Art: The New Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a changed man once again. A change of scene had done it. He had left Paris last summer to roam the warm Cote d'Azur. At Antibes the 17th Century Castle Grimaldi, which had been turned into a museum, caught his eye. The curator happened to be a friend of his and told 65-year-old Picasso to make himself at home.

In a holiday mood, Picasso swept his new quarters free of archaic coins and archeological treasures, painted the walls bright green to soften the Riviera sunlight, locked himself in with an armload of paints and brushes, and started to work. For eight hours a day, for almost four months, he worked.

Only the seagulls, swooping and screaming in the blue rectangles beyond Picasso's green studio, could glimpse what he was up to. When museum visitors paused to inquire why a first floor door was barred, the guide sympathetically explained: "There's a crazy artist inside; nobody can enter."

But one critic did finally manage to enter. What he found (and reported in last week's Parisian Arts magazine) was almost enough to ring the bells in art-conscious Paris. His discovery: the past-master of distortion and despair in oils had been painting like a happy man once more.

Infernal Cycle Closed. Picasso, said Art Critic Rene Rennes, is "working on some very large paintings . . . and it must be said that the spirit of these works constitutes a new phase in the history of Picasso. Ever since the disgust and indignation expressed in Guernica, his canvases have been more or less in the same idiom—the expression of murder and barbarism, [but] at Antibes Picasso has closed the infernal cycle of Guernica. Luminous Mediterranean skies replace the black sun of Spain at war. Centaurs play pipes and an inspired woman, a sort of Goddess of Joy, dances in the company of little goats. . . . The message he sends from Antibes is one of hope and grandeur."

Picasso himself was back in Paris last week, with nothing to say about his change of mood. He had locked up his Riviera labors—about 50 pieces, including gouaches and drawings—and left the key with his friend the curator, who hoped that Antibes would make the green museum room a "Picasso Hall." That was all right with Antibes' practical-minded Mayor Jean Pastour. "In my mind," said the Mayor, "Picasso's paintings are . . . monstrous things. . . .Yet the world is full of madmen who love Picasso, so if Picasso gives our museum some paintings, we will accept and exhibit. Perhaps some crazy fool would come to see them and the town would make money."