by Sam Ben-Meir
Manchester’s Currier Museum is currently presenting Personal Mythologies: Picasso in the 1940s and 50s—a small exhibition consisting of three paintings, two of which are on loan through October, L’Homme au béret basque (1946) and The Two Children (1954). The third, belonging to the Currier collection, is the remarkable Woman Seated in a Chair (1941), a portrait of the artist Dora Maar, painted in Picasso’s small Paris studio during the Nazi occupation.
Maar was a French photographer, painter, and poet, and Picasso’s companion during those years. It is an extraordinarily vibrant painting, bold in its use of line and sharp geometric planes. What makes it truly devastating is how Picasso’s brush transforms the simplest of themes—a seated woman—into a psychologically penetrating examination neither of Maar nor of himself, but of their fraught relationship during a period of great uncertainty and immense social and political upheaval.
Picasso’s fragmentation of the human figure was hardly a response to the Occupation; the visual language of Cubism had emerged decades earlier. Yet an artistic language developed under one set of historical circumstances can acquire new meanings under another. In the Paris of 1941, Maar’s distorted features take on an additional and disturbing resonance. Under Nazi rule, the familiar world becomes strange: streets, homes, neighbors, even the routines of everyday life remain recognizable and yet are no longer quite what they were. Picasso’s fractured portrait captures something of this estrangement. Maar remains unmistakably present, yet her face has become strange even to itself. The distortion can therefore be seen as more than a feature of Picasso’s style: it becomes a way of imagining what such conditions do to human beings, making us unrecognizable to ourselves and each other.
L’Homme au béret basque (The Man in the Basque Beret) is one of four portraits Picasso executed in the summer of 1946, in which he presents himself in the guise of an alternative persona. Here he is both fisherman and faun. In appropriating the beret, Picasso taps into a long history of meanings associated with it in painting, extending at least as far back as Rembrandt, a tradition of which he was certainly well aware. Among the old masters, the beret became associated with the artist as an independent figure, set apart from conventional society and conscious of his own creative authority. For Picasso, it represented—among other things—an homage to his Spanish roots, an identification with the common working man, and a disdain for bourgeois norms.
Immediately beneath the beret we find not the fisherman but the profile of a faun—another of Picasso’s alter egos. The faun is rich in associations, not least of which are the animistic, sensual, and lustful drives that were, for Picasso, an ineliminable part of the artist. But beneath the faun is the fisherman, peering straight ahead at the viewer: a counterbalance to the faun, a sturdy, hard-working, goal-oriented figure—another essential aspect of the artist. What we have, then, is a complex portrait of the artist himself: untamed and instinctive, yet also disciplined, aggressive, and identified with the dignity of labor.
Claude and Paloma, Picasso’s son and daughter with Françoise Gilot, form the subject of The Two Children, painted in April 1954. It is undoubtedly the most poignant of the three works on exhibition—not merely because we know that this was the last time he would depict his children, and that he would eventually become estranged from them, but because it is executed in a childlike manner, borrowing from the visual language of children themselves as they sit down to draw.
There is no embellishment or ornamentation, no Cubist abstraction, but simply the outlines of the children in black, with a blue plane partially overlapping the boy and a light green plane for the girl, while the background remains a muted grey. Its apparent simplicity is what makes the painting such a touching meditation on childhood, as well as on fatherhood and the unbridgeable gap between them.
Personal Mythologies is a modest exhibition, comprising just three paintings by a master who produced thousands of works across a remarkable variety of media. But it is well worth visiting, because in just three paintings we can appreciate Picasso’s depth, range, and boldness. Each of these paintings is entirely different from the others, and each rewards the patient viewer with a glimpse of an artist who remained, throughout his long career, impossible to exhaust.
Sam Ben-Meir teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, College of Technology. He is the author of Ethical Interanimality: Toward a Relational Philosophy of Nature
