Read The Success and Failure of Picasso for Free Online Page B

will remain frightened of explanations and of discussion with and between other people of the way he overthrew his father.
    We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched and re-searched for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
    The distinction between object and image is the natural starting point for all visual art which has emerged from magic and childhood. To exaggerate this distinction, as Picasso does here, until lie and truth are reversed, suggests that part of him still believes in magic and has remained fixed in his childhood. This seems the more convincing to me because conflicts between father and son are so often fought out in precisely these terms. The father accuses the boy of lying. The boy knows he is lying but believes that he is doing so for the sake of a more important and comprehensive truth that his father will never understand. The truth is the father’s defence of his own authority. The lie is the son’s way of escape from that authority. But if the lie is so obvious that the son can’t defend it as the truth, nothing is accomplished and the father’s authority is actually increased.
    There may be a possible explanation here. But if you can accept neither it nor the psycho-analytic premises on which it is based, it is of little importance. The important point for our main argument is that for one reason or another, and as a corollary of his awareness of his prodigious gifts, Picasso has remained sceptical or suspicious of reasons, explanations, learning.
    To emphasize this by contrast, I want to quote another painter.Juan Gris was of the same generation as Picasso and was also a Spaniard. He was a great painter – and his contribution to Cubism was as important as Picasso’s – but he was in no way a prodigy. This is how he wrote in 1919:
    I would like to continue the tradition of painting with plastic means while bringing to it a new aesthetic based on the intellect .… For some time I have been rather pleased with my own work, because I think that at last I am entering on a period of realization. What’s more I’ve been able to test my progress: formerly when I started a picture I was satisfied at the beginning and dissatisfied at the end. Now the beginningis always rotten and I loathe it, but the end, as a rule, is a pleasant surprise. 5
    Compare this with Picasso:
    It would be very interesting to preserve photographically not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing – to notice that basically a picture doesn’t change, that the first vision remains almost intact, in spite of appearances.
    Juan Gris has to travel and arrive – and believes in the intellect. Picasso is visited, denies progress – the picture does not go through stages but suffers metamorphoses – and thinks of the brain, not in terms of the intellect, but in terms of dream sequences. Gris’s paintings develop from beginning to end. Picasso’s paintings, however much they may appear to change, remain essentially what they were at their beginning.
    Everything interesting in art happens right at the start. Once past the beginning you’re already at the end.
    Picasso is again talking here about a single painting, but what he says could apply to his whole life’s work:, a life’s work made up not of stages, because that implies a desired destination, evolution, logical purpose, but made up of metamorphoses – sudden inexplicable transformations: a life’s work which, despite appearances, has left unchanged and intact its first vision – that is to say the vision of the young Picasso in Spain.
    The only period in which Picasso consistently