Art: Fifty Years in Front

Anyone who paints elephant-nosed women and six-sided guitars, and calls them art, should obviously see an oculist —or a doctor. But what if the patient can draw like Raphael when he chooses?

Pablo Picasso is this sort of irritating exception. In a half-century of painting he has ranged from classic perfection to near chaos, without once mislaying the sureness in execution and the vitality which are his only consistent characteristics. That half-century was summed up by scholarly Alfred H. Barr Jr., research director of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, in a comprehensively illustrated monograph out last week (Picasso, 50 Years of His Art; $6). Its 330 pictures were the work of a restless giant in a restless era, who constantly invented new worlds to conquer, then tired of them.

The illustrations start with the year 1895, when Picasso was 14 and a coming artist in Spain. He set up on his own in a

Barcelona studio, decorated the walls with paintings of sumptuous furniture he could not afford.

Pink & Blue Beginnings. Already schooled by his father, an art teacher, Picasso went to Paris at 19 to rule, not to worship. He did go around to see the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he admired enormously, “but all the same,” Picasso decided, “I paint better than Lautrec.” He set out to prove it and for three years painted starved, laundresses, absinthe drinkers and grave, bearded beachcombers in blue. Nowadays they seem a bit stagy and sentimental; Barr suggests that they reflect Picasso’s “room without a lamp, his meals of rotten sausages, even his burning a pile of his own drawings to keep warm.”

For a while Picasso tried pink. His blue period “gave way to the more natural style and melancholy sweetness of a long series of circus people.” His Boy Leading a Horse (see cut) which even a know-nothing in art could see was first rate, has, says Barr, “an unpretentious, natural nobility of order and gesture which makes the official guardians of the ‘Greek’ tradition such as Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes seem vulgar or pallid.”

Walk-Around Art. Picasso saw no point in doing things perfectly more than once. He left the imitating to his growing army of imitators. He began painting faces, tables and guitars from every angle, interlocking his various views of them in tight, infinitely complicated and almost unrecognizable compositions. Why paint from a single viewpoint, he argued, when you have legs to walk around the model and see it from behind as well as in front?

By the time the critics got the point of Cubism, Picasso had moved on. He paused with a neoclassical manner which combined the flowing, controlled line of Raphael and a sculpturesque mass and weight new to painting. But the beauty came too easily, and there was a hint of something false about it. “When we love a woman,” said Picasso, “we don’t start measuring her limbs.”

Are Artists Imbeciles? Then, 20 years ago, the master stopped measuring; his art grew more & more violent, more & more like pure emotion. He twisted women, dogs, Greek heroes, horses and table lamps into paroxysms of rage or frustration. He built monuments of painted bones, drew “pictures” that were nothing but dancing lines and dots, made a “Bull’s Head” out of a bicycle seat and handle bars. He protested the German bombing of Guernica (in the Spanish Civil War) with a massive mural whose ugliness is its strength. “What do you think an artist is?” asked Picasso. “An imbecile who has only his eyes? . . . No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”

Picasso went through one six-month stretch when the only picture he did was a rag cut by a piece of string; and through another period when he tried his restless hand at poetry. Currently he calls himself a Communist, but his art would please no commissar. Author Barr more correctly calls Picasso an “intransigent” individualist.

Picasso is at work on a huge canvas which will never fit anyone’s idea of interior decoration. Entitled The Charnel-House, it is still in the drawing stage (see cut). Says Barr: “Its figures are facts—the famished, waxen cadavers of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. The fury and shrieking violence which made the agonies of Guernica tolerable are here reduced to silence. For the man, the woman and the child this picture is a Pieta without grief, an entombment without mourners, a requiem without pomp.”