SKETCHBOOKS: PICASSO POWER

In Jean Cocteau’s wonderful old surrealist-film chestnut, “Orpheus,” a young poet broadcasts the line, “Whom Jupiter would destroy he first makes wise.” The line is not at first on one’s mind when viewing the new Picasso exhibition at the County Museum of Art--but it is by the end.

The exhibition is the widely heralded “Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso,” which kicked up paroxysms of critical rhapsody when it was shown at New York’s Pace Gallery earlier this year. And scant wonder. What we see here is the very last work of Picasso that remains unknown to the public, some 200 drawings from 45 sketchbooks selected from 175 volumes owned by the artist’s heirs.

The exhibition is not large. It occupies less than half the space in the Hammer Wing special exhibitions gallery (the rest being given over to a spread of Renaissance bronzes from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum). But what a show. Those people with the slightest pretense to a serious interest in art are going to kick themselves if they miss this briefly appearing comet. (It closes Jan. 25.)

Anybody who goes around jabbering that kind of endorsement had better have jolly good reason for it. Two. First, the sketchbooks distill the energy of Picasso’s long and varied career into a small package. Even those lucky enough to have seen Paris’ Picasso Museum or the huge retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art will find something new here. This is a capsule of Concentrated Picasso Power.

Second, drawing is very different from painting. (What an original thought!) In painting the artist can make each work into a whole orchestra, harmonizing the visual equivalents of brass, woodwinds, percussion and all that. Drawing is a single instrument, a violin if you like. It forces the artist to depend on his own ability to create significant nuances. Great artists play this instrument beautifully. Picasso was singular in his ability to change the violin into a trumpet into a kettle drum.

One is stunned by the ferocious virtuosity of even the earliest sheets. A portrait of a tough old beauty in a Barcelona bar blends the touch of Toulouse-Lautrec with the heat of El Greco.

There is not a moment of hesitation in it or any of the rest. He seemed to have somehow lasered the drawings onto paper directly from his mind like some magical mutant from “Star Trek.” Sizzle. A dancing harlequin. Sizzle. An elegant nude in African style. Sizzle. A mother-and-child drawing as magisterial and fully realized as a Renaissance presentation piece. And everything seems to be a preparation for a known painting, from the soulful wretches of the Blue Period to the crystalline displacements of Cubism. Given his vision, they seem a trifle unnecessary and probably attest to the fact that he really loved to draw. (Truth to tell, he was a dull paint handler and an ordinary colorist.)

Picasso was so much in the grip of his own awesome pyrotechnical talent that its very mastery and self-confidence threaten to feel creepy and alien. What always saves Picasso’s work from mere automaton skill and makes it great art is the self-evident fact that technique was ever in the service of authentic feeling.

Picasso must have been a bit of a monster, but he was a Bluebeard and a Minotaur caparisoned with an astonishingly complete range of human emotions and an ability to instantly call up or invent an art style that perfectly expressed the feeling. A Cubist drawing of a lounger at a cafe table is the utterly apt way to speak of youthful insouciance, iconoclastic invention and mordant insight. The bloated grotesques of his Surrealist phase are the haunted nightmares of a man who fears he is going mad along with his troubled wife.

Up to this point, about the only problem anybody has with the exhibition is little tingles at the ends of fingers wishing they could turn the pages of these rich little note pads locked up in vitrines. What’s on the next page? (Those consumed by curiosity may want to look into the expensive $65 book-catalogue for the show. It’s nice, but with blow-ups and photo reproductions, the installation shows about as much of the material.)

Anyway, sometime in the ‘50s something begins to happen to these drawings. They become evermore cartoony and design-like. Some series of, say, monkey’s heads or odalisques actually look like preparation for animated films.

They are evermore dominated by a single emotion, and it is not an emotion most people either experience or appreciate. That’s when you start thinking about Cocteau’s line about Jupiter making wise whom he would destroy.

The late drawings are rendered with the Olympian detachment of somebody who has seen, done and had everything. These silly old men and vacuous, pretty models are rendered with a certain wry contempt that includes the artist himself and his talent. Sometimes he seems to be smirking over his shoulder at us and saying, “Hey, get a load of this. I can do this drawing without looking at it.”

Art done during old age sometimes has the unsettling quality of reports sent back from another world by someone who no longer has any stake in this life. Goya saw the world as purgatorial and predatory. In the film “Ran,” Kurosawa said amen to that but joined Goya in finding a certain awesome profundity in it all. Picasso, the ironical old European Pan, evoked classic mythology but seemed to scan the world as a shallower spectacle.