BEATNIK OF PARIS

...Pascin was bored by his models before he was forty...

...To see the dedicated artist for whom the act of painting is a solitary prayer, one must not turn to Pascin...

...Van Gogh went hungry for days to be able to buy pigments, and Gauguin continued to paint even after his foody was covered with frightful sores...

...He was temperamentally unfitted to spend more than a couple of hours on a picture and was through with a portrait in an afternoon's session...

...This was an odd statement to come from a man who, though only in his early forties, had long become a legendary figure as a brilliant libertine who held elegant orgies...

...lives to achieve the greatest purity of their art...

...But he never developed his potential gifts as did his contemporary, Picasso, who, week after week, set himself a higher task, who negated what he had accomplished yesterday in order to force himself to seek and find newer and more far-reaching avenues of aesthetic conquest...

...His genius completely burnt out, Fitzgerald died in Hollywood as a literary hack...

...Suicide is probably rarer among creative artists than among any other group...

...One would underestimate Pascin's intelligence were one to ignore completely one important factor: the apparent deterioration, or stagnation, of his art...

...What kind of man is he who, squeezing pigments from a dozen tubes, and arranging them on a white area, is capable of expressing, through color and line, the yearnings of an entire generation...

...the pictures and stories were masterpieces despite the lack of involvement on the part of their creators...

...Modigliani preferred penury to selling a work to a collector whom he disliked...

...The gods had endowed him with many gifts: he was attractive and accumulated many devoted friends...

...The fear of getting old...

...Only a first-rate novelist might be able to probe into the strange life of this egomaniac who left thousands weeping for him, who played on a lute with only one string, and yet produced a melody that has haunted two generations—and, in all likelihood, will linger on for decades to come...

...Never before has this question been asked so often, and never before has there been such a flood of books about those artists Who wrecked their ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...Unlike those half-artists who merely dress, walk, talk, and "sin" like artists, Pascin worked feverishly, like a monomaniac—even when the initial enthusiasm had gone...

...He did these [the pictures] even when surrounded by his friends...

...Pascin's undoing was his enormous talent, and a success that came too early...

...He had hanged himself in his studio, slashing his wrists with a razor to make sure that nothing would go wrong...

...Egotism, ambition, the sense of a mission, and the pleasure derived from sensations and things ordinarily unknown to others give the artist gratifications that make a life worth living even though it may seem unbearable to an objective observer...

...Yet the most talented artist who appeared, in the 1905-1930 period, in the cafes of the Boulevard Mont-parnasse, the Bohemian hideouts of Munich and Berlin, and the speakeasies of Greenwich Village, was also one of the unhappiest of men...

...I was reminded of Pascin when I read a psychiatrist's recent description of die "Beat Generation": "The externalized acting-out of internal conflicts and needs rather than a conscious and deliberate response or rebellion toward alleged states of affairs in contemporary society...

...He was not at all concerned about theories of art...

...He mass-produced with the same effortlessness with which Scott Fitzgerald wrote one short story after another...

...The Jazz Age, with its stress on youth, sexual freedom, and social irresponsibility, did not find a more fervent adherent than this self-taught, self-made artist who had run away from a bourgeois home while little more than a child, who knew allegiance to no country (a native of Bulgaria, he had somehow become an American citizen as he somehow had become legally wedded to Hermine David, but he took neither formality seriously), and who found all he needed in any atmosphere of enough hard liquor to drink and enough "Lolitas" to pose for him...

...Pascin was thirty-five at the start of the "Roaring Twenties," when he really came into his own...

...He drew whenever a piece of paper was available, or the top of a cafe table and the burnt-out ends of matches...

...The legends still current about the painter and the writer make each appear to have been rather silly at times, and occasionally even despicable...

...What caused him to end his life...

...Reading about Pascin's sopho-moric pranks, his lavish drinking parties, and his motto, "Take what you want from life, if you can get it," you might think that you were in the San Francisco of 1960 rather than in the Paris of 1929, with only one difference: that the beatniks have not yet produced anyone who has a tiny fraction of the talent of a Pascin, or a Fitzgerald...

...Emotionally bankrupt, the geniuses of the Twenties were superseded by men with stronger nerves and a more mature view of the world into which they had been born—as Hemingway would replace Fitzgerald and Picasso the possibly no less gifted Pascin...

...A quarrel with Lucy Krohg...

...There is something macabre in Pascin's enormous unconcern about the state of world affairs...

...On his last trip to New York, after leaving a night club, he confessed to a friend, "I am the unhappiest man in the world," but offered no further explanation...

...The leadership went to the men with the ability to control themselves and others...

...And what sort of magician is he who can see a living form in an uncouth block of stone, and, with a chisel, "liberate" it from the imprisoning rock...

...But to see more than twenty or thirty of his works in an exhibition gives one a great shock...

...He rarely produced anything which required careful planning...

...Perhaps Jackson Pollock's repetition of his "drips" and the lack of new pictorical ideas drove him into heavy drinking and to the murderous motoring that led to his death...

...Pascin, though born decades earlier, belongs in their company...

...He was blessed with a good physique that should have guaranteed him a Biblical age and perhaps a few additional years—but he wrecked his body carelessly through drink and dissipation...

...All these notions must have played a role on the fatal day, June 2, 1930...

...Only a poet can bring him to life again— the dapper little man, dressed in black, a white scarf around his neck, his derby slightly tilted over his black hair, always smoking, always drawing, always telling funny stories —yet often feeling more desperate than even the poorest of the little girls who slipped into his studio to find shelter and food...

...Reviewing the Pascin show at the Perls Galleries, New York, last year, Robert M. Coates, writing for The New Yorker, astutely noted "a certain callousness" in the artist's approach to his sitters—"as if he were too little concerned about the being inside the envelope...

...When in the end he realized that this single theme [the tragic dilemma of feminine sensuality] would lead him to repetition, he preferred a violent death to an artistic decline...

...Like them, he was a childman, who sought and found immedate gratification of his senses...

...Pascin, by contrast, was bored, he was "beat...

...I have never seen, and never expect to see, a bad Pascin...

...These teen-agers had no soul, no life, no individuality, so far as he was concerned, only fascinating flesh...

...In the language of Mont-parnasse and Montmartre, this meant that he was so successful and so much in demand that dealers would purchase his canvases before they were painted, ordering by size...

...There is something inhuman about the perfection: the facial expression that is nearly always the same complacent negativism, the line and color that never go astray, the sexuality that is invariably faded and sated...

...Pascin had the ability to love—yet was incapable of remaining with his legal wife, herself a gifted painter, for more than a few years, and he injured the next woman willing to share his unorthodox existence...

...In a sense, the "beatniks" of the 1920's were a menace to society insofar as they "preached"—through their own manner of living—an attitude towards society that left little hope for man's survival...

...A contemporary described the atmosphere in Pascin's celebrated atelier on Boulevard Clichy: "He lived in an absolutely negative atmosphere...

...It was his doom that his inherent gifts never let him down, that the 500th doll (draped or undraped) that he painted looked not a bit less enticing than did the fiftieth...

...Even at seventy, Renoir painted his models with all the affection a man can feel for a lovely young woman...

...So eager were magazine editors to shower him with assignments and collectors to acquire his works that he was able not only to support himself in a princely manner but to take crowds of friends and hangerson to expensive restaurants and night clubs and to provide for the needs of many a destitute model or neighborhood child...

...His articles on art have appeared in a score of publications including Commentary, The American Scholar, and the Chicago Jewish Forum of which he is an associate editor...

...I have seen mediocre Renoirs, inferior Picassos...

...Before losing consciousness, he had dipped his finger into his blood and scribbled on the wall, "Pardon Mucy...

...But one does not feel the touch of the wise, mature man...

...As far as we know, he never did...

...The message was addressed to his estranged mistress...

...One characteristic links Jules Pascin in France, Scott Fitzgerald in America, and the "beat generation" of San Francisco: their refusal to grow up...

...The aggravated condition of his liver...

...Beatnik of Paris by ALFRED WERNER ?ith the mounting popular participation in art—our art museums and galleries are nearly always crowded, auctions are well attended, and almost everyone from four to eighty^four is painting—curiosity about the skilled maker of art has reached a new peak...

...the current trends of his day, such as Fauvism and Cubism, made their impact on his work only indirectly...

...Perhaps Jack Kerouac must mail his "prose" right after he has written it, because he might tear it up were he to read it later with a critical mind...

...Towards the end of his life, some American friends were disturbed by Pascin's undisguised despondency and urged him to consult a psychiatrist...

...He painted prolifically because he needed money—for drink, for visits to the notorious rue Blondel, for the banquets he gave to anyone willing to admire him, and for the trips that took him to America, North Africa, Greece, and Spain...

...He knew that he could, in a few superb swift lines, sketch a person or place in such a live, convincing way that all who watched him would break into spontaneous applause...

...Psychoanalytic treatment might have cured the artist's self-destructive-ness and might have taught him that one could live happily without Pernod...

...Pascin did not wait for death to come naturally and remove him from a scene long after he had ceased to be of any consequence...

...When violently drunk, as they often were, they could be aggressive and pugnacious, though the more gentle Pascin would never indulge in the sheer rowdyism of his American counterpart...

...The most significant action of his lifetime was escaping, right after the outbreak of World War I, from Europe to the United States, in order not to be involved in the conflict...

...Still, what distinguishes him from many beatniks of today was one true quality of the artist that never left him: work never stopped...

...He had a nimble mind...

...At the height of his fame he said to a friend, "I am disgusted with myself," adding, "I sell my pictures au numero...

...I do not think that the mourners who gathered inside and in front of the house on the Boulevard Clichy, where the tragedy had taken place, would have commented on this summing-up by an American critic with anything but an angry, "Merdel" All that mattered to the mourners, and even the children of the artists' quarter, was that an unusually kind and wonderful man, whose hospitality had never known any bounds, had gone...

...at forty, and even at forty-five (his last year), Pascin remained the clever boy whose emotions had not grown with his skill...

...Pascin ran away from family, religion, nationality, wife, mistress, even the responsibility to art, stopping suddenly at a time when, for most creative men, their second, better phase of creativity begins...

...One is reminded of certain "action painters" of our time who drip or throw their pigments on the canvas with the utmost nonchalance and speed (except, of course, that Pascin was committed to the classical construction of a picture)—or of certain "beat" novelists who proudly proclaim that they never stop in their writing to correct an error or rewrite a line...

...Cezanne was fifty-six when he had his first one-man show, and to his end, a decade later, remained unsure as to whether he had "realized" his vision...

...To portray him, a writer would have to reconstruct a period in which hedonism co-existed with self-destruction, and even the wailings of the saxophone were unable to silence the beatings of many an anxious heart...

...his talent for drawing was so fabulously deft that when he was barely twenty the fame of his magic line had spread to all the art centers of Europe...

...Two decades later, all the charm and wit were still there, and the sketches appear to be accomplished with an almost alarming swiftness and dexterity...

...Above all, he would have to resuscitate the artist, Jules Pascin, who was beaten by life, but whose art beat death itself into submission...

...His studio in Montmartre was usually crowded with hangers-on of the 'great Pascin.' There would be couples making love, others recovering from hangovers, some sleeping, some drinking, most of them making a great noise, and in the middle Pascin painting or drawing with absolute unconcern...

...Pascin was as precocious as the great Spaniard: extant pencil sketches done in 1903 and signed "pincas" reveal a gift of observation, a sharp intellect, and a sureness of hand that have no parallels in art history, unless one goes back to the juvenilia of a Raphael or a Duerer...

...Little mattered to him except the numerous appetites of his body...

...There is another kind of artist, and his type has never been represented more convincingly by anyone than by the Bulgarian-French-American painter, Jules Pascin, whose suicide three decades ago is still a great puzzle...