ART CHRONICLE
51
wanted; his natural feeling for style would illuminate anything that he
touched and stamp it with the daring and brilliance of his personality.
Cezanne had been unable to find himself until he was secure in the country·
side he knew. Picasso's world, on the other hand, is deliberately de-local·
ized. The national character, although it never loses an essentially Spanish
flavor, is well behind the expression and never protrudes. Picasso could
move as a man of the world, he could even maintain contact with artists
in other fields who were congenial. And the twentieth century breadth of
scholarship became one of the decisive influences upon Picasso's work and
made possible his endless scope and variety. (It is interesting to spetulate
upon the effect which African sculpture .might have exerted on Cezanne,
who is said never to have seen a painting by El Greco, much less the emo–
tional concentration of savage sculpture.) Picasso's work is rarely the
interpretation of a locality and to an even less degree can it be called a
direct expression of his time in the specific sense that Leger or the Con·
structivists express the twentieth century. At first glance his career seems
a stream of disordered comments upon whatever may have struck his fancy
throughout the whole history of art. The retrospective show has admirably
clarified these tendencies and discloses the inevitability of their unexpected
sequence. It demonstrates how the accelerated tempo of today has com·
pressed a whole cultural cycle into a single life-time.
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The American art-critics have never betrayed their limitations more
blatantly than in the handling of this exhibition. The majority confine
themselves to a relisting of Picasso's periods, with occasional quotations
from the catalog. No one seems to have perceived that the numerous styl–
istic changes are not "somersaults" at all but progressions toward an end.
Without such an understanding Stravinsky's parallel development in music
becomes equally confusing.
Picasso demonstrates consistently an unrelaxing effort toward con·
trolling the most intense expression he can deliver. The means is relatively
unimportant and he can adjust himself to any approach. His early paint·
ings showed an expression that was thoroughly obvious, in a manner eas·
ily
accessible at the time; in romantic colors he depicted people whom he
had made expressive through mask and gesture. It was fortunate, perhaps,
that he chose an approach which was plastically uncomplicated, as it is the
enormous output of this period which built up the formidable Picasso
technique. There has probably never been a painter so completely free in
the handling of his medium; for it is only the supremely confident tech–
nician who can manipulate accidentals with assurance. In Picasso's work
contours that slop over edges enhance the quality and make it live, while
scattered drops of paint accentuate the seemingly effortless fervor; fre·
quently one picture is painted over another, and if the under one shows
through a little all the better; he can integrate it completely into the struc–
tural fabric. His tactile sense was very quick to develop; of all the Fauves'
disciples none could emphasize form more delicately through shading, or
