She is a great novelist who looks like a quieter novelist. An essay on Muriel Spark must be correspondingly loud.

So this, loudly, is the quiet shift at the centre of Muriel Spark’s writing.

She inverts the norms of the implicit and explicit in fiction. Her novels are reversed out, like negatives. Factual detail is given bluntly, authorially, directly. This means that she seems old-fashioned. Psychological detail – feeling, motivation – is withheld, or occluded, or only partly explained. This means that she seems avant-garde.

But she is neither old-fashioned or avant-garde. She is original.

* * * * *

Following Henry James, it was seen as a mark of skill in the serious novelist that factual information should be presented indirectly. This information should be dramatised, leaking out from the plot, as if the book had been merely overheard, not invented by the author.

The technical name for this – not used by James, but by his disciple, Percy Lubbock – was showing, which was superior to telling.

In an interview with the Listener, 7 February 1974, Kingsley Amis offers a wonderful rebuke to the forced stringencies of this tradition, talking about the cherished influence of W Somerset Maugham: ‘What I did learn – not consciously of course – was that there was really no need for shock tactics, obvious originality, experiments in style. One learns a great deal simply from, for instance, the fact that one of his Far East stories begins: “Jim Grange was a rubber planter.” It’s wonderful to think that one could get away with saying “that’s what he was” instead of saying: “The noon heat beat down on his back” – and you don’t find out what his name is for a page and a half. He did, I think, help to restore one’s confidence in traditional forms of writing.’

Sometimes, Muriel Spark is in this pre-Modernist tradition. Characters are introduced with dense factual sentences, clipped and informative – nutritious as protein shakes: ‘Joanna Childe was a daughter of a country rector. She had a good intelligence and strong obscure emotions. She was training to be a teacher of elocution and, while attending a school of drama, already had pupils of her own.’ Or there are these trim introductions in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: ‘Rose Stanley was famous for sex. Her hat was placed quite unobtrusively on her blonde short hair, but she dented in the crown on either side. Eunice Gardiner, small, neat, and famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming, had the brim of her hat turned up at the front and down at the back.’

When Muriel Spark uses an unsubtle method, however, she uses it with subtlety; she thinks it through. There is a latent preciousness to the Jamesian method of indirection. The Jamesian imperative to dramatise all the narrative material – fulfilled only intermittently in the novels themselves – is motivated by an embarrassment at the contrivance of fiction. It is a way of trying to pretend that this is not a novel at all. In this respect, the blunt simplicity of Somerset Maugham is, quite rightly, to be emulated. It is truer to the materials.

Think of Lars von Trier, who, in an interview with Stig Björkman, remembered his days at film school.

‘If something took place in Vienna, 1934, our teacher wanted us to…Under no circumstances begin with a caption which read ‘Vienna, 1934’. We weren’t allowed to. I remember Zanussi paid us a visit. He said, ‘Yes, well’. He didn’t want to. Instead of writing ‘Vienna, 1934’ – he wanted to take a close-up of a fly crawling over some ink – making smudges on a cheque, and on the top of it was ‘Vienna, 1934’. After everything I learnt from various teachers, I was convinced – that in my film at any rate, there’d be a caption with ‘Vienna, 1934’. Why waste people’s time with a fly wandering over a cheque – when you can do it very simply?’

* * * * *

There are, naturally, two chronologies to a novel – the chronology of the events depicted in a story and the chronology of the order in which these events are told. There is no need for the two chronologies to match.

The great master of the possible disjunctions is Proust and his A la recherche. When she won the Observer’s short story competition in 1951, spark bought a complete set of Proust with her prize money. In an interview with Robert Hosmer – to be published in Salmagundi January 2005 – Spark analyses this technique: ‘my sense of construction in the novel was greatly assisted by [Proust’s] examples. In the matter of construction take for instance the chapter of A la recherche where Swann ends by deciding Odette was not, after all, his style. Next page, new chapter: Swann has already been married to Odette for some years.’ The past, in a novel, can occur after its future. It is a game displayed in one of the first ever novels – Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with its throwaway ostentatious gags, jamming the past and the future together – ‘a cow broke in (tomorrow morning).’

In a conventional novel, however, the telling of the story follows the chronology of the story itself. In this way, the reader follows the subjective experience of the main characters, and experiences the denouement at the same moment as the characters. It is a method designed to facilitate suspense.

Thus, although flashback is allowable – since it may be necessary to explain the plot – flash-forward, or prolepsis, is not. It is taken as giving up on suspense.

Muriel Spark, bravely and cleverly, uses prolepsis. She states the character’s futures; she states the ends of her plots. All her plots are, in some way, stories about how things end. They are about last things.

Within paragraphs, she uses prolepsis on a small-scale, a constant prefiguring that shadows the characters – as in The Girls of Slender Means: ‘She opened Jane’s door without knocking and put in her head. “Got any sopayjo?”[soap] It was some months before she was to put her head round Jane’s door and announce, “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding”.’ Or in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where the characters’ futures interrupt the present, sadly, irrefutably:

‘Mary Macgregor walked with Sandy because Jenny had gone home. Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head, and for her anger, walked behind them with her dark red face, broad nose and dark pigtails falling from her black hat and her legs already shaped like pegs in their black wool stocking…. Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner who, twenty-eight years later, said of Miss Brodie, ‘I must visit her grave’, gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement…’

But the technique is broader than this. She gives away not only the character’s ends, but also the plot’s ending. Early in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we know that it is Sandy who has betrayed Miss Brodie, though we do not know why. On page seven of The Girls of Slender Means we know that Nicholas Farringdon – a poet, convert and missionary – has died in Haiti. And on page 60, we know this, the central moment in the novel, that will occur 60 pages later.

‘Meantime, Nicholas touched lightly on the imagination of the girls of slender means and they on his. He had not yet slept on the roof with Selina on the hot summer nights – he gaining access from the American-occupied attic of the hotel next door, and she through the slit window – and he had not yet witnessed that action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself.’

The crucial thing is this. Prolepsis does not destroy suspense; it creates a new type of suspense. Because knowing the end is not an explanation or a solution. Rather than wondering how the story will end, the reader is forced to wonder how the story could have ended up at its end. And this is a complicated pleasure.

‘I think suspense is often heightened if the author “gives away” the plot from the very beginning,’ Spark told Hosmer. ‘The reader is then all the more anxious to find out how the conclusion came about.’

Compare this with the opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude – ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’ – magical, engrossing. But it is the sentence’s start that lingers. The ice is discovered fifteen pages later. It is the firing squad that the reader waits for.

* * * * *

This rendering explicit of what is normally implicit – facts, plots – represents a refusal to lie about the novel as a form. There is a refusal to take up Henry James’s imperative: ‘Dramatise, dramatise!’ There is a refusal to get hung up on showing, rather than telling.

In this, Spark is being very clever and careful about what we mean by mimesis in a novel.

The only thing that can truly be imitated, shown in a novel, is language – and this means dialogue, or billboards. Even thought is not linguistic. Everything else has to be told, described. (‘The famous monologue at the end of Ulysses,’ writes T S Eliot, correctly, in his essay on Charles Whibley, ‘is not the way in which persons of either sex actually think: it is a very skilful attempt by a master of language to give the illusion of mental process by a different medium, that of written words.’)

But there are some things that, perhaps, cannot be described, or not described accurately. These things are feelings. Feelings, for Muriel Spark, can only be shown. The conventional descriptions are only inaccurate.

Her most audacious experiment in showing is The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In this book, there are no expressed feelings or thoughts. This does not mean the characters do not have feelings; it means that they are implied from their actions, from their words.

Compare this with Eliot again, in his essay on Philip Massinger – ‘What the creator of character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally aware of them.’

It is important to see how radical Spark’s reversal of the norms of showing and telling is: external facts which were once shown are now told; internal facts which were once told are now shown.

* * * * *

One of the clever things that Muriel Spark has done has been to vary her influences. There is Somerset Maugham. But there is also Robbe-Grillet, and the tradition of the French nouveau roman, as Spark told Hosmer:

I was very much impressed with Robbe-Grillet, not by the effect of what he did, I wasn’t carried away by his novels, but I was very, very interested in his methods. He got away from the novel of descriptions of people’s feelings: ‘he felt’, ‘he thought’ and ‘he said’. ‘He said’ is a fact, actually an outward fact, but ‘he felt’ and ‘he thought’ are interpolations by the author.

In his collection of essays Pour un nouveau roman, published in 1961, Robbe-Grillet tried to explain what he was up to. He was stripping the novel of baggage it could no longer sustain. In his essay ‘A path for the novel of the future’ – first published in 1956 – he stated the roots of his perceived problem with the contemporary novel: ‘One could easily go back as far as Madame de La Fayette. Sacrosanct psychological analysis constituted, already at this time, the basis of all prose: it was that which governed the conception of the book, the description of the characters, the unfolding of the plot.’ In place of this psychological analysis, Robbe-Grillet offered flatness, literalism: ‘There is now, in effect, a new element, which separates us this time radically from Balzac, as from Gide and Madame de La Fayette: it is the destitution of the old myths of “depth”.’ Robbe-Grillet was no longer sure that we understood the world, that the novelist could presume to understand the psychology of a character. All that was left for the novelist was the description of externals: ‘the optical, descriptive adjective, that which is content to measure, to situate, to limit, to define, probably shows the difficult path to a new art of the novel.’

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It was one part of Muriel Spark’s genius that she could read Robbe-Grillet’s anxious, tendentious novels and essays, and make them her own.

* * * * *

The art of Muriel Spark is an art of concision. It operates on a more reduced scale than most novels. But that is not very helpful. We need to understand what is at stake in this concision.

Take the refusal to give extraneous detail. This is nothing new. There is the dry opening to Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître, written in the 1770s, unimpressed by novelistic scene-setting: ‘How did they meet? By chance, like everyone. What were they called? What does it matter to you? Where did they come from? From the next town. Where were they going? Does anyone know where they’re going?’

And it is there, a 100 years later, in Chekhov, too. Writing to Alexander Kuprin, 1 November 1902, Chekhov says: ‘Your first chapter is taken up with descriptions of people’s appearances – again an old-fashioned device; you could easily do without these descriptions. Describing in detail how five people look overburdens the reader’s span of attention, and ultimately loses all value. Clean-shaven actors resemble one another like Catholic priests, and they’ll go on resembling one another no matter how much effort you put into describing them.’

This concision of extraneous detail is there in another of Muriel Spark’s techniques. She does not observe the normal hierarchies of facts to be depicted in a novel. She does not elaborate where she might be expected to elaborate. Instead, she is constantly interested in sentences which are flatly laid beside each other – even if the information in each sentence is not conventionally of the same order of magnitude. Zeugma is central to her comic method. So, in The Girls of Slender Means, ‘Dorothy could emit, at any hour of the day or night, a waterfall of debutante chatter, which rightly gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of these phrase-ripples of hers: “Filthy lunch.” ‘The most gorgeous wedding.” “He actually raped her, she was amazed.” “Ghastly film.” “I’m desperately well, thanks, how are you?”’

This deadpan lack of explanation or emotion can scare some critics. It has scared Christopher Ricks. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, in 1968, Christopher Ricks made the case against Muriel Spark as cruelly seeking to expose her characters’ frailties: ‘human beings cannot but be opaque…so ought our artistic ideal be, above all, to see through them?’

In her great novel Memento Mori, Spark offers this conversation, in a nursing home – an implicit anticipatory rebuke to critics like Ricks.

‘And yet,’ said Charmian, smiling up at the sky through the window, ‘when I was half-way through writing a novel I always got into a muddle and didn’t know where it was leading me.’ Guy thought: She is going to say – dear Charmian – she is going to say ‘The characters seemed to take on a life of their own.’ ‘The characters,’ said Charmian, ‘seemed to take on a life of their own.’

It is a form of literary sentimentality to believe, as Ricks does, that a character can be opaque to his or her author – though, in one crucial respect, Spark’s characters are opaque. When they behave evilly, they behave out of character. Their psychology, psychology in general, will not help us understand them. But this is not the opacity Ricks means.

The reason for Muriel Spark’s concision is this – character is much less complicated than we like to think. Everyone is so much simpler.

In Memento Mori, there is this send-up of the novel’s pretensions to psychological depth: ‘About your novels,’ he said. ‘The plots are so well laid. For instance in The Seventh Child, although of course one feels that Edna will never marry Gridsworthy, you have this tension between Anthony Garland and Colonel Yeoville, and until of course their relationships to Gabrielle are revealed, there is every likelihood that Edna will marry one or the other. And yet, of course, all along one is aware of a kind of secret life within Edna, especially at that moment when she is alone in the garden at Neuflette, and then comes unexpectedly upon Karl and Gabrielle. And then one feels sure she will marry Gridsworthy after all, merely for his kindness. And really, right up to the last page one does not know Karl’s true feelings. Or rather, one knows them – but does he know them?’

* * * * *

In her novels, Muriel Spark rethinks novelistic psychology.

Normally, novels believe in explanations. So a novel about a bad character will be a novel which attempts to explain why a character acts badly. It will attempt to describe a psychology – a set of motivations. Spark is not impressed by this – because it is easy enough, detecting people’s motivations; they are rarely unusual.

Psychology, for Spark, is not an explanation; it is a way of avoiding an explanation. It is a way of offering an explanation, when the crueller truth is that none is commensurate with the facts.

Compare her to D H Lawrence. In a letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, D H Lawrence tried to explain what he was up to: ‘You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element.’ This description is very close to Spark’s novels. She does not describe egos, she describes the allotropic states a character can go through – the sudden slippages of a seemingly stable character.

She describes the behaviour of a character which is not explained by a character’s psychology. This is one reason why all her books are not just stories about last things. They are stories about evil.

The subject of all Muriel Spark’s novels is Original Sin. And this is not an original subject, not in itself. Spark avoids the danger of dullness simply by the force of her precision, and by her economy. She offers no explanation. She offers no lesson. She simply describes how people behave. Spark’s great achievement is to show how accurate religious descriptions of psychology are – how congruent they are with the facts.

Before Hannah Arendt, Spark knew about the banality of evil. But Spark goes further. Evil is not just banal, evil is opaque too – flat, simply there. ‘I am not sure about the devil as a personification,’ said Spark. ‘But the Devil is a very useful personification of what we really do see in the world. Evil exists. Evil is in the world and we know it because we are born with a knowledge of good and evil.’

Spark is not a doctrinal novelist. She does not assert conclusions; instead she invents provocations.

The Girls of Slender Means is exemplary.

The boarding house – where the girls of slender means live – is burning down. Nicholas Farringdon has helped some girls, including his thin and graceful girlfriend Selina, to escape through the narrow bathroom window. Some girls still remain inside – too large to squeeze through the minuscule window. One of these is Joanna Childe, the rector’s daughter and elocution teacher – a devout and gentle Christian. All the girls are saved, except for Joanna, who is too late climbing the ladder to safety. She dies reciting the psalms. Another girl, Selina, re-enters the boarding house – apparently to rescue someone:

Nicholas then saw, through the door of the wash-room, Selina approaching along the smoky passage. She was carrying something fairly long and limp and evidently light in weight, enfolding it carefully in her arms. He thought it was a body…She climbed up on the lavatory seat and slid through the window, skillfully and quickly pulling her object behind her. Nicholas held up his hand to catch her. When she landed on the roof-top she said, ‘Is it safe out here?’ and at the same time was inspecting the condition of her salvaged item. Poise is perfect balance. It was the Schiaparelli dress. The coat-hanger dangled from the dress like a headless neck and shoulders.

Sixty pages earlier, Spark had noted the effect on Nicholas of an ‘action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself.’ This action turns out to be Selina’s saving of a Schiaparelli dress. After which, the house collapses.

The Girls of Slender Means presents, bluntly, deftly, the problem of all theodicy. A gentle, moral girl dies, unsavable – while Selina saves a Schiaparelli dress. The good things of the world, the permanent things, are unsavable.

In the novel, there are three reactions to the catastrophe. Nicholas, who is converted, becomes a missionary, and dies in Haiti. Selina goes mad. And there is another chaarcter, Jane, who had introduced Nicholas to the girls of slender means in their boarding house. Jane is simply stoical. The novel ends on VJ day:

Jane mumbled, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have missed it, really.’ She had halted to pin up her straggling hair, and had a hair-pin in her mouth as she said it. Nicholas marvelled at her stamina, recalling her in this image years later in the country of his death – how she stood, sturdy and bare-legged on the dark grass, occupied with her hair – as if this was an image of all the May of Teck establishment in its meek, unselfconscious attitudes of poverty, long ago in 1945.

The novel doesn’t ask which of these three reactions is right. The novel is only concerned with putting the question, the problem. Nowhere is safe. The novel opens on the day of the first armistice in 1945, and it ends on the day of the second armistice, in 1946. Because the war is never over. There is no end to evil.

* * * * *

In Spark there is a connection between the precision of the form, and the insoluble discrepancies in morality that are described so precisely.

We cannot explain ourselves to ourselves.

Spark shows us this by telling us, tells us this by showing us.

This photo is a metaphor. It is an obvious metaphor. Sarah Lucas has discovered that there is a visual resemblance between a plucked chicken and a vagina.

There is a hat designed by Philip Treacy called Ship. Ship is a top hat, whose top has been slightly squashed, so that the normally gentle ellipse has become a pointed oval. This pointed oval is exactly the shape of a ship’s deck. On this deck, Philip Treacy has constructed an extravagantly elegant three-master, constructed from black lace and metal.

This hat is a metaphor. It is a clever metaphor. It has discovered that there is a visual resemblance between a ship and a top hat.

Without Picasso, Philip Treacy would not have made this hat. Without Picasso, Sarah Lucas would not have photographed a chicken.

* * * * *

Everyone knows about Pablo Picasso. Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, and died in 1973. He was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century. He was a very complicated artist. His pictures were unrealistic and obscure.

My argument is this. Pablo Picasso was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century. He was a very clear artist. His pictures were realistic and subtle.

Picasso was a talent. And this is an essay about talent. It is not very easy to be precise about talent.

Talent is difficult.

* * * * *

So, this is what you need to know about Picasso’s talent. Picasso realised that visual representation was simpler than it looked. It did not require painstaking, anguished reproduction of the minutiae of visual experience. No. It required finding the right equivalent for visual experience. Talking to the photographer Brassai, Picasso said: ‘I always aim for likeness. A painter has to observe nature, but must never confuse it with painting. It can be translated into painting only with signs.’

Maybe this seems obscure. I will give you an example. In his superb 1961 sheet metal sculpture – Woman with a Tray and a Bowl, the woman’s vulva is represented by a triangle cut out of the metal – leaving a jagged gap. It is a sign. And it is absolutely realistic.

Because of Picasso, Ernst Gombrich could write in his best book Art and Illusion: ‘All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalences…’ The essence of Gombrich’s distinction is this. The problem of illusionist art is not to reproduce the precise phenomenology of visual experience, but to ‘invent comparisons which work’.

So when Picasso told Marius de Zaya in 1923 that paintings are all ‘more or less convincing lies’, there is a coherent theory behind this statement. It is a correct theory. But commentators on his work have not often understood this theory. They place the emphasis on ‘lies’. They think that Picasso’s statement proves his refusal of realism. It does not. The crucial words are ‘more or less’. Some paintings are convincing. Others are not. The good ones are convincing. They are all, however, just paintings.

* * * * *

The second element of Picasso’s talent was his talent for economy. Everything extraneous is eliminated. For example, this is Françoise Gilot’s description of the drafts for Picasso’s 1946 Woman Eating Sea Urchins, described in her book Living with Picasso.

‘The Woman Eating Sea Urchins was begun one afternoon in a realistic manner. Everything about the portrait was a recognisable representation of the woman as we knew her: pug nose, corkscrew curls, man’s cap, and the dirty apron in which she enveloped herself. Then, when it was finished, each day Pablo eliminated a few more naturalistic details until there remained only a very simplified form, almost vertical, with just the plate of sea urchins in the middle…’

But Picasso’s economic talent was not just economic with detail. He was economic with his forms too. To depict one of his bullfight scenes, Picasso cut out a picador from a piece of white paper and painted the picador black. Then he stuck this picador down on the right hand side of the paper, on the white background. He then painted the left hand side of the paper black, so that a second picador emerged – the shape left, in white, by the cut out figure. Discussing this process, Picasso said: ‘You must always work with economy in mind. What I’ve done, you see, is to use the same form twice – first as positive form and then as negative form. That’s the basis of my two picadors.’

Or there is his superb vulva shape from Woman with a Tray and a Bowl. Rotated 180°, the same shape is used in Standing Woman, done the same year, for the woman’s mouth.

* * * * *

Economy was central to Picasso’s talent. It was central to his art of visual comparisons.

For instance, in an early pastel study of Picasso’s most famous picture, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, there are seven figures – five naked women and two suited men. One man is sitting in the middle of the group, with three slices of melon on a plate beside him. In the centre foreground is a vase of flowers. In a later watercolour sketch, both the men have disappeared. So have the flowers. The slices of melon have not. They are now in the centre foreground, replacing the vase. In the finished painting, only one slice of melon remains, but Picasso has placed next to it some grapes, a pear and an orange. The grapes spread like pubic hair over the testicular orange and tubular pear.

Traditionally, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is said to represent five women. It does not. It represents five women and one man. In the painting, this man is represented metaphorically. He is his lunch box.

This is Picasso’s most important invention. Painting can be metaphorical. It is an invention that follows from his intuition that painting is a system of signs, and his preference for economy over waste.

Metaphors are quicker than other signs.

* * * * *

In Picasso’s 1912-1913 collage called Bottle and Glass, the bottle is outlined in charcoal. And this bottle is half full. We know it is half full because a tapering piece of newspaper, that has been cut out and pasted within the bottle’s outline, fills half of the shape of the bottle.

A painter has to observe nature, but must never confuse it with painting. It can be translated into painting only with signs. The newspaper does not look like wine, but we read it as wine. The charcoal outline, which is unmistakably the outline of a bottle, means that we mentally abstract the newspaper print. So a piece of newspaper becomes the sign for wine. It is a metaphor.

Maybe this seems easy. It is not. ‘You do not invent a sign,’ Picasso added, talking to Brassai. ‘You must aim hard at likeness to get to the sign.’

* * * * *

‘The papier collé was really the important thing’, Picasso told Gilot. ‘The sheet of newspaper was never used in order to make a newspaper. It was used to become a bottle or something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning.’

Picasso was being very clever. He was being as clever as Aristotle.

In his Poetics, Aristotle defines a metaphor as ‘the application of a name belonging to something to something else’. Compare this with Picasso’s description of collage – ‘an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning.’ They are describing the same operation. Collage is metaphor. (‘What idiots or cowards we must have been to have given that up!’ Picasso told his dealer Daniel Kahnweiler, talking about collage, as reported in Kahnweiler’s 1948 book, Talking to Picasso.) And the best kinds of metaphors, says Aristotle, are analogies, ‘when b is to a as d is to c; for the poet will then say d instead of b, or b instead of d.’ So, because wine can look like newspaper, Picasso can replace wine with newspaper. And this is only possible because shapes are like words. They are equivalents for things.

Arranged in a certain way, for example, a bowl of fruit can look like genitalia.

Aristotle finishes talking about metaphor by saying: ‘This alone (a) cannot be acquired from someone else, and (b) is an indication of genius. For to make metaphors well is to observe what is like.’

And Picasso was a genius.

* * * * *

For example, in 1951, Picasso made his marvellous bronze sculpture Baboon and Young. The baboon’s head is made of a toy car. The hood and grille is its muzzle. The windscreen is its eyes.

‘I achieve reality’, said Picasso, ‘through the use of metaphor. My sculptures are plastic metaphors. It’s the same principle as in painting.’ Picasso, he said, didn’t want trompe-l’oeil. Or not just trompe-l’oeil. Instead he wanted trompe-l’esprit. Rather than fooling the eye, he wanted to fool the brain as well.

In 1961 Picasso constructed a chair called The Chair. The Chair is made out of sheet metal, painted white. It seems like a simple rickety chair. But there are two unusual features to this chair. The first is a flap of metal, protruding inward from the chair back. The second is a corrugated concertina section, at the top of one chair leg, where the leg joins onto the seat.

Both these features are metaphors.

The flap is a metaphor for the silk upholstered padding on a comfortable Louis XV chair. The corrugation is a metaphor for the ruching and stitching round the edge of the seat.

The whole chair, then, cut out of whitewashed sheet metal, is not quite a chair, nor a representation of a chair. It is a metaphor for a silk and mahogany drawing room piece.

The reason this metaphoric procedure had such an appeal for Picasso is obvious. It is there in the fun with the fruit in Demoiselles. Metaphor is economical. It offers a shortcut. It is structurally the same as all his other efforts at reduction.

* * * * *

In 1961, Brassai visited Picasso in Cannes. Brassai had come to show Picasso his new book of photos – Graffiti. Picasso came to the chapter ‘Birth of the Face’ – where Brassai had ‘grouped the faces made of two or three holes’.

‘PICASSO I have often made such faces myself. The people who carve them turn immediately to signs. Art is the language of signs. When I pronounce the word “man”, I evoke man; the word has become the sign for man. It does not represent a man the way photography could. Two holes are the sign of the face, sufficient to evoke it without representing it. But isn’t it strange you can do that by such simple means? Two holes – that’s very abstract when you consider man’s complexity.’

* * * * *

But Picasso invented two types of collage. He invented the austere version, with only newspaper and charcoal outlines, like Bottle and Glass. This is the simple version. But he also invented a gaudy version – with wallpaper, newspaper, sand, paint and physical objects. He called this type ‘Rococo cubism’.

Picasso was not just interested in reduction and metaphor. He was also interested in detail. His talent was also for exuberant realism.

In 1913, Picasso made a collage called Bar Table with Guitar. The collage hangs vertically. In the left-hand corner, there is a piece of blue paper, on which is shaded the left-hand outline of a guitar. Next to this, a piece of grey paper has been pinned, cut to a parallel guitar shape, with the hole marked in. Then another piece of beige paper is pinned parallel to the grey, with its outer edge cut to the right-hand edge of the guitar. At various points, a trellis and rose-sprig peach colour wallpaper has been pinned on. This wallpaper represents wallpaper.

But the pins are a clue to a metaphorical description in this multimedia concoction. It looks like a dressmaker’s pattern. This is a collage of a dress design. So it is a representation both of a guitar and a dress. But because Picasso has shown that there is a structural similarity between a guitar and a dress, he has also shown, as he often does, that there is a similarity between a guitar and a woman. This collage is also, therefore, a portrait of a woman.

Picasso’s titles are not always useful. But then, Picasso rarely titled his own work. How could he? Bar Table with Guitar should really be titled Bar Table with Guitar, or Barmaid, or The Dressmaker’s Studio.

* * * * *

In many of his collages, including Bar Table with Guitar, Picasso uses gaudily coloured and patterned wallpaper. In some patches, it is a girl’s head. In others, it is a wall, or the wood of a guitar. Sometimes the wallpaper is wallpaper. There is a simple reason for this. The wallpaper is there to show how much the eye can ignore and simplify in search of a realistic resemblance. It is a joke that confirms the picture’s realistic aim.

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Picasso, then, is a realist. And his rococo collages allowed him to do two things at once. These collages have the economic simplicity of his early collages and cubist paintings. At the same time, they allow for dense description. And this process culminates in the great rococo cubist portraits.

‘At this period, from 1913 to 1917, his pictures have the beauty of complete mastery’, wrote Gertrude Stein in her 1938 monograph Picasso. Gertrude Stein was admittedly biassed. Between 1913 and 1917, she collected most of Picasso’s work. But she also happens to be correct.

In 1914, Picasso painted Portrait of a Girl. It is over a metre tall, and nearly a metre wide. The background is a virulent green. In this painting, it is possible to identify shadow, hands, a nose and ear, a boa, a dress with a belt, sleeves, a chair, a floral hat with veil, a fruit bowl with grapes, a black marble fireplace, an atomiser, wallpaper, the tassels at the base of the armchair and a dado.

Everything makes sense. Every sign has an equivalent in the world. Nothing is decoratively abstract. The painting, however, seems at first confusing. This is because Picasso has painted a collage.

The fruit bowl looks like a pasted on cubist drawing. The wallpaper looks like patches of applied wallpaper. The marble effect of the fireplace is trompe-l’oeil. The hands look like a quick charcoal sketch. The atomiser looks like a crudely gaudy pastel. The girl herself is constructed from multicoloured pointilliste patches.

Picasso is a metaphorical and realistic painter. He also mixes his metaphors. That is the charming secondary innovation of his rococo collages and paintings.

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As well as economy, there is extraordinary detail in Picasso. In the 1930 Seated Bather, a seemingly reductive portrait of a surrealistly manic nude, Picasso has remembered to shade in the rougher skin on the bather’s elbow. In the 1942 The Serenade, the reclining woman, with her arms behind her head, cocks a tuft of underarm hair.

In his memoir of Picasso, Brassai describes a visit with the poet Jacques Prévert to Picasso’s studio. ‘Prévert takes a fancy to one painting: the large window of the studio looking out on the tiers of old Paris roof-tops and chimneys. Above all, it is the rippling line of radiator parts – the round knob, the long pipe rising to the windowsill – that attracted Picasso…PREVERT – Look! Any other painter would have left out the radiator…’

For instance, Picasso is brilliant at painting a person crying.

There is an etching called Weeping Woman, done in 1937, while planning Guernica. A woman is crying. She has an expensive hairdo. She is holding a handkerchief up to her eyes. This is not why Picasso is brilliant. He is brilliant because he shows how ugly crying is. He shows the woman’s gums. Her eyes are a mess. The handkerchief is a pointlessly elegant netting, draped beside her ruined face.

It is not easy showing this. It is much easier being sentimental. It is much easier editing this kind of detail out. But Picasso is one of the least sentimental artists. Looking at a new book of reproductions of Douanier Rousseau’s pictures, Picasso said: ‘Look! This one’s also a fake. And here’s a third, and a fourth. All these heads leaning sentimentally to one side. Rousseau would never have painted that!’ In the same way, Picasso never paints anyone weeping with their head tilted sentimentally to the side. He paints unposed crying, anti-social crying. In Picasso, people bawl. ‘These days’, he told Michel Leiris, ‘there is no longer any way to make anything out to be ugly or repulsive. Even shit is pretty.’ Picasso’s tears are not pretty. They are all precise.

And they are also metaphoric. In Weeping Woman, there are three streams of tears. They are all represented as long darning needles, embedded below her eyes. In other paintings, Picasso even makes tears into miniature galleons. There is a reason for this hyper metaphorical style. Tears, in the vocabulary of Weeping Woman, are painful. Pain is sharp. That is one minor reason. The real reason, I think, is this. Tears can be theatrical. In Weeping Woman, Picasso is portraying both grief and the artificial invention of grief – self-pity.

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But to lots of people, Picasso is not a realistic artist. Two reasons are normally given to explain this. One of these reasons is reasonable, the other is not. The wrong reason is this. Some people think that Picasso was a deliberately abstract artist.

This is Guillaume Apollinaire, in his article ‘The New Painting’, written in 1912. Picasso, said Apollinaire, was ‘moving further and further away from the old art of optical illusions and literal proportions, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms.’

Apollinaire was completely wrong.

Picasso was not an abstract artist. He hated abstract art. Looking at some reproductions of the abstract expressionists, Picasso commented: ‘It’s always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of. You can’t impose your thought on people if there’s no relation between your painting and their visual habits.’ And he was right. Abstract expressionism is easy on the viewer. It is decorative, not expressive.

And also, it is never abstract. Nothing can be abstract. ‘There is no abstract art,’ Picasso told Christian Zervos in 1935. ‘You must always start with something.’ Even Rothko is representational. The maroon and red Seagram paintings in Tate Modern, say, are not abstract. They are paintings of windows. They were originally painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. While painting them, Rothko reshaped his studio so that its dimensions were an exact replica of the restaurant’s dimensions. Rothko said that his central influence at the time was Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, whose vestibule is flanked by blind windows – windows blocked in with stone. But this is not quite accurate. There is nothing stony about the Seagram paintings. They are full of light. They are stained glass windows. They look like light looks, pushing through stained glass.

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The right reason for objecting to Picasso the realist artist, however, is this. Sometimes Picasso’s paintings, particularly the cubist paintings, are completely unrelated to your visual habits. Sometimes the pictures are obscure. It is not always obvious what Picasso is describing. Because of this, in his 1920 article ‘The Rise of Cubism’, Picasso’s dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, advised that ‘in order to facilitate [assimilation], and impress its urgency upon the spectator, Cubist pictures should always be provided with descriptive titles.’ Kahnweiler is here proposing the cynical addition of realistic titles to abstract works.

But Picasso’s obscurity is not intentional.

The thing about talent is that it is not consistent. Not all of Picasso’s oeuvre is talented.

Let us take, for example, Picasso’s 1913/14 Card Player. What is the function in this painting of the crudely realist details? In Card Player, there is one identifiable playing card, and one identifiable pipe, and one identifiable moustache. They are cartoonishly obvious.

Are the cartoons there to taunt you or to help you?

The traditional art historical view is this. It is Ernst Gombrich’s view. Because he is an art historian, Gombrich cannot believe that Picasso’s obscurity may not be deliberate. ‘The cubist,’ says Gombrich, ‘is not out to clarify his schema but to baffle our perception.’ The moustaches are, according to Gombrich, therefore deliberately confusing. They are taunting: ‘the function of representational clues in cubist paintings is not to inform us about guitars or apples… It is to narrow down the range of possible interpretations till we are forced to accept the flat pattern with all its tensions.’ They force the viewer to accept that Card Player is simply a composition, not a representation.

Whereas Picasso had another idea. Picasso did not think that they were taunting. He thought they were helpful. Because of the realist clues, he said, the viewers’ mind ‘thrusts forward into the unknown and they begin to recognise what they didn’t know before and they increase their powers of understanding.’ They are, therefore, deliberately realistic. They force the viewer to accept that Card Player is not just an abstract composition, but a representation.

Neither Gombrich or Picasso were right. Gombrich was being kind. Picasso was being hopeful. He was hoping that his failures might be interpreted as mystical successes.

It is not easy finding the right equivalent for visual experience. It is not easy discovering a sign. Talent is not natural. It takes work.

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But Picasso did work. He worked very hard. He was prolific. In one week, for instance, 23-30 October 1955, he painted 11 canvases. Four of these were painted in one day. And Picasso’s prolific creativity is the clue to another feature of his talent.

Picasso’s talent was stylistically multiple.

There are two practical reasons for this. The first is hierarchical. When the Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry visited Picasso, Fry worried that Picasso was ‘always chucking his reputations.’ But Fry was not talented. He did not understand talent. He did not understand that originality inherits imitators. And Picasso did not want to look like anyone else. Picasso, therefore, was constantly reinventing his style so that he could throw his followers – the Metzingers, the Gleizes. Talking to Francis Poulenc, Picasso said: ‘Long life to our followers! It’s thanks to them that we look for something else.’

And there was another reason for Picasso’s virtuosity. Talent can be boring. Creating an individual style is essential for most artists, because most artists take a long time to create a work. Paul Valéry comments that ‘it is essential for an artist to know how to imitate himself. This is the only way of solidly constructing a work of art – an undertaking which is bound to be a war on instability, fluctuations of thought and energy and passing moods.’ Valéry is right. He is right in general. But there is no war if one can create four works of art in one day. If Picasso had imitated himself constantly, it would have been tedious.

On 1 December 1955, for instance, Picasso painted a Nude Woman in a Turkish Hat, and a Woman in an Armchair. The Nude Woman is a Matisse, cross-legged and fleshy, full-frontal, with a delicate hat. It is simple – a study in decoration. The Woman in an Armchair, however, is much more similar to Picasso’s own portraits of Dora Maar in the late 1930s. The central feature is the woman’s triangular head in profile, with its one massive mascara’d eye.

The two portraits are deliberately different. They are a study in stylistic restlessness.

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But there is also a more important reason why Picasso was so stylistically multiple.

For Picasso, painting was a translation of nature into visual signs. It was not the expression of a personal romantic vision. (‘Variation does not mean evolution’, Picasso told Marius de Zayas in 1923, refusing to accept that his formal choices were governed by any personal narrative.) For Picasso, painting was always interested in the object. And so the idea of a personal signature style was irrelevant. He was always trying to get the best sign for the object, whatever that happened to be. Every other attempt to represent the world was useful too. Even his own previous paintings were fit to be cannibalised or ignored. In his diary, Brassai described Picasso’s uncanny ability to look at his paintings as if they were painted by somebody else.

Picasso’s talent was omnivorous.

This has upset many people.

Writing on Picasso in 1923, Robert Delaunay attacked ‘Picasso with his periods, Steinlen, Lautrec, Van Gogh, Daumier, Corot, negroes, Braque, Derain, Cézanne, Renoir, Ingres, etc etc etc. Puvis de Chavannes, neo-Italian…these influences prove the lack of seriousness, in terms of construction and sureness.’ Sixty years later, talking to David Bowie, Balthus dismissed Picasso: ‘Picasso was a skater. Artistic skater.’

This view is very wrong. I would defend Picasso in exactly the same way Kundera defends Stravinsky in Testaments Betrayed: ‘it is precisely Stravinsky’s vagabondage through musical history – his conscious, purposeful “eclecticism,” gigantic and unmatched – that is his total and incomparable originality.’

Kundera is much cleverer than Robert Delaunay or Balthus. Vagabondage can be original. Style does not need to be consistent.

When Ernst Ansermet, Stravinsky’s conductor, asked Picasso why he varied his style and medium so much, Picasso replied: ‘But can’t you see? The results are the same.’

And he was right. Go back to his rococo brilliance, Portrait of a Girl. At the same time as Picasso painted it (August 1914), he also painted the exquisite and naturalistic The Painter and his Model. Using a drying-up cloth as a canvas, The Painter and his Model shows a seated painter gazing happily at the exposed vulva of his naked model, who has conveniently lowered a towel below her genitals. Behind them, there is an easel, with a landscape painting propped on it. A table with a fruit bowl is on the right.

And Picasso is still mixing metaphors. He is still trying to find equivalent signs. The painter, part of the easel, and the table are all all simply drawn in crayon, with very little modelling. The model, however, and the painting behind her, are painted delicately in oils.

It is also a kind of collage.

Compare two portrayals of hair in the picture. On the back of the man’s hand, there is a thickly crayoned patch of hair. Because the man is crayoned in black and white, with very little modelling, the patch is coarsely described. It is quickly read as hair. But the girl’s pubic hair is different. Black paint has been dabbed on lightly, sparsely, so that the pink flesh tone blurs through. It has been dabbed on so that it is darker than shadow, but still light enough to match the sparseness of pubic hair as it fades towards the stomach.

The painting includes two different ways of representing hair. The results, however, are the same. In both cases, Picasso discovers visual equivalents. He discovers accurate signs.

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Yes, Picasso had imagination. He had much more imagination than most people. He was more talented.

In the middle of his collage phase, on 9 October 1912, Picasso wrote to Braque, in his terrible French (Picasso was not talented at French): ‘je emploie tes derniers procedes paperistiques et pusiereux. Je suis en train de imaginer une guitare et je emploie un peu de pusiere contre notre orrible toile.’ The crucial phrase is ‘Je suis en train de imaginer une guitare’: I am in the process of imagining a guitar.’

What does it mean – to imagine a guitar? Surely anyone can imagine a guitar?

They can not.

Picasso made many collages of a guitar. In 1913, for instance, he would make a lovely collage called Guitar where one patch of wallpaper represents the guitar and another patch of the same wallpaper acts as the background. In 1912 he had made his first 3-D guitar out of cardboard. Between 1912 and 1913, he produced Twelve Cubist Studies, each about 5 to 7 inches high. These studies are very important. They use perspective. This may not seem important, but it is. The drawings are blueprints, they are diagrams for Picasso Objects™. They demonstrate his commitment to mimicking the visual world. In 1914, Picasso made his first guitar cut from sheet metal.

The medium was irrelevant. All his representations are equal. They are all metaphors for the object. They are all attempts to find comparisons that work. There is no reason why a metaphor should not have three dimensions rather than two.

A guitar is a guitar – in two or three dimensions. It just needs to be imagined meticulously.

This may seem easy. It isn’t easy at all.