Besides this penchant for the pictorial, several other factors made Picasso more receptive than before to the purely pictorial solution of painters, past and present. Among these were his discovery of Douanier Rousseau as a sort of pre-Renaissance example of the primitive consciousness, unspoiled by academic aesthetics, and also the beginning of his friendship with Braque (“It was as if we were married,” Picasso said)[22] which ended his creative solitude and brought an element of the moderation and lucidity typical of the French school. Yet, all of these developments would appear natural in a period of active search and experimentation.
Thus, the Hermitage Seated Woman, coming from a series crucially important to the Analytical Cubism of the Bathing (winter of 1908-1909), seems to be an answer to Matisse (for example, the canvas Luxe II, 1908), with his tendency to transform the figure into a flat, coloured arabesque-an organic part of the ripening decorative grand style. Conversely, Picasso is necessarily interested in the figure, the figure as a bodily apparatus which in itself is a powerful tool of expression, as Tugendhold put it so well.
The only constructive element is Picasso’s artistic will which, heeding the universal law of internal plastic harmony, pulls together the nude’s dissociated body parts, her different spatial aspects.
This amazing innovation (which, by the way, dates back to the ancient past-to the pictographic methods of Ancient Egyptian and Assyrian painters) not only established the method of Analytical Cubism, but also opened up a vast area of previously unknown possibilities for the pictorial metaphor. In that sense, the Hermitage Nude looks into the future and stands, as Zervos was to note, as the starting point for the poetic element in all of Picasso’s subsequent work. Made of formal contradictions—frontal view and profile contours of the torso and left and right halves, lit-up masses balanced by a clear, linear body outline—this nude deliberately has something of Mannerism’s unstable style. Its unorthodox anatomy, with its insect-like joints, elongated proportions, and narrowed limbs, seems to be a deliberate recollection of Cranach’s angular Venuses, of the sophisticated elegance of the Dianas of the Fontainebleau School, or of the voluptuous curves of Ingres’s Odalisques.
Matisse answered reproaches concerning the ugliness of the women in his paintings by saying that he made paintings, not women. Picasso, however, makes women in his paintings. Here he soberly constructs the figure of a female being with youthful forms and an angular gracefulness of motion; and he brings his creation to life by dynamic movements, by the pearly, cool light on the left, which splashes down on the nude’s back and which harmonises so well with the warm ochre tones of her body.
Picasso creates a different, male nature in the gouache Man with his Arms Crossed, using the same pictorial manner of the winter of 1908-1909. This somewhat clumsy, but solidly assembled half-figure speaks less of Picasso’s abstract formal pursuits than of his desire to achieve an expressive character, to reveal the essence in its physical concreteness: the larger-than-life head with its bulging forehead, the powerful neck, the crossed arms that bunch up the shoulders and thus emphasise the athletic and monolithic torso. Yet even now, on the threshold of a new stage in the development of his formal conception, the semantic polarisation of Picasso’s pictorial world of 1908, the basic meanings of his personal mythology, is still preserved.
Picasso, of course, did not know then that he was entering the period of Cubism.
“To know that we were doing Cubism we should have had to be acquainted with it. Actually, nobody knew what it was.”[23] Internally experiencing his art, being the centre and source of that art, Picasso had a more integral, less vague understanding of his goals than did scholars writing about his work at the time. “The goal I proposed myself in making Cubism? To paint and nothing more. And to paint seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought—without enslaving myself with objective reality.”[24]
If the artist spoke of a quest for new expression, it is because that was his professional concern to find adequate means of expression, an adequate language for the impulses inherent in his thinking. Yet he also said: “In the early days of Cubism we made experiments… to make pictures was less important than to discover things all the time.”[25] Today, however, when the formal phenomenon of Cubism has been studied in depth and in sufficient detail, we can look upon Picasso’s work of that time not only from the standpoint of the artist’s self-development, but with an eye more educated and sensitive to the value of its content.
Indeed, almost every work between the winter of 1908 and the spring of 1909 has its own content, either relating to the development of some theme or, as in the case of the still lifes, situating its object-motif in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with a strong current. Bread and Fruit Bowl on a Table, for example, painted during this period, is a still life that is a transformation of the so-called Carnival at the Bistro theme, developed in several sketches. In another still life, the artist, as if in Cézanne’s honour, depicted a pear, a lemon and Cézanne’s hat amid the full folds of a draped cloth which has a luxurious yet controlled leaf-like pattern in the style of the Master of Aix (see Still Life with Hat).
The still lifes of that period simultaneously address the sense of reality, the artistic sense, and the viewer’s imagination. While composed of real, even commonplace objects (usually fruit, table utensils), they are architectonically organised, and yet at the same time each reveals a certain energetic expression—an epic, dramatic, intimate quality—more to be expected of landscapes.