Art: Papa Picasso

“A Picasso exhibit is like an automobile show,” quipped one Paris critic, “everybody . . . flocks there, eager to see the new models . . .”

Last week Parisians were flocking to the government’s Maison de la Pensee Française to see Picasso’s latest. Most of the canvases were slightly more rakish versions of pictures Picasso had painted before. He had splashed on his oils thicker and brighter than ever; some of his nudes had developed a disconcerting habit of projecting their faces onto stark white islands above their multicolored and bulbous torsos.

But there were a few exceptions—new models, as it were—which caused somewhat the same sensation as if Citroen had brought out a futuristic Kiddie Kar. They were eleven paintings which came straight from the nursery of the villa at Vallauris, where 6y-year-old Picasso and Franchise Gillot, his handsome young mistress, live with their two children, Claude (two) and Paloma (five months).

They showed a little boy in blue checks playing with his purple-maned hobbyhorse and a baby sitting in her perambulator. But they were not the. sort to please the average doting father. Picasso had rearranged his offspring’s features, lopped off hands and feet, squashed Claude to a playing-card flatness, and transformed Paloma into a two-headed little monster.

Exclaimed one touring American matron: “This is blasphemy!” But Picasso had obviously enjoyed himself and the nursery studies gave Picasso fans more fun than they’d had in a long time.

On the Riviera, where he was lounging about in soiled white shorts, with his barrel chest a magnificent brown, Picasso left off playing with his son long enough to deny that he was being domesticated. Grumbled Papa Picasso: “My painting hasn’t changed, my subjects haven’t changed. If I happen to paint a little girl it is because she happens to be at hand. If a piece of wood were at hand I would paint it.”