Was Picasso a child genius?

Picasso, Woman Combing her hair, 1906

The recent exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre (Picasso: Legacy of Youth, July 2022) was both informative and fascinating. Focused around a handful of seven Picasso works owned by the Sainsbury Collection, the exhibition (and accompanying book) provides a context and examples from the work of some contemporaries to provide a rough idea of Picasso’s development, in particular his eclecticism – how he borrowed widely from others. Clearly, young Picasso seemed precociously talented – there is a life drawing executed when he was just 15, which is truly remarkable. 

Picasso, Academic Study, 1896 (when he was 15)

At the same time, his talent stretched well beyond simply becoming a member of one or other movement. With the exception of Cubism, Picasso seems to have played with components of any number of styles from his contemporaries and predecessors, including (in this exhibition) Gaugin, Monet, Goya, and Toulouse-Lautrec. 

The key question that the contributors to the catalogue wrestled with is that “legacy of youth”. Was Picasso was a child genius, or did his true talent only emerge as an adult? Picasso himself had some seemingly relevant statements on the subject, quoted in large type on the walls of the exhibition: 

“I have never done children’s drawings. Never. Even when I was very small.” [from Helen Parmelin, Picasso Dit, 1966]

This remark, even allowing for Picasso’s gift for stating quotable sayings, seems quite possible, if his father was pushing him through a conventional art training from a very young age. But some of the contributors to the catalogue are not content to leave things there. Paul Greenhalgh, the exhibition curator, describes this fallacy about great artists, that they somehow emerged from the cradle with all their creative talents ready for us. Vasari, in his Lives of the Great Painters, repeatedly retells this myth when describing Giotto, Raphael and Michelangelo. You would think that today we are beyond such mythmaking, and yet this catalogue contains several examples of just the same kind of thinking. 

The most likely explanation seems to be what the catalogue reveals, the slightly less incredible story behind Picasso’s apparently magical talent. His father was an art teacher of a very traditional kind, who trained his son from a very early age using standard techniques such as copying and life drawing (tantalisingly, the catalogue does not reveal further details of this training). The result, it appears to me, was that Picasso was able to work within the classical tradition or not, but crucially was able to choose either route. It wasn’t magic.  

The catalogue itself provides a justification for this view of early Picasso. William Rothenstein, who taught art at the Royal College for many years, stated: 

At the Royal College of Art I tried, by demonstration before the students, to hint at a logical method both of drawing and painting, only to find it consistently disregarded; yet for tennis, billiards or cricket, the advice of professionals is carefully followed … why should painters alone disdain discipline? [page 45]

This would appear to explain Picasso’s own statement that he never painted childish paintings, even when young. His father appears to have taught him “specific skills, mainly acquired through drawing from life” [Haigh, page 45]. Greenhalgh explains that statement as “he isn’t suggesting possession of early genius, but that he was encouraged from the start to work in a quasi-professional manner” [catalogue, page 58]. Somewhat like John Stuart Mill being taught as if he were an adult from before the age of five, and only much later discovering his own childhood. 

Here in the catalogue, however, we have authors contributing to the mythmaking. Here is John Onians on Picasso’s magical ability to learn from his father just by watching: 

just by watching his father go through the processes involved in art making, whether drawing or painting, mixing pigments or creating a composition, [Picasso] could , unconsciously, become equipped with some of the neural resources of a mature artist. [John Onians, page 38]

If this were true, artists’ models would be among the greatest artists of all time. Sadly, that does not appear to be the case.  

Onians makes other grand claims for Picasso, reinforcing the idea of painter-as-genius: 

Picasso was famous for the exceptional intensity of his looking: which means that , whatever the object of his concentration, that looking will have had a greater impact on his nervous system than it would in someone else.” [Onians, page 29] 

Clearly, the artist as superman. Moreover, Picasso was an artist uniquely tuned to recognizing bulls: 

For a start, Picasso would have possessed exceptionally rich neural resources for the perception of bulls, not only because his father often took him to bull fights as a child, but because he had himself studied them intensely [Onians, page 38] 

This reminds me of the time I worked in a cinema and was told by one of the customers that they were coming to see The Sound of Music for the 17^th time. I should have checked his neural resources immediately. 

Perhaps I am being unfair to John Onians, but I have little patience for someone who has written a whole book about “neural art” and yet appears not to understand the meaning of the word:

Indirectly, Picasso himself have some responsibility for persuading me to write about art in neural terms. He … advocated an engagement with art that was not mental but visceral.  [catalogue, page 21]

I thought that neural meant “mental”, rather than visceral.

What did I think of the pictures? From looking at the Picasso works in this exhibition, I get the feeling that Picasso had a remarkable ability to emulate other artists, but also to stand back from the context in which they painted; he could work within their ideas, or parody them, as he chose. For example, the exhibition includes two nude drawings: Woman Combing her Hair (1906) and Academic Study, an early drawing from 1896, when Picasso was just 15. Paul Greenhalgh describes the Academic Study as moving away from earlier classical studies, yet ten years later, the Woman Combing her Hair looks to be a very classically-inspired image. The Academic Study does appear to be in the tradition of the end of the 19^th century figure drawings, such as Pierre Vallette, teaching art in Manchester:

Pierre Vallette, Life Drawing, 1910-12 (Manchester) 

Greenhalgh describe the Academic Study in words that could equally be applied to the Vallette Life Drawing: “he is an ordinary man of his times, sporting a moustache … he is the polar opposite of the classical ideal”. [Greenhalgh, catalogue page 52]

My point is that Picasso from an early age was able to jump in or out of the classical tradition, but at the same time retain almost instinctively a classical way of working, so that even many of his most iconoclastic works turn out to have classical aspects to them.  The Demoiselles d’Avignon is, after all, not so far from the Three Graces.

One essay makes a good point here. Michael Cary talks about John Berger’s interpretation of Picasso in his Success and Failure of Picasso (1972). For Berger, Picasso’s facility at drawing and composition meant that he never got past the childhood repetition of his slick facility. Instead, claims Cary, following Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso “adopted the language / visual style of other painters to create original works of his own”. As an explanation for Picasso’s leap from emulation to originality, it is as good as I have heard.