To-day's Picassos
doxical that this century's most disruptive force, scattering traditions to the winds, should be an artist as provincial almost as the village Imicer.
Picasso's kaleidoscopic world revolves, of course, within that mind of amazing visual memory and powers of invention. Since Guernica he has intensified, in sustained bursts, his serial conception. of art. The sequence of variations on the Las Menicias of Velasquez was the last we saw in the Tate retrospective of 1960. Now two fantastic metamorphoses from the series sparked off by Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, with two earlier paraphrases of Dela- croix's Femmes d'Alger, show his almost inhuman juggling with recognisable forms at the Gimpel Gallery. By far the most of these compositions spring freely or monumentally out of his earlier cubism, with some bright, flat decorations from the Vallauris period, for current trends touch the lonely old giant not at all.
His painting depends for its impact almost en- tirely on the graphic invention. His colour is so commonly harsh, joyless, or brightly inexpees- sive, that it could seem to have taken a subsidiary place in his conception ever since colour was virtually renounced in his analytical cubism of 1909. In fact, it is that old neutral grey-green and biscuit that Picasso has scrubbed into the construction of his squatting odalisque trans-
formed from Delacroix—a linear construction (1955) of greater hypnotic power than anything else here in acidulous colours. Terracotta browns suffice him also to project his baleful image of a woman in Egyptian head-dress, her tiny beak and hollowed sculptural torso hinting at a recollection of Henry Moore.
The example or two here of his originalities stemming from the famous Dejeuner can hardly suggest the pace and variety of mood and for- mal invention in this series feverishly resumed in February, 1960. Clearly Picasso enjoys stylisa- tion for its own sake, still seeking to surprise himself while never allowing uncontrolled ex- pressionism to overwhelm his formal considera- tions. Manet's sylvan group of two male com- panions reclining on the grass beside a naked model, with a woman bathing beyond, provides Picasso's springboard just as Giorgione's Concert Champetre stimulated Manet's audacity.
The typical communion of elongated nymph and enigmatic counsellor, with the distant crouch- ing bather, shows, however, the skimpiness of a part outside the exhilarating sum of Picasso's lightning transpositions. But posterity must judge them in dispersal. There lies the danger of this later activity, tending to produce so few definitive statements expected of a master painter.
NEVILE WALLIS
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