Berger in Picasso's Red Period

If in The Success and Failure of Picasso (1962), John Berger critiques Pablo Picasso’s bloated finances as the richest artist in history, while at the same time arguing that a period as a public advocate of communism coincided with his decline as an artist, then ‘The Moment of Cubism’ (1967) offers something like a corrective: in its heyday, at the moment of its greatest triumphs, which is to say between 1907 and 1914, Cubism lacked all ‘social content.’ In this latter essay, Berger writes: ‘Cubism should not be understood as a stylistic category but as a moment.’ Berger’s attempt to periodise and ultimately historicise the careers of Picasso, Georges Braque and, later, Juan Gris, frames the emergence of Cubism as a style that lacked all political commitment, but this fact represents a problem that Picasso seeks to resolve through his status as an artist later in his career. What criteria does Berger use to judge Picasso’s political engagements, or lack thereof, at various stages of his career? Was there ever, or indeed could there have been, a socially committed Cubism in representational or formal terms? How does Cubism act as a case study for Berger as he works out his own relationship to realism and abstraction in the 1960s?

In this essay, I focus on ‘The Moment of Cubism’ alongside, primarily, the last fifty or so pages of ‘The Painter’ in The Success and Failure of Picasso, in which Berger concludes with an assessment of Picasso’s whole-hearted embrace of French communism––and the question of what he calls the ambivalent ‘completion’, or resolution, or end, of his working career. Berger was writing when Picasso was the most famous artist, and the most famous communist, in the world. ‘I cannot believe that he was in any way mistaken or that he chose the wrong political path’, Berger writes, ‘But as an artist with all his powers he was nevertheless wasted.’ In what ways do these two claims on Picasso’s success and failure cohere or contradict Berger’s own political aesthetics?