Culture and Civilisations Stories and Essays
Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) had a spectacular career as a Renaissance art historian and critic of modern paintings. Born in Moscow, he was educated in Berlin and London. He came to New York in 1945, earned a late doctorate at NYU in 1960, and taught at Hunter College and the University of Pennsylvania. He was a MacArthur Fellow, received six honorary degrees, including Harvard, and frequently gave dynamic lectures throughout America and Europe. More than a decade after his death, Steinberg’s Picasso: Selected Essays (Ed. Sheila Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 248 pp. $65) has now appeared. But it’s best to examine his style and interpretations—in this well-illustrated, small-print, double-column volume—with open eyes rather than on bended knees.
Steinberg’s very first sentence is misleading and unconvincing. Perhaps forgetting Grünewald’s Crucifixion and Mantegna’s Christ in the Tomb, he calls Picasso’s late Child with a Shovel (1971), which portrays a boy on the beach with twisted face and limbs, “one of the saddest pictures I know.” He analyses tiny details in minor works, even in rough sketches, but neglects major paintings, and he jumps around from picture to picture without a clear structure or argument. Works disappear and reappear in later essays, and favourite quotations are recycled. The long-winded chapters 5 and 6 argue with William Rubin about the origins of Cubism. With his own encouragement —“dispirited readers are advised to skip”— I gladly dodged these tedious pages. He goes in for abstruse pronouncements: “a working code for the denotation of mass” and “the conditioning agent of all embodiment”. His eccentric diction oscillates between arcane and colloquial. Saccadic, cavetto, fizgigs and the Greek paraphs, paraleipsis and ankylosis are uneasily combined with emcee, comfy, all aboard!, beach bunny, party pooper and jet-farting.
Child with a Shovel (1971), Pablo Picasso
Steinberg rarely mentions the biographical background, but makes two serious errors. Picasso did not marry his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, “because she would not otherwise sleep with him”. He lived intimately with her before their wedding. The distinguished critic Edmund Wilson was not “infatuated” with Communism and strongly condemned it after his 1935 trip to Russia. Steinberg is more persuasive when he notes Picasso’s inability to “work fast enough to keep pace with his imagination” and “his self-image as harlequin, lover, ravisher, bull, minotaur, monster, artist-creator or virtuoso performer.”
He perceptively describes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as an “orgiastic immersion and Dionysian release . . . depersonalised and barbaric.” Picasso portrays five women: one in profile drawing back the wavy curtain, three facing the spectator, one seated backward and twisting her head in an impossible contrapposto. The four standing women have energetic raised arms, three have African-mask faces. Grapes, apples and a half-moon melon lie on a cloth below them. Picasso creates beauty from ugliness in a cinematic succession of multiple images.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Pablo Picasso
There’s no evidence in this picture, as Steinberg suggests, that the women are prostitutes. The French title—-Demoiselles, not the Spanish Majas or Putas— refers directly to the Provencal town rather than to Carrer d’Avinyó, the supposed street of ill-fame in Barcelona. Steinberg calls these women “a tidal wave of female aggression” and the personification of “sheer sexual energy as the image of a life force.” Yet prostitutes are portrayed (as in Degas) as passive and available, surrounded by garish décor, displaying sexy underwear and exposing their genitals. Steinberg claims that Picasso contracted venereal disease during his first years in Paris. If so, like the hero of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, he would not associate whores with a “life force”, but with fear and squalor, decadence and disease.
Yet Steinberg obsessively calls the Demoiselles naked whores, lazing whores (in this kinetic painting), teams of prostitutes (who don’t work together), trollops and sluts in city stews (though there is no city and no stews); and places them in a maison close, brothel interior and brothel parlour (without decoration). Heating up, he claims the harmless untouched fruit is a “pernicious indulgence.” Dragging the spectators into the picture, he even claims “we are implied as the visiting clientele.” This is completely different from the unseen but eager customer who sends a bouquet of flowers to the naked woman in Manet’s Olympia. Steinberg’s repetitions are not an argument, and Demoiselles does not show how a prostitute reveals herself to a client.
Steinberg absurdly compares Picasso’s ochre-coloured, blob-like Three Women (1908) to Cézanne’s Bathers (1900), which portrays skinny figures in a pastoral, riverine setting. He writes that Picasso adopts “Cézannist syntax” and is “at his most Cézannesque.” Leo, look at the pictures! They are immediately and obviously very different. There’s no water, no trees, no bathers in Three Women. Picasso is a master draftsman; Cézanne is not. After emphasising Cézanne’s influence for 22 pages, Steinberg illogically concludes that Three Women is “about the young man Picasso arranging his escape from Cézanne.”
Three Women (1907-8), Pablo Picasso
It’s not true, as Picasso said, that Cézanne was “my one and only master.” Velázquez, Goya and Manet had a greater influence on his art. Cézanne’s statement is frequently quoted in connection with Picasso, “Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the square and the cone.” But most of nature, including water and clouds, cannot be reduced to these simplistic geometric figures. When Cézanne regained his reason, he made a significant retraction that is usually ignored: “I soon forgot them once I started using my eyes.”
Equally hard to swallow is Steinberg’s ecstatic evaluation of the collage Bottle, Glass and Violin (1912). It contains five pasted bits of brown newspaper that make a siphon-bottle without a spout; a fractured wine glass; the peg-box of a violin flowing into a drawing of the strings and false-wood paper to suggest the sound box. These pieces, on a greyish-blue background, are complemented by a block-letter JOURNAL and a blank rectangle, which he fancifully compares to “an actor in mufti taking a curtain call.” Steinberg calls this handful of paper scraps “exceptionally daring” and concludes with yet another far-fetched assertion: “Each of these five convening bodies coheres, and the picture contracts like a tight fist, while grappling even the viewer into complicity.”
More could be said about what Steinberg mistakenly calls “the developed feminine charm” of the weird subhuman creatures in Picasso’s On the Beach (1937). One woman stands in the edge of the water, the other kneels in the shallows. Both have extended tortoise necks and heads, with miniscule features, ample torpedo breasts, bloated bellies, bulging buttocks and spear-like arms that play incongruously with a toy sailboat. A saucer-faced, long-necked aquatic man, more curious than menacing, peers over the horizon of the blue-grey water, wondering about their childish occupation and eager to join them. The little boy in First Steps (1943) has twisted features, asymmetrical eyes, nose and mouth on different sides of his face. He wears a triangular patched cloak, lifts his huge, flat, toes-up left foot, and takes his first uncertain steps. His mother, protectively bent over him, with her flat back touching the top of the picture, has anxious drooping eyes, swollen cheek and huge disfigured nose. In a maternal gesture, she touches the boy’s head with her chin, grasps his paws with her stubby fingers and wobbles him forward. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) uncannily anticipates Picasso’s distorted portraits, when Humpty Dumpty tells Alice how to distinguish her face from those of other girls: “If you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose—or the mouth at the top–that would be some help.”
On the Beach (1937), Pablo Picasso
In Women of Algiers (1955) Steinberg ignores the turbaned, green-gowned African eunuch-slave, who emerges through the rear curtains and brings a metal pot of coffee into the harem. The standing woman on the left, with a pin head and heavy judge’s wig, has a bare midriff and wears a red halter, puffed red Turkish trousers and curved pointed shoes. She holds the serpentine tube of a water pipe to smoke with her coffee. The connoisseur-owner of this painting told Steinberg that the huge, naked, contorted white figure, uneasily balanced on a blue divan, “lies supine on her back and prone on her belly at the same time.”
Picasso’s 22 obscene etchings in the Raphael and Fornarina Suite of 1968 are vaguely based on the Renaissance painter’s legendary love affair with a baker’s wife. Steinberg notes they have been mistakenly called a “confession of Picasso’s senile impotence and a recourse to the compensations of voyeurism.” He is at his surprising best when examining these works, in which “a young painter in Renaissance costume copulates with his model, while an older person—pope, patron or potentate—peers in or looks on” as penis repeatedly penetrates vagina in this graphic diletti carnali. During all his frantic coupling the artist, obsessed with his work and recharged by his model, will not be distracted and continues to paint. As the Suite progresses the voyeuristic potentate is demoted from throne to chamber pot, his buttocks protruding over the rim. The crude content of the Suite is redeemed by Picasso’s masterful drawing and mischievous wit.
Steinberg misses a great opportunity by not comparing Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1907), age 26, with his late Self-Portrait (1971), age 90. The youthful artist has a mask-like face and thick black hair plastered across his white-streaked forehead. The pupils of his large black eyes stare out from the white sclera with his fierce mirada fuerte. He has a broad nose, pointed chin and sensuous lips, bisected by a straight black line that covers his teeth. He’s confined in a buttoned-up white shirt with pointed collar and grey jacket, and has an innocent boyish expression. Sixty-four years later, Picasso’s brave Self-Portrait, painted the year before he died, is a close-up view of his apelike face. He has a scarred forehead, huge staring wide-apart eyes, thick wide-nostriled nose, grim slit mouth, deeply grooved stubbly blue face and fringe of red hair dangling down from his bony skull to his hairy raised shoulder. Picasso stares straight at death, stoical and severe but not afraid.
Self Portrait Facing Death (1972), Pablo Picasso
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.
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by Paul T Horgan 14 OCT 2022
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