Picasso on Picasso

During the last decade the works of massive, humorous, Spanish-born Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 48, at present the most famed Parisian painter, have been bought at huge prices by museums, enthusiasts, tycoons the world over. Often he is acclaimed a Master; "it is even said that soldiers of the Red Army stand as guards of honor before his paintings in the Soviet museums." Yet many a purchaser has been puzzled at heart by the scrawl of a cadaverous bull, the entirely blue circus-rider, the patchwork of pasted cloth, cement, brickdust he has bought. And many a student has sought passionately to copy the processes--"researches," "experiments"-- by which Painter Picasso attains undeniable effects. Hence many an "ism," including most of Cubism.

But Painter Picasso, aloof, never has sought to lead a school. Rarely has he issued a dictum on art that was not curt, cryptic. What he thinks about himself and his followers is largely a mystery. When Creative Art lately obtained a translation of a long Picasso letter published in 1926 by the Russian review Ogoniok, it published excerpts as leading article in its June issue, out last week.

Excerpts from the excerpts: "You can imagine how intolerable to me are all those people who ape my art, my work, even my ways. ... In 1925 some friends wanted to take me to that monstrous display of bad taste . . . the International Exhibition of Decorative Art. They said to me, 'You'll see . . . that it is you who are responsible for all that architecture. . . .' Imagine Michael Angelo coming to dine with friends and being welcomed with the words, 'We have just ordered a very beautiful Renaissance sideboard inspired by your Moses.' Think of Michael Angelo's face. . . . Some try to turn Cubism into a kind of physical culture. ... I try to paint what I have found, not what I sought. . . . The idea of 'Research' led some of our painters to abstraction. That was, perhaps, one of the greatest mistakes of modern art. . . . [They] tried to paint the invisible. . . . Men have tried to explain Cubism by mathematics, by geometry, by psychoanalysis, etc. All that is only literature. . . . What is art? If I knew I should take care not to reveal it."

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