If Pratolini tells you about Picasso

Anniversaries are not always a simple memory exercise. They can also serve to pick up a theme to reconsider, go back to looking, reading, listening. Pablo Picasso left us 50 years ago. For this anniversary, a tribute that had been organized for his eightieth birthday emerges from the Rai Teche and is usable again on RaiPlay. It was an episode of the in-depth column «Arts and Sciences». Inside there was a rapid succession of testimonies, analyzes and reflections offered by key figures of Italian culture such as Giulio Carlo Argan and Luigi Dallapiccola. The intervention of Vasco Pratolini played the main role, also due to the particular optics. These, in a series of clear sentences, hit the mark. His considerations on Picasso, spoken calmly with a slight Florentine inflection, precisely outlined the contours of a limpid mirror in which that genius of art, so difficult to enclose in a definition, could agree to find himself.

Pratolini spoke with full knowledge of the facts, as a great art lover collector that he was. In this regard, a piece of news from a few years ago comes back. An auction was held on 22 February 2020 at the Pananti Casa d’Aste Gallery including 121 works from the collection that belonged to the writer. Paintings, drawings, engravings. Just scrolling through the catalog of works allowed a happy immersion in a varied world. Faces, streets, landscapes, wildflowers, parrots in cages and men who are also prisoners, saints facing conversion and life and death, marines and rhinos, children and acrobats, pomegranates and tennis players, May Day, a funeral wake, conversations and compositions. Furthermore, many portraits made by painters who were friends of Pratolini himself. A confirmation that the writer, even within the walls of his home, was familiar with art and frequented it on a daily basis. Nonetheless, when asked to offer his contribution to that televised celebration of Pablo Picasso, he began with awkward embarrassment, ducking, shrugging his shoulders: “You can’t talk about Picasso right off the bat”, he began, “What do I know? if anything, we can venture a few definitions… And seize this opportunity, the occasion of this homage, to greet his eightieth birthday as four centuries ago Titian’s eightieth would have been greeted. The same old age, the same lucid and industrious longevity. This is to repeat, if it were still needed, that the stature of the artist is to be evaluated in this yardstick».

Pratolini placed the painter in the historical perspective of his belonging, immediately attributing to him an indisputable protagonism on the twentieth-century scene: «Picasso is one of those personalities who place themselves at the center of a century and determine it». In short, the incisive presence of the painter of «Guernica» had not only been immersed in the political and social climate of his time. His contribution had been decisive. Significant and remarkable in art and thought. Pratolini continued: «An illuminating definition of himself is the one Picasso gave and everyone knows when he said: “I don’t seek, I find”. Where “finding” stands for “knowing by working” because everything is present in the reality that surrounds us and which still has man as the only and irreplaceable measure». Picasso’s influence, Pratolini concluded, had not acted exclusively on painting and sculpture: «Picasso was and is one of the most important masters not only of the figurative arts but in every other discipline and obviously therefore also of literature. It is no coincidence that both his work and his human figure as a friend and overbearingly committed artist have inspired a whole series of poets, from Apollinaire to Éluard, among the greatest of our time ».