A Picasso Record?

Maccers posted this story about the Picasso rose period painting "Garcon a la Pipe" poised to sell for $100 million. I go back and forth with Picasso.

What kind of a fish is a Picasso? Is Picasso a mighty trout navigating the breakers of the wine dark-sea of Art, or is he a minnow riding on the backs of more original Old Masters ("I collect Old Masters and Young Mistresses" --Nabokov, Ada).

Some days, when I look back at his blue period, suffused with carbolic and icy blues and haunting lunar El Greco lighting that fairly crackles and vibrates, I think: Goddamn, utter and complete genius. Picasso is the sum total of all that came before him.

And then, almost as often, the more and more one looks at his work, the more one sees how much he outright copied from other artists. He was an incredible thief. He stole so well and hid the booty in his own works, that his victims, the melancholy Spanish guitar of Juan Gris with the amber patina, the dispassionate dance hall gaze of Toulouse-Lautrec, Leger, Goya, Velasquez, Braques, El Greco, the unnamed West African mask makers, the Greek potters, have all become, in the fullness of time, his inferiors in the art world, subsumed to Picasso's superior plundering. His artistic borrowings were legendary -- he was a proto-postmodernist, in a way.

Does Picasso disappear in the absence of greater artistic lights; is Picasso like the moon, which shines only from the borrowed glory of the suns rays?

His line is confident, certainly (he could paint before he could talk), but is it worth 100 mil?

the anxiety of influence is particularly heavy with Picasso. Sometimes I even wonder just how original or even if Picasso was very original. The more I learn about art, the more pictures I catalogue in my mind, the more I see that a particularly clever idea, a witty or disturbing character, or use of color, in his paintings -- was borrowed. And, like an onion unraveling, one wonders, underneath it all is there anything of substance? Or is it all just smoke and mirrors and protective layering?

Perhaps he is not a fish at all, but the screaming, disruptive bull of Guernica slowly evolving into the priapic Minotaur as the 20th century unfolds, leaving weeping women in his wake, instead of bombed out Spanish villages.

The Modernists are strange that way. Their break with ancient and classical forms moves them closer to clever statements, or disposable pronouncements, rather than all-inclusive world philosophies. Compare Magritte to Velasquez, or Koons to Titian.

On matters of art (and education politics) I am quite conservative, and on everything else, an unashamed liberal. Then again, the moderns may have a point that art is better served as wit and disposable pronouncement if, indeed, there is no meaning to human existence. A conservative take on art is an anti-Nietzchean view that there are absolutes -- love, God, Buddha, the culture (Greekness, Maya, Nilotic) whatever. The Nietzcheans are all about pushing-the-limits. God is dead, has been for quite some time, really, so the form of Christ is not so much in the renaissance of debate, but form itself, say, in synthetic cubism, or the startlingly beautiful, if lifeless geometric compositions of Mondrian.

Whatever the case, the painting is clearly interesting:

"Charles Moffet, co-director of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's, said: 'It has a haunting ambiguity that has ensured its status as one of Picasso's most celebrated images of adolescent beauty.

"'It is, without question, one of the most beautiful of the artist's Rose Period paintings and one of the most important early works by Pablo Picasso.'"

"John Whitney, a former US ambassador to Britain, bought the painting in 1950 for $30,000.

" ... It is being sold by the Greentree Foundation, a philanthropic body founded by Mr Whitney's wife, Betsey, following the death of her husband in 1982."


If Byron was the first rock star, Picasso was the first international celebrity -- Madonna with talent. Is it worth $100 million? Fuck no. Give me a mysterious labyrinthine Mannerist any day of the week.

Now, back to gossip ("toss me in the shallow water before I get too ...")