ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Paris Honours Picasso

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31343, 13 April 1967, Page 18

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Paris Honours Picasso

A million people visited the Picasso exhibition, marking the artist’s 85th birthday, in Paris recently. JAMES FAIRFAX gives his impressions of the memorable display and discusses the phases of Picasso’s development.

The, long queues stretching from the doors of those rather monstrous twins on the Champs Elysees the Grand and Petit Palais might have been forming ! for the annual Motor Show or an Ideal Homes Exhibition two attractions the Parisians flock to in their thousands. But, far from this, It was an immense retrospective exhibition to honour Pablo Picasso on his eightyfifth birthday—an exhibition which brought together 284 paintings, over 500 drawings and pieces of sculpture and some 150 lithographs, drypoints and gravures in a unique revelation of his genius. There had been other retrospective exhibitions of Picasso’s works, but here were seen many owned by the artist himself which had never before been shown publicly. Among them were sculptures and early drawings which play a vitally Important part in an understanding of his paintings. The visitor who, confronted with the 270-odd paintings in the Grand Palais, may have had a vague idea that the work of Picasso can be neatly divided into “period”—blue, pink, cubist, classical and, finally, a series of heads with features all over the place—received a rude shock. Recurring Themes One of the first impressions one got was of endlessly recurring themes. The hollow-cheeked Harlequin of 1905 reappears in 1915 with an inane little head—a solitary circular eye and foolish curve of a mouth—his body a diamond-patterned oblong superimposed in the stylo of a collage on other

squares, symbolising perhaps the vanity and hopelessness of his profession. But in 1917 he is back In academic form and the nightmarish quality of his predecessor has gone. Finally, in 1923, he is seated, still brooding, but sleek and well-fed in an apparently unfinished painting which has the quality of draughtsmanship particularly evident in Picasso’s superbly done drawings of Derain, Renoir, Stravinsky, de. Falla and Max Jacob of 1919-1920, where his control over his medium is breathtaking.

Then the monumental classical figures bursting out somewhat surprisingly in 1920 run concurrently with still-lives and landscapes which are a further development of his collage works and with groups of figures dancing or playing musical instruments which derive from both the earlier collage and cubist works. One train of development influences another, for these classical figures, having even in their stillness a kind of movement, evolve in the late twenties and early thirties into delightful, almost surrealist fantasies of women throwing balloons or playing with their children on a beach. From here, Picasso’s interest turns to sculpture and the paintings of the next 30 years, whether he is thinking of a girl or the horrors of civil war, seem to have a particular connexion with works in iron and bronze which begin to appear at this time. By the time the visitor reached the works of the thirties, his mind was reeling with the artist’s bewildering twists and turns and any attempt to see a continunity of development was difficult' However, at this point he was drawn back to two supreme achievements: the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907 and the cubist works of 19071912. There two major events appear to have influenced all Picasso’s subsequent work and it is possible to see

this influence in the various directions into which his restless mind forced him. Glorious Shock The “Demoiselles d’Avignon” bursts forth in a glorious shock of flesh tones and subtly curved limbs after the hungry, haunted faces of acrobat peasant mother and child and circus family. But retracing one’s steps to these earliest works—and this exhibition Involved a continual retracing of steps after a sudden revelation prompted the seeking of an explana-tion-one could discern in the delineation of facial lines and angles the gradual progress towards cubism. It was necessary to cross and recross the road to the drawings at the Petit Palais (a process not made easier by the queues) for here in particular one saw how the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” came about The drawings of his own head from different positions, the early studies of the Demoiselles, the gradual transformation of curves into angles, the superimposing of one angle on another, all revealed the road he followed to cubism. Here, too, were various models, violins and guitars dismembered to show their basic con-struction-bottles and glasses and other domestic objects welded together to show their relationship with each other in space. Returning to the paintings themselves in the Grand Palais, one saw the whole cubist series brought together for the first time, partly due to the co-operation of the Soviet Union which owns some of the finest examples. They culminated in the three great cubist portraits: of the publisher Ambroise Vollard, the critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde and the dealer Kahnweiler. The brilliance of these portraits is staggering. Picasso seems to have bored through to the souls Of the three men. Yet the technique, labor-

iously built up over the years, seems deceptively simple. One’s eye is led immediately through the geometric forms which make up the portraits to the essential parts—the sunken brows and down-turned mouth of Vollard; the sharp intense stare and prim little mouth of Uhde; the jaunty moustache and clasped hands of Kahnweiler. Here, surely, is Picasso at his greatest. Picasso’s Sculptures Reference has already been made to Picasso’s renewed interest in sculpture in the early thirties and its influence on his later works. The first sight of his sculptures stretching down the gallery of the Petit Palais produced something of the excitement one felt when first seeing a supreme achievement in art—the Van Eyck's Altarpiece at Ghent, El Greco’s "Burial of Count Orgaz” at Toledo or Rembrandt’s “Nightwatchers.” “These sculptures," said Kahnweiler, “constitute a kind of drawing in space but form at the same time the first step towards the conquest of a realm which before had belonged only to architecture; the creation of spaces.” In the early 1900 s Picasso made' some bronze heads and busts while working towards cubism, but there is a long gap until around 1930 when two heads, constructed mainly from curved discs of metal, appeared. In both, the features are formed by small metal attachments with holes for eyes, but they are so placed that from whichever angle the heads ate observed one sees the whole face or sometimes several aspects of the face at once. In effect one feels the Impact of every aspect of the face at once. Picasso was to follow this theme in many of his subsequent paintings. From these, one was drawn to a magnificent series of part-junk sculptures, some made in wood and cast

in bronze so that the grain is still visible. There was a woman with a child in a pram—the child’s legs two curved pieces of piping expressing its discomfort and irritation far more eloquently than a more conventional method would have done. At the end of the gallery was "The Bathers,” six figures ranging in height from six to 10 feet, cast in bronze from square blocks of wood and arranged in a group. Their tiny heads and arms outstretched in all the activities of a day on the beach suggest at first a happy holiday atmosphere. But a closer look revealed that those little heads don’t really know what life is about: there is a feeling that they are vainly and desperately searching for some kind of meaning to things. Nowhere is Picasso’s deep feeling for humanity, with all its trials and troubles, more clearly revealed than in his sculpture. Even his earliest paintings, with the particular concern for and identification with the conditions of the poor of Paris and Barcelona, do not have this wideness of . vision. Latest Works It has become fashionable to dismiss ' Picasso’s latest works as of no importance or a joke perpetrated on a gullible public. But among many in* ‘ teresting paintings of the past few 1 years, two are outstanding. “Les • Menines,” a study done in 1957 of ‘ Velasquez; “Las Meninas” and • “Dejeuner sur I’Herbe,” after Manet, - and painted in 1960 provide a fascin- ■ atingly different insight into those ■ two famous works. Perhaps the best comment on this 1 great exhibition is Picasso's own: “Painting is stronger than I am; it i makes me do what it wants.” [Reprinted from the “Sydney Mornt Ing Herald" by arrangement.]