The manuscript, War and the Cosmos in Picasso’s Texts, 1936-1940, is a study that builds upon the material and ideas discussed in my 1981 Ph.D. Dissertation, “Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso, 1925-1938: Picasso and the Surrealist Poets.” The many references in the Picasso literature to the dissertation confirm its international reputation as having contributed in a major way to the historic shift from critical emphasis on Picasso’s style-centered, transformable cubism to the altogether different view of Picasso as the master magician of modernism, an evaluation that by the present time has become something of a commonplace among Picasso scholars. Among the first Picasso scholars who endorsed my concept of Picasso’s “magical primitivism” was William Rubin in Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1984), 335-336, 338 and passim. One year later John Richardson hailed my Ph.D dissertation in the New York Review of Books , December 19, 1985, 59-69 . Further references through 2006 to my dissertation and articles also include: Theodore Reff, Linda Nochlin, in Special Picasso Issue, Art in America, Dec, 1980, 142,180; Mark Rosenthal ,The Art Bulletin , Dec. 1983, 652-653; Marie-Laure Bernadac, Le Musée Picasso, Paris, 1985, 48-40; John Golding, “Picasso and Poetry, “ New York Review of Books, Nov., 21, 1985, 11, 14; Carla Gottlieb, “The Bewitched Reflection,” in Source. Notes in Art History, vol.IV, no. 2/3, Winter/Spring 1985, 66; John Russell, “Art: passion of Picasso at Beadleston Gallery,” The New York Times, December 13, 1985, 8; Gert Schiff, Picasso at Work at Home. Selrctions from the Marina Picasso Collection. Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, Florida, 1986, 8, 11, 75, 79, 84, 85, , 158; Timothy Anglin Burgard, “Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes: Autobiography, Apocalypse, and the Spanish Civil War, The Art Bulletin, December 1986, no.4, 660,662, 667-669, 673; Pierre Daix, Picasso créateur. La Vie intime et l’oeuvre, Paris, 1987, 443-444; Ludwig. Ull mann, Der Krieg im Werk Picassos. Reaktionen auf Krieg und Verfolgung, Osnabruck, 1986, 27-28, 385-386, 496; Michael Marshall “Picasso the Magician: Lydia Gasman’s New Look at the Artist as Sorcerer,” University of Virginia Alumni News, September-October, 1986, 22-25; Douglas Cooper, Picasso Theatre, Abrams, 1987, 365; H. Goeppaert and F. Goeppaert , Minotauromachy by Picasso, 1987, 122, 125; Ariana Stassinopolous Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, Simon and Schuster, 1988, 193, 256, 493-497, 798, 511, 525. Julie Baumgold, “The Picasso Wars, “ New York Magazine, 13 June, 1988, 45; Debora Menaker Rotschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’: From street to stage, 1991; Maureen Orth, “Ariana’s Virtual Candidate,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 1994, p.198; Ellen C. Oppler, Picasso’s Guernica, Norton, 1988, 80, 87, 93, 97, 101, 110, 184, 355; Idiot Achronot, Tel Aviv, Israel (Hebrew Newspaper), 29 June, 1988, p.7; Hershel B. Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica, University of California Press, 1988, 235; Patricia Leighton, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1904, Princeton, 1989, 180; Picasso: Collected Writings, Preface by Michel Leiris; ed.with intro. by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Christine Piot; trans. by Carol Volk and Albert Bensoussan , New York, Abeville Press, 1989, XX, XXV, 415,419, 442, 443, 444 ( Bernadac, acknowledges my contribution to the problem of Picasso’s texts in her Abridged Dictionary, ibid, XXV: “I wish to thank Mme Lydia Gasman and to render hommage to her work that have guided my analysis of Picasso’s texts. She was indeed the first - both in her thesis ‘Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso, 1925-1938" and in her article to be published that she graciously communicated to me (“War and the Cosmos in Picasso’s Writings") - to study the writings of Picasso and to discover a certain number of themes which are here listed”.); Commentary in Times Literary Supplement Jan. 19-25, 1990: “The ‘Abridged Dictionary of Picasso’s language [in Picasso Writings], compiled from Lydia Gasman’s 1981 thesis, Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso 1925-1938: Picasso and the surrealist poets, will enlighten the uninitiated ;” Herbert T Schwarz, Picasso and Marie-Therese alter, 1925-1927 Canada, 1988, 19-24, 53, 80, 93; Tom Ettinger, “The Pictorial Structure of Cubism and the Body-Image Construct,”International Universities Press, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought vol.12, 1989, 150-156,158,269, 171, 190, 204, 212, 213, 219, 221, 223, 226, 228, 229, 237, 239; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol.1.1881-1906, Random House, 1991, VIII, 287, 471, 505, 521; Ulrich Weisner, Picassos’Surreslismus Werke 1295-2937 , exhib. catalogue, Bielfeld, Kunsthalle, 1991, 16,167,215,241,244,245, ,264, 270-271, 297, 310. 311; Jean Sutherland Boggs, Picasso and Things, exhib catalogue, Cleveland Museum of art, 1992,with essays by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Brigitte Leal , 200-203, 218, 222, 252-253, 256, 202; Judi Freeman, Picasso and the Weeping Women: The Years of Marie-Therese Walter & Dora Maar, exhib. catalogue Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994; Art Institute of Chicago, 1994-1995, 19, 21, 143, 158, 170, 171,200, 206, 209; Pierre Daix , Dictionnaire Picasso (Musee Picasso, Paris, 1995, 338,903; Norman Mailer, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography, New York, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995, 273, 374, 381, 388; Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso's Variations on the Masters, 1996; Kristen H. Powel “‘La Drole de Guerre’: Picasso’s Femme se Coiffant and the ‘Phony War in France,’ ” Burlington Magazine, vol.CXXXVIII, no. 117, April 1996, p.240; 2 89, 310; Robert Rosenblum , “La Muse Blonde de Picasso: Le regne de Marie-Thérèse Walter,” in Picasso et le Portrait (Paris:Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997, 350 , 361, 382, 383; Kirk Varnadoe and Pepe Carmel , Picasso: Master Works Frm the Museum of Modern Art, New York:The Museum of Modern Art, 1997, 96; Peter Read , Picasso et Apollinaire: les métamorphoses de la Mémoire, 1997, 289, 310; ; Picasso a Dinard , exhib. catalogue Dinard, Palais des Arts, 1999, 76,86,122,207, 208; 366, Natasha Staller, A Sum of Destructions. Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism , Yale University Press, 2001, 397, 413; Elisabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, New York: Phaidon Press, 2002, 874, 679; Kathleen Brunner, Picasso Rewriting Picasso, Black Dog Publishing, 2003, 177, 183; Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica : The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, New York Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004, 127, 342. For citations referring to my work in the writings listed above see my curriculum vitae (here attached).
My new study analyzes an aspect of Picasso that complements but does not stress the idea of Picasso as a magician. Rather I seek to understand him as a philosopher, who between 1936 and 1940, from his empathetic encounter with the political and military events of the time as well as from his intimate contact with the major types of traditional cosmologies, worked out a gloomy comprehension of a world in which he found himself, willy-nilly, both as an outraged victim and as a dynamic observer of its tragic history. Inferred from the evidence of historical circumstances, Picasso’s Weltanschauung was, however, a direct expression of his steadfast sense of concern with the plight of humanity and reached out for an understanding of the vast frightening cosmos containing and indissolubly bound to the war-ridden planet earth .
My reconstruction of Picasso’s poetic style relies on a prolonged investigation of his Collected Writings that were only published in 1989, although I personally had gained access to them somewhat earlier. Now, after some three decades of study and reflection on the writings, I believe to have reached a truthful and valid comprehension of the complex and indisputably logical structure that underlies Picasso’s wartime texts and his repeated claim that his art is a “form of magic.”
The premise of his magic manipulations of style and imagery, directed against an inauspicious “higher” force that he most eloquently termed the ‘enemy!’ is nothing else than his existential and cosmological pessimism: Philosophy came first, magic was only its consequence. It is precisely because of his selective philosophical and ideological perception of prevailing hostility in the earthly environment he lived in as well as in his broader cosmic surroundings that Picasso resorted to the hypothetical healing potential of his art.
Picasso’s remarkable intelligence and erudition are by now widely recognized and references to his philosophy are frequently noted in the extant scholarship on Picasso, but his fundamental, consistent cosmological/ metaphysical system has not yet been identified and is absent in the increasing critical corpus dedicated to the artist. In his well-known public statements, Picasso uses a variety of metaphors for an immanent, elusive and adverse “mystery” or “perfume” to suggest what he thought was his and humanity’s ineffable “enemy!” By contrast, in his 1936-1940 writings, Picasso gives to the “enemy!” a distinct heavenly location and thereby assumes the “enemy’s” objectively real and tangible presence within a transcendent, celestial receptacle - with which the “enemy!” is interchangeable.
Picasso’s traditional, yet subversive geography and teleology of the cosmos controlled from “above” by an other than human “enemy” that he also terms, among other things, a kind of “Wicked God” (alluding to its then well known Manichean ancestry) - was formulated in his annotated Cosmographical Diagrams of 2 August 1940. I was the first writer on Picasso to discover and decipher (in the mid-1980s) Picasso’s unique 1940 DiagramsSee especially Marie-Laure Bernadac’s “Dictionnaire abrege,” in Picasso: Collected Writings, 1989, pp.XX, XXV, 419. of the cosmos that constitute the foundation and justification of his bleakly aggressive wartime philosophy and of his bellicose political commitments - framed occasionally in declarative propositions but as a rule presented in the guise of symbolic images and myths in his writings.
In Chapter 1, therefore, I set out to undertake a close look at and hermeneutic reading of the design, the annotations, and the overarching quasi- narrative structure which underlies Picasso’s Cosmographical Diagrams, as seen in the context of his life during the Spanish Civil War and during the era leading to the Fall of Paris in 1940. At the same time Picasso’s conception of the universe is placed in relation to ancient, Middle Eastern, Platonic, and Christian cosmic models, as well as to their evolution and transformation during and after the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.
Chapters 2 and 3 continue and elaborate Picasso’s cosmic theme by focusing on its so far undetected, ancient (ca. 2500 BC) Mesopotamian (Sumerian) sources and on Picasso’s stunning re-construction of the “Bull of Heaven,” the devastating celestial sovereign featured in the famous literary masterpiece, Gilgamesh (ca. 2300 BC). This paradigmatic symbolic myth of cosmic cruelty, re-created by Picasso as the “blue winged [and] irradiating bull” (26.1.1937), was almost certainly brought to Picasso’s attention by the 1934 and 1935 studies on Mesopotamian art and poetry published by his friend, Christian Zervos. The polysemic, coded, but on a primary level unambiguously destructive meaning of Picasso’s “winged bull,” which corresponds to the heavenly toro-and-predecessor of Satan in Gilgamesh and which became in the New Testament the deceitful Antichrist, simultaneously points to Franco, the par excellence imposter, known at the same time (1937) that Picasso’s “bull” spread out his demonic “wings” as the (mendacious) sacred leader of the Fascist “crusade”’ against the “godless” Republicans. In these two chapters (2 and 3), I further consider - inter-textually - the political position of Picasso and of his eminent surrealist and dissident surrealist literary circles - represented by Michel Leiris, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and others - which in the last instance coincided with the consensus of the “nonconformist” intellectuals in the 1930s that Nazism could not be countered by tactics of defensive appeasement, but only by preemptive and ruthless offensive operations that in fact sought to imitate, in one way or another, the Nazis’ own cold-blooded policies and their seemingly inexorable ability to wage war.
In Chapter 4, I attempt to correlate the airborne “blue...bull” in Picasso’s 1936-1940 texts and the unprecedented military theory of strategic terror bombing from the air that dominated the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and World War II (from 1939 until the fall of France in 1940). This technologically entrenched method of inflicting panic from the air elucidates to a great extent Picasso’s choice as a model of the Mesopotamian bull descending from the sky to devastate the earth, and also his crucial but as yet mostly unnoticed statement: “That death could fall from heaven so many, right in the middle of rushed life, had always had a great meaning for me.”
Picasso’s vengeful, bellicose lex talionis against anti-human, cosmic, socio-political, and military aggression defines the nature of his 1936-1940 texts. Mindful of the opposition between the Good and the predominantly Evil forces struggling with one another despite their law-like conjunction underlying the violence, religious conflict, and blood-letting that continues to mark the dawn of the twenty-first century, this book seeks to foreground Picasso’s relevance to the condition of the contemporary world, to remember his outcry against human suffering and oppression. What mattered most to Picasso was what was most deeply rooted in his body with a vulnerable “‘flayed skin’’ ( 24.12. 1939): his intense emotional pain and moral revulsion that engendered his intellectual speculations - inflected at critical moments - by a Pascal-like assumption of an “infinite” (Picasso, ibid), frightening and crushing cosmic space - ideas and views of the world that have remained obscured or are even completely lacking among the frequently arduous scholarly efforts undertaken in recent years to identify the unbounded magnitude of his thinking and artistic creations.
—Dr. Lydia Csató Gasman