Creators (34 page)

This was the new game in art. There was intense competition, but Picasso became the champion player, and held the title till his death, because he was extraordinarily judicious in getting the proportions of skill and fashion exactly right at any one time. He also had brilliant timing in guessing when the moment had arrived for pushing on to a new fashion. Although his own appetite for novelty was insatiable, he was uncannily adept at deciding exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take. This cunning was closely linked to an overwhelming personality and a peculiar sense of moral values. His ability to overawe and exploit both men and women—some of them highly intelligent and uneasily aware of what he was doing to them—was by far the most remarkable thing about him. His sexual appeal, when young, was mesmeric, both to women and to homosexuals. He later claimed to have first slept with a woman when he was ten, and he attracted women long before his fame and money became their object. His appeal to homosexuals, especially those who enjoyed the passive role, was even stronger; he seemed a small, fierce, thrusting tiger of virility. Picasso himself was overwhelmingly heterosexual by inclination. But in the culture from which he sprang there was no disgrace to his manhood in taking the active role to satisfy a needy “queen,” to use his expression. It was homosexuals who adored him—the dealer Pere Manyac; the publicist Max Jacob; and Jean Cocteau, the Andy Warhol of his day, who first made Picasso famous and reinforced his success.
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His most passionate admirers have always
been homosexuals, such as the Australian collector and publicist Douglas Cooper, and Cooper’s lover John Richardson, who became Picasso’s biographer. Curiously enough, one homosexual who was not taken in by Picasso’s personality and who even pushed him around was Diaghilev. Diaghilev used to call Picasso by the contemptuous diminutive “Pica.” But most homosexuals in the art world did, and do, regard Picasso as almost beyond criticism—an opinion which, granted their power in that narrow enclave, was decisive. Picasso’s own attitude toward men was ambivalent, and he was shrewd at detecting passivity. He referred to Braque, with whom he created cubism, as “my wife” (a term of contempt) and said: “[He] is the woman who has loved me the most.” Picasso also appealed, aesthetically, to lesbians, and it is significant that he called the masculine Gertrude Stein “my only woman friend.”
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In this game of exploitation Picasso benefited from a sort of moral blindness. He had gifts that the vast majority of human beings would give anything to possess. But apparently innately, he lacked two things that ordinary people take for granted: the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. This lack was one source of his power. At the center of his universe there was room only for Picasso—his needs, interests, and ambitions. Nobody else had to be considered. He began by exploiting his penurious father. He soon developed an imperious eye for wealthy women. Once he acquired a reputation, he proved a harder businessman than any of his dealers, whom he hired or fired on a strictly commercial basis. He boasted: “I do not give. I take.” To his harsh mind, kindness, generosity, and consideration for feelings were all weaknesses, to be taken advantage of by master figures like himself. Those who helped him, such as Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire, and countless others, were dropped, betrayed, or lashed by his venomous tongue. His ingratitude was compounded by jealousy, especially of other painters, which may have sprung from insecurity about the merits of his own work and a feeling it was all a con. It is curious that he always subscribed to a press-cutting agency and could be litigious with critics, especially those who quoted his periodic admission, “I am nothing but a
clown.” He grew to hate Braque and put anyone who befriended Braque on his enemies list. He said odious things about Matisse, who thought him a friend. (“What is a Matisse? A balcony with a big red flower-pot falling over it.”)
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He was particularly vicious toward his fellow Spaniard, the modest and likable Juan Gris, persuading patrons to drop him, intriguing to prevent him from getting commissions, and then, when Gris died at age forty, pretending to be grief-stricken.
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By the end of World War I, in which Picasso evaded conscription while many of his contemporaries were killed or maimed, he was a major power in the Parisian art world, since he carefully controlled the release of his paintings and dealers groveled to do his bidding. He could effectively stop any painter he disliked, below the top rank, from getting a show: that is what happened to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, when she left him.
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Gilot was one of the few who dared to tell the truth about Picasso while he was still alive, despite the tribe of lawyers he employed to get her book suppressed. Picasso’s attitude toward women was terrifying. He needed and of course used them for his work and pleasure, but one does not need to look long at his enormous iconography of women to realize that he despised, hated, and even feared them. He said that, for him, women were divided into “goddesses and doormats,” and that his object was to turn the goddess into the doormat. One of his long-term mistresses said of him: “He first raped the woman,…then he worked. Whether it was me, or someone else, it was always like that.” He was predatory—and intensely possessive. He discarded women at will, but for a woman to desert him was treason. He told one mistress: “Nobody leaves a man like me.” He would steal a friend’s wife, then tell the man that he was honoring him by sleeping with her. He told Gilot: “I would rather see a woman die than see her happy with someone else.” Was he a schizophrenic, as Jung, on the basis of his paintings, believed? At times he appeared a monomaniac. He told Giacometti: “I have reached a point when I don’t want any criticism from anyone.” He was overheard saying to himself, over and over: “I am God, I am God.” A pagan who regarded himself as an artistic deity, he believed he had an unfettered right to inflict injustice on those
around him—family, friends, admirers. As he put it, “being unfair is god-like.”
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His distorted paintings of women are closely linked to the pleasure he got from hurting them, both physically and in other ways. He abused them not only in rage but on purpose. Dora Maar, probably his most beautiful and gifted mistress, was beaten and left unconscious on the floor. Another mistress said: “You got hit on the head.” His favorite, almost his only, reading was de Sade. Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he seduced when she was seventeen, was persuaded by him to read Sade, and later initiated into Sade’s practices. Picasso loved to rule over a seraglio but avoided the risk of harem conspiracies by setting one woman against another. His delight was to see his victims turning their rage on each other instead of on himself. He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching. On one occasion Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter pounded each other with their fists while Picasso, having set up the fight, calmly went on painting. The canvas he was working on was
Guernica
.
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He was mean to his women, liking to keep them dependent on him. Most parted from him poorer than when they met. It is true that he sometimes gave them paintings or drawings. But he never signed these works. If, after a rupture, a woman attempted to sell such a gift, dealers would not handle it without Picasso’s authentication, which was refused. This, of course, raises another logical problem about Picasso’s art. Without both a signature and Picasso’s personal authentication, such works were commercially valueless. In short, they had no intrinsic value. Few leading painters have ever been so easy to copy or imitate. Because of his abuse of his power of authentication, and the fear in which dealers held him, some works rejected as forgeries are undoubtedly by him, and it is likely that many authenticated works are fraudulent. Indeed, despite the attention lavished on his oeuvre by hagiographers and scholars, it remains in some confusion.

Many people find it hard to accept that a great writer, painter, or musician can be evil. But the historical evidence shows, again and again, that evil and creative genius can exist side by side in the
same person. It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be so all-pervasive as it was in Picasso, who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind. In my judgment his monumental selfishness and malignity were inextricably linked to his achievement. His creativity involved a certain contempt for the past, which demanded ruthlessness in discarding it. He was all-powerful as an originator and aesthetic entrepreneur precisely because he was so passionately devoted to what he was doing, to the exclusion of any other feelings whatever. He had no sense of duty except to himself, and this gave him his overwhelming self-promoting energy. Equally, his egoism enabled him to turn away from nature and into himself with a concentration which is awe-inspiring. It is notable that, from about 1910, he ceased to be interested in nature at all. He never traveled, except to a few Mediterranean resorts. He never explored Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Leaving aside his women models (and a few quasi portraits), he never drew or painted the world outside his mind. By excluding nature he increased his self-obsessed strength, but it cost him peace of mind and probably much else that we cannot know about. The all-powerful machinery of the Picasso industry—his regiments of women, his châteaux, his gold ingots, his unlimited fame, his vast wealth, the sycophancy that surrounded him—none of these brought him serenity as he aged. It seems to me that his personal cruelty and the evident savagery of much of his work (so different from the indignant savagery of Goya) sprang from a deep unease of spirit, which grew steadily worse and terminated in despair. When he realized that his sexual potency had gone, he said bitterly to his son Claude: “I am old and you are young. I wish you were dead.” His last years were punctuated by family quarrels over his money. His demise was followed by many years of ferocious litigation. Marie-Thérèse hanged herself. His widow shot herself. His eldest child died of alcoholism. Some of his mistresses died in want. Picasso, an atheist transfixed by primitive superstitions, who had his own barber so that no one could collect clippings of his hair and so “get control” of him by magic, lived in moral chaos and left more chaos behind.
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It is an appalling tale, though edifying in its own way—it shows painfully how even vast creative achievement and unparalleled worldly success can fail to bring happiness.

Leaving morality and happiness aside, however, and concentrating on Picasso’s creative impact, it has to be said that, if you subtract him from the history of art in the twentieth century, you leave an immense hole. It is impossible to know what direction art would have taken if Picasso had never existed. Would fine art have been submerged so completely and for so long? Would fashion art have enjoyed so many decades of such complete supremacy? These questions, being hypothetical, cannot be answered. Would our vision of the world be any different? Probably not. But then would it be different if Walt Disney had not lived and worked? That is harder to answer.

Walt Disney, like Picasso, began his working life early, but he had a much harder struggle to earn a living or achieve recognition and success. Much of his childhood was spent on a farm in rural Missouri, and he delighted all his life in observing and drawing animals. Their movements and idiosyncrasies gave him great pleasure, as they did Dürer; and Disney—like one of his mentors, Landseer—liked to pin the entire range of human emotions on them.
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Whereas Picasso tended to dehumanize the women he drew or painted. Disney anthropomorphized his animal subjects; that was the essential source of his power and humor. His family was impecunious and his irascible father demanding, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, Disney always saw the family as the essential unit in society and the only source of lasting happiness. When the farm failed, the Disneys moved to Kansas City, where his father started a newspaper-distributing business (in effect, a glorified round) and made Disney work very hard at all hours. But he did get some art education, even if he never had the luxury, like Picasso, of cutting art classes in favor of visiting brothels. By the age of eighteen he was making his living as a newspaper cartoonist. But he developed two passions. First, he wanted to run his own business and be his own master—he had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree, and by the age of twenty he had already run his own company, gone bankrupt, and set up again. Second, he wanted to get into the art or craft of animation.
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As an artist Disney sprang from a distinct nineteenth-century tradition that included Edward Lear and the great cartoonist Tenniel, who drew for
Punch
and first illustrated Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland,
creating our image of the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and Alice herself. Disney could also take from a huge repertoire of examples in the newspapers—strips known as “comics” in England but “funnies” in America. Disney believed that the first of the animated funnies drawn for the new motion-picture industry was made in 1906 by J. S. Blackburn and titled
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
, updating a tradition of grotesque physiognomy which went back to Leonardo da Vinci and earlier. It was produced and marketed by the Vitagraph Company to accompany longer movies filmed with actors. Vitagraph also used series drawn by Winsor McKay, an artist for whom Disney had much respect, admiring especially his
Gertie the Dinosaur
of c. 1910. McKay took his animated cartoons on old-style vaudeville circuits, accompanying them with a humorous vocal commentary which he delivered himself.

Disney always felt that animation without sound was dead and that the nature and quality of the sound were the key to success. But initially the sound dimension baffled him. So did a lack of capital. The burgeoning movie circuits would buy cartoons only in series of ten, twelve, or twenty, believing that moviegoers had to become accustomed to them (the same belief dominates television in the early twenty-first century), and Disney lived from hand to mouth. Five dollars was a lot of money for him, and he often had to borrow cash. But he contrived to keep abreast of what was a rapidly evolving technology, both in animation and in moving photography. On the one hand there were companies like the Bud Fisher Films Corporation and International Features Syndicate, producing animated versions of comic-strip characters, such as
Mutt and Jeff
and
The Katzenjammer Kids
, both in 1917–1918. In 1917, too, Max Fleischer, famous for his
Felix the Cat
series, made the first movie combining moving photography of actors with animated cartoon characters. Disney used this combination himself in 1923, when he made
Alice in Cartoonland
, using an eight-year-old girl, Margie Gay. A photo survives showing Margie in the middle of Disney’s production team of seven people. They included, besides Disney himself, his elder brother Roy Disney, who ran the finances (he also worked in a bank), and a clever artist and animator, Ubbe
(“Ub”) Iwerks. All the men are wearing plus fours, with ties and pullovers—the uniform of young entrepreneurs in the early 1920s, the era of Harding and “normalcy.”
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