Vitalist Picasso: Bergson's “Psychic States”, Phantasmatic Luminescence and Occultist Cubism

To unravel the relationship of Picasso's Vitalism to Henri Bergson's vitalist philosophy of “1’élan vital” and the occultist “la force vitale”, Picasso's Vitalist Cubism is explored from four multidimensional perspectives. After locating Picasso's portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler within “world standard time” and ergonomic reconception of the body as “le moteur humain”, it is decoded as a durational portrayal of his art dealer, following Bergson's “1’élan vital”, painted from Picasso's memory of his sensory interactions with him over felt time, particularly through touch, taste and smell. To convey its creative rupture with mechanistic materialism and positivist empiricism, Picasso's portrait is then compared with his photography of Kahnweiler and two contemporaneous portraits: Léon Bonnat's of the French President, Armand Fallières, and Jacques-Émile Blanche's of Bergson. Relocated within the context of occulture and spiritist photography, particularly the magnetist photography of phantoms and uncanny luminescence captured by Hector Durville, Picasso's comparable dissolution of the human body in space is re-explored as “la force vitale”. Finally, the fusion of “l’élan vital” and “la force vitale” are explored through the conjunctions of Bergsonism with hermeticism, mysticism and occultism in Picasso's illustrations for Max Jacob's semi-autobiographical prose-poems, Saint Matorel and Le Siège de Jérusalum.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Vitalist Modernism: Art, New Energies and Creative Evolution on 27/02/2023, available online: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/10.4324/9781003045595-8/