TOUCHED BY YOUR PRESENCE
Top left: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, by
Pablo Picasso. Below: The Creation of Adam,
1508-12, by Michelangelobox, the sensitivity of human vision is
so remarkable that it allows us to recog-
nise a familiar presence from hundreds
of yards away by tiny shifts in its stance.
And the information gained by these tiny
shifts is as intimate as any close-up.P
icasso is not principally thought
of as a portraitist, yet portraiture
was his most insistent subject.
He was also a sneaky so and so, who
enjoyed playing games with his viewers,
and the insistent portraiture is easy to
miss. When I was making the Channel
4 documentary series Picasso: Magic, Sex
and Death with John Richardson, the
great Picasso scholar, I was constantly
surprised by the hidden portraiture we
were encountering. That Dora Maar was
the tragic Weeping Woman was familiar
knowledge, but it was Richardson who
pointed out to me that Picasso’s other
sign for her was a hairy armpit.I
n St. Petersburg, in the Hermitage,
there’s a Cubist still life from 1913
of a violin: a fragmented musical
instrument reduced to its essence—the
usual Cubist set-up. Except that one day,
a Hermitage curator happened to be ex-
amining the picture in raking light when
he noticed microscopic letters scratched
into the broken outlines of the iddle.
He peered closer. And found the word
“Eva”, written secretly in the recesses of
the picture, where no one could notice it.
Eva Gouel was Picasso’s woman behind
the arras at the time. To lm her hidden
name, we unleashed our biggest lenses
on the miniscule calligraphy, and still
had a hell of a job seeing it.
More overtly, the 1931 painting
known as Large Still Life With Pedestal
Table, now in the Picasso Museum
in Paris, shows a perky jug on a table
surrounded by a cornucopia of ripe
and colourful fruit—melons, apples,
peaches. The moment you look at it, you
feel its sexual tingle. I’ll never forget the
glee on John Richardson’s face as he
cupped and rounded his hands in fruity
approximation of the gorgeous bulg-
es sported by Marie-Thérèse Walther,
Picasso’s nubile mistress of the moment,
whom the sneaky matador was evoking
as a sun-ripened bowl of fruit, while he
himself was, of course, the pert jug with
the big spout.
This inbuilt playfulness in matters
of portraiture is discussed, fascinat-
ingly, in Françoise Gilot’s indispensible
memoir, Life With Picasso, republished
recently by the New York Review of Books.OPPOSITE PAGE: THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, IL, USA/GIFT OF MRS GILBERT W. CHAPMAN IN MEMORY OF CHARLES B. GOODSPEED/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES ©SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS, LONDON 2019 KAHNWEILERVANITY FAIR ON ART NOVEMBER 2019The image
of Julius
Caesar they
sent around
the word
feels like
someone
real.
But it isn’t
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