Art: Protean Pablo

Red lights gleaming over the marquee of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art one night last week spelt the name PICASSO. Outside, the traffic jam would have done credit to a prize fight. Inside, 4,000 people crowded for a preview of the most comprehensive show ever assembled of work by the world’s most famed living artist.

Prospective stock-takers puzzled by any or all of the show’s 362 items could resort to a hefty catalogue by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s director, whose running commentary under a great batch of reproductions served as a lecture tour through the galleries.

Certain it is that no definite stock-taking can be made of protean Pablo Picasso before he is safely dead. Until then he will spend his life as he has spent it to date: in sporadically escaping from himself by declaring war on his latest period and once more attempting to foretell the shape of things to come. Like the Proteus of classic fable, he has the further gift of eluding those who clutch at him, changing his shape and slipping out of their grasp. At 58, he is still the revolutionary he was in his 20s.

Of Picasso’s work up to the present, the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective show omitted only his student output and his recent sculpture (whose casting for the show World War II halted). Perhaps no other artist could survive so big a one-man show so well. It ranged from an academic study of moonlight and roses, painted in 1898 when Picasso was 17 and had already set himself up as an independent artist in Barcelona, to 1939 portraits in which he practices artistic schizophrenia and tries to catch several views of a face at once.

In Paris and Barcelona, Picasso painted the sombre, introspective canvases of his “Blue Period.” By 1904 he returned to live in Paris, permanently, and in swift succession followed the “Harlequin,” “Rose” and “Negro” periods. By 1908 he was pioneering in cubism, with a side foray into pasted paper compositions. Picasso’s seven years’ designing for the Russian Ballet, beginning in 1917, led him into a neo-classical realism, culminating in the sculptural Three Graces (see cut) of 1924. Year later his classicism came to a violent end with his painting, The Three Dancers (see cut), which left not one line of The Three Graces on another. Picasso’s subsequent work has been a jumble of abstractionist, dadaist, expressionist and surrealist elements.

Even his opponents admit that Picasso has influenced the art of his time more than any of his contemporaries. As an inventor and transmitter of painting techniques he is unrivaled. A believer in eclecticism if not in consecutive growth, Picasso himself knows why he is always changing. Says he: “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it—except from our own works. I have a horror of copying myself.”

What Picasso’s effect on the future will be, no one yet can say. Doubtless he is content to have provided so many possible breaks with the past. “In the old days,” he told a disciple in 1935, “pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.”