PICASSO: DRAWING AS IF TO POSSESS
✻ “. . . Que je les possède!” was the phrase used by Picasso discussing his figure drawing in a recent conversation with Professor William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
“CUBIST SIMULTANEITY OF POINT OF view” is a phrase so familiar, and in one sense so well founded, that it seems to cover whatever else in that line there was to invent. If Cubism had done it all in the teens of the century, why fuss about Picasso still doing it forty years later?
Cubism had not done it all. Cubism was still a transformation of remembered solids into a two-dimensional system. The world it inherited was the world’s theater spaced out with objects, and its effect on the imaging of familiar bodies was to unsolder their structure and scatter their parts. Whereas two world wars later, the given flat Cubist space is taken for granted. It is where its creator has been at home for a generation. And the task he now sets his art is to recover the stereometry of the body without regressing to pre-Cubist illusionism, to restore sensuous presence to objects conceived and maintained in the flatlands of post-Cubist space. Simultaneity of aspects aiming at consolidation becomes the efficient principle of a new constructivism.
For this enterprise—in which Picasso was to find himself increasingly isolated—Cubism furnished some of the tools, but no more; its own so called simultaneities had been of a different order. Their function. had been always disjunctive: a bottle in elevation posed against the plan of a tabletop; the elliptical brim of a pipe bowl floated and cocked as a circle; the glimpse of a sidelong facet or two, splintering off the core of a dice cube or human head. The purpose was not the embodiment of solid structures but, on the contrary, their dismemberment for insertion in a relieflike space of equivocal depth.
Within the Cubist style, the very ideas of body and of aspect simultaneity are antagonistic, designedly incompatible. The faceted objects of the first Cubist phase (1908–1910) display a good deal of residual density, but they reveal little interest in simultaneous point of view. And by the time that interest develops in Cubism’s later phases, mass has drained out, leaving the picture flat.
Picasso’s later work, beginning around World War II, may have picked up the loosened facets yielded by the atomizing forces of Cubism; what he did with them was something new. Meanwhile, however, the settled notion that Cubism was a release from visual fixity intended to represent objects from all sides at once, has blinded us to the goals and inventions of Picasso’s post-Cubist years. Wherever in the 1930s, or ‘40s, or ‘50s, Picasso achieves an unheard-of visualization of simultaneity, the effect is duly noted as a “characteristic Cubist device,” implying, sometimes unintentionally, that the old genius is living off his early investment.
IN A DRAWING OF 1931 in the Seattle Museum, Picasso presents a bearded sculptor at work on a statuette (Fig. 1). I compare it with a small painting of a similar subject by the 17th-century Fleming Gonzales Cocx (Fig. 2). In the earlier picture, the artist’s gaze and his delicate operation converge upon one patch of surface—one patch at a time. In Picasso’s drawing, the sculptor’s wide-angle vision circles the figure, and the statue turns at the touch of his hand; hence its double exposure, the lineaments of a frontal anatomy imprinted on a three-quarter back view. We are assured that the figure is understood in the round.
Shortly thereafter, Picasso launched a series of erotic drawings and prints—again the female body in total possession (Fig. 3).1 But whereas, in the statuette, possession by understanding was symbolized in the overlay of a distinct other aspect, no distinction is allowed in The Embrace. The possessed woman, downed and engulfed, clings too close for seeing. Blind grappling overwhelms every aspect, so that the viewer, rather than receiving multiplied visual data, experiences some of the visual disorientation which attends carnal knowledge.2 The differences between the subjects of artist and ravisher are plain enough. In Picasso’s aspiration of total envelopment they are opposite poles. But they share their reference to a single compulsion. Both reach for that knowing intimacy which Picasso’s iconography confounds in a twofold expression of creation and love.3
THE WILL TO POSSESS the full knowledge of what is depicted, the refusal to be confined to an aspect, is not Picasso’s alone. It pervades Western art, fed by multiple impulses to all of which Picasso responds. The impulse may be sensual, springing from dreams of erotic fulfillment; or cognitive, i.e., from an intellectual passion for complete information—like wanting a picture of the backside of the moon; or moralistic, derived from the preacher’s imperative to remain undeceived by the fair face of the world.
In the late Middle Ages the moralistic impulse gave rise to such images as the “Prince of the World” on the facade of Strasbourg Cathedral. The figure stands at the inner jamb of the southwestern portal—a complacent dandy warmed by the smiles of Five Foolish Virgins; nor do they see that the open back of his garment shows his arse and spine crawling with toads.
Or: a late 15th century ivory carving in the Boston Museum—a pendant detached from its rosary (Figs. 4, 5). The obverse of this macabre contrivance represents a young couple embraced, but being worked in the round and designed for handling, you could not finger the lovers without feeling the carved Death behind. Taking the bridal pair at face value, you missed their love’s future tense and God’s plan for the whole which is why the Museum installs the object against a small mirror. Scaled to a lady’s hand, it was designed to transmit that surpassing knowledge which is not stayed by the facade of romantic love.
Such rhetoric seems at first sight remote from Picasso’s mentality. Yet a personal version even of this allegorical mode does appear in his work. The theme may be that of death ingrown with life (as in some woman-skull images of 1940) or, more often, of an animal nature impaled with the human, both natures faceting the same core. These images of the 1940s are one more manifestation of Picasso’s lifelong obsession with the problem of all-sided presentment—an obsession so keen, that whatever means Western art may have found to display front and back simultaneously, Picasso appropriates all those which he came too late to invent.
Four such means were developed within the Renaissance system of focused perspective. They are: front and back in succession; the averted back revealed to a mirror; the same shown to a responsive watcher upstage; and the figura serpentinata. Evolved within the canons of naturalism, they are techniques of harmonizing an ideal of omnispection with the logic of a fixed point of view.
About-Face in Sequence.
“Because the Danae, previously sent to Your Majesty, had appeared entirely from the front, I wished (in the present Venus and Adonis) to show the opposite side, to the end that the chamber where (these pictures) will hang, may become more delightful to see.” Thus Titian to his client Philip II of Spain in a letter of 1554. He adds that an Andromeda currently under contract “will display yet another view.” Titian was doing more than pandering to the salacious taste of his patron. As his theme was the female nude, he would render it from all sides and, with a painter’s pride, yield nothing to the superiority claims advanced by the sculptors. Like Giorgione before him (assuming that Vasari’s tale may be believed4), Titian was silencing the sculptor’s taunt that painting, as the weaker of the two sister arts, was limited to being one sided.
But these situations were special. The normal procedure for coexhibiting frontal and dorsal aspects of otherwise similar figures was by juxtaposition within the same field. The idea was rooted deep in antique compositional principles, from late Archaic reliefs to such Hellenistic baroque groups as the Farnese Bull. And if Renaissance masters thought the device too predictable, they knew how to disguise it, the game being to maintain hidden identities in variation. In Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (London), the foreground archers are inversions of one another: as one loads a crossbow, his comrade nearby is only himself again seen from behind. And Pollaiuolo surely did not mean their identity to pass unobserved. Examples of such procedure abound at every level of simplicity or sophistication. The adjoined verso is the common means of conveying, or holding on to, full information about three-dimensional objects. You find it in modern coin catalogs and documentary photographs (such as our Figs. 4 and 5), and you find it again and again among Picasso’s early study sheets of female nudes. At first glance the deliberate expository arrangement of his “La Lola,” for instance (Fig. 6), looks like the Master P.M.’s engraving, The Women’s Bath (Fig 7): the same sequence in both of front, back, and side, plus one venturesome flexion. Yet they are worlds apart. One sees at once how the abstraction of Picasso’s line prevents his successive images from dispersing. The 15th-century German engraver models each insulate aspect in order to know. Picasso, knowing each aspect, wants to have them in simultaneity. He will, if necessary, spend the next 50 years learning how.
The paradigm of the sequential mode is the Three Graces–– a cool deliberate exposition of anterior and posterior aspects (Fig 8).5 Endlessly copied in Roman times, the group was enthusiastically revived in the Renaissance and remained a staple of salon art. It comes as a surprise to discover that this Late Hellenistic invention survives into the 20th century as no other antique has been able to do. The Three Graces inspire Gauguin, Matisse, Delaunay, Maillol, and Braque. And they are a constant in Picasso’s own oeuvre where, from 1905 onward,6 they reappear in almost every period. It was their two dimensional about-face routine which allowed the Three Graces to survive the flattening of 20th century art.
The Reflected Reverse.
A 15th-century account of a lost Jan van Eyck picture describes women bathing, “. . . . the reverse of their bodies being visible in a mirror, so that their backs as well as their breasts could be seen.”7
This is the one mode of simultaneity which Picasso disdains. Not that he avoids mirrors as such—only their prosaic fidelity. As in allegories and fairy tales, Picasso’s mirrors are oracular instruments that surprise and transmute and tell secrets. His catoptrics are magical. The plain mirror’s capacity to throw back the dependable image of an alternate aspect—though it delighted van Eyck, Titian, Ingres, Lautrec, and Matisse—leaves Picasso unmoved.8
In 1940–1941 he made drawings involving multiple mirror reflections. Before that late date, he had used mirroring only once—during a three day spell which produced two famous paintings. On March 12, 1932, he painted The Mirror—a girl asleep, her posterior assigned to the looking glass (Gustav Stern Foundation, U.S.A.). Two days later came the Girl Before Mirror (Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.), this time turned face-to-face. Both pictures remain unique, instances of those rare motifs which Picasso abandoned.
But their rejection confirms the seriousness with which he regards simultaneity as a way of consolidating the body. A mirror reflection, after all, is always elsewhere. Its identity with the thing mirrored is not grasped by intuition, but inferred from relational clues. Whether addorsed or confronted, a girl’s mirror image widens the gap between her knowable aspects. Object and image repel one another. Even if carefully hyphenated by means of proximity and obvious likeness, they do not cohere. They want to diverge from each other like one’s own two hands back to back.
Picasso seems to regard this as a fault that requires correction. In a series of drawings dated September 18–19, 1941, he includes a nude seated at a three-quarter length mirror. And the progress of the series (Figs. 9, 10, 11) plots a gradual rapprochement, until the woman and her reflection have coalesced, the two facing aspects at once simultaneous and indivisible. Compare such pictures as Bedoli’s Portrait of a Girl (Parma), Velázquez’ Venus (London), Ingres’ Comtesse d’Aussonville (Frick), or Matisse’s numerous paintings and drawings with posed models reflected: the effect is a dispersion of aspects rather than palpable continuity; the form is fielded but not embraced. And though the volume of information delivered is doubled, the cost in sensuality is, for Picasso, the wrong price to pay.
Implied Rearward Aspect.
Delacroix’s Journal for September 14, 1854, describes hearing Mass in the Church of St. Jacques at Dieppe. After a brief account of the ceremony, which ends with the Kiss of Peace, he concludes: “On ferait un joli tableau de ce dernier moment, pris de derrière l’artel.”9 Delacroix—like the heir of Baroque art he aspires to be—sees in depth and imagines his physical vision rebounding from its own vanishing point, so as to visualize the scene in reverse.
The pictorial stage of Renaissance and Baroque art makes frequent appeal to a character whose function it is to personify such rebounding vision. You find him in the recesses of depicted space, focusing on the inturned aspect of some powerful foreground form of which we are not shown enough. The rearward watcher, a painted figment but our functioning double, becomes, like the reader of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, “mon semblable, mon frère.” In collaboration with our own seeing, he rounds out the protagonist form in its fullness.
In the most moving early examples of such functional vision, the watched protagonist is a Christ whom we only see from the back—as in Mantegna’s Descent into Limbo; in H. S. Beham’s engraving of the Man of Sorrows appearing to Mary (B.9, s.v. Altdorfer), the dramatic action gathers in one searching gaze aimed at what we cannot see. Later, in the hands of the Baroque masters, such dramatized sight lines are stretched to the full depth of the scene. Thus in Rembrandt’s Denial of St. Peter (Amsterdam): the group about the Apostle is staged near the picture plane. As Peter puts off the questioning maid, Christ, placed deep in space, turns his head looking, so that Peter’s lapse is observed, as it had been foreseen, de profundis.
Or else the foreground motif is a canvas in progress—as in Rembrandt’s Painter Before His Easel (Boston), and in Velázquez’ Las Meninas. In both pictures, our attention turns on the glance of the painter; behind the reverse of the canvas, we see its obverse observed.
And even this pure baroque mode of suggestion Picasso retains. In some pre-Cubist works, and again in the 1930s, he had allowed observers in the remote or middle distance to function dramatically—though with no intent to promote a stereometric illusion.10 But just this is unmistakably the effect of the couped witness in Girls with a Toy Boat, 1937 (Fig. 12). The two huge little heroines in the foreground, remarkable for developed feminine charm and wholly preoccupied with their toy, are spied on from the horizon. Someone in earnest is eyeing them, an immense rock with a face in it, yet clearly one of their kind and, I think, masculine. Who else looks so avid watching from across the divide? He studies the seaward aspect of what we watch from the shore. The all-sidedness of the foreground figures derives not from their modeled openwork fabric alone, but almost as much from the inquisitive rover peering from beyond the short sea.11
Serpentination.
In a note to Vasari acknowledging the gift of a drawing, Aretino (1540) praises a certain nude which, “bending down to the ground, shows both the back and the front.”12 He was describing a figure of hairpin design, a variant of the figura sepentinata. Its elastic anatomy serves Mannerist art for the simultaneous display of front and back without recourse to repetition, to external props or the aid of witnesses—but on the contrary, a figure which incorporates both views at once on a jackknifing spine lengthened only by one or two extra vertebrae. In 16th-century pictures, such jackknife figures tend to approach on the run, like homing engines, then double over so fast that the back appears before one can miss their diminished frontality. Indeed, the best jackknifing figures have the torso swerving aside as it folds over so as to leave the most possible frontage in view.13
Thematically, such Mannerist figures draw their justification from the narrative context. It needs a catastrophe to discharge the required velocity and the conflicting emotions—fear and solicitude, curiosity and panic flight, and so forth. Hence the splendid complexity of rotation in a figure such as Paolo Farinati’s Andromeda (Fig. 13).
The more common variety of serpentination, which requires no strenuous pretext, is the standing or lying figure rotating on its main axis. Its motivation is sensual; it suggests wellbeing, self-admiration, or erotic enticement. You would not believe the amount of enticing frontage which a Mannerist back view can show—a Jan van Hemessen Judith, for instance (Fig. 14)—and Picassos galore (Figs. 15, 16). The understanding of this motif in our culture is immediate and universal. Pinup models posing for calendar art usually work towards a figura serpentinata. And their photographer, if he has a sense of his craft, knows just how much expository rotation is wanted to meet the technical terms of an “eyeful.”
Picasso’s draftsmanship which habitually wrings women’s bodies to ensure that all breasts and buttocks show, impounds every known form of serpentination from the stores of the past.14 The Bathers (Fogg), a drawing of 1918 famous for its classical reminiscences, exhibits both Mannerist types one woman a twist on a spiral waist, and a jackknife figure capping the composition. Sometimes the source is mocked, as in the aquatint entitled La Puce (Bloch 359). Dated 1942, it was produced for the Vollard edition of Buffon’s Natural History to illustrate “The Flea.” For reasons unstated but not far to seek, the etching was excluded from the published edition. It is of course based on the Late Hellenistic Aphrodite Callipyge—the “Venus of the handsome behind” who turns about to acknowledge her other aspect (Fig. 17). I know that Picasso’s conception seems trifling; but the frivolous virtuosity of his adaptation is that of a passionate, possessive eye. Since the statue’s pose, seen from the normal front view, amounts to a promise—the promise, that is, of its implied rearward aspect—Picasso synchronizes promise and actuality by flipping half of the torso around; and makes it work without seeming discontinuity.
Frivolous subject matter is no serious deterrent to work. Picasso made a beautiful line drawing on December 6, 1953, a drawing which visualizes an imposing measure of three-dimensionality, in spatial depth as well as volumetric displacement (Fig. 18). The subject is a roundelay of six frisky nudes holding hands. It is a bravura performance, like a Chinese brush painting; thinking and ceaseless practice precede, and no fumbling thereafter. The success is especially remarkable at the two ends, where the projecting of a round dance poses its greatest challenge: how to sustain the continuity of the circular motion through the foreshortened depths of the turns. Picasso meets the challenge with two brilliant solutions. At the left the dancers are stacked three deep, showing—like his many Three Graces—front, side, and back in succession; at the right, one frolicking nude alone incorporates all phases in one. I suggest tilting the drawing 90 degrees to appreciate the cunning of her serpentination. But serpentination here is mere pretense. Such gyrations as hers, or as those of the girl with the flea, entail a disjunctive maneuver far beyond anatomical elasticity. And this principle of disjunction situates Picasso’s figures outside the strained limits of Mannerism in the world of his own making.
For most of Picasso’s twisting anatomies serpentination is in fact a misnomer. The apparent versations of his serpentine poses are not athletically self-induced, but rather the pretext for his own visualization of three-dimensional form. Picasso’s line traps a hidden dimension—like a horizon, at every point of which the mind can zoom in. He draws like the style on a kymograph. While his stylus pretends to pan along the edge of a cylinder, his imagination makes that cylinder turn like a spit, so that even a seeming straight line ends up as a history of spiral motion. And the apparent agility of his gyrating figures resembles that drum rotation; it is part gesture, but in complicity with his own zooming eye. When he traces the innocent flank of a body, he seems not to be thinking a margin but a continuous hither and thither. A meander of three-dimensional reference is foreshortened into a one-dimensional line.
Is it not astonishing that the figure in the Nude Girl Asleep (Fig. 19) can register as a front view even though no less than one third of her back shows at the top, and another third at the bottom? The power behind the conception (and the laborious fieldwork still visible in the studies15), is belied by the winsomeness of the subject. Yet the internal strain and the body’s alacrity disguised as sweet rest are of a Michelangelesque quality of imagination. And a half century of Picasso’s art supports that upper contour which rides in such smooth ambiguity from nape to hip.
The principle was well in hand by 1920. Already then a bland contour that seems merely to sail at the edge of a volume could engender that volume as a revolving form. In the Nessus and Dejaneira drawing (Fig. 20), the smooth linear trace of the bride’s torso from breast to groin is rendered as if on a turning shaft; it describes a hithering diagonal, and the rotation enclosed can no longer be rationalized as a posture of serpentination. The writhing of a nymph in distress merely cooperates with a linear symbol which fans inward with the receding plane.
But Picasso’s impulse to possess the delineated form in a simultaneity of all aspects runs even deeper within his past. Its earliest monumental expression takes us back to the pre-Cubist moment. A new bid for symbolic solidity is made in the large Bather of 1908 (Fig. 21)—a standing nude on which some of Picasso’s most famous distortions appear for the first time. Carefully synthesized and conscientiously transferred from its preparatory drawing (Z.II, 110), the painted figure shows both pubis and rump, and a good deal more backbone than a frontal perspective allows. The splayout distortion by which Cézanne had bonded inanimate objects into the painted field, is applied to the female anatomy, and with a contrary purpose: to confirm a known fullness of body by wrenching its averted sides into view.
Unlike the four modes of simultaneity which respect the fixed viewpoint, the implication of Picasso’s Bather is that of a vision cut loose. Here emerge those effects which encourage talk of circumspicuous or circumambient sight, of visual rays bent around corners, etc. The early literature of Cubism gave currency to the notion that Picasso paints a figure as though he had toured it to collect impressions of its various aspects. But such descriptions tend to be overly rationalistic; who has not had the experience—especially with Picasso’s Cubism—of seeing the work betray its interpretation? The liberties Picasso takes in the Bather’s figure by transgressing its contours seem simple, but every explanation is doomed that remains unilateral; let it take its place in a constellation of possibilities. In the Bather, for instance, the excess visibility at spine and buttocks may record the artist’s bent vision; it may equally well stand for the object itself revolving, as though a rotation of the Bather’s torso had yielded its fixed edges to the extensions of motion. The body turned, or signaling its capability for such turning, is as rational an explanation as the restlessness of an ambulant viewer, or as the idea of separate vantage points trained upon the body at rest. Then again, is not touch involved? The draftsman’s trace trespassing beyond the strict contour is interpretable as a continuous caress, an unwillingness to let go. And beyond all these mythologies lies a simpler hypothesis, that we are dealing merely with a diagrammatic symbolization of volume, a graphic device for maximum density of information. Ambiguity of simultaneity is part of Picasso’s essential approach to the rendering of the external world.
In the Bather, where the overspill from the optical silhouette makes its first dramatic appearance, any single description remains superficial if it ignores the figure’s physical action, and the impacted solidity which it achieves. The far side of the Bather’s face, her pronated right arm and twisted right leg—not obviously pigeon-toed but inturned—all promote one massed involution, so that the aspect of the body’s entire right side grinds inward upon the fixed left. Once again, the suggestion of aspects interlocking and fused is generated by the figure’s gestural energy in complicity with the artist’s eye.
It is essential to Picasso’s multi-aspected imagery that the object he draws meet his encompassing vision halfway. His marvelous evocation of gesture interlocks with the process of circumspection. Picasso’s subjects always cooperate. The gestures he invents abet the grasp of his sight, as when, 33 years after the Bather, he draws a cross-legged nude seated, with both buttocks showing and both knees from the front (Fig. 22); and the very action of the crossed legs, in the energy of their involution, seems to induce the corresponding overlap of antipodal aspects. The image is a symbiosis of world and vision, and results in an emphatic visualization of substantial form.
THE FEMALE BODY UNDERGOES ever new kinds of revision. Its conceptual commonplaces serve as exponents of vagrant aspects. A dotted bosom becomes the prefix to any aspect soever, so that frontal figures as they bend over sprout breasts at the shoulder blades. A Sleeping Nude, prone on her stomach, shows her top sunny-side up and her face facing both ways, like the covers of a dropped book splayed out (Fig. 23). Yet the body coheres; there is neither Cubist dismemberment nor schematic disjunction. These figures work, and Picasso’s draftsmanship makes their irrational translocations seem genuinely informative about the rotundity of the object observed. Could a cartographer do it? Could he make the world’s other side present to the imagination by entering Pacific Islands on the Atlantic? Picasso’s feat was to have created a syntax of inventible intervals within which such transpositions do not simply register as jokes or mistakes. The displacements themselves are not hard to make; making them work, making them human, required the better part of Picasso’s life.16
From 1940 onward Picasso’s faces and nudes insist again on firm structure. But their solidity hardly relies on such tried devices as chiaroscuro, which Picasso finds usable or expendable, but unessential. It depends rather on the interlocking or inweaving of aspects—partial aspects summoned from different compass points and their interpenetrating convergence creating the anatomical body (Fig. 24).
As the scrambling of aspects continues, always centripetal, always generating coherence, one looks and keeps looking, marveling how these impossible contradictions seem to grow normal and necessary, until you wonder how we ever put up with the poor showing of one-sided representation.
Surveying Picasso’s lifelong commitment to the theme of woman as solid reality—a commitment relaxed only during the Cubist episode—one arrives at a disturbing conclusion. That Picasso, the great flattener of 20th-century painting, has had to cope in himself with the most uncompromising three-dimensional imagination that ever possessed a great painter; and that he flattened the language of painting in the years just before World War I because the traditional means of 3-D rendering inherited from the past were for him too one-sided, too lamely content with the exclusive aspect. In other words—not 3-D enough. Though his innovations could be misunderstood and were often mistaken for literal flatness by followers and interpreters, his own resources were developed to appropriate for his art what he knew to be solid and real.
Leo Steinberg is Professor of Art History at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y. The above article is adapted from a chapter in “The Women of Algiers and Picasso at Large,” to be published in a collection of his essays under the title Other Criteria (Oxford University Press, 1972.)
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NOTES
1. See the drawing of 1933 in the Art Institute of Chicago, reproduced in Christian Zervos, Picasso, Oeuvre Catalogue, Editions Cahiers d’Art, Faris, 1932ff., VIII, 112. (Hereafter cited as Z. followed by volume and figure number.) Cf. also the impressive series of etchings of the same year (Bloch 28–31 and Geiser 339 and 372). The drypoint Embrace here reproduced is Bloch 31.
2. The violence of these “embraces” has misled some to regard them as scenes of rape. But one must look at these women’s hands, which never claw or repel; and at their faces, which never show signs of fear, pain, or revulsion. In fact, the action is never a ravisher-victim, subject-object relation. So strong is the indication of bilateral sexual fulfillment, that the image may as well represent the woman’s fantasy of transverberation.
3. The secret is lifted in several etchings of the “347” series, such as the plate dated Sept. 8, 1968/11, which equates the act of painting with coitus. The painter appears to be Raphael and recalls the theme of Ingres’ Raphael and his Mistress (formerly Riga, Museum; cf. the versions at the Fogg, Cambridge, and the Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio). Visually, the Picasso etching is closer to Ingres’ Paolo e Francesca: cf. particularly the upper half of the version sold at Sotheby’s on November 30, 1966.
4. Vasari in the Life of Giorgione: “To prove that painting shows to a single view more than sculpture does,” Giorgione painted a nude soldier half turned, while a limpid stream, a looking glass, and the side view of a discarded corselet displayed all his various aspects.
5. Antonio Federighi, ca. 1420–1490. The drawing is inscribed in the artist’s hand: “These women are in the house of the Cardinal of Siena; they are three, I copied them from the front and from the back. They are called the Three Graces.”
6. Cf. the Three Dutch Women of 1905, Musée de l’Art Moderne, Paris.
7. Bartolommeo Fazio (Facius) in De viris illustribus, 1456, discussing Joannes Gallicus (i.e., Jan van Eyck). The lost painting was in the possession of Cardinal Octavianus. For the full text and the Latin original see L. Baldass, Jan van Eyck, London, 1952, p. 84 and note 1.
8. Cf. the Picasso drawings of February 5, 1935 (Z.VII1, 248, 250, 252), where a metamorphic nude, drawing before a mirror, tries to portray herself from her realistic reflection; the point being precisely that each is unlike the other.
9. Delacroix, Journal, ed. Yves Hucher, Paris, 1963, p. 203. “This last moment would make a nice picture seen from behind the altar.”
10. E.g., the Salomé, drypoint, and La Coiffure, Museum of Modern Art, New York, both of 1905; the Minotauromachy etching, Bloch 111, and the Blind Minotaur, aquatint, Bloch 97, both of 1935.
11. Picasso’s great Seated Bather of 1929 has been cited for the similarity of its openwork anatomical structure. But the comparison also reveals how much more spatial recession Picasso demands in 1937, and how much his distanced witness contributes to the volumetric effect.
12. See the Lettere sull’Arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca, Milan 1957–1960, I, No. CVII, p. 175.
13. Outstanding examples of Renaissance jackknifing figures are Michelangelo’s Brazen Serpent spandrel on the Sistine Ceiling; Tanzio da Varallo’s Defeat of Sennacherib, Novarra, Museum. The type is anticipated in the Christ figure of Butinone’s Descent from the Cross, Chicago, Art Institute (33.1004). Cf. also Rosso’s early drawing, Christ on the Cross, Haarlem, Tyler Museum’ For an intermediary type between jackknifing and spiralling serpentination, but still designed to display front and back at the same time, cf. Rosso’s Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, Uffizi, and Mabuse’s woodcut, Hercules and Dejaneira, reprod. in H. Pauwels, etc., exhibition catalog, Jan Gossaert genaamd Mabuse, Rotterdam, 1965, Cat. 73.
14. An almost pure Mannerist figure, represented as part of a sculptural group, occurs in Picasso’s etching of March 30, 1933, from the Suite Vollard, Sculptor, Reclining Model and Sculpture of Horse and Youth (B. 55). More personal explorations of the jackknifing type occur in Picasso’s numerous drawings, from 1938 to 1944, of women bending over to wash feet. (E.g., Z. IX, 200, 322, 331, 338, 382, 383; also Z. XIII, 291). These bending figures are, so to speak, the reverse of Picasso’s back-bending bodies developed around his studies for the Crucifixion of 1930. The Magdalen’s stricken figure is given as the jackknife reversed into a backbend, with no body landmarks left out of sight.
15. Cf. Z. XVI, 249ff.
16. In imitation of Picasso’s distortions photographers have repeatedly tried to create images “in the round” by splicing disparate aspects together, or by keeping the shutter open while the model or the camera moved. It seems to me that these attempts fail because the photographer is unable to impose necessity and rightness of shape on the intervals between displaced features.
