Conversations with Picasso (review)

Conversations with Picasso. Brassaï. Translated by Jean Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 392. $32.50.

It was not his oversized eyes and bushy eyebrows alone that earned Brassaï the moniker "the eye of Paris." His fame as a photographer of the city's nighttime underworld had been established with the 1932 publication of Paris de nuit, and his increasing demand as portraitist to artistic society testified to his penetrating observation of more elevated circles as well. But Henry Miller might just as correctly have called his friend "the pen of Paris," for the photographer was also a gifted writer who first made his living as a journalist on the cheap for Hungarian and German magazines; he would eventually author numerous books and articles on art, theater, literature, and the contemporary scene. His attention to detail with both the camera and the pen places the two endeavors on a similar plane. In a 1953 review that Brassaï himself cited proudly as reinforcing his own beliefs about photography, Jean Gallien made explicit this link between the photographic and the written in his work, noting that "he can express himself with a flexibility and apparent ease that is almost literary in its nature."¹ The photograph and the memoir share a certain form: an encompassing documentation of a particular scene, a record to which nothing is added but which can nevertheless be composed, selected, edited. As both photographer and memoirist--that is, as both eye and ear--Brassaï observed his subjects while in their milieu, registering the visual quirks of place or telling comments as part of a larger, yet intimate, portrait.

This book--whose voices, according to Miller's introduction, were resurrected from scribbled notes Brassaï deposited in a huge vase every night after his conversations with Picasso--is the product of meetings and meals Brassaï had with the Spanish artist during and after the Second World War. (Besides being a close friend, he also photographed Picasso's sculptures on several occasions; many of these pictures are included.) Reissued now in a new translation, Conversations with Picasso was first published in 1964, when the Great War remained a persistent memory and most of the personages were still alive; now it bears the hallmark of history, a document recovered from all that might have been lost. Miller likened the book to a mosaic, and indeed at times it reads like a series of lists: who ate at the Brasserie Lipp or the Café de Flore, what assortment of artists and collectors was awaiting Picasso in his apartment, who attended the ballet. Snippets of conversation are faithfully transcribed, and Brassaï has even included an actual list, Picasso's paint order, from "White, permanent" to "Violet, cobalt, light and dark" (117). The reader's distinct thrill in being a fly on the wall in Picasso's studio is tempered only occasionally by the feeling that that undistilled discussion provides more raw material than narrative or argument.

But raw source material abounds in Brassaï's collection of observations and anecdotes, and it is a boon for scholars of Picasso, occupied Paris, and the artistic and intellectual scene that surrounded both. The details are both significant and trivial: we learn, for example, that Picasso reworked failed sculptures to new inspiration, refused to sign paintings after the fact (thinking it forgery), and did not distinguish between sculptures and "objects" made of found materials; we also learn that he greeted guests clad only in his shorts, and threw a tantrum upon misplacing his flashlight. The book sheds particular light on his ideas about and working methods of sculpture, which is all the more notable when we realize that until Brassaï began photographing his sculptures, they were virtually unknown to the public. But the conversations recorded herein are not solely with or about Picasso; parading through its pages are Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Paul Eluard, André Breton, André Malraux, Dora Maar, and many other inhabitants of Paris's studios and cafés, and with them we see the creative...