Table of Contents:
Prelude - An Apology
Introduction (pdf) - “That Death Could Fall From Heaven”
Chapter 1 (pdf) - Picasso’s “Cosmographical Diagrams”
Chapter 2 (pdf) - Picasso’s “Winged Blue Bull”
Chapter 3 (pdf) The Celestial Bull In “Gilgamesh:” Its Recreation In Picasso’s 1936-1940 Texts And In The Committed Literature of the 1930s
Chapter 4 (pdf) Bullfighting, The Bull, Franco and His Air Force
Conclusion (pdf) - The “Scorching Bulls” in Picasso’s Text of the “Corrida In Mourning,” 1940
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
]]>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
]]>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
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