[THEME MUSIC]
SARAH URIST GREEN: Throughout history, food
has served as a subject matter, inspiration, and, of course,
sustenance for artists.
Food has also been the art on a number of occasions.
Today, we will cook our way through the life and work
of a hugely prolific artist, about whom thousands of books
have been written.
His metamorphosis through eclectic styles
and notorious progression through wives and lovers
make him a challenging subject, but he's been in the intro
for a while, so we're going to give it a try anyway.
The story of Pablo Ruiz Picasso begins in Spain
where he was born in 1881 in the southern port city of Malaga.
He was named in the customary Spanish way-- the Ruiz
from his father, a painter, and Picasso from his mother.
They moved around for his dad's jobs landing in Barcelona
when Pablo was a teenager.
So the ridiculous story goes, at the age of 13,
his father declared that his son's talent had outstripped
his own, and so he put down his brushes
and never painted again.
That didn't happen, but Pablo was an accomplished artist
for his age and breezed through and quickly got bored
of his art schooling.
Now, I'm not such an amazing drafts person,
but what I'm trying to draw here is the neo-Gothic entrance
to Els Quatre Gats or the 4 Cats,
the café in Barcelona where Picasso had his first show
in 1900 at the age of 18.
In the cookbook you never knew you needed, "Picasso,
Bon Vivant," you'll find a much better drawing of the café than
ours as well as a recipe for the hot wine flavored with cinnamon
that Pablo and his artist friends drank there.
Sorry, we're not going to make these delicious-looking
fritters, but we are going to fry something so hang tight.
To make what this book calls sengri, a variant of the better
known sangria, we're going to start
with a bottle of red wine.
I'm using a Spanish Garnacha along
with some cognac, cinnamon, cloves, and Acacia honey.
We're also going to need the zest of three oranges I
have no clue why I got out for.
But while I make zest using my handy microplane,
I'll tell you that people have been heating and spicing
wine since at least ancient Roman times.
Wine would be heavily watered down, heated,
and mixed with herbs and spices to mask
the taste of the often bad wine and also make
their water safer to drink.
The Spanish name originates from the word for blood
or sangre and, of course, the red hue of the drink.
Into a pot goes your bottle of wine
and a cinnamon stick and three whole cloves.
And you're going to bring it to a boil.
When that happens, add the zest, four tablespoons of honey,
two tablespoons of cognac, and a cup of water.
Let it heat through and set it aside
until you're ready to enjoy.
Now, because I spent a lot of time
at the 4 Cats, which was the gathering
spot at the turn of the century for the experimental artists
and writers and intellectuals of Barcelona, in Catalan,
4 Cats is a colloquialism for just a few people.
And those few people who were the spiritual core of the place
were artists Santiago Rusiñol, Miguel Utrillo, Ramón Casas,
and its proprietor, Pere Romeu.
These guys published a magazine and staged shows,
wanting to ignite a Catalonian Renaissance, all having
spent time in Paris and observing the modernism
bubbling up there.
It was here that Picasso not only had his first show
of unframed drawings nailed to the wall,
but found inspiration and support,
drew portraits of his friends and the café's bohemian
clientele.
He was also hired to design some of their menus.
They did serve food at the 4 Cats,
but what we're going to make next isn't what Picasso would
have eaten there, but rather something
he would have tried to sell.
First we're going to heat a pan with oil.
I'm using safflower, but anything with the high smoke
point will do.
Now, Picasso had made friends with artist Isidre Nonell, who
shared with him his technique for making
antique-looking drawings to peddle to customers on the hunt
for a rare vintage find.
Yes, I too thought that this would be more dramatic,
but there's no liquid in our paper that would
cause bubbling and spitting.
Anyway, Nonell would fry drawings
to achieve a kind of old parchment effect,
agitating the pan or the drawing until it took on a sepia tint.
When the edges of your paper start to roll up,
or when you just like the look and your paper
is too heavy for the edges to curl, take it out and let
it drain somewhere while you bask
in the glory of your surprisingly successful
experiment.
We must remember that there was a time before Picasso
was Picasso, before he had a name that carried
great import, when he was a promising and struggling
young artist who surrounded himself with friends
and mentors, and who traveled between the Spanish countryside
and Barcelona and more and more often to Paris,
hungry for new environs and experiences.
And now our story moves on to France,
which is, you know, actually connected
to Spain, sort of like this.
Pablo visited Paris several times,
trying to make a go of it and landed pretty much for good
in 1904 in the artist enclave of Montmartre.
He encountered impressionism and the work of Degas and Renoir
and Toulouse-Lautrec and the cabaret culture
that reigned supreme.
He had been making paintings we now
think of as belonging to his Blue Period, gaunt, unfortunate
figures suffering from misfortune,
and yes, rendered largely in shades of blue.
He scraped by during his early Paris years
but was surrounded by supportive writers and artists.
And as his fortunes improved, his palate warmed.
His figures became less resigned--
clowns and acrobats and harlequins--
people with a degree of agency.
He started to have shows and actually sell his work,
attracting the attention of the prominent brother
and sister collectors of modern art
Leo and Gertrude Stein, Americans living in Paris.
Picasso painted Gertrude's portrait
and was a frequent guest in her home before and after she
and her partner Alice B. Toklas settled
into the famous apartment where they hosted a weekly salon.
Picasso had become a success, which
brings us to our next course.
Toklas published a cookbook in 1954, most notable
for its recipe for hashish fudge given to her by her friend
Brian Gysen.
But it also includes a recipe for a special dish
she prepared for Picasso.
Toklas writes, "One day, when Picasso was to lunch with us,
I decorated a fish in a way that I thought would amuse him."
She explains how she made a court bouillon to cook it in,
which is a broth made with dry white wine.
I went ahead and made this earlier
using her description and this more detailed recipe
in "Picasso, Bon Vivant."
So our court bouillon goes into a fish kettle--
another thing you never knew you needed--
and we bring it to a simmer while our whole striped bass
waits in the wings.
When it's simmering, we gently lower in the fish
and let it cook for about 20 minutes
while we talk about Picasso and his many styles.
So far, we've mentioned his Blue Period and then
the Harlequin paintings we call his Rose Period.
But next in the progression came something decidedly different,
more of a radical break than a shift in color or subject
matter, and that was Cubism.
Cezanne was an important predecessor to the movement,
breaking up his landscapes into geometric volumes.
But it was Picasso and his buddy Georges Braque
who really made it happen.
They started fracturing their images
into divided planes of light and dark,
finding geometries in nature and discarding linear perspective.
They made still lifes of everyday objects,
not from one guy's perspective, but from all the perspectives.
And they collaged in other materials
like newspaper as well.
But Picasso never just did one kind of thing for very long.
And soon after, he was on neoclassical pictures
of fleshy women and surrealistic images of contorted figures
and the abstracted style for which he is probably
best known--
the one-eye-here, another-eye-there style
that he riffed on for a long time.
But what's hard to fully grasp is how much work he made,
and how much he vacillated between not only styles
but mediums, embracing printmaking and exploring
poetry and ceramics.
He did all the things and not in clean succession,
but back and forth, unwilling to commit to any one way.
OK.
So after 20 minutes, we lift the fish from the kettle
and put it aside to drain and cool
while we get our decorations ready.
First, we'll need to peel three hard-boiled eggs--
you can feel free to do this much more
elegantly and cleanly than I--
and then, separate the yolks from the whites.
Then you'll press them through a sieve
so that you have these nice little bits at the end.
We're also going to finely chop some herbs.
I'm using chives and parsley here,
but you can expand this to include the more
traditionally French mix with tarragon and chervil.
We also need to make a tomato mayonnaise, which
Toklas explains can be made with ordinary mayo but not,
and I quote, "horror of horrors,"
ketchup but with tomato paste.
When our fish is cooled, we carefully
remove the skin from one side and transfer it
to a serving plate to chill thoroughly in the fridge.
Toklas tells us that shortly before serving,
she covered the fish with the mayonnaise,
and I'm using a pastry bag here just
to get it as even as possible.
And then she made a design alternating the egg whites, egg
yolks, herbs, and truffles, which
I've made the executive decision not to use.
Toklas shared in her cookbook, "I
was proud of my chef d'oeuvre when it was served
and Picasso exclaimed its beauty.
But, he said, should it not rather
have been made in honor of Matisse than of me?"
Which is not the nicest thing to say
to a person who has just painstakingly
made a magnificent fish artwork for you.
But to be fair, I'm not totally sure
why she chose to make a striped fish for him.
He made plenty of artworks in his life depicting seafood
in some fashion or another, and he
was certainly known for his taking of real things
in the world and abstracting them
into simplified forms with bold colors and outlines,
but Matisse was the one who had a clear thing for goldfish
and was also a fixture in the Stein-Toklas Salon.
Stein introduced Matisse and Picasso,
who were known rivals and friends throughout their lives.
But anyway, in Stein's 1939 book about Picasso,
she wrote in her syncopated style,
"The thing that I want to insist upon
is that Picasso's gift is completely
the gift of a painter and a draftsmen.
He is a man who always had need of emptying himself,
of completely emptying himself.
It is necessary that he should be greatly stimulated
so that he could be active enough
to empty himself completely."
Which brings us to the sausage problem.
So when you read any account of Picasso or his work,
interwoven is inevitably his biography
and his turbulent and often disturbing
love and family life, often told in chapters
that align with his shifts in style and approach.
And it's really distracting.
Because even if you just want to talk about this 1941 painting
for what it is, you can't do it without addressing the sausage
in the room.
Yes this is blood sausage I'm arranging and joining
on the board with the other elements of the still life
Picasso painted while holed up in his studio
during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II.
These are not ingredients of scarcity or want.
Picasso was very well off by this point.
This is a tableau of plenty.
Unlike many artists who were enlisted in the fight
or fled to safer places, Picasso stayed put.
And we can see this still life as an expression
of the in-between space he existed in during a time
when trauma was unfolding all around him.
The scene is lit with harsh, interrogating light,
sharp angles abound, the wedge of cheese,
the large chef's knife, and the pointed cutlery emerging
from the drawer.
The coil of blood sausage has been
compared to the spilling of intestines,
a reminder of the grotesque and very close-by atrocities
of war.
Picasso reminds us how effective objects
can be in expressing emotion, communicating his anxiety
and dread with the everyday foodstuffs around him.
He had expressed his political sympathies
before in a much more overt manner with his epic painting
"Guernica" and also, "The Dream and Lie of Franco," as recently
as 1937.
Picasso once told a biographer, "Look,
even a saucepan can shout.
Everything can shout."
We're using that French version of blood sausage
called boudin noir.
And yes, it's made with pork blood and snouts
and all sorts of delicious stuff.
And while we're chopping and frying,
we're going to try to work through our conflicted feelings
about this talented man with a proven capacity for empathy who
was also pretty clearly a misogynist and womanizer who
left pain and misery in his wake.
He was a charismatic man, described
by those who knew and loved him as lively, funny, magnetic,
and powerful but also moody, stubborn, sarcastic, sad,
ill-tempered, and sometimes cruel.
His misogyny is not just evidenced in such professions
as the one he made to Francoise Gilot when he was 61
and she was 21.
"For me, there are only two kinds of women," he said,
"goddesses and doormats."
But it can be seen and felt in his work,
too, most notably his monumental 1907
painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," a composition
of prostitutes presenting themselves to the viewer,
faces modeled after the abstracted forms
of African and Iberian masks.
We see in this and other works his complex and often
contradictory feelings about women--
an intermingling of desire and fear and overtones
of Stein's evocation of a man who must be greatly stimulated
so that he could empty himself and promptly move along.
Sausage, anyone?
Oof.
Well, I feel better.
We're now going to breeze through the last decades
of Picasso's life as we work with some bread dough
that I purchased from our best local bakery,
because no one wants to see my bread fail to rise once again.
In 1952, when Picasso was living near Cannes
on the Mediterranean coast of France,
the photographer Robert Doisneau visited Picasso
and took this picture.
The bakers in his small town made these hand-shaped breads
with thick fingers and called them Picassos.
And Picasso himself thought they were funny and playfully
posed with them.
Our first attempt has clearly turned out ridiculously large,
but let's give it a bake anyway and send it off
to a 450-degree oven until the bottom sounds hollow
when knocked.
Hm, not quite as elegant as I'd hoped.
Let's try again.
The bakers had been making these special breads for a long time
but renamed them after this man of outsized reputation moved
to town.
Alas, here we see Picasso's fortune
and also his misfortune.
He continued to make a tremendous volume of work
even later in life, and his fame and other's
fascination with him only grew.
He moved to different houses, bought magnificent chateaus,
and ate well.
He was a legend, whether or not he wanted it.
OK, these are much better and much more
suitable in scale to a man who, while vigorous,
was a rather small person.
In 1960, Picasso revealed to the photographer Brassai,
"I live in seclusion, like a prisoner.
I would not wish my celebrity on anyone, not even
my worst enemies."
And he protected himself largely by making art,
focusing on it to an almost maniacal degree
at the expense of many relationships in his life.
And yes, these are some bread hands.
As we reflect upon Picasso's life,
I can't help but appreciate his insatiable appetite,
not for women, oh, no, but for life and ideas
and for making things.
He once said he wanted everyone to realize,
above all, that an artist works of necessity.
That he, himself, is only a trifling bit of the world
and that no more importance should
be attached to him than to plenty of other things
that please us in the world, though we can't explain them.
And this is a good enough place to end our bumbling attempt
to make sense of this man and his work,
whose impact on art history and on our collective imagination
we'll be mulling over far into the future.
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