November 13, 2007 8:43
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Rosetta Stone, Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC — The British Museum
Just two weeks ago Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, was telling me that Egypt's loan request to his museum for the Rosetta Stone, which it wants temporarily for the opening of Cairo's Grand Museum in 2012, was made in precisely the right way. (This in contrast to Greek attempts to borrow the Elgin Marbles, which get sticky because the Greeks won't acknowledge first that the Trustees of the British Museum are the marbles' rightful owners.) Let the record show that MacGregor wasn't prepared yet to say that his museum would say yes to the Egyptians either. Now Zawi Hawass, Egypt's very high profile culture minister, is complaining that the Brits are stalling.
I think this is called conducting negotiations in public.
November 13, 2007 7:36
Quick Talk: With John Richardson
Picasso with Olga in London, 1919 — Image: Popperfoto
I've been posting in recent days about Volume III of John Richardson's Picasso biography. Here's part of a conversation I had last week with Richardson himself. I'll put this up in two installments.
LACAYO: Volume III opens in 1917, just before Picasso met Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballerina who became his first wife. You say that he fell in love with Olga, but soon after you're referring to his "ambivalent tenderness" towards her. And after their marriage in 1918 he seems to tire of her after just a few years. Was he ever really in love with her, or did he just feel it was time to marry? Not long before his courtship of Olga he had tried to marry his previous mistress, Irene Lagut, but she turned him down. Then suddenly he took up with Olga.
RICHARDSON: I think he was really in love with her, but in love in a diffferent way from the pre-1914 mistresses, which was a whole sort of Bohemian erotic thing. He'd fallen in love with the woman he wanted to be his wife and the mother of his children. The fact that she was respectable and wouldn't go to bed with him until they married was, in his mind, in her favor. Olga was a nice, ladylike, suitable wife.
LACAYO: Olga usually gets the blame for tempting Picasso out of Bohemia and into the world of the rich and famous, where she could play the role, as you write, of "a glamorous ballerina married to a charismatic celebrity". Plainly Picasso missed his old buddies, like Max Jacob, but was he such an unwilling participant in Olga's vision for him, with the big apartment, the servants and the tailored clothes? It seems that at least for a while he fell very willingly into the life she made for them.
RICHARDSON: He all too willlingly fell in with her bourgeoise approach to married life and to being the wife of a famous man. They both fell into this path. Picasso was always apologizing, saying he liked pork and beans and she liked caviar and pastries. That was not altogether honest on his part. He loved having a butler in white gloves and leading this comme il faut life in Paris.
LACAYO: What do you make of Picasso's move to classicism in these years. What was he looking for?
RICHARDSON: It was two or three things. I think he wanted to distance himself from Cubism because during World War I it had been a dirty word. I mentioned in Volume II that "Kub" was the name of a German soup concentrate and that lunatic chauvinists in France thought they [cubist paintings] were signs to the German army about where to invade. Cubism became such a dirty word during the war that he [Picasso] felt he had better get out of it. But of course he couldn't get out, because it was very much a part of his whole vision.
But also, the most avant garde thing he could do was to turn on his tracks and adopt classicism. It was a huge shock to his followers and I think he reveled in that. Also never forget that Picasso grew up in Malaga and when he was young there was a Spanish classicism, which Maillol, who a Basque, was also part of. So this was a way of going back to the world of his forefathers.
LACAYO: It's also interesting that the classicism Picasso had in mind was much wilder than the French idea. It wasn't classicism as Puvis de Chavannes understood it, as serene white marble. It was, as you say in your book, a Dionysian classicism, full of sex and violence.
RICHARDSON: Yes, it was a sort of Nietzschean idea — which also enabled him to express his erotic feelings, to eroticize his work.
LACAYO: So this wasn't John Ruskin's sedate Victorian idea of classicism.
RICHARDSON: It certainly wasn't.
November 12, 2007 1:58
Richardson on Picasso: Part III
Let's look briefly at a few other dimensions of the new third volume of John Richardson's ongoing biography of Picasso:
I think it's a safe bet that Richardson will be the last of the line of Picasso biographers who knew him personally, a line that includes Roland Penrose, Pierre Daix and even Francoise Gilot, Picasso's companion from 1944 to 1953, who wrote a best selling memoir. Richardson first met Picasso in 1953, when the artist was 72 and Richardson was living with the British collector and critic Douglas Cooper not far from Picasso in the south of France. He was in periodic contact with him until Picasso's death in 1973 and afterwards remained friends with Picasso's widow Jacqueline. Even in the first three volumes of his biography, which cover a period of Picasso's life before they met, Richardson writes about Picasso with the sweep and confidence that come from personal acquaintance.
No surprise — Richardson is constantly illuminating on the sources of Picasso's art. He may not solve the mystery of why Picasso was compelled in these years to shuttle among styles, but Richardson knows where to look for the sources of inspiration. Though Picasso continued all his life to deploy the Cubist language he had developed with Braque, his neo-classical phase in the 1920s puzzled a lot of his admirers. Richardson sees Picasso's encounter with the Farnese marbles in Naples as a crucial moment in that move, more important that Picasso's study of classical sculptures at the Louvre.
The giganticism of the Farnese Hercules, and the disproportions of his limbs....
Farnese Hercules, Roman copy of 4th century B.C. Greek original — Museo Archeoligico Nazionale, Naples
....would plainly work their way into Picasso's art years later.
Large Bather, Picasso, 1921 — Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Richardson also points to the 16th-century Mannerist sculpture by Jean Goujon and his workshop that Picasso encountered in Fontainebleau when he was spending a crucial summer there in 1921. Again, massive, disproportionate limbs and figures squeezed into confining spaces. Picasso was looking for a classicism with coiled energies, and he found it in those places.
Jean Cocteau, 1930 — Photo: George Hoyningen-Huene
Lastly, the strange case of Jean Cocteau. For most of this volume Richardson is much more negative towards Cocteau than he was in the Introduction to Volume I. In the new volume he treats Cocteau as vain, shallow, scheming and dilettantish, all of which he was, but also genuinely gifted. I like Truman Capote's catty five word judgment of Cocteau, delivered in the early 1950s: "vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere."
And it was after all Cocteau who gave Picasso the crucial commission to work on his ballet Parade, an opportunity that enormously furthered Picasso's career and circle of contacts. Richardson uses the words gimmick or gimmicky no less than five times to describe the real world sound effects Cocteau wanted to add to Erik Satie's score for Parade, though it has always seemed to me that they would have predicted the noises-as-music in John Cage and even the Beatles. (Some "real" sounds, like the tapping of typewriter keys, survived in the score that was performed.) For anyone sufficiently interested in Cocteau, Francis Steegmuller's 1970 biography takes a more balanced view, still very skeptical towards Cocteau — it seems to be the only safe position to take on him — but more comprehensive in his acknowledgment of the man's gifts.
I caught up with Richardson by phone last week. I'll start posting that conversation tomorrow.
November 12, 2007 8:47
Norman Mailer: 1923 - 2007
Norman Mailer in 1948 — Photo: Library of Congress. Photographer: Carl Van Vechten
I don't regularly review books at Time or discuss writers on this blog, but I don't think anyone needs to wonder why I would make an exception for this guy.
November 9, 2007 4:26
Last Talk: With Neil MacGregor
Scenes from east frieze of the Parthenon, circa 438-432 BC — Elgin Collection/The British Museum
Let's finish up that conversation with the director of the British Museum.
LACAYO: Do you worry about the future of what's sometimes called the universal museum, the museum, like your own, that features objects from as many cultures as possible? It would seem that such museums would be threatened as more nations demand the return of artifacts that were taken from their territory in the past. It's not just the Elgin Marbles. For instance, the Egyptians have said they would like your museum to return the Rosetta Stone.
MacGREGOR: The Egyptians have never questioned the Trustees' ownership of the Stone. The Trustees have received a letter from the Egyptians asking the museum to lend the Stone for a number of months. So it's a perfectly ordinary loan request, of exactly the sort that has never been received for the Parthenon sculptures. The Egyptians have started from the position that legal title is absolutely clear and that they want to borrow it like anything else and then return it.
As for the universal museum, is it endangered? No, I think the need for a museum where the world can look at itself as one is greater than ever. The British Museum was the first great museum to aim at bringing to the world things from all over the world. It's an 18th century ideal, an Enlightenment ideal — a pre-imperial ideal. The museum was founded in 1753, before the British Empire really gets going. The idea of having, in one building, things from the whole world, there for free, for the whole world to study, is just as important now as it was 250 years ago.
It's very interesting that the French government, in their discussions with Abu Dhabi — [about French museum involvement in the culture complex planned there] — is using exactly the same language. What they want to offer Abu Dhabi is a universal museum. And that is what Abu Dhabi wants. When they opened the new Capital Museum in Beijing, they opened it with "Treasures of the World's Cultures", an exhibition from the British Museum showing the cultures of the world other than China. Museums in China have very little in them that was not made in China, so for most Chinese it is very hard to see things made outside.
LACAYO: You're often mentioned as a posible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whenever Philippe retires. You've said you wouldn't want the job because you have things still to do at the British Museum. What are those?
MacGREGOR: I would like to make the museum a place where the world can tell its histories, to allow the whole world to think about its oneness, how it interconnects. Over the next five years, in the run-up to the Olympics, we want to embark on a series of projects about the histories of the world as told through the objects in the British Museum. One aim is to make the museum more available on line. We now have about 300,000 objects in photographs documented on line. We want to make it usable throughout the world, to make the museum what Parliament set it up to be, a resource for the studious and curious of all nations.
Until about the 1960s, when air transport and packing changed, the question for most objects was where should they be. That's not now the case. The fact that Assyrian sculptures can travel to Shanghai, and allow the Chinese for the first time ever to see the civilization of the Mesopotamia, and then come back, changes the assumptions of that argument very profoundly. [Developments in] the technology of transport mean that those old discussions about whether an object should be in place A or place B are old discussions. Objects can be, over time, in many places.
LACAYO: In that case, would you agree to an actual sharing arrangement with Greece for the Elgin marbles?
MacGREGOR: We already have a sharing agreement — we each have about half.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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