Picasso. Magic paintings

 In the summer of 1926, in Juan-les-Pins, Pablo Picasso began work on a series of paintings that was continued into the first quarter of 1930. This group of some one hundred and fifty paintings, which use similar means of expression and a common range of subjects, was first recognised by the editor and critic Christian Zervos in a 1938 article in his journal Cahiers d’art entitled “Picasso’s Magic Paintings”. These paintings, mainly heads and figures, often set in the theatre of the artist’s studio, are based on extreme formalisation and the use of a system of signs. In time, constructions of flat planes and lines gave way to monumental sculptural forms, creating an impression of constant metamorphosis. The artist’s remarkable creative imagination led Zervos to see him as a magician, who could invent new forms that would affect the thinking of the spectator. These radical works provoked strong opinions and interpretations both at the time they were done and ever since.

"Picasso.Magic Paintings" is the first exhibition devoted specifically to this period of Picasso’s activity, including a broad selection of works.

SECRET SPELLS
Pablo Picasso's magic paintings have an expressive power that goes beyond formal representation. The sinuous lines that create double profiles or the substitutions of anatomical features seem to have the character of repeated spells or magic formulae. These works appear in series, and the spells seem to have been elaborated in sequences of drawings in his sketchbooks. In several of the seated figures and heads, the displacement of facial features, especially in the sleeping figures, contributes to their disturbing quality.

Picasso's methods seem to parallel the characteristics of magic rites and ceremonies used to invoke invisible spiritual powers.

MAGIC OBJECTS
By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso owned a significant collection of non-Western works, which he had started collecting early in the 20th century. The creation of the magic paintings parallels a rise in the taste for works of this kind in artistic circles. Between 1926 and 1930, Picasso was in contact with a second generation of dealers in non-Western art in Paris, including Louis Carré, André Level, Pierre Loeb and Charles Ratton, and he added to his collection with their help.

There are eleven objects owned by Picasso or known to him by 1930 in the Musée National Picasso-Paris. These works appeared in exhibitions and in art journals, particularly in Cahiers d'art, where a mask from the Torres Straits was reproduced (Christian Zervos, "L’Art nègre", Cahiers d'Art, No. 7- 8, 1927), and they were an inspiration for Picasso's work.

METAMORPHOSIS
The process of metamorphosis – or re-creation – is seen most clearly in Picasso’s dislocation of facial and physical features. The large compositions in this room, which were done in Cannes in the summer of 1927, show how the artist transformed his drawings of bathers on the beach into what appear to be plans for sculptural figures with exaggerated body parts and gestures. In Nude on a White Background (1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP102), a bather is gesturing upwards with a long thin arm.

Picasso's preoccupation with sculpture was connected to his desire to find a suitable form for a monument to the memory of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, his close friend who had died in 1918. The little plaster maquette Métamorphose II (1928, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP202) was a model for a much larger sculpture, but it was rejected by the Apollinaire Committee as far too shocking for a funeral monument, and this was never realised.

TRANSMUTATIONS
Christian Zervos used the term "transmutation" to describe the relationship of Pablo Picasso's magic paintings to objective reality. In a series of paintings done in Cannes, Picasso developed his formulation of a woman's head by reducing facial features to signs: straight lines for hair, the nose (and nostrils) at the top, with the eyes appearing on opposite cheeks; the vertical, tooth-lined mouth is placed between, while the outline of the head itself becomes an irregular geometric form. In one of these paintings, the incorporation of powdered chalk into the paint surface at once suggests the misty atmosphere and also the sand of the beach.

Among Picasso’s still lifes of the same period is a series of schematic representations of guitars. In the painting Guitar (April 27, 1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP1990-13) there is a floating sign that combines the letters M and T, a reference to Picasso's young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter.

MAGIC WRITINGS
The period that Christian Zervos identified in 1938 as that of Pablo Picasso's "Magic Paintings" received immediate attention in intellectual circles. Several of the writers who wrote about the artist's new paintings were also his friends. Zervos, art critic and founder of Cahiers d'art, had been a supporter of the Spaniard’s work since 1926, and published it as it emerged. Influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, Zervos committed himself to the defence of Picasso’s creative freedom, and in 1938, one year after the creation of Guernica and in the face of rising international threats, this vision of a free Picasso took on a political dimension. The writer, critic and ethnologist Michel Leiris became Picasso's friend in the 1920s. Carl Einstein, a leading author on African and modern art with radical political views, was one of his correspondents. Leiris and Einstein were active participants in the activities of the journal Documents (19291930) together with Georges Bataille. In contrast to André Breton’s Surrealist movement, which considered Picasso to be one of its spiritual ancestors, the Documents group defended a "realist" Picasso, attached to reality in all its compelling monstrosity.

THE POWER OF INVENTION
Drawing played an essential role in Pablo Picasso's artistic practice. His development of imagery in series reveals his constant probing of visual ideas and changes of scale from drawings to paintings. The group of drawings of the artist's studio refers to the large Painter and Model in New York (MoMA). In this series Picasso achieves different effects of texture and substance with Indian ink, and in all of them emphasis is given to the figure of the painter at the right with his palette, based on Picasso’s first welded iron sculpture made in October 1928, Head (Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP263).

When Christian Zervos published his article on "Picasso's Magic Paintings" (Cahiers d'art, no. 3-10, 1938), he included among the reproductions of oil paintings a sequence of drawings of bathers from a sketchbook that Picasso had with him in Cannes in 1927. While the distortion of their bodies and the use of signs for facial features and hair are similar to those in the paintings, the bathers in the drawings are rendered volumetrically, like monumental sculptures, with shadows and highlights revealing not only the massiveness of their forms but also their movement.

THE STUDIO
The artist's studio can be compared to an alchemist’s laboratory, where the Great Work – the transmutation of matter – is carried on in a collaboration between the artist and his model. Several of Pablo Picasso’s experiments in depicting heads and figures culminated in atelier compositions. The vibrant colours of two versions of the model in the studio (done in Cannes in 1927) provide a startling contrast to the subdued palette of earlier works. In the more complex compositions that followed, references to the now familiar formulae used for magic paintings can be seen in the paintings of the studio. While the artist is usually shown in the act of painting, his shadow-profile sometimes intrudes into the studio scene, signifying a spiritual presence.

Throughout these years, Picasso was involved in the preparation of an illustrated edition of Honoré de Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, a novella that explores the interconnected relationships of artist, model, painting and spectator. Among the illustrations in the book are many drawings related to magic heads.

EXHIBITING THE MAGIC PAINTINGS
In the aftermath of the first world war, Pablo Picasso showed at Paul Rosenberg's gallery at 21, rue La Boétie in Paris. Rosenberg, who also represented Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin, was one of the most progressive art dealers of the 1920s. As a commercial strategy, he sometimes gave Picasso solo exhibitions, sometimes included him with other modern artists, as when he first exhibited some magic paintings in 1929 and 1930. Thanks to his contacts with American collectors and dealers, Rosenberg ensured that Picasso's work became widely known in the United States. These works (not yet referred to as magic paintings) appeared in many individual and group exhibitions, facilitating their entry into private and then public collections across the Atlantic. Rosenberg also provided documentation of Picasso's art, photographing his work and collecting it in a portfolio that could be shown to admirers and collectors. These works were therefore already familiar in certain circles when Christian Zervos wrote about them in 1938.

SIGNS-SYMBOLS
As the representation of faces and bodies became more formalised in the series of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of 1927 and 1928, features and body parts were increasingly reduced to signs. The positioning of the almondshaped eyes, tooth-lined mouth or even the nostrils may seem arbitrary, but the emotional power of these heads is undiminished. In certain paintings Picasso replaced the predominantly curved, often biomorphic, forms that had characterised his earlier work, with figures composed of sharp angles. While two of these appear to cry out in anguish, others hark back to the mysterious symbolic conventions of non-western art, particularly from Africa or Oceania, as Picasso understood them.

RHYTHM AND MONUMENTALITY
Pablo Picasso's engagement with sculpture, beginning in the autumn of 1928, had repercussions in his paintings and drawings, many of which reflected a move towards monumentality. Following the rejection of his submissions to the Apollinaire Committee for a memorial to the poet, the forms of the heads in his paintings become increasingly solid. A series of heads and figures, sometimes featuring a red armchair, done between January and May 1929, suggest possible new solutions for a monument, but they remained unrealised in three-dimensional form.

However, Picasso did work on a number of sculptures at this time in collaboration with Julio González, who initiated him in metal sculpture. Head of a Man (1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP269) combines iron, brass, and bronze elements, and here the sharp contrasts of flat planes with protruding elements, as well as the curved back of the head, achieve a forceful expressiveness akin to the heads in Picasso’s magic paintings.

MYTHIC REALISM
The German critic Carl Einstein wrote with great insight about Pablo Picasso at this time, notably in the journal Documents, of which he was an editor. He coined the label "mythic realism" to distinguish Picasso's work of the late 1920s from that of the Surrealists. It was, he considered, far more “grounded” and related to the fundamental realities of mythical sources. While the unsettling quality of Picasso’s magic paintings has often provoked comparison with Surrealism, Picasso’s artistic undertaking was not concerned with revealing his own fantasies but rather with producing a body of work with a more universal significance.

Painted in Picasso’s Paris studio between December 1929 and March 1930, the final magic paintings were a group of works on wooden panels, apparently from a dismantled wardrobe. The formulation of the heads in these compositions varies between triangular-shaped faces to monumental “creatures” whose bone structure defines their mass. These figures would be introduced into the panel painted with a scene of the Crucifixion (7 February 1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP122), in which the elements of expressive transformation that had characterised the magic paintings of the previous four years find their fullest expression.