It was just at the time when newly married couples throughout the western world were having their photographs taken in postures and clothing similar to those of my grandparents that we entered the period that has aptly been called the Age of Suspicion. For the one thing that seems to unite all the greatest artists and thinkers of the later nineteenth century – Marx, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Nietzsche – and of the twentieth – Proust, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Freud, Eliot, Picasso, Schoenberg – was their suspicion of the notions they had inherited from the Enlightenment and Romanticism – Progress, Reason, Imagination, Art, Glory, Human Nature, etc. – and their desire to strip away false façades and lay bare the needs and motives that had given rise to them.
Yet, among the artists at least, this desire went hand in hand with a profound sense that the ethos of suspicion was always in danger of sweeping away the precious and genuine along with the false and the shoddy, with an awareness, largely instinctive, that if our relation to the world is to be one of unwavering suspicion then we will have wounded ourselves more deeply than we realise. Van Gogh, quite as iconoclastic as Nietzsche in his way, could nevertheless write to his brother about ‘what only Rembrandt has among painters, that tenderness in the gaze … that heart-broken tenderness, that glimpse of a superhuman infinite that there seems so natural’. Unmasking the sentimental, the hypocritical, the oppressive, the shoddy, can, indeed must, co-exist with a recognition of the true and the genuine.
Picasso, less romantic than van Gogh but equally responsive to those aspects of our lives that call for celebration as well as those which need to be unmasked, has left us a whole series of icons of trust, particularly that which exists between mother and child, at the same time as he wittily undermines the pretensions and bad faith that so often underlie nineteenth-century depictions of this theme. Two pieces of sculpture in particular come to mind. One of them is so famous that it is now difficult for us to read it. In Vallauris in 1952 the seventy-year-old artist found a toy car which, in a flash of inspiration, he saw as the broad-nosed face of a monkey. The finished sculpture, however, provides us with more than the simple play of wit embodied in that perception. For it is an image not of a car/monkey but of a mother and child. The tiny baby monkey, clinging to the mother's massive chest, completely alters the meaning of the car/face above it. Quite as much as any madonna and child, what the sculpture suggests is the child's need for dependence and the mother's tenderness, clumsiness and pride. Had this been a work of Duchamp's none of this would have emerged. Duchamp would have made the connection between car and monkey-face and been satisfied to embody that flash of wit. Indeed, he would probably have felt that anything more would destroy the purity of the initial conception. For Picasso, on the other hand, the flash of wit – this car, seen from above, is the face of a monkey – is only the beginning.
Two years earlier he had welded together another piece of sculpture made from found objects. This too is a mother and child, but the tall, stately mother is pushing a pram this time, in which sits a tiny infant. The mother's hands just touch the enormously elongated handle of the pram, her head on its long neck looks up and out, but again the piece is much more than a playful tour de force: a spark flies between the child in the pram and the mother standing proudly above it, a spark which elicits sympathy and understanding from us, however ‘unrealistic’ the mother and child may be. As always with Picasso the technical skill and witty insight are not there for their own sakes or even to make a general point about perception or art, but for the sake of the human content.
4. (right) Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child, 1952. (Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN. © Succession Picasso/DACS, 1996)
5. (below) Pablo Picasso, Mother with Pushchair, 1950. (Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN. © Succession Picasso/DACS, 1996)
6. (left) Pablo Picasso, First Steps, 1943. (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; gift of Stephen C. Clark B.A. 1903. © Succession Picasso/DACS 1996)
7. (below) Rembrandt, Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk, c. 1635–7. (British Museum)
There is nothing in the least witty, though, about the 1943 painting, First Steps, in which a grossly distorted mother, bending over an equally distorted infant and holding both his hands, is helping him to learn to walk. Hockney once remarked, apropos of this painting, that even great artists rarely add to the repertoire of motifs that have dominated the western painting tradition, but that here Picasso does just that. The theme of the child's first steps is after all a universal one, since the moment the child discovers he can walk on his own is one of the key moments in every human life – yet how often, asks Hockney, has it been portrayed in art? (I can't believe he did not know that among the drawings by Rembrandt owned by the British Museum is one, dated 1635–7, which shows two women teaching a funny upright little child to walk, and one, dating from the 1650s, which shows a mother similarly engaged with her child. Yet his point of course still holds: the iconography of first steps is an extremely rare one in art.)
Here, in the Picasso, the post-Cubist distortions convey, in a manner figurative realism never could, the mother's love and concern, her hopes and fears, and the child's equally powerful mixture of terror and excitement. She thinks of nothing but him and his well-being, he thinks of nothing but his body and the freedom that beckons. She is about to let go the two hands she holds in hers, while the absurdly enlarged feet of the child are already on their way to freedom, the left raised so that we see the toes and most of the sole from below. A miracle no less great than that of the Resurrection is about to occur, the miracle that takes place in every human life when we are forced to let go and find that we can actually make it on our own, when we reconcile ourselves to letting go and find that those we have nurtured can actually make it on their own. Trusting that her hands will hold him should he stumble, the child discovers that he can retain his balance, that his legs will hold him upright and that he is no longer attached to his mother; trusting that his feet and legs will carry him, the mother lets him go with a mixture of pride – look at what he can do! – and sorrow – this is an index of things to come.
That charged moment enters into dialogue with Proust's equally charged depiction of the moment when the child discovers that he is not the centre of the world, that even his mother has a life and interests of her own, and in that instant discovers his profound dependence on her. In the Picasso the instinct to cling is overcome by the need to set out; in the Proust the need to know that the parent can be relied on in every circumstance turns the steadying touch into the anxious grasp, with inevitably tragic results. We have all of us experienced both emotions, and they have marked us for life. Who is to say which is the deeper or which has marked us more?