INTERVIEW WITH PABLO PICASSO
"I don't paint anything I haven't seen"
The New Barcelona Post inaugurates a section of interviews with emblematic figures of culture, art, thought, and science present as reproductions in the new Barcelona Wax Museum. With this cycle, we want to open an imaginary and dystopian conversation, forcing the timeline, so that we can get closer to what these figures would tell us today about their lives, about Barcelona, and about the times we live in now.
29 october of 2022 at 20:14h
--- Thank you for having accepted. --- Well, here I am. And now what do you want from me? --- While they take some photos of him, we are supposed to talk. --- You speak, that is your job. Mine is to paint. --- Next year marks 50 years since his death. A good one is being set up.To me, posterity has never worried me
. --- But posterity exists. His last work is from a year before I was born. --- My last work is from a year after you die. --- Okay. Is it good here? --- One can rest. --- Are you bored? --- No, simply that here I am not a painter but a museum piece. --- With a sailor shirt. --- Because here I don't act as a painter, but as a vedette. It's just that I'm not Marilyn Monroe. Besides, if I had to paint, I would take it off. --- Many interpreted it as a political message. --- What? A sailor shirt? --- They said, of the self-portrait The Sailor, that it expressed his anguish at being captured by the Gestapo while in Paris. --- Let's see: it's just a sailor shirt. --- No political background? --- If so, it will be in my subconscious. --- But it is not possible to escape reality, Mr. Picasso. --- Of course it is. It's possible and normal. --- Not in your case. You cannot deny the existing politics in the Guernica. --- There is symbolism there, of course, but only in that painting. The bull is brutality, the horse is the people. --- Is the bull fascism?I have told him the brutality.
--- Is it not the same? --- It was not my intention to represent fascism. In the same way that, if I paint a hammer and sickle, it does not necessarily mean that I intend to represent communism. --- But if you answered a Nazi officer, who asked about your authorship of Guernica: "No: you did it!" --- And in a speech Hitler also did me the honor of calling me an evil corruptor of youth. So what? --- True. "Degenerate art," they called it. --- The problem is not my art: the real drama is that some painters, whom I thought were close, approached the Nazis. --- Some said he was already living well, in occupied Paris. --- Look, I joined the Communist Party the day after the occupation. I took care of Gertrude Stein's apartment when the Germans moved the Jews out of Paris. --- But how can you defend communism? An ideology that, had it ruled in France, would have closed the Museum of Modern Art in Paris? --- Would that be so bad? --- That sounded rather anarchist. Like these environmentalists who throw soup at Van Gogh's sunflowers. What do you think? --- I believe in total freedom, but I am no anarchist. I am building, not tearing down. I am in favor of building. --- He went so far as to give the French communists a portrait of Stalin. --- I believed Stalin was good, it turns out I was wrong. Fine: but nevertheless, communism worked towards ideals I believed in. The communists rewarded me for the dove of Peace, for example. Look, I knew a priest who wasn't good, but would that alone have made me stop being Catholic? ¡Well, no!
--- Perhaps the communists were using him. --- Of course. And the others would have used me too. The truth is that, in any case and luckily, the Nazis lost. --- Let me inform you that the communists lost afterwards. --- So what? I'm dead too, but the dove isn't. --- Well, now that it seems fascism wasn't so dead after all. It's growing all over the world. Do you have an opinion? --- Look: when I expose the Guernica in Paris, in the Spanish pavilion of the Exhibition, many see a preview of what will happen in Europe. --- And then it goes around the whole world. It even stayed a good few years at MOMA. What do you want to tell me with this? --- Well, I forbade him from returning to Spain until public liberties were restored. --- Now, rather, public freedoms are being restricted. --- Because the ""Death to intelligence" by Millán-Astray is an eternal temptation. --- And so, what do you recommend? --- I'm already telling you: they need someone to do a Guernica. --- It's that more than the Guernica, what the Republic had was a Picasso. --- What do I care. Find yours. --- It's not easy. --- Look how easy it is: now they take pictures of me for sitting doing nothing. Now I am a work, I have become a piece. Like the one I have here in front of me. --- Who? Dalí? --- Dalí was a Francoist, neither was I. --- Precisely this he said about his communism. --- You see, a war portrays us.
--- But in the same conference he also said he was a genius. --- The difference between Dalí and me is that I don't need to talk about Dalí. --- And he also ridiculed their devotion to misery, certainly. --- Tell him from me that I paid for his first trip to New York. --- But don't they talk to each other when there are no visitors? --- I think we've already said everything to each other. --- In any case, we are talking about two exiled people. They must have something in common. --- I have already told you that brutality is everywhere. --- Aside from the fact that you also had a surrealist period, didn't you? --- I have never been out of touch with reality. --- Well, its trees are not like those in reality. --- It's that copying a tree is the opposite of painting reality. --- Perhaps so. Now that you mention it, I, for example, have always seen the Guernica as red. --- If I take the red out of a painting, it remains somewhere. --- Ah, do you mean there was red? --- I just say that a painting is a sum of destructions.
--- And a sum of money. We return to this sailor shirt: Christie's was aiming for seventy million dollars for that self-portrait! --- Oh, and there are people who pay five thousand dollars for one of my popsicles. --- It never goes down in price. --- Me?
--- Your work. Your signature. --- Here the only thing that really oscillates is the dust of snobs and speculators. --- Yes, but… --- Listen, if you've come to talk about dollars, do it with the spoiled child with the mustache. --- Well, let's talk about art. --- I don't like to talk about my work. --- And what if I tell you that people are increasingly lost with contemporary art? --- I see no problem in getting lost. --- We all want to understand. --- Tell me, do you like fried eggs? --- A lot. --- Okay: but does he understand them? --- Understood, understood… --- "Understood, understood"... Let it be. There are people who don't understand English, or who don't understand Einstein... I tell you: if you understand my language, you will understand my thought. --- That is to say, that understanding is important. --- I do not paint to be understood, but to progress according to what I think. --- But sometimes there are languages difficult to digest. --- Because you must be a creator while observing. You have to commit entirely. Otherwise, everything is useless. --- But hasn't this always been done through beauty? --- We have already seen enough beauty. It is a form, of course, but not the only one. You write, don't you? --- Yes.
--- So why deny to painting what we accept in literature? --- What does it mean? --- Well, accept that there is a beauty in the ugly. --- Yes, okay, but there are uglinesses and uglinesses, huh? --- We must awaken people, prevent the soul from stagnating. We must totally change the way we identify things. Create unacceptable images. --- An eye from the front and one from the side, master? --- Don't call me master. I am not a master of anything or anyone. --- And what do you want me to call you? --- Pablo, Picasso, Pablo Picasso, Pablito, whatever except master. --- Well, what I was saying: what's the point of painting one eye from the front and one from the side? --- Why not? Or an eye on a leg. They always make both eyes the same, have you ever noticed? Nature does many things like me, it hides them. --- So, what you were telling me about reality, where does it stand? What importance does reality have for you? --- Reality inspires me, pushes my imagination, and gives me new life. In contrast, painting is stronger than I am; it makes me do what it wants. --- I think I understand now… with all due respect. --- I simply saw that we had to break with everything and start from scratch. Everything was already done, and something else had to be done. --- Can an apple have a cubic shape? --- It can have any form. What I convey is an emotion, not a specific form. --- But no one has ever seen a square apple. --- I don't paint anything I haven't seen.
--- In any case, thanks to that, you are now immortal. --- I don't care. You can only work on the here and now, not on tomorrow. --- Don't bother, Mr. Picasso. But you anticipated tomorrow! --- That's another thing: I was always more interested in the paintings I hadn't done yet than in the ones I had already done. --- Even when he was in Barcelona? --- Especially when I was in Barcelona. --- Well, now we are at the Wax Museum. Tell me about Barcelona. --- Oh, Barcelona was the beginning. And you know: after the beginning, the end comes. --- But man, there was also Paris, right? --- It was in Barcelona where I understood how far I could go. --- And Madrid? He also studied at the San Fernando Academy. --- Madrid was a provincial city, impervious to Catalan modernism. I abandoned that world immediately. --- Although, during the war, the republican government appointed him director of the Prado museum. --- It was already late. So, the true directors of the Prado could not be wise men or artists, but those soldiers who fought every day on the Madrid front. --- Before the war, Madrid's modern art museums ignored him. --- Oh, and the French too. I've already told you that where I learn is in Barcelona. --- Los Quatre Gats, Sabartés, Rusiñol, Casas… --- I think I did more than twenty portraits of Rusiñol. And with Sabartés we even walked up to Vallvidrera, to sign Verdaguer's farewell book. --- Was it because of Verdaguer's position towards the ecclesiastical hierarchy?--- It was because he was Verdaguer. As he adored Maragall, because he was Maragall and because, had he been French, he would be a poet known throughout the world.
--- And I suppose Barcelona because it was Barcelona. --- Exactly. And the same with Horta de Sant Joan, or with Gósol, or with Perpignan, or Ceret. --- According to the current director of his museum in Barcelona, the 20th century was born with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. --- It's just that my century was still interesting. --- More than the current one? --- Now in Barcelona there are neither bullfights nor boxing matches. --- Ah, yes. He took Hemingway to his first bullfight in Pamplona. --- Oh, we've all taken Hemingway to Pamplona. But Hemingway is just a fake tough guy. It's what I was telling him about art: Americans don't understand Europe, but they're enthusiastic about it. --- Many, in the prohibition of bullfighting, what they see is progress. --- Ah, but art is blood and guts. --- And primitive sculptures, and minotaur heads, right? --- How beautiful they would look in Plaça Catalunya! Don't you think? (laughs). --- It would be a scandal. --- I think they should remake it from top to bottom. Like the purple stripe on the Republican flag. --- How? The one from the Spanish Republic? --- Between you and me: I had some at home but, as a painter, I must confess that stripe doesn't go with anything. --- Rather, he slaps himself with everything. --- Why are two colors, placed next to each other, charming? Can it be explained? No. That's why you can't learn to paint, painting is a game of the spirit. --- I suppose something must be learned… --- If you want to discover what an artist is like, have them draw a perfect circle. The circle won't be perfect, but we'll be able to know their personality and temperament. Also if you have them copy a work. --- To copy? --- Without fear. They said my father was Cézanne: well, of course!
--- And once Cézanne has been copied? --- That is the danger: when you succeed, the danger is to copy yourself. And this leads to sterility (smiles). --- That seems quite true. --- It is easier to make oneself hated than to make oneself loved. --- By the way: and the women? They say he was quite a misogynist. --- Women devour you. When I try to portray a woman, she often dominates me. --- I speak of outside the canvas. --- What's happening? --- When I was young I was against women's suffrage. And they say he was an abuser. --- What should interest you is how I treat women in my art, not my home. --- Nowadays, this topic cannot be avoided. And the accusations are serious. --- Those who love me will defend me, those who hate me will attack me. What is written about me is generally full of foolishness. --- Well, we will always encounter the issue of separating the work and the artist. --- If they want to separate me, let them also separate me from the Guernica. --- I'm afraid we're busy with other things today, frankly. Art is no longer that important. --- Oh, that has been happening for many years. Before you were born. People have put their hearts into machines, scientific discoveries, riches, sports, the domination of nature and territories... They no longer feel art as a vital necessity. At most, they maintain a certain nostalgia, or inertia, or fashion, or snobbery. But never passion. --- And where does that lead us? --- To cynicism. You will have already seen it. --- But he died rich and famous. --- It's just that perhaps, when I died, I was no longer an artist. --- Finally: where do you feel you are from? Do you feel Catalan? --- We have had that conversation in perfect Catalan. --- As much as perfect… --- Look, Catalonia is a passion. A bit like with art, a bit like with me: when it stops being a passion, it will only be a calculation. --- Or a car brand. --- Ask my children that. Don't mix me in. --- Okay. This would be all, then. Thank you very much for the conversation. --- Ah, no: I am just a model here, asked to speak. But a model does not speak. It is you who must disrupt the work. I am like a tree, like the sea. --- I understand. --- Do not understand! Do not look at me, do not listen to me. Invent!