Art: Art's Acrobat

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In Paris last week, at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in the fashionable Rue La Boétie, 33 small oils-on-canvas were making the art news of the season. With one exception they were still-lifes of candles and flowers, fruits and mandolins, pitchers and bird cages, ox skulls and oil lamps, knives, forks figurines and doves. Had these objects been painted with the luscious realism of a soup advertisement, the pictures would not have been at Rosenberg's, nor would they have interested any of the people there. Yet if there was one thing these doodles, lozenges, swabs and swishes of bright paint represented to that crowd of connoisseurs and jealous artists, it was sheer technical virtuosity— probably the greatest painting virtuosity in the world.

So, for 30 years, have the works of Pablo Picasso continued to delight the knowledgeable and confound the common man. Flying like a shuttlecock between the esthetic debaters of two continents, the very name of Picasso has been a symbol of irresponsibility to the old, of audacity to the young. To millions of solid citizens it has been one of the two things they know about modern art— the other being that they don't like it. But the show a Rosenberg's had a new significance, because it came at the full tide of a new period both in Picasso's work and in appreciation of it.

For two years, 1935 and 1936, Picasso neither drew nor painted. There seems to be little doubt that, when he began to paint again it was in response to a political event —the war in Spain. In any case, the two works which have put him in the news since 1936 have been public, polemical jobs: his big, lacerating mural, Guernica, for the Spanish government pavilion at the Paris exposition of 193 7, and a series of hairy-nightmare etchings entitled Dreams and Lies of Franco. At the same time, Picasso's previous work has begun to emerge from the smoke of controversy into the lucidity of history. Not a mere canonization but a symptom of universal stock taking was the announcement last week by the Art Institute of Chicago and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art of a huge, joint retrospective show of Picasso for next autumn. And various other sources, including that vivacious storyteller, Gertrude Stein* have lately increased public understanding of a man whose life and painting explain each other.

Spain Picasso was born in Málaga, Andalusia, Spain, 57 years ago last October 25, of a Basque drawing teacher named Blasco Ruiz and an Italian mother Maria Picasso. By the Spanish order of patronymics his name was Pablo Picasso y Ruiz, and he so signed his earliest pictures.

In physical build Pablo resembled the small, robust, dark-skinned mother whose name he later took.

Of Málaga, Picasso's characteristic recollection is a singing motorman whose streetcar's speed depended, not on the company's timetable, but on the rhythm of the song he steered by—gay or melancholy, galloping or slow. The mind of little Pablo appears in a revealing flash in a story of his being given a pair of roller skates: instead of skating on them he took them apart and, with huge amusement, attached each pair of wheels to the flippers of an enormous tortoise, whose slow progress around the patio had annoyed him.