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Soon afterwards, Picasso made a startling announcement: "I have become a Communist . . . because the Communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain.
The Old Changeable. Since then, Painter Picasso has obediently lent his name and prestige to every cause his gleeful Communist colleagues suggest. The fact that his art is regularly excoriated in Moscow seems to bother him not a bit. And his friends maintain that his Communism arises simply from boyish admiration of the Reds who fought with the Spanish Loyalists and in the French underground. "Pablo is too much of a revolutionary," they say, "to be a real Communist."
Seemingly politics has not affected his art, but love and a new vitality have. Today Picasso lives in a plainly furnished house near Vallauris (a potterymaking village just back of the Riviera coast) with a 26-year-old beauty named Françoise Gillot. She has given the old man two children and apparently a lease on youth. His joy at the turn in his life is expressed in his most recent work, which combines the serenity of his early "classical" paintings with a wealth of playful inventions lifted from all his past periods.
Ceramics like that of the two fighting centaurs (see color pages) show the Old Changeable at his lightest and gayest. Recently he has given them up to make huge, happy paintings and sculptures, superb line drawings of his children, and wooden dolls and animals for the kids to play with. Among his other works in progress are gold medallions engraved with twisted heads, and doves, seagulls and owls cut out of tin. One of the doves is nesting on her eggs—pebbles Picasso found on the beach.
Evolution, or Variation? After a bout of fast, hard work, Picasso makes a habit of hopping into his cream-colored Oldsmobile and rolling down to the beach at Golfe-Juan. There, surrounded by his family and a worshipful circle of younger artists, he sits and muses on one of the most varied, productive and controversial careers in art history.
"Repeatedly I am asked," he once grumbled, "to explain how my painting evolved . . . Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression, this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking ... It might be for the better or it might be for the worse."
That is certainly true of Picasso. To a somewhat lesser degree, it is also true of his contemporaries:
Henri Matisse is one whose brilliance equals Picasso's own. The ailing 80-year-pld master lives in a huge hotel apartment in Nice, spends most of his time in a bedroom hung with dozens of his own cheerful works and some of the darkest, dourest
Picassos in existence. At present he is completing designs for a Dominican chapel to be constructed in nearby Vence (TIME, Oct. 24). Like Picasso, Matisse has borrowed much from older art forms —especially Persian miniatures. But the important thing, he says, "is to keep the naiveté of childhood. You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover."