Ghoulish or Great?
Sir:
Your May 27 article on Picasso, assisted by wonderful reproductions, will be of much help in aiding the readers to understand and appreciate him. Picasso's art truly manifests the spirit of our wondrous age. No artist before him has been able to portray emotion on canvas in such a way.
HENRY MATTHEWS
Norwich, Conn.
Sir:
For a man who knows "there are vitamins even in garbage," Picasso has parlayed inventiveness into a sizable garbage can. Art always contains elements of invention, but invention is not necessarily art. The final caricature by this apocryphal "genius" is the comparison of himself with Raphael.
CHARLES B. ROGERS
Huntington Hartford Foundation Pacific Palisades, Calif.
Sir:
Your Picasso spread was one of the most interesting I have ever read. The reproductions are by far the finest I have seen, and will make a wonderful addition to my TIME art collection.
MARCIA KARSZEWSKI
Bowling Green, Ohio
Sir:
How can you possibly desecrate and denigrate art by publishing under its aegis those nightmarish horrors by Picasso? That legendary character is fooling no one but himself with his ghoulish atrocities. Of his more conventional paintings, the "Mother and Child" is a poor imitation of Michelangelo's.
W. G. SARGENT
South Bend, Wash.
Sir:
While rephrasing the standard cultist glosses of art-clown Picasso's work, your art editor must not have considered the more appropriate evaluation best expressed by Picasso himself: "I am only a public entertainer ... I am celebrated; I am rich. But when I am face to face with myself, I have not the courage to consider myself an artist in the great and ancient sense of the word . . ."
GERALD H. WHIPPLE Foxborough, Mass.
All in a Nutshell
In the May 13 issue you mentioned a 60-year-old Philadelphia woman who got a skin rash after gathering cashew nuts in Ceylon. When it is picked from the tree, the cashew nut is covered with a hard tough shell that has a thin layer of black oil underneath. This oil is quite corrosive to the skin. It is in the shell, however, which is left in India —in fact is used for fuel—and is not in the kernel that we eat.
In the processing plants here, the nuts are shelled by hand after being roasted to make the shell soft and brittle. The shelling is done by women. Each woman has a pan of ashes by her, and after shelling two or three nuts she dips her hands into the ashes, which protect the fingers from the corrosive oil. In this way they shell nuts all day, everyday, for weeks and months on end, and never have any skin trouble.
ROY SELLERS
U.S. Department of Agriculture Bombay
A Question of Race
Sir:
In describing Irish Gallant Man, unlucky second in the Kentucky Derby, as English-bred, TIME [May 20] has blundered and been unhorsed. The colt, by the Irish stallion Migoli out of the Irish mare Majideh, was foaled and reared at the Aga Khan's stud in County Kildare, Ireland, at whose studs in that county both his sire and dam were foaled.
D. L. KELLY
Editor
Irish Racing & Breeding Dublin