The Politics of Pleasure
Picasso at Gagosian Gallery
Picasso. Tête-à-tête. April 18 through July 3, 2025. Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York City. https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2025/picasso-tete-a-tete/
“Everything that comes before consciousness as a whole is already dreadfully complicated: we merely ever have an appearance of wholeness.
The phenomenon of the body is the richest, clearest, most apprehensible phenomenon: to be methodically made present without extracting anything of ultimate meaning.”
»Alles, was als “Einheit” ins Bewußtsein tritt, ist bereits ungeheuer kompliziert: wir haben immer nur einen Anschein von Einheit.
Das Phänomen des Leibes ist das reichere, deutlichere, faßbarere Phänomen: methodisch voranzustellen, ohne etwas auszumachen über seine letzte Bedeutung.« — Friedrich Nietzsche1
I]
Just because there are naked people in paintings and sculpture, is no excuse for the existence of naked people, says some MAGA fruitcake evangelist.
So Picasso has his uses after all. He makes naked people necessary, which hasn’t brought him many friends of late. Not since John Berger, who sixty years ago criticized Picasso for his lack of political engagement. Picasso, according to Berger, refused to engage with material reality, let alone the reality of Materialism, the only real reality as far as Berger knew:
‘There is no interest here in structure or the dimensions of time and space… […] What Picasso is expressing here becomes absurd because there is nothing to resist him: neither the subject, nor his awareness of reality as understood by others.”
Only after he joined the Communist Party in 1944 was Picasso able, ever so briefly according to Berger, to break through the clouds of his own subjectivity: .
“This was a moment of truth which it had taken him fifty years to arrive at. It was the moment when Picasso acted and chose so as to come to terms with both the reality around him and his own genius.”2
Berger was recycling an old accusation. Picasso was unable to transcend his own limits, an artist trapped in a male body, the body trapped in his own time; the Sigmund Freud of painting; or maybe Nietzsche. As though the fact that Picasso, like Freud and Nietzsche, took subjectivity itself as the raw material of his work, was enough to disqualify him. Picasso, then, was a bad artist the way Freud was a bad thinker. Like Freud he failed to live up to the standards of plain-vanilla Positivism; to submit, as we are called to do today, to what Roland Barthes calls “the tyranny of the signified over the signifyin’.” 3 Picasso, Freud, Nietzsche (Marx, for that matter) must be fitted into what Fredric Jameson calls “a political order purged of contradiction and therefore of the objective possibility of choice.”4Not to mention Hegel, the Dialektikmeister. Picasso brings me back to my happy days at the Guggenheim Museum, when thinking and talking about Art was still possible, because you weren’t required to read from the script. Now Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter and sponsor of the Picasso show at Gagosian, seems a little desperate to promote her father for what he’s not: transparent to our day; sticking to the script:
“It’s a very touching, moving portrait”… “You can see that it’s a real person who’s there.”5
Notice how the eyes follow you around the room. All three of them.
II]
In Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Der Weg ins Freie, an artist illuminates the contradictions in his life and work:
“Yes. I’ve felt guilt-free. Somewhere in my soul; and elsewhere, deeper perhaps, I’ve felt guilty; and yet deeper: guilt-free. […] It all comes down to the depth at which we see ourselves. And if you turn on all the lights on every floor, we’re all of those at once: guilty and not guilty, cowards and heroes, fools and wise.”
„Ja. Ich hab mich ohne Schuld gefühlt. Irgendwo in meiner Seele. Und wo anders, tiefer vielleicht, hab ich mich schuldig gefühlt [...] und noch tiefer, wieder schuldlos. Es kommt immer nur darauf an, wie tief wir in uns hineinschauen. Und wenn die Lichter in allen Stockwerken angezündet sind, sind wir doch alles auf einmal: schuldig und unschuldig, Feiglinge und Helden, Narren und Weise.“6
Picasso in his art was that fool and that hero, layering the innocent and the guilty, each through a distinct painterly approach: perspectival distortion, brushwork, color contrasts, strips of newspaper, boobs, asses and vaginas. What’s so instructive is the ease with which each approach is conscientiously unpacked and reinserted into the whole. We’re left with a series of interlocking rules, or rather a series of interlocking systems of rules in a perpetual tension. Picasso’s works, as Leo Steinberg observed, are an “allegory of process.”7
Consciously. Berger’s critique is a direct, clumsy, unacknowledged, restatement of Freud’s own analysis of the procedures of art-making, as distinct from the psychological profile of an individual artist. Berger, like many critics, is unable to distinguish between the two. Freud, like Berger, posits that neuroses originate in the individual’s rejection or flight from “the reality around him:”
“We have long realized that every neurosis has the result, and most likely the purpose, of drawing the sufferer away from real life, to alienate him from reality.”
„Wir haben seit langem gemerkt, daß jede Neurose die Folge, also wahrscheinlich die Tendenz habe, den Kranken aus dem realen Leben herauszudrängen, ihn der Wirklichkeit zu entfremden.“
Freud takes this commonplace observation to posit two principles of psychic life, the Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle. Like Berger, he begins by calling out the artist as an exemplar of a neurotic who cannot reconcile the two,
“ who turns away from reality because he cannot befriend the initially required renunciation of instinctual satisfaction.”
„welcher sich von der Realität abwendet, weil er sich mit dem von ihr zunächst geforderten Verzicht auf Triebbefriedigung nicht befreunden kann.“
There Berger ends, and Freud proceeds:
“Art brings about a reconciliation of the two principles in a distinctive way.”
„Die Kunst bringt auf einem eigentümlichen Weg eine Versöhnung der beiden Prinzipien zustande.“
In the course of natural development
“A new principle of psychic activity has been introduced: what’s made present to the mind is no longer what’s agreeable but what’s real, even if it should be disagreeable.”
„Damit war ein neues Prinzip der seelischen Tätigkeit eingeführt; es wurde nicht mehr vorgestellt, was angenehm, sondern was real war, auch wenn es unangenehm sein sollte.“8
A neurotic is unable to integrate this new perspective. To the artist, however, what is re-presented is what is real, even as it is in the process of being made agreeable. Blaise Pascal, that somber social pessimist, had noted something similar:
« Quelle vanité que la peinture qui attire l’admiration par la ressemblance des choses dont on n’admire point les originaux. » 9
It would be foolish to imagine that a thinker as sophisticated as Pascal refers here merely to external or “material” correspondences between a painting and what it represents, a philosophic Paloma Picasso. The Pensées consist of detached notes; they can be arranged to suit any number of narratives; but the problem of moral relativism runs through them. Pascal shared with his contemporary Descartes a raw, foundational “interest […] in structure or the dimensions of time and space.” Nevertheless, Pascal in his Pensées is not so much concerned with literal correspondence in the arts as with agrément, social and moral correspondence, “awareness of reality as understood by others,” a moral, and therefore a political position.
Like Paloma and Berger, Picasso finds himself directed in his career toward a kind of zero degree of representation, an agreement, an adaequatio imaginis et rei. Like Pascal, he can’t bring himself to believe it, and this is the foundation of his social engagement.
Many, many years ago, in the most bourgeois of the bourgeois newspapers, I read a review of a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni which consisted of complaining that the singer playing Leporello, in his enumeration of the many women Giovanni had seduced, did not show the appropriate degree of displeasure. This might as well have been the New York Times (or any glossy art journal) reviewing Picasso today. It might as well be Berger who, much like Pascal’s friends and interlocutors at Port-Royal, cannot reconcile representation with prescription. (Mozart, in his own self-image, seems to have felt himself to be somewhere between Masetto and Don Ottavio.) Picasso’s art from early on (say, roughly, starting with Demoiselles d’Avignon), is an art of inner contradictions, of dis-agreement, an art that’s supremely dialectical. He takes pleasure (and provides it) by the depiction of his inability to come to terms with the terms of representation themselves. It’s the same pleasure (jouissance) Roland Barthes found to be sadly missing in the one-dimensional literalness of all dictatorships, a degré zero of painting. Picasso is the artist they love to hate who hate to love.
III]
And, while Picasso is of little use for his engagement with the questions that concern us (T. & A. aside), his mode of engagement—supremely dialectical—is in itself a model for painterly engagement, including engagement with those issues that are politically—that is, socially and intellectually—relevant to us: not art that prescribes; art that problematizes.
As Barthes put it,
“Revolutionary praxis, whatever its scale, is a polyphonic practice.”
« La pratique révolutionnaire, à quelque échelle qu’elle se dessine, est une pratique polyphonique. »10
Does that entail that all polyphonic practice is politically revolutionary? Of course not. But it’s a start.
WOID XXIV-45
May 13, 2025; revised May 21, 2026
Friedrich Nietzsche, »Notizheft, 1888-1889,« »Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre«, Werke in Sechs Banden , Bnd VI, ed. Karl Schlechta (München: C. Hanser, 1980), p. 860.
John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 144, 172.
« Il n'y a plus de signifiant, le signifié reprend sa tyrannie. » Roland Barthes, « Pierre Loti : "Aziyadé" », Le Degré zéro de l'écriture. Suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 175.
Fredric Jameson, “Presentation IV,” Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 2010), p. 161.
Robin Pogrebin, “A Picasso Show From Pablo’s Daughter,” New York Times, April 22, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/arts/design/picasso-show-paloma.html; accessed April 27, 2025.
Der Weg ins Freie. Roman (1905-1907) (Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1908), p. 459.
Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Other Criteria. Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.159.
„Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens“ [1911], Gesammelte Werke, Band 8, Werke aus den Jahren 1909-1913 (London: Imago 1943), pp. 230, 236, 236, 232.
Fragment Vanité n° 27 / 38; see also Pensées diverses I – Fragment n° 33 / 3 : « On ne sait pas en quoi consiste l'agrément, qui est l'objet de la poésie. » See also John D. Lyons, “Speaking in Pictures, Speaking of Pictures: Problems of Representation in the Seventeenth Century,” Mimesis: from Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, John D. Lyons and Stephens G. Nichols Jr., ed. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 166-187.
Roland, Barthes, « Plaisir/écriture/lecture” [1972] Oeuvres complètes II, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 1482.