PICASSO

So here is Francoise Gilot with Paloma and Claude (1951), a painting on wood in “Picasso and Portraiture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (The show runs until September 17, then moves to the Grand Palais in Paris.) Francoise in the upper half is a green stick-figure on a yellow beach towel; her body is scratchy and scrambled, her legs are like a grasshopper’s, and she looks worried — wouldn’t you? But on the lower right is a squashed watermelon with a disk on top that actually gives you a boy-on-a-tricycle feeling, and in the lower left Paloma, diving into a pool, is fashioned of an arch, a half-disk, and a couple of spare triangles. The catalog treats the painting seriously, as it is obliged to: How do these particular depictions of Picasso’s mistress and their children compare to others? I read the picture as the answer to a different question: Using a plywood board and a few cans of enamel paint in basic child’s-crayon colors, can I create a masterpiece in twenty minutes? (I don’t know how long it actually took, but it could have been twenty minutes.)

The answer this time is no. Francoise doesn’t work, and the colors, as so often in Picasso, are depressing. But the boldness with which each child fills its allotted pane, the mother hovering like a preoccupied cloud, and the stunning stripped-bare simplicity of the shapes in the lower half are all wonderful. The painting radiates joy and power — and a gigantic, maniacal hubris that is so unselfconscious you want to join the artist and laugh out loud.

The thesis of William Rubin’s magisterial catalog essay and the exhibit itself is that Picasso paints “transformed” or “conceptual” portraits. He looks at his sitters through a haze of passion and prejudice and paints what he sees. Thus the artist in his sixties shows the young, luminous, newly acquired Francoise (to give one famous example) as a “woman-flower.” His portraits of first-wife Olga turn ghastly as he stops loving and starts hating her.

The thesis is plainly right — yet it has little to do with the impression that hits hardest as you look at these pictures. That impression centers not on what these images show but on how they are made. By the close of high cubism, Picasso’s portraits (drawings and oils, big and small) are mostly improvisations — and their sheer spontaneous vibrancy makes the galleries sing. Some are “transformed” and some are not. Whichever, they are united by the utter clarity with which the artist expresses himself, his decorative genius, and the prodigious power with which he lays the image down.

For Rubin, Picasso’s uncanny skill as a draftsman was a seductive trap; he writes of the artist’s “battle against virtuosity.” Certainly this artist despised prettiness as much as the next guy in the modernist pantheon, and it is conceivable that he would have been a greater painter had he been a lesser virtuoso. Regardless, we cannot grasp the artist he is unless we acknowledge that if his virtuosity posed a problem for Picasso, it was also a source of unmitigated joy. It is a remarkable experience to watch him frolic among these multiple translucent textured layers, the decorative bloom that fills every nook and cranny like an outof-control grapevine, the shapes that explode like fireworks to fill up and press against the walls of whatever odd corners they have been allocated. The best of these improvisations have irresistible beauty and force.

Thus a 1935 pencil drawing of lover-of-the-hour Marie-Therese: a cloud of soft caressing strokes for her face, hard wavy lines for hair. A dramatic close-up from inches away; the page is filled with her dreamy mood like a glass full of clear water. A 1936 Marie-Therese, black ink and wash; her face occupies the upper half of the sheet, but the lower half is extraordinary — her collar and the featureless front of her dress in oscillating pen squiggles and soft brush strokes; his eye and decorative genius are such that these squiggles are gorgeous and you could gaze at them for hours. It is hard for Picasso to sign and date a picture without turning the routine act of bookkeeping into art. In Paloma with a Doll, the four dates on which he worked on the drawing (in late 1952 and early ’53) form a cluster with as much texture and panache as any other passage.

It doesn’t always come off. Paloma with her doll is fascinating but creepy; the child could almost be an old crone decorated with cobwebs. Picasso had the bizarre, unnerving gift of seeing people as if they were things — of listening to words (so to speak) and hearing only sounds, which makes the 1922 coppery-pastel head of his young son seem like an object of porcelain, a glorified plumbing fixture. The unedited clarity with which he sets down his thoughts gives the Marie-Therese drawings unforgettable lyricism and many portraits of his children (especially the earlier ones) a disturbing emotional neutrality.

And then, in the “failures” department, there are works like a 1941 portrait of Dora Maar called Head of a Woman, 8 which is ” transformational” for sure: a strange mud-colored shape with the eyes aligned wrong and the nose and one ear stuck on top. Picasso has managed (as he so often does) to convey a likeness against impossible odds. But this image suffers, as art, from just one small problem: It’s revolting. If you’ll excuse a bit of critic’s jargon . . . not a few of these pictures are so ugly you could plotz. And it is hard, sometimes, to avoid the impression that Picasso doesn’t so much lack a flair for color as have one for coloristic mayhem. In his Rose-period Boy with a Pipe of 1905 the colors merely make you uneasy: The tension between the gray-blue of the boy’s clothing and the greenblue in the background yields a sweet-and-sour, chutneyish taste that some people enjoy. By the time you reach the famous Girl Before a Mirror of 1932, however, you are facing a full-blown crisis. The background starts off in a tulipy red-and-yellow vein, but then a mob of olives and silvery greens elbows in; a mele ensues, and a gang of lilac blues roars into the middle of it with a warm yellow-orange in tow. As you depart in exhaustion the color police are donning their riot gear, jaws set.

Yet to grasp Picasso’s greatness three self-portraits suffice. In a 1901 rust-and-blue oil, his first masterpiece, he hangs back with the cool of a cat plotting an amazing pounce. The 1938 Artist before his canvas is brilliant in part because it is unfinished — just a charcoal drawing on canvas, no weird opaque colors to hide the steel framework. The layers of smudged erasures and over-drawing give this picture a fascinating depth that doesn’t reproduce — Picasso’s dates and signatures are vibrant design elements, and his pentimenti are too — but what is most striking is the arrogant pride with which he wields the brush, like a weapon, like the knives with which he equips the Greek soldiers he likes to draw. The waxcrayon self- portrait of June 1972 shows an old man in the likeness of Picasso facing death with a stark fear that was to this artist wholly unknown. “He held the drawing beside his face,” writes his biographer Pierre Daix, “to establish that the fear on the portrait’s face was an invention.” But this is as haunting an image as has ever been conceived, and it is impossible to walk away from it unshaken.

In 1968 Life magazine published a special issue on Picasso. “Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya,” he is quoted as saying, “were great painters; I am only a public entertainer. . . . Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.” I was no great judge of character at age 13 when the piece appeared, but I was a longstanding Picasso fan, and the statement astonished me. I saved the magazine and have it beside me as I write. That staggering clear-sightedness came to him like the hard light of a cloudless day, only occasionally (to most of us it comes never) — but he put that clarity into his best portraits, transformed and untransformed, and they will always be astonishing.

By the way, “Picasso and Portraiture” is an ergonomic disaster on many fronts: What a falling-off for a museum that used to value good design! The first half tends to be mobbed, and you can’t see the paintings from more than a foot away because of the shuffling throng of earphone zombies feeling its way along the walls. (Throughout the exhibit the recorded audio tour creates an undertone like the ghostly cackling of a million departed chickens.) By the midpoint many visitors have given up, the crowd thins, and people start to notice that in this whole sprawling show there isn’t one bench. Why not build elevated islands in the middle of each gallery? Buying a ticket to an art show ought to entitle you to see, just as buying one to a concert entitles you to hear. Why not hand out copies of the curator’s text instead of hanging wordy signs and letting mobs collect in front of each? Because, I suppose, no bigshot curator ever sees a show under general-public conditions. And must the catalog weigh as much as Ecuador? Suppose that somebody, somewhere, someday, should actually want to read it?

But of course I would not miss this Picasso show for anything, rotten ergonomics or not. Here is a man who, for all his adult life — through years of world war, scientific and political revolution, the coming of cars, planes, movies, computers, antibiotics, atom bombs — behaved as if the most important person in the world were an artist. For such a man I will brave crowds of zombies and forgive anything.

Earlier this summer the British Art Center at Yale University in New Haven mounted an exhibit of the English abstract painter Andrew Forge that is worth writing about even though it’s over, because Forge is an artist of the first rank who deserves attention; seek out his pictures and you won’t be disappointed. His paintings are masterpieces of quietness, and the fact that they are shown at all in today’s noisy, running-to-vulgar art world is good news. Most are hazes of small squarish dots and seem like snapshots of constantly varying mental landscapes; you half expect them to move and change as you watch Thus Tent II of 1992, where zips of yellow-ochre and yellow- green emerge out of a color fog like firefly flashes. But the best pieces in the show weren’t the characteristic dotted oils but a handful of gentle, lovely pastels. Twin of 1985 is made of soft shifting screens of horizontal hatchings in yellows, ochres, and browns; flocks of hatchings meet in the center, pool together, and overlap like waves. A breeze runs through this picture, and it has the warmth and moodiness and wistful lyricism of a hearth in autumn. It is the sort of drawing you return to repeatedly and wish you could look at forever.

Shows we guess we’ll miss: And then there is “Rings,” the art extravaganza staged by former National Gallery director J. Carter Brown as an Olympics sideshow in Atlanta. The exhibit is divided into five groups at one emotion per: In one segment you can see “Joy”-type artworks; in the others you meet up with “Love,” “Anguish,” “Awe,” and “Triumph.” The section devoted to “Disbelief in the Presence of Great Corniness” has inexplicably been omitted (or perhaps that would come under “Awe”?), but evidently Brown’s show is full of masterpieces, and who could quarrel with the goal of bringing art to a wider public? Still, the whole thing leaves me cold.

It’s not just the Donahue-esque master plan; of course some great artworks convey anguish, et cetera, but the point of art is beauty and truth, not group therapy. Only a smattering of Picasso’s paintings and none of Forge’s would fit Brown’s scheme. More important (yes I know I am not supposed to say this), I am sick of the Olympics and annoyed at this trotting-out of great art as one more member of the supporting cast. In recent years our national sports obsession has crossed the thin, fine line of sanity. Sure I like sports . . . somewhat, and I understand that the huge popularity of athletics nowadays partly reflects a regrettable tendency among other forms of entertainment to be depraved. Even so, our need to turn the Olympics into a sacred rite is awfully sad; we are neglected children falling in love with our teddy bears — a society starved into craziness by a prolonged famine of ritual and sanctity. If I had been coaching the Art Team, I would have advised my players to visit Atlanta some other time.

By David Gelernter