Of all those who have written on Picasso, I suspect that Christopher Green is the only one who thought to mention the pangolin. The reader of his addictive and brilliant new study would be forgiven for wondering whether Green’s description of the scaly ant-eater ritually sacrificed by the Lele people of Africa is quite necessary to the understanding of the avant-garde’s ringmaster. But pangolins and Picassos, we find, are surprisingly similar.

The first is a hybrid species, scaled like a fish but adept at climbing trees, a symbol of all that defies categorisation. Picasso’s paintings, too, are hybrid species that invoke but override conventions, and they become all the more monstrous when seen, as Green sees them, set against the prevailing values and hierarchies of the society in which they were made. Green shows how these paintings engage with every kind of taxonomy imposed on the world in the effort to make sense of it: the classification of peoples, of buildings, of forms of experience, and of genres of art. For the Lele people the pangolin is a reminder that categories are fictive, but imposed for a reason. Picasso probes and challenges such fictions while acknowledging their necessity. He fuses the African with the Western, the occult with the ordinary, the architectural with the vertiginous.

The relationship between what Green calls ‘architecture’ and ‘vertigo’ is the central theme that runs through the study and holds together the many different kinds of evidence that Green excavates so meticulously from Picasso’s world. ‘Architecture’ is used to denote order, control, and the very notion of classifiable, comprehensible experience. ‘Vertigo’ is the loss of control, the loss of an organising system; vertigo sets the world spinning. In Green’s analysis, Picasso’s paintings and constructions become dialogues between these two polarised tendencies. The idea is compellingly simple, but amenable to infinitely subtle variation. Green borrows the terms from Picasso’s influential contemporaries, the anthropologists Michael Leiris and Georges Bataille, who used them repeatedly in the Surrealist periodical Documents. But they are personal words for Green too, as he explains in a short chapter that brings to the whole book an attractively candid autobiographical strand. Green suffers from Menier’s disease, which affects the inner ear, causing vertigo attacks. In the precise, measured sentences from which he never deviates, he explains that during an attack ‘the spinning world takes control, and, as the nausea mounts, all sense of a self in command of things from the centre is sucked away.’

I remember him having a minor attack while giving a paper at the Courtauld Institute in London. He was at the head of the table, in control of the room, unravelling by ingenious stages an argument about order and disorder, couched in the most rational of terms. And then his world started to spin. The unpredictable transitions he had been finding in paintings were met with this alarming physiological analogy. That afternoon I learnt a bit about Picasso and a lot about the intensely personal, even physical, nature of reading, writing and seeing. Green acknowledges that his own frightening experiences have deepened his need to ‘keep a positive hold on the architectural as [he] confronts the immanently and potentially vertiginous in Picasso.’ So he looks at the cubist still-life The Bottle of Rum as a stable structure that keeps disintegrating, rocked by diagonals that set it in motion. Things come together, and things fall apart.

Green is at his best when he allows himself to describe works of art metaphorically and therefore subjectively. The viaduct, for example, in one of Braque’s great cubist landscapes, ‘is erected as a kind of barrier against penetration, with the buildings above it placed like still-life objects on a table, bleeding out into the faceted sky.’ But his real aim is to prioritise not his own reading of the many iconic modernist works he addresses, but the responses they elicited from Picasso, and Picasso’s contemporaries. Green tries to see as they might have seen. He wants to empathise with Picasso, or with Le Corbusier. He wants to ‘empathise a Corbusian encounter with The Bottle of Rum,’ wondering how the architect of purism might have viewed the still-life that obviously fascinated him (he owned it), even though it threatens chaos.

Each of the central chapters tells an independent story in which Picasso constructs or is constructed by someone else. Everything and everyone is relative: Picasso’s Rousseau, Lipschitz’s Picasso. So although the book is defiantly not a biography (its focus is always the work and not the life) it incorporates a sequence of biographical experiments. It insists that there is no continuous, coherent story of Picasso: there is only a collection of moments and meetings, a very few of which might, with great effort, be retrieved from the past. Green chooses a series of key Picassian encounters with certain discourses (anthropological, geographical, popular), and with certain other artists (Rousseau, Braque, Lipchitz, Miró), gathering a group of ‘different Picassos.’

This kind of art history is a form of empathetic life-writing, and Green has much to say about the possibilities and limits of entering imaginatively into another person’s mind. Intuitive leaps won’t do: this kind of empathy depends on the most exacting contextual research, and Green never stints on that. In order to imagine Picasso looking at a Rousseau, for example, we must first learn the codes of bourgeois Paris: the correct pose to adopt in a studio portrait, the values of an optimistic republican, the version of French history promoted in the writing of Jules Michelet.

Each chapter begins with a picture or sculpture, roams far and wide through contemporary thinking, and eventually returns to the initial work of art, which seems to have grown into something more complex and more absorbing while we were away. Take, for example, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. There is plenty of formal ‘architecture’ in the painting: the cloisonné structure of the curtains, the intricate symmetry of the figures. Yet this is a brothel, a place of vertiginous desires. ‘Nothing,’ wrote Michael Leiris, ‘seems to resemble a brothel so much as a museum,’ and accordingly Picasso’s painting corrupts museum taxonomies, making them promiscuous. But to see this happening we need to know about nose measurements. Patiently, minutely, Green delves into the more obscure aspects of anthropometry, establishing the various measurements once used in the classification of humankind, before leading us back to look again at Les Demoiselles. Picasso, it seems, has ‘scrambled the codes.’ He has made the proportions of arms and waists and noses obey the rules, but only to a point. He has given typically European proportions to the crouching, confrontational, africanised figure; he has collaged Iberian and African characteristics; he has hidden the telltale physiognomies behind masks. In Green’s analysis, this is Picasso’s grand gesture to the hollowness of those ‘monumental architectures’ of which anthropometry was the foundation. The reader emerges from the historicist’s labyrinth to find that something dramatic has occurred. The picture looks new again.

The book teems with such anthropological findings: with the bourgeois ‘cartes de visite’ that Picasso collected obsessively, with newspapers, histories, hiking groups, school textbooks. Anybody who visited Tate Modern’s exhibition Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (reviewed ORB 5:1), which was co-curated by Green, will know the fascination (and sometimes the claustrophobia) of his cultural curiosity shops. At the Tate, Rousseau’s paintings hung against white walls, uncluttered, each working its witty magic in the here and now. But at the centre of the exhibition was a quite different gallery. All the ‘documentation’ was collected there, a vast array of fragments from Rousseau’s Paris: taxidermic animals, letters, scrapbooks, video-footage, all chattering together. It was, as a friend remarked to me, Green’s writing in three dimensions. The proliferation of evidence, which was spatially contained in a single gallery of the exhibition, has to be controlled with similar discipline in the book. Sometimes the ‘documentation’ which comes clustering around the paintings threatens to take over completely, but the paintings always emerge victorious.

Green likes to give shape to the apparently random; but he also likes to break up structures which seem too coherent to be accurate. So his cluster of ‘different Picassos,’ which refuse to sit together seamlessly, is a purposeful departure from the body of critical writing which has approached Picasso’s sprawling output as a whole. As he explains, Picasso tried to create an illusion of comprehensiveness in his oeuvre: he collaborated with Christian Zervos on the 33 volumes of the catalogue raisonné, and in 1928 he began to date his drawings, suggesting the logic of chronology. In Documents, his work was even described as a diary: ‘the diary of a dramatic life.’ Green wants to break down this notion of something monumentally complete, he wants ‘to avoid the continuity of a narrative’ by giving autonomy to the particular ‘encounters’ he chooses to examine.

This critical method is closely related to the procedures he uncovers in the works of his subjects as they seek out the chaotic and try to contain it. There is, for example, the process documented in Miró’s sketchbooks, where a smudge on the page, or an outline seeping through from overleaf, provides the starting point for significant doodling. Miró ritualistically takes possession of the random. He ‘sets up the limits for play,’ letting loose the amorphous and the excremental within the most structurally defined of sketchbook systems. Green employs the most defined of critical processes to expose the bizarre and disorienting manner in which Miró does this.

While Miró made portraits in sticky black tar, Picasso aired his dirty linen, taking control of disorder by incorporating old floor-cloths and pieces of well-worn shirts into his compositions. Green makes these ‘dirty paintings’ and ‘rubbish sculptures’ the talismanic objects of a culture obsessed by spillage and excess, by waste sexual energy, and by the points at which civilized life slips into the savage unknown. In this climate the painter could be conceived as a magician, empowered to expose unconscious desires in the sign language of art. For Green, Picasso’s 1928 Painter and Model is an image of ‘the magician in the magician’s den’ with all the necessary accoutrements of modern alchemy: a phallic brush, an all-powerful gaze, even a blank mirror. Just visible beneath the paint surface is the shadow of a handlebar moustache on the magician’s upper lip—just the kind of moustache Rousseau sported in his bid for bourgeois distinction. It is as if Rousseau, the ‘ordinary’ republican, has been summoned up and painted over by the extraordinary sorcerer. Green argues that, when seen in the context of inter-war France, this painting might be called a pangolin. In that place, at that time, he says, Painter and Model harboured ‘myriad unresolved cultural contradictions.’ It brings together a flowery Western armchair and an African reliquary mask; the primary palette and the architectonic composition gesture to the purism of Mondrian, but the vertiginous practice of erotic magic strains against any such rationalism. Like the strange swimming ant-eater of the Lele people, it is a contained symbol of disorder; for Picasso’s tribe—the Paris avant-garde—it, too, had magic power.

Green’s Paris is populated by sorcerers and monsters, conjured up through painstakingly logical research. This is an admirably precise book about muddles and messes, a determinedly sane book about madness and magic. It generates the fairground sensation of going very fast and very high while being securely strapped in. The thing about vertiginous vantage points is that you have to hold on tight.

Alexandra Harris is a DPhil student at Christ Church College, Oxford College. She is writing about English art and literature of the 1930s and ‘40s.