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Over the Horizon. Long before that could happen, Picasso had climbed back into overalls, and his art was on a new tack—one which took him straight over the horizon and out of most solid citizens' ken. He borrowed ideas from the whole range of art history, carving figures that looked like Sumerian fetishes, and drawing in every manner from the Cro-Magnon to that of severe 19th Century classicists such as Ingres. His subject matter became anything at all—dogs, women, roosters, bones, furniture, dots, musicians—violently twisted, hacked, smeared and rearranged to suit Picasso's moods.
"It is my misfortune," he gayly explained, "to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things—so much the worse for them, they just have to put up with it."
His Girl Before a Mirror (see color pages), painted in 1932, was a striking example of his vast capacity for forcing any number of conflicting "things" and means to serve his ends. Its lozenge-patterned background and thick black lines recall stained glass. Its involved, curlicue composition relates to Chinese calligraphs. The girl's head has a playing-card look, yet it seems also to symbolize the sun as its reflection does the moon. Her violently distorted body appears to be clothed, nude, and Xrayed, all at one time. She is quietly contemplating herself, yet the picture is an anything-but-quiet struggle of strident colors.
Not long afterwards, Picasso gave up painting as a bad job. For two years he loafed, and did a little writing in a style that seemed to derive from Gertrude Stein and an old grad's 25th-anniversary recollections of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Sample: "Nothing to do but to watch the thread that destiny works which taints the theft of the glass from the mind that shakes the hour coiled up in remembrances toasted on grills of blue ..."
Out of the Doldrums. The Civil War in Spain settled Picasso's doldrums. Passionately Loyalist, he painted Guernica for the Spanish government building at the Paris World's Fair. The mural, done entirely in black, white and grey, symbolized the bombing of a Spanish town by German planes. Brutally ugly, it mixed classical analogies with a suggestion of crumpled newspapers and memories of the bull ring. Goya himself never painted a darker evocation of war's horror.
Still in the black mood, Picasso found a new girl, Photographer Dora Maar, and used her pretty face as a starting point for hundreds of grotesquely twisted, hysterical-seeming portraits. When the Germans took Paris, Picasso had fled to the south of France. Shortly afterwards he decided to return. "Simple Nazi soldiers used to visit me," says Picasso, who was considered too valuable to molest, even though Resistance leaders sometimes met at his studio. "When they left I presented them with souvenir postcards of Guernica."
On the day Paris was liberated, he copied a watercolor sketch by Poussin "as an exercise in self-discipline." He greeted the first American soldiers who came to his studio with kisses, exclaiming: "You two are so lovely!"