Read The Success and Failure of Picasso for Free Online

familiar with sex and havelearnt all the scientific explanations, we still tend to think of the force of it – whether we think in terms of the id or of reproductive instincts – as something outside ourselves, we still tend to project its force on to nature, to which we then gladly submit.
    And so it is not surprising that most prodigies believe that they are a vehicle – that they are driven. Keats, the outstanding prodigy of English poetry, makes the point in a letter of 1818. First he distinguishes between two types of poet: the prodigious and the highly self-conscious, like Wordsworth. Of the character of the prodigy he says:
    It is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – it has no character – it enjoys light and shade – it lives in gusto … a poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually [informing] and filling some other body.
    I myself have heard Yehudi Menuhin say words to very much the same effect. And Picasso, at the age of eighty-two, has just said: ‘Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants.’
    The fact that Picasso was a child prodigy has influenced his attitude to art throughout his entire life. It is one of the reasons why he is so fascinated by his own creativity and accords it more value than what he creates. It is why he sees art as though it were part of nature.
    Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of painting people have to understand. If only they could realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them.
    This is partly a reasonable protest against all the pretentious intellectual constructions that have surrounded so much art in our time. But it is also a justification of the nature of his own genius as he sees it. He makes art like a bird sings. Understanding has nothing to do with it – indeed understanding is a hindrance, almost a threat.
    I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting, to find is the thing.
    This – perhaps the most quoted of all Picasso’s remarks – has perplexed people ever since he made it in 1923. It is clearly untrue of modern painting in general. It was undeniably a spirit of research which inspired Cézanne, Seurat, Mondrian, Klee. Did Picasso say it simply to shock? Is it no more than another way of making the commonplace observation that good intentions aren’t enough? No. Like everything that Picasso says it is truer for him than seems likely. Picasso does not make paradoxes for their own sake – it is rather that his whole experience is paradoxical. He believes what he says because that is how it happened to him. He himself achieved art without searching. He found his own genius without looking for it. It happened apparently instantaneously, without any preparation on his part.
    The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. All I have ever made was made for the present, and with the hope that it will always remain in the present. I have never taken into consideration the spirit of research. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future .… I have never made trials or experiments. Whenever I had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but an adaptation of the idea one wants to express and the means to express that