Art's Acrobat

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In Paris last week, at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in the fashionable Rue La Boetie, 33 small oils-on-canvas were making the art news of the season. With one exception they were still-lifes of candles and flowers, fruits and mandolins, pitchers and bird cages, ox skulls and oil lamps, knives, forks figurines and doves. Had these objects been painted with the luscious realism of a soup advertisement, the pictures would not have been at Rosenberg's, nor would they have interested any of the people there. Yet if there was one thing these doodles, lozenges, swabs and swishes of bright paint represented to that crowd of connoisseurs and jealous artists, it was sheer technical virtuosity-- probably the greatest painting virtuosity in the world.

So, for 30 years, have the works of Pablo Picasso continued to delight the knowledgeable and confound the common man. Flying like a shuttlecock between the esthetic debaters of two continents, the very name of Picasso has been a symbol of irresponsibility to the old, of audacity to the young. To millions of solid citizens it has been one of the two things they know about modern art-- the other being that they don't like it. But the show a Rosenberg's had a new significance, because it came at the full tide of a new period both in Picasso's work and in appreciation of it.

For two years, 1935 and 1936, Picasso neither drew nor painted. There seems to be little doubt that, when he began to paint again it was in response to a political event --the war in Spain. In any case, the two works which have put him in the news since 1936 have been public, polemical jobs: his big, lacerating mural, Guernica, for the Spanish government pavilion at the Paris exposition of 193 7, and a series of hairy-nightmare etchings entitled Dreams and Lies of Franco. At the same time, Picasso's previous work has begun to emerge from the smoke of controversy into the lucidity of history. Not a mere canonization but a symptom of universal stock taking was the announcement last week by the Art Institute of Chicago and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art of a huge, joint retrospective show of Picasso for next autumn. And various other sources, including that vivacious storyteller, Gertrude Stein* have lately increased public understanding of a man whose life and painting explain each other.

Spain Picasso was born in Malaga, Andalusia, Spain, 57 years ago last October 25, of a Basque drawing teacher named Blasco Ruiz and an Italian mother Maria Picasso. By the Spanish order of patronymics his name was Pablo Picasso y Ruiz, and he so signed his earliest pictures.

In physical build Pablo resembled the small, robust, dark-skinned mother whose name he later took.

Of Malaga, Picasso's characteristic recollection is a singing motorman whose streetcar's speed depended, not on the company's timetable, but on the rhythm of the song he steered by--gay or melancholy, galloping or slow. The mind of little Pablo appears in a revealing flash in a story of his being given a pair of roller skates: instead of skating on them he took them apart and, with huge amusement, attached each pair of wheels to the flippers of an enormous tortoise, whose slow progress around the patio had annoyed him.

Getting practically no ordinary education, Picasso worked off his ingenuity in drawing and painting at home. When he was 14, his father moved to Barcelona to take a post as professor in the School of Fine Arts. Picasso's precocity was already such that at 15 he left his father's instruction and set up his own studio, first in Madrid and later in Barcelona. His painting at this time was perfectly strong, finished and professional. Too poor to furnish his Barcelona studio, he amused himselt by painting on the walls, in great detail, the missing pieces of furniture.

Paris. What Rome is to the Catholic priesthood, Paris has been for centuries to the artists of Europe. Among the hundreds of hopefuls who arrived there m 1900 at the dewy dawn of a destructive century, 19-year-old Pablo Picasso was remarkable for his impressionability, his facility his profound self-confidence. Standing one day in admiration before a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, whose bold draftsmanship and garish atmosphere he was then busily imitating, he was heard to murmur, "All the same, I paint better than he does.

But it was not until he had gone back to Spain for another year that Picasso found a style of his own. The paintings of his "Blue Period" were done in that year, 1903, and during the next year or so in Paris.

Fernande Olivier, a model who lived with him then and for the next 14 years, has said he was ". . . small, black, stubby, unquiet, disquieting, with sombre, deep, piercing, strange, almost fixed eyes. Awkward gestures, feminine hands, ill-dressed, ill-cared for. A thick, black, brilliant forelock divided the intelligent protuberant forehead. Half-bohemian, half-workman in his dress; his overlong hair swept the collar of a tired coat."

For eight years Picasso and Fernande lived in Montmartre in the famous "bateau lavoir" (floating laundry) at 13 Rue Ravignan (now Place Emile Goudeau), a fantastic barrack tenanted by painters, sculptors, writers, cartoonists, laundresses and pushcart peddlers. Picasso was Spanishly jealous of his 18-year-old mistress--though he was grateful enough that the ogling coal dealer neglected to leave a bill. To keep her at home he did the marketing himself, dressed in the cap, espadrilles and blue jeans of a workman, plus a famous white-polka-dotted red shirt that cost him less than two francs. The mystic poet, Max Jacob, helped Picasso, who steadfastly refused to do any "commercial" work. A terrific and efficient worker, to avoid interruptions Picasso soon took to painting all night, a habit which may have had something to do with the blueness of the Blue Period.

In any case, these new paintings by the little Spaniard from Malaga were extraordinary affairs. The sombre, elongated El Grecos which Picasso had studied in Madrid certainly influenced his manner; so did the predominantly blue compositions of Cezanne. But, unlike Cezanne and still more unlike the Impressionists, Picasso was uninterested in Nature, painted to make paintings, painted to express himself.

Gay Life. The first private buyer Picassos was the Moscow tea importer, Sergei Stchoukine, who began about 1904 to select the Blue canvases that, later, formed the basis of the great Soviet collection in the Moscow Museum of Modern Western Art. The sandaled Stein family (Gertrude, Leo and Michel) became occasional buyers by 1905.

When in the money, the entire Picasso gang" often came home very late, drunk as bedbugs, singing, declaiming poetry and shouting such slogans as "A bas Laforgue!

Conspuez Laforgue!* (Down with Laforgue! To hell with Laforgue). Picasso on these occasions used to fire a revolver to wake the bourgeois neighbors.

When he had painted all the blue pictures he wanted to paint, Picasso immersed himself in the life of Paris, went to the circus once a week and to prize fights with two new, tall, stalwart friends: Painter Andre Derain and Poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Working more during the day, in 1905 and 1906 Picasso poured out the pictures of the Rose Period: --robats, harlequins, companies of jugglers and players all painted with a wistful delicacy and long-boned grace. By 1907 he had been sufficiently housebroken to go to the Stein "at homes."

Cubism was an invention of the same mind nind that put roller skates on the Maagan tortoise. In 1909, in the village of Horta, near Saragossa, in Aragon, Spain, Picasso painted a series of pictures of jumbled roofs and houses which suggested to him a whole new method. Liking nothing so Puch as new methods, on his return to Paris he went to work on it. Cezanne had patiently toiled for years to realize on canvas the solidity of air and landscape by means of delicately placed little patches and planes of color. Cubism put roller skates on this technique.

In the hands of Georges Braque, who took it up almost simultaneously, of Juan Gris, a young Spaniard who took it in 1911 and made it charming, and of Picasso, cubism made cunning use of all that painters know about form and color in themselves--from such elementary facts that a red patch seems to advance and a Violet patch to recede, to the most ingenious refinements All paintings, as painters see them, are merely areas of certain colors on flat canvas. Cubism made pictures which everybody could see that way.

In 1911, Picasso finally left the Bateau lavoir and the straight bohemian life. He now had money stowed away in his "strong box"--a large wallet kept in an inner pocket and fastened with a safety pin. He also had liver and stomach trouble that has persisted ever since. Moving into i studio apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy with at last some actual comfort, he worked furiously, with less gaiety, with a beginning of the bitter, abstracted air which characterized him later. In 1912 he moved to Montparnasse. In 1914, saddened by the departure of most of his riends for the War, he left Paris to live in the suburb of Montrouge.

Fame and War are two unsettling things. On Picasso both had lasting effects which critics of the future will have to reckon with in estimating his work. It is significant that his first "collages," paste-jobs of paper and other textures, were not intended as pictures but as models for pictures. Dealers and dilettante admirers insisted that they were wonderful, and Picasso shrugged off the whole matter. The element of nose-thumbing and Dada (organized senselessness) in his later work has probably the same genesis.

Class & Classical. There is, in fact, reason in the theory that losing his direction during the War and being flattered by a lot of fancy literary people, Picasso has found since little to do but pull rabbits out of his hat for easy applause--and easy money. The alternate theory is that this tough, unschooled, brilliant little man has responded subtly to the intellectual insights and disorders of his time, has created in paint their diverse and furious images. Unbiased observers think both theories are partly true.

In 1917 three absolutely last-word fashionables--Musician Erik Satie, Poet Jean ("Birdcatcher") Cocteau and Ballet Impresario Sergei Diaghilev--spirited Picasso out of the dumps and off to Italy to paint decor for a ballet, Parade. It has never been publicly known that Picasso not only did the cubist decor for this extravaganza but rewrote Cocteau's book. In Rome he fell in love with a minor member of the Diaghilev ballet, Olga Koklova, and found himself faced with the unusual demand for a Russian-Orthodox Church marriage. In 1918 the marriage took place in Paris, and the Picassos moved into the two top floors of a heavy, expensive, Second Empire house in the Rue La Boetie.

An impeccable conventional draftsman when he wanted to be, Picasso produced in the next period a number of line drawings of Ingres-like delicacy, including several of his wife. The "classic" pictures of these years (1918-25) were really of several kinds: monumental, massive giantesses which to some critics symbolize the all-maternal space of the universe; softly bulky, grand but graceful human figures that recall such Italian masters as Paolo Veronese; out-and-out Greco-Romanesque figure compositions in various stages of archaism, action and distortion. His production was enormous. At Gisors, about 35 miles from P'aris, he bought a chateau.

Business. Estimates of the number of paintings Picasso has produced vary from 1,200 to 10,000. Best guess is somewhere between 3,000 and 4,500. Since Rubens, with a whole "factory" of apprentices, turned out less than 3,000, it is likely that Picasso has been the most prolific first-rater who ever lived. In any logical system of supply and demand, a Picasso ought to be cheap. But Picassos are notoriously not cheap, and for this there are two explanations.

The first is that from his early days Picasso has hated to let any of his pictures go. "No painting is ever finished" is one of his gloomy sayings, and it is true that his studio and his chateau are jammed full of canvases which he will not sell. Even so, Dealers Rosenberg, et al., have occasionally been so hard put to it to keep from being flooded with Picassos that a wit once suggested, as a solution, a tie-up with the Citroen (Ford of France) Motor Company: "A Picasso with every Citroen."

The other explanation is that sales of Picassos have long been skilfully manipulated and that Picasso, who knows how good he is, has grown rich by not objecting. The merest page from a sketch book of the Toulouse-Lautrec period fetches $200, and there have been at least two sales of paintings in the U. S. for a reputed price of about $25,000 each.

Picasso's enemies attribute to him a peasant tightness with his money. There are few stories of his personal generosity, though it is a fact that any poor but promising poet can get a Picasso etching for his book by asking for it. He has certainly contributed a great deal to the Loyalist side in the Spanish civil war: the Guernica mural free, all proceeds from exhibiting it (to date about $5,000), at least two fully equipped fighting planes, and during the last few weeks a cash gift of 300,000 francs ($7,959).

The Man. Picasso's eyes, enormous in relation to his head, dominate his face, which despite a largely indoor life has taken on a finely crinkled, leathery quality often found in Spaniards. Never a dandy, he now dresses adequately but with indifference, is only a bit touchy about being short (5 ft. 3 in.). A plausible theory for the usual dirt and disorder of his rooms is that it is largely reaction from the neatness enforced by his bourgeois wife.

After lunching on noodles or spaghetti at a little Italian restaurant in the Rue Bonaparte near St. Sulpice, Picasso starts the real day's work at about 2 p. m. in an enormous, factory-like studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. He no longer selects or sizes (prepares with glue to make nonabsorbent) his own canvas but is fussy about its fineness and weave. His concentration, intensity, efficiency and command of his medium at work are legendary. But, while one painting may be finished in a day, another just like it will take 90 hours of work, spread over as much as three years. He is never satisfied; all his life the question "C,a marche?" has invariably met with the same reply: "Peuh!"

In the evening, Picasso dines at the same little restaurant on the same pasty food, will then take a cafe-creme at the Cafe de Flore, almost always with the same group. His wit, which has made him feared by sycophants, is famous and often malicious. Examples: (of a young girl artist) "Her mother drinks, her father drinks, and it is she who has the red nose"; (of James Joyce) "an obscur whom everyone can understand." Picasso's critics do not like the way he pretends that nothing he says can have any really damaging effect. They point to this as one more symptom of spoiled-childishness which accepts the pleasant aura of fame without acknowledging the responsibility it entails.

Picasso's constant woman companion since his divorce in 1937 has been Dora Maar (nee Markovitch), a 29-year-old photographer of French-Yugoslav parentage who lived in the Argentine until she went to Paris eight years ago. A black-banged beauty, she appears in several of the artist's recent paintings, notably the Woman with Long Hair. Last week Dora Maar had her second exhibition of photographs at the Galerie de Beaune, also had her nose punched outside the Cafe de Flore by the ex-Mme Picasso.

The Work. Woman with Long Hair illustrates Picasso's perennial obsession with catching the essence of several facial expressions and positions at once, creating a visual "now you see it now you don't." It is of such peculiar problems, enormously complicated and multiplied in certain pictures, that his art of the past few years is made. He has borrowed like a magpie from every graphic manifestation that interested him, from latrine drawings to the child art of Paul Klee. In the still-lifes displayed at Rosenberg's last week, dated from 1936 to January 15, 1939, critics found a synthesis of cubist, infantile, surrealist elements.

In his one brusque little essay on himself, published in a Soviet magazine in 1926, he said: "For me, a picture is never either an end or an achievement, but rather a happy chance and an experience." Max Jacob once said: "He saves himself by being an acrobat."

Discounting all the evidence of irresponsibility in his work, sober critics are inclined to respect tough, small Pablo Picasso's insistent assertion of his own independence, to find in it an example of commonplace psychological and artistic health. But with equal sobriety they feel that the time is past for amazement, shock or swoon over Pablo Picasso; that young painters had better know their own minds, their craft and their time as well as Picassian esthetics. Says Picasso, bored: "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of the birds? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? Whereas with painting, people must understand. If only they would realize that an artist ... is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things. . . ."

*Picasso, Scribner ($3)

*An elegant, impudent and decadent poet.

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