The New in the Old

Life at La Californie had seldom been as lively as it was in the sunny peace of August on the Riviera last year. Pablo Picasso had never seemed more relaxed, playing with his children, feeding his parrots and his owl, greeting the visitors who dropped in every day. Then one day Picasso disappeared into his big second-floor studio, and became a changed man. "There was a tragic preoccupation on his face," says Novelist Helene Parmelin. Every day after lunch he would go up to his studio "like someone going up to the scaffold." Picasso was attempting to repaint in his own manner and to do an analysis on canvas of the picture he considers one of the world's greatest--Velasquez' Las Meninas.

For four months he worked in solitude. "It is going badly," he would tell friends at his favorite cafe in Aix. "It is this salaud Velasquez. If at least he was an intelligent painter. But no, it is Velasquez, with all that implies of everything and of nothing."

Organist & Theme. The result of Picasso's labors was a huge canvas done all in greys and a covey of brilliantly colored smaller paintings in which he explored details of specific figures. Last week critics and public got a first glimpse of them in reproduction, with the publication in Paris of a limited edition (to be published in the United States this spring).

In effect, Picasso has diagramed what Velasquez left represented, sculpted out space that Velasquez implied. Velasquez himself has been erected into a towering, plastic figure on the left. The watcher in the doorway has been raised in ominous emphasis by reducing him to black silhouette. The dwarf has become a Charlie Brown cartoon, and the mastiff transformed into Picasso's own dachshund. The mysterious, airy space of the room's depth has been chopped into emphatic fragments by the invented windows on the right.

Disassociation & Dream. Fact is, Velasquez is suddenly much in the modern air. Last week Salvador Dali turned up in New York with a new painting called Velasquez painting the Infanta with the lights and shadows of his proper glory. The Infanta is only shadowily visible through the darkly luminous galleries of the Prado. Explains Dali, sighting along the points of his caliper-style mustache: "The new was and is through Velasquez. Abstract expressionism is in the details of Velasquez, in the brush strokes."

Even abstract expressionists themselves have been rediscovering Velasquez. Perhaps the cold, snowy veil that abstraction has cast over almost the whole landscape of art has proved too chill, and they felt the need for a thaw, for seeing earth again. Both Dali and Picasso were trying to bring Velasquez's illusion-making genius into a new, dreamlike focus, distorting the original (as dreams do) by a breaking-up and jumbling-together process. Dali calls this "disassociation." Says Dali: "The impressionists made disassociation of light. The cubists made disassociation of forms. The surrealists made disassociation of ideas. In the future it will come together and be painting, as Velasquez."

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