Firsts
Richard Shone
Pablo Ruiz Picasso Patrick O'Brian (Collins £6.95) Pleas Timothy Hilton (Thames and Hudson £4.50) t_she Silent Studio David Douglas uuncan (Collins £5.50) Iwo firsts: Patrick O'Brian has written the first complete life of Picasso in English and Ilinothy Hilton's book is the first full critical Study since the artist's death. They ought to uie the last but, in spite of particular merits, theY are unsatisfactory and leave the way °Pen for further accounts. Picasso's prochgballtY, that ubiquitous genius which was 0th constructive and improvisatory, in the end defeats them both. The biographer glazes valiantly but the glaze cracks; the critic trails his verbal luggage from picture t° Picture in a valiant effort to find a room With every modern aesthetic convenience. Mr O'Brian has some sense of design and iletw and again gives an air of authenticity !° his pages; Mr Hilton is frank, serious and 'a, kes up a definite critical stand. Side by sLicle, the biographer makes the critic seem nelPlessly jargon-bound; the critic makes
the biographer noisy and superficial.
Mr O'Brian plunges into a geography lesson—and there is a great deal more of it throughout the book. He is lively on Picasso's Spanish youth, though there are some infantile stories which recall those 'Great Lives of the Painters' told-forchildren volumes. He evokes Barcelona Modernism° and Picasso's friends at the Quatre Gals: particularly Pallares whose influence on the painter he does not underestimate. After that, more familiar territory —Paris blue and Paris rose, Cubism in its various stages and the hefty figure of Braque; studios and mistresses, the Russian Ballet and marriage to Olga Koklova. Mr O'Brian seems to loathe most of Picasso's women—Fernande, Olga, and the perfidious Francoise Gilot. He cannot resist personal asides and thrusts himself into the narrative, especially towards the end, with 'friend of a friend' comments, more geography lessons and varieties of agricultural chatter. About the work, though, he is spirited, sometimes offering insights which unfortunately have to be disentangled from a number of descriptions of pictures which are necessary because of a virtual lack of photographs—the supreme and obvious blunder of the publisher.
His serious fault here is a nagging emphasis on Picasso's iconoclasm, the shattering of tradition at the expense of the constructive and progressive nature of Picasso's art. It is through failures of distinction such as this-another is the different motives for which Picasso quarried Mediterranean culture-that the book loses in depth and solidity.
Timothy Hilton's is a more interesting book and fails for more complex and interesting reasons. The biographical elements are too slight to satisfy the curious; the rigorous 'new puritanism' that guides his selection distorts Picasso's work for a
reader wishing for a comprehensive survey. Work after work is dismissed following exacting tests on Mr Hilton's litmus-paper. He is harsh, for example, on Picasso's designs for the ballet Parade which, in performance, seem strikingly triumphant. The famous drop-curtain, he says, is too big 'to carry a decent painting', a peculiarly idiotic remark. With considerable justification he devotes very little space to the last thirty years of Picasso's production but without mentioning the artist's personal development in the use of colour--if in no other direction. He has absolutely no use for Picasso's ceramics.
When he is engaged however, Mr Hilton can be tough, lively and provocative. This is particularly evident in his chapter on Cubism and on Picasso's activities as sculptor, especially in the early 'thirties. He applauds, more than most commentators, Picasso's use of paint in the pre-collage pictures and rightly plays down the much discussed debt to Ingres in the drawings of friends done in the First War. I wish he had said more of the so-called neo-classical phase and developed its links with the work of the Gosol period. If he is not prepared to give his critical assent to such painting, the facts at least should be there. This is simply suppression. If you want to know what Picasso was up to at a certain date, you would be ill-advised to turn to this book. But if you want to know what a highly intelligent and sometimes very sensitive critic, weaned on 'sixties art writing, feels about selected works, then it is here.
Much of the late work, which Mr Hilton rightly finds disappointing, appears in the book of photographs by David Douglas Duncan of Picasso's last home at Mougins. His marshmallow of a preface is redeemed by some of the splendid photographs which follow.
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