Art: Art's Acrobat

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Picasso's constant woman companion since his divorce in 1937 has been Dora Maar (née Markovitch), a 29-year-old photographer of French-Yugoslav parentage who lived in the Argentine until she went to Paris eight years ago. A black-banged beauty, she appears in several of the artist's recent paintings, notably the Woman with Long Hair. Last week Dora Maar had her second exhibition of photographs at the Galerie de Beaune, also had her nose punched outside the Cafe de Flore by the ex-Mme Picasso.

The Work. Woman with Long Hair illustrates Picasso's perennial obsession with catching the essence of several facial expressions and positions at once, creating a visual "now you see it now you don't." It is of such peculiar problems, enormously complicated and multiplied in certain pictures, that his art of the past few years is made. He has borrowed like a magpie from every graphic manifestation that interested him, from latrine drawings to the child art of Paul Klee. In the still-lifes displayed at Rosenberg's last week, dated from 1936 to January 15, 1939, critics found a synthesis of cubist, infantile, surrealist elements.

In his one brusque little essay on himself, published in a Soviet magazine in 1926, he said: "For me, a picture is never either an end or an achievement, but rather a happy chance and an experience." Max Jacob once said: "He saves himself by being an acrobat."

Discounting all the evidence of irresponsibility in his work, sober critics are inclined to respect tough, small Pablo Picasso's insistent assertion of his own independence, to find in it an example of commonplace psychological and artistic health. But with equal sobriety they feel that the time is past for amazement, shock or swoon over Pablo Picasso; that young painters had better know their own minds, their craft and their time as well as Picassian esthetics. Says Picasso, bored: "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of the birds? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? Whereas with painting, people must understand. If only they would realize that an artist ... is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things. . . ."