Corpse of Beauty

Regarding the paintings of Picasso (1914) “...I see a woman lying in the coffins our beauty created in the image of God so much ugly, inglorious, without (From funeral chants) The art gallery of S. I. Shchukin in Moscow contains many masterpieces of French painting, which reflect the bold and sometimes paradoxical quests of modern art. However, most of these searches and achievements remain in a purely artistic, aesthetic plane; many of these paintings unpretentiously excite and delight the eye with the melodiousness and luxurious splendor of their colors. Naively and thoughtlessly they sing the glory of beauty, like a bird chirping joyfully at the greeting of a bright morning, cheerful as a bird and, like a bird, ingenuous, naive, simple-minded. Morning thoughts, sunny songs. This perception of the world is not without aesthetic and sentimental affectation, this worldview, somewhat naive in its aestheticism, which, according to the old usage, would most easily be called ancient pagan, if we did not now know that the ancients knew their terror antiquus and were certainly not singing birds and naive children. Such a purely aesthetic worldview, for all the charm of its charms and the irresistibility of its artistic arguments, is still naivety, unacceptable to our serious, tired age, aware of the tragic side of life. Serving beauty does not always lead to aestheticism, which expresses a certain relaxation of spirit, bad femininity, and in addition, some insincerity is felt - make-up. Modern man, in a certain sense, cannot afford the worldview of Matisse, enchanted by the singing of his colors, in love with his palette, or even the exotic Gauguin, fleeing in Tahiti from the disease of Europeanism. But this “golden veil” of beauty, thrown “over the nameless abyss” of chaos, is pulled away by a powerful hand, and the aestheticizing worldview is immediately given harsh and murderous criticism, coming precisely from art. Only an artist can criticize an artist quite convincingly, not with words, but with images, contrasting aestheticizing art with the art of the ugly and vile. We have this antithesis precisely within the Shchukin gallery. The work of Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne, Renoir and others is a day sparkling with colors, about which I would like to say in the words of a poet: To the world of mysterious spirits Above this nameless abyss A gold-woven cover is thrown over Day is this brilliant cover, Day - earthly revival, When you enter the room where the works of Pablo Picasso (born in 1882) are collected, you are enveloped by an atmosphere of mystical horror, reaching the point of horror. The veil of the day, with its soothing variegation and color, flies away, you are enveloped by night, terrible, faceless, in which silent and evil ghosts and some shadows surround you. This is the suffocation of the grave. But the day fades, night has come, - She came - and from the world of fate Fabric of the Blessed Veil Having ripped it off, he throws it away, With your fears and darkness, And there are no barriers between her and us, This is why the night is scary for us. Picasso's work is this night, moonless and starless, it is as mystical as it is. Moreover, this is a mysticism not of the content, not of the plot (quite the contrary - these plots are very common, even trivial, mainly the female body, dressed or naked, and pink nature morte), but of the brush itself, the paints, the smear, the very nature of his work is mystical through and through. This is, if not religious, then, in any case, mystery painting, something iconographic, albeit in a very special sense. Despite the rapid development and radical change in the methods of Picasso’s work, in terms of spiritual content it is completely monotonous and from beginning to end imbued with one feeling - the growing melancholy and horror of existence. There is undeniably power in Picasso, he doesn’t just try to seem strong (as, with Nietzsche’s light hand, many people do nowadays), his brush is truly powerful; as a “demanding artist,” he persistently mints, bringing to the utmost perfection, the form corresponding to the task, and in this work on the form he shows the perseverance of a great master. This young artist, a Spaniard with an admixture of Moorish blood (a very significant trait!), has already gone through a long path of artistic development, all the main stages of which can be traced in this room. The works of the early period, written with great skill and strength, but in ordinary realistic tones (this includes “The Drunkard”, two male portraits, “Old Jew with a Boy”, “Date”, etc.)” are distinguished by a sharp, almost inhuman melancholy in the eyes and some kind of music of melancholy in the figures. Next come the works of the middle, cubist period, which make the most powerful impression and so far constitute the culmination of the artist’s work. Here is the pensive “Isabeau”, shackled by some kind of iron melancholy, here is the melancholy and still evoking acute pity “Sitting Woman”, then there are demonic images. Here is “Naked Woman with a Landscape”, bent in an ugly erotic pose - legs like the blades of an amphibian, heavy, heavy, spreading into parts: evil cynicism and a challenge to corruption, a rebellion of corpses and rot. Here is the “Woman after the Ball”, sitting heavily on a chair and staring into the distance with evil eyes - how these colorful blocks go here, not welded together, to depict this vampire, whose body has only anger and geometry left. Here is “Lady with a Fan”, all made of triangles and geometric shapes, angry, mocking and inhuman. Here are three women, like nightmarish visions in crimson flaming tones, frozen heavily in a dance. Here is the terrible “Farmer’s Lady”, consisting of several geometric cobblestones, all heavy and inert. Here the body lost its warmth, life and flavor, turning into figures, into geometry, into a block; life lost its movement and froze in some kind of grimace; the flesh is dried up and bled dry with some kind of demonic asceticism. This is spirituality, but the spirituality of a vampire or a demon; passions, even the most base ones, are taken here in a purely spiritual, ethereal essence, subtracted from physicality. Here a very special, inhuman way of seeing and perceiving flesh is revealed, a bad spiritualism that despises and hates the flesh, corrupting it, but at the same time inspiring the artist, who, ironically, still speaks only in images of flesh and through flesh. The works of this second period, in terms of technical, artistic and especially colorful achievements, are probably of great importance. But no less amazing is their mystical power and content, which is so significant that the paradoxical, deliberate ugliness of cubic writing is quickly forgotten, you simply stop noticing it - a clear sign of the correspondence of this form to its content and, in this sense, the high artistry of the work. It is difficult to give an idea of ​​these paintings without reproductions, and in colors at that. Their dominant theme is, undoubtedly, woman, Femininity itself, artistically captured and comprehended under different faces. How does the artist see and feel this Femininity? This is the key to understanding his work, for Femininity, the Soul of the world, is the mother’s womb of art, and at the same time its love. She appears in Picasso’s work in unspeakable desecration, as an ugly, heavy, creeping and falling apart body, or rather, a corpse of beauty, as godless cynicism (“Woman with a Landscape”), devilish malice (“After the Ball”), a decaying astral corpse (“Lady”) with the snake-like mockery of a witch (“Lady with a Fan”). And all these faces live, representing something like miraculous icons of a demonic nature, mystical power flows from them; If you look at them for a long time, you experience a kind of mystical dizziness. They are depicted with such artistic conviction and mystical authenticity that it is impossible for a moment to doubt the sincerity of the singer of “La Belle Dame” himself, the demonic style and the mystical realism of his art. It is interesting that in their own way, other paintings of this era, with the most harmless content: nature morte, a bottle with a glass, vases with fruit, make an equally strong and mystical impression. The same unenlightened and hopeless heaviness, the same mystical horror and melancholy. From all of them flows a certain black grace, which is felt in this room almost to the point of physical tangibility. These “black icons” even resemble some of the Egyptian idols depicting sacred animals in their power and mystical horror (see the Egyptian section of the Museum of Emperor Alexander III). What kind of hell must the artist himself carry in his soul, if such are its emanations, if under the impression of his creations one has to experience a nightmare at night! Not a single ray of light in this dead and mournful desert, scorched by hellish fire. (By the way, the favorite colors of Picasso’s palette, which he masters perfectly, are crimson-red and earthy orange - colors of evil meaning in the “aura”.) For me, the meaning and significance of the very last period of Picasso’s work remains unclear, when he began to paint mainly nature morte, moreover, in expansions. What does it mean: is there a special perception in four-dimensional space and its projection on a plane, or are these images of “occult clairvoyance” from other “planes” of existence, and their transmission in the picture is likened to notes and is in the same relation to its actual content as these latter are to genuine music? Is this the decomposition of art or its expansion? It is undeniable that rhythms of movement that are inaccessible to ordinary vision are introduced into the flat image here (similar to how we have it in the paintings of Churlianis). There is no doubt about the sincerity and authenticity of this last stage of Picasso’s development, but due to its obscurity, we are judging here not the Picasso of today, but only of yesterday, his first and mainly second period. The impression from Picasso’s work is one of the most powerful that one can generally have from art, although it is qualitatively different than that received from the great creations of ancient and modern art, for example, from the Venus de Milo or from the Sistine Madonna. There is something in it that makes it “modern”, characteristic of our spiritual era, that’s why it so excites thought, excites and worries, it’s not easy for me to understand the chaos rising from the bottom of the soul, from the night consciousness. When I looked at the paintings of Picasso - this half-Spanish, half-Moor, half-Parisian - exclusively Russian thoughts and feelings sounded in my soul: it was probably not in vain and not by chance that Russia, through the hands of S.I. Shchukin, expropriated Picasso’s paintings from the French - if not for joy and not for the consolation of itself, then as material for that painful religious work that the Russian soul is sacred. Before Picasso’s paintings, I thought about Gogol and his religious and artistic fate, in particular about his “Portrait” and the artist, the hero of this mysterious story, and even more thought about Dostoevsky, for Picasso’s work is, of course, the music of Dostoevsky, his torment, his “underground,” the philosophy of eternity of Svidrigailov 1 and even more Nikolai Stavrogin (“Demons”). Various phenomena of Russian modernity, the painful decay or painful growth (who will say?) of the Russian soul, insistently suggested themselves to thought. It seems that if Stavrogin painted pictures, it would have to turn out something like Picasso, that’s how he would feel the flesh, that’s how he would see the world. But the main property of Stavrogin is that he is possessed, a medium of black grace, evil power. Stavrogin is a mystic and at the same time, in the deepest, ultimate sense, an atheist, an atheist not out of boyishness and misunderstanding, but in the same sense as demons who know about the inevitability of God’s existence, but do not know God, because they do not love Him and deny Him with defiant cynicism. Picasso's work, especially clearly in the second period, is the fruit of demonic possession. With great intensity, it expresses the worldview of an evil spirit, who does not love and blasphemes God’s creation, and at the same time languishes in hellish torment. Picasso artistically shows what the world is like for a demon, how Femininity appears to him, how the flesh of the world is felt by him. Limitless, truly black melancholy, experienced on the verge of being and “pitch darkness”, the darkness of non-existence, and at the same time blasphemy, congealing in powerless torment, a mystical spasm of the spirit - this is the general tone of Picasso’s work, which provides, as it were, an artistic illustration for the chapter on Gehenna in the book about, Pavel Florensky: 2 rebellious, self-eating self, existing only in subjective consciousness, only for oneself, and not about oneself and not for another. Picasso’s melancholy is somewhat reminiscent of Gogol’s “boredom,” when the latter saw only pig snouts and dead souls everywhere (“it’s boring in this world, gentlemen”). It is a trait of a noble, albeit sick, spirit: it distinguishes the “demon” to which Lermontov’s soul was so painfully attracted from the “petty devil with a runny nose among the failed ones,” a self-satisfied, self-satisfied representative of vulgarity. The latter cannot take possession of the artist and his art: such a devil is completely satisfied with the aesthetic surrogates of art, making a slut out of femininity, which he forces to dance the tango undressed, and is content with that. In the days of his youth, even the clear, harmonious Pushkin saw the demon in a kind of seductiveness. However, in essence, between the “demon” and the “devil”, between pride and vulgarity, there is no fundamental opposition at all, as many see, they are both different faces of the same principle, its different degrees and aspects. Pride is the greatest selfishness, complacency, self-restraint, subjectivism. Pride is the opposite pole of love, it is non-love itself, just as humility (in the ontological sense) is love. God is Love, and therefore He is Humility, which forms the basis of the relationship of the Three Hypostases, each finding themselves in the other. The demon does not love anything, as the poets who were fascinated by him saw and testified: He didn't want to bless. And everything that he saw before him. Or despised, or hated. It is said about him elsewhere: He cast a contemptuous eye He remains withdrawn and essentially content with himself. Only he does not despise or hate himself, although he cannot calm down on himself, because he is still aware of his limitations and is saddened by this. However, he does not want to look for something better and freezes in his tragic narcissism. But that is precisely why pride directly borders on vulgarity and leads to vulgarity. Pride is the very basis of vulgarity. A vulgar devil like Mephistopheles in Tamara would see a “strawberry” that could be savored Karamazov-style, and would make an “indecent gesture” towards her (as he does in front of Faust towards Margarita). “For me there are no moves,” 3 - in this sense only, for Fyodor Karamazov, Femininity exists - as material for petty debauchery. The demon, remaining himself and not, at the behest of Lermontov, undergoing a completely incomprehensible transformation into an opera lover, who, however, kills the victim of his love and even tries to steal her soul, would have seen in Tamara a “woman with a landscape,” if not the very “farmer,” that is, deadness, inertia and vileness. In a similar way, having just experienced the death of a loved one and having experienced all its humiliation, when before your eyes just yesterday a living and dear body in one or two days turns into a decaying, ugly, stinking corpse, we begin to see these features of death on all faces, and mentally try on everyone to the position of a decaying corpse. Fortunately for us, these impressions do not linger long in the soul, for they are deadly. But Picasso always has this mirror of death before his eyes; he is inherent in this search for stains of death on living faces. And this ice in the heart, this dislike for God’s creation is, in a strange way, the pathos of his work: Stavrogin’s painful atheism, which constantly fluctuates between pride and vulgarity, breaks from one to the other. It cannot be said about Picasso that he is vulgar, because for this he is too terrible and suffers too much, however, transposed by several tones, his art definitely leads to vulgarity, that is, to a nonentity who no longer feels his nothingness, his emptiness, but feels its fullness. Melancholy in Picasso still belongs more to the person than to the artist: it is the person who rushes about in mortal horror among the icy desert of unlove in which the artist “creates.” For it is the artist who is possessed here—someone stranger, having tied him up, took his brush into his hands, infusing it with his poison. But, of course, the artist’s brush would not have been taken without some permission from the person, without his secret consent or permission. Obsession, its roots and causes, is the greatest secret that is revealed to God alone. But one cannot think that the free human spirit could be captured quite violently, with a complete violation of its freedom: so in the story of Vl. Solovyov’s “On the Antichrist,” the father of lies takes possession of his “beloved son” only when he has committed a complete and final apostasy from Christ. And something similar must have happened - we inevitably have to assume - to happen in Picasso’s soul. It is clear that his work is distinguished by a special mystical density; as if something was whispering to his muse and inhuman inspirations burst into his human creativity. In a word, here the story of Gogol’s “Portrait” and the artist who painted it clearly takes place: just as through the brush of this latter the spirit of a mysterious and evil old man received a certain incarnation, again biting into existence, poisoning the soul of the artist himself, so through the work of Picasso, an evil spirit seeks incarnation - and, to a certain extent, finds it - poisoning the very origins of creativity, damaging the artistic eye and freezing heart. Gogol knew (from where? was it on his own?) that this was possible, and he understood how it was possible. Apparently, he himself experienced something similar to what he described (in the last part of his life, when he raised his hand to his art, obviously sensing it as demonic and precisely because of this, condemning it). And this is how he talks about this strange illness of the artist. “If you take,” the latter argues, “an object indifferently, insensitively, without sympathizing with it, it will certainly appear only in its reality, not illuminated by the light of some incomprehensible thought hidden in everything, it will appear in the reality that opens when, wanting to comprehend a beautiful person, you arm yourself with an anatomical knife, cut open his insides and see a disgusting person.” The same artist, having already been cleansed of his sin by feat, instructs his son: “Explore, study everything you see, conquer all the brushes; but learn to find the inner thought in everything and, most of all, try to comprehend the lofty mystery of creation. Blessed is the chosen one who owns it. There is no low object in nature for him. In the insignificant, the artist-creator is as great as in the great; in the despised he no longer has the despicable, for the beautiful soul of the creator shines through him invisibly, and the despicable has already received a high expression, for it has flowed through the purgatory of his soul... The hint of a divine heavenly paradise is contained for man in art, and for that alone it is already above all else. And how many times solemn peace is higher than any worldly excitement; how many times an angel alone, by the pure innocence of his bright soul, is higher than all the countless forces and proud passions of Satan - so many times higher than everything that is in the world, a high creation of art... to calm and reconcile everyone, a high creation of art descends into the world. It cannot instill grumbling in the soul, but with resounding prayer it strives forever towards God. But...” And he remembers here how he committed the sin of painting a portrait of a terrible old man, and this sin was that he “did not feel at that time any love for his work. He forcibly wanted to conquer himself and soullessly, drowning out everything, to be true to nature. This was not the creation of art, and therefore the feelings that surround everyone when looking at it are already rebellious feelings, anxious feelings, not the feelings of the artist, for the artist breathes peace even in anxiety.” (This undoubtedly applies to Picasso as well.) “Save the purity of your soul,” the elder instructs his son in conclusion, “whoever has talent within himself must be the purest soul of all.” Gogol here describes the fate of an artist who committed a sin against the Holy Spirit. This raises a general and profound question: how can art become obsessed? After all, obsession is death for art and creativity, like contempt, coldness, and dislike. Everything is decomposing here; nature becomes only a cubist heaviness, femininity becomes only an ugly corpse that retains the ability to fornicate, the beautiful turns into the ugly. If in the soul of a saint, who has purified his heart through feat, the world of God appears as Cosmos, as Sophia, as Beauty, 4 then in the hardened and frozen heart of a demon it is mediocrity, parody and ugliness. But art, by its very nature, is inseparable from beauty, it is generated by it and lives by it, it is inseparable from falling in love with the world, with nature, with the Soul of the world, with Sophia, with Eternal Femininity itself. Every true artist is truly a knight of the Beautiful Lady. How will ice and fire, love and contempt be compatible? How is obsession possible in art? Isn't art protected by a veil of beauty from vile attacks? Picasso's work gives an antinomic answer to this question: both yes and no. Yes, because although this is creativity, it is damaged, spiritually corrupted, sick, vile: Vl. spoke about this to the monkfish in his “admonition.” Soloviev (“Das Ewig-weibliche”). Into that beauty, oh treacherous devils, You soon found your secret path, Hellish seed of corruption and death You could sow into a beautiful image. No, for it is still art, and great art despite its painfulness, despite all its corruption. It turns out a terrifying paradox: vile art, ugly beauty, mediocre talent. For a talented artist has such power, such mystical and artistic authenticity and persuasiveness, and if he is captivated and bound, then in his very nature he is not affected, not completely transformed by evil. Otherwise, he would become mediocrity, for he is mediocre, metaphysically mediocre (in the sense of genuine, unstolen creativity) self-proclaimed rival of the Creator, and he can show a form of creativity only by corrupting other people’s creative individualities in order to express himself through their forces. The complete victory of evil kills the artist and reveals the true mediocrity, emptiness and pompousness of the “demon” with his peacock plumage (Vrubel’s insights). Picasso, as a polar opposite, or an antinomy associated with him, brings to mind Beato Angelico, an Artist who was inspired not by evil, but by good power. It seems that it is impossible to hang the paintings of Picasso and Beato Angelico next to each other in the same room, they cannot stand each other: I imagine a fantastic image, either Picasso’s paintings will be incinerated, leaving behind only stench and soot, or through demonic distortions their artistic truth will be enlightened and under the scales of the impudent shame of the “woman” with the landscape” there will be ... “a wife clothed in the sun.” Metaphysically, this is so: it is in this sense that Picasso is a great artist, for he knows the rhythms of beauty and reveals her face. He sees her in a nasty way, draws her slanderously (διάβολος, the devil, is the slanderer), like a vile caricature, but he draws precisely this, the genuine face of beauty that he sees, and it is this authenticity of vision that saves him as an artist, but it also makes him so seductive and terrible. However, ugliness is only a subjective prism, the artist’s self, a product of his “subjective, idealism,” while beauty is the existing and abiding content of creativity, although for him it is made up and veiled. Such is this terrible antinomy of Picasso’s work. The artist is in especially intimate communication with the soul of the world, he is the beloved child of Mother Earth and pays her back with love, with which the creature is revealed to him in the radiance of the divine Sophia. The artist has a special knowledge of that enlightenment of the flesh, which is the property of people of religious feat, saints. In the artist’s relationship with creation there is a certain pristine purity, and therefore the sin of the artist as such lies precisely in the area of ​​​​the relationship to the flesh of the world and to the soul of the world: this is simultaneously the sin of the son, who exposed and desecrated the nakedness of his mother, and the betrayal of the groom, who desecrated his love; Here, in the area of ​​these relationships, the seed of demonic corruption creeps in, depriving the artist’s Muse of her purity and innocence. And in Picasso’s work one can definitely feel the presence of this noumenal sin against the flesh, against Mother Earth, the soul of the world, the divine Sophia, against the Eternal Feminine in all its gradations, faces and aspects. With his brush, Picasso insults the Eternal Femininity and blasphemes her. There are two attitudes towards the flesh in general and the body in particular: a metaphysical affirmation of the flesh in its ontological essence, authenticity and holiness, and the same denial, disgust towards the flesh, insensibility of one’s body. The first corresponds to the Christian worldview, the second – to the Buddhist, with its newest European varieties (theosophy, and Yogism, etc.). “And the word became flesh” - this is the very core of Christianity. “The Body and Blood of Christ” are communicated to believers in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Belief in the resurrection of the dead in the flesh, the veneration of relics and icons, and much more in Christianity is only a conclusion from this recognition of the ontological authenticity and holiness of the flesh. From the veneration of the flesh, from the desire for its sanctification, for the transformation of the body into power, or natural and sinful flesh into glorified, all Christian asceticism flows, which therefore, as one of the necessary aspects, includes the asceticism of the body (“fasting” in every sense of the word). Christianity is characterized by a sense not only of the authenticity of the flesh, but also of its individuality, i.e. the feeling of the body, my body, which is in a sense a side of my self, integral and indestructible. This sense of the authenticity of the body, which in the pre-Christian world was so strong, on the one hand, among the Jews (with their “religious materialism”, about which V. Solovyov wrote), and on the other, of course, among the Greeks, creates fertile ground for the development of art in general, plastic and fine art in particular. This or that attitude towards the body is becoming in our days one of the essential signs of religious self-determination, for it is in this area that, apparently, some kind of “shift” is taking place, or, rather, a subtle religious temptation of false spiritualism and spiritualistic asceticism, based on “the feeling of one’s body, disgust towards it, a kind of wickedness towards the flesh, is spreading. This wind blows, of course, from India, but in Europe its influence is found in modern theosophical teachings of various shades. Hinduism knows its asceticism, asceticism is its very basis, but in its meaning this asceticism is the opposite of Christian, for it does not mean the sanctification of the body, but its training, yoga, the development of “higher abilities,” the use of the body as an instrument or means for the spirit, which essentially turns away from this flesh, disdains it, and is ashamed of it. The goal of this asceticism is not the transformation of the flesh, but liberation from it, overcoming the “physical plane” and entering other, “higher” planes of “evolution”, and any “delay at a lower level” is disastrous and sinful. Therefore, the body, the flesh, strictly speaking, here is only a “physical plane”; in its full form, it is true, it consists of several bodies belonging to different “planes,” but these very planes correspond to stages of spiritual growth and stages of development, in which in themselves there is nothing abiding. From this point of view, the physical body can only be spoken of as a kind of solidification and heaviness of the spirit, corresponding to a certain stage of its evolution, which is why the body or flesh loses all definition, blurring or decomposing into its different “planes.” 5 The same meaning, by the way, belongs to the doctrine of the reincarnation of souls: leaving aside the religious meaning of the idea of ​​​​reincarnation, in the relation that interests us, we see in it an expression of the same insensibility of the body and disgust towards it, for here too it is considered only as a case or instrument for the spirit, something external, non-individual and essentially indifferent. According to ancient teachings about reincarnation, for example, Plato, 6 the general rule is the reincarnation of souls not only into people of different sexes, but also into animals - the single essence of man as a spiritual-physical being is completely lost; in the newest theosophical teachings, although direct reincarnation into animals, as far as I know, does not occur - it refers to the previous stages of world evolution (to other planets that preceded the earth), but gender changes here too, sometimes alternately - male and female, sometimes according to circumstances. True, at the same time some primary plasma, “Keimatom”, is preserved, but it does not at all determine the individuality of the body, but is only a thread on which various reincarnations are strung. Overcoming the flesh through such spiritualistic and deeply un-Christian asceticism, which in its metaphysical essence approaches demonic oppression of the body, as is easy to understand, becomes deadly for fine art, which lives in love with the soul of the world and the holiness of its flesh. For this path leads to the decomposition of the flesh and a breakthrough into the “astral plane”, directs art towards the path of “occult experience” with its magic and makes its God-given harmony a victim of astral whirlwinds, puts it face to face not with Mother Earth in her crowning beauty, but with her astral atmosphere: the fauna of the astral world rushes towards him, just as in Gogol’s “Viye” the whole evil spirits rush at Khoma Brut, once he decided to look at Viy. Doesn’t the same fate befall the work of Andrei Bely, who is undergoing a huge, often unbearable pressure of astrality? I fear that Picasso's work suffered precisely this fate. What he writes gives the impression of genuine visions, although not of the highest, but still of the transcendental world. And at the same time, decay is quite clearly felt, the smell of decaying flesh, the disintegrating physical plane, through the thinned thickness of which astral monsters, living embodiments of human passions, or vampire “shells”, “larvas” loom and dance. This corresponds to both the visual techniques and the peculiar technical achievements of Picasso, his “cubism”. In cubism, everything, even living things, becomes material, composite, dies and decomposes; sincere, unpretentious cubism also corresponds to a special, definite sense of flesh only as a “physical plane”, and not as a body. That is why bodies here are deprived of their warmth, colorfulness, beauty, and retain only their geometric, mechanistic nature. That is why the difference between living and dead nature, which is not captured by geometry, is so weakly felt here, and the special predilection of Cubism for nature morte becomes understandable. It differs little here from living nature, and at the same time, it also lives mystically in its own way, while this latter dies: both are for Picasso only a “physical plane”, something shines through it, but with its weight it only obscures it. Hence the mystical, ominous, demonic weight of these bottles, glasses, fruits, and it is almost as impossible to look at them for a long time without mystical dizziness as at the “woman with a landscape” and other women. This is also where the growing indifference to the content of the painting and the gradual transformation of colorful art into geometric art arises, solving the problems of artistic geometry, almost epistemology (the comparison of Picasso with Kant has already been made more than once). From here we can approach the understanding of the last, darkest stage in Picasso’s work. On the one hand, this is obviously only the next step in the decomposition of the “physical plane”; occult whirlwinds are increasingly breaking into Picasso’s work and decomposing and drying up his artistic individuality: here nature morte almost exclusively predominates, moreover, in decompositions (several paintings of the last period are in the gallery of S. I. Shchukin). The painting turns into musical notes to express experiences that are already inexpressible for the language of the physical plane, while the images and colors of this world are eaten by the occult world. However, in this last stage of Picasso’s work, some elements of recovery seem to be visible: the astral monsters with their ugliness and ugliness are no longer there, although they have been replaced by the icy, dead calm of the spiritual desert; further, one feels that the artist hears some rhythms unknown to us, and, perhaps, this rhythmicity will ennoble and balance his muse, 7 will heal her. Artists will find here solutions to new, most difficult artistic problems. And the perception of four-dimensional space, if it really exists in these paintings by Picasso, still refers to the native “physical plane”, returns to the flesh and leads away from the demonic population of the “astral plane”. It is difficult to say anything confidently about this stage: is it incipient death or instinctive self-defense, healing, artistic growth? The fate of the artist is mysterious: whether death awaits him, not only empirical, in the form of impending madness, but also spiritual, or, like Gogol, he will break his brush, break his palette and curse his unclean, demonic art - he will be saved, but “like fire, his work will burn up” - or, finally, he will defeat the terrible temptation on the path of his art and, like some archangel, although with singed wings, will he tell the world the newfound truth and joy? One thing is clear: Picasso is at the edge of the Gadarene abyss, and salvation is only “at the feet of Jesus.” Picasso’s work expresses religious torment and despair, all of it is a cry of horror at the world as it exists without God and outside of God: the pathos of melancholy and the enthusiasm of melancholy, expressed in the pathos of cynicism and blasphemy, this is the disintegration of the soul, hellish torment. Picasso, obviously, does not see his obsession himself, does not notice that a distorted mirror of existence is presented to him, but believes that this is the true reality, and until he objectifies his decay for himself, does not realize his illness, does not recognize his obsession, the path to healing is closed to him. But at the same time, he retains a trait of high spirit - his inhuman melancholy, he does not delight in vileness, like a petty imp among the failed ones or like Mephistopheles, a cynic and a fornicator - he deeply, tragically grieves. His soul is possessed by the forces of darkness, but he is suffocating in this darkness. Picasso’s work is the mystical atheism of the artist: but, as Dostoevsky told us, this latter atheism is not only more honorable than the secular or aesthetic indifference of even major artists (there are such in the gallery of S.I. Shchukin), but there is the penultimate step to perfect faith, for the one shaken by the demon most of all feels the need for healing at the feet of Jesus. In this sense, Picasso’s work is related to the work of Gogol and Dostoevsky (in his “Underground”); it, like the latter, is mysterious, although in a negative sense. Naturalism, superficial, naturalistic realism, like any “pure”, i.e. religiously unconscious, aestheticizing art, remains far behind this harsh, painful, but deeply serious, tragic and, to the deepest degree, mystical art. The mystical nature of art is naked and shown here clearly. And that’s why, after Picasso, everything else in S.I. Shchukin’s gallery with its aesthetic masterpieces somehow becomes tasteless, seems somewhat insipid, naive, and irresponsible. Mir gab der Gott zu sagen, was ich leide, this is said about every true artist, and Picasso is given the opportunity to confess that unknown and mysterious, noumenal sin, thanks to which he became the playground of his possessing spirit, artistic and therefore such a convincing advocatus diaboli. Therefore, Picasso's art represents a powerful religious temptation, a test of faith. Demonism in art, of course, is the most intimate, subtle and therefore dangerous form of Luciferic infection of creativity, for art is connected with the deepest layers of the spirit, in comparison, for example, with philosophy or, especially, science. You may not know Picasso and you can, out of laziness of spirit or for pedagogical-ascetic reasons, turn away from him, for who can deny that this is unhealthy art. However, it is not always possible or even permissible to do this, just as one cannot turn the pages of The Brothers Karamazov about “The Rebellion” and immediately go to Zosima. It is not easy to overcome him, to sincerely reckon with him, with his image of the world. 8 Picasso is terrible because he is demonically authentic. Obsession is again becoming a widespread phenomenon of our time, the fight against it requires sobriety, spiritual health, self-collection, but above all the stone of faith, support not in one’s subjectivity and solitude, but in conciliarity and churchliness. Only in the name of Christ, which is the Church, are demons cursed. There is some mysterious rhythm, a certain musical relationship of light and shadow, in obedience to which the unknown architect of Notre Dame Cathedral placed on its external balustrade his Chimères, demonic monsters of the highest artistic power and the deepest mystical authenticity. I have always been amazed by the mystery of the Chimères, these demons that flew to the roof of the shrine: what torment tore them from the artist’s soul? How many people they seduced and tempted, not among the tourists traveling through the Baedeker, but precisely those who gathered in prayer in the church, under the dome of the marvelous cathedral, both in the distant, “Middle” centuries, and in our days! But is there also the work of Picasso – Chimères on the spiritual church of modern humanity? It is impossible to imagine this evil spirits inside the church; Picasso’s paintings brought into the church, it seems, would immediately burn and incinerate, like the Chimères. But at the same time, due to some mystical attraction, this evil spirits sits on the roof of the church. And it is remarkable that in Picasso’s work so many motifs are taken from African idols, which perhaps his African ancestors prayed to, and his chimeras, therefore, are hieratic even in their genesis. And there remains one more, already quite enigmatic and mysterious question: was the spiritual creator of Chimères and the majestic portal of the Parisian cathedral one and the same person, or were they completely different persons? History is silent... “We all see eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something huge, enormous. But why does it have to be huge? And suddenly, instead of all this, imagine, there will be one room there, like a village bathhouse, smoky, and there are spiders in all the corners, and that’s all eternity. You know, I sometimes imagine things like this.” And a similar feeling of eternity, similar music sounds in Picasso. By the way, in the same conversation between Svidrigailov and Raskolnikov there are several confessions that, in our eyes, shed light on Picasso’s work. It's about ghosts. “Ghosts,” argues Svidrigailov, “are, so to speak, scraps and fragments of other worlds, their beginning. A healthy person, of course, has no need to see them, because a healthy person is the most earthly person, and therefore, must live only this life here, for completeness and order. Well, if you get sick, if the normal earthly order in the body is slightly disrupted, the possibility of another world immediately begins to take its toll, and the greater the illness, the more contacts with another world, so that when a completely human person dies, he will directly pass on to another world.” "The Pillar and Ground of Truth," Letter Eight: Gehenna. "The Brothers Karamazov", part I, book. III, ch. VIII (“Over the Cognac”): “For me... even in my entire life there has never been an ugly woman, that’s my rule!.. For me, moves did not exist; the mere fact that she is a woman is half of everything... Even in Vielfilms, sometimes you find something that makes you wonder at other fools how they let her grow old and still haven’t noticed anything! A sandal and a shoe must first be surprised - that’s how you should take it on!” etc. Of the numerous testimonies of Christian writing, I will cite one as an example, borrowing it, however, from the most severe ascetic leadership, terrifying and even repelling others with the severity of its penitential discipline, namely the “Ladders” of St. John Climacus. In the 15th word, §59 we read: “Someone told me about an amazing and highest degree of purity. Someone, seeing an extraordinary female beauty, greatly glorified the Creator about her, and from this one vision he was inflamed with love for God and shed a source of tears. Truly an amazing sight! What could have been a ditch of destruction for another, supernaturally served him to receive a crown of glory. If such a person in such cases always has the same feeling and action, then he is resurrected, incorruptible before the general resurrection.” Here we completely leave aside the question of the existence of different “planes” of corporeality, which, in our opinion, does not need to be disputed, because here we are not talking about the complexity of the body, but about its composability and decomposition, about the emergence of one plane from another and the abolition of the physical plane. See the dialogues “Phaedrus”, “Republic”, “Timaeus”, “Phaedo”, “Gorgias”, etc. The question of new paths of art is very interestingly and meaningfully interpreted in the work of the artist W. Kandinsky: “Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei.” München, 1912. The thoughts of V.V. Kandinsky, with all their philosophical incompleteness and therefore some ambiguity and reticence, deserve attention. Dostoevsky speaks through the mouth of “The Idiot” about the nature of the impression from Hans Holbein’s painting “The Descent from the Cross”, that “from this picture someone else’s faith may disappear!” A similar conversation could arise regarding Picasso’s paintings.