The reign in Spain

Yale University Press, #30

ANY book about Picasso is off to a flying start purely because of the name. This latest dissection focuses on Picasso's Spanishness. Evidently American libraries classify him as a French painter. Well, that's their problem! The book is made up of five sections, each by an American academic who questions how much did his first quarter century born and bred in Spain influence his later work?

Did a further 70 years as a displaced Spaniard in France wipe this out? What was the effect of El Greco and Velazquez? How far did Spanish nationalism impinge on his work, especially the still lifes - and what about national identity? If these sound like exam questions, you are fairly near the mark, for the book results from a 1992 New York academic symposium.

This tends to make for some big words like ``thanotopic'' or long quotes in Spanish, but it does have the advantage of illustrating many very early drawings and caricatures. Here we see the very young Picasso doing a send-up of Manet's Olympia with himself presiding, the nude transformed into a voluptous black Venus and his friend Junyer as the servant.

The following year, 1904, he drew a broadsheet with a storyboard of six images showing two young, unknown painters setting off from Barcelona for Paris to find fame and fortune. The last frame shows Junyer receiving a sack of dosh from the famous art dealer Durand-Ruel. It's all good studenty stuff, unremarkable but for the signature, the inscriptions which are in both Catalan and Castilian - and the fact that it all came true!

Another plus is the juxtaposition of illustrations which compare and contrast images by Picasso with the three great Spaniards, El Greco, Goya, Velazquez, (except that El Greco was Greek!) and with near contemporaries like Braque and Cezanne, finding echoes which range from far fetched to plausible.

As all Pollok House lovers know, Spain was almost unknown until the 1830s but the end of the Napoleonic era brought with it an influx in Spanish paintings to France and well-heeled tourists to Spain, including Sir William Stirling Maxwell who was one of the first to collect and study Spanish art. It's his collection which forms the nucleus of Glasgow's Pollok Spanish collection.

The writers pick out every instance of Spanishness, from Picasso's use of swaggering bullfighters and demure duennas to his passion for colour, especially the frequent use of the Catalan flag's red and yellow, national colours featured in anything and everything from his famous 1921 Three Musicians' harlequin costumes via cryptic examples involving various mistresses to the full-blown, ferocious red and yellow Bull's Head 1938.

Sly Spanish texts appear in cubist still lifes and there's an interesting discovery of his use of the cubist glass facets of the Spanish Anis

bottle and phallic connotations of Spain's porron drinking vessel.

Annoyingly, the book omits basic dates and any mention of Guernica - I suppose because academics know it backwards. But for the average reader, student, or indeed even the professional, it's frustrating that it's totally ignored.

However, the book is good on details about his painter father, the mundane traditionalist Jose Ruiz. Although Picasso soon took a stylistic path in direct opposition to that of his father, it was Ruiz who introduced him to Velazquez's great picture Las Meninas, when, en route from La Coruna to Malaga in 1895 the family stopped for a day in Madrid so that Ruiz could take his 14-year-old to the Prado. My father also took me, as a child, to my first Picasso show. One never forgets these seminal moments.

More than 50 years later, in 1957, Picasso began his famous series of 45 paintings based directly on Las Meninas. Spatial analysis of this Alcazar palace room by Professor Martin Kemp, ex-Glasgow University, throws light on Picasso's intriguing analysis of perception and reality.

After this intensive period, on the very day Picasso painted his last two Meninas Infantas, he began a lighthearted series of pigeons seen through his studio window. Was it incidental that his father had specialised in fur-n-feather pictures, with pigeons his favourite subject? As a child Picasso even helped him paint the legs of the birds. Such is our subconscious.

After the war Picasso retreated to the idyllic seclusion of Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes with his new love Francoise Gilot, to live out a life of sybaritic joie de vivre where his oils featured frolicking nymphs, fauns and minotaurs.

How much his exile on the Mediterranean coast had to do with post-war politics, (he was criticised by both left and right), his love of the spiritual affinities of Catalonia and ancient Greece - or just happiness under a warm sun, is open to debate.

When I began reading this book I had not yet been to the wonderful and pioneering Picasso exhibition at Louisiana in Copenhagen which examines the influence of ancient Mediterranean art on his work. This book was written before that show, so cannot take advantage of its memorable impact - but Louisiana does does point up the gaps in knowledge here.

In the end, it's Picasso's words that matter. ``I am Spanish,'' he asserted emphatically in a 1954 interview. ``I have the documents to prove it!''