Pablo Picasso’s Raphael et la Fornarina

This summer, in the gentrified backstreets of King’s Cross in London, art enthusiasts have ogled the Gagosian Gallery’s Picasso show. For a little over two months this summer, we’ve been treated to an intimate portrait of the artist during his later years. A playful, experimental nature peeks through his work: from prints, to drawings, sculptures, ceramics – and of course, paintings. The exhibition is boosted by fine pickings from the MOMA in New York, the Museo Picasso in Málaga and the private collection of Picasso’s grandson. A series of lithographs, Le Taureau, is a great example of Picasso’s artistic processes: one by one, his imagery fades from a vivid, realistic depiction of a bull, to minimal, abstracted lines. They are revealing of how he built composition, and his experimentation on a subject.

This exhibition got me thinking about something Picasso once said to the poet Apollinaire:

‘I hasten to add, however, that I detest exoticism. I’ve never liked the Chinese, the Japanese or the Persians’.

However, when the Malagan-born artist upped and moved to Paris, he must have been influenced by the hub of notable artists that included Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. These artists were heavily influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and Picasso would naturally have absorbed some of the traits from the ukiyo-e masters. The artist was also an eclectic collector, amassing an interesting collection of works by Matisse, Braque, Modigliani, that sat cheek by jowl with sixty-one Japanese prints by Utamaro, Kiyonobu, Harunobu and Kiyonaga – among many others. These included portraits of courtesans, Kabuki celebrities, satirical scenes and shunga (erotic prints).

His initial repudiation of the so-called ‘Japanese influence’ in art was transformed into an appreciation and connoisseurship of woodblock prints. The photographer Brassai recalled a conversation he had with Picasso in 1945:

‘Art is never chaste, [Picasso] said to me one day, showing me the erotic prints of Outamaro, prints of a rare beauty in which the sexual organs figure prominently but are stripped of any vulgarity, emerging in a strange frenzy like strange vegetables from a strange landscape, lashed by a strange storm.’

Utamaro’s Lovers in an upstairs room, from Uta makura ['Poem of the Pillow']

So it was the eroticism of these shunga prints, enveloped in an elegance, that appealed to Picasso’s aesthetic. Towards the end of his life, the influence of erotic Japanese prints is felt in his drawings and prints. By 1968, Picasso was producing a reinterpretation of erotica by Kiyonobu. In the words of critic Klaus Berger, ‘[he] set before us the sexual embrace in vibrant curves and dark patterning, abstract and yet highly concrete.’ His sensual oeuvre was becoming more radical: in 1968, a series of prints entitled Suite 347 depicted explicit and avant-garde scenes of the union between Raphael and La Fornarina (see the image at the top). Despite the directness of their embrace, the print is laced with a restrained exoticism.

One of our artists, Paul Binnie, is heavily influenced by shunga too. Sensuality crops up in his work in his intimate portraits of female beauties and tattoo prints, but also through his witty references within the prints themselves. Take a look here, for his own riff on Utamaro:

The link between Picasso’s images and erotic Japanese art has been delved into by an exhibition curated last year: ‘Secret Images, Picasso and the Japanese erotic prints” at the Picasso Museum, in Barcelona. If anyone went to the exhibition, do drop us a comment below on any insights/thoughts from the show - we’d love to hear from you!

Petra.

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Interesting links to follow up…

http://store.bluerimgallery.net/?page_id=3&category=2&product_id=48

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/picassoprints/main.html

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/asia/k/kitagawa_utamaro,_lovers_in_an.aspx

In a previous blog post I wrote about how the Impressionists were influenced by Japanese woodcut prints. Emulation of this Japanese aesthetic has more recently been expressed in Jeff Wall’s nod to an iconic print by the nineteenth-century printmaker Hokusai (South Wind, Clear Weather, from his 36 views of Mount Fuji series) made in 1993. In Wall’s contemporary landscape, the minimalist sketch of Mount Fuji is reinterpreted as an anonymous modern landscape dotted with high-rises. Both scenes capture an unexpected moment when a sudden gust of wind spins its figures into dance-like contortions; sheets of a manuscript sent flying upwards into the air in a whimsical gesture.

Hokusai portrays a spontaneous moment; he offers his viewers a ‘photographic’ instantaneous moment. He captures the illusion of a frozen moment. On the other hand, Wall has painstakingly staged his digital composed print (this is one of a hundred attempted shots of the scene) to construct the so-called accidental scene. Hokusai’s image presents the illusion of a decisive moment while hiding the ‘linear’ time that went into its creation; whereas digital photography has allowed Wall to manipulate the relationship to ‘the moment’ -  that the camera is typically known for.

I found this threshold between the old and new through the lens of Japanese prints interesting, and if any of our readers have any other examples, do feel free to comment below!

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A wonderful quote by Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly’s distinctive lithographs, based on paintings of the same subject in 1971. Perfectly encapsulates Twombly’s work:

(image:  © Christies’/Cy Twombly)

‘In his own particular way, Twombly tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply gesture - the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence. We can reason this out through a comparison. What would be the essence of a pair of trousers (if it has one)? Certainly not that carefully prepared and rectilinear object found on the racks of department stores; rather the ball of cloth dropped on the floor by the negligent hand of a young boy when he undresses tired, lazy and indifferent. The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash. It is not necessarily what remains after the object has been used, it’s rather what is thrown away in use. And so it is with Twombly’s writings. They are the fragments of an indolence, and this makes them extremely elegant; it’s as though the only thing left after the strongly erotic act of writing were the languid fatigue of love: a garment cast aside into a corner of the page.”

- Roland Barthes, Non Multa Sed Multum 1976

(Quote found in Christie’s Print catalogue, for 31.3.10 Auction, King Street)