Battleground

What's wrong with the human face? Nothing, says Pablo Picasso, not a thing. Two eyes, a nose and a mouth are nice in themselves; furthermore it is great fun to add and subtract them, multiply and divide, maul, chop, smear, twist and shred them.

Last week seven garbled girls by Picasso were hanging on the wall of a Manhattan gallery by way of example. In the exhibition catalogue, William Carlos Williams, a poet-pediatrician, gave Bad Boy Picasso a clean bill of health.

"What is a face?" Williams wrote. "What has it always been, even to the remotest savagery? A battleground. Slash it with sharp instruments, rub ashes into the wound to make a keloid; daub it with clays, paint it with berry juices. This thing that terrifies us, this face upon which we lay so much stress is something they have always wanted to deform, by hair, by shaving, by every possible means. Why? To remove it from the possibility of death by making of it a work of art ...

"In these seven pictures we see a progress in the attack Picasso has been making upon that face. We may humanly disagree with his tactics but with his strategy we cannot disagree. His success has been phenomenal."

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