Art: Oscar the Oscillator

The hardest job for a painter in Paris is to be original; the next hardest job is to be wilder and woollier than one’s associates. Oscar Dominguez achieves the No. 2 aim with distinction. His latest works, on exhibition in a Paris gallery this week, prove that when he settles down before an easel, Dominguez can be wild in a mighty workmanlike way.

Hits of the show are twelve geometrically patterned pictures of bullfights, which Dominguez painted in three weeks. Done with a few simple lines and clear colors, they recall bullfight scenes painted by Dominguez’ good friend, Picasso. One well-disposed critic got around their obvious derivation by reporting that Dominguez “has fully developed a theme which Picasso merely sketched in earlier years.” Another wrote, a little more accurately, that Dominguez’ new paintings are “works of extreme precision and perfect elegance.”

Beginning with Bananas. His Montparnasse studio is precisely and elegantly arranged, too, but no one would apply these words to 45-year-old Artist Dominguez himself. Ham-handed and heavy-maned, he does a great deal of painting and even more cavorting. In the course of his career he has cavorted through successively popular School-of-Paris styles.

The son of a wealthy Canary Islands banana planter, he arrived in Paris at 21 to sell his father’s produce. “I went out on one continuous binge for three months,” he recalls, “and visited practically every cabaret, bistro and cafe in Paris. At 5 o’clock in the morning I usually turned up at the Halles [Paris’ central market] dressed in a tuxedo and with a terrific hangover, and tried to sell father’s bananas. Naturally he fired me, and gave me an allowance to copy the old masters in the Louvre. I found it perfectly easy to copy Leonardo, El Greco and Delacroix, but Goya was too difficult for me on account of his half-tones. After one year in the Louvre I decided to stay in my room and do my copying from reproductions. Father never knew the difference.”

Burgeoning with a Breast. Dominguez graduated from the student-artist class the day he met Surrealist Andre Breton in 1935. Breton introduced him to the surrealist round table at the Cafe de la Place Blanche, where, in the course of fevered discussions with Picasso and Paul Eluard, he hit on some weird and wonderful notions. Dominguez rose to prominence in the group by such creations as a bas-relief of a horse inextricably tangled with a bicycle, and a “gramophone” with a forefinger in place of a needle and a female breast for a turntable.

But surrealism could not satisfy Dominguez long. He oscillated between it and abstract art, produced cobwebby abstractions with surrealistic explanations. “Imagine any tridimensional body,” he suggested, “an African lion, for instance. If we consider the whole formed by every point of the lion at every instant and in every position, and if we draw the enveloping surface, we obtain an enveloping super-lion with very delicately graded characteristics.” His friends could never be sure whether or not Dominguez knew his theories were nonsense, but they could be sure he did not care. When asked to think out his conclusions, Dominguez amiably responds: “What for?”

Finishing with Butterflies. Dominguez held one exhibition in Paris during the German occupation, went into hiding when he saw the reviews. “How is it that this madman is allowed to move freely?” a Nazi critic demanded. “Why don’t they arrest this lunatic?” Since the war, Dominguez has followed Picasso’s lead in painting halfway abstract versions of recognizable scenes. Combining bold simplicity with great finesse, they have earned him an enviable reputation in Great Britain and the U.S. as well as in Europe.

Craftsman though he clearly is, Dominguez refuses to admit it. “I stand before my canvas,” he begins, shrugging his broad shoulders and rolling his round, bloodshot eyes, “and I pick up the brushes. Then things begin to happen all by themselves. Often I have started painting a woman and finished painting a bull. At the Riviera last summer I started painting sailboats. When the picture was finished I realized I had painted butterflies.”