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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In April, 1973, the month that Picasso died, he was asked to choose an image to be used as a poster for a show of recent work at the Palace of the Popes, in Avignon. He picked "The Young Painter," an oil sketch he'd done a year earlier, at the age of ninety--a vision of his dewy beginnings, not his bitter end. The look is naive and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood but of the archive of painting. The apple-cheeked youth recalls another young painter at the outset of his career, the twenty-three-year-old Rembrandt, picturing himself and his calling around 1629, in a panel not much bigger than this page. The faces are unmistakably similar: gingerbread-clownish beneath a wide-brimmed hat; snub nose; eyes stylized as ogling black holes, as if drawn by a child. The captured moment, in both images, is solemn; the young men pause before their work, brushes in hand, as if locked in a creative trance. A raking light, the illumination of an idea, strikes their faces. "I don't paint what I see," Picasso was given to saying. "I paint what I know." Rembrandt, his picture tells us, felt the same way: the mind instructing the hand.
It was an unlikely pairing--the cerebral modernist who had made a point of expelling sentiment from painting going wistful over the master whose every brush mark was loaded with emotion. But the fixation was real. The shelves in Picasso's studio at Mougins, in the South of France, were packed with Rembrandtiana, including all six volumes of Otto Benesch's edition of the drawings. And though Picasso could not have seen Rembrandt's little panel first-hand (it was in Boston), he must have plucked that archetypal image of setting forth from one of his books. Radical remaker of art though he was, Picasso always balanced his iconoclastic instincts with a compulsive historicism. In 1936, he had agreed to become absentee director of the Prado, while Madrid was under Fascist siege. Constantly measuring himself for admission to the pantheon, Picasso evidently felt that taking down the masters also meant taking them on, and in his time he had mixed it up with, among others, Grunewald, Poussin, Cranach, Velazquez, Goya, and El Greco. At the end, though, it was Rembrandt of whom, according to his friend and biographer Pierre Cabanne, he spoke "ceaselessly." The haunted self-portraits of those final years, all stubble and cavernous eye sockets, were surely prompted by the series of pitilessly truthful mirror images that Rembrandt executed in his last decade: a dispassionate scrutiny of time's ruin recorded in heavy jowls and pouches. Occasionally, as in the self-portrait as St. Paul (in the Rijksmuseum), Rembrandt arched his eyebrows in an expression of quizzical self-recognition, the chastened sinner who might yet imagine redemption. Picasso's face-making, on the other hand, is showy with self-contempt: so many glaring skulls.
Rembrandt first appeared in Picasso's visual imagination in the nineteen-thirties, as Janie Cohen points out in her essay "Picasso's Dialogue with Rembrandt's Art," in the volume "Etched on the Memory," at a time when the Spanish artist was making an ambitious "suite" of a hundred prints for the dealer Ambroise Vollard. Two qualities in Rembrandt's printmaking had sparked a sense of comradeship across the centuries. First, there was the experimental freedom that Rembrandt allowed himself--sketching ideas on the etching plate and then reworking them, adding other designs, sometimes related...
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