2023-06-12 15:28:42
Picasso was 17 years old when, together with the drawings he was sketching in one of his notebooks, he wrote: “Greco, Velázquez, inspire me!”. They were very quick drawings in which he practiced his hand with figures that he found in his path. On another page of one of those notebooks he also noted: “I, El Greco.” Starting from that adolescent phrase, the Carmen Giménez police station builds the theory that relates the arts of the Greek painter with the analytical cubism of the man from Malaga. As the specialist in Picasso’s work writes, that phrase is “a complete declaration of intent for a student barely 17 years old, who sensed in the work of El Greco the germ of what would precisely free modern painting from the academic dogma”.
Giménez’s vision is the Prado Museum’s contribution to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. There are four pairs of portraits of El Greco facing four paintings from the analyzes, made by Picasso in 1911 and 1912. Three of the Greek come from the Toledo Museum and those of the Cubist come from the Beyeler, Thyssen-Bornemisza, Guggenheim collection. and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The only text from the room in which the temporary exhibition takes place justifies the relationship of couples in the commented sentences and in the hypothesis of shared audacity.
“El Greco, with his bold challenge to the canon of classical tradition, provided Picasso with the keys to definitively break with the art of the past and with the pillars of traditional representation”, can be read in one of the corners of the museum. And, on the other hand, the hypothesis of plastic audacity: “In this first phase of cubism, the theme breaks down into geometric fragments that accumulate until they create an image. Picasso creates an illusion of relief and depth that is based on shading and in which the two-dimensionality of the canvas was; At the same time he reminds El Greco in the flattening of the perspective and the vertical format, even in the brushstroke ”, adds the insufficient explanation of Picasso, El Greco and Analytical Cubism.
Very Velazquez
In two paragraphs the museum has put together a relationship that deserves more detail and justification. In fact, a showcase is incorporated with the most varied documents that in no way confirm the plastic couple in Picasso’s analytical transit. On the one hand, the letter confirming Picasso as director of the Prado, on September 26, 1936, and his 15,000 pesetas salary. On the other, the copyists’ book in which “Pablo Ruiz” appears, in November 1897, copying Velázquez. But not El Greco.
So is there any documentary evidence linking Picasso’s Analytical Cubism to El Greco? We asked Carmen Giménez and she answered: “Picasso’s father got very angry with him because he liked El Greco a lot.” It is an anecdote told by a third party, Francisco Bernareggi, fellow visitors to the Prado, who recalls in his memories how they were called “modernists” when they saw them copy El Greco. Picasso’s father scolded them: “You are going the wrong way!”, when he found out that they were copying the author of The gentleman with his hand on his chest.
As the director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, explained, “art history can be made in many ways and one of them is with an exhibition, where a curator develops his idea.” Giménez’s idea of the fundamental role of El Greco in the genesis of analytical cubism is not consolidated in the gallery, beyond the colors used in the paintings matched by the police station. For Falomir, the public that approaches the room “will not fail to perceive a series of relationships.” Although he did not go into detailing any at the press conference. For Carlos Alberdi, president of the Anniversary Commission, celebrating Picasso at the Prado is good news. “Exhibitions like this justify a celebration like the one we are holding,” Alberdi assured, after explaining that this is the 22nd of the 43 exhibitions on the official program.
Without justification
Carmen Giménez insisted on the belief of the rebel referent. “Picasso saw in El Greco an act of rebellion against the prevailing taste,” she said. But in the exhibition no document written by Picasso is provided to ensure such an interpretation. In other moments of the heterodox trajectory of the painter of the Guernica, there does seem to be a more evident relationship, especially in the blue period. “I had already seen some of his paintings, which had amazed me. I decided to take a trip to Toledo and it made a deep impression on me… If my blue period figures stretch, it is probably because of their influence,” he told the Hungarian photographer Brassaï. No such revealing statement about the origin of a decisive stage in his career and in the history of art such as analytical cubism, of which he spoke ad nauseam, is kept. In that blue period, he lined his studio with reproductions of works by El Greco.
The history of traditional art turns to the memories of the recently deceased Françoise Gilot to demonstrate this hypothesis of the link between El Greco and Picasso. Although they have canceled it for revealing the destructive intimacy to which she was subjected by her partner and father of two children, they rescue it from her when the artist recounts the color theory that the author of The Ladies of Avignon. Gilot and Picasso were leaving one of his visits to Matisse and he told him that he “had very good lungs.” What was he referring to? To the way Matisse used color. “It is not necessary for a color to have a certain shape. It’s not even desirable,” he told her. And Picasso continued: “As a rule, in my own work I do not use that language. One of the language of construction in the traditional way used by painters such as Tintoretto or El Greco, who painted entirely in “camaïeu” [monocromo], and then, with the painting nearing completion, they would add surfaces of red or blue to make it stand out better and at the same time be more resplendent. The fact that in one of my paintings there is a red surface nearby is not the essential part of it,” he explained to Gilot. An appointment that also does not clarify a plastic link capable of being the genesis of analytical cubism.
There is another statement that is used to link the painter of the 17th century with that of the 20th: “What do people have with Velázquez lately? I prefer El Greco a thousand times, that he was a real painter! But he told her in 1966, five decades after the paintings on display now. However, Roberto Otero, the Argentine journalist who took this statement, clarified that Picasso meant that he had dominated El Greco, but not Velázquez.
On the other hand, Carmen Giménez also assures that El Greco’s brushwork was “almost impressionist” and there she finds the other link: “Picasso seems to recover this brushstroke”. We pay attention to the verb “to seem”. In the sample there is no room for explanation and in the exhibition catalog there is no argument that dispels doubts about the emperor’s nudity. The police station does not talk about the paints used or the relationship they have with the ones it has decided to confront.
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