Creators (33 page)

That world was disappearing even in Balenciaga’s lifetime. The death of Dior in 1957 was the final fatal blow. Dior was a man who loved rich food, he had fought a constant but losing battle against surplus flesh, and his heart inevitably failed. His funeral was a historic gathering of high fashion: only Chanel, who had returned from her exile in Switzerland and brazenly reopened her shop four years before, failed to pay tribute. On prie-deux, in front of the congregation, knelt two striking figures, symbols of a passing era: Jean Cocteau and the duchess of Windsor.

After Dior’s death, Balenciaga seemed an increasingly lonely figure, working backward rather than forward. He was rich, with houses and apartments in Paris, at La Reynerie near Orléans, in Madrid, in Barcelona, and in Iguelda in his own Basque country. This last house was as near as he ever came to making a home. He designed beautiful dresses for the maidservants, sometimes sewing them himself. The centerpiece of the house was a vast
antique wall table with his mother’s old Singer sewing machine in solitary state, beneath a vast and fearsomely realistic crucifix. His apartment in Avenue Marceau displayed his halfhearted collections: Spanish keys in gilded bronze, ivory cups and balls. There were eighteenth-century chairs in satin upholstery, dyed a certain dark green by the master himself. Balenciaga was seventy in 1965, and he found the 1960s increasingly unsympathetic as horrors of taste and behavior were unveiled. In the 1950s he had been generally regarded as the greatest dressmaker in the world. But he worked in fashion; he was fashion; and it is of the nature of fashion to turn every one of its heroes, sooner or later, into a museum piece. In the 1960s he was increasingly criticized. His dresses were said to be so overwhelming that they “dwarfed the woman.” He was “not for the young.” He refused to go into the pret-à-porter trade—“I will not prostitute my talent.” He hated miniskirts. He felt that “youth has no time for grand couture and the craftsmanship on which it rests.” He never commented, but he looked down his nose at designers like Yves St. Laurent, taking over at Dior, who was “trendy” (a new Anglo-Saxon expression that Balenciaga found abhorrent). In 1966, to defy the trend, he lengthened skirts, but the big New York buyers would not take his wares. In 1967 he appeared to capitulate by making short tutu dresses and trouser suits, and did good business. But in 1968 he was uncompromising again and sold nothing wholesale. His individual clientele flourished as ever, but he was himself an increasingly disillusioned and melancholy figure. The
événements
of 1968—the student revolt hailed everywhere as a new dawn—he saw as a display of savagery and an assault on civilization, a view which he shared with the perceptive philosopher Raymond Aron and which proved to be right. Balenciaga continued designing for a time, and it is significant that his dresses of the late 1960s—against the trend; “cut against the bias,” as he put it—are now the ones most admired, collected, and copied. But his heart was no longer in the game, and he found that the new tax rules and labor regulations made it increasingly disagreeable to run his business. Abruptly, like de Gaulle, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely (there was no possible successor), and returned to Spain. He died in 1972, sad and lonely, a great artist
broken by the years, one of the many casualties of the lunacy of the 1960s—along with institutions such as the Society of Jesus, the old-style university of scholars and gentlemen, the traditional rules of sexual decorum, artistic reticence, and much else.

High fashion, begun by Worth, essentially ended with Balenciaga’s retirement, and with it went a tradition not only of civilized, and occasionally inspired, design, but of craftsmanship of the highest possible standards. The fashion industry continues, polycentric and multicultural, and on an enormous scale as the world becomes wealthier and travel easier. But it is most improbable that the kind of dresses Balenciaga created in the 1950s and 1960s will ever be made again. They are, indeed, museum pieces to inspire women or, among the fortunate descendants of his clients, heirlooms to be treasured and, on grand occasions, flaunted.

T
HE TWENTIETH CENTURY
saw a transformation of our visual experiences comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. We saw many more things and saw them differently, both because they were different and because events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes. Whether this process was benign or malevolent, creative or destructive—or a mixture of both—only the long evolving judgment of history will determine. It was certainly both exciting and disturbing. Much of the altered vision was due to technological change, especially the coming of cinema, television, videos, and digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible to humanity everywhere. But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists who destroyed the tradition of naturalism, which had hitherto dominated the visual arts, and replaced it—as the prime source of beauty—with the expression of what was going on in their own minds. The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created a third element of visual change. In the twentieth century, then, new experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless impersonal forces frog-marching humanity forward and of powerful creative individuals striving to wrest control of change in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things. Among this last group none were more successful than Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Walt Disney (1901–1966).

A comparison of the two is instructive. Picasso was born two
decades before Disney and outlived him by a few years, but both were essentially men of the twentieth century, outstanding creative individuals first and foremost but also representative figures. Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm. But there were essential differences. Picasso came from Andalusia, on the periphery of the culture of old Europe, and he progressed first to Barcelona, Spain’s cultural capital, and then to Paris, for over 200 years the capital of the arts of Europe. Paris gave his ideas the resonance and the critical and commercial success that enabled him to carry through his revolution in art. No other center could have done this. And it should be added that Picasso’s successful charge against representative art was the last absolute victory Paris enjoyed in leading cultural fashion. If Picasso created shocking novelties, he did so in a traditional old-world manner—in an artist’s studio and in the familiar capital of art. Disney, on the other hand, was of the New World—a midwesterner from an agricultural background, who eagerly embraced both America’s entrepreneurial effervescence and the new technologies leaping ahead of popular taste. He went from the open spaces to Hollywood, not so much a place as a concept. When he was born, it did not yet exist. During his lifetime it became the global capital of the popular arts, thanks in part to his creativity. He made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life, just as Picasso exploited the old artistic disciplines of paint, pencil, modeling, and printing to produce the new. Paris and Hollywood: no two places could be more unlike; yet no two are so similar in the mixture of eagerness and cynicism with which they nurtured creativity, both vulgar and sublime. It is also notable that both men played roles in the tremendous and horrific ideological battles which characterized the twentieth century, at opposite poles of the axis of ideas. And the influence of both continues, in the twenty-first century, powerfully and persistently, raising a question: which has been, and is, more potent?

Picasso was born in Málaga on the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, where his father was an art teacher and artist, specializing in birds but fascinated by bullfighting. The family moved first to La Coruña, in the northeast, then to Barcelona, capital of the most economically advanced and culturally enterprising
province of Spain, Catalonia. His father continued to teach him until he was fourteen, and then he put in some time at La Lonja, Barcelona’s excellent fine arts school, before setting up on his own as a teenage artist.
¹
He was essentially self-taught, self-directed, self-promoted, emotionally educated in the teeming brothels of the city, a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism. He lacked the benefit—though also the inhibitions—of full academic training, and if his drawing is sometimes weak in consequence (one of the myths most consistently spread about Picasso is that he was a superb draftsman), he was exceptionally skillful, from an early age, at exploiting his many and ingenious artistic ideas. He always kept a sharp eye on the market and always knew what would sell. He disposed of drawings from the age of nine on; and though his output became and remained prodigious throughout his long life, he never had any difficulty in marketing.
²

Picasso seems to have grasped, quite early on, that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting from nature. In Barcelona the competition was severe. In particular, he was up against perhaps the greatest of modern Spanish painters, Ramon Casas i Carbo, fifteen years his senior and far more accomplished in traditional skills.
³
Taught in Carolus-Duran’s atelier, Casas oscillated between Barcelona and Paris, sharing for a time the famous studio above the dance hall of the Moulin de la Galette. In 1890, following in the footsteps of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec but excelling both, he painted a superb, sombre picture of this hall. His most important pictures were striking pieces of social realism, such as
The Garroting
and a painting of a street riot,
The Charge
. At one time the young Picasso thought of entering this field, but Casas had preempted it. Casas was also a draftsman on the level of Ingres, and a portraitist of uncommon ability. He not only befriended Picasso but produced, in 1901, the most beautiful and accurate drawing of him.
⁴
Casas’s superb full-length charcoal portraits of people in Barcelona inspired Picasso, at age eighteen, to do a similar series, which he exhibited in his first one-man show at the place where “advanced” artists, known as
modernistas
, gathered: El Quatro Gats. There were 135 other drawings and paintings in the show.
But it was not a success.
⁵
Indeed it was a foolish move, one of the few in Picasso’s career, for his portraits invited comparison with Casas’s and are manifestly inferior (both can be seen in Barcelona). Picasso had already been in Paris, and in 1900 he challenged Casas again by painting his own version of
The Moulin de la Galette
, a spectacular piece of updated Renoir but again inferior to Casas’s restrained study in light and gloom. It was, however, calculated to make a splash.
⁶
Picasso visited Paris twice more and found that he had no difficulty in staging shows there or in selling his work. In 1904 he effectively left Spain for good, partly to escape conscription, but chiefly to get away from life under Casas’s shadow, and from endless disparaging comparisons with Casas. Picasso also saw that Paris, with its preoccupation with novelty and fashion, was the place where he could shine and rise to the top.

Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived. But everything had to be done at top speed. He was incapable of lavishing care, time, or sustained effort on a work of art. By 1900 he was turning out a painting every morning, and doing other things in the afternoon. He tried sculpture, facial masks, and symbolism, among other forms of expression, and from then until his death, at age ninety-two, he remained a master of spectacular output, working on paper and canvas; in stone, ceramics, and metal; in every possible variety of mixed media. He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets and costumes, dresses, logos, and almost every kind of object from ashtrays to headdresses. The number of his creations exceeds 30,000, and although there is a thirty-three-volume
catalogue raisonné
(1932–1978), it is far from complete and has to be supplemented by ten other catalogs. The literature on Picasso is enormous and continually growing.
⁷
It includes an ongoing, detailed multivolume biography by John Richardson, comprehensive and essential though hagiographic, and hundreds of specialist studies covering every aspect of his activities, as well as a few critical efforts, such as A. S. Huffington’s
Picasso: Creator and Destroyer
.
⁸
In the twentieth century, more words, often contradictory, were written about Picasso than about any other artist. Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multimillionaire by the
end of World War I; and his wealth continued to grow, so that by the time of his death he was by far the richest artist who had ever lived. He made a deal with the French government over inheritance taxes, and as a result, in 1985 the Musée Picasso opened in Paris. There, his work of all periods can be studied, supplemented by the Musée Picasso in Barcelona, which specializes in his earlier portraits and his drawings.
⁹

Picasso’s work can be divided into eight chronological periods. First was his early work up to the end of 1901. Then came the “blue period,” with a predominantly blue palette, figurative in style and focusing on stage characters, prostitutes, outcasts, prisoners, and beggars. This lasted until 1904 (autumn) and also included sculpture and etching.
¹⁰
Then came the “rose period,” with much use of pink and flesh tints, again with figures (chiefly clowns) but dislocated from surrounding objects and space. In 1906 Picasso changed again: he was experimenting with primitive shapes and figures and moving away from representative art.
¹¹
By 1907 he was able to produce
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
, perhaps the most important and influential of all his works, in which he disengaged from nature and representation and adopted linear analysis.
¹²
This led directly to his fourth phase, cubism, in 1907–1908. He and Braque used the late work of Cézanne to dismantle objects and reassemble them in blocks and lines. The object was, or was said to be, to achieve greater solidity and thus greater realism than mere representation. Cubism in this original, so-called “analytical” phase was the most sensational of Picasso’s revolutions, since it broke the umbilical cord that linked art to the world of nature and the human body.
¹³
This raises a logical problem about Picasso. If cubism was his greatest invention, since it sounded the death knell of representation in art (or so the majority of art historians claim), why do collectors, museums, and the art market place a much higher value on works from his earlier periods, especially the blue period, when he was still a representational artist? In 1912, Picasso reinvented an old trick of sticking bits of paper onto his canvases (especially bits of newspaper, to introduce an element of literary-political comment), and building on it by inserting solid objects, such as bits of guitars, wire, and metal. This work, known as synthetic
cubism, was a further step in his fourth phase. It lasted until World War I, and it raises another logical problem. If cubism was a way of introducing a new degree of solidity and realism into the depiction of objects on a flat surface, surely the introduction of solid (three-dimensional) objects into the work of art defeated the whole purpose of the cubist method?
¹⁴
This problem, like the earlier one, has never been satisfactorily answered by writers on Picasso. Indeed such writers refuse to recognize that they are problems, denouncing people who pose them as Philistines.

After synthetic cubism, Picasso spent the war years and postwar years working in theater, designing costumes and sets and painting backdrops. But he also, in the 1920s, entered and left a fifth phase, classicism, using images from antiquity. In 1925–1935 he was in a sixth phase, surrealism, though he was never a surrealist as such. During the Spanish Civil War he took up political subjects, his seventh phase. At the request of the embattled Republican government, he painted a large canvas,
Guernica
, for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1937.
¹⁵
This joined
Les Demoiselles
as his best-known picture. His later years constitute the eighth phase. His works now featured particular models; minotaurs; variations on the old masters, such as Velázquez and Goya; bullfights; and crucifixions. All these themes overlapped and are difficult to distinguish. And each phase of Picasso’s two-dimensional work overlapped with sculpture, pottery, and constructions, as well as exercises in lithography, prints and etchings, book illustration, and costume design—and more work in theater. Even among his admirers there seems to be some agreement that his work deteriorated from the 1940s on, but this, like every other aspect of his professional career, is a matter of sharply differing opinions.

The extraordinary success Picasso enjoyed from quite early in his career and then in growing measure until his death is explained by a number of factors. He took a long time even to become literate and was middle-aged before he could communicate in French. Very few of his letters survive, for the simple reason that to him writing a letter was more difficult, and took more time and effort, than doing a painting. Matisse wrote him many letters, which we have, but got only one in return, in which his name was misspelled (“Mattisse”). But if Picasso’s brain was
not academic, it was nonetheless powerful, reinforcing his ability to think visually with sharp clarity and cunning. He was essentially a fashion designer (like two other Spaniards imported to Paris, Fortuny and Balenciaga), at his best working on costumes and drop curtains, designing logos and symbols, creating arresting images of women tortured out of shape into distortions that etch themselves into the mind like acid. In the first decade of the twentieth century, French painting finally moved from art to fashion, and, in a world tired of figurative skill, Picasso was a man whose time had come. He replaced fine art—that is, paintings composed 10 percent of novelty and 90 percent of skill—with fashion art: images where the proportions were reversed.
¹⁶