Mess & Magic

All Pictures that's Painted with Sense & with Thought Are Painted by Madmen as sure as a Groat; For the Greater the Fool in the Pencil more blest, And when they are drunk they always paint best.

--William Blake, circa 1808

The pasty little man with the well-ripened nose sat fingering a razor blade.

At 45, he was one of Paris' most honored painters. Hundreds of people, mainly tarts and fellow artists, loved him as he loved liquor and sex. Doubtless some orgies were in him still, but his liver would not let him live long. He gazed, heavy-eyed, about his chaotic studio, strewn with pictures as with the feathers of a moulting bird. Delicately, as he had always done things, he slashed his wrists.

That was 25 years ago. To commemorate the tragic event, Manhattan's Perls Galleries last week was staging a retrospective show of Jules Pascin's work.

Pascin (rhymes with askin') had been a sad mess, both in his life and in his death--his last acts were to scrawl farewell to his girl in gore on the wall and then impatiently hang himself. Yet his paintings were not in the least messy, and they were sad only in the one sense possible to true art: a serene expression of melancholy.

Most of the Pascin canvases on show last week were of half-dressed girls loafing about the artist's Montmartre studio in the silver dusk. He had painted them quickly, in the magic hour between the first few sickening drinks of the day and putting on his bowler to go out and get drunk again. The colors were soft as fog and fleeting as perfume. The contours--often done in charcoal atop the oil--shaped his sagging subjects like tender pats of a moist palm. Pausing at a mouth, the corner of an eye, a flexed wrist, Pascin would sometimes sharpen his line, pinching and twisting cruelly to bring out the girl's full character. Then he would add the final transparent stains of cloudy paint, looking almost as if it had been breathed onto the canvas, and veil his subject in impersonal melancholy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.