The Great Debate

Pablo Picasso once warned a baffled interviewer not to "ask questions of the man at the wheel." People think he is sometimes off his course, but the aging (65) helmsman of modern art presumably knows where he is going. For 40 years he has let others debate his painting for him. The debate was hot as ever last week.

Anti-Picassos had found new ammunition in an article by British Painter and Critic Michael Ayrton. As a painter, Ayrton admits Picasso's influence--even on himself. As a critic he consistently opposes it. He wrote (in New Writing and Daylight, New Directions; $6):

"In the hierarchy of the great masters, the greatest have a quality beyond the temporal, which Picasso lacks, and shock tactics are not a final way to alter human vision. The crux and center of Picasso's art is, in my view, hysteria, and in this he so echoes the prevailing evil of his age that he seems to be its prophet. . . .

"The whole body of Picasso's work amounts, in my opinion, to a vast series of brilliant paraphrases on the history of art. . . . In terms of the art of painting, in terms of the living, breathing symbol of man's tribute to the work of God, it is no more than a vast erection of bones in the graveyard of experience."

For an answering salvo, pro-Picassos quoted Jaime Sabartes, Picasso's secretary and friend. Sabartes concedes that Picasso's work is sometimes, by ordinary standards, ugly. But he has an explanation. Wrote Sabartes, in a book published in Paris (Picasso, Braun & Cie; $6):

"Picasso took on as aim the fantastic wager of destroying the phantom of 'official' beauty and substituting his own personal concept of beauty. He pursues and discovers beauty even in objects regarded as ugly--just as light sometimes lends to sordid things effects of gorgeous color."

Whether Pablo Picasso's art is indeed enlightening or hysterical is a question for his contemporaries to argue, for posterity to judge.

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