Pablo Picasso and the Truth of Greek Art

In a brilliant article for the exhibition Picasso and Greece, organized by the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros in 2004, Niki Loizidi, Professor of Art History at the University of Thessaloniki discusses the role of classicism in Picasso’s art as a counterpart to Modernism. According to Loizidi, Picasso juxtaposes the character of the Apollonian youth in some of his works from the early 1930’s to the figure of the Minotaur, a symbol of modernist distortion. “The juxtaposition of the Minotaur-Picasso and the Apollonian figure of the young girl may embody the symbolic juxtaposition of two formative turning points of western art: the classical tradition and the modernist revolution”. The final death of the Minotaur is interpreted as a victory of classicism over modernism. It is argued that in spite of Picasso’s decisive contribution to the modernist revolution, the artist did not hesitate to honor a classical structuring of reality, a declared “truth” that he searched for throughout his life. Loizidi’s argument is corroborated in the present paper by examining it under Timothy Clark’s (2013) recent proposal that Picasso’s work (and in particular cubism) involved a form of classical framing of reality: He states: “Physical reality is something the mind or imagination can only reach out to incompletely, for objects resist our categories; and painting can speak to this ultimate non-humanness of things very well; but only by giving their otherness the form of a certain architecture, a certain rectilinear?indeed, ‘cubic’?constructedness.” While classicism and the presence of the Apollonian frame declare victory in the end, as Loizidi contests, I would claim that this still allows Picasso to establish the permanence of an ungovernable reality (the monstruous Minotaur) as an external “untruth,” that is simply impossible for the human eye to fully conceive. It is only through the infrastructure of classical art that reality can even be thought of, it is the only “truth”. To quote Clark, “Painting’s ultimate coldness is only excusable (only nontrivial) because it follows desire’s path. It mimics the process?the geography?of splitting and projection, but only by having those movements of mind and feeling become nothing but moves in an aesthetic game. ‘Expressiveness’ cedes to choreography.” The paper examines a range of artworks by Picasso from the late 1920’s and 1930’s that were clearly under the influence of Greek art, and analyses the recurrring presence of