Picasso PROTEAN GENIUS OF MODERN ART

THE caretaker peers through the peephole in the front gate of the walled villa overlooking Cannes, disappears, then returns to admit the visitor. A dark-haired, handsome woman in blue pants emerges from the big square house and says: "Picasso will be down in a moment." She is Jacqueline Roque. a 30-year-old divorcee who is Picasso's latest companion, and she speaks with the air of one announcing the approach of an emperor.

Everywhere there are signs of the prodigious energy of the most dynamic and disturbing artist of his time. Ferocious bronze owls glare from under the palms, a huge stone head of a woman lies in the basin of the fountain, plywood pipe-players are scattered about the lawn. Inside, the three main rooms are jammed. Canvases crowd the walls, spill out of crates. Weird ceramics stand in disheveled confusion on the floor. The rest of the space is taken up by a litter of objects that Picasso collects compulsively, objects that may set him off on a new theme or be incorporated into a new sculpture -- a hollow elephant's foot filled with pebbles, a bird cage containing two parakeets, an African drum, faded flowers, a life-sized wooden crocodile, a pile of hats ranging from Chinese coolie to carnival papier-mache. "There are vitamins even in garbage," Picasso insists.

Living Legend. Picasso comes down -- stocky, spry, bronzed as a piece of sculpture. At 75 he is a living legend and he knows it; his dark brown eyes gleam as they sweep the room in a commanding glance. He picks up a black Spanish cape from a pile of clothes, flings it around his shoulders with the lordly grace of a matador, tops it off with a Spanish hat from the pile. " Magnifique , this material," he cries. "It is not only elegant, but it keeps you warm." Next thing the visitor knows, Picasso is romping on the lawn with his pet goat.

Though a millionaire several times over, Picasso lives in the elegant villa like a wandering Okie. A flock of pigeons coo from the third-floor balcony, chickens cluck on the lawn, the goat is kept on the second floor. Significantly the one clear space in the house is around his easel, lit by a powerful electric lamp with triple reflectors, where he paints every day from 4 p.m. until after midnight with an old boxboard for a palette, sometimes knocking off two or three versions of a subject in a single session. Explains Picasso : "I am a Spaniard. Just as a torero takes his bull through all sorts of passes, I like to take my pictures through all kinds of variations."

Crumbs from the Table. Picasso has been called "a volcano in constant eruption," and his continued volcanic -- and unpredictable -- activity has made him a phenomenon almost unique in the history of art. No other artist has ever commanded so wide a fame in his own lifetime. His name is almost a synonym for modern art. His works have set off debates in Levittown living rooms, rocked the cafes of Montmartre, built up pressures in Moscow. If a friend in need asks for help, Picasso can manufacture money simply by sketching a few lines on the back of a menu and adding his dramatic signature. His vintage works (Blue, Rose, and early Cubist periods) bring prices over $100,000; his latest oils fetch up to $35,000. Even the figures he absently kneads out of bread and leaves on restaurant tables are saved as potential collectors' items.

This week in Manhattan, to celebrate Picasso's 75th birthday, the Museum of Modern Art is opening the most comprehensive exhibition of Picasso's works ever collected under one roof. On view for a summer-long show that takes over three whole floors are 328 paintings, sculptures and drawings, selected from 95 collections. Included are 31 works owned by Picasso, which can be distinguished by the fact that the old man, with a peasant's shrewdness, never signs a painting until it is sold.

Stamp of Authenticity. As the first major show of Picasso's works in the U.S. since 1939, it also provides a unique opportunity to reassess the man who in 50 years of dazzling innovations had upended, along with a whole tradition of painting, the very standards of criticism itself. The paintings --grown familiar in countless art books and reproductions -- no longer shock. In retrospect, some seem to be failures. But there remains an overwhelming sense of endless vitality and prolific invention. Each painting bears the visual impact and unmistakable stamp of authority of the greatest of modern draftsmen. The overall impression is of a great painter who has painted few absolute masterpieces, because he seldom lingered long enough with any one work to bring it to perfection. But even his failures are monumental -- testament of a man made in a larger mold than any other artist of his time.

Spread on the museum's walls, Picasso's works provide the viewer with a journey through 50 years that changed art more radically than it had been changed in the 500 years before. It is a journey conducted by the man who, more than any other, did the changing. Picasso himself obligingly recalls his point of departure with an early canvas. Le Moulin de la Galette (see opposite), painted when he was 19 and a fiery-eyed Spanish provincial on his first visit to Paris. "Banal but talented," pronounced Painter Amedee Ozenfant, "and that's how it should be. A beginner is not a master."

But the restive talent of the young Picasso, tramping about Paris with a Browning automatic flamboyantly tucked in his belt, was quickly evident as he began to paint gaunt laundresses, half-starved nudes and such El Greco-haunted scenes as Blind Man's Meal. Their signature was the all-pervading blue monotone, a color which Picasso has since explained "was not a question of light or color. It was an inner necessity to paint like that." The clowns and buffoons of the Rose period that followed still astonish by their sure draftsmanship and haunting melancholy.

Make It Ugly. Then, abrupt as a blow, came Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, a painting done in 1907 depicting five dramatic salmon-pink nudes, their faces hideous as primitive African masks. On seeing the painting, French Painter Georges Braque gasped: "You are asking us to drink petrol in order to spit fire." Today, Demoiselles, which made primitive art an accepted fountainhead of modern art, has only the dated quality of yesteryear's manifesto. But it marked a significant break in art history, ushering in an age in which art is no longer the readily grasped reaffirmation of everyman's vision, but a special hierarchical world into Avhich initiation is required. Reported Gertrude Stein: "Picasso said once that he who created a thing is forced to make it ugly . . . Those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing."

Cubism, Picasso's next creation in collaboration with Georges Braque, now seems less like an explosion in a shingle factory than a rigorous analysis of reality in terms of planes rather than lines. In such works as Girl with Mandolin, where the figure and background have been broken into sharp-edged, sculptural planes, with the mandolin and model's breast distorted to carry the viewer's eye around the bend, there is today a kind of elegance and even a sensual formalism.

Picasso's cubism radically affected the course of modern art, but it is now clear that it failed to establish itself as the Grand Manner of the 20th century. As an apparatus to carry the full weight of modern man's deepened and often troubled sensibility, it has proved inadequate. Picasso himself, no man to cultivate the hinterland after exploring a new area's boundaries, pushed on, leaving a generation of less gifted painters to work laboriously through its implications.

Skeletons on the. Beach. In room after room, the current exhibition breathtakingly displays the energy with which Picasso investigated one direction after another. He briefly turned back to classicism ("They say I draw better than Raphael, and probably they are right," he once remarked), then in what amounted to a burlesque of classicism created such monumental figures as Mother and Child, which only superb talent saves from becoming ludicrous. In his Three Dancers he not only bade farewell to his period of stage designing with the Ballet Russe (where he met and married his one legal wife, Olga Koklova, mother of his eldest son Paul), but initiated a series of agonizing, lopsided, contorted figures whose displaced limbs and wandering eyes still boggle the public.

Such distortions dramatically extended the range of metaphor in Picasso's own work. The walls abound with pictures of women treated as moon goddesses, as concrete skeletons on a beach or as interlocking arabesques with strange, brooding masks. They reveal little about the outward appearance of the numerous women who have responded to Picasso's own vitality, but they clearly record Picasso's own often savage counter-response. With children (he has four) Picasso has almost invariably used distortion sympathetically to reinforce rather than mock childhood's peculiar and perilous excitement.

Picasso's attachment to the Communist Party has been subject to fits and starts. He let the party make his Peace Dove (actually a lithograph of a white fantail pigeon Henri Matisse had given him as a present) a propaganda symbol the world over, and Communist Boss Maurice Thorez is a frequent and conspicuous guest at Picasso's villa at Cannes. But when someone asked Picasso what he would do if France became a satellite and he was ordered to paint the party line, Picasso exploded: "If they stopped my painting, I would draw on paper. If they put me in prison without paper or pencil, I would draw with spit on the cell walls."

Owls from a Perfume Factory. As the Manhattan show demonstrates, age has not withered nor imitation staled Picasso's infinite variety. It apparently takes only a new subject or a new medium to revitalize him. After World War II he became absorbed in lithography, largely revived it as a serious medium in France. He revived his interest in sculpture. From the abandoned perfume factory that he took over in the sleepy Riviera town of Vallauris, Picasso has turned out a host Of ceramics of his own ferocious owls, toads, bulging females, nymphs and bullfight scenes never seen before on land or kiln.

Most recently Picasso has thrown himself enthusiastically into makiag a full-length film, Le Mystere Picasso, a dazzling display of Picasso's technique, which had its U.S. premiere this month as part of the museum's Picasso exhibit. In it Picasso undertakes to paint a new canvas from scratch before the camera's eyes. Naked to the waist, white hair bristling on his chest, Picasso proclaims with calculated drama: "One must risk everything." Ad-libs Director Henri-Georges Clouzot solemnly: 'That's going to be dangerous." Says Picasso: "Out, that is what I seek." While the camera watches, Picasso designs a beach scene, takes the theme through a series of dexterous variations. Suddenly he rumbles, "It is going badly," pauses, then adds, "It is going very, very badly." Wiping out the whole work, he dashes off the final version, a simple, glowing abstraction.

An even more astonishing feat of showoffmanship is the 15 exhibited variations of Eugene Delacroix's famed Louvre painting, Women of Algiers, turned out by Picasso over a 15-month period. Noted a friend: "It was with a kind of malicious pleasure that he took up this venerable museum work, turned it over like an old coat, recut it and adjusted it to his own measurements." Painted in 1954-55, the exercise was also Picasso's way of working off the melancholy caused by the departure of his companion of eight years, Franc,oise Gilot, who one day suddenly left, taking their two children with her, announcing: "I was tired of living with a historical monument."

Today an Indian-summer mood appears to have settled over Picasso and his work. Credit for Picasso's contentment is given by friends largely to Jacqueline, who runs the house, tenderly cares for "Pablito," and delights him by making his favorite Spanish sausage, chorizo, or a surprise dessert of Turkish halvah. Jacqueline has also served as model for the series of 50-odd paintings such as Woman by a Window (see left), that Picasso had turned out using his new Cannes studio as a theme.

Death Is Final. Though Picasso shaped a whole half-century of art in his image, it is clear that since the end of World War II he no longer dominates the whole canvas of modern art. He believes a work should be constructed, is distressed by the work of many young abstract expressionists, once grabbed an ink-stained blotter, shoved it at a visitor and snapped, "Jackson Pollock." But Picasso's latest work shows that he has lost none of his amazing powers of draftsmanship nor his virtuoso ability to improvise on a theme until it is obedient to his will. With age, Picasso becomes more impatient. His own limitations--an insensibility to the sensual qualities of paint, a violence and haste in execution--stand forth more clearly. In Woman by a Window, Picasso, who uses boat paint "or whatever they give me," worked over the area of the model's shoulders with an intensity that has made a bulge in the canvas, but he has barely sketched in the right side of the canvas.

Picasso works to exhaust a subject, not to beautify it. "I have a horror of something finished," he says. "Death is final. A revolver shot finishes off. The not completely achieved is life." Beauty, as the world knows it, has long since ceased to interest him. "What is the beautiful?" he exclaims. "One must speak of problems in painting!" Such rumblings give the art world warning that the volcano is still alive, may erupt again before the world's astonished eyes. The most demanding commission of his career is now directly ahead of him--a huge mural for Paris' new headquarters for UNESCO. What its subject will be Picasso does not hint. But until the final revolver shot sounds, the old master can be depended on to keep the world's eyes focused on the tip of his brush.

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