In The Accidental Masterpiece, Michael Kimmelman relates a conversation he once had with the photographer Cartier-Bresson. While viewing a self-portrait by Bonnard, Cartier-Bresson said, “You know, Picasso didn’t like Bonnard and I can imagine why, because Picasso had no tenderness. It is only a very flat explanation to say that Bonnard is looking in a mirror in this painting. He’s looking far, far beyond. To me he is the greatest painter of the century. Picasso was a genius, but that is something quite different.”
Kimmelman goes on to quote Picasso on the topic of Bonnard: “Don’t talk to me about Bonnard. That’s not painting, what he does…Painting isn’t a question of sensibility: it’s a question of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.”
Is that the spectrum, sensibility versus power? My distrust of Picasso’s distorted ego makes it easy to dismiss his comment, but perhaps that is a presumption I should give up in order to understand something I may have missed. “Seizing power, taking over from nature”? My experience is better described by words like surrender, and humility.
To me “seizing power, taking over from nature” is a statement that defines a mechanistic attitude and way of thinking. Just because Picasso is a great innovator doesn’t mean that every utterance he made deserves to be considered as “truth” or even wisdom. They are just things he stated as based on his own opinion, and we all know just how wrongly based opinion can be. Of course, Picasso, like others, probably didn’t qualify his statements (as far as can be discerned by what is written about him). It is such absolute certainty that I distrust, especially if there is even a whiff of ego-distortion present. In my own experience, being an artist (any kind) is to be an instrument from and through which flows a fountain of information and potential originating outside but filtered through individual sensibility and capacity. Your words “surrender and humility” aptly express this conduit nature of artists, in my opinion.
Well said, and so hearteningly in synch with my own experience. Thanks for this.
Picasso fits perfectly into the story of modernism: “seizing power, taking over from nature”, a “mechanistic attitude” like suburbanlife writes, the power of maleness, male “genius”, innovation… I would say the other type of artist has excisted alongside this modernist artist type (like you say, Bonnard was this other type of artist, not like Picasso at all).
I wonder which artist type is the most compatible to zeitgeist today…
This is a question I ask myself a lot. I know the poles have shifted, but I’m not sure how to characterize that change. Not yet anyway.