Art: Radical Grandfathers

Paris, traditionally the place where the talented young wild men go, is actually an old man’s paradise. Last week art lovers crowded the swank Galerie Charpentier in Faubourg Saint-Honore, to see 100 topflight examples of the contemporary “Paris School.” Of the 52 painters in the show, about a dozen were dead. The average age of the living: 65.

The show displayed the rich harvest of an era whose beginnings had not yet been recognized or accepted by a good many Americans. Among the radical grandfathers of modern art:

¶ Matisse (76), whose freewheeling, almost religiously joyful art is broader and bolder than ever, now does most of his drawing in bed.

¶ Picasso (64), who sometimes changes his style when he changes women, recently shifted his affections to a new girl friend. He has had no new “period” since the broken teeth, swollen hands and multiplying eyes of his Spanish War mural, Guernica.

¶ Rouault (75), still hard at work on hog-faced justices, blazing Byzantine Christs with noses like thumbs, and painfully contorted acrobats, has come to look like a wistful old clown or a humorous old priest. He keeps to himself in Paris, suing his enemies for old debts and avoiding his friends.

Four of the painters in the show, Derain (66), Van Dongen (67), Segonzac (63), and Vlaminck (70), had been suspended from public showing for the past year (because they exhibited in Berlin during the war). Now their year of quiet humiliation was up, and the weary old foursome could creep into the daylight once again.