Review: The Mystery of Picasso Embraces and Deconstructs Artistic Mythology

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 documentary reveals art to be a life of many deaths.

Mystery of Picasso
Photo: Milestone Films

The conceit of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso is both ingenious and resonantly disappointing. The French filmmaker records Pablo Picasso as he paints on a translucent canvas, which is often situated as the film’s entire “frame” so that Picasso’s art seemingly materializes out of the ether in front of us. Picasso’s hand and brush are initially seen, but soon we’re watching only lines of paint as they dance across the screen. Upon completion, a painting vanishes via an on-screen wipe, leaving a new blank canvas so that the process can begin over again, as if a Picasso is but kindling for Clouzot’s formalist fireplace. The subtraction of Picasso’s hands and brush is a loss, as it robs the film of the docudramatic dimensions it purports to contain.

The Mystery of Picasso is less concerned with watching Picasso paint—which would’ve been more than enough to justify the film’s existence—than with pitting Clouzot and Picasso against one another. Clouzot is testing his medium against that of a master, seeing if he can fashion a dynamic film out of the act of almost literally watching paint dry. And Picasso, that wily icon, is correctly certain that the film will bolster his reputation whatever the result.

Clouzot is aware of the perils of his “cheating” against the strictures of his concept, as these violations are as much his subject as Picasso’s process. At one point, after Picasso’s art has continually materialized on the screen with seemingly little effort, Clouzot says to the artist that audiences will think he created a composition in a matter of minutes, even though they’ve been filming for five hours. This admission casts the film in a startling new light, underscoring our naïveté, as we’ve indeed been seduced—by Clouzot’s sleek techniques, by the general pop-art mythologies of the artist as a mystic conjurer—into believing that Picasso is casually knocking off one canvas after another over the course of a few glasses of wine.

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The Mystery of Picasso embraces and deconstructs artistic mythologies, as Picasso’s effortlessness is revealed to be an illusion. And, if one looks closer, his process doesn’t seem so instantaneous after all. Watching the paintings take shape across the screen, one sees, for instance, how often Picasso revises his work, and the revisions become the most fascinating element of the film. A kind of natural suspense seeps into The Mystery of Picasso, as we may often assume a composition to be finished because it’s remarkable for its simplicity—a scene rendered in a few playful curlicues—though Picasso will often continue to add flourishes.

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The first piece we see is of a man painting a portrait of one of Picasso’s most common subjects: a nude woman. Picasso (appears to) quickly compose the man and woman and soon paints a window showing a horse near a tree. Other details emerge, as we come to see the couch on which the woman rests. As the composition appears to be near completion, Picasso begins to blot out certain details, isolating elements with black ink, intensifying the insular relationship between the artist and subject on the canvas. A charming natural-ish sketch begins to take on Picasso’s famous, neurotic angularity before our eyes.

Other paintings follow a similar evolution. Images of bulls defending themselves against bullfighters attain the primordial cubist violence that was among Picasso’s hallmarks, as the artist splinters bull and man into overlapping shards of imagery and color. And a canvas with a large chicken gradually becomes an almost demonic human face—with the chicken somehow residing underneath it, giving the face and the image overall a subliminal texture.

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Presumably, Clouzot omits Picasso’s hands and brush because he’s seeking to avoid a literalist art documentary, so as to foreground the feverish power of the artist’s work while forging a free-associative bridge between painting and cinema that expands the possibilities of both mediums. At times, Clouzot’s efforts feel forced, such as a trumped-up moment of suspense where he asks Picasso if he can finish a painting before cinematographer Claude Renoir’s camera runs out of film. We see precious little of Picasso, Clouzot, and Renoir on screen, and this is how the filmmaker spends the time? Yet Picasso’s puckish, aging-god presence nevertheless gives the film a pulse, as his somewhat thick, powerfully stout frame offers an arresting image of an artist savoring his control over his personal realm.

The Mystery of Picasso climaxes with a reckoning with Picasso’s methods. Picasso paints a beachside canvas that begins life, like many of the compositions that we’ve seen up to this point in the film, as relatively naturalistic by the artist’s standards. Picasso gradually splinters the images with lines, and then paints other images over them and yet other images over those. Meanwhile, the soundtrack, which has been humming with Spanish music throughout The Mystery of Picasso, works itself up to a frenzy, suggesting that Picasso is continuing to throw everything he’s got at this painting, which grows cluttered and unappealing. Knowing that he’s pushed the piece from lovely to evocatively abstract to busy, Picasso throws it away and starts over again, this time starting with the sense of abstracted purpose that took him who-knows-how-long to discover, combining this abstraction with a honed simplicity, utilizing only a few of the images he developed on the prior canvas.

Even with Clouzot’s tricks—time-lapse editing, the parring away of quotidian details of painting—the film’s climax dramatizes the endless trial and error of most artistic creation, as well as the faith that it takes to proclaim something to be done within a process that could be endless. Clouzot, in his way, de-sentimentalizes art-making, showing the exaltation and the terror of a way of life that requires knowing how and when to throw something away. The Mystery of Picasso reveals art to be a life of many deaths.

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Score: 
 Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot  Distributor: Milestone Films  Running Time: 78 min  Rating: PG  Year: 1956  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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