Once long ago, Pablo Picasso warned an inquisitive American lady not to "ask questions of the man at the wheel." At midcentury, Protean Pablo is still grasping the wheel of modern art, and most people are still wondering whether the boat is hopelessly lost or merely off on an extended voyage of exploration. This week in Europe, hundreds of dauntless American ladies and their husbands were once again doggedly searching for a first-hand answer.
In a cluster of pavilions beside a Venetian lagoon, they had their best chance of finding it. There the Venice biennial, the world's oldest, biggest and best-known international art show, had assembled a record exhibition of 4,000 art works from a record 22 nations, to celebrate its silver anniversary.
Portugal, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and Colombia were all on hand for the first time. Germany and Yugoslavia (but none of the Soviet satellites) were back for the first time since the war. From the U.S. had come a retrospective showing of 48 paintings by Seascapist John Marin, along with samplings of six younger—and lesser—U.S. artists (TIME, June 12). Surveying that bewildering array, one British critic moaned: "They have collected too much art. Too many impressions are fighting each other."
But one impression stood out unmistakably: the same little group of French painters who had dominated 20th Century art right along were still the class of the show.
Different as they all were, an apparently ageless youth was one trait all held in common: all of them were 60 or over; their average age was 70. And they held a common artistic philosophy: that nature is not a subject to be imitated and recorded on canvas, but is simply a jumping-off place for whatever an artist thinks or feels. Unlike their impressionist forebears, who painted what looked like windows opening onto sunny worlds, the young old men of the Paris school had long since shut the windows and painted whatever they liked on the glass.
Like Hot Coals. For most people, half the pleasure in looking at pictures is in recognizing what they see. Modern artists often refuse them that pleasure. But there are compensations. In breaking new ground for art, the moderns have also found new means of making art enjoyable. Such men as Dufy, Chagall and Matisse, for example, have applied their free-wheeling philosophy primarily to color, laying it on canvas in broad, brilliant, arbitrary splashes, and raising it to an intensity never before equaled in Western painting. Rouault trowels on his colors like hot coals, achieving the richness and emotional impact of Gothic stained glass—which also shuts nature out. Braque, who is more interested in form than color, leads the eye on surprising new adventures by painting shapes that seem to shift and change as one looks at them. The results may sometimes shock; they can also feed the imagination with the fire of new experience.