A Gaze that is Always Already Here

A Gaze that Is Always Already Here

Contemplating Picasso’s Exhibition[1]

Gleb Napreenko

Picasso drew incessantly from childhood. We read a quote from him in the exhibition: “A picture was a sum of additions. For me, a picture is a sum of destructions.”[2] And another: “Basically, what is a face? Is it a photo? Is it make-up? ... What is in front? Inside? Behind? And what about the rest?”[3]

We cannot assert that the “sum of destructions” Picasso performs on the image is guided by a logic of discovering hidden truth: the face is the photo, the face is its make-up, and there is no hierarchy of what is in front and what is behind. But what is Picasso doing? Art critic Rosalind Krauss[4] identified a quasi-linguistic logic in Picasso’s cubism: the same element (a fragment of a newspaper) is read differently (as a part of a violin or a wall) depending on its articulation with and opposition to other elements. This underlines its value as a signifier and its independence from pre-established meaning; the viewer’s gaze is engaged in the game of “reading” and is not left undisturbed.

The same armature of tension between elements builds Picasso’s operation of “destructions” on the image of the body, primarily the woman’s body. This operation must always be reiterated, implying that is not reducible to the articulations between the elements. This remains the source of Picasso’s restlessness, compelling him to continue drawing and to reinvent drawing, “to infinity.” It is akin to psychoanalysis: the deciphering of the signifier produces its remainder, the object a, which relates in its consistency to the living, enjoying, suffering, sexuated body.[5] This body remains at the centre of Picasso’s practice, even when subjected to all kinds of “destructions.”

The exhibition features a series of drawings preceding The Brothel of Avignon. In these drawings, according to poet André Salmon, Picasso searched for the plastic formulas of the female body with incessant anxiety.[6] These are women with shut eyes or without pupils. It is hard not to recall Lacan’s words from Seminar XI: “What gazes at us? The white glaze of the blind man’s eyes, for example.”[7] Blindness was a leitmotif for Picasso during his blue period. The women with closed eyes are striking because, as in The Brothel of Avignon itself, all eyes are open. But it is this painting, a key moment on the way to cubism, which art historian Leo Steinberg[8] interprets as a work where an extreme activation of the gaze occurs: the entire space is turned towards the viewer, and this is the space of a brothel, where the gazes of all the women are directed at the person entering. In Picasso’s later drawings, vaginas and body orifices face the viewer as much as the eyes do, without any hierarchy or cover.

Picasso’s phrase, “I do not seek, I find,” indicates his position in relation to the gaze. He deals with the gaze that is always already here, in the flesh. His drawing is iteration: not the repetition of “that’s not it,” which relates to the search for the lost and hidden, but of “that’s it!”[9] — here, every time.

References

[1] Picasso: Dessiner à l’infini, [Drawing to Infinity] exhibition from 18 October 2023 to 15 January 2024, Pompidou Centre, Paris, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/kVxyAVk

[2] Statement said to Christian Zervos at Boisgeloup, quoted in “Conversation avec Picasso”, Cahiers d’Art, 1935, Vol. 10, No. 10, pp. 173-8; reprinted in Barr, H. A., Jr., Picasso, Fifty Years of His Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946, p. 272.

[3] Picasso: Dessiner à l’infini, op. cit.

[4] Krauss, R., In the Name of Picasso, Art World Follies, Vol. 16, Special Issue, Spring, MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1981, pp. 5-22.

[5] Cf. Brousse, M.-H., “Quelle éthique de la psychanalyse dans le dernier enseignement de Lacan? La dupe et les non dupes,” Quarto, No. 98, 2011, pp. 52-61, unpublished in English.

[6] Picasso: Dessiner à l’infini, op. cit.

[7] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, Anxiety, Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2014, p. 254.

[8] Cf. Steinberg, L., “The Philosophical Brothel,” October Vol. 44, Spring, 1988, MIT Press, p. 13.

[9] Cf. Chiriaco S., “Répétition, Itération,” Quarto 105, p. 31, unpublished in English, https://www.kring-nls.org/swfiles/files/Chiriaco---Rptition-itration.pdf