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PARTISAN REVIEW
achievements of the first forty years, Picasso may have lost that essen–
tial contact with a particular reality outside himself. Instead, he has
turned for stimulus to his own earlier inventions, and the result is self–
destructive. Other contemporary artists who work within the refined
limits of their own stylistic artifice can do this with profit-consider
Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian-but Picasso cannot. The limp, mannered
products of the last decade are almost mistakable for works of a
Picasso imitator. Perhaps Picasso is now of too early a generation to
define for us the new experiences of the period ushered in by the
Second World War. It would
be
more than pointless and ungenerous,
though, to complain about the very great man who has given definitive
visual expression to the major realities of the first half of our century–
the revolutionary aesthetic and spatial concepts of cubism; the subcon–
scious imagery of the
Girl before a Mirror;
the ominous moral and
political facts of
Guernica.
Robert Rosenblum
