TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0314> <title> 1950s: Captain Pablo's Voyages </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> TIME Magazine June 26, 1950 Captain Pablo's Voyages </hdr> <body> Once long ago, Pablo Picasso warned an inquisitive American lady not to "ask questions of the man at the wheel." At mid- century, Protean Pablo is still grasping the wheel of modern art, and most people are still wondering whether the boat is hopelessly lost or merely off on an extended voyage of exploration. This week in Europe, hundred of dauntless American ladies and their husbands were once again doggedly searching for a first-hand answer. In a cluster of pavilions beside a Venetian lagoon, they had their best chance of finding it. There the Venice biennial, the world's oldest, biggest and best-known international art show, had assembled a record exhibition of 4,000 art works form a record 22 nations, to celebrate its silver anniversary. Portugal, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and Colombia were all on hand for the first time. Germany and Yugoslavia (but none of the Soviet satellites) were back for the first time since the war. From the U.S. has come a retrospective showing of 48 paintings by Seascapist John Marin, along with samplings of six younger--and lesser--U.S. artists. Surveying that bewildering array, one British critic moaned: "They have collected too much art. Too many impressions are fighting each other." But one impression stood out unmistakably: the same little group of French painters who had dominated 20th Century art right along were still the class of the show. Different as they all were, an apparently ageless youth was one trait all held in common; all of them were 60 or over; their average age was 70. And they held a common artistic philosophy; that nature is not a subject to be imitated and recorded on canvas, but is simply a jumping-off place for whatever an artist thinks or feels. Unlike their impressionist forebears, who painted what looked like windows opening into sunny worlds, the young old men of the Paris school had long since shut the windows and painted whatever they liked on the glass. Like Hot Coals. For most people, half the pleasure in looking at pictures is in recognizing what they see. Modern artists often refuse them that pleasure. But there are compensations. In breaking new ground for art, the moderns have also found new means of making art enjoyable. Such men as Dufy, Chagall and Matisse, for example have applied their free-wheeling philosophy primarily to color, laying it on canvas in broad, brilliant arbitrary splashes, and raising it to an intensity never before equaled in Western painting. Rouault trowels on his colors like hot coals, achieving the richness and emotional impact of Gothic stained glass--which also shuts nature out. Braque, who is more interested in form than color, leads the eye on surprising new adventures by painting shapes that seem to shift and change as one looks at them. The results may sometimes shock; they can also feed the imagination with the fire of new experience. No one has ever tended the flames more assiduously or mistreated nature with more zestful enthusiasm than the little barrel of a man with the wonderful name: Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispin Crispiniano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso. Seizing nature by the hair, he joyously twists, tears, chops, stretches and mauls her to create new faces never before shown to mortal men, "What is a human face?" asks Picasso. "Who sees it correctly--the photographer, the mirror or the painter? Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?" Like the Eiffel Tower. Today Picasso's own face is leathery, seamed and wrinkled, illuminated by big dark eyes which sometimes sparkle but more often stare off into the distance. He is old and fat, but still powerful: his chest and belly, bristling with white, goatlike hairs, are mahogany- tanned. At 68, he still dominates the whole canvas of modern art. In his adopted France, Spanish-born Pablo Picasso is as much of an institution as the Eiffel Tower or the Grand-Guignol. His ideas, his loves and his wisecracks are as faithfully reported as the goings-on of any movie star. In the rest of the world he is almost as well known. His pictures hang in the world's most famed museums, and fetch prices as high as $50,000. Almost anywhere the mere mention of his name is enough to start a boiling controversy. Though he can draw like Raphael when he likes, he much prefers to voyage off to worlds that never where, and to return from them with his own devil-may-care impressions. To his admirers he is a restless, inventive, original genius. To his critics, including some of the older topnotchers in the school of Paris, he is a talented mountebank and irrepressible showman who has lured his followers and the world up a blind artistic and intellectual alley. But the fact remains that no young artist today can wholly escape Picasso's shadow. Picasso has done as much as anyone to develop the two distinguishing and disputed techniques of modern art: abstraction and distortion. Whenever a student tries a new experiment these days, he is apt to find that Picasso, like Kilroy, has been there ahead of him. If he falls back on traditional art forms, he is simply returning to Picasso's own beginnings. A painter who easily masters every tool of his trade, is easily bored with everything new he tries, Picasso often seems not just one individual but half a dozen. Since work, for Picasso, means self-expression above all else, his art changes as fast as the artist. And his life, like his art, has always been a ragged succession of brief, blind voyages to unknown ports of call. First Tack: Blues. Before he was 15, Picasso was already well launched on his first tack. His father was a drawing teacher in Spain, and Pablo inherited the old man's academic skill along with his brushes. He was still a boy when he had his first one-man show, in the doorway of an umbrella-maker's shop in La Coruna. At 18 he took off for Paris, the artists' Mecca, which has been his base of operations ever since. Poor as a sparrow, he shared a small room and single bed with Poet Max Jacob, sleeping by day while Jacob was at work. At night he painted furiously at his first strange subjects; the attenuated figure of half-starved beachcombers, laundresses and musing alcoholics. He painted them all with subtle variations of a single color which he rapidly made his own: blue. Before long, Picasso had found a mistress, a host of Montmartre friends, and even a few buyers. He lost his blues and began painting "pink" pictures, such as his famous Boy Leading a Horse, which represented no real advance over Picasso's bluer ones. It had the same impeccable draftsmanship and the same arty, somewhat sentimental air. By 1907 he was bored stiff with classical grace. Casting around for new ideas, he became fascinated by the distortions of primitive sculpture. He put them into his huge, 92-by-96-inch Les Demoiselles d'Avignon--a strong, muddy draft of Congo water. It was unlovely but energetic, and it attracted attention--as Picasso had meant it should. Next Tack, Cubes. With the Demoiselles, young Pablo became an art-for-art's-sake painter. He was through with doing tinted reflections of what most people mean by "beauty." Thenceforth his pictures would have more to do with what he felt rather than what he saw--not because he loved nature less, but because he cared more for Pablo Picasso and Picasso's art. Unlike many of his followers, Picasso never abandoned nature altogether. "There is no abstract art," he said. "You must always start with something." But he and fellow painters like Braque could and did smash nature into little pieces and fit the remains back together to suit their fancy. Tables, people, pipes and wine bottles were all reduced to barely decipherable fragments, each seen from a different angle and painted in various shades of bird-lime and mud. Scoffers, and later the artists themselves, called the new technique "cubism." "The life of the cubists," Gertrude Stein wrote later, "became very gay...Everyone was gay, there were more and more cubists." But Picasso, who never enjoyed traveling in a crowd, was already searching for new adventures. In 1916 he moved to suburban Montrouge (where a burglar insulted him by stealing his linen and not his paintings). Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau rescued him from the suburbs and persuaded him to do the scenery and costumes for a Diaghilev ballet. The invitation led him to one of his strangest adventures of all. In the troupe was a Russian beauty named Olga Koklova, who not only convinced Picasso that he needed a wife, but also taught him to air the dogs at 9 every morning. They rented a swank apartment, bought a chateau for weekends and a Hispano- Suiza to take them there. In keeping with his new respectability, Picasso painted neo-classical nudes and started wearing striped trousers. Once he hopped over to London to order 30 suits. "I'll come back," he said, "when all of them are worn out." Over the Horizon. Long before that could happen, Picasso had climbed back into overalls, and his art was on a new tack--one which took him straight over the horizon and out of most solid citizens' ken. He borrowed ideas from the whole range of art history, carving figures that looked like Sumerian fetishism, and drawing in every manner from the Cro-Magnon to that of severe 19th Century classicists such as Ingres. His subject matter became anything at all--dogs, women, roosters, bones, furniture, dots, musicians--violently twisted, hacked, smeared and rearranged to suit Picasso's moods. "It is my misfortune," he gaily explained, "to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit!...I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things--so much the worse for them, they just have to put up with it." His Girl Before a Mirror, painted in 1932, was a striking example of this vast capacity for forcing any number of conflicting "things" and means to serve his ends. Its lozenge- patterned background and thick black lines recall stained glass. Its involved, curlicue composition relates to Chinese calligraphs. The girl's head has a playing-card look, yet it seems also to symbolize the sun as its reflection does the moon. Her violently distorted body appears to be clothed, nude, and X-rayed, all at one time. She is quietly contemplating herself, yet the picture is an anything-but-quiet struggle of strident colors. Not long afterwards, Picasso gave up painting as a bad job. For two years he loafed, and did a little writing in a style that seemed to derive from Gertrude Stein and an old grad's 25- anniversary recollections of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Sample: "Nothing to do but to watch the thread that destiny works which taints the theft of the glass from the mind that shakes the hour coiled up in remembrances toasted in grills of blue..." Out of the Doldrums. The Civil War in Spain settled Picasso's doldrums. Passionately Loyalist, he painted Guernica for the Spanish government building at the Paris World's Fair. The mural, done entirely in black, white and grey, symbolized the bombing of a Spanish town by German planes. Brutally ugly, it mixed classical analogies with a suggestion of crumpled newspapers and memories of the bull ring. Goya himself never painted a darker evocation of war's horror. Still in the black mood, Picasso found a new girl, Photographer Dora Maar, and used her pretty face as a starting point for hundreds of grotesquely twisted, hysterical-seeming portraits. When the Germans took Paris, Picasso had fled to the south of France. Shortly afterwards he decided to return. "Simple Nazi soldiers used to visit me,' says Picasso, who was considered too valuable to molest, even though Resistance leaders sometimes met at his studio. "When they left I presented them with souvenir postcards of Guernica." On the day Paris was liberated, he copied a watercolor sketch by Poussin "as an exercise in self-discipline." He greeted the first American soldiers who came to his studio with kisses, exclaiming: "You two are so lovely!" Soon afterwards, Picasso made a startling announcement: "I have become a Communist...because the Communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain." The Old Changeable. Since then, Painter Picasso has obediently lent his name and prestige to every cause his gleeful Communist colleagues suggest. The fact that his art is regularly excoriated in Moscow seems to bother him not a bit. And his friends maintain that his Communism arises simply from boyish admiration of the Reds who fought with the Spanish Loyalists and in the French underground. "Pablo is too much of a revolutionary," they say, "to be a real Communist." Seemingly politics has not affected his art, but love and a new vitality have. Today Picasso lives in a plainly furnished house near Vallauris (a potterymaking village just back of the Riviera coast) with a 26-year-old beauty named Francoise Gillot. She has given the old man two children and apparently a lease on youth. His joy at the turn in his life is expressed in his most recent work, which combines the serenity of this early "classical paintings with a wealth of playful inventions lifted from all his past periods." Ceramics like the two fighting centaurs, show the Old Changeable at his lightest and gayest. Recently he has given them up to make huge, happy paintings and sculptures, superb line drawings of his children, and wooden dolls and animals for the kids to play with. Among his other works in progress are gold medallions engraved with twisted heads, and doves, seagulls and owls cut out of tin. One of the doves is nesting on her eggs--pebbles Picasso found on the beach. Evolution or Variation? After a bout of fast, hard work, Picasso makes a habit of hopping into his cream-colored Oldsmobile and rolling down to the beach at Golfe-Juan. There, surrounded by his family and a worshipful circle of younger artists, he sits and muses on one of the most varied, productive and controversial careers in art history. "Repeatedly I am asked," he once grumbled, "to explain how my painting evolved...Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression, this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking...It might be for the better or it might be for the worse." That is certainly true of Picasso. To a somewhat lesser degree, it is also true of his contemporaries: Henri Mastisse is one whose brilliance equals Picasso's own. The ailing 80-year-old master lives in a huge hotel apartment in Nice, spends most of his time in a bedroom hung with dozens of his own cheerful works and some of the darkest, dourest Picassos in existence. At present he is completing designs for a Dominican chapel to be constructed in nearby Vence. Like Picasso, Matisse has borrowed much from older art forms--especially Persian miniatures. But the important thing, he says, "is to keep the naivete of childhood. You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover." Maurice Utrillo, 66, still paints a few of the Montmartre scenes whose pale, subtle coloring and cool geometry of composition made his fame. But red-eyed, emaciated "Monsieur Maurice" no longer visits his old haunts; he sits at home in a suburban stucco villa; staring at his buxom energetic wife and dreaming of the dark, drunken, amazingly productive old days. Marc Chagall, a wanderer at 60 as he has always been, recently moved to the south of France and resolved to take up ceramics. But he continues to paint lush, lyrical fireworks of color. Referring to the image of the floating man that continually recurs in his paintings, Chagall says: "The man in the air used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me." Fernand Leger looks hard as flint at 69, lives in a chaotically cluttered Montparnasse studio, and has 100 pupils--most of them ex-G.I.s. Leger's own Leisure seems half daguerreotype and half poster. It shows that he himself has come a long way from the brash, machine-tooled "Tubist" abstractions of his early days. He painted it during World War II, which he spent in Manhattan. "Because of the gasoline shortage," he recalls, "the city was suddenly teeming with bikes, and I was much impressed by the many attractive girls I saw pedaling around..." Georges Roualt feels "very tired" at 79. He lives in seclusion outside of Paris, painting his molten, haunting illustrations of the New Testament. Dark though they generally are, Roualt's religious works depend on color to convey his intense emotion. Far more self-critical than most moderns, Roualt two years ago burned 315 old, unfinished works he had come to dislike. Georges Braque, 68, collects and polishes old bones to embody in the ceramics he is making nowadays. Braque and Picasso were once Montmartre pals, painted almost indistinguishable cubist pictures. After the two parted, Braque stuck with cubism, gradually developed it into the tricky, fluid and elaborate medium of expression he employs today. In his spotless Paris studio, Craftsman Braque works at his complex, heavily textured canvases slowly and with obvious enjoyment. "The fun," he says, "is that when you begin a picture you never know what it's going to look like. Each new work is a journey into the unknown." The Terrace represented a twelve-month on and off cruise for Braque. Andre Derain, too, is now working in ceramics. A big, heavy old man of 70, Derain lives in an 18th century mansion outside of Paris, draws for two or three hours a day in the park surrounding his house. In his youth his art reflected first Matisse's use of brilliant colors, and later, cubism. Since then it has grown steadily more simple and calm. Derain's subjects and his manner of painting them are never starling, but their clarity and order hold the eye. "The great danger for art," he says, "lies in an excess of culture. The true artist is an uncultured man." Maurice de Vlaminck thinks the trouble is not too much culture but "too damned many artists and would-be artists." Huge and still volcanic at 74, he calls himself "a simple farmer." Vlaminck almost never forsakes his farm for Paris. "What would I do there," he snaps, "see the movies?" He once remarked that he would like to paint pictures that could be recognized as Vlamincks even from a speeding car. His stormy landscapes, painted thickly with bold strokes, succeed in that ambition, but nowadays a lot of fellow artists speed right on by Vlaminck's little roadside stand. He retaliates by heaping scorn on his contemporaries, who have accused him (as well as Derain) of collaborating with the Germans during the war. "French art is dead," Vlaminck roars, "and Picasso is its gravedigger. He is not an artist, he is a virtuoso who changes his act every week." Raoul Dufy, a 73-year-old wisp of a man, is now in the U.S. undergoing treatment for arthritis is a Massachusetts hospital. He works every day at his art, sometimes sketching on hospital doilies with a pencil gripped between thumb and stiffened forefinger. Dufy long ago reduced the impressionist techniques of his predecessors to a highly personal but perfectly legible shorthand. Today his work is as cheerful and heady as ever; he has no illusions about his depth. One of the most charming masters of the atmospheric sketch who ever lived, Dufy maintains that "classicism is perfection. Unfortunately, I do not have perfection." End of the Struggle. Individualists all, Pablo Picasso and his contemporaries have long since won the case for individualistic, self-expressive painting. Artists like Tintoretto in the 16th century and Rembrandt in the 17th had won skirmishes in the same campaign. The Paris school has won it for all of modern art. As Frenchman Andre Malraux puts it in his Psychology of Art: "The long-drawn struggle between officialdom and the pioneers...draws to a close. Everywhere except in Soviet Russia [the moderns] are triumphant." Modern painting, says Malraux, is now a law unto itself which has replaced traditional art with "a system of research and exploration. In this quest the artist (and perhaps modern man in general) knows only his starting point, his methods and his bearings--no more than these--and follows in the steps of the great sea venturers." Picasso and his contemporaries are nearing the end of their journey. To some seasick critics it has seemed a trip aboard a Walloping Window Blind, but no one can deny that it has vastly broadened the horizons of art. That fact alone assures Captain Pablo and his shipmates an important place in art history. But will their works loom large in the museums of the future? In Picasso's case there will have to be a lot of weeding out first. His casual absorption of ideas from any and all sources sometimes gives his work a synthetic, prefabricated air. And Picasso is not the least embarrassed by a poor showing. He paints as rapidly as any living artist, and since, like other mortals, he has his off days, much of what he paints is hardly worth a second glance. Yet Picasso at his best is still the most vital painter living, with energy unsurpassed, and directness backed by a steely control of whatever medium he chooses to employ. Today his paintings of 50 years ago are generally admired, and chances are that the public taste will eventually catch up with his present works as well. For though Picasso at 68 is a far more complex and subjective artist than he was at 18, he has the same astonishing mastery and zest for art and life. "The whole world is open before us," Picasso once exclaimed, "Everything waiting to be done, not just redone." That spirit has prompted all his voyages in art. It keeps him at the wheel. </body> </article> </text>