Art: 30 Years of Picasso

The Fourth of July is celebrated discreetly in London with a banquet by the Pilgrim Society, a few wreaths on Trafalgar Square’s statue of George Washington, and flags in front of the American Express. The date is seldom significant to the British art world. Tardy British art lovers this year remembered July 4, hurried to the Lefevre Galleries of King Street to attend the last day of the season’s most important exhibition since the Persian show in Burlington House (TIME, Jan. 12). It was the largest showing of the paintings of Pablo Ruiz Picasso ever held. Dealers were there in respectful silence; for Picasso, who used to sell his sketches to Pere Soulier, prizefighter, for 20 francs apiece, is today one of the rich-est, most successful of modern painters. Last summer he spurned $30,000 from the Copenhagen Museum for a single canvas.

Stocky, tousle-haired Pablo Ruiz Picasso looks like an extremely able Spanish mechanic, will be 50 years old on Oct. 23. He was born in Malaga in Andalusia,* the son of an Italian mother, a Spanish drawing-teacher father. From his earliest childhood it was understood that he was to be an artist. He lived successively in Barcelona, Madrid, finally Paris—always drawing. Paris became his spiritual as well as his physical home. Today it is as unfair to consider him simply a Spanish artist as it is to consider George Bernard Shaw an Irish dramatist.

Gifted with extraordinary technical ability, Pablo Picasso is a painter who has found drawing too easy. He can imitate anyone, which is perhaps the reason why he has become the most obscure, the most scientific of modern artists. In 1900, when he first settled in Paris, he painted gypsies, vagabonds and melancholy children in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec and Daumier. Always changing his style, he developed what art critics like to call his Blue Period, his Rose Period, his Neo-Classic Period, etc., etc. He became more and more abstract, more and more removed from humanity. Picasso was one of the founders of Cubism. He is the wellspring of that latest artistic unintelligibility, Surrealism, which has been defined as “the expression of thought without the control of reason, that is, the painting of dreams and states of mind by any means whatsoever.” Cubism, in other words, was still objective painting; it attempted to suggest the appearance of things. Surrealism is subjective painting, attempts to depict an irrational emotional reaction—which, almost by definition, can make no sense to anyone except the emoter.

No painter has been as wildly praised, as furiously attacked. Mrs. Chester Dale, famed collector, writes of Picasso: “Like a god, he destroys Nature itself when the impulse seizes him and recreates it in a new and more wonderful form which he has discovered.” Hearstwriter Brisbane of the New York Evening Journal, stung to rage by a Picasso abstraction, reproduced it last fortnight, added, “You feel ashamed for the human race when you realize that stuff as this [sic] is actually shown and bought by people supposed to be sane.”

Cautious museum curators who pay enormous prices for Picasso abstractions recognize the dexterity of his line, his ability as a maker of patterns, realize that anyone who has exerted such an enormous influence on the art of today is deserving of honor.

In London last week were Picassos of all complexions: the cubist pastiches, the early acrobats, the later big footed nudes.

Many pictures were sold, for prices that made post Depression bond salesmen sigh with envy, but to the surprise of British reporters, the highest prices were paid not for the early Daumieresque Picassos, not for the clean lined drawings and portraits, but for the Picasso abstractions. Editors widely hinted that if one must pay £1000 for a Picasso, there was no fun in buying one that anyone could understand. Picasso himself who hates the teas, conversaziones and routs of the art world (with the exception of those given by his good friend Abstract Poet Gertrude Stein) was not present. He remained in his neat comfortable studio in the Rue de la Boetie, among his astronomical charts, his African masks, and his collection of old guitars. The guitars are frequently recognizable in the otherwise indescribable confusions of his abstractions.

*Seven weeks ago Malagan hotheads burned the churches because of Cardinal Segura’s pastoral letter, last week rioted (see p. 17).