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not the diversity of his styles, but rather the diversity of things he
chooses to reveal to us.
Above all, the world Picasso describes is anthropocentric. In keep–
ing with the Spanish pictorial tradition, landscape is a very minor facet
of his art and his still lifes, at their greatest, will often evoke qualities
of human passion and drama that are surprising to those used to the
French interpretation of apples and tabletops as inanimate objects
manipulated for aesthetic ends alone. Somehow the human being is
never far from the center of Picasso's stage, though it appears in mul–
tiple guises. Consider, for example, two pictures about sleep. In the
1919 gouache,
Sleeping Peasants,
Picasso seeks and finds a pictorial
equivalent for the condition of heavy physical slumber. He shows us a
somnolent peasant couple whose sodden weight bears down upon a hay–
stack in what is almost a parody of gross torpor. Thirteen years later,
in the 1932
Nude on a Black Couch,
Picasso again defines an aspect of
sleep. But in this picture the heavy, earthbound forms of the peasants
are completely flattened into undulant, linear rhythms, and the colors
move from the harsh, sunlit glare of pink flesh and golden hay to a
nocturnal world of blacks, lavenders, blues. Yet this is not evidence, as
some would suspect, of a pictorial chameleon who is simply repainting
an earlier picture in a new style. In the later work Picasso has chosen
instead to describe the internal and not the external experience of sleep,
and to express this, a new vocabulary is mandatory. It is not a country
siesta he now shows us, but a magical night realm in which subconscious
fantasy releases the body from its imprisoning weight and strange fetal,
germinal images emerge in colors that would vanish under the clear
light of noon. And if in the same year, 1932, Picasso seizes upon the
spectacle of a woman bather cavorting with a beach ball, he must again
find an appropriate language to convey the facts of this amusing kin–
esthetic experience. A grotesque effusion of swelling breasts, buttocks
and belly, she clumsily attempts to grasp the ball with globular hands
whose lack of fingers speaks eloquently for the elusiveness of the ball.
And as a final, masterly touch, Picasso describes the ball as absolutely
flat, in witty opposition to the spherical creature who pursues it. How
better could Picasso have extracted the essential geometric likenesses
and gravitational differences between the woman and the ball?
Or consider another document of this respect for fact. The
Man
with a Lollipop
of 1938 does not use barbed and jagged shapes simply
as ends in themselves; this vocabulary unveils to us the' nature of the
objects Picasso has chosen to paint-a spear-shaped lollipop, five
gnarled and dirty fingers, a straw hat's torn weave, a bristling beard
