Vol. 24 No. 4 1957 - page 595

ART CHRONICLE
595
the Ingresque drawing of Ambroise Vollard of that year can look as
invented, as arbitrary in its language of particularized external descrip–
tion as the radically simplified synthetic cubist
Harlequin
which follows
it; and in the same way, the ravishing outline drawings of the late
1910's look just as abstract, for all their seeming fidelity to nature, as
the earlier cubist drawings. And lest this point be unclear- that pictorial
means are as real as pictorial ends-Picasso, in 1928, reaffirms it in
the didactic
Painter and Model.
For here, the familiar mimetic relation
of art to nature is reversed; the reality of the seated painter and his
female model is described by the most unreal cubist inventions, whereas
the unreality of the image the artist creates on the canvas is presented
as a relatively naturalistic profile. In this light, it is also worth noting
that the seeming illusionism of the monumental sculptured forms of the
early 1920's is never thoroughly realized in consistently three-dimensional
terms; at some point they invariably flatten out against the picture
plane in order to insist upon the two-dimensional fact of the canvas.
And however plastic the
Seated Bather
of 1930 may appear, her preda–
tory, insect-like anatomy is nevertheless impossible to reproduce in
sculpture, for ultimately it pays fully as much homage to the demands
of pictorial flatness as do the paintings of synthetic cubism.
Picasso's assertion of the fundamentally artificial nature of a work
of art as opposed to the external reality it describes is evident through–
out his entire post-cubist
oeuvre.
Each different pictorial language he
speaks takes on the quality of an objective phenomenon to be scru–
tinized as carefully as the phenomena of nature, and for this reason
he can rediscover, like his almost exact contemporaries, Joyce and
Stravinsky, a multitude of past styles. Just as Stravinsky can rejuvenate
the sound of Machaut, Pergolesi, or Tchaikovsky, Picasso can recreate the
look of Ingres, Delacroix, Gruenewald, or Catalan Romanesque paint–
ing. Thus at the very time, 1921-23, that he newly explores the ample,
generalized forms of the antique-Italian tradition in the archaic serenity
of the
Pipes of Pan
or the Michelangelesque gigantism of the 1921
Mother and Child,
he can also paint the same figure type in miniatures
whose exquisite smallness and nuanced rendering of atmospheric values
recall the counter-tradition of the Flemish primitives.
In a sense, then, Picasso has no style, for the basic vitality of his
art depends upon his continual rejection of preconceived formulae and
his insistence upon a direct response to an unprecedented variety of
objective stimuli.
If
this is true, it may in part explain the decline in
the quality of his art from about 1939 to the present. In these works,
few of which approach the vigor and immediacy of even his most casual
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