The Mystery of Picasso: Process over Product
The name “Pablo Picasso” is an internationally known name. He has become a rock star of the art world but also an enigma in the minds of many people. The Spanish-born artist has enraptured audiences and art lovers for decades, and the film The Mystery of Picasso (1956) is a doorway into the brilliant mind of the painter.
Unlike most films about artists and the work they create The Mystery of Picasso is a documentary in which the artist, Pablo Picasso, displays his own artistic process which makes the film a piece of artwork within itself. In collaboration with director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, they are able to bring to life the artwork of the master as he creates it by using a semi-transparent canvas that shows each brushstroke as he works from behind–though it is the mirror image that the camera captures. This combined with the use of stop motion photography makes it seem as if the paintings are painting themselves. This medium offers Picasso the chance to peel back the layers of his art and show the audience that the creative spark of his work is not the final piece, but the journey he took to create the piece itself.
The paintings start off relatively slow and safe. He draws with thin black lines that slowly reveal reclining women and short naked men with bulls, and then slowly fills in large parts of the canvas seemingly destroying what he spent so long carving out. Soon the pace picked up and Picasso started making bold strokes of colors. What once was a thick blue line seemingly lost in the middle of the canvas transforms into a scene of a woman sleeping in a field. Picasso paints with passion and as if he is merely uncovering what was already within the canvas. As a viewer it is almost impossible to tell where he is going with any piece.
It may seem dry to literally be watching paint dry for an hour and fourteen minutes, however it is the exact opposite. The small moments when the camera cuts away and pulls back to show the entire filming set up, combined with the little nuggets of dialogue between Picasso and Clouzot, keep the film on a distinct path. During these moments away from the canvas they discuss the process of his paintings and about how Picasso wants to take more risks and not be as “superficial”, as he said in his own words while pulling out his oil paints.
Picasso’s process is not linear. He backtracks and redraws and repaints constantly. It is impossible to tell when he is finished with a piece because he will go back and smash the composition to bits and then reform it as he sees fit. Picasso is the god of his paintings–both the destroyer and the creator. This can be seen multiple times throughout the film as he turns a fish into a chicken, into a portrait of a person or as he repaints a goat over and over again each time destroying the previous incarnation.
This film is revolutionary in a totally unique way. It takes the medium of cinematography and elevates it to the status of high art. In the case of The Mystery of Picasso film becomes just another tool in the artist’s belt. This film bridges the gap between film/photography and fine art.
It also shows that Picasso is not infallible either, and that he too sometimes struggles to get a piece to turn out correctly. As Picasso said, “To draw, you must close your eyes and sing,” but it seems that even Picasso’s voice can sometimes crack. He overworked one of the final paintings, so much that he admits that it was not going the way he envisioned, and he pulled off all the collage and started the painting anew. As both an artist and an art lover I appreciated the honesty and was inspired by his will to keep going and restart. This film just feels honest. The farther into the film one gets the more the preconceived notions of Picasso fall away. In a way, this film helps humanize Picasso to a general audience.
This type of film/documentary was very different for director Henri-Georges Clouzot, who usually stuck to thrillers, but I feel like it was one of his most successful films. He worked as a filmmaker during Nazi-occupied France, and after the war was banned from film until 1947 because of his involvement with Continental Films– which during the occupation was Nazi controlled–and especially for directing the movie Le Corbeau which was Nazi-propaganda to subdue the French people with weightless and empty entertainment.. The Mystery of Picasso seems to be Clouzot’s redemption in the eyes of the French public.
This film was a beautiful deep dive into the creative mind of Picasso. It also helps give context to a lot of his other works. His process is more important than his final pieces. By just looking at a finished piece there is no way of understanding how many layers he repainted to get the final look. An example from the film is how he repainted the bull and matador from a realistic style into his more well-known cubist style. The final piece also has no way of showing how much time and effort was put into it. One painting took over five hours, but as Clouzot pointed out to Picasso, “I hate to think the people watching will think it took ten minutes.” It is a privilege to watch his creative process unfold and thus watch the real artwork come to life, and I would highly recommend watching The Mystery of Picasso to anyone with even a passing interest in his artwork.
