There was a second way in which the vertical invader claimed recognition. From the early twenties onwards Picasso began to make oracular statements about his art. Finding himself treated as a ‘magician’ — in the fashionable sense of the word — he began to discover within himself a more serious magical basis for his work.
The essence of magic is the primitive belief that the will can control the latent forces and spirits residing in all objects and all nature. The power to bewitch and the state of being possessed are superstitious legacies from this early belief. The Spanish duende is not far removed from magic. Generally speaking, some belief in magic persisted up to the stage of social development of the clan — and the clan, if not a continuing reality, was at least a memory in Spain.
Frazer in The Golden Bough defines magic as mistaking an ideal connexion for a real one.
Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things.
Magic is an illusion. But its relevance should not be underestimated in the modern world.13 To some extent all art derives its energy from the magical impulse — the impulse to master the world by means of words, rhythm, images, and signs. Magic first led man to the beginnings of science. And now, modern science confirms, if not the practice, at least some of the concepts of magic. The concept of ‘action at a distance’, with which Faraday struggled and from which he created the concept of the field of force, was fundamental to magic. So also was the conviction that reality was indivisible. Magic offered a blueprint of a unified world in which division — and therefore alienation — was impossible. This blueprint, which had no more substance than a dream, has now become a scientific aim. Magic may be an illusion but it is less profoundly so than utilitarianism.
It is hard to say how conscious Picasso is of talking about his art in terms of magic. What he says is sincere; it describes what he feels when working. At the same time it emphasizes the difference between himself and those who buy his pictures and lionize him. He establishes his right to ignore a certain kind of reasoning. Instead he establishes a logic of his own through which he can express his sense of the mysterious power which he has brought with him from childhood and from the past.
I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room.
This is a perfect example of ‘mistaking’ an ideal connexion for a real one. Or again, expressed more abstractly: ‘I don’t work after nature, but before nature and with her.’ This is a definition of magic.
The power which Picasso possesses means that he must be granted a special licence:
It is my misfortune — and probably my delight — to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth. I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things — so much the worse for them: they just have to put up with it.
On one level, Picasso is claiming here his right to adore blondes — in the flesh. Baskets of fruit notwithstanding, no painter has ever had to stop himself painting blondes! But on another level there is the implication that his passions, his will, can control ‘things’ — even against their wishes, and that by means of painting a ‘thing’, he possesses it.
He can be possessed himself, but not in the sense in which the word is understood in the Rue de la Boëtie, a fashionable street of antique-dealers and objets d’art, into which he moved in 1918.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions.
This view of himself as an artist — the artist as receptacle — incidentally confirms how Picasso fits again into Apollinaire’s first category. It also stresses the difference between his unified world of magic and the life around him in a class society. ‘Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions’ would make no sense to an antique-dealer — for him the very opposite is true. But it is a prerequisite for magic.
The primitive, magical bias of Picasso’s genius is not only evident in his statements about art: he performs quasimagical ceremonies as well. Here is an account by Roland Penrose of Picasso making pottery.
Taking a vase which had just been thrown by Aga, their chief potter, Picasso began to mould it in his fingers. He first pinched the neck so that the body of the vase was resistant to his touch like a balloon, then with a few dexterous twists and squeezes he transformed the utilitarian object into a dove, light, fragile, and breathing life. ‘You see,’ he would say, ‘to make a dove you must first wring its neck.’14
Of course this is a game. But play and magic are perfectly reconcilable. (All young children live!through a phase of believing that the world is governed by desire or will.) And what is remarkable is how we feel Penrose, who is by no means an unsophisticated man, falling under the spell of this magic. He is induced to say that the dove breathes life! He has seen the dead turned into the living.
Picasso began to play with such transmutations in the early thirties and spasmodically he has continued up to the present. He takes an object and turns it into a being. He has turned a bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars into a bull’s head. He has turned a toy car into a monkey’s face, some wooden planks into men and women, etc.
54 Picasso. Bull’s Head. 1943
In the case of the Bull’s Head, Picasso has not changed the form of the saddle and handlebars at all. He has scarcely touched them. What he has done is to see their possibility of becoming an image of a bull’s head. Having seen this, he has placed them together. The seeing of this possibility was a kind of naming. ‘Let this be a bull’s head,’ Picasso might have said to himself. And this is very close to African magic. Janheinz Jahn, in Muntu,15 his study of African culture, writes:
It is the word, Nommo, that creates the image. Before that there is Kintu, a ‘thing’, which is no image, but just the thing itself. But in the moment when the thing is invoked, appealed to, conjured up through Nommo, the word — in that moment Nommo, the procreative force, transforms the thing into an image … the poet speaks and transforms thing-forces into forces of meaning, symbols, images.
Picasso is an intricately complex character. There is a part of him, cunning as any Rasputin, which exploits ‘magic’ in response to his success as a ‘magician’. There is another part of him which uses it to procure himself licence as a public figure and to defend his independence. Yet another part is governed by sympathies and needs which are unusually close to the point where art really did emerge from magic.