Spanish Demoiselles

By last week Manhattan reviewers had had their seasonal say on Pablo Picasso, as represented in two fairly comprehensive shows. Gallerygoers, who kept on talking, agreed as usual that the forelocked Spaniard had performed most flatteringly in his so-called "Blue" period (sad, cool, Cezanneish portraits and figure paintings), most disturbingly later. Exhibited at the Seligmann Galleries for the first time anywhere was the renowned Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, painted in 1907, Picasso's first really cut-&-run experiment and the second biggest canvas he ever painted (8 ft. by 7 ft. 8 in.).* The Demoiselles had hitherto been jealously cloistered by their Paris owner, the late M. Jacques Doucet.

Response to this rose-colored composition by New York Times's Critic Edward Alden Jewell was that he could live happily without ever seeing it again. More guarded reviewers noted that it stood midway between Picasso's Blues and his Cubist compositions, whose beauty almost everyone now recognizes. The Demoiselles were Picasso's tribute to the formal, vital grotesques of African Negro sculpture. When the picture was painted every line in it was a deliberate insult to sentimentality. It still has few of the comforts of home. At the Valentine Gallery could be seen several of Picasso's latest jobs, which have even fewer. Most notable 1937 item: L'Arlesienne (Woman of Aries), in which Picasso appeared to have out-agonized Vincent van Gogh, painter of a famed picture by that name.

*Biggest: a mural on the horrors of Fascist war, done for the Spanish Government building in Paris last summer.

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