Picasso

Abstract

PABLO PICASSO has for thirty years been the central figure in twentieth century art, and the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective exhibition of his works should afford the interested public a chance to decide how well he has deserved and lived up to his position. In making its decision, the public will lack the guidance of one of those detailed summaries of an artist's work with which the Museum's Director, Mr. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., has customarily prefaced his catalogues. It will, on the other hand, benefit from a series of notes interspersed throughout the catalogue. These notes constitute the most concise, lucid and informative commentary which has yet been made on the painter. They are all the more welcome because Picasso, of all living artists, has so often been interpreted in terms of a machino-Romantic vocabulary, so often viewed through a trauma of hysterical adoration. It was not so very long ago that a serious critic was demanding “words of steel” to describe Picasso's painting, whereas all along words of sense and content have been needed.