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That sense of being "always at the frontiers" of history itself is volatile, and it began to evaporate from Picasso's work before the end of World War I. It left behind a residue, however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, a rappel à l'ordre (call to order), which would place art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia. "Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th Arrondissement after October 1917.
The Picasso of 1918-24 was made for this situation. With ebullience, he threw himself into the role of the maestro, designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, marrying one of its dancers, and allowing a conventional style of portraiture, often as insipid as the $3 million Acrobat sold to Japan in last week's Garbisch auction, to alternate with a highly decorative form of cubism. "Decorative," of course, is no longer a cuss word, and his best flat-pattern cubist paintings of the early '20s, with their gravely shuttling collage-like overlaps of bright and dark color, are marvels of pictorial intelligence. The two versions of his Three Musicians, 1921, show what Picasso could do when his sense of form was fully engaged. The classicizing drift of the early '20s took its most explicit shape in the Three Women at the Spring, 1921. Their dropsical limbs resemble a Pompeian fresco inflated with an air hose, even though the full-size sanguine drawing for the painting, which Picasso kept for himself, has the genuinely classicist air of unforced, continuous modeling.
As solitary virtuoso, Picasso would from now on depend wholly on himself and his feelings. There would be no more collaborations, as with Braque. The corollary was that Picasso gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity, so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage, castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong to the Spaniard. This frankness—allied with Picasso's power of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a ravenous, animistic vitality—is without parallel among other artists and explains his importance to a movement he never joined, surrealism.