13 JANUARY 1967, Page 17

The Age of Picasso-1

ART

By BRYAN ROBERTSON

nARIS has at last risen to the occasion, and r on the grandest scale conceivable. The three exhibitions staged as a French official act of homage to the greatest artist of the twentieth century are at least being held during Picasso's lifetime: their scale is awe-inspiring and without precedent in our time. At the Grand Palais are nearly 300 paintings from 1895-1965; across the street at the Petit Palais over 200 drawings from 1894-1966, 186 sculptures from 1901-63 and 108 ceramics from 1948-65 clamour for attention; if you have any doubts, basic curiosity, or the slightest flicker of energy left after these two mammoth confrontations, you can at least take your shoes off on the cab ride to the Bibliotheque Nationale, where the prints and engravings and work for books are assembled: 172 items, in- cluding an instructive handful of intimate photo- graphs and souvenirs.

On no account take any notice of the views of artist friends on either the merits or otherwise of the work, or on how to 'handle' the shows: artists do not visit exhibitions like you or I, they raid them, swooping like amiable but unswerv- ing predators on to the one phase or category of work that interests them, or from which they need stimulus, or that they need to 'kill' because its potency disrupts their current speculations. Every major artist represents a threat to all other artists and Picasso is a Titan, the living embodi- ment of the art history of this century as well as the pace-setter for certain now generally shared views of the art of the past. This situation was for a long time intolerable to all artists; but its persistence has led to a ludicrously dismissive present tendency in which Picasso is written off merely because he has lived and worked for so long that everything he has achieved has been digested and is therefore irrelevant.

Or is it? I am putting the artist's case, of course, and especially the feelings of some Younger artists. One of these recently made the astonishing assertion on TV that Picasso's con- tribution to the most significant art of the twentieth century is far less than that of Mon- drian, Malevitch or Kandinsky: an absurd view understandable only if one remembers the 'raid- ing' principle of artists. Picasso's orchard has been open for scrumping for a very long time; meanwhile, allegiances shift and it is more useful to pull a few nourishing things out of some- body else's vegetable plot. The public, however, is left to its own conclusions. It is strange to have lived long enough to have witnessed, as I have, first, the pre-war ignorance of Picasso's activities changing overnight into a state of shocked outrage in 1945; passing into a sceptical tolerance of the idea of Picasso as a kind of serious farceur when he made a few years later the first ceramics, and painted some fauns and satyrs disporting themselves with nymphs in Provencal settings; and finally, after the pro- liferation of cheaply available reproductions of some of the more tender or decorative aspects of Picasso's work, the relieved sense that he was neither as alarming nor as lightweight as once imagined, but had actually made some solid and pleasurable works of art. This is the general public's point of view, I feel; and, of course, it is as false as the attitude of the artists: in both cases Picasso's true stature is diminished and he is comfortably, soothingly embalmed.

The plain fact is that Picasso has made a larger number of sheer towering masterpieces than anyone else in our time, and many of these masterpieces are disturbing either to our formal sense or our understanding of life. And as these masterpieces relate far more directly to the general level of human experience in the twentieth century than the devices of most other artists, Picasso should by now be completely understood and accepted as the most popular artist of the age working from and for the people's experience and enlightenment. He is, after all, of the same generation as our great- grandparents, for most of the world, and cer- tainly contemporary with the grandparents of the rest of us. The language of our grandparents should be easy for everyone to understand. Why, then, does his art still remain outside the know- ledge of most people and, in essence, beyond their understanding?

The answer applies also to the dilemma of all the other remarkable artists of our time and it is double-edged. First, there is the democratic fallacy that because we, or large numbers of us, live in a democratic age in which art is made freely available to everyone, then everyone must enjoy or at least 'understand' art. This is clearly nonsense. Visual education is still in its infancy in this country; it is still run on a disgracefully thin shoe-string; and it will be at least another twenty-five years before the level of visual -literacy, let along basic recognition or conscious-

ness, has clearly risen. The Tate Picasso retro- spective was a great event in London, thousands of people thronged the galleries, and only a

minute percentage, I am certain, knew what they were looking at. The arrival of the popular art exhibition as an extension of indoor entertain- ment should not mislead anyone seriously con- cerned into thinking that taste or 'awareness' has radically developed. It hasn't; there has only been progress on the diluted popular fronts: colour supplements and Carnaby Street. The serious images of living artists are still incom- prehensible to all except a very small minority: grim, because the visual symbols, signs and images of our time are an essential key to any real understanding of the period.

The other side of the answer is also, in a different way, historical. Until roughly the turn of the century there were two kinds of art: one was for the people in the shape of posters, decoration, illustrated books, and penny-plain or tuppence-coloured prints. Think of Dicky Doyle, Phiz, Tenniel, John Martin's mezzotints for the Bible (which used to hang in every front parlour), Lautrec's posters (which didn't), or, further back, the prints of Rowlandson, Gillray or Hogarth. There are no equivalents for this now. As a separate sequence, though inter- dependent on occasion, was the evolution of 'serious' art for the cognoscenti from Raphael through to—Picasso. But today we refuse to admit that there must or should be, let alone is, an informed elite: everyone is supposed to be able to understand everything. One day, this may be possible; in the meantime, the encounter between ordinary people, everywhere, and the serious art of their own time is still a compara- tively recent phenomenon: there is no popular art to take its place (so-called 'pop' art is for tired and whimsical intellectuals with a relish for satire and formal double-takes) and the result of this new confrontation is bound to be blank incomprehension or active dislike.

The crowds in Paris milling round the three immense Picasso exhibitions suggest an at- mosphere of bemused respect, combined with a subsidiary sense of something déjà vu. But here he is, in enforced isolation by artists for one reason, by the public for another; and the most engrossing aspect of the whole manifestation is the sculpture—happily to be seen in London at the Tate in June under Arts Council auspices. Picasso's sculpture in the past has been known mostly through reproduction: rarely exhibited, very few know the physical presence of more than a handful of works. What emerges is what a lot of people, including many sculptors, have suspected for a long time: that Picasso is the greatest sculptor of the century, with a rich and dynamic plastic sense and the most devastating flow of original ideas.

Bryan Robertson's second article on the Age of Picasso will appear next week.