This was ‘the only time when Picasso felt entirely at home’, 5 and it is when Berger is most at home with Picasso, finding him purposeful, attuned to others’ minds, desires and needs.
The next few years, during which Picasso found himself fruitfully participating in a group that included Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and André Derain, were ‘a period of great excitements, but also a period of inner certainty and security’. Berger likens the witchy women in the painting, three of whom glare at the viewer, to ‘the palings of a stockade through which eyes look out as at a death’. It constituted a ‘frontal attack’ on ‘life as Picasso found it – the waste, the disease, the ugliness, and the ruthlessness’. Berger describes this large oil as ‘clumsy, overworked, unfinished’, yet acknowledges that its sheer brutality is astonishing. It was in 1907 that Picasso produced Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, an angular and aggressive painting of five naked prostitutes, not exhibited till 1916. But Picasso exulted in the spirit of the moment, becoming the most energetic driver of ‘a revolution in the visual arts as great as that which took place in the early Renaissance’. In 1907, he ‘ provoked Cubism’ 2 – the italics are Berger’s, indicating his view that the artist was far from being this iconoclastic movement’s architect or philosopher-in-chief. Berger argues that Picasso was a thrillingly rebellious visionary, but only for about ten years of his long life (1881–1973).
Written against the background of the early years of parenthood, the book often proceeds in a straightforward, stern manner redolent of the twilit gruffness one feels in the presence of small children and tries hard not to inflict on them. 1 It cannot have been a period of uninterrupted contemplation, though, since Berger and his partner Anya Bostock, employed in Geneva at the United Nations, had two children in 19. His biographer Joshua Sperling describes ‘the quiet of exile’ – ‘projects unfurl with greater patience’, ‘a séance with the past becomes easier’, ‘voices a metropolis would drown out can be heard’. By the time of the move he was established as a combative art critic, but for the next few years he concentrated on writing fiction. The Success and Failure of Picasso appeared in 1965, three years after John Berger left England for Switzerland.
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