Two defining facets of genius are that it rarely comes via a committee's approval, and it does not know compromise. As a consequence it is rarely seduced by the cult of mediocrity and the game of numbers. Indeed, owing to its nature genius cannot join the club or submit to the straight jacket of mediocrity, because the soul of genius is forged in temperatures where mediocrity cannot survive (and which removes the impurities). So, for the Revolution of the Mediocritat to succeed in art, the 'liberation from formal convention' had to be affected before the abstract tyrannists could enforce a truer 'liberation from talent and skill'. Once these obstacles (rules, conventions, prerequisite's: call them what you will) were shifted, the void (is) was (and always will be) filled by those who were both attuned to the possibilities and had the guile to both shape and profit from them.

This doesn't mean to say that the shift away from art's old school arbitrators wasn't a passionate, heartfelt revolution and that the Gimmickists were not sincere in their efforts to exhibit without prejudice and (un)invent the colour wheel. But, as in every revolution, one power class merely makes way for another: the pinchbeck Machiavellis ride in on the backs of the foot soldiers, then start shaping a new salon in their own favour. Wittingly or not, art was freed from many of the underlying principles of excellence and, as in the laissez faire Friedmanomics that have been encouraged to bankrupt our finances, a kind of survival of the ugliest ensued, in which the rules were (and are) forever (re)written by those who plotted, networked and politicked their way to positions of power and influence.

Anyhow, by playing his role in the unraveling of art's unending tapestry, Picasso, arguably more than any other painter, made it possible to chuck up a major wall-filler in a minor window of opportunity. And in purveying novelty-over-skill and celebrity-over-substance, he paved the way for cultural undertakers Hirst, Emin & Price to profit from the burying of art's dead.
I mean, why waste years on one masterpiece when you can reinvent the wheels of art industry and piece together three-score-and-ten major minors in the time it takes real masters to master one masterpiece?
What a position to have engineered!
What power!
It must be quite a high for a painter to know that whatever they chucked up onto canvas, it would sell for buckets of money. In a way, you can't blame Picasso for adding weight to the 'school' that allowed painters to pass a 'masterpiece' between toilets, and he doubtless would've rattled off a few saleable gems in the time it has taken to wrestle this (albeit trifling) collection of impressions and expressive distortions into some kind of coherent whole.
Not stupid, the proud old bull. Unless you seek your value beyond coinage and your worth beyond fame.
Whether Picasso merely rode the first waves of fashion art, or whether he drove them like the moon and wind, is, like most things Pablovian, up for debate. But we never find out the extent of the skill and talent that lay within him, because the ever-changing needs of fashion demoted talent and skill to a minor part of the frame. What remained was novelty and the saleable fashions of the hour; an argument expertly presented by Paul Johnson in his book Art: A New History.

You'll be aware by now that, for the sake of brevity, I'm over-simplifying my arguments (which I nevertheless intend to elaborate upon fully), but for me, art of the highest obliterates barriers, and can transport the willing spirit of even the lowliest spectator to the essence of the spectacle. It goes without saying that this isn't achievable by merely throwing paint at a canvas and parceling it up in pretentious, sub-prime claptrap. On the contrary, great work is given a better life by the willingness of the artist to surrender his skills to the subject, and the soul of a skilled work grows in direct relation to the artist's subordination of his talents to the spirit of something greater than mere designs. Regardless of whether the subject is inside or outside the artist's head, or born of reality or pure imagination, it is a basic requirement that (s)he at least surrender to the creative process. And if, within that act of surrender, you are caught by a flame that transports you above your own base interests, then magic can happen and the page or canvas can take on varying shades and degrees of fullness.

However, with Picasso's work I always feel the opposite has happened and that his subjects are merely pawns, which are sacrificed for the greater good of Pablo. Picasso seems incapable of giving himself to the subject and I couldn't find one picture in the National Gallery's exhibition that bore witness to more than the man's ego.

An example of this difference was provided by Picasso's 'Child with a Dove', which I saw last year, at the Scottish National Gallery's inappropriately named (though very good) 'Impressionists in Scotland' exhibition, where it was made to look lifeless and dull by the company it had been forced to keep, not least amongst which was A Portrait of Joseph Crawhall by Edward Arthur Walton. This unassuming painting is an absolute jewel, and a wonderful demonstration of an artist both at home with his gift and willing to offer it up in friendship, as 'a portrait of J.C the Impressionist by A.E.W the Realist' (which are the words Walton inscribed on the canvas).
The Barge Boy in Jules Bastien-Lepage's 'Pas Meche' is also given a value way beyond the mere coinage of the marketplace, as he stares us out down the years.
'What you looking at?' the boy may well ask. You, my friend...for the wonderful gift of life you still bring to the canvas because the gift was offered up on your behalf. In both of these paintings I was humbled by the greatness of the seemingly insignificant, and knew that the artist has done justice to the subject because the very subject is given precedence. Great work ennobles the subject and through a selfless transfusion of artistic juices, the work is given a life of its own. But whatever moves the artist moves the paint and Picasso is the centre of his (kn)own universe, hence he merely bestows his greatness upon his subjects in suitably recognizable strokes. In doing so, a kind of disembowelment of the human spirit takes place, before Pablo embalms the carcass in the shallowness of his oils and lesser juices.

At the bottom of the stairs to the Sainsbury Wing, a huge photographic image of Pablo towers above the entrance to the National Gallery's Picasso exhibition. This paparazzo-style photo was taken at St Tropez's Sénéquier Cafe in 1965 and, in both size and tone, the image makes you fully aware that this is the age of celebrity-worship and at no point of the exhibition did this feeling abate. Picasso's paintings, like the man, have attained considerable celebrity, and as fame by association is rife in our celebrity-diseased culture, it is now enough to say that you have been to an exhibition: coherent opinions and dissenting viewpoints are neither encouraged nor required. As with the artist, many of the paintings are famous for being famous and the majority of people visiting the exhibition are immersing themselves in the essence of art celebrity and the value of currency, not searching for meaning in the scrabbled faces on the walls, or looking for love in some of the mauling strokes with which he exposed his women.

Las Meninas is Picasso's testament to his (belief in his) own greatness and it's the one piece that should prove his undoing. Picasso's so-called 'combative encounter with Velasquez's Las Meninas provided more than 50 canvasses'. The fact that Picasso regurgitated 50 variations of Las Meninas in 4 months, which would make one 'masterpiece' every two or three days, tells you quite a lot about the man and his shifty method. The development of the original idea apart, I wonder how many variations Diego could've knocked out in four months? Not many, methinks...unless he hijacked some passing bandwagon that conveniently relieved him of paying the life duties on the gift of genius, and consequently liberated him of having to render his big idea with dizzying skill and talent.

In Las Meninas Picasso enforces a Gimmickist format, turning a true masterpiece into a slysdexic's interpretation of 'Where's Prince Wally?' for bored Spanish Royals. But such is the success of Pablo Incorporated, and the apparatchiks who are prepared to heap meaning onto his strokes, utterances and silences, that learned donkeys nod on our behalf and we mutely accept their interpretation of another masterpiece which tries, in spite of the spin, to be everything but.
And whereas SHAKESPEARE can be forgiven for plundering the good ideas of others because he rendered them timeless, Picasso's ego renders the ideas of his betters so lifeless and soulless that I found myself wondering what Diego would make of Picasso's 'expressive distortions' of his masterpiece?
Would he rush off to the nearest 'purveyor of orthodoxy' to brush up on the latest vague and meaningless art-speak, so he may better understand the working of this re-worked masterpiece?
Nah. Methinks if he didn't pee laughing he'd die crying. Or perhaps he'd just paint over it.

If, as was proclaimed by the film The Usual Suspects, 'the Devil's greatest trick was to convince the world that he didn't exist', then Pablo's most masterful slight of intention was getting so many of us to believe that this stuff actually matters. And we are still in his thrall after all these years, incapable, it seems, of freeing ourselves from the 'facets' of spin in which both he and his entourage have enslaved us.
We go, we pay, we look...and yet little is seen other than that which has been drawn up for us by those on the money-go-round, and for fear of looking unlearned and stupid, we stay schtum. Best to nod with the other donkeys and hope nobody asks us to explain our appreciation for the Emperor's new clothes, when simple courage and old fashioned honesty would speak volumes more.

On my way towards the exit The Rape of the Sabine Women (after Poussin) demanded some attention. To my unlearned and uncluttered eyes, the upside down Sabine woman at the foot of the picture represented something truly worthy, and the horse towering above her looked like a proud, destructive Minotaur trampling her under foot. I had a sudden urge to grip hold of the frame and spin the picture the right way up.
But in an upside down world, who would ever notice?
And who the hell would care?

Picasso: Challenging the Past is in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. It runs until 7th June 2009

Click image button for thumbnail links to desktop / screen saver size jpegs

Two defining facets of genius are that it rarely comes via a committee's approval, and it does not know compromise. As a consequence it is rarely seduced by the cult of mediocrity and the game of numbers. Indeed, owing to its nature genius cannot join the club or submit to the straight jacket of mediocrity, because the soul of genius is forged in temperatures where mediocrity cannot survive (and which removes the impurities). So, for the Revolution of the Mediocritat to succeed in art, the 'liberation from formal convention' had to be affected before the abstract tyrannists could enforce a truer 'liberation from talent and skill'. Once these obstacles (rules, conventions, prerequisite's: call them what you will) were shifted, the void (is) was (and always will be) filled by those who were both attuned to the possibilities and had the guile to both shape and profit from them.

This doesn't mean to say that the shift away from art's old school arbitrators wasn't a passionate, heartfelt revolution and that the Gimmickists were not sincere in their efforts to exhibit without prejudice and (un)invent the colour wheel. But, as in every revolution, one power class merely makes way for another: the pinchbeck Machiavellis ride in on the backs of the foot soldiers, then start shaping a new salon in their own favour. Wittingly or not, art was freed from many of the underlying principles of excellence and, as in the laissez faire Friedmanomics that have been encouraged to bankrupt our finances, a kind of survival of the ugliest ensued, in which the rules were (and are) forever (re)written by those who plotted, networked and politicked their way to positions of power and influence.

Anyhow, by playing his role in the unraveling of art's unending tapestry, Picasso, arguably more than any other painter, made it possible to chuck up a major wall-filler in a minor window of opportunity. And in purveying novelty-over-skill and celebrity-over-substance, he paved the way for cultural undertakers Hirst, Emin & Price to profit from the burying of art's dead.
I mean, why waste years on one masterpiece when you can reinvent the wheels of art industry and piece together three-score-and-ten major minors in the time it takes real masters to master one masterpiece?
What a position to have engineered!
What power!
It must be quite a high for a painter to know that whatever they chucked up onto canvas, it would sell for buckets of money. In a way, you can't blame Picasso for adding weight to the 'school' that allowed painters to pass a 'masterpiece' between toilets, and he doubtless would've rattled off a few saleable gems in the time it has taken to wrestle this (albeit trifling) collection of impressions and expressive distortions into some kind of coherent whole.
Not stupid, the proud old bull. Unless you seek your value beyond coinage and your worth beyond fame.
Whether Picasso merely rode the first waves of fashion art, or whether he drove them like the moon and wind, is, like most things Pablovian, up for debate. But we never find out the extent of the skill and talent that lay within him, because the ever-changing needs of fashion demoted talent and skill to a minor part of the frame. What remained was novelty and the saleable fashions of the hour; an argument expertly presented by Paul Johnson in his book Art: A New History.

You'll be aware by now that, for the sake of brevity, I'm over-simplifying my arguments (which I nevertheless intend to elaborate upon fully), but for me, art of the highest obliterates barriers, and can transport the willing spirit of even the lowliest spectator to the essence of the spectacle. It goes without saying that this isn't achievable by merely throwing paint at a canvas and parceling it up in pretentious, sub-prime claptrap. On the contrary, great work is given a better life by the willingness of the artist to surrender his skills to the subject, and the soul of a skilled work grows in direct relation to the artist's subordination of his talents to the spirit of something greater than mere designs. Regardless of whether the subject is inside or outside the artist's head, or born of reality or pure imagination, it is a basic requirement that (s)he at least surrender to the creative process. And if, within that act of surrender, you are caught by a flame that transports you above your own base interests, then magic can happen and the page or canvas can take on varying shades and degrees of fullness.

However, with Picasso's work I always feel the opposite has happened and that his subjects are merely pawns, which are sacrificed for the greater good of Pablo. Picasso seems incapable of giving himself to the subject and I couldn't find one picture in the National Gallery's exhibition that bore witness to more than the man's ego.

An example of this difference was provided by Picasso's 'Child with a Dove', which I saw last year, at the Scottish National Gallery's inappropriately named (though very good) 'Impressionists in Scotland' exhibition, where it was made to look lifeless and dull by the company it had been forced to keep, not least amongst which was A Portrait of Joseph Crawhall by Edward Arthur Walton. This unassuming painting is an absolute jewel, and a wonderful demonstration of an artist both at home with his gift and willing to offer it up in friendship, as 'a portrait of J.C the Impressionist by A.E.W the Realist' (which are the words Walton inscribed on the canvas).
The Barge Boy in Jules Bastien-Lepage's 'Pas Meche' is also given a value way beyond the mere coinage of the marketplace, as he stares us out down the years.
'What you looking at?' the boy may well ask. You, my friend...for the wonderful gift of life you still bring to the canvas because the gift was offered up on your behalf. In both of these paintings I was humbled by the greatness of the seemingly insignificant, and knew that the artist has done justice to the subject because the very subject is given precedence. Great work ennobles the subject and through a selfless transfusion of artistic juices, the work is given a life of its own. But whatever moves the artist moves the paint and Picasso is the centre of his (kn)own universe, hence he merely bestows his greatness upon his subjects in suitably recognizable strokes. In doing so, a kind of disembowelment of the human spirit takes place, before Pablo embalms the carcass in the shallowness of his oils and lesser juices.

At the bottom of the stairs to the Sainsbury Wing, a huge photographic image of Pablo towers above the entrance to the National Gallery's Picasso exhibition. This paparazzo-style photo was taken at St Tropez's Sénéquier Cafe in 1965 and, in both size and tone, the image makes you fully aware that this is the age of celebrity-worship and at no point of the exhibition did this feeling abate. Picasso's paintings, like the man, have attained considerable celebrity, and as fame by association is rife in our celebrity-diseased culture, it is now enough to say that you have been to an exhibition: coherent opinions and dissenting viewpoints are neither encouraged nor required. As with the artist, many of the paintings are famous for being famous and the majority of people visiting the exhibition are immersing themselves in the essence of art celebrity and the value of currency, not searching for meaning in the scrabbled faces on the walls, or looking for love in some of the mauling strokes with which he exposed his women.

Las Meninas is Picasso's testament to his (belief in his) own greatness and it's the one piece that should prove his undoing. Picasso's so-called 'combative encounter with Velasquez's Las Meninas provided more than 50 canvasses'. The fact that Picasso regurgitated 50 variations of Las Meninas in 4 months, which would make one 'masterpiece' every two or three days, tells you quite a lot about the man and his shifty method. The development of the original idea apart, I wonder how many variations Diego could've knocked out in four months? Not many, methinks...unless he hijacked some passing bandwagon that conveniently relieved him of paying the life duties on the gift of genius, and consequently liberated him of having to render his big idea with dizzying skill and talent.

In Las Meninas Picasso enforces a Gimmickist format, turning a true masterpiece into a slysdexic's interpretation of 'Where's Prince Wally?' for bored Spanish Royals. But such is the success of Pablo Incorporated, and the apparatchiks who are prepared to heap meaning onto his strokes, utterances and silences, that learned donkeys nod on our behalf and we mutely accept their interpretation of another masterpiece which tries, in spite of the spin, to be everything but.
And whereas SHAKESPEARE can be forgiven for plundering the good ideas of others because he rendered them timeless, Picasso's ego renders the ideas of his betters so lifeless and soulless that I found myself wondering what Diego would make of Picasso's 'expressive distortions' of his masterpiece?
Would he rush off to the nearest 'purveyor of orthodoxy' to brush up on the latest vague and meaningless art-speak, so he may better understand the working of this re-worked masterpiece?
Nah. Methinks if he didn't pee laughing he'd die crying. Or perhaps he'd just paint over it.

If, as was proclaimed by the film The Usual Suspects, 'the Devil's greatest trick was to convince the world that he didn't exist', then Pablo's most masterful slight of intention was getting so many of us to believe that this stuff actually matters. And we are still in his thrall after all these years, incapable, it seems, of freeing ourselves from the 'facets' of spin in which both he and his entourage have enslaved us.
We go, we pay, we look...and yet little is seen other than that which has been drawn up for us by those on the money-go-round, and for fear of looking unlearned and stupid, we stay schtum. Best to nod with the other donkeys and hope nobody asks us to explain our appreciation for the Emperor's new clothes, when simple courage and old fashioned honesty would speak volumes more.

On my way towards the exit The Rape of the Sabine Women (after Poussin) demanded some attention. To my unlearned and uncluttered eyes, the upside down Sabine woman at the foot of the picture represented something truly worthy, and the horse towering above her looked like a proud, destructive Minotaur trampling her under foot. I had a sudden urge to grip hold of the frame and spin the picture the right way up.
But in an upside down world, who would ever notice?
And who the hell would care?

Picasso: Challenging the Past is in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. It runs until 7th June 2009

Click image button for thumbnail links to desktop / screen saver size jpegs