Nikolaj Berdjaev et Sergej Bulgakov face à Picasso

Nikolaj Berdjaev and Sergej Bulgakov Confront Picasso Very early on, Russian critics and thinkers began to contemplate a new form of art, conventionally named 'Cubism,' consisting of a geometrization of the objective world. The most illustrious exponent of this new form was Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. In 1914, two representatives of Russian religious philosophy, N. A. Berdjaev and S. N. Bulgakov, dedicated articles to Picasso. In the present essay, the author attempts to bring to light the main elements of the reception of Picasso's work by the two Russian thinkers. He also highlights the influence of the analyses of French critics and essayists, particularly Jacques Rivière, on them. The author then examines Berdjaev and Bulgakov’s responses to the 1913 exhibition of S. I. Ščukin’s famous collection of French art, which took place in his mansion and was dominated by the works of Matisse and Picasso. Berdjaev and Bulgakov recognize Picasso’s genius, but for them, it is a demonie genius that distorts ail notions of Beauty. Looking back to the magnificent examples of the Renaissance, Berdjaev laments the loss of everlasting embodied beauty and the distortion of the female form. Не insists that Picasso’s work is not the beginning of a new art, but the end of an entire era in which the beauty of the flesh was the measure of art. For his part, Bulgakov speaks about 'the corpse of beauty' and the abominable, scandalous, diabolical work of Picasso. For him, as for Berdjaev, the artistic form is not subject to fundamental transformation, and both see in Cubism and Futurism a 'crisis of art', a sort of illness. The Russo-Ukrainian painter and theorist A. Grischenko, however, correctly noted that the problem is not a 'crisis of art', but a crisis of the approach to art. Despite their overall negative reaction to Picasso’s work, Berdjaev and Bulgakov took his creation of a new world vision seriously. It is interesting and paradoxical to note that the debate that took place at the beginning of the 20th century over the corporeal measure of art, as opposed to its dematerialization, re- appeared at the end of the century, particularly in the work of essayist Jean Clair. Clair, until recently director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, began to lead a war against abstraction and conceptual art in the name of this same corporeal measure of art, the perfect example of which is the author of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon...