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<text>
<title>
(1930s) Art's Acrobat:Picasso
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1930s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
February 13, 1939
Art's Acrobat
</hdr>
<body>
<p> In Paris last week, at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in the
fashionable Rue La Boetie, 33 small oils-on-canvas were making
the art news of the season. With one exception they were still-
lifes of candles and flowers, fruits and mandolins, pitchers and
bird cages, ox skulls and oil lamps, knives, forks, figurines
and doves. Had these objects been painted with the luscious
realism of a soup advertisement, the pictures would not have
been at Rosenberg's, nor would they have interested any of the
people there. Yet if there was one thing these doodles,
lozenges, swabs and swishes of bright paint represented to that
crowd of connoisseurs and jealous artists, it was sheer
technical virtuosity--probably the greatest painting
virtuosity in the world.
</p>
<p> So, for 30 years, have the works of Pablo Picasso continued
to delight the knowledgeable and confound the common man. Flying
like a shuttlecock between the esthetic debaters of two
continents, the very name of Picasso has been a symbol of
irresponsibility to the old, of audacity to the young. To
millions of solid citizens it has been one of the two things
they know about modern art--the other being that they don't
like it. But the show at Rosenberg's had a new significance,
because it came at the full tide of a new period both in
Picasso's work and in appreciation of it.
</p>
<p> For two years, 1935 and 1936, Picasso neither drew nor
painted. There seems to be little doubt that, when he began to
paint again, it was in response to a political event--the war
in Spain. In any case, the two works which have put him in the
news since 1936 have been public, polemical jobs: his big,
lacerating mural, Guernica, for the Spanish government pavilion
at the Paris exposition of 1937, and a series of hairy-nightmare
etchings entitled Dreams and Lies of Franco. At the same time,
Picasso's previous work has begun to emerge from the smoke of
controversy into the lucidity of history. Not a mere
canonization but a symptom of universal stock-taking was the
announcement last week by the Art Institute of Chicago and
Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art of a huge, joint retrospective
show of Picasso for next autumn. And various other sources,
including that vivacious story-teller, Gertrude Stein, have
lately increased public understanding of a man whose life and
painting explain each other.
</p>
<p> Spain. Picasso was born in Malaga, Andalusia, Spain, 57
years ago last October 25, of a Basque drawing teacher named
Blasco Ruiz and an Italian mother, Maria Picasso. By the Spanish
order of patronymics his name was Pablo Picasso y Ruiz, and so
he signed his earliest pictures. In physical build Pablo
resembled the small, robust, dark-skinned mother whose name he
later took.
</p>
<p> Of Malaga, Picasso's characteristic recollection of a
singing motorman whose streetcar's speed depended, not on the
company's timetable but on the rhythm of the song he steered by--gay or melancholy, galloping or slow. The mind of little
Pablo appears in a revealing flash in a story of his being given
a pair of roller skates; instead of skating on them he took them
apart and, with huge amusement, attached each pair of wheels
to the flippers of an enormous tortoise, whose slow progress
around the patio had annoyed him.
</p>
<p> Getting practically no ordinary education, Picasso worked
off his ingenuity in drawing and painting at home. When he was
14, his father moved to Barcelona to take a post as professor
in the School of Fine Arts. Picasso's precocity was already such
that at 15 he left his father's instruction and set up his own
studio, first in Madrid and later in Barcelona. His painting at
this time was perfectly strong, finished and professional. Too
poor to furnish his Barcelona studio, he amused himself by
painting on the walls, in great detail, the missing pieces of
furniture.
</p>
<p> Paris. What Rome is to the Catholic priesthood, Paris has
been for centuries to the artists of Europe. Among the hundreds
of hopefuls who arrived there in 1900, at the dewy dawn of a
destructive century, 19-year-old Pablo Picasso was remarkable
for his impressionability, his facility, his profound self-
confidence. Standing one day in admiration before a painting by
Toulouse-Lautrec, whose bold draftsmanship and garish atmosphere
he was then busy imitating, he was heard to murmur, "All the
same, I paint better than he does." But it was not until he had
gone back to Spain for another year that Picasso found a style
of his own. The paintings of his "Blue Period" were done in that
year, 1903, and during the next year or so in Paris.
</p>
<p> Fernande Olivier, a model who lived with him then and for
the next 14 years has said that he was "...small, black,
stubby, unquiet, disquieting, with sombre, deep, piercing,
strange, almost fixed eyes. Awkward gestures, feminine hands,
ill-dressed, ill-cared for. A thick, black, brilliant forelock
divided the intelligent protuberant forehead. Half-bohemian,
half-workman in his dress; his over-long hair swept the collar
of a tired coat."
</p>
<p> For eight years Picasso and Fernande lived in Montmarte in
the famous "bateau lavoir" (floating laundry) at 13 Rue Ravignan
(now Place Emile Goudeau), a fantastic barrack tenanted by
painters, sculptors, writers, cartoonists, laundresses and
pushcart peddlers. Picasso was Spanishly jealous of his 18-year-
old mistress--though he was grateful enough that the ogling
coal dealer neglected to leave a bill. To keep her at home he
did the marketing himself, dressed in the cap, espadrilles and
blue jeans of a workman, plus a famous white polka-dotted red
shirt that cost him less than two francs. The mystic poet, Max
Jacob, helped Picasso, who steadfastly refused to do any
"commercial" work. A terrific and efficient worker, to avoid
interruptions, Picasso took to painting all night, a habit which
may have something to do with the blueness of the Blue Period.
</p>
<p> In any case, these new paintings by the little Spaniard
from Malaga were extraordinary affairs. The somber, elongated
El Grecos which Picasso had studied in Madrid certainly
influenced his manner; so did the predominately blue
compositions of Cezanne. But, unlike Cezanne and still more
unlike the Impressionists, Picasso was uninterested in Nature,
painted to make paintings, painted to express himself.
</p>
<p> Gay Life. The first private buyer of Picassos was the
Moscow tea importer Sergei Stchokine, who began about 1904 to
select the Blue canvases that later formed the basis of the
great Soviet collection in the Moscow Museum of Modern Western
Art. The sandaled Stein family (Gertrude, Leo and Michel) became
occasional buyers by 1905.
</p>
<p>When in the money, the entire "Picasso gang" often came home
very late, drunk as bedbugs, singing, declaiming poetry and
shouting such slogans as "A bas Laforgue Conspuez Laforgue"
(Down With Laforgue! To hell with Laforgue!--an elegant,
impudent and decadent poet). Picasso on these occasions used to
fire a revolver to wake the bourgeois neighbors.
</p>
<p> When he had painted all the blue pictures he wanted to
paint, Picasso immersed himself in the life of Paris, went to
the circus once a week and to prize fights with two new, tall,
stalwart friends: Painter Andre Derain and Poet Guillaume
Apollinaire. Working more during the day, in 1905 and 1906
Picasso poured out the pictures of the Rose Period: acrobats,
harlequins, companies of jugglers and players, all painted with
a wistful delicacy and long-boned grace. By 1907 he had been
sufficiently housebroken to go to the Stein "at homes."
</p>
<p> Cubism was an invention of the same mind that put rollerskates on the Malagan
tortoise. In 1909, in the village of Horta, near Saragossa, in
Aragon, Spain, Picasso painted a series of pictures which
suggested to him a whole new method. Liking nothing so much as
new methods, on his return to Paris he went to work on it.
Cezanne had patiently toiled for years to realize on canvas the
solidity of air and landscape by means of delicately placed
little patches and planes of color. Cubism put roller skates on
this technique.
</p>
<p> In the hands of Georges Braque, who took it up almost
simultaneously, of Juan Gris, a young Spaniard who took it up
in 1911 and made it charming, and of Picasso, cubism made
cunning use of all that painters know about form and color in
themselves--from such elementary facts that a red patch seems
to advance and a violet patch to recede, to the most ingenious
refinements. All paintings, as painters see them, are merely
areas of certain colors on flat canvas. Cubism made pictures
which everybody could see that way.
</p>
<p> In 1911, Picasso finally left the bateau lavoir and the
straight bohemian life. He now had money stowed away in his
"strong box"--a large wallet kept in an inner pocket and
fastened with a safety pin. He also had liver and stomach
trouble that has persisted ever since. Moving into a studio
apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy with at last some actual
comfort, he worked furiously, with less gaiety, with a beginning
of the bitter, abstracted air which characterized him later. In
1912 he moved to Montparnasse. In 1914, saddened with the
departure of most of his friends for the War, he left Paris to
live in the suburb of Montrouge.
</p>
<p> Fame and War are two unsettling things. On Picasso both
had lasting effects which critics of the future will have to
reckon with in estimating his work. It is significant that his
first "collages," paste-up jobs of paper and other textures,
were not intended as pictures but as models for pictures.
Dealers and dilettante admirers insisted that they were wonderful, and
Picasso shrugged off the whole matter. The element of nose-
thumbing and Dada (organized senselessness) in his later work
has probably the same genesis.
</p>
<p> Class and Classical. There is, in fact, reason in the
theory that losing his direction during the War and being
flattered by a lot of fancy literacy people, Picasso has found
since little to do but pull rabbits out of his hat for easy
applause--and easy money. The alternate theory is that this
tough, unschooled brilliant little man has responded subtly to
the intellectual insights and disorders of his time, has created
in paint their diverse and furious images. Unbiased observers
think both theories are partly true.
</p>
<p> In 1917 three absolutely last-word fashionables--Musician
Erik Satie, Poet Jean ("Birdcatcher") Cocteau and Ballet
Impresario Sergei Diaghilev--spirited Picasso out of the dumps
and off to Italy to paint decor for a ballet, Parade. It has
never been publicly known that Picasso not only did the cubist
decor for this extravaganza but rewrote Cocteau's book. In Rome
he fell in love with a minor member of the Diaghilev ballet,
Olga Koklova, and found himself faced with the unusual demand
for a Russian-Orthodox Church marriage. In 1918 the marriage
took place in Paris, and the Picassos moved into the two top
floors of a heavy, expensive Second Empire house in the Rue La
Boetie.
</p>
<p> An impeccable conventional draftsman when he wanted to be,
Picasso produced in the next period a number of line drawings
of Ingres-like delicacy, including several of his wife. The
"classic" pictures of these years (1918-25) were really of
several kinds: monumental, massive giantesses which to some
critics symbolize the all-maternal space of the universe; softly
bulky, grand but graceful human figures that recall such Italian
masters as Paolo Veronese; out-and-out Greco-Romanesque figure
compositions in various stages of archaism, action and
distortion. His production was enormous. At Gisors, about 35
miles from Paris, he bought a chateau.
</p>
<p> Business. Estimates of the number of paintings Picasso has
produced vary from 1,200 to 10,000. Best guess is somewhere
between 3,000 and 4,500. Since Rubens, with a whole "factory"
of apprentices, turned out less than 3,000, it is likely that
Picasso has been the most prolific first-rater who ever lived.
In any logical system of supply and demand, a Picasso ought to
be cheap. But Picassos are notoriously not cheap, and for this
there are two explanations.
</p>
<p> The first is that from his early days Picasso has hated to
let any of his pictures go. "No painting is ever finished" is
one of his gloomy sayings, and it is true that his studio and
his chateau are jammed full of canvases which he will not sell.
Even so, Dealer Rosenberg, et al., have occasionally been so
hard put to it to keep from being flooded with Picassos that a
wit once suggested, as a solution, a tie-up with the Citroen
(Ford of France) Motor Company: "A Picasso with every Citroen."
</p>
<p> The other explanation is that sales of Picassos have been skillfully
manipulated and that Picasso, who knows how good he is, has grown
rich by not objecting. THe merest page from a sketch book of the
Toulouse-Lautrec period fetches $200, and there have been at
least two sales of paintings in the U.S. for a reputed price of
about $25,000 each.
</p>
<p> Picasso's enemies attribute to him a peasant tightness with
his money. There are few stories of his personal generosity,
though it is a fact that any poor but promising poet can get a
Picasso etching for his book by asking for it. He has certainly
contributed a great deal to the Loyalist side in the Spanish
civil war: the Guernica mural free, all proceeds from exhibiting
it (to date about $5,000), at least two fully equipped fighting
planes, and during the last few weeks a cash gift of 300,000
francs ($7,959).
</p>
<p> The Man. Picasso's eyes, enormous in relation to his head,
dominate his face, which despite a largely indoor life has taken
on a finely crinkled, leathery quality often found in Spaniards.
Never a dandy, he now dresses adequately but with indifference,
is only a bit touchy about being short (5 ft. 3 in.). A
plausible theory for the usual dirt and disorder of his rooms
is that it is largely reaction from the neatness enforced by his
bourgeois wife.
</p>
<p> After lunching on noodles or spaghetti at a little Italian
restaurant in the Rue Bonaparte near St. Sulpice, Picasso starts
the real day's work at about 2 p.m. in an enormous, factory-like
studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. He no longer selects or
sizes (prepares with glue to make non-absorbent) his own canvas
but is fussy about its fineness and weave. His concentration,
intensity, efficiency and command of his medium at work are
legendary. But, while one painting may be finished in a day,
another just like it will take 90 hours of work, spread over as
much as three years. He is never satisfied; all his life the
question "Ca marche?" has invariably met with the same reply:
"Peuh!"
</p>
<p> In the evening, Picasso dines at the same little restaurant
on the same pasty food, will then take a cafe-creme at the Cafe
de Flore, almost always with the same group. His wit, which has
made him feared by sycophants, is famous and often malicious.
Examples: (of a young girl artist) "Her mother drinks, her
father drinks, and it is she who has the red nose"; (of James
Joyce) "an obscur whom everyone can understand." Picasso's
critics do not like the way he pretends that nothing he says can
have any really damaging effect. They point to this as one more
symptom of spoiled-childishness which accepts the pleasant aura
of fame without acknowledging the responsibility it entails.
</p>
<p> Picasso's constant woman companion since his divorce in
1937 has been Dora Maar (nee Markovitch), a 29-year-old
photographer of French-Yugoslav parentage who lived in the
Argentine until she went to Paris eight years ago. A black-
banged beauty, she appears in several of the artist's recent
paintings, notably the Woman with Long Hair. Last week Dora Maar
had her second exhibition of photographs at the Galerie de
Beaune, also had her nose punched outside the Cafe de Flore by
the ex-Mme Picasso.
</p>
<p> The Work. Woman with Long Hair illustrates Picasso's
perennial obsession with catching the essence of several facial
expressions and positions at once, creating a visual "now you
see it now you don't." It is of such peculiar problems,
enormously complicated and multiplied in certain pictures, that
his art of the past few years is made. He has borrowed like a
magpie from every graphic manifestation that interested him,
from latrine drawings to the child art of Paul Klee. In the
still-lifes displayed at Rosenberg's last week, dated from 1936
to January 15, 1939, critics found a synthesis of cubist,
infantile, surrealist elements.
</p>
<p> In his one brusque little essay on himself, published in
a Soviet magazine in 1926, he said: "For me, a picture is never
either an end or an achievement, but rather a happy chance and
an experience." Max Jacob once said: "He saves himself by being
an acrobat."
</p>
<p> Discounting all the evidence of irresponsibility in his
work, sober critics are inclined to respect tough, small Pablo
Picasso's insistent assertion of his own independence, to find
in it an example of commonplace psychological and artistic
health. But with equal sobriety they feel that young painters
had better know their craft and their time as well as Picassian
esthetics. Says Picasso, bored: "Everyone wants to understand
art. Why not try to understand the song of the birds? Why does
one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without
trying to understand them? Whereas with painting, people must
`understand.' If only they would realize that an artist...is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance
should be attached to him than to plenty of other things..."
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>