BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO
IT was my great fortune just as I was finishing this book[1] to be taken by a friend to the studio of Pablo Picasso. We had been talking on our way of the lively arts; my companion denied none of their qualities, and agreed violently with my feeling about the bogus, what we called le côté Puccini. But he held that nothing is more necessary at the moment than the exercise of discrimination, that we must be on our guard lest we forget the major arts, forget even how to appreciate them, if we devote ourselves passionately, as I do, to the lively ones. Had he planned it deliberately he could not have driven his point home more deeply, for in Picasso's studio we found ourselves, with no more warning than our great admiration, in the presence of a masterpiece. We were not prepared to have an unframed canvas suddenly turned from the wall and to recognize immediately that one more had been added to the small number of the world's greatest works of art.
I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn't even important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and to me overwhelming thing was that the work was a masterpiece and altogether contemporary. It is a great pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself—that is a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect—after one had gone away and begun to be aware of effects—was to make one wonder whether it is worth while thinking or writing or feeling anything else. Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day, it isn't sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn't, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest—that the real opposition was between them, allied, and the polished fake. To that position I returned a few
- ↑ The Seven Lively Arts, by Gilbert Seldes, to be published by Harpers.
