Poisoned genius

...It is the same unredeemed, hopeless heaviness the same mystic dread and anguish...

...One may not know Picasso or one may ignore him through spiritual laziness, indolence, or for moral and ascetic reasons, since unquestionably his is a morbid art...

...The Atlantic excerpts led me to an essay I remembered by an Orthodox philosopher and priest, Ser-gius Bulgakov...

...His behavior went beyond the egbcentricity of a Frank Lloyd Wright or Rilke or Chopin...

...The work stands or falls on its own merits...

...It is rare that a person who is a genius at art is also so balanced at living that the fact leaves a mark: but the same thing is true, probably, of people who do particularly well at anything...

...This may be what many of Huffington's critics object to: Are we to reject Picasso's art because he was a bad man...

...New York ran a feature on the controversy, which was widely reported elsewhere...

...It can be argued that art has no effect at all...

...Are we to reject it even if some of his dreadful attitudes toward life found their way into the art...

...Should we accept a wonderfully done depiction of a diabolical state of mind as if it had only an aesthetic importance, and made no moral difference at all...

...but a deeper and more important nerve had been touched as well, an article of post-Enlightenment faith...

...deprived of this tiny (he was five-foot-two) torturer, this 'sadistic manipulator.' by separation or death...

...If art can make us sense this, it can lead in other directions as well: There is an evil romanticism about Nazism, and art fed some of it in the work of Wagner, and in the thought of Nietzsche...

...But it is not always possible or indeed right to do so, just as it would not be right in reading The Brothers Karamazov to skip the pages on rebellion and pass at once to Zossima...

...He left a trail of terribly damaged lives, and the most affectionate accounts of his life are often those offered by visitors who took charming photographs of a strong, compact man with a powerful gaze, and then left...

...the first son drinks and drugs himself to death, and a grandson, barred from Picasso's funeral, swallows bleach and dies...

...a nice couple of choices...

...It is curious that the same powerful and uncanny impression is produced by his other pictures of the same period in spite of their wholly inoffensive subjects: still life, a bottle and tumbler, a vase of fruit...

...That was a woman who had written about Maria Callas, after all...

...They are so artistically convincing and mystically true it is impossible to doubt for a moment the artist's sincerity and the mystical realism of his art...

...Julie Baumgold, author of the New York article, lists a few of them: "Are you any less of a genius if, as Picasso did, you hold a lit cigarette to your mistress's cheek...

...Lawrence's belief: don't trust the teller, trust the tale...

...Picasso approaches the feminine, Bulgakov writes, "in unutterable humiliation . . . indeed, as the very corpse of beauty...

...OF SEVERAL WHIPS John Garvey POISONED GENIUS WHEN ART IS FOR EVIL'S SAKE Last June Arianna Stassino-pulos Huffington's iconoclastic Picasso: Creator and Destroyer appeared, and The Atlantic printed an excerpt that was more like a digest, excellently done, than most excerpts are...

...Interesting writers are the sort of people who get noticed and attract biographers...

...Picasso's last wife shoots herself, one mistress hangs herself, another goes crazy...

...The reaction was strong and often nasty...

...If the lives of hard-driving accountants or cardiologists or chain-store executives drew biographers the way the lives of writers and artists do, the level of decency would likely be just as thin...

...It would be objectionable if we claimed that they were good or bad artists on moral grounds-if, for example, Dostoevski were to be judged a good artist simply because he espoused a Christian world view and Lawrence a bad one because his was more or less sloppy paganism...

...A number of art critics were particularly scornful, in no small part because a woman who was not blessed with their sort of thin credentials had dared to write about one of the untouchables, one of those who must be revered no matter what...

...As a Christian, I find what Dostoevski has to say fascinating, on Christian grounds and no doubt there are sloppy pagans who like Lawrence for the same reason...

...The question is, in Picasso's case whether the dreadful life left its mark in the art...

...the ruined lives which, in the author's view, were finally as much his products as were his paintings and sculptures...

...Nazi camp commandants listened to Bach and murdered children...

...His closer acquaintances-Max Jacob, Apollinaire-were often betrayed and his family was left wounded, where its members were left alive...

...an uncanny power flows from them...

...By the same token, Dostoevski could be considered a bad artist because of his anti-Semitism...

...Is your art poisoned if you leave your children scratching at the gates of Notre-Dame-de-Vie...

...It is easier to make a moral evaluation of the art that comes to us in words, because it so often has an implied moral weight...

...That was part of it...

...Walker Percy has written somewhere about the relative scarcity of great writers who were also decent people...

...Evil as well as good can be reinforced by art...

...What does it say if...

...But it is important for me to appreciate Lawrence as well, as an artist, and for the pagan to appreciate Dostoevski...

...The book emphasized Picasso's cruelty, his demonic manipulativeness...

...Or is art a special case...

...From there, to Picasso...

...The most interesting issue Huffington raises is whether we can divorce an evaluation of the work of the artist from an evaluation of the life...

...I ordinarily agree with D.H...

...Is art capable only of uplifting us, and never of degrading us...

...I think it offers a confirmation of Huffington's final judgment...

...But what is it we are to trust in the tale...

...His paintings are "something like miracle-working ikons of a demonic nature...

...Though the book was received poorly by many art critics and art historians, and though I have read only the Atlantic excerpts, I think Huf-fington has raised some important questions which her critics either did not, or did not want to, see...

...Nabokov was one pagan who could never make that leap...

...Hgocentricity is one thing...

...He is frightening because he is demonically genuine...

...He mentioned Chekhov and Eudora Welty...

...Or does it make any difference at all to our moral lives...

...We know, if we have been touched intimately by a line of poetry or a passage of music or a painting, that the sense of glory we feel has something to do with the glory of the night sky or the surge of the North Atlantic-and if we are believers, we sense too that it has to do with what Dante called "the love that moves the sun and other stars...

...What hell there must be in the artist's soul if its expressions are of this kind...

...To look at them for any length of time gives one a kind of mystical dizziness...

...You may not be any less a genius, but the further question-is your art poisoned?-may be worth going into...

...But something in our own experience tells us that this is not enough of a refutation, strong as it is, of art's possible moral weight...

...These questions are important ones and can't be answered too easily...

...an apparently deliberate cruelty and ma-nipulativeness is another, and Picasso had it in gallons...

...He was, among other things, fascinated by the Marquis de Sade...

...You know, for example, where Lawrence, Dostoevski, or Dickens stand on a number of issues which matter to the way we live and make choices...

...A kind of dark force emanates from them all and makes itself almost tangibly felt...

...That is the near-doctrine of the creative person as a special sort of being whose art exists in a pure state, apparently unconnected to the life of the artist, who is not in any case to be judged by ordinary standards...

...It , is not easy to tackle in earnest Picasso's representation of the world and to overcome it...

...It can be found in A Bulgakov Anthology (London, SPCK, 1976) and first appeared in 1918, before Picasso's fascination with the Marquis de Sade was public knowledge, and long before many of the terrible events in the Huffington book took place...