Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
senses. It demands we save history. For between the primitive fusion with a world "full of gods" at our origins and any final destiny of re-identification with cosmic Spirit lies interposed the...
...Consciousness represents the inside of nature, claims their new vision--and says St...
...For the iconoclastic Hebrew subversion of our primitive symbiosis with the sacred via nature led to an inward turn, a "centrifugal deepening" of soul-space and time wherein the Divine Name was to be discovered behind our basic imaginative figuring of an external world...
...It wanders into a satire of Puccini one minute, into some mime the next, and into homosexual jokes after that...
...Paul, sounding the depths of nature's soul in him, she groans to be replenished with Spirit--"that God may be all in all...
...than in the presence of Picasso himself...
...The streets surrounding the museum have been clogged with peddlers selling T-shirts and cheap reproductions...
...For not otherwise than through us will nature become spirited...
...When we stop to think that he had that side to him which Papa represents in the film, we have to laugh...
...On the contrary, his subjects were very peaceful--still lifes, nudes, landscapes, idylls...
...A dozen new coffee-table books on Picasso have appeared in all the bookstore windows, and galleries have scrounged up any Picasso ephemera they could with the hope of luring in some of the overflow crowds from the museum...
...The exhibition at the museum lent credibility to these ideas...
...In its immediate aftermath, an astounding inventiveness was unleashed in Picasso's painting accompanied by an equally astounding violence and aggressiveness...
...More disturbing still are some of the experiments with multiple points of view that would lead to Cubism...
...There is another possibility, however, one that Barfield recommends...
...Is such a vision finally so different from the Upanishadic vision of the identification of atman, or soul, with Brahman, the Nameless One...
...But at the funeral Papa comes back to life again, and thereafter accompanies Pablo on all his adventures...
...Whereupon a man emerges from the sheet and accepts one of the cigars Serior Picasso starts handing out...
...must add: In no way to relate the former with the past, and the latter with the future of the world, is to seek to deprive history, and perhaps time itself, of all religious significance...
...Here they take on the character of a dismemberment, a cracking open of female anatomy, a breaking on the wheel...
...At the exhibition the indivisibility of these two sides of Picasso is apparent in every phase of his career, but nowhere more than around the time of ' 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1900...
...The film really is better in light of the exhibition...
...He advises we remember our Hebrew roots, and the Hebrew strategy of dealing with nature that no longer represented the Presence hiding outside us, behind phenomena...
...It is the look of someone numb with pain...
...The only modern art to which this sort of material bears comparison is Mad comics...
...something ontologically new is at stake in our wrestling ourselves and nature independent of the Creator...
...The move to Paris in 1900 was a liberation not only from the academic tradition, but from the cloistered culture of Spain itself...
...Our scientific imagination has succeeded in transfiguring environing nature, once teeming with divine voices, into a literal idol, a dumb, dead thing which does not speak to us...
...The newlyweds form a partnership and open Picassoland, where Papa continues to conduct tours through Pablo's room even when Pablo is on his deathbed...
...Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toldas are played by comedians Bernard Cribbins and Wilfred Bramble, the cast's only Englishmen, which is itselfa spoffy, nasty anti-fagjoke...
...In fact, the visual doubles entendres on which this film relies are very like Airplane!'s...
...The expressions on these women's faces range from a mixture of agony and submission to the impassive, mask-like gaze Picasso derived from African art...
...But equally, not to strive to realize the sameness--to renege from the Supreme Identity--is to deny the Holy Spirit...
...The film is more at home in the company of other summer movies like Airplane...
...It looks as if a volcano is erupting under there...
...What I like about Papa is the implication he carries of a certain ruthlessness, even a potential for fascism and violence, in Pablo himself...
...Commonweal: 568...
...When the Nazis occupy Paris, Pablo hides people in his studio by having them pose as fanciful lamps and furniture be's designed...
...To this a true Christian...
...He often slashed and gouged at the female form, literally scribbling over it with the brush in places and disfiguring it...
...I can only conclude with one of Barfield's more haunting paragraphs...
...In the way he painted women, especially, there was an unmistakable sexual rage...
...Scatter-brained as it is, TheAdventures ofPicasso is also a richly black little comedy...
...If there is a single painting that represents the break with the past and with all historical restraints, ' 'Les Demoiselles" is it...
...In the last analysis, The Adventures ofPicasso doesn't really get Picasso right...
...Suddenly, the artist's father (Hans Alfredson, who co-scripted the film) bursts through the door...
...Not to realize to the uttermost the otherness of GOd from ourselves is to deny the Father...
...In the Paris atelier, Papa keeps picking up the apple junior is painting in order to take bites from it...
...The erotic and aesthetic alterations in his life sometimes came in dizzying succession, And through all the paintings of women in all the stylesruns that.tendency to combine idealization with ravishment, with rage...
...II Screen ARS GRATIAARTIS TRIP TO PICASSOLAND IIN TAGEDanielsson's TheAdventures ofPicasso, the great artist (Gosta Ekman) ultimately lives in a place called I"Picassoland," on the model of Disneyland...
...These last are often exceedingly tasteless...
...Whenever he changed mistresses, he also changed styles...
...If we didn't, we'd cry.COLINL...
...and out of the conflict between these two ways of consuming an apple, Cubism is born...
...In another of the film's sub-plots, Pablo eludes the clutches of harridan art collector ' 'Ingrid Guggenbeim" only to have Papa marry her...
...For between the primitive fusion with a world "full of gods" at our origins and any final destiny of re-identification with cosmic Spirit lies interposed the task of redeeming the fissuring, bloody sweep of the times and spaces holonomists now tell us we have co-authored...
...There usually seems to be a conflict like this between Papa's actions and Pablo's...
...The proud papa is not attending to his son's birth as we supposed...
...Time need not be the play of "eternal return...
...The Adventures of Picasso is rather clever about this when it turns the dialectic into a father-son relationship...
...This, any deeply religious man may feel, whatever terminology he may have learnt to employ...
...It should come as no surprise, then, if holonomic epistemology is right, that the emptiness of nature is reflected in the hollowness of men's souls...
...The move also set free in Picasso's art all those traits which Catholic Spain bred in itssons expressly for the purpose of repression--traits which were never supposed to be turned loose, particularly in the hands of a'genius so brilliant he was beyond any authority save his own...
...Thus does the father become a kind of alter-ego for the son...
...Yet for all its inadequacies and limitations, its plain silliness, the film does have an unexpected grasp of who its subject was...
...At the appropriate point in young Pablo's life, his father dies...
...Papa becomes a Nazi officer whose sole duty, zealously but fruitlessly carried out, is to search the studio...
...In ways the East does not, Western religion ambiguously blesses the differentiating "fall into consciousness" and choice which gradually "disgodded" natureand expelled us from that innocent symbiotic garden wherein God walked with our ancestors "in the cool of the evening breeze...
...Since Papa is the one made to bear this onerous symbolic weight in the film, there is even a suggestion here that this side of Picasso was part of his Spanish heritage...
...I mean something more fundamental than subject matter shows, something so basic it came out in technique...
...Unlike the Greeks, for whom the disgodding of nature served the study of outward phenomena, the Jews disgodded with equal vehemence, but for the purpose of finding the nameless Divine Name hidden in the human heart and soul...
...The father and son in the f'flm are a buffoon and a mouse...
...It's inescapably paradoxical~ because it seems to manifest all phases of some universal dialectic--thesis and antithesis--at the same time...
...I don't mean that he painted scenes of rape and pillage...
...15:28) According to this reformed Pharisee, it is this visionary act that heals the cosmic schism, that reconciles penultimate mother nature, through us, with her Creator...
...For we fabricate ourselves by fabricating a world...
...This device allows the movie to make insinuations about Picasso's character, to suggest that just being Picasso involved a moral expediency and self-excusing arrogance...
...The mind's task is to awaken and decipher that code--in the large sense, what science is about, the very science that until recently had banished God to his heaven and faced us with incommunicative atoms "blindly running...
...Not the least of the attempts to exploit the situation has been the release of The Adventures of Picasso itself...
...I Cor...
...He's celebrating the blessed event in a brothel, where it's obvious he's well.known...
...The idea is to retrieve the image of the universe that God used in creating it, to name it as he does, and to speak in his tongue...
...The real Picasso was a tiger...
...Genius of Picasso's magnitude contains all possibilities within itself...
...Yet because of its irreverence toward Picasso's father, this inebriated film stumbles into an interesting idea or two about the painter...
...New York itself has looked like Picassoland this summer during the definitive exhibition of Picasso's work at the Museum of Modern Art...
...The boundless One, holonomists are likely to claim, is tacitly in the many, secretly coded in our blood and tissue...
...WESTERBECK,JR...
...History is religiously significant, claims the Western reading of ultimate implication, because history's fissuring of cosmic harmony alters the ontological relationship between creature and Creator...
...The exhibition may even be better in light of the film, which has a surprisingly astute comment to make on Picasso's life...
...It's all so very Spanish...
...In an opening scene dealing with Picasso's birth, a woman lies writhing beneath a sheet...
...Examples from this period--the "First Communion" of 1894-95, or "Science and Charity" (1897), in both of which Papa appears--make it clear how repressive that tradition and the society it represented were...
...This gag feels very true to life...
...As art critic John Richardson has pointed out, there was a direct connection between Picasso's love life and his painting...
...we are her big chance at second birth...
...The comedy here is pretty low-brow...
...This enhances the comedy...
...The movie follows the story of Picasso's life about as I0 October 1980:567 closely as a drunk walks a straight line, and like the drunk, it's funny for its divergences...
...By a small leap we might even imagine that the artist depicted in this f'dm is the same revealed by the exhibition: somebody whose enormous creativity was also a form of destructiveness, an energy for life that was almost murderous at times...
...Picasso was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of Western culture, one of the finest specimens that we have produced...
...But if something like this is possible, Barfield goes on, then in retrospect the objectivizing scientific revolution begins to look as if it were part of that process whereby we liberated ourselvesfrom an unwitting and unfree participation in the sacred cosmos and prepared for a willing, consciousparticipation--and thus a material world deliberatelyhallowed by imagination reborn in God's great Darkness...
...To get a sense of this historical rite of passage, now with holonomic eyes, I found it useful to return to Bruno Snell's essay on the Greek gift of objectivity and soul language, The Discovery of Mind, to Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, to Julian Jaynes's The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and finally, my own favorite, to Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances...
...As a student in Barcelona Picasso mastered the academic tradition of Spanish painting by the age of fourteen or fifteen...
...Papa suggests that there was a demon side to Pablo's personality...
...Now at this point some transpersonalists would advise the remedy of returning to the wisdom of primitives...
...If transpersonalists decide to honor the implications of Western history, then it would seem they must honor the Western religious romance with earth...
...Where the film is concerned, however, the opportunism pays off for us as well as the distributor...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 18
