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Maurice de Vlaminck thinks the trouble is not too much culture but "too damned many artists and would-be artists." Huge and still volcanic at 74, he calls himself "a simple farmer." Vlaminck almost never forsakes his farm for Paris. "What would I do there," he snaps, "see the movies?" He once remarked that he would like to paint pictures that could be recognized as Vlamincks even from a speeding car. His stormy landscapes, painted thickly with bold strokes, succeed in that ambition, but nowadays a lot of fellow artists speed right on by Vlaminck's little roadside stand. He retaliates by heaping scorn on his contemporaries, who have accused him (as well as Derain) of collaborating with the Germans during the war. "French art is dead," Vlaminck roars, "and Picasso is its gravedigger. He is not an artist, he is a virtuoso who changes his act every week."
Raoul Dufy, a 73-year-old wisp of a man, is now in the U.S. undergoing treatment for arthritis in a Massachusetts hospital. He works every day at his art, sometimes sketching on hospital doilies with a pencil gripped between his thumb and stiffened forefinger. Dufy long ago reduced the impressionist techniques of his predecessors to a highly personal but perfectly legible shorthand. Today his work is as cheerful and heady as ever; he has no illusions about its depth. One of the most charming masters of the atmospheric sketch who ever lived, Dufy maintains that "classicism is perfection. Unfortunately, I do not have perfection."
End of the Struggle. Individualists all, Pablo Picasso and his contemporaries have long since won the case for individualistic, self-expressive painting. Artists like Tintoretto in the 16th Century and Rembrandt in the 17th had won skirmishes in the same campaign. The Paris school has won it for all of modern art. As Frenchman André Malraux puts it in his Psychology of Art: "The long-drawn struggle between officialdom and the pioneers . . . draws to a close. Everywhere except in Soviet Russia [the moderns] are triumphant."
Modern painting, says Malraux, is now a law unto itself which has replaced traditional art with "a system of research and exploration. In this quest the artist (and perhaps modern man in general) knows only his starting point, his methods and his bearings—no more than these—and follows in the steps of the great sea venturers."
Picasso and his contemporaries are nearing the end of their journey. To some seasick critics it has seemed a trip aboard a Walloping Window Blind, but no one can deny that it has vastly broadened the horizons of art. That fact alone assures Captain Pablo and his shipmates an important place in art history.
But will their works loom large in the museums of the future? In Picasso's case there will have to be a lot of weeding out first. His casual absorption of ideas from any & all sources sometimes gives his work a synthetic, prefabricated air. And Picasso is not the least embarrassed by a poor showing. He paints as rapidly as any living artist, and since, like other mortals, he has his off days, much of what he paints is hardly worth a second glance.