Quietly 85

The art world was busy celebrating Pablo Picasso's 85th birthday last week. Some dozen exhibitions have opened from Lapland to the Los Angeles County Museum and Macy's department store in New York City. Bags full of mail and telegrams arrived at Mougins, a tiny town above the bay at Cannes on the French Riviera, where Picasso lives. Grateful citizens of Vallauris, the town Picasso resurrected by reviving its pottery industry, sent a huge bouquet of red roses with a white dove in a cage, and their children sent batches of their best crayon drawings. His wife Jacqueline, 41, gave him a pair of 16th century lead dogs for the garden.

There was nothing but silence, however, from modern art's most famous master. "Monsieur and Madame are not at home," squawked a loudspeaker hooked up to the electronically operated gate of his villa, Notre Dame de Vie. A few intimate glimpses of life within still leak out to the world. A recent visitor recalls a prudent Picasso who has sworn off chain-smoking Gauloises, drinks carrot juice at teatime, guzzles thyme tea at other times, and sips wine only sparingly. A lifetime of painter's discipline has not changed. After dinner, Picasso leaps up, announces: "Now I must work," and paints until 1 or 2 in the morning. And in his spare time he has just finished writing a play in Spanish entitled The Burial of Count Orgaz, based on El Greco's famous canvas. "Naturally," he says, "it is not quite a play, and it's not a question of a burial."

Few critics expect Picasso to be a significant playwright. More disturbingly, some critics feel that Picasso in his later decades is painting mainly to amuse himself. Clement Greenberg in this month's Art forum judged that since Picasso's famous Guernica, the brutal 1937 mural depicting the aerial bombardment of civilians during the Spanish Civil War, "Picasso's art has ceased being indispensable." London's Sunday Times Art Critic John Russell acknowledges that Picasso is still "the perpetual president of modern art," then adds: "This indisputably great artist has sacrificed too much in recent years to immediacy, to the demands of a voracious and often childlike nature, and to the applause of people who are likely to seem, in the cool gaze of history, to have been too easily pleased."

Such caveats may be too harsh. Just how tremendous his lifetime's accomplishment has been will be best seen next month when Paris' Grand Palais and Petit Palais, in a birthday salute, opens the largest Picasso show ever assembled, with 800 works, including 100 from Picasso's own collection. Will he attend? "Go to Paris?" says Picasso. "But I go there only to see my dentist. At the moment, I haven't a toothache."

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