The Unseen Picassos

Photographer David Douglas Duncan had often passed the locked door during his visits to the Riviera villa of Pablo Picasso, but in the three years he had known "the Maestro." he never guessed what was stored on the other side. One day in 1959, Picasso took him by the arm, unlocked the door, and motioned him inside. There, and in other rooms in the villa, were 532 finished paintings by Picasso that the world had never seen--"the greatest unrecorded treasure in modern art." Duncan says.

This week, as Picasso celebrates his 80th birthday, the treasure goes on record in a new book illustrated and written by Duncan and printed under his supervision in Switzerland (and published in the U.S. by Harper*). Picasso's Picassos is more than a historymaking catalogue of the unknown paintings at the villa "La Californie"; it is also a touchingly sentimental journey into Picasso's life. Duncan spent six months photographing the paintings while Picasso watched and commented, and the book's 102 color plates thus take on an added dimension. As the reader examines them, he can almost imagine Picasso looking over his shoulder, offering comment and explanation as Picasso did for Duncan.

The Personal Note. There has never been a collection of Picassos more personal than this, and that, along with his canny desire not to flood the market, is the reason for its being kept so long from view. The four paintings that TIME reproduces (see color) catch a variety of styles and colors--plus this personal note. Picasso has seldom been more tender than in his first portrait of Marie-Therese Walter, and rarely has he endowed a figure with such regality as in the second portrait of her. The Minotaur is all passion, sad and fierce at once, almost like the master himself, and in the portrait of the woman with the dramatic hat, all conventions of beauty and ugliness are swept aside, as if the artist were intent only in crashing through the skin to get a look inside. In all four paintings the palette glows and roars: the image is not just there--it explodes.

Today, married to 35-year-old Jacqueline, the sixth of the important women in his life, Picasso is as exuberant as ever. But in a sense, this most inventive of living artists has come to be one of the least controversial: his stature is so enormous, his gifts and influence so overwhelming, that even the most conservative critics are apt to forgive his occasional tendency to showmanship and shock. His very restlessness sometimes seems a form of dilettantism, but every art movement from cubism to collage to abstraction, has felt his presence. In the entire history of art, no one man has offered so many ideas or seemed to find so many ways of looking at the world. To a great extent, Pablo Picasso is a history of modern art in himself.

That's a Guitar. For so varied a talent, there is a refreshing no-nonsense quality about Picasso as Duncan portrays him. When photographing one of the earliest paintings at "La Californie"--a realistic portrayal of the Holy Family that Picasso did at the age of 14--Duncan asked whether the "curious image floating" above the family might have been meant to symbolize the Holy Spirit. "Holy Spirit!" snorted Picasso. "Those are dates. That's a palm tree--with dates. They had to eat somethingl"

By 1907. Picasso had come a long way from those dates. That year he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, now regarded as the first cubist painting. But he also did a demoiselle the world has never seen--a redheaded girl that Duncan found sandwiched between several still lifes of a later period. "Painted on a panel so thin that it is nearly transparent (the lid of an ancient paint box), it seems as though the colors merely screen the person behind." wrote Duncan. In 1907, too, Picasso discovered African masks, and over the next few months his heads took on the look of sculpture, while his nudes became arrangements of ovals with limbs that twined about each other like thick brownish taffy. In 1918 he did a cubist study that Duncan thought was meant to be a dog. "Dooncon," explained the Maestro slowly, "this is a table, with a table cloth. There is a guitar at the left. And a pitcher at the right. You must see that!"

A Lost Period. Every so often, nature snaps back into shape in Picasso's Picassos: a 1923 neoclassic nude is followed by a wispy portrait of little Paulo, Picasso's son by his first wife, Olga Koklova. But the works of the 1920s are few: almost half of those in Duncan's book were done in the '30s. One of the book's chief surprises, in fact, is the chapter devoted to 1936. It was a period during which most authorities believed Picasso painted nothing.

The Maestro was separated from Olga, and his new love was Marie-Therese Walter. Picasso subjected her to startling transfigurations. In one canvas, she is almost normal, her features boldly outlined in strong, simple lines. In the next canvas, she becomes three circular shapes, as if Picasso had reduced her to a kind of amoeba. Other paintings of this period are tragic ones. In a shattering series of portraits, Picasso painted a woman sinking into madness. In the last of these, she is seen staring blankly at a blackened mirror while near by sits a ghostly figure --the visitor of whom the disintegrated mind was only partially aware. Who is this woman? Missouri-born Dave Duncan, who has made himself Picasso's photographic Boswell after an adventuresome career of action photography (the Korean war for LIFE) that turned gradually toward culture-capture (The Kremlin), does not know, or loyally refuses to say.

Love-Smitten Minotaur. More portraits of Marie-Therese follow before the dark features of Dora Maar, Picasso's next love, appear. There are some cityscapes, bright as a patchwork quilt, and later a series on one of Picasso's favorite themes, the Minotaur. This time, the artist was thinking of a legend in which three muses come upon the Minotaur dying on a beach. Two flee at the sight of his ugliness, but one stays to nurse him back to health. "Forever thereafter, while she floated offshore, he spent his days sitting where she had offered the only love he had found in life."

The Picasso's Picassos done in the '30s are mostly domestic. Only one before 1939--that ol a nun torn asunder by a bomb during the Spanish Civil War-echoes the horror of Guernica. Picasso painted still lifes, a bird or two, portraits of Dora and Picasso's daughter Maia. But one da>' he finished an anguished woman who looked as if she were racked by some grisly disease. As World War II descended on Europe. Picasso's women became savage, lunatic figures done in colors that scream with rage. The agony vanished as suddenly as it came: once again, Picasso's Picassos came home.

Homage to Jacqueline. A strange, doll-like portrait shows his little daughter Paloma poking at some presents under a Christmas tree. His present wife Jacqueline makes her debut in 1954. One of the early portraits of her is a straightforward drawing of enormous tenderness. The final plate in the book is of a painting of three eels on a table. Picasso did it last year just after Jacqueline had cooked some eels for his lunch. On the back he wrote: "Homage to Jacqueline for a matelote that she prepared for lunch 3.12.60. offering to her through this painting a small portion of the immense desire I have to please her.''

David Duncan's book is not to be read as art criticism; his obvious fondness for his friend blots out any fault the painter might have. But this fondness gives the book an extra dimension. Picasso's Picassos are not just paintings but extraordinary human documents. Duncan's admiring text may not illuminate Picasso's genius, but it does light up the man--simple, passionate, earthy, and, at the age of 80, head over heels in love again.

*$24.95 until Dec. 31, 1961, $30 thereafter.

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