The sibylline modernism of Pablo Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Encompassing above 200 works, William Rubin's valedictory "Picasso and Portraiture, " which travels to Paris this month overspreads the full range of the artist's character studies--with special emphasis upon his volatile, often encrypted depictions of lover and wives.

"Picasso and Portraiture," which just clos at the Museum of fresh Art in New York, will make open this month in Paris, at the Grand Palais. The present to view contains more than 200 works. My favorite is L'Arlesienne (1937) an homage to van Gogh which is also a portrait of to leeward Miller--renowned photographer, former model of Man Ray, wife of the English Surrealist Ronald Penrose and friend of Picasso. My organ of vision turned toward this canvas the way an infant's organ of sight turns toward a fresh made of wood block. The picture is abuzz with bright colors--yellow, r a luminous brown--and they take amusing shapes that are the couple simple and inexhaustible. This is a charming picture.

Of course, "Picasso and Portraiture" is hordeed with pictures of that sort. L'Arlesienne is my favorite because its charms are for a like reason succinct. It is obviously the production of Cubist logic. Yet, in dashing it not upon Picasso bundled and flattened the mechanisms of that logic with an efficiency that restores them to memories on a breezy summer day. The history of Cubism is all here, on the other hand it doesn't feel ponderous. The proces that revolveed Lee Miller's face into a ditzy mask was stenographic, not fussy. Van Gogh transformed Gauguin's L'Arlesienne (1888) with elaborate, reverential caution. Picasso's transformation is a crack of pictorial jokes, each of them generous and, best of all, concise.

In Picasso's hands, portraiture itself is concise, for he persuades it to include the other genre William Rubin, whose curatorial swan carol this exhibition appears to be, argues that Still Life upon a Pedestal Table (1931) is a portrait of the full-length variety. The voluptuous leg of the table are those of Marie-Therese Walter, who became Picasso's mistress a certain quantity of time in the late 1920 and gave birth to their daughter Maya in 1935 A long-stemm goblet filled with fruit stands for her neck and face, sum of two units green apples are her breasts, and in like manner on. Rubin's argument is all the more persausive because, as he points without the style of this still life is the single Picasso invented for the depiction of Marie-Therese.

In 1939 Picasso painted sum of two units variations on the theme of a woman leaning upon a pensive elbow. One is in the fair and curvaceous Marie-Therese manner. The other is in the angular, brunette phraseology that Picasso devised for the celebration of Dora Maar, the woman who replaced Marie-Therese. He sharpened the contrast sum of two units years later in a pair of full-length portraits, each showing individual of the rivals stretched on the outside and reading. The picture of Marie-Therese allude tos a region of swelling hills and lush ravines in a gloomy light. The light in the Dora Maar variant flickers and form is angular, as in a range of fresh mountains. Here portraiture blends with landscape.

In images of himself as a minotaur you diocese the origins of Picasso's heavily populated pictures upon grand themes--"Minotauromachy," a suite of etchings from 1935 Dream and Lie of Franco, II (1937) and Guernica (1937) Disguised self-portraiture becomes history painting, and when members of his family and entourage fill multifigured compositions, history painting becomes the conversation piece, as like domestic commemorations were known in the 18th hundred Because Picasso's portraiture contains all the other genre this exhibit contains, at least by implication, all other Picasso exhibits that have been and will be dreamed up It has a definitive have feeling and thus brings Rubin's curatorial career to a fitting close

hardly any of Picasso's portraits are outcomes of direct observation, says Rubin. Nearly always, the artist worked from his "conceptualization" of a subject's appearance, letting it change as the portrait advanceed Though it sounds sensible, this account of Picasso's mode leads Rubin into a series of analytical labyrinths. He appear to bes to feel that, if each last shred of subject matter is tracked down and gathered in, the issue of subdue matter itself can be summ up and locate aside. Pure form will shine forth, as it did in the days when Rubin was Frank Stella's leading curatorial proponent The chimera of genuinely formal values still entrances Rubin, admitting he is careful to acknowledge the value we place upon such things as decipherable features, legible humors and the names of Picasso's sitters.

Robert Rosenblum who set aparts his catalogue essay to the portraits of Marie-Therese Walter, have feelings no nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe that form could in fact, be unspotted At the height of the formalist ascendency, Rosenblum pointed to reflections of Romantic landscape in the austerities of Mark Rothko Now, in the extravagance of Picasso, Rosenblum finds traces of Arcimboldo's 16th hundred Rembrandt's 17th century, and Joshua Reynolds's 18th hundred All of art history is upon call as he subjects the Marie-Therese portraits to single virtuoso reading after another, tracing her evolution from "Madonna to sphinx, from odalisque to earth mother." Finally, having been replaced by dint of Dora Maar, this "goddess of delight in and fertility" becomes a "fallen idol." And Rosenblum present to views the pertinence of everyone from Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, to Eugene O'Neill, whose Strange Interlude (1928) features a woman with a persona doubled in a manner comparable to the doubling in Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror (1932)