Wednesday January 15, 1958 THE P1ABLI The Curren A Prolific and 'By R. C. GREGORY . t provides a retrospective history of SIXTY YEARS of any artiat's modern art. Indeed, greater artists creative life illustrated in an there may well have been-but exhibition of more than three who more versatile? Karl Shapiro hundred pieces provide an im- wrote once: mense prospect. When the artist is .. An album of Picasso Pablo Picasso, the total effect is Shocks by variety: and if such overwhelming. There remain only a master superlatives in which to speak of And influence in the arts of the Picasso 75th Anniversary Ex- paint and words t hibition. There have, perhaps, been Can so transmute his media, greater artists in the past but not, what remains surely, in this century and, for For any mere practitioner but better or worse, this is the ten- to follow tury to which one is bound. Suit? The 75th Anniversary Exhibition ICASSO started, of course, be- is large in many respects: It is s , the largest collection of Picasso's fore the turn of the century, work ever assembled in the United with an early homage to Toulouse- States. It contains the largest Laotrec. "Le Moulin de la Galette" number of items ever loaned by (1900) sums up what the influence the artist from his own collection. meant; it is a canvas illuminated And, not unimportant, it will have by the faces of cafe-visitors as been seen by more than half a much as by the lights strung above million people when it is finally the dancing couples, faces that dispersed at the end of January full-front or in profile betray a from the Philadelphia Museum of feverish sharpness. The oil-and- Art, pastel "Gypsy Girl" (1898?) and the watercolor-and-conte-crayon Opened in New York's Museum "Redemption" (1898?) suggest of Modern Art last May 22, the Edvard Munch, particularly the show was visited by 300,000 people former, whose similarity to a before closing September 8. It re- Munch oil, "Aftenstund" ("The opened at the Art Institute of Evening Hour"), is uncomfortably Chicago on October 29 and 116,000 coincidental. And who but the people visited before the close on Pointillistes made the art history December 8. With some altera- of "Dwarf Dancer," painted in tions, the show opened in Phila- Paris in 1901? t delphia the first of January; num- bers there will surely bring the pICASSO'S Blue Period, along total above the half-million figure. with the Pink Period, is per- Picasso's 75th Anniversary Ex- haps his most popular. The Art hibition has undoubtedly been Institute of Chicago owns the more written about at great length famous "The Old Guitarist," com- than any other one-man show in memorated by Wallace Stevens in the nation's history. "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Picasso himself, his home, chil- dren, dogs, nd doves, have been The man bent over his guitar, the subject of photographic essays A shearsman of sorts. The day and his life in photographs and was green. documents, the subject of a book, They said, "You have a blue A Portrait of Picasso. A book on guitar, his posters appeared late in the You do not play things as they fall. Sirpultaneous to the anni- are." versary show, the Saidenburg Gal- The man replied, "Things as leries in New York have been ex- they are hibiting a group of Picasso's recent Are changed upon the blue -meaning from the last two years guitar," -oils, The profile of Picasso by Janet Manner, written for The Unfortunately, this well-known New Yorker in 1956, has appeared canvas was not included in the as part of a book. Whatever may show. There were, however, several be said in general about modern blue canvases seldom seen: "Wom- art and artists, so far as reception an in Blue" (1901?), from the is concerned, Pablo Picasso has Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid; had a great year. the piercing, haunting "Sebastian Few who saw the 75th Anni- Junyer Vidal" (1903), owned by versary Exhibition would begrudge the subject, who lives in Barcelona. Picasso his triumph, for his work The two outstanding paintings of MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAINE Page Elevern t Exhibition Chronicles Masterly Six-Year Output the Blue Period were probably "Blind Man's Meal" (1903), witha. the long, beautiful hands of the ma n domin.atisig the c. nvas, and "Woman Ironing" (1904), the tall, frail body bowed down by the weight of her flat-iron and the ' sense of inescapable poverty. "Boy with a Pipe" (1905) is well-kno\n; the superb "Monkey" (1905) from the Cone Collectiona in Baltimore less so' its casual precision is rem- iniscent of oriental animal draw- " But the masterpiece of 1905 is the lyrically beautiful,"Boy Lead- ing a Horse," a large painting that is strangely restrained and digni- fied and natural, with none of the pathos of the blue canvases. Picas- so was not twenty-five until 1906. AND IN HIS twenty-fifth year he painted Gertrude Stein, re- quiring her for many sittings and finally finishing the face without the subject. He painted his own clean - shaven face, giving it a mask-like immobility and epth. There was, late in 1906, "Two Nudes," one painted with a dis- located breast, the other with a mask-like profile in three-quarter view. Monumental in their solid pose, the two women are seen full- face (or full-mask), splintered into brilliant flesh-tone planes, in a later canvas, the famous "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907). "Les Demoiselles" is the art his- torian's official beginning of Cub- ism-which may have just hap- pened, not got formally begun- but it clearly evolved from previous experiments. "This was the year 1907. Gertrude Stein was just see- ing through the press Three Lives which she was havng privately printed, and she was deep in The Making of Ameni- cans, her thousand page book. x Picasso had just finished his portrait of her which nobody at that time liked except the painter and the painted and which is now so famous, and he had just begun his strange complicated picture of three women, Matisse had just fin- ished his Bonheur de Vivre, his first big composition which gave him the name of fauve or a zoo. It was the moment Max Jacob has since called the heroic age of cubism. I re- See PICASSO, page 16 -Photographs Courtesy Museum o Modern Art "Three Ballerinas," (top) a pencil-and-charcoal drawing of 1919, is in Picasso's own collection. Diaghilev, the famous impre- sario of the Ballets Busses, commissioned Picasso to do the designs for several ballets both new and old-these are for "Les Sylphides." Picasso painted the cubist portrait "Wilhelm Uhde" (above) in Paris the spring of 1910; during the same year he painted "Girl with a Mandolin," and cubist portraits of Ambroise Vollard and D. H. Kahnweiler. Both Vollard and Kahuweiler were dealers; Uhde was a critic. "Reclining Nude," (left) from a private collection in Paris, was painted between 12 August and 2 October, 19x6; it has not been shown in the United States prior to the 75th Anniversary Exhibition. Violently distorted, it provides marked contrast to the still lifes of the same period and is more alkin to the "Guernica."