Railway Stations and Minotaurs

Picasso the artist became Picasso the voyeur. No longer able to fully engage with his subject, the artist instead depicts himself as an aging clown, a voyeur in his own creation. He invites our empathy, if not sympathy, whilst at the same time reclaiming his narcissistic loss by means of his still virile creative potency as an artist (Fig.1).

Anxiety caused by loss, self-image, heightened sexuality and melancholia are all mainstream psycho-physical preoccupations. What was not so mainstream was the degree to which they consciously and unconsciously obsessed Picasso and De Chirico. Clearly for both artists life and art were symbiotic. Picasso openly acknowledged this fact by meticulous dating every thing he produced, thus leaving a visual autobiography for others to decipher. The extent to which Picasso and De Chirico engaged in deep self-analysis in order to generate their work is highly doubtful. In fact they may well have consciously avoided the temptation to intellectually reflect on their oeuvre, preferring instead to cherish the muse that instinctively and emotionally propelled their work. And, perhaps even more significantly, strive to see the world through the eyes of a child. De Chirico and Picasso undoubtedly preferred poetic insight to intellectual dissection. In broad terms, it is also quite clear that both were quite capable of making objective observations concerning their sexuality and their differing preoccupations with death. Even Picasso towards the end of his life confronted his fear of mortality largely through indulging in a form of self-pathos linked to impotence. This is evidenced by the monkey-like self-portraits that he produced close to the time of his death, following a lifetime of indulging in an Oedipal sexual engagement with the maternal presence (Fig.2). By re-entering the woman-mother he symbolically re-entered the womb, a time before death, thus achieving virtual immortality. De Chirico took another path to the same goal, preferring instead to pass through the paternal false-door (of antiquity and ancestry), and the key that he used to open this door was provided by the lost art of metaphysical perspective (Fig.3-4).