That Man Is Here Again

The grandfatherly elevator man had never made so many trips so fast, nor in such a creaking weight of company. Lines formed out to the sidewalk waiting to get in. The little fifth-floor gallery, which usually regarded 100 people a day as a crowd, was filled with so many hundreds every day that the building superintendent worried about undue strain on the floor. Silver-haired Art Dealer Sam Kootz was delighted; he had scooped Manhattan's arty 57th Street with the first one-man show of new Picassos since before the war.

From a flying trip to Paris, Kootz had brought back nine oils. Priced at $3,500 to $20,000, seven were sold in the show's first week. The New York Times's good, grey art critic, Edward Alden Jewell, dazedly noted the waving checkbooks and concluded that Picasso was "the supreme hero of the hour. I don't know about the bobby-soxers, but were Picasso suddenly, himself, to appear in New York, he would be pursued with all the ardor to which Frank Sinatra has long been accustomed."

Critic Jewell was far beyond the swooning stage. "A few of us," he warned, "incline to rate the new Picassos as little better than disastrous. . . . Picasso, in his recent oil work, may be said to paint vigorously--which isn't being really very explicit, I know. In my opinion his sense of color has grown steadily worse. . . . There remains the matter of distortion, and in that department he moves with the utmost freedom."

Returning to the attack five days later, Jewell had his own name for Picasso's latest period. "This, as of course everyone knows," said he, "is the phase of the monstrous distortions. . . . Now, distortion itself I can quite take in my stride. But I must repeat with firmness, even though I alone be out of step, that Picasso's painting of about the last 15 years has me stymied. . . . [It] appears to be, in the main, just mediocre or bad painting."

Actually not all of the nine paintings on show were distorted, but most of them were poor. They ranged from a seasick-looking sailor with form and features rearranged to suit Picasso, to a 1944 Plante de Tomates which made perfectly good sense--except that the plant appeared to be growing from a puddle of light rays instead of a pot.

Cro-Magnon Innocence. Five blocks away, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art put on a reassuring show of Picasso lithographs, which proved that 65-year-old Picasso can still draw.

Some of the lithographs--printed in series from the same stone--showed Picasso's method of starting realistically, then distilling and distorting his subjects into something horrendous (or sometimes absurdly simple). The first print of Picasso's Bull, at the Museum, looked solid and sensible enough to illustrate a children's picture book. The sixth stage of the same lithograph was an airy arrangement of less than a dozen thin lines which looked as innocent as a Cro-Magnon cave painting --but less knowing. Another series of nine lithographs, entitled Two Figures, began as a rather sweet and sentimental pair of nudes. In the end they emerged as a nightmare vision of two twisted and highly ambiguous beasts (see cuts for steps 1, 6 and 9). Frank Sinatra himself never changed a girl more.

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