CONVERSATION: Picasso In Florence

| PICASSO AND FLORENCE

Secrets and stories of the artist and the city curated by James M. Bradburne

This publication was written to coincide with the exhibition Picasso, Miró, Dalí.

Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity Florence Palazzo Strozzi 12 March–17 July 2011

Promoted and organised by Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali Soprintendenza PSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze with Comune di Firenze Provincia di Firenze Camera di Commercio di Firenze Associazione Partners Palazzo Strozzi And Regione Toscana Main Sponsor Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Sponsor eni Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane Ataf Aeroporto di Firenze Aeroporto Galileo Galilei-Pisa Caja Madrid Coop-Unicoop Firenze Firenze Parcheggi

A PUBLICATION OF Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi CONCEPT AND CREATI VE DIRECTION James M. Bradburne EDITED BY James M. Bradburne TRANSLATION Stephen Tobin The conversation was recorded in Florence on 11 May 2011 PARTICIPANTS in THE CONVERSATION James M. Bradburne Vincenzo Burlizzi Eugenio Carmona Rodolfo Ceccotti Luigi Cupellini Simone Guaita Manuel Ortega Ludovica Sebregondi TRAnscription Maddalena Mancini Caterina Rocchi

EDITORIAL COORDINATION Ludovica Sebregondi GRAPHIC DESIGN AND LAYOUT RovaiWeber design ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to express our gratitude for their generous cooperation to: Fondazione Primo Conti, especially to Gloria Manghetti and Maria Chiara Berni; Biblioteca delle Oblate, especially to Vanna Forni; and Stamperia Il Bisonte.

Special thanks to Miel de Botton www.palazzostrozzi.org

PHOTO CREDITS James O’Mara/O’Mara & Mc Bride (pp. 6, 12-16, 18-20, 23, 25, 26, 29, 33, 36, 38-39, 41, 44, 46-50, 52-55, 59-61, 63, 65, 67-68, 72-73, 75, 79); Rabatti & Domingie Photography (pp.

82, 83, 85). © 2012 Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze Graphic design © 2012 RovaiWeber Design

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publisher, author or copyright holder.

Printed in March 2012

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Waiting for Picasso James M. Bradburne

In 1926, the twenty-two year-old Salvador Dalí finally visited Picasso in Paris, at the suggestion of Miró, accompanied by his aunt and sister. Dalí was still a young man, Picasso was about to turn forty-five. The first thing the young Dalí recalls saying to Picasso was: “Master, I just arrived in Paris and have come to see you before going to the Louvre.” According to Dalí, Picasso simply replied: “Very good.” Twenty-six years earlier, Picasso himself had arrived in Paris at the age of nineteen, already an innovative young artist. Looking back now, almost a century later, we can see how all the dots connect. But seen from his own point of view, that of a young man in 1900, Picasso’s dots all lay in the future, their eventual connections uncertain. For Picasso, modernity was yet to be born, and when it was, he would be among its most important parents.

The experience of youth and rebellion are not confined to the distant past. Picasso’s father and uncle had decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country’s foremost art school in 1897, but Picasso disliked formal instruction and quit soon after enrolment. Some 75 years later, another young man, founder of Apple Computers, the late Steve Jobs, similarly dropped out of Reed College to make his own way. In a valedictory speech to graduating students of Stanford University in 2005, Jobs told the young graduates something as relevant in 2005 as it would have been to Picasso in 1897.

pablo picasso, portrait of a woman, 1960, firenze, il bisonte 7

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“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.You have to trust in something […] because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

When we first started working on the exhibition Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Angry Young Men, we were told that none of the dots connected Picasso to Florence. “Picasso never visited Florence” said historians both at home and abroad. It seemed to us odd—and unlikely—that the 20th century’s most important master had never visited the birthplace of the Renaissance. And so we discovered. Picasso had not only visited Florence once, but two times, and the conversation in this book documents the way in which the dots now connect Picasso not only to Malaga, Barcelona and Paris, but to Florence.

Since its inception, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has followed an explicit cultural strategy of “visible listening”; looking for hidden voices, making visible experiences that would otherwise be forgotten or swept away with time. The American philosopher Nelson Goodman said in 1980 that “works work when, by stimulating inquisitive looking, sharpening perception, raising visual intelligence, they participate in… the making and re-making of our worlds”.This book—and the conversation it records—is part of the on-going discovery and rediscovery of our cultural heritage.

Every reader is also a part of the process—so welcome to the conversation!

picasso and antonello trombadori on the lungarno embankment by the ponte vecchio, 1949.

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PICASSO and florence

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Conversation recorded at the Printing Works of the Fondazione Il Bisonte in Florence on Wednesday 11 May 2011

Participants

JAMES M. BRADBURNE

is an Anglo-Canadian architect, designer and museologist who has designed world expo pavilions, science parks and international art exhibitions. He was educated in Canada and in England, graduating in architecture with the Architectural Association and taking his doctorate in museology at University of Amsterdam. Over the past twenty years he has produced exhibitions and organised research projects and conferences for UNESCO, national governments, private foundations and museums in many parts of the world. He is currently the director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, an organisation whose goal is to turn Palazzo Strozzi in Florence into a dynamic cultural centre.

has a degree in art history and holds the post of professor at the University of Malaga. He writes and explores the relationship between poetry, music and painting in the work of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and the Spanish artistic renewal in the first half of the 20th century. His latest work is a reappraisal of critical interpretations of the Cubist experiment. He has curated exhibitions in both Europe and Latin America, and he is currently scholarly consultant to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, to the Colección Arte Contemporáneo (CAC), to the Fundación Mapfre and to the Fundación Telefónica.

Vincenzo Burlizzi was

was born in Florence in 1945 and lived in the city until 2008, when he moved to Petrognano in the hills above La Rufina. A painter and engraver, he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence until his retirement in 2010. He continues to occupy the post of director of the Fondazione Il Bisonte, to teach at the U.I.A. in Florence and, of course, to paint. His work has been shown at one-man and collective exhibitions at both the national and international levels.

born in Melissano (Lecce) in 1967. After attending Florence University’s Faculty of Architecture, he enrolled with the Il Bisonte international school for higher studies in graphic art, where he studied for four years under Professors Manuel Ortega and Swietlan Kraczyna and under Rodolfo Ceccotti, the school’s principal. He was awarded his engraver’s credentials in 1997 and the title of engraver-printer in 1999; he now holds the post of workshop assistant at Il Bisonte.

He has taken part in numerous graphic art exhibitions both in Italy and abroad.

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EUGENIO CARMONA

Rodolfo Ceccotti

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LUIGI CUPELLINI

studied interior design at the University of Florence, going on to specialise in the field of museum design. Over the past thirty years he has produced numerous exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, one of his most recent achievements being the MNAF (Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia) in Florence. He has written articles for specialist publications and he worked on conferences devoted to the theme of “ethnographic conservation and restoration” in the 1990’s. For several years now he has been involved with exhibitions at the Museo Marino Marini and with many of the events produced by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.

was born in Santiago de Veraguas (Panama) in 1956 and graduated from the local Escuela de Bellas Artes. A government grant enabled him to complete his art studies in Florence, where he was awarded a diploma in painting by the Istituto Statale d’Arte, going on to attend a specialist course in engraving at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica d’Arte Il Bisonte. He has been working with the Scuola de Il Bisonte as a workshop assistant since 1986 and as a lecturer in engraving techniques since 1991. He opened the “Urraca” painting and engraving studio in Florence in 1989, where he supervises the work of a group of engravers. He has held several one-man exhibitions and taken part in major collective exhibitions.

was born in Florence in 1972. He studied architecture at Florence University and began to work in 1996 with the Centro Culturale Il Bisonte, celebrated heir to the historic printing works founded by Maria Luigia Guaita in 1959. He broke off his studies after a few years in order to devote more time to his work for Il Bisonte, which was soon to become his primary activity.

Il Bisonte became a foundation in 2004 and Simone Guaita became its vicepresident. He was promoted to the post of president on Maria Luigia Guaita’s death in 2007.

LUDOVICA SEBREGONDI

Simone Guaita

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Manuel Ortega

an art historian, has focused her interest on confraternities and on the artistic history of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, publishing books and curating exhibitions on the topic. She has also studied the iconographic “careers” of numerous figures, including in particular that of Fra’ Girolamo Savonarola. She has taught and still teaches at Italian and foreign universities. She designed and produced the new Museo del Tesoro di San Lorenzo in Florence, and she is currently working on the MUDI project for the new Museo degli Innocenti. She is in charge of scholarly and editorial coordination for the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curates exhibitions on Renaissance themes.

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BRADBURNE | We

had to start with the “Bisonte”. If a visitor comes to the show they see wonderful things, but things come from places. Artists, art, objects, they all come from places. So we’re talking about art, about prints that tell a story.

The printing press is the perfect place to start talking about the link with “Il Bisonte”, which tells the story of a connection with Picasso. “Il Bisonte” is a focal point.

CECCOTTI | Maria Luigia Guaita was responsible for setting up “Il Bisonte” in 1959. Maria Luigia worked in Prato for Imex Lane, a company that still exists by the way, but at the same time she used to write for Pannunzio’s Mondo. She fell out with the bishop of Prato over a story of concubines so her colleagues in Prato, seeing that things were turning a little nasty, said:“Maria Luigia, you’d better get away from here for a while or all hell will break lose”. She went to Scotland where she met a Scottish artist and lithographer. She fell in love with the technique and so when she got back to Italy, she decided to quit her job in Prato and open a fine art printing press in Florence. The fine art printing press did not start out life in the Oltrarno district.

It was in Borgo Pinti first, then on the Affrico, and then—it was in 1965, I believe— it moved here, just in time for the flood! In the ‘sixties she decided... well, actually we don’t know for sure because all the records of her rapport with Picasso were lost in the flood, sadly, so we have to go by what she told us and what others tell us; but anyway, Maria Luigia probably got in touch with Picasso through some friends, to persuade him to produce a lithograph. The profits from the lithograph were going to be used to pay Spanish lawyers for a conference on political prisoners in Spain...

CARMONA | …there was an amnesty.

CECCOTTI | …there was an amnesty, but also costs to meet, so she decided that if Picasso did produce a lithograph for her, she would donate the profits from the sale to the Spaniards. Picasso agreed and sent Maria Luigia Guaita a preparatory drawing. What do I mean by that? Well, there are two main kinds of lithography.

You can either draw directly onto lithographic limestone, and then there’s a whole preparatory process…

GUAITA | …which we shall be seeing.

CECCOTTI | Yes, which we shall be seeing… either you can prepare a lithographic zinc plate which has more or less the same characteristics, in which case there is no change, or very little (unless you have to add colour, which makes it all more complicated). Or else you can take a preparatory drawing on paper, thin paper 17

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with the illustration drawn on it, lay it on the stone, and then use a series of solutions to transfer the drawing onto the stone. That way you’re preparing the stone as though it had been drawn on normally, and then you make your print. By hand, of course.

The operation was successful, Maria Luigia Guaita produced one hundred and forty-one prints and took them to show Picasso, thinking he’d keep some of them for himself: that’s why a hundred and forty-one is a bit of an odd number, but he signed the whole lot, he didn’t want any for himself and he gave them back to Maria Luigia Guaita, who brought them back to Italy. They were put on sale and the profits went to what they’d been earmarked for.

CARMONA | Ragghianti comes into the picture too…

CECCOTTI | Yes, she dedicated one to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, who probably played a role in the story, if not in connection with Picasso himself – his name still carried weight because he’d played an important part in the Resistance movement in Tuscany. Maria Luigia Guaita was a messenger in the Resistance, but Carlo Ludovico was a big shot in politics as well as in the world of art history.

BRADBURNE | Now we’ve established the background, perhaps we should move to the other room, because I’d like to pick up the thread from much earlier, from when Picasso was a young man, because that’s the side of the artist we talk about in the exhibition, and to take it from there to the end. I’d like to travel back in time, and to do that I’d like to move to the other rooms.

(The group leaves the Bisonte offices, and walks along a narrow street to the printmaking studio.)

CECCOTTI | These are the old Palazzo Serristori stables, which Maria Luigia Guaita bought from Signora Bossi Pucci when she decided to sell them. That was when she resolved to start a school in the stables. This is the entrance, this is where the carriages came in; the horses were uncoupled from them, and they probably took the carriages down there, while the animals were taken to the stable next door.

Here you can see the old printing machines, which are still in working order but

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they’re getting on a bit now. The first one, in wood, is a chalcographic machine, in other words a chalcographic hand-press, which belonged to Pietro Annigoni. His son Benedetto donated it to us in memory of his father. It’s a fabulous piece, but we don’t use it because it’s made of wood so the pressure varies with the damp and other factors. These over here, on the other hand, are lithographic hand-presses.

One’s made of wood and the other of cast iron...

GUAITA | And they play a crucial role in “Il Bisonte’s” history. Il Bisonte bought these presses, and our stones (we’ve got over two hundred of them), all together from the Istituto Geografico Militare.That was a very important relationship because we also hired their three lithographic press workers.The Istituto Geografico had begun to use offset printing by then, so “Il Bisonte” got off to a flying start with three fully experienced artisans in a single day. But there was no shop for customers to buy our products from then.

CECCOTTI | The lithographic press workers were experts in printing, but in geographical printing, so they had to adapt their skills to the artists’ needs. It was fascinating to witness.

BRADBURNE | I suggest we get back to the exhibition, to Picasso. Let’s pick the thread up from there, and we can come back to the history of this particular print at the end. Then we can see how a print is produced. Eugenio, I’d like you to tell us first how we discovered this young Picasso and how our story began.

CARMONA | Our story began in an odd way for me, when I learnt that the

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show was also about Salvador Dalí, and young Dalí interpreted prints. So it’s a story that needs to be told in reverse, because we have the end, the way Dalí, the way modern art interprets its own self, and in my view that means understanding how Picasso was seen, read and interpreted by the others.

BRADBURNE | What Dalí wrote, too, in addition to the others’ works.

CARMONA | Of course, his writing too.

BRADBURNE | But may he have been lying?

CARMONA | Yes, maybe he was lying. Dalí tells us in his Secret Life that he went to meet Picasso, but none of those who accompanied him to Paris in 1926 mentions the occurrence. Perhaps Dalí went to meet him in secret, or it may just be something he invented. But when he writes that chapter, you have to read Dalí closely, because he says that given that he’s a follower of Freud, the things he invents and reality end up merging in his mind. Some people experience a fantasy that fuses the real with the imaginary.

BRADBURNE | Picasso doesn’t mention the meeting, does he?

CARMONA | No, Picasso doesn’t mention it.

CECCOTTI | Or perhaps he didn’t want to remember it! (laughs) CARMONA | No, because Picasso’s relations with Dalí weren’t bad. When the Spanish Civil War ended, Picasso was in a sticky situation because of his Republican sympathies, while Dalí was on Franco’s side. But despite that, if we look at the documents and examine Picasso’s encounters with Dalí, we do know that the two artists were in touch with one another. Their ideological differences weren’t a problem for them.

BRADBURNE | But Picasso kept out of the Spanish Civil War, and he kept well away from the First World War too, didn’t he?

CARMONA | He wanted nothing to do with the First World War. During the First World War and after the Russian Revolution, Picasso was in an odd situation.

Everyone always forgives Picasso everything, yet we imagine that he was personally 24

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committed to certain ideological stances. But during the First World War Picasso lived with Russian exiles …

BRADBURNE | His first wife was Russian.

CARMONA | Yes, with his Russian wife Olga Khokhlova, with Diaghilev and all the others, with the whole of the Russian resistance movement... but I’m not sure I understand exactly what it is you want to know.

CUPELLINI | Picasso’s political sensitivity is undeniable. I’m just going back to what Rodolfo was saying. It was no coincidence that Maria Luigia Guaita often went to meet with Picasso, not just because he was one of the most important artists of the 20th century but because there was a response to both their political

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sensitivities. I remember one story about Guaita that struck me in particular. A few years ago, in fact less than ten years ago, I happened to bump into Maria Luigia, who wasn’t a young girl any more, in Piazza San Pancrazio. I thought she was going to the Museo Marini. But she told me she was going to a war veterans’ association meeting because she’d been sent an award for her work and her military activity during the War of Liberation. It wasn’t much in terms of hard cash but she felt it was crucial as a matter of principle. She was very sensitive to the issue. So I think the encounter between Picasso and Bisonte, and between Picasso and Maria Luigia Guaita, was certainly very interesting from an artistic point of view, but far more interesting from a social and historical standpoint.

BRADBURNE | Let’s get back to our main theme. Of course we’re talking about the exhibition, but Picasso’s politics are still extremely controversial...

CARMONA | Yes, it would be interesting to do a book on the topic.

BRADBURNE | …we prepared the show in that vein. Everyone has always said that Picasso never came to Florence, but we’ve discovered that Picasso did come here, and not just once but twice: first with the Russian ballerina whom he was later to marry and with the Ballets Russes, in 1917, thus during the First World War, and then again in 1949 after he was invited to Rome by the Communist Party. His second visit to Florence was linked to his political activity.

GUAITA | For the Partisans of Peace?

SEBREGONDI | Yes. In fact, when he came to Rome in 1949 he was accompanied by Antonello Trombadori, a leading figure in Italian politics at the time.

Picasso had to return to France by car and he asked Trombadori (who was barely over thirty) to accompany him in his chauffeur-driven saloon car.When they got to Florence, they toured the city and Trombadori was obviously very excited because Picasso was so famous. We’ve got some newspaper articles on his stay in the city.

CECCOTTI | Primo Conti told me that he met Picasso in Florence in 1917.

He told me that Picasso and he went to the Comunale together...

SEBREGONDI | That’s true, we have further confirmation of his visit!

CECCOTTI | And Primo Conti wasn’t a liar! (laughs) SEBREGONDI | Picasso was in Rome in 1917 to work on the backdrop for Parade, and Olga, with whom he fell in love, came to Florence for a performance.

I’ve dug up all of the articles on the Ballets Russes performance in La Nazione.

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There are reports but there’s no mention of Picasso, though Primo Conti met him at the Teatro Verdi during a performance of Donizetti’s Favorita.

BRADBURNE | What about Picasso’s relationship with politics?

CARMONA | No one has produced a study of Picasso’s relationship with politics. First of all, there’s a theory held by American scholars who have addressed Picasso’s ties with the anarchists. They’ve tended to focus in particular on Catalan anarchism in the late 19th century. I think it’s difficult to grasp the sense of anarchism in Spain, because you have to remember that the anarchists were immensely important right up to the Spanish Civil War. Derutti was an anarchistic pop group along punk lines that was a very famous symbol of anarchy in the 1970s. At the end of the day, the whole thing about the anarchists was because the Republic lost the war (and the Republic lost the war because Franco had the support of Hitler and Mussolini, while on the Republican side itself there was another civil war, between the Communists and the anarchists). I think you have to understand what it meant to be an anarchist in Spain. Of course, it’s excessive to claim that Picasso was an anarchist. It really is an exaggeration to argue that he was an anarchist because he was sensitive to the plight of the poor. Dozens of works of art in Spain from the 17th century onwards show a special interest in the plight of the poor. Guell, the man who sponsored Gaudí in all of his work, was a left-wing Catholic who displayed the same kind of sensitivity too. I think that liberal thinking was extremely widespread in Europe at the end of the century, but it didn’t mean that you were a militant or that you were openly anarchistic. No one knows why Picasso was so sensitive to the plight of the poor as a young man. I think it was probably an aesthetic consideration more than anything else.The way we have to look at it is that Picasso was interested in addressing intense themes. Later on, when he moved to Paris, we don’t really know what his politics were, but the cuttings he used to make his collages came from pacifist newspapers.

BRADBURNE | Some people have written that Picasso didn’t devote enough energy to politics. He was a pacifist but he kept well away from the action. War was a distant event for him. But what about the others? Did Miró and Dalí, who were younger than him, have a different approach to politics?

CARMONA | In his collages in 1912 Picasso always uses pacifist newspapers opposed to the war in the Balkans, but when the First World War broke out in 1914, all 28

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of his friends, like Apollinaire and Marcuse and even the others who weren’t French, supported the cause of France, yet Picasso acted as though he simply didn’t want to know. One might say he opted out. He lived as though he had absolutely nothing to do with France...

BRADBURNE | So he hadn’t yet espoused the cause of France…

CARMONA | It was a difficult moment because, as we said, avant-garde artists were considered a threat in Paris. Two or three members of the French Chambre des Deputés called for all of the artists, especially the Cubists, to be “expelled”...

The Cubists were called gotcha, which was what they called the Germans during the First World War. Picasso opted out, as though he wanted nothing to do with it.

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Young Dalí, on the other hand, was an activist in a left-wing Catalan nationalist party and he painted a self-portrait in which he’s wearing black and holding a copy of L’Humanité, the French Communist Party daily to which he had a subscription.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, because his later image was so different.

We know nothing about Miró. A Catalan scholar is doing some research into Miró’s relationship with politics, because when the war in Spain came to end, Miró was the first artist to return to Franco’s Spain. He went to live in what he called “interior exile” in Majorca, where he had no contact with anyone. He didn’t subscribe to Franco’s regime, but neither did he want to be away from the landscape that made him feel alive. That’s the real, cultural, anthropological aspect of Miró: he was totally at one with the lansdscape and certain features, and that landscape and those features were Catalan. He was deeply Catalan, anthropologically Catalan, but in his written works and his letters to his friends he was genuinely critical of the Catalan national party in power at the time.

BRADBURNE | To get back to Picasso, I was thinking that while his active participation in politics may be a little vague, he has left us some very strong antiwar images like Guernica or the Dove, which has become a symbol of peace. It was Picasso who left us those images!

CARMONA | Picasso painted over many lifetimes. There isn’t just one Picasso, there are many. He’s like a character who arises afresh time after time. I think that in the early ‘thirties, after a deep personal crisis (the literature on Picasso always claims that all this poetry sprung from his love for Marie Thérèse Walter, for his amour fou), Picasso may well have become the first modern artist to join the hall of fame while he was still alive. The moment Les Demoiselles d’Avignon went on display at the

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MoMA in 1929, Picasso was hailed as the greatest living artist, which caused him immense distress. If someone told you “you’re the greatest living artist,” you’d say: “oh my God, that’s terrifying, what can I do now?!” I think what Picasso did then was to commit politically to the left, which he’d never done before. That was his position. It’s a position we can deduce by reconstructing his psychology. It’s a kind of paradox. That was the time he became a paid-up member of the Communist Party, he became a left-wing militant. It’s difficult to explain. Given that all the great collectors in the world wanted one of his works, he’d become extremely wealthy by the Thirties. He had a castle, two villas on the Côte d’Azur, his work fetched a higher price than a Velázquez or a Caravaggio, and he was only fifty-five! It was all a bit over the top!

BRADBURNE | He was a youngster! (laughs) CARMONA | Very young indeed. (also laughs) I think he finally took his position as a homo politicus on board with the Spanish Civil War. BRADBURNE | I was also thinking of this image of De Chirico, the revelation that De Chirico, who didn’t play an active part in the war, painted mutilated figures, all those statues with no arms...The experience of the war must have marked him the way it marked Picasso, the experience of all that destruction, that total horror... But we see the way in which that mood reflected on its time. The First World War, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler, the Second World War... He lived through two World Wars...

CARMONA | …and then there was the Korean War. Picasso was against the Korean War. He subscribed to the European left’s anti-American dogma, but he was hardly consistent because he was one of the most highly praised artists in the United States and he had an American mentality!

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But did he ever travel to the United States?

CARMONA | No, never, never!

BRADBURNE | We should remember that McCarthyism, which was rabidly anti-communist, was in full swing in America in 1954. How could Picasso have travelled to America while that kind of thing was going on?

CUPELLINI | Eugenio, I wanted to ask you about an aspect of Picasso’s work that reveals his ideology, his sensitivity to the plight of the poor, and it’s a thing we can track throughout almost the whole of his life. There’s a print in the exhibition on the theme. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Picasso supplied this image in 1960, in other words some decades later, so it may have had something to do with his political leanings? He could have supplied some other kind of work, yet he supplied this one, which I feel is relevant to this issue, both because of the kind of image it is and because of a certain simplicity in several of the figures.

CARMONA | I couldn’t tell you.

CUPELLINI | My question is really this: is it a coincidence that he depicted this kind of subject matter—a poor and simple figure—in response to Maria Luisa GUAITA |’s prompting on this theme, in other words when political crimes received a general pardon in Spain?

CECCOTTI | It may be poor and simple, but it may be a Spanish woman.

SEBREGONDI | I think it has closer links with his homeland.

CECCOTTI | Yes, it probably does.

SEBREGONDI | I wouldn’t say that it was poor, like the print in the exhibition entitled The Frugal Meal, I would suggest it was more a question of its being linked to local tradition.

SEBREGONDI |

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BRADBURNE | There’s

one thing I’m interested in finding out. As we wrote for the exhibition, Picasso never produced a single abstract painting, he never believed in Abstract Art. In other words, the man who “paved the way” for Abstract Art—and everyone after him chased off in the direction of Abstraction—the man who is considered the father of Abstract Art, never actually considered himself an Abstract artist and never produced a single Abstract picture. That’s incredible!

CARMONA | That’s true. When Picasso was at Horta de Ebro in 1910, he was the closest he ever came to Abstract Art. When he returned to Paris, he didn’t have a contract but he had an agreement with Kahnweiler. He showed him his work and told him he wanted to get rid of them. Kahnweiler bought the lot because he didn’t want him to destroy them, and he says that Picasso was in despair because Cubism had brought him close to Abstract Art. Abstraction was anathema to him, and he wanted nothing to do with it. That was in 1910.

BRADBURNE | When our friend Dalí was six years old. Could he have played with Picasso?

CARMONA | Maybe not, but there was a point of contact between Picasso’s and Dalí’s families. I think that this Dali-esque world took shape when Dalí was a child and he had this image of Picasso as a truly great artist whom he’d seen in Paris.

While as far as Miró’s concerned, we can say that he was the first artist to study under Modern painters rather than at the Academy.When Miró went to study with Galí, Galí was an artist who absorbed everything he possibly could, from Modern art up until 1915, and he didn’t teach his students in accordance with academic precepts. Galí got his students to shut their eyes, to touch objects and then to paint them on the basis of their tactile experience. Alois Riegl, who was an art historian,

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used the term “aptico”, which doesn’t exist in the Spanish dictionary. It means that you can acquire a plastic sense of the visual through touch rather than through sight.

I don’t want to take this too far, but it happens to people suffering from epilepsy too... the two connections can be severed from one another in the more extreme cases of the illness.

BRADBURNE | It was used a lot in the Fifties.

CARMONA | Yes, it was. And the result was that when these people whose connections had been severed were given an object, they couldn’t understand it with their eyes because the connection had been severed; they could only recognise it by touching it. Miró studied this phenomenon and Galí had him paint that way.

Miró never attended the Academy as a young man, only as a child; after that, he studied under Galí. Miró may be the first modern artist who never studied.

BRADBURNE | Because Dalí attended the Academy, and so did Picasso, of course.

CARMONA | Yes, they did.

BRADBURNE | We’ve also spoken about the connection between their families. Picasso and Dalí may not have played together, but Picasso’s and Miró’s mothers knew each other, that’s what’s so incredible.

SEBREGONDI | And when Miró went to Paris, he brought Picasso a gift from his mother.

CARMONA | Yes, when Miró went to Paris, he brought him a gift because the families were acquainted.

BRADBURNE | This reveals a fantastically human side to them, because when we think of them as great artists, we don’t really think of them as having parents, yet they must have been born! And the fact that Picasso’s mum chatted with Miró ‘s

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mum brings a smile to my lips.

SEBREGONDI | So when Miró went to Picasso’s house…

CARMONA | When he went to Picasso’s house, it was his mother who received him, who let him in, who made him feel welcome and showed him Picasso’s work...

BRADBURNE | What about Picasso?

CARMONA | Picasso wasn’t there.

BRADBURNE | It was the year Picasso first visited Florence. The same year as the Parade tour. They went to Rome and then to Barcelona, didn’t they?

SEBREGONDI | Yes, but they hadn’t put on a performance of Parade in Rome or in Florence yet.

BRADBURNE | Quite, but all of the scenery was made in Rome.Yet they only performed Parade in Paris and then in Barcelona...

SEBREGONDI | What we’re trying to work out is what exactly Picasso went to see when he was in Florence in 1917.

BRADBURNE | Yes, because we have records for 1949, but we have no idea what he did in 1917.

SEBREGONDI | Picasso arrived in the city on 29 April, because on 30 April there was a performance for the families of reservists who’d been called up (there was a war on in 1917, so married men, even the not-so-young, were in the forces and their families were in difficulty). The profits from the charity show were earmarked for them.

BRADBURNE | So that, too, has to do with politics again, doesn’t it?

SEBREGONDI | Charity work, not politics. The performance was organised by a certain “Signora Collacchioni” for the reservists’ families. But we don’t know

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for certain what Picasso went to see when he was in Florence.

CARMONA | No, we don’t know. I have a theory and it involves bringing Ardengo Soffici into the picture—he was born in Tuscany, after all—because he was the first person to have learnt of the existence of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and the first person to talk about Picasso travelling to Gosól in 1906 and conducting a reappraisal of Classicism... it was a really fantastic discovery for me to find out that this Gosól period in Picasso’s life didn’t exist until the ‘eighties. None of Picasso’s biographers specifically discusses this Gosól period in Picasso’s life but people did talk about it. But they were talking about it as long ago as in 1911... But Soffici spoke, he wrote.Yes, he wrote. In 1911 he said that Picasso produced these compositions in Gosól because they’d been discussing the early Florentine painters... and that Picasso knew these works by Italian painters in the Louvre. We can’t know for sure, but Soffici mentions Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto, Masaccio and a few others. And he spoke about Picasso in that sense, when Picasso returned from Gosól.

But later, when Picasso discovered Egyptian painting in the Louvre, and maybe the African masks and totems, there was a change. I think Picasso let news leak so that others could understand. We know that when Picasso came to Florence in 1917, he went to see the work of the early Florentine painters. Picasso himself said so, leaving it up to others to work out what he meant. I think we can take it as read that Picasso changed the sense of his painting after visiting Florence. I think all of these large women that Picasso painted two years later, perhaps if we look at Giotto’s and Duccio’s figures and conduct a stylistic comparison, perhaps we may find that Picasso...

SEBREGONDI | Apparently he went to see Michelangelo’s work in the New Sacristy... but I don’t think he talks about them.

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No, he doesn’t.

CECCOTTI | I read that he saw the Last Judgement in Rome and was struck by it, not by its quality so much as by the relationship with the ochre and the blue ground. At one point he says: “Well what an idea!”

CARMONA | That’s true, because that was the blue ground that he then used in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso may have taken the blue ground from Michelangelo when he was painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He may have, but of course we’ll never know for sure.

SEBREGONDI | Where there any colour photographs available at the time?

CARMONA | No, there weren’t.

BRADBURNE | So if he hadn’t seen it in person, it would’ve been impossible.

But the striking thing in the exhibition is Picasso’s struggle to create Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, given that he had an excellent academic training. It’s one of the most absolute acts of creation, and this exhibition is exceptional in that it stresses that very moment. The exhibition allows us to discover works Picasso painted when he was aged fourteen and then the Demoiselles. Picasso was a bit like Beethoven in a way. Everyone thinks they know what a Picasso looks like, then they say “I’ve never seen Picasso that looks like that”, because it’s easy to think of Picasso as a too wellknown brand, like Coca-Cola, and that’s what happens to Beethoven too, in a way, but rediscovering both Beethoven and Picasso for the geniuses they were is thrilling.

I find it incredible that after all his studies, he threw away (almost) everything to perform this astonishing act of creativity and to produce Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in two months.

CARMONA | And the thing that emerges most strikingly is that Picasso was a hard worker, because everyone thinks that when you’re a genius, you just stand in front of a canvas and produce a masterpiece in a couple of minutes. But this man worked every day and pondered things, mulling them over and coming up with his own solutions. The bottom line is that, while I think we can discover a vast range of inspiration and influence for Picasso’s work in this period: Egyptian art, primitive art, African art, Michelangelo. in the end we find a man who worked on his own graphic sense. And this work that Picasso produced is ultimately linked to that graphic sense.

CARMONA |

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Having said that, of course, we can ask ourselves questions about the iconographic interpretation, we can speculate on whether the woman in the print is a peasant, a Spaniard, a Catalan or an Italian, but when Picasso painted, for instance the women with headscarves in the exhibition, they were the prostitutes from the Hôpital Saint-Michel in Paris; yet even before he met these women, he’d produced the same drawing in Barcelona with women carrying children or working.

It’s as though he produced a kind of model to draw a lithograph, a model on how to do it.You can produce a drawing like that.

BRADBURNE | And where is the origin of this lithograph?

CECCOTTI | The origin of the figure?

BRADBURNE | Yes. GUAITA | I have to say that Picasso never came here to Il Bisonte to meet Maria Luigia Guaita. She took these copies to him and he signed them. There are various stories. Maria Luigia Guaita claimed that this figure was a portrait of her, but I think that was only a caprice on her part. The writer Maria Luisa Spaziani reproduced this lithograph in her book, which I think was published by Mondadori, and she herself said in an interview: “This is me, by Picasso”. (they all laugh) CECCOTTI | That’s absolutely untrue! I think that Picasso was a man who drew and thought at the same time. He put his pencil, his crayon or whatever it was, on a sheet of paper and drew, and at that moment his head was probably filled will all of the images that he was interested in or that he’d seen. He probably thought: well, seeing as it’s a woman who asked me for it, I’ll draw a woman. I think that must have been what happened.

BRADBURNE | But is it true that he also thought on stone? Because in Malaga we saw Le Chant des Morts—I also have it at home—which he produced with Tériade to illustrate Paul Reverdy’s poem. Paul Reverdy wrote all the poems on stone. Picasso did all of his work directly on stone. Have we got a stone here?

GUAITA | This is a stone ready to be drawn on.

BRADBURNE | Oh, fantastic, we can do a woman!

CECCOTTI | You can draw on it, each of you can draw something, whatever you like.

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(Eugenio Carmona takes a pencil and starts drawing a woman, after Picasso.)

GUAITA | A woman?

CARMONA | Honestly! Picasso never did this!

CECCOTTI | Watch your hand, because hands make the stone a bit oily.

CECCOTTI | Press! Press harder (referring to the way Carmona is drawing on the stone) CARMONA | What did you say?

GUAITA | Harder, apply more pressure.

CARMONA | It’s a woman I’ve invented.

CECCOTTI | It’s a woman by Picasso.

BRADBURNE | You have but to sign it and we’ll have a work of art. We can produce a limited edition and put it on sale (smiles). Here, just sign and date it here...

CARMONA | What’s today’s date?

SEBREGONDI | 11 May. GUAITA | You do realise people are going to see the signature and date back to front, don’t you?

BRADBURNE | A historic signature! (everyone laughs)

(They begin describing the preparatory phase in the creation of a lithograph.)

GUAITA | We need to explain the preparation process.

BRADBURNE | Yes, what happens now?

BURLIZZI | We add a plug to protect the drawing and then we move on to the preparation, which consists of gum arabic and nitric acid, and according to the type of drawing and materials used for the drawing, you can vary the progress of the preparation by adding more or less acid.

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ORTEGA | You

can see at once how thin the acid is by the foam that it pro-

duces on the stone.

BURLIZZI | It’s usually left to act for at least a day, and for editions of which more copies are planned...

BRADBURNE | A day? We have to wait an entire day?

BURLIZZI | No, don’t worry, we’ll see the print with a different stone.

GUAITA | Ah, art prints don’t repay haste!

BURLIZZI | Quite the contrary, in fact. Then, if more copies were required, there was a second preparation the next day which fixed the drawing even more firmly. That made it possible to produce more copies.

GUAITA | There’s a certain talent there, wouldn’t you agree? (looking at Carmona’s drawing on the stone) CARMONA | No, no!

BURLIZZI | We let it dry.

GUAITA | The first part is over, isn’t it?

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BURLIZZI | Yes, it’s

almost finished.

GUAITA | It’s rather like one of those cookery programmes on television.

First we show the audience all the ingredients then we move over to the cooking area, or rather to the presses. (laughter) CARMONA | It’s the first time!

GUAITA | What do you mean by that?

CARMONA | It’s my first time! (laughter) GUAITA | Actually, that’s one of the most interesting features of lithography: artists often don’t have to have any special technical knowledge because the lithographers manage the whole process, while with engraving on metal, for instance, if you don’t know the techniques, you won’t get anywhere. In social terms that changes the artist’s role in a big way. We always have the big names in lithography because great artists just pop in here, dash off a drawing and leave, whereas with woodcuts you have to spend hours and days working with a technician. In any event, here’s a stone that has already been prepared, so we can show you a step in the printing process.

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BRADBURNE | And

now you have to explain it.

GUAITA | Vincenzo, can you explain what you’re doing as you go along?

BURLIZZI | This is a stone that was prepared by a girl student of ours last year, then it was preserved so that it could be restored for use and we could print from it again. To preserve it, it’s left with printing ink and gum arabic on it as protection.

Now Manuel’s removing the gum, and then we’ll remove the printing ink and replace it with fresh ink. Now he’s using turpentine oil.

BRADBURNE | What’s this, just water?

GUAITA | Water and turpentine.

BRADBURNE | What’s happening now?

BURLIZZI | We’re removing the dry ink so that we can replace it with fresh printing ink. This step usually takes place at the beginning when you replace the material used to produce the drawing, in other words pastel, with printing ink.

BRADBURNE | Ok, let’s get back to the book that Picasso did with Tériade, Le Chant des Morts. It’s as though Paul Reverdy’s poetry had been written in heavy black crayon, and the drawings are in bright red, almost orange. Are they on two different stones?

BURLIZZI | Yes, they probably are.

BRADBURNE | But how did he integrate the drawings with the texts?

BURLIZZI | You can get the right register, you can get it down very fine, in stone.

BRADBURNE | Could you do that on the same stone, or would he have used the same stone twice?

BURLIZZI | You have to erase the stone and then prepare it for a new drawing.

BRADBURNE | If you think that it was probably produced with two stones, how did Picasso manage without having the text beneath it?

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Maybe he knew where the text was going to be, or else the text may have been printed first and so he built his image around it.

BRADBURNE | But they’re closely integrated with the texts, which is one of the reason why this isn’t the most expensive art book on the market. Matisse’s Jazz is worth three hundred thousand dollars at auction, and why is that? Because every sheet is a separate work of art.You can dismemember it and sell it all in pieces, folio by folio. Picasso’s book is a complete whole, it’s inseparable.

BURLIZZI |

(The printing process resumes.)

CARMONA | I went to Tériade’s home in Paris on many occasions.

BRADBURNE | Tériade’s an extraordinary person as well.

CARMONA | A fantastic person. I’ve been to Mytilene, where Tériade was born.

BRADBURNE | He was a really great man, he egged artists on. When Matisse produced Jazz, he immediately told Picasso, who responded with Le Chant des Morts. And of course Reverdy was an important figure in the world of Surrealism.

This link is important, as we haven’t said a great deal about the poems, about the 52

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bond between words and image, which is a very strong bond.

CARMONA | Very strong indeed.

BRADBURNE | Apollinaire, Breton, Reverdy…

CARMONA | Poetry always lay behind everything he did.

BRADBURNE | How can we see the poetry behind Picasso’s pictures?

CARMONA | Did you know that, when Picasso lived in Montmartre in 1905, someone had the words Au rendez-vous des poètes written on his door. I think it’s difficult to describe, but all of these discoveries... first of all, what’s known as his pink period, though we really ought to change its name if we think of Rilke or Apollinaire. Picasso constantly drew his inspiration from Rilke. Picasso had read Rilke and he was inspired by the way he wrote about saltimbanques and all those kinds of people. I think Picasso was trying to find an equivalence among these poems of Apollinaire going back to 1904, and after that, I think that it was his conversations with Gertrude Stein which forged the awareness of Cubism, because Picasso has this way of creating only if they can easily be shown with paintings. If we compare Picasso’s Cubist output, with Gertrude Stein’s trademark all over it, with the poems 53

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that Gertrude Stein dedicated to Picasso, we can see how the meaning of the words and Gertrude Stein’s hesitancy reflect the sense of fragmentation and palpitation in Picasso’s work.

BRADBURNE | We have this situation when he had to work for Paul Reverdy, because they were supposed to work together to produce Le Chant des Morts.

CARMONA | Yes, they were supposed to work together on Le Chant des Morts.

Picasso’s problem was that he never worked with a single sense. He sometimes tried to get back to the deeper meaning of poetry and... I don’t quite know how to put in Italian, I can’t find the right words...

BRADBURNE | Who’s making a noise?

BURLIZZI | We’re starting to load the stone with printing ink. First you load the roll with lithographer’s ink and then you ink the stone. Normally the first lithographs you print are rather weak, so you need to wait for the third or fourth print to get a completely satisfactory result.

SEBREGONDI | Did Picasso learn the technique of engraving as a young man?

CARMONA | He learnt as a very young man with Ricard Canals.

SEBREGONDI | Because there’s this really nice story about his partner claiming that he used to do them in the basin at home.

CARMONA | Yes, that’s right, in the basin at home, and I told the story about his first engraving earlier. He did a picador, as they’re called in the world of bull fighting, and at the end of the process the picador was holding his lance in his left hand in the print, so Picasso called the print El Zurdo. Los zurdos are people...

SEBREGONDI | Left-handers.

CARMONA | Left-handers, that’s right! It was to justify the fact.

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your name’s going to be back to front too. (shifts her attention to the printing process) So what’s happening now?

BURLIZZI | We set up the sheet of paper for the print, then we put several very light sheets of paper on, and then we add this thing, which is a called a tympan.

It’s a piece of lithographic zinc with fat on it.

SEBREGONDI | How old is the machine?

BURLIZZI | I think this one goes back to the late 19th century, while that one…

CECCOTTI | Early 20th century. (points to the machine driven by electric power, which is being used to produce the print) Because basically this one had a star, but it was removed and replaced by a motor.

SEBREGONDI | So they’re both basically identical?

CECCOTTI | They’re the same. That one has a star, of course, while here it’s been removed.

GUAITA | The interesting thing is that the technology has hardly changed since artistic graphic techniques were invented, especially for presses; in other words, they’ve maintained their identity from the outset: chalcographic presses in particular, but also lithographic presses.

BURLIZZI | (displaying the print) This is the first one. As I was saying, it’s always lighter than you’d expect because, among other reasons, you load the ink by degrees to avoid losing the very clear shades, or maybe the nuances. So now I increase the amount of ink on the roll and proceed to ink more heavily.

SEBREGONDI | How many times do you have to ink it?

BURLIZZI | It depends. At least three or four times.

SEBREGONDI | Three or four times at first, and then ink it only once?

SEBREGONDI | And

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No, no.You have to try to maintain that number of runs.

SEBREGONDI | So the number of runs never changes, then?

BURLIZZI | Yes. Once you’ve found… there can be three, depending on the type of stone and the work underneath it.

CECCOTTI | In some ways it’s the fastest process for producing the matrix.

Senefelder discovered it. He didn’t invent it so much for artistic purposes as for graphic purposes, because in chalcography you have to apply the ink, then remove it from the surface, then print and wet the paper first. In this case, once the stone’s been prepared, you just have to wet it, then ink it and you can print. Because the first lithographs were designed for sheet music, and in fact it was largely a coincidental discovery, really. He had a small printing press, and he had a limestone on which he primed the colour for printing his chalcographies, and he stumbled upon this odd reaction between water and fat. In fact, one of the first artists to experiment with lithography was a Spaniard, Goya, because he produced lithographs in black and white in the final stages of his life. He may well have been the first artist to produce a lithograph.

BURLIZZI |

(He continues with the printing process.)

CECCOTTI | It’s a very laborious process! Is this the second?

BURLIZZI | Yes. GUAITA | There we are, you can see that the water’s drying.

BURLIZZI | Speed is of the essence in this job.

SEBREGONDI | How big a print run can you do?

BURLIZZI | A large number, in lithography.

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He was saying that you have to go fast to prevent the whole thing from seizing up. Well, there are machines now. There’s no difference between a print made by hand and a print produced with a flatbed press. Flatbed presses are fascinating because the mark of the pressure from the stone remains.There are some differences, but only a trained eye can see them. It’s fascinating precisely because there are the edges of the stone just as there are in the original print.

BURLIZZI | The sheet of paper in lithography was usually smaller than the stone, and the stone also bore the marks of the register. (referring to the print) The next one should already be more…

CECCOTTI | No, this one’s already…

BURLIZZI | It’s lost a lot of things because it didn’t remain stationary long enough. The atmosphere itself tends to get thicker.

CECCOTTI | This stone was drawn by a student and once they’ve printed the trial runs, the stone is set aside, then it’s smoothed over again for the next drawing; otherwise you’d need a new stone for each job. To smooth it over you use another stone, or carborundum and so on, until the drawing disappears. So stones, which are usually eight to ten centimetres in height at most, can be reused several times over, though after a while they wouldn’t be able to withstand the pressure any longer.

BURLIZZI | The pressure is far greater in lithography than, say, in chalcography, so if you’re stone’s anything less than six centimetres there’s a danger of it breaking. And given the cost, too, it’s no coincidence that stones were often backed with marble slabs to extend their useful life.

CUPELLINI | What type of stone is it?

BURLIZZI | A kind of limestone that used to be mined particularly in Bavaria, in southern Germany; it’s almost pure calcium carbonate with traces of iron.

CECCOTTI |

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So it’s very homogeneous, then?

BURLIZZI | Very homogeneous, very compact, very granite-like.You can tell the quality of a stone from its colour. Grey stones are the best; they’re the hardest because they’re also suitable for use with liquid ink.Yellow stones are the softest and pastel may be the most suitable method.

CECCOTTI | Because you can use pastel in lithography, or you can use liquid ink and you can even produce them à la plume, using a pen, in other words with a nib with this ink. And sometimes these lithographic stones also contain fossils, but they don’t spoil the printing results.

CUPELLINI | When a print is initialled as an artist’s proof, clearly it’s because he can see it and make changes, but how many copies does an artist produce as proofs? Just one...?

CECCOTTI | There are printer’s proofs and artist’s proofs. Printer’s proofs are the ones printed before achieving perfection, and there can be differences in the paper, the ink...

CUPELLINI | It’s a technical thing.

CECCOTTI | A technical thing. In the end the artist makes his choice: “I like this one,” and then the printer or the artist does the run. Printer’s proofs are normally produced as part of the run and they’re usually supposed to be given to the artist free of charge, but they end up getting sold anyway. They normally shouldn’t exceed the 10% mark, in other words there should be ten unnumbered prints for every hundred numbered ones, but having said that, some people do not do any at all and tear up all the rest, while others do a few extra ones to give to their friends.

GUAITA | That’s the potential weakness in anyone running a printer’s workshop.

CUPELLINI |

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We know that there was a lot of trouble while the artist’s proofs were being produced because the prints weren’t numbered, so there was no real supervision.

CUPELLINI | You get the same problem with bronze casts.

GUAITA | That’s the trouble with lithography, though it’s extremely interesting. The trouble is, it’s too faithful and too versatile a technique. The print quality’s too good, which paves the way for all kinds of fraudulent use.

CUPELLINI | Because technically speaking, it can’t be duplicated.

GUAITA | But it can produce thousands of faithful copies. The technical shortcomings of engraving, which make it “faulty”, are what has protected it. You can never have too many copies of an engraving, however hard you try. With the dry-point technique on copperplate you can make twenty, or fifteen, and that’s it.

After that, even if you want to dig up an old run and you shouldn’t, you can’t.

CUPELLINI | Because it shows.

GUAITA | A stone is at home in a workshop, like today. Techniques have changed a great deal now, but photoengraving... put it this way, in lithography you get an excellent, perfectly mimetic result with the really traditional kind of lithography, but with photoengraving it’s immediately apparent. The quality plummets, so engraving’s technical limitations are what has protected it from fraudulent use, while lithography’s excessive versatility and quality have paved the way for fraud, and that’s why lithography in Italy in the 1980s took a real battering.

CUPELLINI | So we might say that we need to place our trust in the printer’s honesty.

GUAITA | That brings us back to a really sore point, because lithography’s big problem was perpetrated precisely by the people involved in it, the artists, the printers and the gallery managers who offered things for sale that they shouldn’t have.You see, if the printer or the artist doesn’t have a sufficiently strong or stringent ethical sense, they can easily fall prey to certain bad habits, so you the public aren’t better protected just because you go direct to the lithographer or to the printer’s; it depends on the printer’s you go to and the artist you buy. There’s no guarantee, and that’s where the system has come unstuck. For instance, even today there are lithograph collectors who only buy works of art printed before the 1980s to avoid having to worry.When was it printed? 1978. Fine. Let’s check who printed it, when it was printed, how many there are around...

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BRADBURNE | We’ve discussed Picasso as a youngster, when he was a fourteen-year-old student at the Academy, and we’ve talked about Picasso’s first visit to Florence in 1917. Now I’d like to talk about the later Picasso. He returned to Florence after the war, and there are some enchanting photos of Picasso by the Porcellino and at the Mercato Nuovo, and there are pictures of Picasso strolling in Florence.

Eugenio, you said earlier that there isn’t just one Picasso but many. Which Picasso returned to Florence in 1949?

CARMONA | It was in 1949, and this Picasso may well be the least wellknown Picasso, because it’s a Picasso who has become a worldwide focal point for the art world, yet the art he was producing wasn’t moving in the direction of Modern art. No one has realised that this was a man who was to do something I find absolutely fascinating only a few years later. He drew himself as an old man. He was an old man, always naked, always dancing, always surrounded by women, always on the beach, he was creative, and Mourlot made a film in which he is painting. We can’t say anything final, but what I find fascinating is the fact that, at the very moment the youth revolution was getting under way in Europe, in the United States, pop art and pop music were taking off, James Dean was an idol, an old man like Picasso embodied vitality and creativity. At this juncture Picasso’s work is no longer just his works of art, his image, his output. It’s true that Picasso produced some graphic work before the Second World War and I think that this work Picasso did with Mourlot, with lithographs—because it takes physical strength, you have to be fit to work with these things—what he was trying to prove was that he was an old man but still young, a man who could all these things and take as long was needed to patiently make one proof after another while creating something at the same time.

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said that he produced Le Chant des Morts with Mourlot and with Tériade. But I’ve just thought of something important: this was an era of self-representation, and not only for Picasso; just think of Dalí, think of all the films, of the whole new genre of the media, because everything was growing, and ten years later we have Andy Warhol. Could Picasso have breathed this new atmosphere after the war? The optimism in the air? The self-representation?

CARMONA | I don’t know. It’s an intriguing question and it demands a good answer, but I’m afraid I have to say that, at that time, Picasso wasn’t moving in the same direction as society. He was moving in another direction, but the direction Picasso was moving in meant, I’m not sure how to put it, it meant continuity with a remote culture. What Picasso wanted to put on the top rung of the art ladder was the capacity for manual work. Picasso was always something of a handy man.We saw that wonderful exhibition in New York, of Picasso with guitars. He was true handy man, in the sense of a man who works with his hands, and I think that, moving in the opposite direction from American art which was moving towards the masses, communication, the new media, in the sense of conceptual art, in the sense of the art of technical reproduction, I think that what Picasso wanted in the Fifties was to see the triumph of the artisan’s skills, skills the artisan can’t afford to forget, meticulous work done by hand rather than by machine; and in that sense Picasso ran the risk of being left behind by history, because the Sixties was something else. But I think that he could perceive the manual sense of art precisely because he pursued this research in Europe. He did it for a living, didn’t he?

SEBREGONDI | I’d like to take a different angle here, if I may. When Picasso returned to Florence in 1949, he stopped off at Arezzo to see the Piero della BRADBURNE | We

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Francesca frescoes. When he got to Florence, he was asked if he’d like to visit the museums and he said: “no, I’ve had enough of museums, I don’t want to see another museum”, choosing to stroll around the city instead. He was particularly interested in the area around the Ponte Vecchio, which hadn’t yet been rebuilt after the war.

The place was still a bomb site, and so he talked about peace. It’s as though he’d cleared a hurdle, he wasn’t interested in the past any more, he’d travelled his road, he no longer needed to seek inspiration or cues for his work, as he had when he was a young man. But he went to visit the Uffizi all the same.

CUPELLINI | I have a question: apart from not being interested in the seeing the museums again on his second visit, wasn’t he interested in meeting or in getting in touch with the artists working in Florence at the time?

SEBREGONDI | I read an article in the Nuovo Corriere which says that he took a room at the Pensione Bertelli, he walked around the city for a bit, then he went to see the Ponte Vecchio and the wreckage, and he was shocked, among other reasons because on either side of the bridge the place still looked like a bomb site in 1949; the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt yet. He went to the Porcellino and touched the statue of the boar, he stopped at a fishmonger’s stall and and then he got into the car and drove off. He got as far as Ventimiglia, where he gave Trombadori an enormous amount of money to get back to Rome by train.That’s the big difference.

In 1917 he was clearly very eager to see things, though of course no one knows to what extent he was influenced by what he saw, while in 1949 he was no longer an enthusiastic young man. He was sixty-eight years old.

CARMONA | I wouldn’t exactly call Picasso a young man in 1917 either.

SEBREGONDI | No, he was…

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CARMONA | Thirty-six.

He was extremely young! (they laugh) I don’t think it’s a matter of his no longer being young. He returned to being his true self because he was looking for two things: the struggle against ageing, which we all share and which Picasso takes as his cue (he’s always active, with women, with everything); and second, the struggle to get back to who he really was, to art, which was the most important thing for him, and which we can also find in his love of manual work and in his decision to go back and see the bridge in Florence.

CARMONA | I’d like to say something but I’m not sure whether my Italian’s up to it, but it’s very clear in my mind at least. Italy as an artistic condition is of the utmost importance for the Germans, the French and the British, in accordance with the canons of Classicism; but Classicism in Spain, throughout Spain and in Catalonia, is perceived as something rather exotic. There’s no sense of the classical.

When Picasso was young, all of the Spanish academic authorities wanted the first prize to consist of a trip to Rome to study Classicism, a bit like in France in the late 18th century. But Picasso never did that. When young artists wanted to go to Rome, he wanted to go to Munich. He had a different sensibility. And when Picasso rediscovered Classicism in 1917, it was in the guise of Ingres and Poussin, of French Classicism. Now, what I am trying to say? When we Spaniards or Catalans come to SEBREGONDI | BRADBURNE |

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Italy, art is still a focal point, but the most important thing for us—though I can’t speak for Picasso because a century has gone by—is the sense of truth, because we’ve always seen Italy as a country similar to Spain in terms of religion, morality, the Church, except the Italians know how to enjoy life better while the Spanish are darker in temperament. I’m not sure I’m getting my point across, but I can understand it when Picasso wants to see the market, the Ponte Vecchio, I can understand.

What am I going to do with my wife tomorrow? Do you want the money to buy a ticket to the museum? Yes, yes, of course! No, I want to go for a walk! I want us to go for a walk together because the weather’s nice, because life is always, I don’t know... I think we should understand Picasso very well, because I don’t think Picasso’s a pedant, a literary scholar; I’m not trying to expound a theory, but that’s what lies behind it, because when Picasso came here he was a communist, and this is my personal theory: Picasso wasn’t a communist so that he could become an activist in the Communist Party, but to show that he had a purpose in life, that he felt close to the poorer classes, that he felt that it was clear to him that one lives with that sensitivity; the Spanish fascination with the development of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was always very strong because the PCI was so different from the French Communist Party, which was far more orthodox. At the end of the day, all I’m trying to say is that what Picasso could find when he came to Florence was

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the sense of a life that can be rebuilt, that can…

CECCOTTI | So Picasso chose to soak up the atmosphere, to walk around the streets and see people going about their daily business.

BRADBURNE | That’s how Italian communism is so different from every other kind of communism. Because it’s linked to the way people in Italy share things, the way they relate to each other. There’s no communism anywhere like the communism that exists in Italy. It’s different here, as we’ve all seen. When I read Gianni Rodari, it isn’t like reading a French, or a Canadian, or an American or any other kind of communist. We read the work of a man who finds a way, in this approach to life, of depicting an ideal kind of communism which never existed, yet in doing so he discovers a cultural link with his country, and I believe that Picasso may have experienced the same thing.

CARMONA | I think that the thing that interested him in Italy—I was discussing this with my wife last night—was the soft air in Italian poetry and Italian opera; that’s an expression you can’t translate into any other language because, I don’t know, in Hannover for instance there’s no such thing as soft air. (they all laugh) CUPELLINI | I have a question, because you were talking about the Spaniards’ and Picasso’s lack of interest in classical Italian art, unlike the Germans. I think that may not be true in Dalí’s case.

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CARMONA |

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It was completely different with Dalí.

CUPELLINI | He was a Spanish artist too, but I don’t know whether his atten-

tion for classical Italian art was through knowledge of plastic values…

CARMONA | It’s an intellectual construction, there’s no spark of a life force, it’s simply a concrete intellectual construction, the way some people might decide to go to Spain to study Flamenco. You can learn Flamenco, but in the end its a cultural construction because you can’t learn it, but you can experience it when there are so many of us who live or have lived in Spain without ever having had any kind of relationship with Flamenco. For me it’s the kind of cultural rapprochement that there might be with Italian 17th century opera. It isn’t in the Italian register, it doesn’t exist in Italy.

CECCOTTI | The Spanish, for instance, didn’t have the Grand Tour like the others.

CARMONA | Dalí speaks of an intellectual construction on Classicism which is extremely important for us to understand that those who work with the classical can work with an iconographic and literary referent. But this relationship with Italy is difficult to clarify because there are so many of us professors who’ve come here today; it’s a living thing here. I can tell you that Picasso saw beyond the art in museums; Picasso said in 1949 that we don’t have art in museums so much as a vacation in museums. What can one add to that?

BRADBURNE | That we can stop here, we already have enough to fill two books! (everyone laughs)

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Appendices

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“La Nazione” 29 April 1917 Florence pages

“La Nazione” 30 April 1917

The Russian Ballet in Florence

After the Last Russian Ballet Performance in Rome The aesthetic value of the Russian ballet.

The implementation achieved so far.

The Russian “ballet” in Rome

As we have had occasion to announce previously, we will be witnessing the first performance by the “Diaghilev Russian Ballet Company” tomorrow evening, and it will be one of the most important events in our artistic life. The Russian Ballet Company will be performing in Florence under the aegis of a commendable noblewoman, for the benefit of the families of those who have been called up, and it will undoubtedly attract a large audience because this is a special artistic display due to the genius of its creator, Serghei Diaghilev. Russian ballet today is the result of an encounter among various forms of art—dance, choreography, music and painting—which join together to create a new art form that is splendid in its complexity.

The sole performance to be held in Florence will include: Goldoni’s The Women of Good Humour with music by Domenico Scarlatti, arranged by the young and extremely talented composer Vincenzo Tomasini.The choreographer is Massine, the celebrated Massine, while the sets have been designed by Leone Bakst and produced by a talented young Italian painter named Carlo Socrate. The Florentine public will appreciate this admirable and original artistic creation.

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Review by Giannotto Bastianelli It is common knowledge that, under the aegis of the noble and commendable Signora Collacchioni, a magnificent performance of the Russian Ballet is to be staged at the Politeama Fiorentino this evening for the benefit of the families of those who have been called up.The aim of the recital and the magnificence of this artistic performance will attract a very numerous and select audience to the huge theatre this evening. picasso's signature in cyrillic characters on the back of a leaflet from "la favorita", fiesole, fondazione primo conti, archivio conti

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“La Nazione” 2 May 1917 Florence pages

Three Artistes with the Russian Ballet Company Injured in a Railway Accident.

The Diaghilev Russian Ballet Company left our city on Train 1648, which departed the Stazione Centrale at 12.20 yesterday morning, bound for Pisa. As readers will be aware, the company ga.ve a charity performance at the Reale Politeama Fiorentino the evening before last.

News has now reached us of an accident that occurred to the train in Pisa station.

For reasons as yet unknown, the end carriage suffered a very severe jolt when crossing a set of points. Some of the ballerinas with the Diaghilev Company were travelling in the carriage and three of them were injured, albeit apparently not in any serious fashion, following the jolt. The three artistes received medication at the “Red Cross” first aid post and were able to depart at once for Leghorn, whither the Company is bound.

picasso's signature and address on the back of a leaflet from "la favorita", fiesole, fondazione primo conti, archivo conti 84

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“Il Nuovo Corriere” 3 November 1949

A chat with Pablo Picasso The great painter visited Florence yesterday – The wreckage around the Ponte Vecchio and the defence of peace – The “publicity” of modern war

by Augusto Livi Pablo Picasso was in Florence yesterday. We met on the doorstep of the Berchielli Hotel at about 9 o’clock. He was a little bit dazzled by the morning sun on the Lungarno embankment as he gazed at the wreckage around the Ponte Vecchio.

Talking to Picasso in Florence is something of a spiritual event for his interlocutor (if you’ll allow me the rhetorical expression), not because Picasso is very famous or because such encounters are rare, but on account of an irrepressible sense of pride as Florentines and as Europeans, as men bound to something shared, something valuable that we have to defend and to strengthen. That’s when you realise that Florence is a European cultural capital, and that those Italians who agree with that statement and who are working to salvage a heritage that belongs to everyone from the material and spiritual threats looming over our era, and to make it accessible to all, are not alone.

Picasso was returning from an assembly of the World Peace Partisans Committee, and peace was the topic that he was more eager to discuss than anything else. He wanted to talk about a problem that is more closely bound than any other to the fate of our cities, or as Picasso says, to the fate of Michelangelo and to the fate of all the future Michelangelos, to the fate of the stones that make up Palazzo Vecchio and to the fate of the children playing around the Loggia del Porcellino. Hearing him speak, it felt wonderfully human to discover something more than merely the great painter in him, to discover a militant for peace, a simple man close to the lives of millions of his fellow human brings, a man in whom his art and even his life find true meaning above and beyond, and against, the bickering of the politicking aesthetes and the aesthetic politickers who have been trying (and still are trying) to turn him into something worthy of the Musée Grévin, or even of the Kravcenko trial. It was with this encouraging feeling of freedom that Picasso and I strolled through the streets of Florence yesterday. As you can well imagine, it was a very “special” kind of interview, having far less to do with his and my professions and far 86

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more to do with spiritual events, things seen and experienced, or what we might call shared impressions.

He was enchanted by the blue sky, the clear light of the sun. He gazed at the wreckage on the other bank of the Arno with sorrow in his eyes. Picasso is extraordinarily vivacious, but at times he is also motionless, with that look of wisdom and of affection so typical of our people and of Latins in general. His eyes dwell intensely on things with a long, searching gaze; his sense of contemplation is innate and concrete, without any theoretical flights of fancy but often fuelled by the strength of a hope.

“I was thinking of Michelangelo, but most of all I was thinking of others like him who might be born, or who will be born, or who were born, and the war crushed them and overpowered them with these ruins. That is the most important thing of all today: saving man and his works, saving peace”.

Picasso walked bareheaded for a long time, bald and diminutive in his grey suit enlivened by the colour of his waistcoat and his yellow and blue scarf. He is short, like many people from our own south, with the same minute yet solid build of a man doggedly devoted to his work and to his experience of life. He has very pronounced facial features, a face that seems to be made of terracotta like that of a Spanish peasant or a labourer from the Italian south.

“I have known Italy since 1917”, he said, “and I also came to Florence. Back then, I went to see Piero della Francesca; coming back here, seeing the wrecked Arno embankments, I immediately felt the emptiness of this loss, the danger that still hangs over what has managed to survive of all the works, and especially over mankind who creates those works”.

It was the first thing he said to me and he repeated it several times, but each time it was with a different tone and with greater precision. “Why do they only sell postcards with reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s work rather than with the pictures of all this wreckage to the tourists, the foreigners and the Italians, to remind them of the most important thing of all, the thing they tend to forget.

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What would they think they were doing by destroying that”, he added, pointing to Palazzo Vecchio, “would they think that they could win the war that way? The thing I’m most struck by is the way the Germany wrecked the Ponte Vecchio, the Arno embankments and Via Por Santa Maria not because doing so would be of any use to them but as a form of publicity, of advertising, as though they were doing something charming to capture their audience’s attention”.

I asked him what he thought of Italy, a standard question in any interview. “It’s a wonderful country”, he replied forcefully, “I’d like to spend a few weeks here in Florence to rest a while”. How about classical Italian art, I insisted: Do you think it can have an influence on modern art? “Of course it can”, came the reply, “but that isn’t the most important thing”.

I was definitely unlucky, or too lucky, perhaps. I had before me one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living painter and he was apprising me of his ideas as a man rather than as an artist, or rather of his ideas as an “artist as man”. “In Rome in the past few days we discussed some important issues, including art; people from all over the world came to talk about them. One must never flag when one sees that, if the discussion turns to freedom and peace, certain people provide the same kind of answer as has been given in France against Aragon, which has been deprived of its civil rights”.

Picasso was suddenly fired with enthusiasm. “It’s an abomination against which all honest men have protested. That is how they answered, as I was telling you. Some time ago I was speaking with a UN official, who was extremely affable even if he didn’t subscribe to my point of view. He said that US political leaders are eager to make war even when they countenance the possibility of losing it. It’s the US military brass who often say: ‘No, we’re not ready yet’. They’re blind men who can’t see any other way out because in their view there is no other way out, unless they’re prepared to own up to their own mistakes. So they’re preparing more damage like the wreckage we can see here in Florence, more ‘advertisements’, but with the US atomic bomb rather than with German mines”.

Picasso carried on walking, deep in thought. I ventured an insensitive question, albeit indirectly: at this juncture our conversation had taken what one might call a political turn. Picasso mentioned Aragon again, and we talked about an old poem

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of his. “Feu sur Léon Blum—feu sur le les chiens savants de la socialdemocratie…”.

“You’re a communist”, I said, “and many people would be interested to know why that is”.

It was as though something had clicked inside him. He said: “It isn’t a matter of taste but a matter of logic. I don’t believe that any reasonable person, anyone who examines issues in any depth, can adopt a different position. I repeat, it isn’t a matter of whim but of reason”.

That was all he said, but I realised that he was alluding to what he had said earlier about peace and the defence of peace. In any event, Picasso isn’t the kind of man to bear a grudge over an inopportune question. He carried on talking with composure; he stopped at a shop and bought a green velvet suit for his son, who isn’t yet three; he approached a fishmonger’s stall and was mesmerised by the colours of the fish on display, the pinks, the whites and the greys; and he started chatting with a postman who was popping a letter into a basket let down from an upper window.

I walked him back to the Uffizi, and as we passed in front of Palazzo Vecchio again he said: “I saw it yesterday evening. I don’t like the spotlight, it makes it look like cardboard”. He intends to visit all of the galleries including Palazzo Pitti. I said:“You have to go down, because you can’t get through over the Ponte Vecchio. “Another mistake since I’ve been in Florence”, I said, “but mine is less serious. There are others that are more serious, like the mistake made by those who destroyed the gallery, and we’re still alive to prevent it”.

I left him by the entrance to the Uffizi so he could commence another, deeper and more personal dialogue. The crowds brushed by this elderly gentleman with his beret, but they didn’t recognise him even though they’ve probably heard an awful lot about him. I thought of his courage, of his simplicity, of the spirit of truth that pervades both the man and the artist, of how he has renewed his own art, of how he has renewed the art of Europe and of the world, of how he has chosen his own path. Churchill once said that he would willingly have kicked Picasso in the pants because he didn’t like his painting. Yet it has to be admitted that Europe and the world at large owe a far greater debt in every way to this old gentleman who is struggling for the peace and survival of the human race and its works, than they do to old Winnie who lays claim to merit for a “third world war” and for painting.

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Selezione bibliografica

Primo Conti, Pablo Picasso, in «Lo Spettatore. Rivista di Lettere, Arti, Scienze, Politica», I (1922), 2, pp. 188-194.

Maria Grazia Messina-Jolanda Nigro Covre, Il cubismo dei cubisti: ortodossi/ eretici a Parigi intorno al 1912, Roma, Officina, 1986.

Picasso in Italia, catalogo della mostra (Venezia 7 giugno-9 settembre 1990), catalogo a cura di Giorgio Cortenuova, Milano, Nuove edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990.

Picasso, Miró, Dalí y los orígenes del arte contemporáneo en España, 1900-1936 (Francoforte e Madrid, Shrin Kunsthalle e Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) a cura di Eugenio Carmona e Christoph Vitali, 1991.

Giovanni Papini-Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio III, 1916-1918, La Grande Guerra, a cura di Mario Richter, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Fondazione Primo Conti Fiesole, 2002.

John Richardson, A life of Picasso.The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Enrique Mallen, Digital Catalogue Raisonné, On-line Picasso Project.

Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Giovani e arrabbiati: la nascita della modernità, catalogo della mostra (Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi 12 marzo-17 luglio 2011) a cura di Eugenio Carmona, Milano Skira, 2011.

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