Pablo Picasso spent nearly eight decades restlessly reinventing how a mark could be made: oil, collage, welded scrap metal, ceramics fired in a converted pottery studio above Vallauris. But nothing he ever made is quite as startling, or as fleeting, as the night in 1949 when he traded his brushes for a small electric torch and began drawing directly onto the dark. The results exist nowhere except in the photographs collected here: no canvas, no paper, not even a wall. They were drawings made of nothing but time and light, and they vanished the instant the shutter closed.
The man behind the camera was Gjon Mili, an Albanian-born engineer-turned-photographer who had spent the 1930s and ’40s at LIFE magazine pioneering high-speed strobe and long-exposure techniques nobody else in photojournalism was using yet, freezing hummingbirds mid-flight and dancers in overlapping ghost-trails of motion. In 1949 he brought a portfolio of his latest experiment to Picasso’s villa in the South of France: photographs of an ice skater gliding through total darkness with a small light bulb fixed to the toe of her skate, her path traced across the frame as a single unbroken line. Picasso studied the images for a long moment. Then he asked Mili for fifteen minutes.
“Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment,” LIFE wrote in its January 30, 1950, issue, in which the images shown here first appeared. He was so fascinated by the results that he posed for five sessions.
Those fifteen minutes became five separate night sessions. Working in a pitch-black room with nothing but a small pen-light (sometimes with Picasso’s own body caught faintly by a supplementary flash so you can see him mid-gesture, sometimes with the artist dissolved entirely into darkness and only the drawn line left glowing), Mili’s camera held its shutter open long enough to record whatever path the light traveled. The results exist in a strange, thrilling category all their own: drawings by Picasso that were never meant to last, made of nothing more solid than an electric current, visible only for the length of the exposure and then gone. What survives isn’t the drawing itself but the photograph of the drawing: Mili’s contribution as inseparable from the final image as Picasso’s.
Picasso, never one to abandon a lifetime of preoccupations just because the medium had changed, filled the dark with the same motifs that haunted his canvases for decades: bulls, centaurs, mythological faces pulled from the same Mediterranean imagination that produced Guernica and his Vallauris ceramics, several of which sit on a shelf behind him in more than one of these frames. It’s a small, telling detail: the same hands that helped pioneer Cubism, breaking form apart to view it from every angle at once, were now drawing in a medium that could only ever show a single, unbroken line.
LIFE published the results in its January 30, 1950 issue, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art put a selection on view that same year, a strange kind of institutional validation for photographs that technically record a piece of art that no longer exists in any physical form. The single image of Picasso “drawing a centaur in the air” has since become the one everyone recognizes. But scroll back through the full sequence above and it’s often the lesser-known frames (the faces, the loops, the ordinary studio clutter glimpsed behind an extraordinary gesture) that make the whole series feel less like a stunt and more like watching someone’s mind move in real time.
Read more: http://life.time.com/culture/picasso-drawing-with-light/#ixzz1tuw3Io4a
