A final word: the advent of a swan into a room starts stirring in some persons a decided sense of discomfort. If one is to believe these swan “allergics,” their hostility does not derive from envy, but, so they suggest, from a shadow of “coldness” and “unreality” the swan casts. Yet isn’t it true that an impression of coldness, usually false, accompanies perfection? And might it not be that what the critics actually feel is fear? In the presence of the very beautiful, as in the presence of the immensely intelligent, terror contributes to our over-all reaction, and it is as much fright as appreciation which causes the stabbed-by-an-icicle chill that for a moment murders us when a swan swims into view.
PABLO PICASSO
In 1981 our world, granted it is still orbiting, will celebrate Picasso’s centenary. Of course, because he has that kind of luck, the great man will be on hand; and available, as usual, to all mediums of publicity: very likely on this occasion television will display him in the buff, as befits a god-creature quite beyond the laws of human decorum. Born in Malaga, a country of figs and stone and guitars, Picasso was a child-prodigy who stayed one: that is, remained a prodigy and something of a child, a man inhabited by a boy’s fooling-around impatience, hatred of system, fresh-eyed curiosity: “Pablo,” to quote his oldest friend, Jaime Sabartes, “is preeminently a sum of curiosities. He has more curiosity than a thousand million women.”
When Picasso was thirteen his father, an acrimonious Andalusian art-teacher who ground out greeting-card still lifes for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, gave over to his son his palette and brushes and never painted again; which was, in its way, Picasso’s first conquest—he went on to strew the century with painters overshadowed by him or altogether put to pasture. Queer, come to think of it, why some of these fellows have not united to assassinate this octopus of art; for, though not the master of Matisse and unpossessed by Braque’s compositional strength, Picasso has, via vivacious gall and a bottomless plethora of inventional surprises, outrun them all: he is the winner.
COCO CHANEL
Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, midnight in one of her nonstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these decades modeled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman,” the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco,” daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white? Neither, she answered—what she preferred, Chéri, were the stakings to start a little shop.
Thus emerged Chanel, the fashion-visionary. Whether or not the productions of a dressmaker can be called important “cultural” contributions (and perhaps they can: a Mainbocher, a Balenciaga, are men of more authentic creative significance than several platoons of poets and composers who rise to mind) is uninteresting; but a career woman impure and simple like Chanel arouses a documentary interest, the sum of which is partially totaled in these photographs of her changeling’s face, at one angle a darling dangling in a heart-shaped locket, at another an arid and avid go-getter—observe the striving in the taut stem of her neck: one thinks of a plant, an old hardy perennial still pushing toward, though now a touch parched by, the sun of success that, for those talented inconsolables primed with desire and fueled with ego and whose relentless energy propels the engine that hauls along the lethargic rest of us, invariably flourishes in the frigid sky of ambition. Chanel lives alone in an apartment across the street from the Ritz.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Duchamp, born in Rouen, the third son of a multi-membered middle-class family, many of whom were artistically inclined, has lived in New York since 1915. During these forty-four years of American residence he has dabbled away at only one painting (Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—an oil, on transparent glass, the size of a church window), and finished none; for all practical purposes, he abandoned painting in 1913, the year his Nude Descending a Staircase (of which a contemporary critic remarked, “Whirl around three times, bump your head twice against the wall, and if you bump hard enough the meaning will be perfectly obvious”) was the drunkmaking sensation of some sixteen hundred forerunner experiments on view at the historic Armory show. “But,” protests Duchamp, “not to paint doesn’t mean I’ve given up art.
All good painters have only about five masterpieces to their name. The others are not vital. The five have the force of shock. Shock is good. If I’ve done five good things, it’s enough. Or you might say that instead of dying like Seurat at thirty-one, I am a man whose inspiration for painting stopped, eh?”
His inspiration, at all events his talent, for playing games with art, wherein resides the kindergar-tenish and nowadays altogether shockless charm of his paintings, has not lain entirely fallow: in his infinite spare time he has concocted surrealist perfume bottles, made a pioneer abstract film, involved himself in interior decoration (ceilings swathed in coal sacks), devised a portable Duchamp museum fitted with miniatures of his best-known works (also a phial containing “Parisian Air”), and invented for himself other fraudulent forms of art-toy; but what seems to concern him sincerely is chess, a more serious style of fun, a subject around which he has improvised the most recherché volume possible: a thousand copies were printed in three languages, and (hold on to your berets) the title goes Opposition et Cases Conjuguées, Opposition und Schwesterfelder, Opposition and Sister Squares.
Duchamp explains that “It all has to do with blocked pawns, when your only means of winning is by moves of kings. This happens only once in a thousand times. And why,” he adds, “why isn’t my chess playing an art activity? A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It’s mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the heads and hands. Besides, it’s purer, socially, than painting, for you can’t make money out of chess, eh?”
And supposing you could, undoubtedly Duchamp wouldn’t: he has often expressed anti-lucre sentiments amounting to a financial allergy (“No! Painting shouldn’t become a fashionable thing. And money, money, money comes in, and it becomes a Wall Street office”); certainly very little about his living quarters, a fourth-floor walkup in a soiled and sullen brownstone on an unprepossessing Manhattan sidestreet, implies limousine standards; the flat, done up in a sort of flapper-period of modern artiness, boasts nothing rain might harm, except a small Matisse and a large Miró: as a sanctuary, it speaks of a man who would be himself, reasonably free and unbeholden.
Downstairs, there is on the mailbox a nameplate dingy but dazzling; it reads: “Matisse-Duchamp-Ernst.” Because, you see, the present Madame Duchamp is the former Madame Matisse, wife of the great man’s son Pierre; as for Ernst, that is boyishly pink and silvery Surrealist Max, the apartment’s onetime tenant. The order of the names, the billing, as it were, seems an appropriate artistic judgment.
JEAN COCTEAU AND ANDRÉ GIDE
André Gide, that moralizing immoralist, a writer favored with sincerity but denied imagination, quite disapproved of Jean Cocteau, whose gifts the mischievous muses had reversed, making of him, both as man and artist, a creature vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere. It is interesting, then, that Gide should have authored the most accurate, and for that reason most sympathetic, description of our eldest terrible child.
Gide is writing in his journal; the time is August, 1914. “Jean Cocteau had arranged to meet me in an ‘English tearoom’ on the corner of the rue de Ponthieu and the avenue d’Antin. I had no pleasure in seeing him again, despite his extreme kindness; but he is incapable of seriousness, and all his thoughts, his witticisms, his sensations, all the extraordinary brilliance of his customary conversation shocked me like a luxury article displayed in a period of famine and mourning. He is dressed almost like a soldier, and the fillip of the present events has made him look healthier.
He is relinquishing nothing, but simply giving a martial twist to his usual liveliness. When speaking of the slaughter of Mulhouse he uses amusing adjectives and mimicry; he imitates the bugle call and the whistling of the shrapnel. Then, changing subjects since he sees he is not amusing me, he claims to be sad; he wants to be sad with the same kind of sadness as you, and suddenly he adopts your mood and explains it to you.
Then he talks of Blanche, mimics Mme. R. and talks of the lady at the Red Cross who shouted on the stairway, ‘I was promised fifty wounded men for this morning; I want my fifty wounded men.’ Meanwhile he is crushing a piece of plum cake in his plate and nibbling it; his voice rises suddenly and has odd twists; he laughs, leans forward, bends toward you and touches you. The odd thing is that I think he would make a
