THE MYSTERIOUS PICASSO

...The denigrators of Picasso's work might remember that El Greco scandalized his Sixteenth Century contemporaries, and the classic-minded Eighteenth Century even more, with his wildly elongated and contorted figures, his disregard of orthodox iconography, his indifference to three-dimensionality and relative proportions of figures...

...Many of them are superficial diatribes...

...Picasso desires the truth," his admirer, the poet Paul Eluard has written...

...As for the Picasso . worshippers who indiscriminatingly treasure every scrawl he has produced and accept as the final word his every wisecrack, I find no basic difference between these fanatics and the lunatic fringe who would have him shot or, at least, put behind bars...

...The parallels between Picasso and El Greco are too intriguing and enlightening to relinquish quickly...

...Picasso mirrors an interpretation of the mass-hysteria of the Twentieth Century as the Baroque master mirrored the inner conflicts of the late Cinque-cento...

...His huge 1952 diptych, War and Peace, much larger than Guernica, is as bitter and desperate as that canvas which upset visitors to the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair...

...Both artists are the Mannerist masters of their times...

...Gauguin had maintained that paintings were symbols born of the imagination rather than mere records of visual facts...

...Influenced by Gauguin were the Nabis ("prophets") who included Maurice Denis, famed for his statement: "A picture—before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order...

...But the Greek believed that this truth could be found somewhere, if not here at least in the Christian paradise from which man was exiled for only a while...

...Artists are doers rather than thinkers...

...He is the editor of the Little Art Book series__The Editors...

...As recently as 1900 a critic had this to say about El Greco: "Through heavy nightmares he seems to guide his brush, revealing the twisted incubus of his heated brain...

...Or he may, like the second of the Big Three, Georges Rouault, re-discover Christ's martyrdom as a protest against the hypocrisy and callousness of present-day society...

...Picasso needed to rest from his fatiguing concern with the disintegration and transformation of natural forms, but the avant-garde was wrong in fearing that Picasso had completely reversed his direction...

...Doesn't this sound like some of the sneers which have greeted Picasso so frequently...

...The Mysterious Picasso by ALFRED WERNER Special American attention will be centered on Pablo Picasso in the weeks ahead as the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, opens the most important exhibition of his work held in this country...

...The term has often been used in a derogatory way, yet Mannerism, as we consider it today, was an important revolt of the Sixteenth Century against the classicism and rationalism of the High Renaissance, and thus a return to spirituality and emotionalism...

...I see no sharp contradiction between the opinions of his level-headed opponents and the verdict of his sober friends...

...Each is many-sided...

...I single out these pictures, as I referred to Les Demoiselles d''Avignon...

...El Greco must have known this when he rebelled against the naturalism of the High Renaissance by deliberately elongating and "distorting" figures and faces, and by inventing glowing and orgiastic colors far from the phenomena of everyday life...

...I do not believe this of a man who frantically hops from experiment to experiment, loudly sings his own praises, and makes himself the most talked-of painter in this century...

...For in this picture, painted only one year after Cezanne's death, and with Degas, Monet, and others still active, the young denizen of Montmartre endeavored what even these pioneers had never considered doing—to force three dimensions into the two-dimensional surface without recourse to trompe I'oeil and other worn-out devices...

...Artists—like children— see and draw purple cows...

...But what shall the Twentieth Century artist do...

...Yet neither fully assimilated his adopted country...

...Did he ever, in a moment of delusion, consider himself as the one who had been chosen to redeem art...

...A comparison of these two extraordinary men is so obvious that it is surprising it hasn't been done before...

...whenever Picasso's name is mentioned...

...But more often than once he fails to communicate...

...Indeed, a mere listing of all the invective arrayed against him probably would fill many pages...

...Even his severest critics, however, will not go along with those extremists who howl "charlatan...

...THE LONG entry on Pablo Picasso in a recent Dictionary of Painting rises to the glorification: "We must be grateful for his boldness and inventiveness, and the shocks he administers to sluggish ways of thinking and seeing...

...Whatever his detractors may say to the contrary, he has been striving toward that goal...

...But what real artist does not desire the same...

...More often than once inability to externalize the great conflict, to unify content and form, led to pointless artistry, to empty gesture, to rhetorical pose...

...Biographical-ly, these two men have much in common: the Greek who chose to spend his life in Spain, and the Spaniard who as a young man left his native country to seek his fortune in France...

...Then came Matisse who, when a shocked observer protested that he had never seen a woman resembling the artist's version, retorted, "But this is no woman—it is a painting...

...Cubism was born in this convulsive break with natural appearances, and all that Picasso produced in the previous decade and the following five is of minor importance compared to his "invention" of Cubism...

...Neither repudiated his origins...

...This remark offers a key, not only to Picasso's but to all genuine art...

...Cubism—the movement of which Picasso was the undisputed leader—• was, in the last analysis, the greatest revolt against the Renaissance traditions in art, following the flickering of unrest represented by Nineteenth Century symbolism...

...Even though he does not have El Greco's faith, or, for that matter, any faith, Picasso clearly knows that art does not exist in a vacuum, that it is communication from man to man...

...I do not wish to imply by this that I would not miss tremendously the tender and melancholy paupers of his Blue Period, or the pink circus folk of his Rose Period...

...and "faker...

...One is reminded of moments at the movies when, suddenly, the sound track fails, and one sees the actors talk, yet does not hear them...

...Scorning both the happy philistinism of the extreme left (in the arts, that is), and the escapism of Abstractionists, expressionist or otherwise, he has sympathy with the denizens he exposed to the cold wind of doubt, but no time for real pity, as he must go on tearing down walls...

...He may, in between formalistic adventures, stop to draw or paint "classic" portraits or compositions, or he may produce them parallel to, and simultaneously with, his "abstract" experiments...

...the eccentric Cretan, given to ostentation and extravagance, uncompromising and arrogant about the high fees he charged for his work —and our lusty contemporary whose behavior and manner of living violate the Marxist principles to which he has paid lip-service...

...Picasso made his great contribution to art when he was about twenty-six, through his large canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—now owned, like Guernica, by New York's Museum of Modern Art...

...It is a sheer delight to view the elegant neo-Classic figures he drew after Cubism had developed into full bloom, yet those conservatives who applauded warmly what some Cubists considered a startling apostasy, cheered prematurely and without good reason...

...And finally there was Picasso, deliberately flouting the tradition handed down through David and Ingres, who believed in painting nature as it is...

...El Greco was born in an era not unlike ours: one in which the ferocious strife between Catholicism and Protestantism occupied man as much as ideological conflict has shattered peace of mind in our time...

...All of this is correct, yet to a large number of those who profess to love the arts, the Spaniard's name has long been what a red rag is to a bull— and this antagonism pre-dates by many years his joining of the French Communist Party in 1944...

...His detractors claim that this protean master uses his enormous skill and baffling facility to borrow and graft onto his own art features from the work of artists of all periods and places, and has calmly amalgamated the inspirations that came to him from contacts with all sorts of archaic or folk art...

...the innovator El Greco, in constant controversy with his patrons who were startled by his unorthodox way of painting, and the iconoclast Picasso who broke all traditions of painting and sculpture...

...It is no coincidence that he is among the old masters Picasso reveres most, and whose direct influence can be seen in many of his works...

...Picasso, however, is a John crying in vain for a Christ to baptize—or, as he would put it, for the painter-dictator who would suppress not only the traitors, cheaters, and tricksters, but also the "charm" and "history" that are his anathema...

...El Greco's St...

...But in the realm of the spirit we are not the operators, much as we would like to be...

...In his late painting, Vision of the Apocalypse, there is as much ecstacy and anguish as there is in Guernica, the huge oil Picasso painted a few days after learning of the brutal and wanton destruction of a small Spanish town by German bombers flying for General Franco...

...Against El Greco, the charge of astigmatism was lodged (a childish accusation, as the artist often included in his most unorthodox pictures some realistically seen details, drawn with the most academic metic-ulosity...

...But he is, to this very moment, a Cubist in the sense that he still adheres to the basic principles which fired his imagination fifty years ago...

...Call Picasso a wrathful symbol of our time, a cauldron of aesthetic sensibilities, or a sociological phenomenon—there is always the corollary notion of a catalyst aiding in some mysterious way the change and trans-, formation in the world this unusual man entered seventy-five long years ago...

...El Greco, too, devoted himself to a quest for the Absolute, for that total truth which, in Eluard's words "joins imagination to nature...

...Ildefonso Writing at the Virgin's Dictation encountered no difficulties in Catholic Spain, but William Blake's angels were rejected by the matter-of-fact Nineteenth Century...

...El Greco wrote theoretical treatises, but it is unlikely that he arrived at his painterly solutions by speculation alone, just as it is improper to assume that Picasso's collages or his celebrated double faced women are the results of pure calculation...

...Like the Seated Bather (1929) or The Muse (1935), these are neither lyrical nor playful, neither delicate nor decorative (all of which his work can be whenever he wishes...

...However, the British critic, Michael Ayr-ton, struck more deeply at Picasso's roots than he possibly knew when he declared: "The crux and center of Picasso's art is . . . hysteria, and in this he so echoes the prevailing evil of the age that he seems to be its prophet...

...Nature and art . . . cannot be the same thing," Picasso summed up his productions...

...Picasso has made no statement on Cubism in more than twenty years, but what he said in the Twenties and Thirties still holds...

...In each case the artist had to coin a pictorial currency of his own: Raphael's formal values were not adequate to cope with the spiritual upheaval of the Counter Reformation, and, similarly, the pictorial language of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts had neither syntax nor terminology to express the "hysteria" of a Europe heading towards another world-engulfing war...

...If we use the term "hysteria" in its clinical sense—as a consequence of a conflict in the unconscious division of the psyche—the critic is right...

...Through art we express our conception of what nature is not," Picasso once declared...

...But in rationalistic ages children are wise to keep their visions to themselves (did not the elder Blake whip his son for saying he had seen a tree filled with angels...

...He cleared a road for his fellow-artists, a road to freedom—but it is the freedom to sleep on a path that leads nowhere...

...No other artist has changed his "style" so frequently, and so unabashedly, and no artist has experimented with so many media, discarding one after another as a child throws away toys when he has tired of them...

...Cubism was not a result of what he derisively termed "mental lubrications," but a mode of expression, of releasing feelings and translating visions...

...Both chose to live in cities suiting their temperaments—El Greco in the easy-going and picaresque Toledo, and Picasso in the gay and exciting Paris...

...That Picasso chose Communism at the age of 63 was, perhaps, not solely his fault (if one has a. right to form a moral judgment...

...The fact clearly emerges from his own statements that he took this step for purely emotional reasons rather than because he accepted Marxist theory—that he would have endorsed Christianity, or Hinduism, or Humanism, or bourgeois democracy, indeed anything in which he saw a cure for the world's ills...

...Yet these critics, while not disputing the artist's sincerity, have attacked his art as formalist and frigid, devoid of feeling and humanity...

...An anarchist rather than a Communist, he has breached the walls of that old, outwardly respectable, but inwardly rotting house that is our civilization...

...Here he haunts the spectator with baffling apparitions that deal a double blow: one to such notions of "beauty" as have survived from the Beaux-Arts days, another to the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds...

...The work of Matisse may be more valuable on an aesthetic level, but Picasso voices the anxieties of mankind, reflects the split in modern man's personality...

...In a movie theater the angry spectators can shout or clap their hands, and the operator quickly notices and repairs the error...

...He is the most original creative genius of our time...

...For there is in his work too much anxiety betraying insecurity...

...He may withdraw into a rich, yet inconsequential, hedonism, as did Matisse, who was satisfied to create for the tired businessman an "art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling subject matter...

...He may, finally, like Picasso, embrace one of a variety of ersatz religions...

...Picasso is the El Greco of our time —but an El Greco shorn of the faith that moves mountains...

...Alfred Werner, art critic and author, has written widely of art and artists for many American and European publications...

...But he did not paint Communist pictures (if there be such), and, much to the dismay of his party comrades, never concealed his contempt for the insipidly optimistic and naturalistic creations of what is called Socialist Realism...