The line of the head bending towards the mount of the moon states that the heart will be capable of tact.
It is unfortunate that this hand should be invaded by threadlike lines which come from the mount of Venus and lead one to suppose that love will play too great a part in its possessor’s life.
Notes: Aptitude for all the arts.
Greediness—activity and indolence both at the same time. Religious spirit without austerity. Cultured mind. Sarcastic wit without malignance. Independence.
5
Jung on Picasso
HAVING seen the retrospective exhibition of his works at the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1932, Jung wrote an article on Picasso for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Almost at once Zervos’ Cahiers d’Art translated it and printed the greater part in very, very small letters, preceded by two pages of indignant refutation in much larger type. What I offer here is a translation of this translation, but I do so with all the reservations due to a double handling of the original high-flying metaphysical German, particularly as the French text is somewhat corrupt.
An art which does not represent objects draws its subjects chiefly from the “within.” This “within” cannot correspond to the conscious mind, since the conscious mind contains reproductions of seen objects in general which must necessarily have the same appearance as that which most people expect. Now Picasso’s object is quite unlike the general expectation; indeed it is so unlike that we no longer seem to be concerned with objects perceived by our senses. The chronological sequence displays an increasing movement away from the empirical object and a growth of those elements which no longer correspond to outward experience but derive from an inner world lying behind the consciousness, which is as it were an organ of general perception superimposed upon the five senses and turned towards the outer world. Behind the consciousness lies not a total void but the unconscious psyche, which affects the consciousness from within and behind just as the exterior world affects it from without and before. Consequently those images that do not correspond to any exterior object must come from the “within.” Since this “within,” although it can have a most lasting effect upon the consciousness, can neither be seen nor represented, I ask those patients who suffer primarily from these influences to give them form as well as they can by means of drawing. The aim of this “method of expression” is to bring the unconscious elements into view so that they may be accessible to the intelligence. From the therapeutic standpoint this allows one to prevent the fatal dissociation of conscious mind and unconscious phenomena. Unlike drawings of consciously-perceived objects, these concretely-represented phenomena and influences are all symbolic, that is to say they possess in some degree a meaning that is in the first place unknown. This being so, it is equally impossible to make any certain statement whatsoever about an isolated case. All one has is the feeling of being confronted with a quantity of strange, varied, disparate, disturbing elements that cannot be exactly placed. One does not know the nature of the ostensible object nor what it symbolizes. The only way of understanding is to compare many series of pictures. Generally speaking, since they lack artistic imagination the patients’ pictures are simpler, clearer, and therefore more intelligible than those of modern painters. Among the patients we may distinguish two groups, the neurotics and the schizophrenes. The first produce pictures of a synthetic character which display one single, uniform feeling throughout. Even when they are completely abstract and devoid of the emotional factor they are at least either clearly symmetrical or they possess an unmistakable direction. The second, on the other hand, make pictures that instantly reveal the strangeness of their emotion. In any event, they do not display any single, harmonious feeling but rather contradictory emotions or even a complete absence of sensibility. From a strictly formal point of view, their predominant characteristic is that of an intellectual laceration, rendered by what are termed broken lines, that is to say, psychic clefts or rents that traverse the image. The picture leaves one either unmoved or astonished at its paradoxical, disturbing, frightening, or grotesque flights of audacity. Picasso belongs to this second group.
In spite of the sharp distinction between the two classes, they do have one thing in common—their symbolic content. Both represent the outline of a meaning, but whereas the neurotic seeks out the meaning and tries to communicate both it and his emotion to the observer, the schizophrene shows scarcely anything of this tendency: on the contrary, he appears to be the victim of the signification. He seems to be overwhelmed and swallowed up by it, and one has the impression that he is being disintegrated by all these elements that the neurotic does at least endeavor to control. The schizophrene’s form of expression calls for the same remark that I made with regard to Joyce—nothing comes towards the observer; everything turns away from him: even an incidental beauty seems no more than an unforgivable delay in the withdrawal. The seeking-out of the ugly, the morbid, the grotesque, the incomprehensible, the commonplace is not intended to express but to conceal; and this concealment is not directed against an investigator but is rather a pointless veil, a cold mist that stretches over an uninhabited bog: a play as it were that has no need of any audience.
In the one case it is possible to make out what he would like to express: in the other, what he is incapable of expressing. The mysterious content is to be seen in both. A series of images of this kind, whether made up of drawings or of written words, usually begins with the symbol of the Nekya, of the descent into Hades, into the unconscious, and of a farewell to the upper world. The later images still make use of the forms and shapes of the world of light, but they show a hidden meaning and they therefore possess a symbolic character. Thus Picasso too begins with paintings of objects and the paintings are blue, the blue of night, of water or of moonlight, the Touat-blue of the Egyptian underworld. He dies and his soul flies away to the beyond on a horse. Sunlit life clings to him and a woman with a child advances to exhort him. Just as day is a woman for him so too is night, and psychologically this is the same as the light and the dark aspects of the soul (anima). The dark soul sits waiting, and it waits in the twilit blue, arousing pathological forebodings. As the colors change, we enter Hades. The concrete forms, expressed as they are in the dismal masterpiece of the prostituted, tubercular, syphlitic adolescent girl, are given over to death. The theme of the prostitute begins with the entry into the other world, where “he” in the form of a dead soul meets several other people who have died. I say “he” because in relation to Picasso I think of that character who undergoes the doom of the lower world, of the man who by reason of that doom turns not towards the world of light but towards the darkness, the man who follows not the acknowledged ideal of the good and the beautiful but rather the demoniac pull of the ugly and the evil, which in modern man resists and counteracts Christianity, and by veiling the sunlit world with these same mists of Hades brings into being a pessimistic, end-of-the-world atmosphere; and which in doing so begets a deadly spiritual sickness of disintegration, to end, like a country shattered by an earthquake, by falling apart in fragments—broken lines, rags, faint remnants, debris, and lifeless entities. Picasso and the exhibition of Picasso’s works are, like the twenty-eight thousand people who have seen them, transitory phenomena.
Broadly speaking, when a man subjected to such a fate belongs to the neurotic group, the unconscious reveals itself to him in the form of the “darkness” of a frighteningly, grotesquely hideous Kundry or in that of a diabolic beauty. In Faust’s transformation we find Margaret, Helena, Maria, and the formal idea of the “eternal feminine” answering to the four female figures of the Gnostic underworld, Eve, Helena, Mary, and Sophia. Nevertheless Picasso transforms himself and appears in the underworld shape of the tragic Harlequin, a theme that is to be seen in many later pictures: Harlequin who like Faust is implicated in a murder and who reappears in the second part in another form.
Ever since Homer the going down or back to primitive ages has been part of the Nekya. Faust looks back to the imaginary pr
imitive world of the Blocksberg and to the fanciful illusion of ancient times. Picasso conjures up the heavy terrestrial shapes of the grotesque primitive epoch; and, endowing them with a cold, radiant light, brings back to life the soulless forms of Pompeian antiquity—a Giulio Romano could not have done worse. Rarely or never have I seen a patient who has not turned to forms of neolithic art or who has not indulged in the evocation of classical Dionysism. Harlequin, like Faust, passes through all these aspects, although at times nothing betrays his presence except his wine, his lute, or at least the lozenges of his jester’s coat. And what does he learn in the course of his wild pilgrimage through mankind’s long centuries? What quintessence will he distill from this accumulation of debris and wreckage, of merely potential shapes and of half-born, soon-dead colors? What symbol will be the ultimate cause and the meaning of all disintegration?
Confronted with the chaotic diversity of Picasso, one hardly dares point it out. That is why I preferred in the first place to speak of what I found in my records. The Nekya is not a titanic, pointless, purely destructive plunge but a katabasis eis antron with a meaning and an end; it is a going down into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge. The aim of the pilgrimage through the intellectual history of mankind is to re-establish man in his integrity by revealing the memory of his blood. Faust’s descent to the Abode of the Mothers allowed him to bring back the complete man in the state of sin … that man who was quite forgotten because he lost himself in the maze of things of the present. It is he who caused the earthquakes in the upper world during all the periods of great upheaval and it is he who will always cause them. This man is at the antipodes of the man of the present day because he is that which was always thus, whereas the other is so only for the moment. From this it follows that my patients’ stage of “katabasis and katalysis” is succeeded by an acknowledgment of the contradictions in human nature and of the necessity for the state of conflict between the opposing elements. That is why the symbols belonging to the insane visions in the period of disintegration are followed by images that show the reunion of the opposing pairs—light and dark, top and bottom, black and white, male and female, etc. In Picasso’s latest pictures the union of contraries is very clearly to be seen in their immediate juxtaposition. Although admittedly it is broken by some discontinuous lines, one picture even shows the junction of the light anima and the dark anima. The brilliant, clear-cut, and even violent colors of the most recent period correspond to the unconscious mind’s tendency to overcome the conflict of the emotions by force (color = emotion).
Index
Abetz, Ambassador, 359-60
“Aficionado, L’, ” 194
African sculpture, 149, 153
Alberti, Rafael, 475-76
Alcools (Apollinaire), 201, 206
Algerian war, 426-27
Almoguera, Juan de, Archbishop of Lima, 15
Almoguera, Juan de (P’s great-great-grandfather), 15
Almoguera, María Josefa de (P’s great-grandmother), 15
Almoguera, Pedro Dionisio de (Tío Perico) (P’s great-granduncle), 15, 27
Alphonso, King of Asturias, 33
Alphonso XII, King of Spain, 11
Alphonso XIII, King of Spain, 28
Amies de I’Art nou (Friends of Modern Art), 304; exhibition. 305
Analytic Cubism, 177-78, 191, 194, 202, 237, 260, 437
Anarchism, 70-72
“Anatomie, ” 294, 295
Andalucía, 11; Spanish reconquest of, 13
Andreu, Jaume, 67, 97, 226, 367-68
Antibes, 259, 341-42, 380-81
Antibes Museum, See Grimaldi Palace
Antigone (Cocteau), P’s settings for, 253, 256
Anuari de Catalunya, 226
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 73, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131-32, 133, 149, 156, 157, 158, 159-60, 162, 163, 165, 175, 177, 184, 191, 192, 201, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216, 217, 219, 223, 224, 225, 231, 236, 240, 262, 266, 271, 279, 295, 303, 313, 400, 404, 456, 479; and Cubism, 166, 182, 183; and Marie Laurencin, 161-62; and Iberian figures theft, 187, 188-91, 295; marriage to Jacqueline Kolb, 231; his death, 234-35; monument to, 278
Aragon, Louis, 226, 240, 262, 265, 268, 279, 293,362, 374, 396, 412
“Aragonese Customs, ” 61, 63, 68
“Arbres, Les,” 200
Archipenko, Alexander, 180, 183
Arcimboldo, Lombard, 267, 333
Armory Show (1913), 200-1
Arp, Jean, 262, 263
Art and the Resistance exhibition (1947), 379
Artaud, 293
Arte Joven, 92-93, 94, 95
Art Nouveau, 50, 85, 267
Arts, The, 257
Ashton, Dore, 174
Assiette au Beurre, L’, 74, 136, 161
Associación Wagneriana, 72
Asul y Blanco, 34
“Atelier, L’, ” 278, 280
Athenaeum, The, 249
“Aubade, L’.” 358-59
“Au rendez-vous des amis” (Ernst). 262
Auric, Georges, 218, 414
Auric. Madame, 414
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), 296
Avignon, exhibitions of P’s late work at, 472, 474-76, 478-79
Azorín (Martinez Ruiz), 92, 93
“Baie de Cannes, La, ” 440, 446
“Baignade,” 319
“Baigneurs, Les,” 433-34
Ballets Russes, 219-22, 223-25, 237
Balzac, Honoré de, 277, 286, 317
Bakst Léon, 220
Bakunin, Mikhail, 65, 66, 71
Barcelona, 41-42, 43 ff, fall of, 337; food center, 338
Barcelona Blue Period, 116-23
“Barefoot Girl,”38
Baroja, Pio, 92
Barr. Alfred, 146, 149, 257-58, 301
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 320
Barre d’appui, La (Eluard), P’s illustrations for, 304
Bataille, Georges, 293
Bateau-Lavoir (studio), 124 ff., 160 ff., 175-76.183,280
“Bateleurs,” 138
Béalu, Michel, 366
Beaudin, André, 463
Beaumont, Etienne de, 218, 219, 256, 264, 268, 274
“Beggar,” 38
Beauvoir, Simone de, 354
Bell, Clive, 237; his preface for Leicester Galleries exhibit, 248-49; on P’s genius, 383
Bergamín, José, 310, 327
Bernard, Madame, 115
Bernareggi, Francisco, 54
Bernheim-Jeune gallery, 98, 157
Berry, Walter, 254
Bibliothèque nationale, P’s retrospective exhibitions at, 429, 469
Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 254
Blanco y Negro, 61
“Blanquita Suarez,” 227
Blasco de Ruiz, María (P’s great-grandmother), 14-15
“Blind Man’s Meal, ” 117
Blue Period, 101-4, 108-9, 113, 116-23, 129, 130, 134-35, 141,291,471, 476
“Blue Room,” 143
Blue-Rose Period, 139
“Bock, Le, ” 104
Boëtie, la rue. flat, 233 ff.; Brassai’s description of, 234; requisition of, 401, 404
Bois, la rue des, 163 ff.
Boisgeloup, Château de, 289-90, 311,465
Bone Period, 281-83, 293, 319-20, 346
Bonnard, Pierre, 83, 84, 85, 86
“Borrachos, Los,” 37
Bosch, Hieronymus, 267
Bossuet, Jacques, 104
Boudin, Marcel, 296, 341, 344, 357, 382, 394, 395, 404
Bouguereau, Adolphe, 131
“Bouteille de Suze,” 200
“Bouteille de vieux marc,” 200, 201
Boyd, Robert, 13
Brancusi, Constantin, 183
Braque, Georges, 103, 104, 130, 149, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163, 177, 183, 184, 192, 201, 205, 212, 229, 239, 241, 246, 248, 250, 254, 269, 283, 302, 303, 313, 354, 364, 371, 387, 397, 411, 442; his reaction to “Demoiselles d’Avignon, ” 152; friendship with P, 156-57, 271; and Cubism, 156-57, 165, 167, 177-78, 179-81, 182, 18
5, 191, 194-95, 203; P’s Cubist portrait of, 178; his house in Sorgues-sur-1’Ouvéz, 193-94; three-dimensional structures, 194-95; papier-collé, 195, 199-200, 203; goes to war, 207; wounded, 214; estrangement from P, 236; and Uhde auction, 248; renews friendship with P, 292; P’s jealousy of, 400; his death, 457
Braque, Marcelle, 156, 247
Brassaï, 19, 36, 107, 126, 142, 156, 233-34, 266, 292, 294, 309, 311, 344, 345, 377, 381, 389, 400, 406, 438, 452-54, 465; on P’s rue de la Boëtie flat, 234; his photographs of P’s sculpture, 365
Brassaï, Madame, 452, 453
Breton, André, 240, 253, 262-63, 265, 266, 279, 292, 293, 303, 352; on Surrealism, 268
Briant, Aristide, 65
British Arts Council exhibition (1950), 402
Brossa, Jaume, 67, 71-72, 226
Brueghel, Pieter, 418
Brune, Pierre, 413,429
Buen Retiro landscapes, 55
Buffet, Bernard, 270
“Buffet du Savoyard,” 354
“Buffet de Vauvenargues,” 442
Buffon, Georges, 332, 364
Bullfight engravings and drawings, 29, 55, 443-4
Buñuel. Luis, 293
“Burial of Casagemas, ” 101, 105, 108, 121
Burlington, The, 249
“Buste de femme,” 365-66”
“Bust of a Woman” (Cranach), P’s version of, 451
Caba, Antonio, 50
Cadaqués, 179-81
“Café à Royan, ” 348-49
Cahiers d’Art, Les. 290, 292, 303, 488
Caillebotte, G., 86
Californie. La, 428 ff.. 434-36, 442, 447, 448,451,454, 457,467, 471
“Californie la nuit. La, ” 440
“Calvary,” 29
Calligrammes (Apollinaire), 231; P’s illustrations for, 240
Campos Garvin, Don Antonio, Marqués de Ignato, 18, 22
Canals, Benedetta, 76, 88, 125, 127, 133, 139
Cannes, 278, 295, 296, 439-40, 447, 450, 452-53, 454
Canovas del Castillo, Antonio, 53
Capvespre d’un faune, El(Reventós), 388
“Caprichos” (Goya), 55
Carbonero, Moreno, 41, 53, 54, 67, 89, 161