THE JILTED PICASSO WANDERING IN THE ART WILDERNESS

Author: By Cate McQuaid

Date: SUNDAY, February 15, 1998

Page: E3

Section: Books

The master, horrified and abashed, turned in on himself. He began to dabble in classicism, to draw portraits in the style of Ingres. His paintings, collages, and drawings were pastiches, quoting not just Ingres but Toulouse-Lautrec, Braque, Corot, and Renoir -- quoting himself, for that matter. As Rosalind Krauss observes of this breakdown of Picasso's art, ``Between 1916 and 1924, Picasso did increasingly fatuous work.''

In ``The Picasso Papers,'' Krauss -- a professor of art history at Columbia University and the author of three previous books on modernism -- examines Picasso's dilemma from all sides. She places the modernist movement in the social and economic context of the time, drawing not only on Picasso's work but on that of Stravinsky, Dostoyevsky, Schoenberg, and Gide.

The early part of the century was a time of forsaking the signified for the sign. Paper money took the place of the gold standard. Newspapers gave ordinary people a few minutes of glory, publicizing tragedies that previously would have passed unnoticed except by those involved. Typography and the compartmentalization of stories in newspapers gave readers a whole new way to envision their world, as an ordered polyphony. Events and objects grew secondary to their representation, which became invested with a different kind of meaning. Society was becoming a hall of mirrors, in which it wasn't clear which was more potent, the reflected or the reflection, or even the reflection three or four times removed.

Picasso's collages dating from 1910 to 1913 reflect and embody these trends. A piece like ``Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass and Newspaper'' (1913) is packed with shapes reflecting each other, flipping a viewer's reading of the painting from figure to ground, from transparent to opaque.

The collages are brilliant, a natural extension of the artist's cubist explorations in painting and pen, giving even more emphasis to the planar quality of his vision. So what went wrong thereafter?

Krauss points the finger at Francis Picabia, an artist who took cubism and turned it into a fascination with the mechanical and with abstraction. He was an early Andy Warhol. His art was clever and facile, representing people as machines (his portrait of Alfred Stieglitz was in fact a picture of a camera). And occasionally it explicitly mocked Picasso.

It's almost as if Picasso, the great lover, the great artist with the fragile ego, had been cuckolded. Cubism was no longer his, nor was it any longer what he had nurtured so dearly. His classical portraits were a way for him to skulk off with his tail between his legs.

To explain this turn of events, Krauss applies the Freudian construct of ``reaction formation'' -- a pattern of behavior that both staves off the undesirable action (which in this case, I suppose, would be succumbing to Picabia's worldview) and, in a perverse way, incorporates it. For while Picasso was executing his Ingres-esque portrait of Stravinsky (1920), or ``The Sisley Family (After Renoir)'' (1919), he was being as facile, indeed as mechanical as Picabia.

Even his more cubist works, like the ``Balconies'' series of drawings, pastels, gouaches, and prints exhibited in 1919, lacked the clear energy of Picasso's earlier collages. They reacted against a mechanical, serialized, de-skilled means of making art, rather than making statements in themselves.

In the first three quarters of her book, Krauss makes a strong, convincing argument, applying this psychological model without falling into the pit of the artist's no doubt roiling subconscious -- a place she could neither justify visiting nor ever, truly, escape. ``The Picasso Papers'' is nonetheless a struggle to read. Her language is that of the theoretician, often turgid, only occasionally fresh.

The book's structure adds to the confusion. Krauss follows one line of thought to its satisfying conclusion, then jumps somewhere completely different, taking too many pages to circle back to her basic argument.

The easiest chapter to read is the last, ``Dime Novels.'' It's also the most questionable. Here, Krauss explores Picasso's relationships: with Fernande Olivier, his mistress of eight years until he left her in 1911, and with Marie-Therese Walter, a 17-year-old with whom he became involved in 1927. He kept that relationship a secret for years after Walter came of age.

First Krauss debunks Olivier's writings as romantic fabrications, and wonders about the quality of her relationship with Picasso when she was apparently such a featherhead. Then, more importantly, Krauss questions the necessity of keeping Walter a secret. She suggests that his reaction formation to the growth of cubism beyond his control not only brought about his commitment to pastiche, but also was ``the hook that addicts him to secrecy.'' His secrecy, Krauss argues, plays itself out in obsessional, encoded paintings.

The idea of examining how secrecy motivated Picasso is a good one. It's just too big for this chapter. It should be a book in itself -- a big book, as much biography as art theory. But to pin Picasso's so-called addiction to secrecy on his reaction to a movement in the art world that occurred when he was well into his maturity as an artist seems naive. The roots of such behavior must be deeper than that.

``The Picasso Papers'' is a rich book, layered with scintillating, well-argued social and art theory. If Krauss writes a follow-up, though, that will be a truly juicy read.