Two years earlier he had welded together another piece of sculpture made from found objects. This too is a mother and child, but the tall, stately mother is pushing a pram this time, in which sits a tiny infant. The mother's hands just touch the enormously elongated handle of the pram, her head on its long neck looks up and out, but again the piece is much more than a playful tour de force: a spark flies between the child in the pram and the mother standing proudly above it, a spark which elicits sympathy and understanding from us, however ‘unrealistic’ the mother and child may be. As always with Picasso the technical skill and witty insight are not there for their own sakes or even to make a general point about perception or art, but for the sake of the human content.
4. (right) Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child, 1952. (Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN. © Succession Picasso/DACS, 1996)
5. (below) Pablo Picasso, Mother with Pushchair, 1950. (Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN. © Succession Picasso/DACS, 1996)
6. (left) Pablo Picasso, First Steps, 1943. (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; gift of Stephen C. Clark B.A. 1903. © Succession Picasso/DACS 1996)
7. (below) Rembrandt, Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk, c. 1635–7. (British Museum)
There is nothing in the least witty, though, about the 1943 painting, First Steps, in which a grossly distorted mother, bending over an equally distorted infant and holding both his hands, is helping him to learn to walk. Hockney once remarked, apropos of this painting, that even great artists rarely add to the repertoire of motifs that have dominated the western painting tradition, but that here Picasso does just that. The theme of the child's first steps is after all a universal one, since the moment the child discovers he can walk on his own is one of the key moments in every human life — yet how often, asks Hockney, has it been portrayed in art? (I can't believe he did not know that among the drawings by Rembrandt owned by the British Museum is one, dated 1635–7, which shows two women teaching a funny upright little child to walk, and one, dating from the 1650s, which shows a mother similarly engaged with her child. Yet his point of course still holds: the iconography of first steps is an extremely rare one in art.)
Here, in the Picasso, the post-Cubist distortions convey, in a manner figurative realism never could, the mother's love and concern, her hopes and fears, and the child's equally powerful mixture of terror and excitement. She thinks of nothing but him and his well-being, he thinks of nothing but his body and the freedom that beckons. She is about to let go the two hands she holds in hers, while the absurdly enlarged feet of the child are already on their way to freedom, the left raised so that we see the toes and most of the sole from below. A miracle no less great than that of the Resurrection is about to occur, the miracle that takes place in every human life when we are forced to let go and find that we can actually make it on our own, when we reconcile ourselves to letting go and find that those we have nurtured can actually make it on their own. Trusting that her hands will hold him should he stumble, the child discovers that he can retain his balance, that his legs will hold him upright and that he is no longer attached to his mother; trusting that his feet and legs will carry him, the mother lets him go with a mixture of pride — look at what he can do! — and sorrow — this is an index of things to come.
That charged moment enters into dialogue with Proust's equally charged depiction of the moment when the child discovers that he is not the centre of the world, that even his mother has a life and interests of her own, and in that instant discovers his profound dependence on her. In the Picasso the instinct to cling is overcome by the need to set out; in the Proust the need to know that the parent can be relied on in every circumstance turns the steadying touch into the anxious grasp, with inevitably tragic results. We have all of us experienced both emotions, and they have marked us for life. Who is to say which is the deeper or which has marked us more?
19 Kinetic Melodies
One of the ways in which the masters of suspicion worked was to reveal to us that what we had taken to be natural, a ‘given’, was in fact man-made, the result of choices and decisions made by individuals and institutions. Thus Marx unmasked the workings of capital, Nietzsche the workings of morality and Freud the workings of sexuality. Where the Enlightenment had seen all men as essentially unchanging and human nature as universal, the nineteenth-century masters of suspicion set about exploring the genealogies of morals and social institutions with the aim of freeing men from forms of bondage to which they did not even know they were subject.
The work of Oliver Sacks has stood at a curious angle to all this. He too is an unmasker, he too is concerned that we should see that much of what we take for granted needs to be examined critically. But his aim seems to be rather to make us aware of the extraordinary nature of what is unmasked, to fill us with wonder again at the almost miraculous nature of so much in our lives that we tend to take for granted. In one brilliant and illuminating article and book after another he has helped us to understand the complexity of the way the human mind and body function and of such apparently simple things as standing, walking and talking.
He has done this negatively, by exploring what happens when those things we normally take for granted no longer seem to function, when, for one reason or another, we cease to be able to cross a room, ask for a glass of water, remember what our husband or wife looks like. As he describes, with a novelist's empathy, patients who seem driven either to rush frantically forward or to stop dead in their tracks, either to gabble incoherently or to search hopelessly for the most ordinary words, we come to realise how amazing it is that we can walk up stairs without even thinking about it, communicate with our friends, understand what we are told and act upon it.
This was not of course his primary aim, which, in the time-honoured way of medical papers, was designed to explain illness where he found it and to suggest cures. Nor of course was he the first to bring empathy, imagination and a sharp eye for detail to bear on neurological problems affecting human beings. His own mentor, the great Russian neurosurgeon A. R. Luria, and such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical experts as Sir Charles Bell, the author of a famous book on the mechanism of the hand, and Henry Head, the influential author of Studies in Neurology (1920), had already shown the way. But Sacks' unique writerly gifts brought this branch of medicine into general public consciousness, first with his extraordinary study of the aftermath of the great influenza epidemic of 1919, Awakenings, and then in a host of case studies published in non-medical journals, and later collected into books, such as The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars.