Supreme Fiction

Picasso from the waist down

THE NEW YORK SUN
October 31, 2007

'Sketching A Portrait Of Picasso'
BY JAMES PANERO

John Richardson's multitivolume "Life of Picasso" has become an institution. Mr. Richardson, who has even set up his own foundation — the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research — has been researching the life for 25 years, and his work has certainly resulted in our more exhaustive study of the artist. "Volume I: 1881–1906" was published in 1991; "1907–1916: The Painter of Modern Life" came out in 1996. The new, third volume of his study, "The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932" (Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages, $40) surveys the midpoint of the career of Picasso, who was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Though this period is not Picasso's most engaging one (we can rank it after the Blue Period, after Cubism, before "Guernica"), Mr. Richardson still knows how to deliver his subject matter. In his hands, Picasso remains the priapic visionary who translated the sexuality of Andalusia to canvas, the mystical shaman who fought evil with evil, the sadistic lover who admired the Marquis de Sade, and the superstitious clown who refused to give old clothes to the gardener for fear that "some of his genius might rub off on the wearer."

Picasso, as Mr. Richardson explains, came from sybaritic stock: He was a "Peeping Tom like so many Andalusians," Mr. Richardson writes, who "suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male." For an Andalusian faced with a virtuous fiancée, Mr. Richardson continues, "regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response." Mr. Richardson's explanations would not exactly hold up in divorce court, indeed they can be downright silly, but his passion can come as some relief to the cooler and detached voice of much contemporary biography.

Yet for all that virility, the Picasso we find at the start of this new volume seems oddly emasculated. While his Cubist collaborator George Braque and the poet and friend Guillaume Apollinaire fought at the front, Picasso escaped to the safety of Rome. He settled into the world of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, accompanied by the composers Erik Satie, the choreographer Leonide Massine, and the dramatist Jean Cocteau, whom Mr. Richardson belittles as a "pampered, high-society homosexual … trying to gatecrash the avant-garde."

Picasso soon translated his accomplishments on canvas into tableaux vivants onstage. For his first production, "Parade," he designed innovative Cubist costumes. He also drew inspiration from the Farnese Hercules in Naples, inaugurating a classical period in his own painting. Finally he fell for a petite Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova, who became his first wife and who lifted Picasso out of his bohemian milieu.

Picasso painted the first portraits of Olga in the reverential style of the beaux arts. For this future minotaur, who would one day plunge "his monstrous, taurine penis," as Mr. Richardson delicately puts it, into a lover's "tumescent folds," his visions of the early 1920s were rather staid. Olga's transformation into a vagina dentata was still half a decade away.

Picasso never had much of a personality outside of the studio or the bedroom, and the glamorous society that surrounded him during this period clearly sucked up the artistic air. Picasso could paint remarkable work — there is "The Dance" of 1925 — but such achievements were rare, and Picasso can seem, in Richardson's telling, almost somnambulant. Picasso's friends, including Braque, were likewise left wondering what had become of the great artist: "Picasso's all too evident absorption into Diaghilev's effete world," Richardson reports, "left Braque worried about the state of his old friend's integrity."

This all changed, Richardson writes, on a "propitious" evening in January 1927 — propitious for the biographer, certainly, and propitious for anyone who prefers Picasso from the waist down. While cruising for love along the boulevards of Paris, the 45-year-old artist came upon Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was 17, "an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body — big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus." Ever the willing accomplice, Mr. Richardson is never at a loss for words when it comes to Picasso's bed games. After a brief attempt at domestic normalcy, "For the rest of Picasso's life sex would permeate his work almost as cubism did … As he once joked, he had an eye at the end of his penis." Mr. Richardson excels at writing from this point of view.

Picasso's mistress for nine years, Marie provided a counterbalance to "skinny Olga." She encouraged an avalanche of work and inspired Picasso "to unleash his sexuality and harness it to his imagery," which was often wickedly brutal. Picasso felt free to paint the most memorable work of the period, including "The Dream," now in the possession of the Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn (who in 2006 put his elbow through it), and the whimsical "Bather with a Beach Ball," now at the Museum of Modern Art: "In this glorious work," Richardson writes, "Picasso has pumped Marie-Thérèse so full of pneumatic bliss that she looks ready to burst." For Picasso this was as sweet as it got.

In his book "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy," Peter Gay takes stock of Picasso's achievement: "Of course, obviously, for any painter major or minor — or any poet or playwright — sexuality and aggression are indispensable raw material. What distinguishes Picasso was the animation, at times the brutality, with which he fixed love and hate on canvas and paper."

At issue, however, is how literally we should interpret Picasso's translation of emotion to paint. The poet and critic Roland Penrose once warned, "It would be too mechanical to read [Picasso's] portraits as a direct paraphrase of his troubles with one mistress or another; he was too imaginative for that." Richardson has build a great biography out of great gossip, but by looking for genius between the bedsheets, his ribald "Life" never quite credits the artist's imagination with the autonomy it deserves.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

Waiting

Dara writes:

Tonight, I will join other members of the National Arts Club's Literary Committee in reading short pieces on the theme of Waiting. It should be fun, and always a nice evening at the Club, especially when concluded by hot cider and warm M&M cookies in the parlor, as this event will be.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 8pm, National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York. Free.

Inventors' Country

Dara writes:

It is not often that an article on the front page of the New York Times makes me laugh out loud. Not the hysterical laughter that issues forth involuntarily from bad news, since that is what typically mars an NYT front page. No: laughter of hilarity, of mirth. Yet, this is what came on Saturday, during my breakfast, at this, an article about crime fighting techniques in Japan, a country with a low crime rate.

According to the article, since the Japanese are averse to confrontation, their crime-fighting techniques facilitate hiding from rather than facing would-be attackers, muggers, etc.. To make hiding easier, one woman has created a skirt that turns into a vending machine. Apparently, a row of vending machines is a common site on a street in Tokyo. All a woman would have to do, were she being pursued, aside from having had the perspicacity to don her vending-machine-skirt that morning, would be to unwrap her skirt, put it over her head, and voila, she looks like she can start dispensing Cokes.

I'm not kidding. The amazing thing, in the photo to which I link, is that you can SEE her blue sneakers sticking out from under the skirt/machine. But maybe the attacking would be running and wouldn't notice that??

Other camo of which the woman has thought is a bag that becomes a manhole and a backpack that becomes a fire hydrant. If you feel someone following you for your money, you can drop your purse on the ground and presumably the thief will walk over it because it looks like a manhole. If your child is being followed, he can slip his pack over his head and become a hydrant.

I adore Japanese writing utensils, notepads, stationery, etc., because it's so inventive. The Kinokinuya store in Rock Center satisfies my yen. This recent NYT story further convinces me I have to get myself to Japan someday.

Simone Dinnerstein

Dara writes:

Last night James and I had the privilege of experiencing the piano genius of new star Simone Dinnerstein, a 34-year-old pianist who lives in Brooklyn. Three magical elements marked the evening. One, of course, was Dinnerstein's playing. The second was the thing played: Bach's Goldberg Variations. James and I adore this piece and chose it as the music accompanying our wedding ceremony. Ms. Dinnerstein's love for the music is exceptionally personal as well as professional; she insisted that her doctor let her listen to it while she gave birth to her son during an emergency C section. She "thinks he was born during Variation 20."

Like most, I know Glenn Gould's iconic interpretation. Now there is another iconic moment in the piece's history. I'm not sophisticated about music, so all I can say is that her playing rocked. It was awesome. Certain things truly distinguish her mastery. Her rhythm and pacing are beyond reproach, in addition to being so unique and artistic. The way she trills and makes the piano sing is remarkable. Each variation and its repeat was so interesting, modulated, and fresh. Nothing by rote. Each note felt new.

The final element of the evening that will sear it in my memory was the setting in which we heard the Variations, the perfect setting, if you ask me: the sitting room in the Buckleys' maisonette on Park Avenue.

Our friend Larry Perelman, a pianist himself, organized the evening for Mr. Buckley. To listen to Bach in a plush room with red velvet sofas and silk tassels, reclining on a stuffed chair, intoxicated me. After she played, Ms. Dinnerstein was told by Bill Buckley that her playing represented one of the most exciting performances he had ever seen. He has lived quite a life, and that was an incredible compliment. She must be thrilled. Perhaps as much as we were listening to her!

'Mystical Mediator'

ART & ANTIQUES
critic's notebook

'Mystical Mediator'
Re-examining the legacy of Robert De Niro Sr.
By James Panero

September 2007

Modern art has tended to be divided into one of two categories. Visit Venice during this year's Biennale, for example, and you mostly encounter art of the dominant style-work based in tone, volume, depth, illusion, narrative and theater. This is art with a story to tell, art as a window, art that is loud, art with a point. The points may be radical, but the means are traditional, in that everything from academic painting to contemporary political art shares the common trait of using one medium to depict another. In the history of taste, this "public" style of extraverted, didactic art has always won out. But modernism has long nurtured a minority position. Mystical and idealist, often occult and certainly introverted, this secondary style is most easily recognized by its embrace of color.

On view in Venice through September 10, at the San Marco Casa D'Aste, the work of Robert De Niro Sr. serves as a counterpoint to the official art of the Biennale. This artist, who died in 1993, gracefully internalized art's color-based legacy.

Although little-known outside the world of art, De Niro Sr. remains just as famous as his celebrated actor-director son in the eyes of serious painters. Drawing on the sonorities of Bernard and Gauguin, the luxuriance of Bonnard, the anxieties of van Gogh, the moods of Munch and the textures of Matisse, De Niro
was spellbound by color's potential. A child prodigy, born in 1922 in Syracuse, New York to an Italian father and an Irish mother, De Niro at first studied with Josef Albers but then abandoned Albers' rigid color theories and went in for the push-pull compositional dynamics of Hans Hofmann, the celebrated painter and teacher of the New York School. Hofmann became De Niro's champion and godfather to the painter's only son.

De Niro's art, like the work of his colorist predecessors, finds its roots most directly in Symbolism, synesthesia and the metaphysical philosophies of the late 19th century (De Niro took an interest in the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy). Here the unity of painting predominates. The interlocking flatness and
harmonies of shape and color take precedence over subject matter. The painting itself is subject matter. In De Niro's case, the Passion of Christ, a recurring theme in his work, becomes passion itself. Writing in 1981 about Bonnard, De Niro echoed a similar sentiment: "His works are not about happiness. They are
happiness."

De Niro's indebtedness to Bonnard comes through most clearly in one of his early paintings-appropriately, a centerpiece of the Venice show. "Venice at Night is a Negress in Love" (1943-44) features a Bonnard bather awash in Gauguin-like colors, the palette more intense and atonal than anything the earlier artists
could have imagined.

Clement Greenberg made note of De Niro's early color combinations, not altogether approvingly: "Where De Niro usually goes wrong is in his hot, violent color, which, although he had digested the favorable influence of Matisse, often over asserts itself and distorts the drawing."

I disagree. This work is a masterpiece. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s and through the 1970s and 1980s, De Niro cooled his colors into a glassy sea. His signature flourish came in the form of broad, brushy outlines that defined his figures. At their best these gestures foregrounded his murky depths with graceful sweeps. The success or failure of his paintings often hinged on how well these final applications tied his compositions together.

De Niro Jr. has a deep affinity for his father's work. At a press conference in Lisbon, he broke down in tears discussing it. In Venice, as I walked through the exhibition with him, and joined him at a press conference for the opening, he said, "I am so proud of my father. But as a kid I didn't want to go to the shows. I now consider my father the best painter of the century."

Artist and son share the hunched shoulders, the taciturn expression, the brooding intensity, the inward pressure. The father was a dandy, maintaining the personality of the bohemian artist. In New York he crossed paths with the greatest painters of his generation. But unlike the Abstract Expressionists, De
Niro was more a mystical mediator than an innovator. As financial success passed him by, he would hit up rich friends like de Kooning for cash.

The marriage between De Niro and Virginia Admiral, another esteemed painter (they met through Hofmann), did not last longer than a few years, yet the two remained close. In the late 1970s, as Admiral worked to convert SoHo lofts into artist studios, De Niro took up residence in one of her buildings on West Broadway.
Here he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

This beautiful, top-floor space, with skylights illuminating every corner, remains as De Niro left it: tubes of seeping oils haunt the palette board, books on art, theology and philosophy line the shelves, posters from the history of art cover the walls, clothes fill the closets. In one corner, an umbrella hangs on the handlebars of a bicycle. In another, the door of a built-in birdcage swings ajar (De Niro favored parrots). When I asked De Niro Jr. if he ever wanted to become a painter, he said he "never had an interest. My kids don't want to be actors. But I preserved the studio for the children." The studio remains in the private possession of the family, but fortunately, Salander-O'Reilly published a monograph in 2004 on De Niro's work
that is filled with images of this magical place.

In 1857, the poet Charles Baudelaire, drawing on the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the poet Heinrich Heine, laid the groundwork for colorist innovation in his sonnet "Correspondences," from part of Les Fleurs du mal. Here is how Richard Wilbur translated the second stanza of this famous poem, which became a manifesto for painters like De Niro: "Like dwindling echoes gathered far away/ Into a deep and thronging
unison/ Huge as the night or as the light of day,/ All scents and sounds and colors meet as one."

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away, the art of Robert De Niro Sr. remains a place where scents and sounds and colors meet as one. What a joy to see it in the city of Titian, where color was born.