13 - Picturing Picasso : Revisiting Paul Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso (1950)

Summary

Abstract

A documentary by art critic Paul Haesaerts, Visite à Picasso (1950), shows Pablo Picasso painting on a glass pane placed in between the artist and the camera. Apart from reconstructing the film's production context, this chapter investigates in what way this lyrical documentary responds to Haesaerts's notion of cinéma critique, a form of lens-based art criticism. In addition, it analyzes how Haesaerts combines his attention for the temporal development of Picasso's linear drawings with an interest in post-cubist spatiality. Lastly, this chapter demonstrates how Haesaerts presents Picasso as the ultimate embodiment of the image of the artist as a genius, alluding to both ancient myths of artistic creation and the modern celebrity cult of mass media.

Keywords: Art Documentary, Pablo Picasso, Paul Haesaerts, Film and the Visual Arts, Artistic Creation

Picasso and Film

Shortly after the World War II, Pablo Picasso became a veritable celebrity, his artworks elaborately reproduced and his personality widely discussed in both art journals and the popular press. Leading photographers such as Brassai, Dora Maar, Paul Strand, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gjon Mili, and Jacques Henri Lartigue portrayed Picasso, who appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Look, L’Express, and other magazines and photo journals. This abundant photographic imagery of Picasso and his work went hand in hand with cinematic explorations of the life and works of the artist. In the Cold War era, Picasso was surrounded by film-makers, actors, and film producers. In 1949, he appeared in La Vie commence demain (Nicole Védrès, 1949) and in 1950 he created his first film in collaboration with Frédéric Rossif and Robert Picault. The late 1940s and early 1950s also marked the heyday of the experimental and lyrical art documentary. Film-makers like Alain Resnais, Luciano Emmer, Glauco Pellegrini, and Robert Flaherty presented the art documentary as a highly poetic genre that enabled them to combine cinematic experiments with artistic profundity. Strikingly, each of these directors created a landmark film on Picasso. Glauco Pellegrini's L’Esperienza del cubismo (1949) explores Picasso's pioneering role in the evolution of cubism, created with the assistance of painter Renato Guttuso. Other mid-century films by Robert J. Flaherty, Helge Ernst, and Alain Resnais focus on Picasso's dramatic portrayal of the atrocities in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.