Sources of the Modern Imagination: A Review Essay

F ι Sources of the Modern Imagination: A Review Essay DANIEL R. SCHWARZ Cornell University John Richardson. A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906. New York: Random House, 1991. xii + 548 pp. $39.95 AS THE HIGH MODERNIST period between 1890 and 1939 becomes distant, we need to locate the modernist turn of mind and see what distinguishes its ethos and what its legacy is. Modernism bears for students the same approximate chronological distance from their lives that the Victorian period does for those of us who were born in the forties. Modernism provided not merely the texts but the argument for New Criticism, namely that a literary work was a self-contained ontology , and that there was no formal relationship between the creator and his or her creation. Contrary to what we were taught a few decades ago, the authors' lives play a particularly vital role in the work of the major modernists. Moreover, we now understand that modernism is derived from cultural and historical events which provide the frame for understanding its development. If ever there was a period in which authors' self-fashioning in response to a confused and complicated cultural milieu is a central subject, it is this one. Not only were religious beliefs and political assumptions called into question by the work of, among others, Darwin and Marx, but the very notion of what constituted reality was undermined by the discoveries of modern physics. John Richardson's biography—the first volume of a contemplated four-part study—is quite simply a remarkable study that convincingly establishes Picasso's importance to the history of modernism and his stature as the predominant figure in twentieth-century painting. While the culture in which any artist creates depends in part on extant cultural assumptions, including symbolic structures, Picasso, as much as any artist, contributed originally to the reservoir of available symbols his successors inherited. In his major works, such as Les Demoiselles 311 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 d'Avignon (1907), Guernica (1937), The Old Guitarist (1903), The Three Musicians (1921), and The Dance (1925), he left images for his successors to wrestle with. These paintings became the texts which more than any other oeuvre created our understanding of modern painting and became the standards by which subsequent painters measure themselves . Lucidly written for a literate audience as well as for specialists, scrupulously researched, informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of Picasso's oeuvre, Richardson's first volume has the kind of authority literary scholars expect from Richard Ellmann's work on Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde. Just as Ellmann does with Joyce, Richardson shows how Picasso's work is deeply and profoundly autobiographical. For Picasso, like Joyce—to quote what Stephen Dedalus said about Shakespeare as the prototypical man of genius—"found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible." Picasso thought of his works as a diary, and the history of his art as his autobiography. He used his paintings not simply to reflect his feelings but to create his identity. For Picasso, the artist's creative imagination has the power to recast the world, but he does not ignore the world beyond that imagination. Richardson provides an intricate grammar for reading Picasso's work. He not only shows that the "blue" period motif is in fact a pervasive symbol of sadness and gloom, but that the rose motif of the rose period is a symbol of preciousness and sentimentality as well as the symbolic enactment of the return to life from the blue period's despair. His trenchant analyses of major works place the paintings in a rich context of intellectual and artistic history. Thus, writing of one of the great triumphs of the rose period, The Saltimbanques (1905), he remarks: "Like Manet [in The Old Musician], Picasso has appropriated Baudelaire's metaphor of vagabonds as artists; and he had set his wanderers in a metaphysical wasteland, where they confront each other, not to speak of ourselves, with the coolness that Manet (primed by Baudelaire) used to such telling effect." What gives Richardson's splendid study much of its authority is the amplitude of illustrations—900 if the book jacket is accurate...