Picasso’s imagination contained a vast hidden territory that was never divulged: his vision of infinite space and conception of the universe. No one ever knew about his meditations on the cosmos nor did anyone ever see a depiction of the cosmos in his paintings because cosmography was all but proscribed by the tenets of Picasso’s modernist aesthetics. In his private, unpublished texts, however, written between 1936 and 1940 and not inhibited by avant-garde taboos, Picasso revealed a preoccupation with what seemed to matter to him more than love and fame - in a deep sense, in fact, more than anything else: the boundless receptacle of the earth and its implications for the contemporary course of history that was sinking inexorably into the abyss of agony and bloodshed.
Picasso’s struggle to reach the sky and the “heaven of heavens” - a twentieth century variation on the ancient and early Christian “impassioned leaping of the spirit”into the “Kingdom of Heaven James Miller, Measures Of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London: 1986), p. 73. - commenced in 1936, at exactly the same time that his friend André Malraux was also undergoing the odd sensations of stretching out beyond experience to touch the universe’s extreme outer limits. In Man’s Hope (1937-1938), Malraux, as the commander of the Loyalist Air Force in the Spanish Civil War, and exhausted by the bloodshed that he had witnessed, became aware at the end of his military maneuvers, that the “horizon seemed to be expanding under the shattering detonations from all the fascist batteries” as far as the most distant imaginable border of the sky, where his airmen became capable of “hearing” an awe-inspiring “voice” announcing the “infinite possibilities of their destinies.”André Malraux, Man’s Hope (1937-1938). Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald (New York: Modern Library, 1983), pp. 488 and 511.
Picasso’s “passage from [the everyday] world to another” (13.7.1940; PCW, 220) All bolded words and phrases are citations from Picasso’s own texts as published in Picasso: Collected Writings (1989). Bolding is intended to illustrate Picasso’s writings in the same way that reproductions of his paintings illustrate, in books dealing with his art, his visual oeuvre. PCW is an abbreviation of Picasso: Collected Writings. The translations of Picasso’s original, Spanish and French texts are mine, unless otherwise specified., involved the transformation of the real, material, cosmic objects into cosmological symbols of “another,” mystical universe that Picasso squeezed into furious litanies on mythical skies, stars, suns, clouds, the central globe of the earth, the subterranean hell - and the “paths of tripes” it disgorged on the land (20.1.1936;PCW, p.97). The microcosm like the macrocosm metamorphosed the domestic objects Picasso actually observed in his everyday life—secreted away from public scrutiny in the same intimate sketch-books—into symbols of far distant spatial chambers in recurrent series of: “windows”, “doors”, “tables”, “ovens”, “jars”, “cups,” “oranges”, “eggs”, “curtains”, “mouths”, “eyes”, “hairs”, “mantles”,“bees” cf. the “swarm of bees of the air,” Picasso, 12.2.1936; “swarms of bees encircling with a halo the head of the bull,” Picasso, 28.1.1936. - the solar “yellow yellow at the limit of its yellowness” (7.11.1940; PCW, p.254), and himself, the “excessive blue scandalized by [his] power to turn [things] blue” (ibid).
As if augmenting the clandestine nature of Picasso’s affair with the cosmos is the fact that none of his students seem to have taken note of his precisely designed, glossed diagrams of the cosmos - not even after their publications in Picasso: Collected Writings. What I have titled, after years of research, Picasso’s Cosmographical Diagrams were not identified and not titled in the text of Picasso:Collected Writings (pp.229-230), where their illustrations bore only the inscription indicating of their original location in Picasso’s “Royan Sketchbook; page 49R and V” (ibid.). It was only due to the illogical recommendation, in the notes to the unnamed cosmographical diagrams (Picasso:Collected Writings, p.419) - ”See, the forthcoming text by Lydia Gasman War and the Cosmos in Picasso’s Writings” (p.419 ) - that, finally, in 2004, Kathleen Brunner examined the Diagrams, though, unfortunately, in addition to, for example, misunderstanding their Ptolemaic model, she chose to reduce them to a voguish expression of Picasso’s fear of castration (Kathleen Brunner, Picasso Rewriting Picasso ;Black Dog Publishing, 2004, pp.83, 85). One may wonder though, upon seeing them for the first time, if these Cosmographical Diagrams (Picasso, 2.8.1940; PCW, pp.229-230; figs.2-5), that could pass for doodles or playful child-like distractions, were really Picasso’s. Was it not more likely that Dora Maar was their author, as the director of the art bookstore La Hune speculated when I showed them to him? Were there precedents in Picasso’s work for such illustrations? What led him, an artist whose conceptual work was seldom detached from perceptual reality, portray that which by definition escaped his own direct experience? And assuming that they are Picasso’s, why focus on the universe, and what could they possibly mean?
My serendipitous discovery of their existence caused me to virtually freeze in my tracks. The existential facts of history entailed difficulties that were weighty enough to thoroughly absorb my intellectual energies. Questions of cosmology had never really touched me and what did cosmology mean anyway? Was it perhaps something of a humanistic relic, a mélange of astronomy, philosophy, and theology? What did space signify and how was I to understand its guarded history as a true manifestation of God’s omnipresence? How many layer of matter and spirit comprised space - the infinite and the void - what, in fact, were they? These were just a few considerations that began to float around in my consciousness while completing in 1981 my Ph.D. dissertation. It was while dissecting the problem of magic in Picasso’s theoretical speculations and in his visual oeuvre, that I registered amazement that a grand archetypal yet commonplace idea like the “center” had become the leitmotiv of the texts Picasso composed on Christmas day 1939 - as variations on the “Theme of the Interior” underlying most of his art. But, in uncovering (in the mid-1980s) his Cosmographical Diagrams in the Picasso Archives, I began to realize that he was haunted by the principle of the world’s “center,” not simply because of his adherence to Surrealism’s ahistorical universals, but more importantly because of his prophetic insight into the essential truth of his era, the arrival of the space age. I had probed Picasso’s image magic, but now I had to contend with the nature of the “infinite void” (25.12.1939; PCW, p.211) that he was engaged with in a confrontation of the highest order.
It soon dawned on me that the unknown “hostile” forces he had depicted in the Demoiselles d’Avignon might have finally disclosed their address at the “center” of the “infinite void” in his Cosmographical Diagrams (2.8.1940; PCW, pp.229, 232) and in his reflections on the cosmos written during the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II. “Center”, “infinite void”, and “hostile” spirits were for Picasso interrelated entities that were therefore transformable one into another. At the same time I also began to grasp the deeper meaning, and to note the concrete textual and pictorial configurations of Picasso’s “cosmo-phobic” vision of the universe, which lent credence and specific, descriptive support to Malraux’s seemingly cavalier and abstract remarks, concerning Picasso’s “incurable conflict” André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask. Translated And Annotated By June Guicharnaud With Jacques Guicharnaud (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p.17. with creation - registered at the time that Picasso was completing Guernica (1937). In addition, the anti-cosmic views Picasso expressed in his verbo-visual texts from the mid 1930s, seemed to be in agreement with the similar positions concurrently endorsed by his friends and associates like Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre - positions that were in turn related to the Gnostic appraisals of the “world as a whole” in the works of a host of other writers like Georges Bataille, Simone Weil and Thomas Mann.
But why did Picasso’s 1940 Cosmographical Diagrams appear precisely at that time? Why did he draw and annotate his cosmological model when the fate of the world hung in the balance, when it depended on the outcome of war in the air à outrance launched by Hitler against France and against England? Certainly it was not exclusively due to the collective, philosophical and political ambiance of the moment. Rather, it was primarily, because Picasso had watched as if transfixed the war from the air when it had first scorched his native country in the Spanish Civil War, causing him to become one with the victims of the air raids - air raids, that at the beginning of World War II were spreading like contagion to virtually all the rest of the European continent and the British Isles. It was against the background of these life-threatening circumstances that Picasso’s fear and fury escalated. Intense awareness of these events pervaded his wartime texts written in that watershed year, 1940, which read as a puree of corpses, confusion, filth, stench, revulsion, escapism, outrage and self-derision. By disgorging from his psyche the detritus of war, he cleansed his mind - satisfying his “almost absolutely necessary need to illuminate the night” (8.3.1936; PCW, p. 104) that had fallen over the world. He had to figure out clearly the connection between planet earth and the oceans of space surrounding it, to sort out the location of the besieger and the besieged, to record the details of his transactions with the absolute “black of space” (19.4.1936; PCW, p.122) - to accomplish all this by drawing on paper the blueprint of the structure of the cosmos so that he could detail his campaign against it.
The Cosmographical Diagrams, then, were charts pinpointing the enemy’s location and strategy, as well as Picasso’s own vantage point and containing coded instructions for his retaliatory moves. To be sure, if they were nothing more than an attempt to place undue value on his subjective thoughts and to bracket external reality, the Cosmographical Diagrams would have perhaps sufficed to put his mind at rest and exorcize his demons. But they were much more than that. For the magnitude of strategic terror bombing from the air that Picasso chronicled in his texts between 1936 and 1940 was not a subjective exaggeration of the events unfolding at that time. They were real and it took no more than an increased degree of savagery to become the catastrophic bombings of 11 September 2001.
I remember my own traumatic encounter with dive bombers in Romania in 1944 and I recall seeing, later on, an adorable little girl covering her ears in horror as a bomber roared through a limpid sky. This was, I thought, recalling Courbet, a “Real Allegory.” It captured in a moment an unprecedented fear: fear as the human condition redefined by this century’s gravest, lasting “boundary situation,” ushered in during the Spanish Civil War when Stukas bombed Guernica and at the beginning of World War II, when the air power of the Luftwaffe dug the “Grab in der Luft” for the souls risen from Hitler’s gas chambers, the sacred site of mourning for Paul Celan.
Was there a relation between my experiences and those of Picasso? Those who have not endured the horror of air raids might smile at the rebirth in the twentieth century of the Christian myth of “evil spirits, and agents of the lord of cruelty” wandering in the “teeming air.” Picasso too smiled, but not really. Nor did I. Over the last three decades I have attempted to resolve many gnawing fears by teaching myself what Picasso made me learn.
—Dr. Lydia Csató Gasman