Word: barre
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Pablo Picasso is this sort of irritating exception. In a half-century of painting he has ranged from classic perfection to near chaos, without once mislaying the sureness in execution and the vitality which are his only consistent characteristics. That half-century was summed up by scholarly Alfred H. Barr Jr., research director of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, in a comprehensively illustrated monograph out last week (Picasso, 50 Years of His Art; $6). Its 330 pictures were the work of a restless giant in a restless era, who constantly invented new worlds to conquer, then tired...
...paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he admired enormously, "but all the same," Picasso decided, "I paint better than Lautrec." He set out to prove it and for three years painted starved, laundresses, absinthe drinkers and grave, bearded beachcombers in blue. Nowadays they seem a bit stagy and sentimental; Barr suggests that they reflect Picasso's "room without a lamp, his meals of rotten sausages, even his burning a pile of his own drawings to keep warm...
...while Picasso tried pink. His blue period "gave way to the more natural style and melancholy sweetness of a long series of circus people." His Boy Leading a Horse (see cut) which even a know-nothing in art could see was first rate, has, says Barr, "an unpretentious, natural nobility of order and gesture which makes the official guardians of the 'Greek' tradition such as Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes seem vulgar or pallid...
Picasso went through one six-month stretch when the only picture he did was a rag cut by a piece of string; and through another period when he tried his restless hand at poetry. Currently he calls himself a Communist, but his art would please no commissar. Author Barr more correctly calls Picasso an "intransigent" individualist...
Picasso is at work on a huge canvas which will never fit anyone's idea of interior decoration. Entitled The Charnel-House, it is still in the drawing stage (see cut). Says Barr: "Its figures are facts-the famished, waxen cadavers of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. The fury and shrieking violence which made the agonies of Guernica tolerable are here reduced to silence. For the man, the woman and the child this picture is a Pieta without grief, an entombment without mourners, a requiem without pomp...