‘Humour,’ said Jacques Vaché, ‘derives too much from sensation not to be very difficult to express. I believe it is a sensation.’ Nothing could be better suited to shed light on this sensation, if indeed it is one, than to see it produced in relation to another, and it is perhaps in this regard that Picasso’s work is most significant. In it, the visual faculty is brought to the highest power and presented in a state of ‘permanent revolution.’ ‘Do you think,’ he says, ‘that I’m interested in the fact that this painting depicts two figures? These two figures once existed, but they exist no longer. Seeing them gave me an initial emotion, and little by little their real presence faded; for me they have become a fiction. Then they disappeared, or rather they were transformed into a whole gamut of problems.’ We cannot help seeing a relation between this desire to move the object from the particular into the general, to suppress anecdotal details – which represents the fundamental aim of Cubism – and the concern with overcoming accidents of the ego, expressed by a recourse to humour. We may nonetheless consider these accidents highly necessary: nothing could be less impassive than this art. But, given the emotion’s extreme mobility, we must pursue it within the work itself and not take it as the work’s preconceived subject, which would be tantamount to stopping it arbitrarily in its tracks: ‘At bottom, everything comes back to oneself. It’s a sun in the belly shining with a thousand rays. The rest is nothing.’ It is clear that the superego is acting here as the condenser of light, like a suit of armour turned inward.
The uninterrupted lyrical act that constitutes Picasso’s visual works can, therefore, admit of no better guarantee than humour, as it must result from emotion cultivated for its own sake and brought to its climax. A unique tremor runs through the obscure interval that here separates things of nature from human creations. A throbbing, tireless question passes back and forth between them, which by sole virtue of the interposed instrument makes man from his song (if it’s a guitar) or woman from her nudity (if it’s a mirror). The human face in particular is presented as eternity, as an inexhaustible game of patience, as the chosen site of every disturbance. The external world is merely a gangue for this forever unknown, ever changing face, in which all things must finally meet. It is the metaphorical world into which the emotions pour, a mould valid only insofar as it is common to all men, and is based on their daily experience. As Picasso says, ‘You should make paintings the way princes make children: with shepherdesses. You never draw the Parthenon or paint a Louis XV armchair. You create paintings out of a country shack, or a pack of cigarettes, or an old chair.’
Picasso’s recent poems allow us to embrace everything that such a process, which he has pursued for over thirty years, pathetically demands in the way of abandonment and defence, toppling the entire modern viewpoint as it goes.
Young girl nicely dressed in a tan coat with violent facings 150,000 – 300 – 22 – 95 centimes calico ensemble corrected and revised by allusion to ermine fur 143 – 60 – 32 an open bra, the edges of the wound held back spread by hand pullies making the sign of the cross flavoured with reblochon cheese 1,300 – 75 – 03 – 49 – 317,000 – 25 centimes openings openwork daylight added one day out of two embedded on the skin by shivers kept alert by the mortal silence of the colour lure Lola de Valence type 103 plus languorous gazes 310 – 313 plus 3,000,000 – 80 francs – 15 centimes for a glance forgotten on the dresser – penalties incurred during the game – throwing the discus between the legs by a succession of facts which for no reason manage to make themselves a nest and transform themselves in some cases into the reasonable image of the cup 380 – 11 plus expenses but the drawing so academic size of the whole story from his birth to this morning doesn’t even write if they’re walking on fingers that point to the exit but spits out his bouquet with the tumbler that the odour formed by regiments and parading flag at the head of the line that if the tickle of desire can’t find a good place for transforming a sardine into a shark the shopping list lengthens only from this moment without the inevitable stop at the table at lunchtime so to write sitting down amid so many hyperboles mixed with cheese and tomato.
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Tongue of flame fans its face in the flute the goblet that singing to it gnaws the knife thrust of blue so playful that sitting in the bull’s-eye inscribed in its jasmine head waits for the veil to swell the piece of crystal that the wind enveloped in the cape of the mandoble drooling with caresses distributes bread blindly and to the lilac-coloured dove and squeezes with all its meanness against the lips of flaming lemon the horn torso whose farewell gestures frighten the cathedral that faints into its arms without a bravo while in its gaze the radio explodes wakened by dawn that photographing in the kiss a bedbug of sun eats the aroma of the hour that falls and crosses the page that flies undoes the bouquet that carries off stuck between the wing that sighs and the fear that sings the knife that hops with pleasure leaving even today floating as it likes and no matter how at the precise and necessary moment at the top of the well the cry of the rose that the hand tosses her like small charity.