following chapter. Remarkably, and in poignant
testimony to his artistic commitment, Picasso made one assemblage using the most
valuable product available during a period of food shortage: a piece of bread.
92 Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Paul Saunders, “Economic draining German Black Market Operations in France, 1940–1944,” Global Crime 9.1–2 (February 2008): 138168. 93 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, The Art of the Defeat, 86101.
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To conclude, Picasso’s sculptures and their public display through photographs need to be contextualized in terms of other artists’ works, shared artistic strategies and common methods of sculptural production, as well as methods of art display. The work
needs to be understood, insofar as it is photographed, in dialogue with the writing of
André Malraux and the formulation of the musée imaginaire. Further, the different
circumstances and vibrant scenes in the 1930s and 1940s dictated Picasso’s artistic
concerns as well as the artist’s choice of display format and of photographic conventions.
Chapter Five: Other than Brassaï - Contemporary Photographers and Picasso’s
Sculptures
Brassaï’s privileged position as Picasso’s main photographer changed in the
1940s as Picasso gave others access to his studio and allowed them to photograph him.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Lee Miller photographed Picasso after the liberation of Paris, as did Alexander Libermann in the late 40s and early 50s. In the 1960s
David Douglas Duncan became Picasso’s favourite photographer but never gained exclusivity;1 Edward Quinn, André Gomès, and André Ostier, among others, documented
Picasso and his family, studio, and work.2 While my main focus is Brassaï’s photographic fashioning of Picasso’s sculptures, this chapter offers context for the ways in which other photographers depicted his work. Different images of the same sculptures demonstrate the role of photography in circulating ideas including, presumably,
Picasso’s about the sculptures, and in shaping their reception.
The following pages focus on strategically chosen photographs of Picasso’s sculptures taken by Picasso himself, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Robert Capa. These were taken during the same time period as Brassaï’s and at the same locations the
1 David Douglas Duncan published several books on Picasso, lavishly illustrated with his own photographs of the artist: The Private World of Pablo Picasso (New York: Ridge Press, 1958); Picasso’s Picasso: The Treasures of La Californie (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); Goodbye Picasso (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1974); Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration 1881–1981 (New York: Viking Press, 1980); Picasso and Jacqueline (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988); Picasso Paints a Portrait (New York: Abrams, 1996); Picasso Nomad (New York: Norton, 2003); Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund Odyssey (Wabern: Benteli, 2006). 2 Several exhibitions have been devoted to Picasso’s photographs. In 1991 Bernadac organized the exhibition “Picasso vu par les photographes,” at the Musée Picasso in Paris between 16 january–8 april 1991. See Marie-Laure Bernadac, Picasso visages (Paris: Reunion des musées nationaux, 1991). During the spring of 2001, the exhibition “Objectif Picasso” took place in Paris at the Galerie Mennour. See Kamel Mennour, Objectif Picasso: Man Ray, Pierre Jahan, Denise Colomb, Paul-Louis, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, René Buri, André Villers, Edward Quinn, Cecil Beaton, Lucien Clergue et autres (Paris: Galerie Mennour, 2001). For an extensive bibliography of publications by photographers who made Picasso their subject see Picasso visage, 59.
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Boisgeloup and rue Grands-Augustines studios but the similarities end there, for each
photographer frames the sculptures differently. Comparing the images heightens our
awareness of their constructed nature and gives context to Brassaï’s view of his role as
the photographer of Picasso’s sculptural work.
The first set of photographs was taken by Picasso himself. The artist was an amateur photographer who documented his work regularly during the first two decades of the 20th century.3 These three photographs, taken at the Boisgeloup studio around 1931,4
depict Bust of a Woman and Woman’s Head in different installations (figures 5.15.3).5
The sculptures were unfinished when Picasso photographed them, as is made apparent by
Brassaï’s subsequent photographs; by 1933 the sculptor had reduced the size of both
sculptures and changed the former piece’s format from a ‘head’ to a ‘bust’ by adding
shoulders and breasts.
The three photographs document the artist’s attempt to combine his sculptures
into different configurations, as he examined alternative spatial relationships between the
pieces, and turned the separate works into a grouping. In order to achieve this, Picasso
rotated the sculptures to face different directions. The first photograph shows two works
in a row Bust of a Woman standing before Woman’s Head thus creating a parade of
long necks, noses, and bulging eyes. The second displays the same two sculptures facing
3 Baldassari’s work on the photographic findings in Picasso’s archives has established how crucial photography was to the artist, both as a maker and a collector of prints as a source of inspiration. Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997). 4This series of photographs was recently found by Bernard Picasso, the artist’s grandson, and was published in John Richardson’s third installment of A Life with Picasso. Richardson reproduces six of these, but he does not specify how many pictures were found in the family archives. He dates them to early spring-mid summer of 1931 by the foliage on the trees. I was unable to gain access to the archives in Madrid to examine the whole film. John Richardson with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life With Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 442–447. 5 Spies, 131.II and Spies, 132.II
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one another, rubbing noses. Finally, the third photograph shows them facing opposite
directions, perhaps attached by their hair. The practice of grouping sculptures in this way seems natural in light of their stylistic and material affinities and their proximity in
Picasso’s Boisgeloup studio.
Picasso’s biographer John Richardson interprets the installation in the second photograph as a representation of a kiss but for their large phallic noses the sculptures
would be locking lips and the third photograph as a reference to the double-headed
figure of Janus. He does not offer an interpretation for the first installation. Richardson’s readings ignore the comic element of these photographs. The biographer does not see, or
perhaps chooses to avoid the ways that rotating the two sculptures to face each other
turns their features into a grotesque mirroring, or a failed kiss, or how silly their giraffe
necks appear when the sculptures are placed one after the other. The photographs do not
lend themselves easily to Richardson’s more elevated readings.
The images are out-of-focus, blurry, and awkwardly cropped. Their subjects are
not centrally positioned and are shot from unflattering viewpoints, which hampers a clear
view of the installations. These traits suggest that the images were not designed for public
consumption and dissemination as Brassaï’s photographs were but were created for a
viewer who is already familiar with the works, namely Picasso himself, and that they
were integral to his process at the time.
Picasso often photographed his incomplete works, especially during his cubist
phase.6 The 1913 photograph of the three-dimensional Guitar surrounded by two-
6 Picasso used to stage these events by asking friends and colleagues to pose in front of unfinished works. For example Baldassari reproduces three photographs of Three Woman in different stages of completion. The earliest has André Salmon in it, the second Sebasità Junyer Vidal, and the photograph depicting the most advanced stage also includes Fernande Olivier and Dolly van Dongen. Anne Baldassari, Picasso and
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dimensional papiers collés sheds light on Picasso’s photographic practice (figure 5.4),7
about which there are conflicting interpretations. Anne Baldassari, following Edward
Fry’s terminology,8 describes the photograph as a “didactic demonstration”9 that
registers the shift from two-dimensional collages into three-dimensional assemblages.
Elsewhere the author claims that “the photographic act interrupts the energy of the
productive process, allowing the artist’s gaze to ‘distance’ its object….”10 In a third text,
Baldassari again argues that the photograph facilitates detachment and objectivity, calling
the studio wall “a test-site for experiments.”11
These two final readings are equally applicable to the 1931 photographs. Rather
than merely documenting Picasso’s working process, thus allowing a better
understanding of the final product, the photographs enable the process: they distance the artist’s gaze and become test-sites for experimentation. After assembling the two sculptures, Picasso set each permutation in a photograph and continued onto the next, thus employing combinatory trial and error.
Following this examination of the photographs, I believe that Picasso linked the works capriciously. The different logic underlying each combination narrative (kissing), compositional (one after the other), and, if we accept Richardson’s reading, mythological
Photography: The Dark Mirror, 64–66. Another example is the two photographs of Marie Laurencin in front of Man with a Guitar taken by Picasso in the fall of 1911, photographs that were thoroughly analyzed in T. J. Clark, “Cubism and Collectivity,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 169–223, esp. 188–190. 7 Zervos was the first to publish two of these photographs in the supplement to the fourth volume of his Picasso catalogue raisonné. In her extensive work at the photographic archives of Musée Picasso, Baldassari discovered a third one in the late 1990s. 8 Edward Fry, “Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity,” Art Journal 47 (1988): 306. 9 “Picasso sometimes used his sculptures for didactic demonstrations, for example, when he hung the carton Guitare (Spies 27A) in the midst of a series of papiers collés on which he was working during the winter of 1912–13.” Anne Baldassari, “Chapter 22,” in Elizabeth Cowling, Matisse Picasso (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 357, n. 8. 10 Anne Baldassari, Picasso Working on Paper, trans. George Collins (London: Merrell, 2000), 65. 11 Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 106.
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(Janus) – and the flippant execution suggest that the installations were whimsically conceived. Photography allowed Picasso to experiment without committing to one particular option, and without making permanent changes to his works. The photographs are therefore the only evidence of this idea that was tested and deserted: Picasso abandoned altogether the combination of these sculptures into a group and left them as a series.
These photographs are further illuminated by Picasso’s own words. He once complimented Brassaï for his ability to cast new light on the sculptures,12 suggesting that
the other man’s photographs allowed Picasso to achieve the distance required to shift from maker to viewer of the works. On another occasion, Picasso argued that it would be interesting to “photographically document not the stages of a painting, but its metamorphoses. It could perhaps show the mind’s path toward the concretization of its dream.”13 The photographs discussed above do register the “mind’s path,” as coming
through from the different possibilities that the artist tested.
One of Brassaï’s 1933 photographs examines the same combinatory possibility as
Picasso’s (figure 5.5), such that the choice of angle fuses separate sculptures into a larger
whole. The composition is centered on Woman’s Head, a plaster mass from the same
series as those mentioned above, but not photographed by Picasso in 1931.14 The
sculpture is depicted in profile, emphasizing the round, exaggerated shapes of its hairdo
and nose. Other plaster sculptures appear in the vicinity of Woman’s Head: in the
12 Brassaï reports Picasso saying “it’s curious, isn’t it, but it’s through your photographs that I can judge my sculptures. When I look at the pictures I see the work with new eyes.” Picasso and Company, trans. Francis Price, pref. by Henry Miller, intro. by Roland Penrose (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 118. 13 Christian Zervos, “Conversations avec Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art 7-10 (1935): 1738. Translation taken from Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 12. 14 Spies, 133.II
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foreground are details of the most abstracted version of the Boisgeloup sculptures, barely recognizable due to the partial view; Bather is located in the middle ground to the right of the main sculpture while Rooster appears to its left; and finally, two plaster eyes hang on the wall, behind Rooster.15 The wall also contains other objects. The arrangement of
sculptures and hanging objects creates an independent assemblage that resembles a
disproportionate face, as the hoop and ivy branch to the right of Woman’s Head connects
to the two plaster eyes, the round shape becomes a nose, and the serrated form a mouth.
Brassaï effectively combines the different elements in the studio to create new
sculptures. The photographer’s choice of angle rhymes all the objects in the photograph
in a way that extends the central object into a more elaborate work. The ivy branch seems
to be attached to Head of Woman so it can be read as an extension of her hair. Similarly, the abstract forms in the foreground become the woman’s body, transforming this female
figure into a sphynx or an octopus-like creature, whose body stands in contrast to the
more realistic representation of her facial features. This new assemblage is characterized
by formal heterogeneous qualities as well as by hybrid subject matter (half-woman, half-
animal), stressing the differences between the voluminous sculptural language of
Woman’s Head and the cruder representation of the face on the wall. The effect of this
combinatory approach is that the elements can migrate from one form to the other, create
multiple connections and enhance the sense of movement and metamorphosis, as if
everything in the picture were mutable and fecund: the eye on the wall, for example, echoes the cockscomb, just as the rooster’s wings repeat the formal qualities of the
sculptures in the foreground.
15 Spies, 110.II, 108.II, 134. II, 122, and 124a.
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For the 1948 catalogue, Brassaï chose to render the same sculptures in a more
traditional fashion. By then the whole series was cast in bronze, suggesting that the works
were completed, and Brassaï’s photographs are far less adventurous than those he
undertook in 1933. The contact sheets serve again as our repository of images: on sheet
number 5, Brassaï pasted five photographs of Bust of a Woman below four images of
Woman’s Head (figure 5.6).16 Even considering the changes in the sculptures’ positions
and the minute variations in lighting, the photographs are virtually identical. They repeat the same conventions typifying his work for the catalogue: the work is set alone on a
pedestal in front of a wall, and Brassaï tests various angles and lighting conditions as he
takes several photographs. With the exception of these nuances the resulting images are
identical.
The differences between Picasso’s photographs of his own work in 1931 and
Brassaï’s photographs from the thirties and forties show how various contexts, purposes,
and audiences shape representations of the sculptures. While Picasso’s photographs were
created for himself, Brassaï’s were made with an audience in mind; while Picasso’s are of
poor quality and intended to quickly test and document an idea, Brassaï’s 1933 image accomplishes a poetic nod to the artist’s explorations of transformation, such that one
form can shift and replace another (an eye becoming a breast). In the later photographs
the sculptures seems to be almost washed away by the call for clear depiction. Their
representation is almost too neutral and impersonal, resulting in ineffective photographs.
My second example compares photographs by Brassaï and Lee Miller. Miller’s
photograph with Picasso in his Rue des Grands-Augustins studio was published in British
16 Contact sheet five is reproduced in Anne Baldassari, Brassaï/Picasso, Conversations avec la lumière (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), 194.
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Vogue in October 1944 together with nine other photographs depicting postwar Paris.
Miller worked freelance for Vogue, both as a fashion photographer and, from December
1942, as a U.S. war correspondent. In this Vogue spread Miller functions in both
capacities: even though the photographs depict Parisian cultural life and fashion, Miller
was only able to enter the recently liberated city due to her status as an embedded
photographer to the U.S. troops. The photographs in the British Vogue are not precisely dated; the short text that accompanies them declares that “the battle of Paris [was] just won,” but the scholarship has yet to determine the exact date of Miller’s visit to Picasso’s studio.17
The Vogue photograph depicting Miller and Picasso’s reunion is relevant to my
investigation (figure 5.7). In Picasso’s Rue des Grands-Augustins studio, Picasso and
Miller look amicably into one another’s eyes as he gently holds the nape of her neck and she places her hand on his shoulder. While they face one another and seem absorbed in
their embrace, they are still conscious of the presence of the camera: Picasso is holding a cigarette in his right hand while Miller keeps her left arm behind her back, forming an open embrace as if to include the camera.
Miller’s attire is significant in contextualizing the photograph. Her outfit is a casual version of her U.S. war correspondent uniform. She wears her beret as well as her
olive-coloured shirt, but she has taken off the jacket and tie and opened the top button of
17 Carolyn Burke in her 2005 Miller biography puts Miller at Michel de Brunhoff’s apartment with her G.I. friends on August 25th and dates Miller’s studio visit to the first days after the Liberation without drawing a clear timeline. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2005), 231. Elizabeth Cowling, in her book based on Roland Penrose’s notebooks and letters relating to Picasso, published the following account by Miller, describing the mood of the encounter: “between laughter and tears and having my bottom pinched and my hair mussed we exchanged news about friends and their work, incoherently, and looked at new pictures which were dated on all the Battle of Paris days… I added my K rations to their celebration chicken and we drank lots of wine, and gossiped and held hands and cried some more.” Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 51.
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her shirt.18 Her clothes signal her military status, which has allowed her to enter the
French capital, but her casual appearance also suggests that it is as a friend rather than as
a soldier that she visits the studio. Picasso also appears in an outfit that suggests casualness and ease; he still wears a necktie and a tucked-in dress shirt, but he does not
wear a jacket.
Behind the two and to Picasso’s right, we see Man with a Sheep, a work modeled
in clay in February or March 1943 after months of working on this motif.19 The sculpture
was not the only artwork present at the studio at the time. In a different print of the same
photograph,20 we see also a stacked pile of framed canvases facing the wall, cropped out of the Vogue image. It seems significant that Miller chose to depict her reunion with
Picasso with Man with a Sheep in the background, and not, for example, with Picasso’s
most recent work, his lustful version of Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, painted between
the 24th and 29th of August 1944.21
In his article “Picasso’s Man with a Sheep: Beyond Good and Evil,” Albert Elsen
enumerates the sculpture’s myriad interpretations. Together with the common reading
that contrasts the “peaceful figure” with “the notion of war,”22 Elsen also offers Greek
sources for the sculpture’s meaning, reads it in light of Christian symbolism, interprets it
as a self portrait, and even quotes Jaime Sabartés, who suggested that the inspiration for
18 When comparing Lee’s uniform in more official photographs (see Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller [London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007], 166, figure 143) to the uniform worn by American soldiers during the Second World War (see Andrew Mollo and Digby Smith, World Army Uniforms since 1939 [Poole, England: New Orchard Editions, 1986], 104) it is clear that her U.S. war correspondent uniforms were modified from the official U.S. uniform, similarly to her male war correspondent counterparts (such as David E. Scherman, with whom she worked closely), but with the feminine twist of the skirt. Her beret, for example, is identical in shape to the enlisted man’s ‘overseas cap,’ with the addition of a patch bearing the inscription that marks her position in the forces as a non-combatant. 19 Spies, 280.I. The preliminary sketches for the sculptures (Z.XII, 087 and Z.XII, 088) are dated July 16th and 17th, 1942. 20 Reprinted in Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso, 52–3. 21 Bacchanal; After Poussin (Z.XIV, 035). 22 Werner Spies, Sculptures by Picasso (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), 146.
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the work came from Picasso’s dinner at his favourite restaurant (“he had seen a lamb at
the Catalan,” Picasso’s secretary told Brassaï).23 The art historian does not privilege any
one of these interpretations. Instead he argues that the work’s meaning is determined by
its location: when the sculpture was first placed in a church in Vallauris, it became an
image of the Christian Good Shepherd, whereas when it was moved to the city square
next to a World War I memorial, “it became an accidental monument to the victims of all wars.” In David Douglas Duncan’s 1957 photograph of the sculpture in the garden of La
Californie (figure 5.8), Picasso’s villa in Cannes, it is instead the sculpture’s pastoral
associations that come to the fore.24
In Miller’s photograph, the sculpture addresses the camera and by extension the
viewers directly and earnestly, and Picasso and Miller’s encounter accentuates particular aspects of its symbolic content. The photograph documents a warm, human
rendezvous and promotes values such as freedom and friendship, thus playing into the
humanist interpretation later promoted by Roland Penrose, the photographer’s husband,
who describes the work as attesting to “Picasso’s love of humanity.”25 In this context, the
work can indeed be read symbolically, even if ambiguously, as a powerful, pacifist image.
Brassaï’s photographs of Man with a Sheep emphasize different qualities and
implications. One of them, taken a few years before Miller’s, was reproduced in 1946 in
23 Albert Elsen, “Picasso’s Man with a Sheep: Beyond Good and Evil,” Art International 21 (1977): 815, 29-31. More recently, the sculpture has been read as a part of Picasso’s focus on “memento mori” images during the war: Elizabeth Cowling, “Picasso’s Imagery of Death: Sculpture as Memento Mori,” Apollo Magazine 144.417 (November 1996): 9–15. 24 The work of David Douglas Duncan is outside of the timeframe of this exploration. Duncan’s commitment to photographing Picasso has produced a body of work as large as Brassaï’s, photographs that deserve a full-length study. 25 “When at the end of the war visitors of all nationalities crowded into his studio, the tall white figure greeted them as a symbol of Picasso’s love of humanity.” Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and His Work (London: Gollancz, 1958), 131. Interestingly, his description of the work emphasizes the location of the work in Picasso’s studio.
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Harriet and Sidney Janis’s book Picasso: The Recent Years 1939-1946, but not in the sculpture catalogue (figure 5.9).26 One of four Brassaï photographs in the Janis’s book,27
it depicts Man with a Sheep flanked by Head of Woman (Dora Maar) and Cat in
Picasso’s studio.28 The authors date all three sculptures to the 1940s. Only Man with a
Sheep is titled (as The Shepherd); the two other works are only referred to as “plasters
made during the war.”
The tight composition of the published print, unlike the uncropped image found in
the archives of Musée Picasso,29 emphasizes the sculpture’s position. On the left, Head of
a Woman is propped up by three bases and is positioned in the foreground so that it
seems to be the tallest of the three. Next to Head of a Woman is Man with a Sheep, which, despite being the tallest work in the photograph (surpassing two metres), appears to be smaller than Head due to its location at the farthest point in the background. To the right,
Cat, the smallest work in the picture, is placed on a barstool in the middle ground. This play with the sculptures’ size vis-à-vis their placement is complemented by Brassaï's
attention to the works’ scale. Cat is life-sized while Man with a Sheep and Head of a
Woman are both on a non-realistic scale: the first slightly larger than life, the latter monumental.
Such attention to differences between size and scale as registered in photographs is atypical of Brassaï’s approach. In most of the 1948 catalogue images, the sculptures’ actual sizes were avoided in favour of disproportionate representations of general, and
mostly false, monumentality. This approach typifies all six proofs of Man with a Sheep
26 Harriet and Sidney Janis, Picasso: The Recent Years 1939–1946 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1947), plate 131. 27 Ibid., plates 2, 47, 129, and 131. Only one of these four Brassaï photographs is actually credited to him. 28 Spies, 280.I, 197.I, 278.I. 29 MP 1986-33.
156 on contact sheet 2 (figure 5.10);30 five of them depict the work from a frontal view, similar to Miller’s image, and one in profile. With the exception of one photograph, which shows the sculpture from the knees up, the images all enhance the sculpture’s strong kouros-like, walking but immobile stance. Unlike Miller’s photograph, the studio is excluded from Brassaï’s images as a result of the tight framing. The effect of this close-up is twofold: it both emphasizes the sculpture’s highly articulated surface and lends it monumentality.
The Brassaï photograph published by Harriet and Sidney Janis does not modify our sense of Man with a Sheep’s actual size. Instead it explores the relationships between three sculptures’ actual and relative sizes, and the visual distortions that occur due to their positioning. These representations of Man with a Sheep by Brassaï and Miller generate strikingly different interpretations of the work. While the sculpture serves a loosely political allegory of liberation in Miller’s photograph, Brassaï emphasizes the camera’s ability to maintain and impact scale and actual size.
In addition, though, Brassaï’s photograph offers more than an abstract investigation of scale. This composition of two humans and two animals does not have a specific precedent, yet the juxtaposition of and interaction between these sculptures suggests an enigmatic narrative, perhaps recalling Boisgeloup after Dark. In framing the three works thus, Brassaï is perhaps nodding to the tradition of genre painting, to domestic rural scenes of male and female figures joined by animals.
My third comparison between Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s sculptures and those of other photographers focuses on images of Picasso’s Standing Woman, a small figurine, 13.5 cm in height. Dora Maar, Picasso’s ten-year companion, was also an
30 Contact sheet number 2, reproduced in Baldassari, Conversation avec la lumière, 186.
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accomplished photographer whose participation in international exhibitions included the
1936 “International Surrealist Exhibition” and the 1937 “Surrealist Objects and Poems
Exhibition,” both in London.31 As argued in chapter three, Maar was certainly a
candidate to photograph Picasso’s sculptures due to both her skills and her intimate
relationship with the artist. The following photograph attests to the complexity of her
unique position as Picasso’s lover and muse, and an artist in her own right.
Maar’s photograph, in which the plaster figure stands alone on a pedestal facing a
wall, differs from Brassaï’s in many ways (figure 5.11 and 5.12). Maar’s depicts the
sculpture in its initial plaster state in 1941, the year it was made, Brassaï’s after it was
cast in bronze at least two years later. Brassaï deals with the reflective qualities of bronze
to accentuate the work’s details, while Maar’s photograph capitalizes on the way light
strikes the white absorbent plaster surface in order to bleach the figure’s form. Maar
positions the sculpture at the centre of a glaring spotlight that hinders more than
facilitates sight and makes details disappear. 32
Maar’s photograph is divided into dark and bright areas by the slightly tilting
plane of the tabletop on which the figure stands. The table blocks the light so that there is
a well of darkness in the lower half of the photograph, and the resulting shift from light to
shade on the vertical axis is not gradual but rather a stark division that creates a feeling of
31 See for example Robert Rosenblum, “‘For Charming Dora’: Portraits of Dora Maar,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 384–403. A series of exhibitions and scholarly texts revisiting Maar’s role in the Parisian art scene was released in the past decade. See Mary Ann Caws, Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (Boston, New York, London: Bulfinch Press, 2000); Mary Ann Caws, Dora Maar – With and Without Picasso: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Victoria Combalía, Dora Maar (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2001); Anne Baldassari, Picasso-Dora Maar, il faisait tellement noir… (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), released in English as Picasso: Love and War, 1935–1945 (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). See also McCully’s review which recounts the changes in Maar’s reception: Marilyn McCully, “The Surreal Life of Dora Maar,” in The New York Review of Books, 49.7, April 25th, 2002, 2528, 37. 32 Maar’s photograph 42.P-DM depicts the sculpture catalogued as Spies 196.I. Brassaï’s photographs depict its bronze version Spies, 196.II.
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instability. The plane turns into an irregular geometric shape, the right side of which
appears sturdy while the right seems to taper off into fragility. This chiaroscuro effect
registers on the crude stained plaster walls, causing the white plaster figure to seem like a
purified emanation from them. The sculpture is marked as different from the surrounding space, yet seems also to originate from it as a compression of material.
The figurine does not appear clearly in the photograph. Maar does not zoom in on the sculpture but photographs it from a distance, further hampering the examination of its details, or making it clear that the details are not central to this composition.33 The
relative vastness of the empty space that dominates the photograph emphasizes how small
and fragile the figure is, and the camera angle also obscures most of its details.34 Another
consequence of the figure’s position in profile and facing the wall is the suggestion of
a state of absorption, to use Michael Fried’s term, lending the figure an imagined inner
life that remains inaccessible to the viewer.
Although it has not been suggested in the scholarship, I believe that the figurine
represents Maar herself. The hair is similar to that of the contemporaneous Head of a
Woman (figure 5.13) known to be a portrait of Maar. The link between the two works
was also made in the 1948 catalogue in which the two sculptures were reproduced side-
by-side. If one accepts this hypothesis, the photograph becomes a meditative self-
representation by Maar, who composed a mise en scène with Picasso’s tiny figurine.
Those devices that allow the image to resist sight make the figure unavailable. In this
33 Maar’s decision to leave the expansive space seems purposeful since on other occasions she cropped her photographs, as seen in a Picasso portrait taken in 1937 at Mougin. See figures 75 and 77 for the cropped and uncropped versions of the same negative in Anne Baldassari, Picasso–Dora Maar, 194–5. 34 Brassaï also photographed the work from that angle (contact sheet 8, figure 37G), but it is not surprising that this photograph of Standing Figure was not selected for the catalogue; this angle does not lend itself to the inquisitive look of the catalogue’s reader who wants to gain knowledge of Picasso’s oeuvre.
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biographical interpretation, the photographer makes this replica of herself inaccessible,
thus counteracting the fact that she and her body have already been appropriated for its
creation.
Brassaï’s nine images of Standing Woman reflect his characteristic method at that
time for photographing Picasso’s work (figure 5.12).35 The nine proofs show the
sculpture from different angles, using close-up views as well as tight framing. They
enlarge the sculpture, which facilitates scrutiny of the work’s details. The two
photographs chosen for the catalogue enable simultaneous views of the work from the
front and at a three-quarter angle, highlighting the differences in Picasso’s modeling
technique: the figure’s legs are crudely articulated relative to the more refined modeling
of the upper torso and face. The delicate facial features two slits for eyes, a tiny nose,
and thin lips are easily decipherable in the photograph.
Brassaï directs light in order to activate the sculpture’s bronze material, drawing
attention to certain areas of the figure. In the three-quarter angle shot (figure 5.12a),36 he highlights the forehead, the delicate transition from neck to collar bones, the breasts, and round belly. In the frontal view (figure 5.12b),37 the left side of the figure is bathed in
light – its parted hair, left arm, right breast, and left buttock are highlighted creating
tonal gradation on the surface of the sculpture.38 These delicate transitions from lit to
35 These photographs are found in contact sheet number 15, reproduced in Baldassari, Conversations avec la lumière, 222. It is worth noting that Standing Woman was the work most photographed by Brassaï: he took nine photographs from different angles and with lighting modifications. For comparison, the large Head of a Woman (Dora Maar) was photographed seven times, Death Head and Man with a Sheep each six times. 36 Les Sculpture de Picasso, plate 114. 37 Ibid., plate 115. 38 See my discussion of scale in Brassaï’s photographs in chapter three.
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shadowed areas attempt to recuperate the work’s volumes despite the two-dimensional
medium, a desire that could, of course, never be quite achieved.
The differences between Maar’s and Brassaï’s images are striking: Brassaï creates neutral, un-dramatic, even pedestrian, images of Picasso’s work that belong to the
tradition of documentary photography. While such photographs are only as good as the sculptures they depict, Maar’s transcend the documentary. She adds another layer of meaning to Picasso’s work, ultimately surpassing the depicted sculpture and providing a seemingly personal statement about her position as Picasso’s companion, model, and photographer in her own right. Her images speak of her perceived vulnerability. They also reflect the drive to reclaim herself through her art: faced with the task of photographing her own sculpted image, she takes a creative approach that denies
Picasso’s appropriation of her. Maar’s work foregrounds the ethical dimension of the
presentation, representation, and dissemination of art; it engages us with questions concerning the morality of seeing, an act that ultimately exposes, reveals, and probes its subjects.
This chapter’s final comparison is of Brassaï’s photographs of Woman with a
Long Dress and Robert Capa’s image of the same sculpture.39 Capa’s picture was
published in Life Magazine on November 13th, 1944 as a part of an essay entitled “New
French Art.”40 The opening two pages of the article are devoted to Picasso, “the father of
the new art,” while the rest of it discusses other ‘new’ French painters such as Pierre
Bonnard, Francisco Borés, Maurice Estève, Lèon Gischia, Henri Matisse, and Édouard
Pignon. According to the essay even Matisse and Bonnard, who are older than Picasso,
39 Spies, 238.II 40 “New French Art,” Life Magazine, November 13, 1944, 72–76. Intriguingly, the author’s name does not appear, while Capa’s name does, in the body of the text.
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are part of this new art and are seen as his followers. The author attempts to determine the
relationship between the new art and politics by describing where the artists were during
the war, considering whether each was part of the resistance movement, and examining their work for signs of political affiliation.
The second part of the essay is devoted to Maurice Girodias of Éditions du Chêne,
who recounts the difficulties his publishing house endured during the years of German occupation. The prominent place given to Girodias along with the fact that Chêne
released a book on the work of the four young artists represented in the essay in 1943,41 as well as books about Matisse and Bonnard in 194442 suggests that the Life article was
designed to promote Chêne’s publications on the other side of the Atlantic. This might
explain why Picasso’s sculptures appear so prominently; Girodias may have been
preparing for the impending release of the Picasso sculpture catalogue.
The essay includes photographs of the artists in their studios as well as colour reproductions of their paintings. It names Robert Capa as the photographer of Picasso’s studio and dates the images to precisely eight days after the liberation of Paris. Two of the photographs, however, are not Capa’s but Brassaï’s, a fact that is only mentioned in the magazine’s opening credits; Capa receives the credit in the body of the essay because he was a regular (and American) contributor to Life.43 The first Brassaï photograph in the
41 Cinq peintres d’aujourd’hui: oeuvres de Beaudin, Borès, Estève, Gischia, Pignon, intro. Roger Lesbats (Paris : Éditions du Chêne, 1943). The only artist represented in this book but missing from the Life essay is Beaudin. 42 Pierre Bonnard, Seize Peintures: 1939–1943, intro. André Lhote (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1944). Henri Matisse, Seize Peintures: 1939-1943, intro. André Lejard (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1944). 43 Brassaï was not the only photographer whose work was used for the Life article. Photographs by David E. Schermann, an American war correspondent who worked closely with Lee Miller, were also included in the essay See Life, November 13, 1944, 23. On Scherman see Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller, 159–166.
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essay depicts Matisse working in his studio with a model.44 The second is the same
image of the sculpture Picasso’s Hand that would appear on the cover of the sculpture
catalogue four years later. The difference in the rhetoric employed by Life and by the
catalogue is worth noting. As demonstrated in chapter three, the image reproduced on the
catalogue’s cover wavers between signalling the presence and absence of the artist; it
aggrandizes the notion of the master. The context for the image provided in Life is much
more casual and fits the article’s general tone. The photograph of the sculpture Picasso’s
Hand is analyzed by palm readers who comment on Picasso’s personality, longevity, love
life, etc. Whereas the cover image is made to engage with the rhetoric of genius, the Life
image is rendered folksy reading the artist’s palm does not help us better understand of
his genius, but rather offers anecdotal, unscientific, and possibly inaccurate information.
The essay moves from great appreciation of Picasso’s mastery of the image of
his hand it is said that “this is the most influential living hand in modern art” to
showering the artist with compliments on his youthfulness (“looks much younger than his
67 years”) and describing his experiences under the German occupation (blacklisted,
defined as a degenerate artist, but protected by his fame). It also, however, expresses
some dissatisfaction with the artist and even minimizes the significance of his latest work.
This inconsistent approach to Picasso is especially evident in the offhand account of his
sculptures, which are defined as his way of “having fun,” or “relax[ing] from painting,”
and are twice called “grotesque.”
44 The photo of Matisse was also reproduced in Brassaï’s book on Picasso where it was dated 1939. See Brassaï, Picasso and Company, plate 54.
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The photograph I wish to examine presents Picasso in his studio next to Woman
with a Long Dress from 1943 and Head of a Warrior from 1933 (figure 5.14).45 The two sculptures are not identified or interpreted.46 The photograph is dimly lit and most of the
studio space is indecipherable, with the exception of the area where Picasso and the two
sculptures are found. Head of a Warrior, set in profile directly on the floor, occupies half of the photograph,47 but despite this prominent position, it is obscured by the
photograph’s blurriness. The centre of gravity is thus located at the other half of the
photograph, where Picasso and Woman with a Long Dress stand. This piece exemplifies
the full range of Picasso’s sculptural techniques: comprised of a tailor’s dummy, an arm from Easter Island, and a modelled head and arm,48 it is a combination readymade, found
object, primitivist sculpture, and demonstration of Picasso’s modeling technique.
Even though Capa’s photographs were taken only a few days after Lee Miller’s
visit to Picasso’s studio, their tone is quite different. Capa takes the same approach as the
Life article, casting Picasso as an eccentric and his sculptures as slightly comic. The image presents a curious interaction between Picasso and Woman with a Long Dress:
Picasso wraps his arm around the work as if in an embrace, suggesting that they are a
couple they are the same height,49 the bronze patina echoes the colour of Picasso’s
45 Spies, 238.II, 136.II. 46 The author is more generous to the readers by supplying a key for the paintings. Picasso’s piece depicting Dora Maar from the war years (Z.XI, 347) is accompanied by the following explanation: “Pablo Picasso … is still preoccupied with figures which gives the observer the effect of looking at the subject from front and side at the same time.” “New French Art,” Life Magazine, 76. 47 Spies, 136.II. 48 On the sculpture see William Rubin, “Picasso,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 330-331. For information about the Easter Island arm, given to Picasso by the dealer Pierre Loeb, see Peter Stepan, Picasso’s Collection of African & Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 120. 49 In her essay on Picasso’s La femme à la clé, Cowling has suggested that Picasso’s choice of height is not coincidental, but representational. See Elizabeth Cowling, “Picasso’s La femme à la clé – The Sculptor, his Model, and his Assistant,” Apollo 464 (2000): 15.
164 pants, and they both face the same direction, as if engrossed in an event occurring outside the frame. Due to the quality of the print, the lack of strong artificial lighting, and the angle from which the photograph was taken, it seems that Picasso’s right hand, which holds a cigarette, is actually the female figure’s right arm. The embrace becomes reciprocal. 50
This interaction between maker and object is obviously staged for the camera, even if Picasso, by looking in a different direction, does not acknowledge the photographer’s presence. The photograph reinforces the essay’s rhetoric concerning
Picasso’s playful approach to his sculptures. It also, however, anticipates a sense of identification with the piece that he would continue to explore in an installation created for Brassaï and his camera. In a series of photographs dated December 1946, Brassaï documented the sculpture staged as a painter (figure 15) the figure holds brushes and a palette, wears a cloak, and stands in front of a painting. Brassaï’s written account reveals that the installation was made in order to be photographed, and moreover, he suggests that it was made especially for him: after Picasso created the mise-en-scène, Sabartès called at the studio and was immediately taken to see Picasso’s latest creation.51
50 Picasso’s reception in America was the subject of the 2006 exhibition at the Whitney. Michael C. Fitzgerald, Picasso and American Art (New York: Wh itney Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2006). Fitzgerald meticulously follows the encounters between American artists and Picasso’s art, arguing that it was the actual paintings rather than their reproductions that truly shaped the reception of Picasso’s work in America (12). Fitzgerald only mentions in passing the popular fascination with Picasso as a public figure after the Second World War, a phenomenon to which the Life article belongs. He also does not fully address the strangeness of this fascination (why Picasso? Why did G.I. troops flood Picasso’s studio? Why did Picasso’s affiliation with the communist party sit well with American audience s?) These issues are only addressed sporadically in the detailed catalogue, for example when Fitzgerald discusses Alfred H. Barr’s 1956 version of Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art: “While Barr offered a thorough overview of the work, he centered his account on Picasso’s transformation from an artist (however famous) to an international political figure.” Ibid., 214. Another example is Roy Lichtenstein’s change in attitude from being a G.I. in Paris who was too afraid and awe-struck to enter Picasso’s studio to saying “A Picasso has become a kind of popular object – one has the feeling there should be a reproduction of Picasso in every home.” Ibid., 240– 43. 51 Brassai, Picasso and Company, 212–3.
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Brassaï took two photographs of the dressed-up sculpture. The first shows the
sculpture-turned-painter in front of a painting, standing at some distance from the work,
examining the final product. The second offers a close-up view of the sculpture at the
same location, but only the canvas’s stretchers are visible from this angle. This
photograph emphasizes the palette and brushes, which are less visible in the previous photograph. As whimsical as the installation might be, it stresses Picasso’s identification with the figure. Woman with a Long Dress becomes a stand-in for Picasso, positioned in front of his piece L’Aubade.
Brassaï’s other photographs of this sculpture are far less playful than the ones
Picasso orchestrated. The three designed for the catalogue, found in contact sheet number
2 (figure 5.10), do not stray from Brassaï’s photographic style for the publication. They
depict the sculpture from three different viewpoints: a full-body shot, a bust, and the head
alone.52 The inscriptions on the contact sheet suggest that there were two other identical
photographs of the sculpture. Both the full-body shot and the bust were taken from the
same frontal angle. The former emphasizes the differences between the sculpture’s parts
in terms of materials, textures, and production techniques, while the latter concentrates on
the differences between the smoothness of the shoulders and the textured face, thus
opposing the handmade and the readymade.53 The third photograph, which was not
included in the catalogue, depicts the sculpture’s head on a pedestal. The detachability of
the head suggests that it could function as a separate piece.
These photographs by Capa and Brassaï highlight how context and awareness of
one’s audience can alter the product. Taken for the Life article, Capa’s photographs were
52 See contact sheet 2 reproduced in Baldassari, Conversations avec la lumière, 186. 53 See Les Sculptures de Picasso, plates 192, 191.
166 designed to capture the patriarch of contemporary French art, yet Picasso’s interaction with the sculpture in the photographs provides a view of his art that is more accessible to the article’s likely audience. Brassaï’s photograph of Woman with a Long Dress posing as if the sc ulpture is the painter of L’Aubade was first published almost twenty years after it was taken. When it was released, it was a part of Brassaï’s book on Picasso, which aimed to give the reader an “insider’s” peek at the artist’s personality through a description of the collaboration between the two men. The photograph signals both Picasso’s creativity and his sense of humour. The photographs for the catalogue conversely reflect the serious tone of a publication intended to present Picasso’s sculptures objectively to a specialized audience.
Viewing Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s sculptures alongside his contemporaries’ images of the same works aids in the assessment of Brassaï’s objectives.
First and foremost, Brassaï insisted on creating sympathetic images of Picasso’s sculptures, through his choice of background colour, lighting, and angles. Brassaï also created flattering images of sculptures made of non-photogenic materials. Consider, for example, how the light washes away almost completely the plaster figurine in Maar’s photograph; the chalky quality of the plaster, its whiteness and materiality require attentive staging – an effect that does not occur in Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s plasters in 1933. Similar claims could be made concerning Picasso’s sculptures made of paper or pebbles. The comparisons to Capa’s and Miller’s images show that Brassaï had a clear idea of the appropriate manner in which to represent Picasso’s studio an aesthetic space, almost sacred in its separation from everyday events and of the image of the artist he was hired to promote. Brassaï’s photographs do not convey any political
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messages, and only on rare occasions is the studio documented as a site of humorous
activities. Even these comic shots – like the pi cture of Woman in a Long Dress in front of
L’Aubade – serve as further proof of Picasso’s incredible protean creativity and ingenuity.
The most striking conclusion resulting from this comparative exercise is that the
sculptures’ official representation Brassaï’s photographs for the 1948 catalogue
remains unsatisfactory. If Brassaï set out to cast Picasso’s sculptures in an objective and
understated (as opposed to dramatic) light as objects worthy of serious contemplation, the
result is a set of strangely undistinguished photographs that do not reflect the
individuality of the works. It seems that Brassaï did not find an effective tone with which
to depict the sculptures. Adhering to the ostensible neutrality of a catalogue raisonné, he
assumed that more dramatic lighting and sympathetic angles would create satisfying
images; and yet the resulting photographs seem ordinary, neutral, and ineffectual. This is
accentuated when comparing these later photographs to the early images Brassaï took for
Minotaure. The 1933 photographs present a compelling, intriguing, and enigmatic sense
of Picasso’s sculptures, and are striking in their variety of photographic methods,
conventions, and styles. The collaboration between Brassaï and Picasso that began with
such a creative and original rendition of Picasso’s oeuvre ended in a trivial dare I say
boring? staging of the artwork
Conclusions:
This dissertation has explored the role Brassaï’s photographs played in fashioning
the reception and meaning of Picasso’s sculptures. While I have argued that photography
was the prominent means of display for Picasso’s sculptures, there is an important exception to this rule. By way of conclusion, I would like to introduce Picasso’s
“museum” a display cabinet found in the artist’s studio containing a selection of his
sculptures, as well as other objects he found, bought, and received.1
While Brassaï was systematically photographing Picasso’s sculptures for the
catalogue, he also captured one image of “the museum” (figure 6.1), an image he released
only in the 1960s. This blurry photograph, taken from an oblique angle, is the only visual
evidence I was able to trace of this medium-sized vitrine, holding about fifty objects on
its three shelves. The poor quality of the photograph and the minute size of the objects
impede an exact inventory. Only some pieces are recognizable: a wooden figure from
1907;2 one of the versions of Glass of Absinthe;3 Metamorphosis, a figure from the late
twenties created with the Apollinaire monument in mind;4 Picasso’s carved elongated
figures from the early thirties;5 two of his four small-scale reliefs from 1940;6 a tiny
1 One category that is not found among Picasso’s selection of objects is that of readymade objects. The only exception that I was able to find is the spoon placed on top of Glass of Absinthe. 2 Spies, 16. 3 Spies, 36. 4 Spies, 67. 5 Spies, 869, 947. 6 Spies, 183, 184.
168 169
figurine of a standing woman;7 a bust of a woman made of carton board from 1943;8 and
the bronze sculpture Head of a Man.9
Brassaï also described in writing his encounter with the vitrine:
Picasso wants me to see the showcase, or as Sabartès calls it, the “museum.” It is
a large, locked armoire of metal and glass, occupying a little room adjoining the
studio. Picasso takes out his imposing collection of keys and opens it. Fifty or so
of his bronze statuettes are heaped on its shelves, along with his carved woods, his
engraved pebbles, and other objects that are either curious or rare.10
The photographer notes the clutter inside Picasso’s vitrine and the haphazard way the
objects are arranged. Picasso points out a couple of glasses from Martinique which
survived a volcano eruption, a cast of the prehistoric Venus of Lespugue, as well as the
white skeleton of a bat, attached to a black support. In her memoir, Françoise Gilot adds
to Brassaï’s account, recalling that Picasso also kept mementos in his cabinet, such as a
token from his first meeting with his former companion Dora Maar.11
The cabinet strictly frames the sculptures in a way markedly different than the
way it was captured in the Minotaure photographs: in 1933 the sculptures were freely
dispersed over every available surface. The presentation in the vitrine offers an
alternative to the 1948 sculpture catalogue as well. It holds sculptures from different
periods, grouped together with no consideration of chronology. Instead of the coherent
7 Spies, 196. 8 Spies, 277. 9 Spies, 279. 10 Brassaï, Picasso and Company (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 724. 11 Maar’s entrance to Picasso’s life, or as it is told, is coloured by the rules that govern the surrealist concept amour fou. Maar grabbed Picasso’s attention at Café des Deux Magots while dangerously playing with a knife and her gloved hand. According to Gilot Picasso kept in the cabinet her bloodied gloves years after this encounter. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso (New York; Toronto; London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 856.
170
body of work constructed by the catalogue, Picasso’s objects are randomly accumulated.
Placed next to personal souvenirs, presents, knickknacks the artist found or bought in
junk yards and thrift stores, the sculptures become less of an oeuvre and more like ‘stuff.’
The vitrine functions as a storage space for small objects as well as an exhibition
site. Unlike wooden crates, in which Picasso stored most of his painted and sculpted
works, the cabinet’s glass doors make its content visible, allowing the artist to employ the armoire’s potential as an exhibition space. Even though at first glance the display seems cluttered, one can decipher some curatorial logic in the arrangement of the messy shelves: the eight tall wooden figures from 1931 are evenly spaced on the top shelf, creating a rhythmic arrangement. The second shelf is more crowded than the top one, but all the objects are of the same size. The arrangement of the bottom shelf is intended to be seen from a higher angle, when standing, as the majority of the objects have a horizontal orientation. The placement of objects in relation to each other is also meaningful. Most notable is the prehistoric figurine of Venus of Lespugue next to the Picasso’s voluminous
Metamorphosis, a juxtaposition that turns the latter into a fertility Goddess, thus embracing André Malraux’s demand for a non-hierarchical, cross-cultural study of material culture.12 The presence of natural objects in the vitrine, like the aforementioned
bat’s skeleton, brings to mind cabinets of curiosity whose encyclopedic collections
lacked categorical boundaries and conventions of display in natural and ethnographic
12 Malraux describes his encounter with the display case in similar terms to Brassaï, and was very excited to find a cast of Venus of Lespugue: “He led me into a small room nearby, took a bunch of keys of his belt, and opened a metal cupboard. In the shelves were his very elongated statuettes which were then called Cretan Women, a violin shape idol from Cyclades and two casts of prehistoric statutes. ‘The Lespugue Venus?’ [Picasso replies] ‘yes.’ One of the casts was of the mutilated statuette. The other was one he had found of the restored statuette: her bust and her legs joined together, sprang forth symmetrically from the lusty volume of her rump and her belly.” Malraux then described the content of the cabinet: “there were also some of his engraved pebbles, some of his small bronzes, a copy of his Glass of Absinthe, and the skeleton of a bat….” André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. June Guicharnaud, with Jacques Guicharnaud (New York; Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 1245.
171 museums. Surrealist concerns and strategies of display are also relevant for understanding
“the museum,”13 as they explicate and contextualize those works done with “nature’s assistance.” The engraved pebbles, for example, were said by Picasso to expose the image that is already within the pebble. He similarly stated that the glasses altered by the volcano were as “beautiful as any work of art,” suggesting that nature too is an artist.14
The display case, however, was not available for public viewing and this reflects the tension between revealing and concealing typical of Picasso’s general approach to his sculptures. While the artist’s large sculptures were placed in the main room of the rue des
Grands Augustins studio, where he worked and received visitors, the vitrine was in a separate room attached to the studio’s central area.15 According to Brassaï and Malraux,
Picasso insisted on limiting and controlling access to the cabinet and kept his sculptures under lock and key Brassaï even complained that his work was obstructed by Picasso’s refusal to let anyone touch the cabinet.16 By locking the glass doors, Picasso assured that the collection would be perceived as a whole, through complex network of association known only to him, rather than experienced piecemeal. Once again Malraux’s principles seem to inform this practice: “the headlong sequence of works is more important than any single one of them, even the best.”17
13 See four th chapter of the dissertation for an overview of the different definitions of surrealist objects. 14 The full qu ote goes as follows: “I was intrigued and dumbfounded by its beauty, just as you were… so it was given to me as a gift. All these glasses recast by the heat of the earth – it’s as beautiful as any work of art, don’t y ou think so?” Picasso quoted by Brassaï in Picasso and Company, 724. 15 Picasso’s rue des Grands Augustins studio was also the artist’s living quarters during the 1940s. 16 “Having finished with the large statues, I am ready to begin photographing the little bronze and figurines in the “museum” but Picasso keeps the key to this himself…. From this point on I can do nothing unless he opens the case for me. Yesterday, occupied with other things he said, “I don’t have time to get out the sculptures for you. I am sorry – but I will do it tomorrow, that’s a promise….” Ibid., 95. 17 André Malraux, The Psychology of Art: The Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 53. It is possible to assume that Malraux was the target audience for “the museum,” similarly to the way in which William Rubin argued that Picasso made Still Life with a Butterfly with Breton’s preference and sensibilities in mind. See my discussion in chapter two.
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The display case exemplifies Picasso’s awareness of how methods of display impact the meaning of art. While some scholars have analyzed Picasso’s first curatorial effort, the 1932 comprehensive Picasso retrospective in Galérie Georges Petit,18
Picasso’s strategies of art display have been largely left unexplored. The artist’s first
retrospective and “the museum” can be joined by other a ctivities of the artist: the small
shows he orchestrated in his studio, during which he advanced his own ideas concerning
his art; his collaboration with Christian Zervos on the comprehensive catalogue; his
attempts at controlling the reproduction of his artworks in magazines; and, of course, his
fifteen-year collaboration with Brassaï. This new study exploring Picasso’s shrewd
understanding that the display of art dictates its interpretation would build on the current
project and provide further context in which to examine its insights.
18 See installation photos and analysis of the exhibition in Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion; Forth Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1998), 624. Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London, New York: Phaidon, 2002), 1415, and John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 19171932 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 47390. Both emphasize Picasso’s role as the curator of the show in deciding on the heterogonous hanging of the works, which promoted stylistic diversity instead of chronological consistency.
173
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