On Art

...It is true that certain Renaissance paintings also meant to instill religious awe are things one might gladly hang in one's living room today...

...I see no true sophistication, no true advance in sensibility, in the embracing and enshrining of, let's call it, Avi-gnonism, unless it is practiced in extreme moderation, as in the later works of Cezanne or in Picasso's Three Women (version rythmee) of 1908...

...And how nice to find a sense of humor that with a palm leaf for the back, a wicker basket for the rib cage, a couple of flower pots for the udder, could fashion the memorably droll body of a goat (1950), or could assemble the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle into the head of a bull (1943...

...Rather, I propose to view this most gigantic exhibition of the colossus of 20th-century art as a challenge to speculate about what happened to the fine arts in our century...

...Ah, say the confirmed antiphilis-tines, here is art being reduced to literature once more, as if (alluding to a famous remark attributed to Matisse) a picture were about a woman and not about painting...

...A cynic might say, of course: "Live to be 91, change your style continually, and paint two or three pictures a day, and you cannot fail to come up with a few diverse masterpieces...

...Fiercely and unceasingly, it combines the grace of the matador with the bestiality of the bull...

...We observe these humbled creatures from the back, with an ominous glass looming between their bent heads and hunched shoulders...

...Paul Klee and Max Ernst seem funnier than Picasso...

...A moderately cubist still life such as Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (early 1909) I can appreciate...

...What do I mean by those terms...

...Or a metronome, or a Klansman's hood on a pole, or anything, or nothing...

...Consider two related works from 1913 that hang on facing walls at moma and appear on the same page of the catalogue: Head and Geometric Composition: The Guitar...

...Distortions of the Avignonish sort are discernible in it (nearly every Picassoan mode is anticipated or recapitulated in unlikely periods and places), but a woman, a personality, a mood are there for everyone to recognize...

...Sauve quipeut...

...Where exactly is the drama??never mind tragedy??in the relation of a glass and a moulding...

...The only facial feature visible is the left eye of the woman on the right (her head is in nascent profile), and that eye is lowered or closed, completing the aura of tiredness and defeat...

...for a primitive culture cannot be recaptured by an evolved one??and, even if it could be, should not be...

...T JL...

...the woman on the left, more erect than her companion, retains even some vestigial pride...

...To the very end Picasso produced conservative works, often etchings or drawings, usually of famous people or beloved women...

...Two lengthy visits to the exhibition and conscientious perusal of the catalogue leave my body exhausted and my senses reeling...

...It is comforting to note, too, that for all his experimentation, Picasso never quite severed the umbilical cord to reality, that even the 1972 Monument (originally meant for Apollinaire's tomb, although now in moma's garden) contains hidden but demonstrable human elements...

...they are for the glosses that, as like as not, stem from self-importance or self-interest...

...In the final version of Demoiselles we see intermingled figures deriving from Iberian and African primitivism...

...In these pictures, though the mediums are somewhat different, the basic elements are the same: a large triangle in front of which two more or less oblong shapes of different color disport themselves and form a suggestion of another triangle, albeit without a proper hypotenuse...

...Even thinner than the line between art and nonart is that between commentary and sales pitch...

...he irony is that Picasso, even as he became more abstruse, brutal and ugly, also continued to create works that communicate with great, noble clarity...

...It is, further, reassuring to see that this painter who frequently left recognizable anatomical reality far behind, could??whether in the early anatomical studies, the later so-called Ingres-like drawings, or the portraits in various mediums??produce works that could satisfy the simplest and most sophisticated demands for representation (that, in other words, he could do splendidly what, say, a Frank Stella or an Adolph Gottlieb could not have done if his life depended on it...

...What is it, then, that makes Pablo Picasso great??very likely greater than those others I often prefer to him (and I have named only some...

...My terminology, I realize, is subjective, but that is what the modern predicament has reduced us to...

...but that is because in a Renaissance Last Judgment there is beauty and salvation as well as horror and damnation...

...In the rendering of the decorative values of interiors and the figures in them, Vuillard and Matisse strike me as more gracefully evocative...

...There is elegance in such works, as there is in the best cubist landscapes, and there is a pleasure in discerning underlying shapes and rhythms...

...Again, it is deeply satisfying to see a mind at work behind the hand (a painterly, not a literary or scholarly mind, to be sure, but that is as it should be)??a mind that could turn whatever it alighted on into grist for its mill, which could grind as fine as it could paint huge...

...For whether he invented them, quickly adapted and expanded them, or reinvented them out of history and prehistory, Pablo Picasso managed to embody just about all significant movements of this century's art, and to work successfully in all mediums from painting to sculpture...

...sensuality, despite the claims made for the rhinocerine heads and topsy-turvy nudes based on Marie-Therese Walter, is incomparably headier in Paul Delvaux...

...There is no doubt whatever concerning his greatness...

...It is this manifoldness, contradic-toriness, and inexhaustibility that cannot be denied greatness, however limited the number of works that provide lasting enjoyment...

...Truth, is it...

...Connotations may differ, yet a basic denotation for all humankind is essential...

...This is where we come to the fundamental and irresoluble problem of modern art even before it becomes abstract: the lack of criteria to invoke...

...it is only his goodness that is so often questionable...

...I detect the answer in the reference of another Pablo, Neruda, to Picasso as "the inspired minotaur of modern painting," and in a maxim by an 18th-century moralist, the Marquis de Vauvenargues (particularly appropriate because Picasso is buried outside the Chateau de Vauvenargues in which he lived and worked from 1959 to 1961): "One is compelled to respect the gifts of nature, which neither study nor fortune can confer...

...Now, why should one of these things be a "head" and the other a "guitar...

...Small wonder that John Ashbery, epitomizing countless modern sensibilities, pronounced this garish, grotesque, repellent 96" by 92" monstrosity "the greatest painting of this century...

...Jean Cocteau has an essay on Picasso in Le Rappel a /'o/r/re (1926), where we read: "Tragedy no longer consists in painting a tiger devouring a horse, but in positing between a drinking glass and the moulding on an armchair plastic [i.e., formal) relationships able to move me without the intervention of any anecdote...

...The dialogue of a glass and armchair moulding is conducted in a language inscrutable to most of humanity...

...Moreover, from here it is only the tiniest distance to abstraction: the tragedy (or comedy, or tragicomedy) of the relations of one nonrepresentational shape and color with another...

...meanwhile we proceed through many remarkable works??blue, rose and other??until, beginning with the renowned Gertrude Stein portrait and culminating in the dismal Demoiselles a"Avignon (1907), something dreadful happens to Picasso and, with and through him, modern art...

...But I can see no gain in trying to make art compete with the x-ray machine, the stroboscope camera, the geometer's formula...

...This text is archetypal, down to the very choice of pronoun: the work is to move me, not one, or you, or humanity in general...

...Both represent the beginnings of synthetic cubism, where the reductive research of analytic cubism was, allegedly, reconstituted into a simpler, more expressive world of geometric symbols...

...That you can get from the New York Times alone in some five versions...

...Assuming it exists for someone, does it exist for someone else...

...But in these Demoiselles, actually whores in a notorious brothel, we find prefigured a compendium of art that was, alas, to come...

...And here let me adduce another, even earlier, key statement about Picasso, from Guil-laume Apollinaire, the first eloquent and influential champion of cubism: "This is a newborn infant," writes Apollinaire about Picasso in Les Peintres cubistes (1913), "who puts order into the universe for his personal use, and also for facilitating his relations with fellow human beings...

...on the contrary, they were possessors of highly developed cultures...

...As one walks, then staggers, through this well-nigh interminable show, one may be struck, as I was, by how much better other artists did in individual disciplines than Picasso, the old decathlon champion...

...The palette is all blue and green, giving the picture an uncanny underwater coloration, suggesting that these hapless prostitutes are part of a submerged Atlantis, some lost continent of enforced incontinence...

...Only the glass of alcohol is central, ascending, triumphant...

...More or less simultaneously, the influence of primitive art hit other painters as well, notably Matisse and Andre Derain...

...Nevertheless, I find it amazing how very many of the master's works strike me as not only ugly but also bad...

...The difficulty is that we cannot, as we still could with the wildest storms of expressionism, invoke shared human values as a norm...

...I find Braque's cubist landscapes more lyrically suggestive, Juan Gris' cubist still lifes more sensuously colored and satisfying...

...The Oriental artists, even if they placed higher value on decoration than we do and had a different concept of perspective, were not primitives...

...Why should an infant's view of the universe become binding on grownups...

...The era of anarchy wherein the viewer improvises the work of art from a few random, indeterminate elements provided by the artist is at hand...

...Or take the extraordinarily raffine painting for a 21-year-old, Two Women at a Bar (1902, now in the Hiroshima Museum, and thus not readily accessible), from the blue period...

...1 shall return to that presently...

...There is in Picasso a tireless, nature-like force??not quite human, but rather minotaurian as it charges into painting and sculpture, and in so many other related directions...

...These strictures do not apply to the adaptation of Japanese prints by the post-impressionists...

...It is just one very short step from beyond the pallid to beyond the pale, however, and there is no pope of art to set down the demarcation line...

...Nearly a thousand artifacts of every kind are on display??more Picasso than has ever been seen in one place, and much more than many of us want to see...

...Flattened-out picture space (no longer strictly new), cubism, fluid angle of vision (e.g., a face seen from both front and side at once), monumentality (the human body given epic??or elephantine??dimensions), distortion and simplification (a black hole in the middle of the chin for a mouth), limited palette (in this case, predominantly earth and sky tones), and militant ugliness where once would have been beauty...

...Is not the infant's arcane solipsism the opposite of the social adult's concern for communication...

...Really two dreadful somethings: ancient Iberian sculpture and African masks...

...The same cannot be said for the Iberian and African sculptors...

...Or, more precisely, why couldn't both be, interchangeably, either...

...And how is "personal use" compatible with "facilitating relations with fellow human beings...

...A portrait by Ko-koschka or a self-portrait by Schiele is more moving to me than all but a few early Picassos...

...Too soon the master became, in the words of John Berger, "a national monument and produced trivia...

...There are many marvelous early works that attest to great originality and precocious mastery??for example, the 1900 pastel and gouache Bullfight, with its asymmetrical division of the canvas between arena and bleachers, its provocative dialogue between ultramarine and orangey reds, its somewhat blurred yet aggressively assertive figures, and its entire composition firmly ushering the eye toward that black square from which the absent, but already vividly felt, bull will emerge...

...Their appeal is either to the civilized person's jadedness and rejection of civilization, or to the pseudocivilized person's mindless craving for novelty and distraction??to find the new within the traditional culture being infinitely harder...

...But the sadness here is not in any way ugly...

...Why, for example, should the heads of the two demoiselles on the right look like African masks with ghastly blue or green stria-tions...

...the slightly later and more militant The Reservoir, Hor-tadeEbro (summer 1909) strikes me as of merely academic interest...

...It is inspiriting to see the work of an artist who, aged eight or nine, can already execute an oil of the competence of Picador, and who at 91 is still experimenting, setting out for perhaps the ten-thousandth time in what might turn out to be a new direction...

...Thus the blindly parroted ah's and ooh's are not for the work...

...A still life by Chardin, for example, is not about the tragic relationship of a glass and a moulding, but about what certain objects??so chosen, arranged, and depicted??mean to human beings in general...

...Whose truth...

...But let me start with the positive...

...The contours of the figures are a marvelous compromise between flaccid roundness and bony angularity...

...and because, furthermore, the damned tend to have lovely and beautifully painted bodies...

...From the plastic point of view, one could claim that we could have done without so much truth, but once this truth has become manifest, it becomes necessary...

...what the brainwashed majority may choric-ally admire there is apt to be not the Ding an sich, but the fantasticated footnotes with which art historians, curators, and dealers??not necessarily disinterested folk??have covered it...

...Let me say, initially, works that do not stimulate any kind of awareness or curiosity in me, that do not make me want to live or even linger with them, that in the most inclusive sense of the concept are of no use to me??except for eliciting the kind of revulsion I can get, without recourse to art, from a long, hot, crowded subway ride...

...imaginary states of being are more hypnotic in Magritte...

...Thus along with many nightmar-ishly scrambled portraits of Dora Maar ??all twisted angularities, garish colors, distorted and dislocated limbs and organs??there is also the one of 1942 where she wears a striped red and green dress...

...Either he wanted posterity to see them untransmogrified, or the sitters insisted on not being depicted as they might have appeared to a capricious newborn infant...

...Should what was originally meant to put fear into an enemy or trembling into an idol worshiper, and was not intended to hang on an apartment wall and become part of an esPABLO PICASSO thetic ambience, now, all of a sudden, be something we gaze at while we talk, eat, think, or make love...

...Both of these appeals are basically base...

...Virtually the only painters of what might be called grosso modo the modern movement who are not subsumed by Picasso's output are Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt, but on closer scrutiny even traces of them can be discovered...

...Yes, a soupcon of the strange, oversimplified, exaggerated, distorted can be hauntingly piquant, wittily provocative, passionately critical of reality or the norm...

...Oh, but you can, you can...