Picasso As Revolutionary
GREENBERG, CLEMENT
Picasso As Revolutionary Picasso. By Frank Elgar and Robert Maillard. Praeger. 315 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Clement Greenberg Associate Editor, "Commentary"; author of numerous works on art This...
...The chronological list provided of 261 of the artist's "principal works," each illustrated with a small half-tone cut, is invaluable, and so is a catalogue of all works owned by European museums as well as a list of the books for which Picasso has expressly made engraved illustrations...
...Not everything the master creates is of equal value, to be sure, but nothing ever really fails for him, or fails enough to detract from the enormous figure he cuts...
...Picasso was a very great artist between 1906 and 1926, and the achievement of those years will, I am sure, bulk as large in time to come as any Old Master's...
...On the credit side are its numerous illustrations, both in color and in black and white, which are of a decent fidelity and reproduce many things not familiar to Americans...
...The exaggeration of certain traditional elements of the discipline of painting that Picasso undertook in cubism was revolutionary in scale and in aspect but not in intent—certainly he did not intend abstract art...
...Yet, it is quite easy for those who take the trouble to look to see how firmly Picasso is tied to tradition, which he continues in the same direction as Cezanne, who continued it in the same direction as Manet, who continued it in the same direction as Goya...
...For Mr...
...Maillard's is much the more interesting contribution, not only because he presents facts—some of them fresh—in an interesting way, but also because his own critical observations are a little more incisive than Mr...
...It is as if the heart of Picasso's achievement were to confound and astound us, to become the myth of himself, and the quality of the individual works of art he has produced were of peripheral importance...
...The impression left is not of an artist engaged in permanent revolution, but of one who continues to go through the motions of a revolution already won and over with...
...Given that his formal language, which remains essentially cubist in his ambitious projects, received its last creative touches by 1937 at the latest, the shock value of his art has derived since then mostly from its illustrative effect...
...That the page, despite this layout, achieves a certain neatness (and that the book, crowded with plates and half-page illustrations, has a nice compactness in general) speaks for the taste and skill of its German makers...
...Elgar makes a lot of the Picasso who keeps reversing his tracks, who is a "prodigious creator yet at heart a fierce negator," the artist who "sent his blasphemies echoing down our century," the "revolutionary who pushes his inquiries in every direction, with no use for prejudices, opening doors on every hand and shutting them with a bang after him...
...Nor, for that matter, does an honest artist intend anything but good works of art, to which innovation and "revolution" are solely means...
...Instead of criticism and analysis, we get rhapsodic description...
...It has been many years, in any case, since Picasso has been revolutionary in any real or relevant sense...
...But most of these have been bad books, and this is not altogether a good one...
...The shock comes from what is done to the human or animal anatomy—to the idea of it as a norm—and not from what is done with or to the language itself of painting, where Picasso's frequently deliberate bad taste and ruptures of stylistic unity have the effect of rearrangements of the familiar rather than of re-creations of it...
...And the text has the benefit of the easy English into which Francis Scarfe has put its French original...
...Elgar, however, as for most people who write appreciatively on Picasso, he can do nothing wrong...
...which he has never accepted for himself...
...Elgar's "critical study" is indeed the only thing really wrong with the book, but it also forms the main part of it...
...The text page itself is laid out in novel fashion: The main text, by Frank Elgar, a young French critic, is given in single-columned roman on the upper half, with Robert Mail-lard's shorter biographical account running below in two-columned italics like a continuous footnote...
...Elgar's, whose fundamentally uncritical approach he nevertheless shares...
...If this were better understood, the truly prodigious quality of Picasso's best work would also be better understood...
...Like most of those who treat him as a prodigy rather than as a mortal man, Mr...
...author of numerous works on art This is one of the better among the many books on Picasso that have appeared recenty...
...But he has been a very uneven artist since then, and in the last 20 years not even a good one on the whole...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 50
