To finish an object

MANILA, Philippines - I am a genius. I am the greatest artist of the 20th century... I pretty much invented modern art, and I do weird abstract paintings even though I could paint totally realistic (sic) if I wanted to. Also, even though I am super short and bald, I am able to have sex with any beautiful woman I want, just because I’m so great,” the young Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) thought in the creative cliché repository of a movie Art School Confidential (2006). He was, of course, dressed as Pablo Picasso in a Breton shirt and a beret. He was also mistaken. He could not be Picasso.

That was plain to see as I reviewed his “Suite Vollard,” currently exhibited at The Met  that’s our very own Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Visibly, Picasso’s role, which desperate young artists like Jerome want to play, has been played out. It resolved its own conflicts. It sighed to its own romances. What culminated in “Guernica” wasn’t sheer genius. It was also a war. What makes up Picasso’s nudes aren’t just art school models. They were mostly his lovers. What we think of Picasso has been a caricature.

His art and life, on the other hand  in the care of a zealous patron, in the hands of scrupulous archivists, through the pen of avid chroniclers  is much richer. For example, the “Suite Vollard”  a collection of 100 prints  was actually made through engraving. Picasso did this, not only painting or sculpture, he was also into ceramics. Thanks to Monsieur Ambroise Vollard who set up Picasso’s first Paris exhibit in 1901 and worked with the artist until 1939, we have this exquisite collection of engraving work around Picasso’s move to France’s Le Boisgeloup estate in 1930.

Outside his famed work from the Blue, Rose, Cubist and other periods is this handful of prints never before seen in the Philippines, and it is an overflow of play. It’s a romantic diary. It’s a vicious wrestle to understand violence. It concludes in a despairing over blindness. Far from sticking only to his identifiable Cubism, Picasso, in the "Suite Vollard," has his mind at play, deriving one style from the other, improvising even from mistakes (i.e. some cracks on the plate had him rendering himself a few times as Rembrandt).

On a frame, one would observe his Cubist lines, and then, on the same plane, his classicist figures appear as if part of another independent work. In the selection marked Sculptor’s Studio, the artist and the muse are on the “real” plane, while the work (a sculpture) is in the artifice’s realm. The artist is lustful and obsessed with his work; the muse is eroticized and disconnected from the artist. As if a voyeur to his own affair, here is Picasso, etching himself as a burly man, always in after-sex situations with his then lover Marie-Thércse Walter. Reality? Well, reality as portrayed in art. It is a suspiciously absent separation from his personal life.

That’s why it is sound to conclude the transformed figure, a Minotaur, in the later drawings is the artist metamorphosed. So is the bull in a ring. The critics would argue this to be the animal that Picasso sees in himself, also the dark animal that suited Europe’s dark mood in the 1930s. It was the brink of the Spanish Civil War. It was the looming of World War II. And so we find this same animal in “Guernica” when the region is bombed in 1937. It is a dying horse, a ravaged bull, and there is the anguished woman.

Their other parts are absent (decapitated?), but in “Suite Vollard,” one would see these other parts, more bodies providing back stories to a grand body of work. You see, the “Guernica” establishes Picasso’s genius yet its figures appear incomplete. That’s none of his concern, says biographer Roland Penrose. He caught the artist saying, “Finish a work! Complete a picture? How absurd! To finish an object means to finish it, to destroy it, to rob it of its soul, to give it the puntilla, as to the bull in the ring.” Why don’t you finish his sentence yourself?

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"Suite Vollard": Pablo Picasso 1930-1937 is running at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila until Jan. 7, 2012. For more information, visit metmuseum.ph.