Book review

Viva Picasso:A Centennial Celebration by David Douglas Duncan
Published by Viking Press, New York, 1981

Reviewed by PETER WELLS

Recently I saw a Volkswagen movie advertisement from the 1950s. I was a child through that decade and to see this sort of advertising is, in one way, to remember the decade's aspirations. Pastel cardboard facades outlined baroque buildings, which in turn were colourfully backlit. Around the car, chic European-types meandered; the smart lady with her poodle, a little infant with scarlet balloons, a baker in striped vest with baguettes. The ad relied totally on the mystique of 'Europe' to sell an item. 'Europe' was chic, smart-yet really it was only selling a car. This is one image.

The other image I have from this period comes from the Saturday Evening Post. This was one of thievery few visual contacts with the outside world I had in those pre-television days. In every issue there was a wryly-drawn cartoon of a middleclass couple looking, sometimes upside down, at a piece of modern art. Always this couple would have an expression on their faces which said: we're baffled but I guess we have to accept it. The name most commonly mentioned here, a kind of italic for the crazy hoax being perpetrated on the public was Picasso.

Picasso when he died left an estate of three hundred million American dollars.

There is a kind of apotheosis here, a maximum stretch of success that an artist can aspire to in our postindustrial society. This alone creates a kind of legend. Alive he was a legend too. 'Picasso is an old man who can still get himself young wives. Picasso is a genius. Picasso is mad. Picasso is the greatest living artist. Picasso is a multi-millionaire. Picasso is a communist. Picasso's work is nonsense: a child could do better. Picasso is tricking us. If Picasso can get away with it alI, good luck to him!' (John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso.) The contradictory elements here all provide fuel for the legend. This book of photographs by David Douglas Duncan adds another faggot to the flame.

One day in 1956, Duncan, a well-known war photographer, arrived on the chateau doorstep bearing metaphorical myrrh to the master. This was by no means unusual: Picasso was used to an adoring public. What was unusual was that Picasso decided Duncan could stay - Duncan and his new Nikon lense. For the following twenty-five years, through to Picasso's death, Duncan look photographs of Picasso, providing, in its own way, a kind of stately visual cavalcade of the last years of the legend.

So far so good. But why did Picasso settle on Duncan? Was it that he sensed here was the right kind of visual acolyte? Certainly there is not one photograph in this book that might detract from the legend of Picasso. We see Picasso the Prodigious at home, in castle interiors-a remarkable old man with a young beauty, making plates, modelling masks, revelling in a public bath.

For myself I would like to have seen what Richard Avedon would have made of Picasso's old face. Today Duncan's style of photography is as alienating in the distance it places between us as viewers and Picasso as a person as his slightly breathless prose. He, uses the camera deferentially, never allowing it to register for one moment any sense of jarring reality. John Berger's Success and Failure of Picasso might serve as a hidden subtext to these photos.

Berger points to an agonised series of drawings wherein the theme of an obscenely sexual old man confronts his age in the presence of succulent young flesh. Clearly this is a core of truth for the ageing Picasso. Yet one looks in vain for any hint of this tension in Duncan's photographs. There is never that urgent truth the paparazzi deal in-the moments of anger and forgetfulness whereby the rich and famous are revealed before our hungry gaze as being no more than we are, skeletons clad in pitiful flesh, confused, hurt, sweating. We are denied that salutary lesson. Picasso the legend is left intact.

I think this is a shame. Because the smooth lamination of legend risks leaving him incarcerated in the tomb of a reputation. Speaking personally, I can respond better to a person with human failings than I can to a man who is widely regarded as superhuman. Berger's excellent text points out these last years-the years that Duncan documents-were years of retreat into an art of 'sentimental pantheism'. Duncan's photographs capture, in an inverse image as it were, Picasso's cloistered world of exile and celebrity. But as a viewer you must carry into this world of apparent delight the darker shades of an art verging on self-mimickry.