mountshang: Comparisons from Richardson's Picasso

Remoir "Dance at the Moulin de la Galette" , 1876

I don't know why it took me 20 years to discover John Richardson's biography of Picasso.

Maybe it's because my interests lie a bit outside the canonical history of modern art. And even though Picasso's work makes me happy almost every time I run across it, I'm less curious about his personal life than I am about thousands of other stories -- so it took the upcoming "Picasso and Chicago" show at the Art Institute to get me interested in his life.

And I soon discovered that nobody could write about it better than Richardson

Not only is he thoroughly immersed in his subject (so that he can mention a piece from 1958 when he's writing about an episode in 1897) -- but he's a great sleuth, aesthete, and world-class gossip.

And he personally knew the artist over a period of time -- an advantage which future biographers will never share.

He has packed his volumes with reproductions of both Picasso's work, as well as work by his artist friends and rivals -- making this a visual as well as verbal trip through the time machine.

And he loves to make comparisons.

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Subsequent to my last post about the charcoal portraits of Picasso and Ramon Casas, this post on Mountshang is going to be an ongoing collection of all the other comparisons that interest me the most -- especially when they involve pieces that can be seen up close on Googleartproject.com

(though unfortunately, copyright restrictions seem to have kept Picasso's own work off that site)

So I expect to be working on it intermittently over the next few months - and maybe even into 2014 when Volume Four is scheduled to be published.

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Picasso "Moulin de la Galette", 1900

(text in green by John Richardson)

The earliest and most important of Picasso’s Paris paintings is his highly charged scene of dancers at the Moulin de Ia Galette. This dance hail, above which Rusiñol, Utrillo and Casas had once had an apartment, was a hallowed haunt of Catalan expatriates.

Picasso would already have been familiar with the look of the place from the unprepossessing view that Casas had painted ten years earlier Casas portrayed the dance hall in daytime as a desultory place that catered to a working-class clientele. Picasso saw the Moulin in a more glamorous, if lurid, spirit. The floor is crowded with a mob of dolled-up cocottes and their top-hatted clients doing one of the new South American dances. The garlands of lights and the hard, bright colors of the women’s dresses are rendered with utmost effulgence, but it is typical of Picasso that he has conceived the composition in terms of modernista shadows rather than impressionist light.

Picasso’s Moulin de Ia Galette also challenged two artists who were far more formidable than Casas: Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, each of whom had devoted major works to this very subject.

Picasso would have known Renoir’s sparkling view of the outdoor dance floor from visits to the Musée du Luxembourg, which had just been enriched with this impressionist masterpiece and countless others from the collection of Gustave Caillebotte.

Toulouse Lautrec "At the Moulin Rouge , 1890

He would also have known Toulouse-Lautrec’s lower-key but no less masterly indoor view of the music hail, from reproduction, if not firsthand. That someone so new to French art should have pitted himself against these masters at the top of their form is a measure of Picasso’s confidence and daring. He did not have the easy victory over Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec that he had had over Casas. Nevertheless, Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette shows that within weeks of arriving in Paris the nineteen-year-old Spaniard had established his right to a place in the modern French tradition; what is more, without making any concessions to impressionism or neo-impressionism. Unlike Renoir, who uses color to generate an allover sparkle of light, Picasso takes refuge in Spanish chiaroscuro—darkness lit up with incandescent splashes of crimson and yellow. Unlike Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sense of the reality always transcends his fin-de-siècle stylizations, Picasso evokes an erotic ambiance all the more exciting for being faintly menacing.

Van Gogh, 'Dance Hall at Arles', 1888

It is as if he saw the cocottes through Casagemas’s eyes with a little help from van Gogh (Dance Hall at Aries). And then, what a sense of the new century Picasso has already developed. Whereas Toulouse-Lautrec’s gaslit dancers embody the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of the 1890s, Picasso’s hookers, with their mascara and lipstick, their cheek-to-cheek smooching, project a sexuality that is distinctly twentieth century. They have abandoned the raunchy cancan for the more sophisticated Argentine tango and Brazilian maxixe (for which the Moulin de la Galette was famous). The girls fondling each other in the foreground are more svelte, more heavily made up.