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But even if true, the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point. To say that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art. In the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person knows, is the same.
The wave is essentially the movement which one tends to associate, not very accurately perhaps, with the name of Cézanne: it has nothing to do with Jazz; its most characteristic manifestation is modern painting, which, be it noted, Jazz had left almost untouched. "Picasso?" queries someone. I shall come to Picasso presently.
It included such names as Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck, Marchand, Friesz, Maillol, Duncan Grant: one need not be laudator temporis acti to feel that the men of the new generation are on a smaller scale. This merely confirms my often expressed notion that the decade 1875-85 produced a prodigious quantity of greatly gifted babies.
Then, at the right moment, he plunged headlong into the movement, became the student of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, though not, curiously enough, of Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest affinity, and, for a year or two, suffered his personality to disappear almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate. He painted French exercises. He was learning. He has learnt.
This is as true of Picasso as of Derain: only, Picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the impression of a will to surprise, while his habit of turning everything to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every new manifestation of vitality.
It has nothing to do with Life; for not only was Picasso never satisfied with a line that did not seem right in the eyes of God of the God that is in him, I mean but never would it occur to him that a line could be right in any other way. For him Life proves nothing and signifies not much; it is the raw material of art.
If we can realize that Giotto, with his legends, and Picasso, with his cubes, are after the same thing, surely we can understand that when Vasari talks of "Truth to Nature" or "nobility of sentiment," and Mr. Roger Fry of "planes" and "relations," both are about the same business. Only a fool could suppose that the ancients were less sensitive to art than we are.
No more than Picasso does he seek small profits or quick returns; on the contrary, he casts his bread upon the waters with a finely reckless gesture. The fact is, Stravinsky is too big to be covered by a label; but I think the Jazz movement has as much right to claim him for its own as any movement has to claim any first-rate artist. Similarly, it may claim Mr.
Consequently, I was not at all surprised to learn that the sure, though unconscious, taste of the statesman had led the rulers of Russia to reject their first loves; that instinctively they had divined that both Matisse and Picasso were too much like genuine artists to be trustworthy; and that they had, therefore, transferred their affections to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work of Larionoff, which should, I fancy, be just the thing for advanced politicians.
Though the war did not kill or even cripple the movement, since the war there has been a change, or, at any rate, a change has become apparent. To begin with, Picasso has, in a sense, retired from public life from the life of the cafés and studios I mean and in isolation works out those problems that are for ever presenting themselves to his restless brain.
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