Picasso by norman mailer biography
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
By Chris Busa
Stocky, powerful, and libidinous, he was also short, cowardly, and fearful. A rough chunk of primal matter, with dark zones of energy drawn around the eyes, he mesmerized women. He mesmerized men. For the artists who came of age during the ’30s and ’40s, Norman Mailer’s generation, Picasso was God. Mailer witnessed this homage and absorbed it, eventually signing a contract in 1962 to write a biography of the artist and spending some weeks with Picasso’s oeuvre in reproduction and two more months writing a series of self-interviews. These inquiries were essentially dialogues between self and soul about the violent act of creating artistic forms.
Published in 1966 as a 200-page conclusion to Cannibals and Christians, a collection of occasional pieces, the writing was all the more extravagant for being in the bastard form of journalistic Q&A. Mailer explored his key ideas through the dynamic of an interrogator who was at once sympathetic and hostile, pushing the argument forward with either a pull from the front or a kick in the behind, here with invigorating encouragement, there with questions so challenging as to be damning. A generative concept for Mailer was that “form was the physical equivalent of memory,” meaning that the form, say, of a piece of driftwood revealed the history of the wood. The scars and missing knots, knobs and hollows, were evidence of its experience. Its very deformities were telling and embodied time in the same way that Cubism, by splaying separate planes onto a flat surface, put past, present, and future into a single dimension. Additionally, if terrors were part of the history of the form, then the form possessed the power of a gargoyle and cound function magically to protect the creator from the anxiety it expressed. Mailer expected his mediation to function as a midwife to his imagination in producing the project biography, but he found, as he says in the preface to the IN MIAMI A FEW YEARS BACK, during a reading of his novel Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer told the audience that “authors reveal more about themselves through their choice of words than with the subjects they write about.” Then he went on to use words like rage, psychopath, revenge, violence, chaos, and fury. If this was irony, Mailer seemed oblivious. After taking on the life of Marilyn Monroe in an early-’70s “interpretive biography”—a hodgepodge of facts woven together with bits of psychosexual speculation—Mailer has now done the same for Pablo Picasso. Borrowing liberally from other sources, Mailer starts with the artist’s birth in 1881 and stays with him for the next 34 years. This must have been a glorious time in Picasso’s life: he moved to Paris, formed friendships with Gertrude Stein, Matisse, Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, to name only a few. He traveled, he drank, he laughed it up with his contemporaries, illustrious and otherwise. Bohemian life never had more ardent supporters. During this period, Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism, and Picasso created some of the strangest and most notable paintings of the century. He painted prolifically, working throughout the night, driven on by his inner demons. By the time Mailer leaves him in 1915, the artist had already gained a degree of notoriety and had made the jump from being a penniless artist to living in a grand home with servants. During this time women came and went, great loves and lesser ones, leaving their mark on the man and his art. They were loyal and submissive, feisty and independent, in awe and, at the same time, repelled by him. He was impossible to satisfy, so great was his wanting, his need. He painted his women as they were, then repainted them as gross caricatures of themselves. Their breasts were unattached to their bodies, floating in space, drowning him. They PORTRAIT OF PICASSO AS A YOUNG MAN An Interpretive Biography. By Norman Mailer. Illustrated. 400 pp. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. $35. HE has "a greedy desire for recognition," and "the vanity and the need for group applause of someone like Muhammad Ali." When young, he pushed "his explorations into sex, drugs," and had a lengthy affair that was one of "those delicate, lovely and exploratory romances that flourished like sensuous flowers on slender stems, those marijuana romances of the 50's and 60's in America where lovers found ultimates in a one-night stand, and on occasion stayed together." "Short in stature," "possessed of the ambition to mine universes of the mind no one had yet explored," he was "not macho so much as an acolyte of machismo." He "could not box." Norman Mailer on Norman Mailer? Not this time, though it's obvious why Mr. Mailer, whose prime subject has always been himself, might have spent more than three decades contemplating a biography of Pablo Picasso. On the other hand, it's not so easy to comprehend why, after all that time, he has come up with such a clumsy and disappointing book, culled, at startling lengths, from already existing biographies. With so many out there, most notably Volume 1 of John Richardson's monumental "Life of Picasso," which covers nearly the same early years, one wonders what Mr. Mailer could have been thinking. The book, his 29th, is a copiously illustrated account of the span from the artist's birth in 1881 to the start of World War I. Picasso emerges in a familiar guise, as a selfish, superstitious, sometimes cowardly and combative prodigy who moved chameleonlike from one style to another, through one relationship after the next. Mr. Mailer has called his work "an interpretive biography," to distinguish it from a work of original scholarship. This is f
Norman Mailer’s Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
But Mailer also was a champion of the value of art and literature, and had, at times, from the heart of the maelstrom, a keen eye for the demands and responsibilities creation can have on the creator. With this spirit he approaches Picasso's early years.
Really, this book is an excuse for Mailer to riff interpretations of Picasso's work and life--there's a reason Mailer's name is as big as Picasso's on the cover (I wish I could see a book on Mailer by Picasso). Sometimes the results are compelling, as in his discussion of narcissism; sometimes they hilarious bullshit ("Since each inhalation of cigarette smoke is a minute wound inflicted on the lungs, the mind develops a habit of reacting to the infinitesimal injury by a compensatory flow of thought"). Mailer's need to compete with Picasso is almost touching it is so bare, as is his need to comment everywhere on Picasso's manliness.
But the book is also a well-constructed story, built from the voices of many primary sources--most notably, Fernande Olivier, Picasso's first serious mistress--which Norman has the good grace to let speak for themselves, at length, without interruption. But Mailer also isn't afraid to take sides with his sources: you could make a great poem from the derisive labels he applies to Gertrude Stein and her writing when he's forced to quote her, while his affection for Fernande is one of the animating features o
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