The Success and Failure of Picasso

"As the title suggests, it’s about where he thinks he went right and where he thinks he went wrong. The success and the failure comes down to his relationship to the public. He says the kind of success offered to artists now by bourgeois institutions is not something they want to accept, and that this is for their own sake. The book was published in ’65, so this must have been in Berger’s mind when he was offered the Booker. So it’s also important as a book for thinking about Berger. He quotes Picasso writing to his dealer, Marius de Zayas, and explaining why there’s huge formal variety in his work. He says, “Whenever I’ve had something to say, I’ve said it in the manner in which it ought to be said.” That is a good template for what Berger has done throughout his life. We were talking earlier about the shift from painting to writing. The thinking behind that is that painting was no longer the best way he had for saying what he wanted to say, writing was, and within that there’s the formal variety of all the different sorts of writing Berger has done: poetry, poems, plays, novels, short fiction, essays. A lot of that is the animosity Berger built up over his career. When he was the art critic for the New Statesman in the 50s in London, he was very combative and made quite a lot of enemies. He had a Marxian approach informed by people like Frederick Antal, who had been his mentor. Picasso was an artist whom he enormously respected and thought was very important. But he thought that various things about the way he presented himself had been harmful for his work. A lot of Berger’s writing about art comes from the position of someone who had tried to make art themselves. It’s studio criticism, in the sense that he’s trying to think as a fellow artist. Picasso had become such a sacred cow at that point that that seemed pretty presumptuous. He is such a big figure that people become possessive of their way of approaching him being the correct one. Also, Berger is not an art historian in the meticulously footnoted fashion. That isn’t why you’d read him. To art historians, that can be very frustrating. Which were the reviews that you read? It’s an essayistic perspective. Often in critical writing, I think the more academic it is the less honest it can be about what criticism actually does, which is to present you a subjective perspective as a way into a subject. Looking at it more widely, the book is Berger using the process of writing about this figure as a way of working out what he wants to do. That makes it interesting, not just if you’re interested in Berger, but because it gives him an optic, an insight into how Picasso shaped his career. It doesn’t fit with everyone’s. Picasso’s such a varied and impossible to pin down character. What can be produced in the process of trying to get there is the interesting thing."