A rich, well-stocked memory is an ensemble of dynamic associations for Picasso.
Through Soffici, Severini, and Jarry, Bergsonian thought reached Picasso in a “digested” form, feeding into the aesthetics of his art. The artist's originality lies in the way he assimilated it all, appropriating it as a creative method that enabled him to move beyond the discontinuous nature of his own self and in view of the construction of an absolutized image of a creator. During the hermetic years, Picasso's art gradually retreated from the real, referential world, recoiling within itself. Objects are fragmented, analyzed, and assembled in a manner that is close to abstraction instead of being represented as clearly identifiable objects, seen from a single point of view. The reassuring continuity of the mind is denied. Beginning with the Demoiselles d’Avignon, a milestone in Picasso's entire production, memory ceases to be a mere depository for the artist's recollections. It becomes a dynamic process for centering the self. A rich, well-stocked memory is not a collection of imprints, but an ensemble of dynamic associations.
As in a piece by Jarry, looking at Picasso's paintings from this period, the human mind is constantly on the verge of sinking into madness, given the way that the artist breaks up the foreground-background continuum. The surfaces cross at random, stripping the ensemble of any coherent sense of depth. According to Jarry, true artists do not take notes: they trust their memory to weed out the secondary elements from their recollections. Instead of gazing at the landscape, they dash off to quickly store away as many abstract images as possible.[1]
In a nod to Jarry's river, Picasso said of himself: ”I am like a river that flows on, dragging along trees uprooted by the current, dead dogs, all sorts of rubbish and the germs that feed on it.” [2]
The image of the artist as a river is an excellent illustration of the dynamics of Bergsonian duration and of the intuitionist method adopted by Picasso. The movement of painting is what interests Picasso. These dynamics do not stem from Heraclitean evanescent temporality, but rather, as in Bergsonian memory, they retain and build up in its churning background, acting creatively upon the integration of the present and the projection of effective interventions in the future. If the interpretation of time according to Plato and Artistotle could be supported by the practice of art, if everything passed and nothing remained, art simply could not exist. This is the underlying paradox of futurist art and the origin of its own denial.
Analytical images appear to rise out of the background of memory, of time, of desire, with the cracked surface revealing the active bottom that ebbs like a meta-phorein and leads the gaze beyond the visible, beyond the surface. The lighting no longer takes the exterior into account; it is an inner light shining outward. Being and becoming mix as in duration, where the past remains present. The blind eye of its prison, having crossed the boundaries of a blindness imposed by perception, penetrating into a deeper reality that quivers under the solidified crust of the visible. In the eyes of Soffici, the pressure inside Picasso's analytical paintings builds up and bursts into myriad fragments that allow us to glean, between the fissures that separate them, the inside, the bullfighting lake, the Apollinairian ocean, il sezionabile contesto interiore (the sectionable inner context). This creative force, this irresistible urge is the vital impulse, the élan vital.
[1] “If man has been brillaint enough to invent the bicycle, […] he ought to use this machine with its cogs to capture shapes and colors in a quick drainage, in as little time as possible, along the roads and tracks; because feeding the mind with its food mashed and mixed up saves us the efforts of the destructive dungeons of memory, and after this assimilation, it is all the more easy for the mind to recreate new shapes and colors on its own.” Alfred Jarry, Œuvres Complètes, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972-1988), vol. I (1972), pp. 769-770.
[2] Picasso as quoted by Françoise Gilot, in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York, McGraw Hill, 1964), published in French by Calman-Lévy, 1965, p. 116.
13 / 15
Summary