Michel Leiris on Knowing

To one who asked me right now which one of Picasso's works I prefer, I would answer that, at each moment, it is the latest.¹

Michel Leiris's 1930 essay "Toiles récentes de Picasso" opens by considering the failure of Picasso criticism in general. The problem is Picasso's genius, which his critics see as putting him in a position incommensurable with their own. This causes them either to circle Picasso as though he were a dangerous object or to dive headlong into crudeness ("Toiles," 24). The Surrealists, worst of all, try to make Picasso one of their own, casting him as "a sort of man in revolt, or indeed rather in flight (try as we may, words often say something quite different from what one would at first have liked them to), before reality" ("Toiles," 26). Leiris says that Picasso is a realist, and that we should assume the same approach to him that he takes to reality. Leiris tells us that Picasso "stands toe-to-toe with everything, treats things as familiarly as it is possible to" ("Toiles," 25), and can do so because "nothing that is human—and no greater portion of that which is inhuman, either—is strange to him"("Toiles," 25; emphasis in original). Leiris goes on to insist that "one must therefore be able to behave the same way" toward Picasso ("Toiles," 25) and strike an attitude toward his work that is "absolutely direct, free, spontaneous, naïve" ("Toiles," 24).

Against the Surrealists, and anyone else who takes the (perhaps commonsense) view that Picasso rebels against reality in his work, Leiris claims that Picasso's pictorial invention

has less to do with [. . .] remaking reality for the sake of remaking it, than for the sake, incomparably more important, of expressing all the possibilities, all the imaginable ramifications, so as to press it a little closer, really to touch it. Instead of being a vague relationship, a distant panorama of phenomena, the real is thus illuminated from all its pores, one penetrates it, it becomes for the first time and really a reality. In most of Picasso's pictures one notices that the "subject" (if one may use such an expression) is almost always completely down-to-earth, at any rate never borrowed from the hazy world of dreams, nor immediately available to be converted into symbol—that is to say, in no way "Surrealist."

("Toiles," 26–27)

It is striking, and of prime importance, that Leiris represents Picasso's realism not merely as a style, but as related to metaphysical realism. As Leiris sees it, Picasso's realism is a corollary of—or means to—the conviction that the true nature of things manifests itself to our perception (i.e., that the world as we see it is "real"). Moreover, it is Picasso's genius to make the reality of the world plainer to us—to allow us "really to touch it." (Yet, one might ask, what does it mean for someone espousing a realist position, as Leiris seems to here, to speak of our access to reality being contingent upon anything, let alone a painter's ability to represent it forcefully? I hope the present essay will explain the point of such an implicitly self-contradictory formulation.)

Similarly, Leiris's claim that understanding Picasso's work depends on approaching it (indeed, approaching Picasso) directly and naively suggests that Leiris thinks Picasso's critics are mistaken in understanding their task. Leiris says that they can simply see what Picasso means to express—that they needn't circle Picasso's paintings as if they were traps or decipher them as though they were symbols. Leiris's idea of interpretation is analogous to his treatment of metaphysics. He insists that understanding Picasso through his painting is like understanding the nature of reality through the world— one need only approach the world candidly. This amounts to claiming that Picasso achieved what Leiris would later term "presence."²

* * *

Much...