Art: What Are Apples For?

I am writing you immediately to inform you that as of this afternoon I am giving up painting, sculpture, engraving, and poetry to devote myself exclusively to singing. Your most devoted and humble servant who shakes your hand . . .

Picasso

The man to whom Picasso sent that note (in 1936) lost no sleep over it. Jaime Sabartés, devoted as a friend, and fairly humble as a secretary to Picasso, knew that Pablo didn't really mean it, though he may have thought he did. Picasso was apt to do things like that in one of his blue periods.

So Sabartés filed the note away, along with scraps of dialogue by the master, and embedded them all in Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (Prentice-Hall; $5), a book out this week. Sabartés evidently thinks that every detail and every chit of paper involving the artist is of equal value; his Portrait is loaded with pointless details about Picasso's living arrangements, his day-to-day existence and his favorite cafés. But the dull stretches are offset by Picasso's remembered obiter dicta. Samples:

On Abstract Art. "Tell me," the painter once asked Sabartés, "what do you think an apple is for?"

"To eat, no?"

"There you are, and yet sometimes we get a notion to copy it. On the other hand, colors seem made to be painted, yet it rarely occurs to us to use them for that purpose, that is, for painting colors."

On Masterpieces. "In the museums . . . there are only pictures that have failed . . . Are you smiling? Think it over . . . Those which today we consider 'masterpieces' are those which departed most from the rules laid down by the masters of the period."

On Perfection. "To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow: the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture . . . The value of a work is in what it is not."

To illustrate his Portrait of Picasso, Sabartés used the four portraits Picasso had painted of him. The first one, dated 1901 and titled The Glass of Beer, had been just as shocking to turn-of-the-century tastes (Sabartés had found its color "shrieking" at first) as the final version—showing Sabartés as a dizzily distorted clown—seems in midcentury.

To explain the last portrait, which Picasso painted in 1939, Sabartés repeats a puzzled dialogue with his own doctor, who had never before seen a Picasso. "What astonishes me," the doctor had sensibly remarked to Sabartés, "is to see the nose going one way and the lips and chin another, as if the face were in profile, and the head both in profile and full face at the same time but in a different direction from the eyes, except that one of them is hanging in the air while the glasses are upside down ..."

"This lends me an air of movement, or rather of life," Sabartés had answered. "Here you have me now before your eyes, and surely you do not mind seeing me from both one side and the other . . ." "But, how about the glasses?" "That's something else . . . Picasso didn't even notice that he was painting them upside down."