Le Mystere de Picasso

Abstract

It is not given to all artists to end on a Ninth or to close with a Wake. In our time it fell to James to go beyond The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl; to Yeats to continue after Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, and Among School Children. The first produced as The Finer Grain a group of tales at once higher in style and lower in pitch than his last three masterpieces, while the second found in Words Without Music a directness and levity not at all characteristic of his major poems. Nor was the very genius of this age permitted to rest upon completing his Guernica. That was almost twenty years ago and Picasso has been busy ever since. Predominant in him too, especially in the past decade, has been a desire to say quickly and often what he thinks of the ways of the world. Comedy succeeds tragedy. In his human comedy we have again and again the spectacle of a man refusing to act seventy, rejecting the sober and sedentary, creating instead at a more and more furious pace, and taking i...