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<text>
<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>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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?"
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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..."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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!"
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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."
</p>
<p> That is certainly true of Picasso. To a somewhat lesser
degree, it is also true of his contemporaries:
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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..."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>