Picasso, or the modern artist as despot and advertising tyrant

Riccardo Bacchelli had a vivid youthful memory of Picasso, an ungrateful memory. He was then, 1911, practicing as editorial secretary at Prezzolini’s Voce, even putting articles on the page. “For some time,” Prezzolini would write in Il tempo della Voce, “Bacchelli helped or substituted for Prezzolini in compiling issues of the periodical, as Slataper had done.” But it was a late snub: “there is here in Florence a young man, Bacchelli from Bologna, who will make him the Voce this summer under the name of Papini, and later he will serve as my secretary,” he wrote in fact on July 16, 1912, to Alessandro Casati, who financed the newspaper, including Bacchelli’s regular salary.

The recollection was of the revision and layout of Ardengo Soffici’s endless article Picasso and Braque , published on August 24, 1911. “It seemed to me,” Bacchelli would write in 1949, “an ingenious and sterile curiosity, an aberration of critical rationalism, exasperated and driven by its own emptiness, to become a consequential mania.” Soffici’s cubist discovery then contributed nothing less than to the split from the Voce of Gaetano Salvemini, the paper’s political columnist, who founded his L’Unità:“Among the ’friends of the Voce,’” he had immediately written to Prezzolini, "some are passionate about the articles on Verbicaro and enjoy the articles on Picasso; others are passionate and fisticuffs perhaps about Picasso and don’t give a damn about Verbicaro [ed: in Verbicaro, Cosenza, a cholera epidemic had in those days caused a riot that was harshly suppressed]... It is evident that it is not possible to go longer together.“ Bacchelli himself, at the end of a year, would detach himself from it: ”after solemn accusations of aestheticism, I distanced myself from it with Scipio Slataper, who was partly right and partly wrong. Need it be said that there were quarrels and outrages? Peace!"

“An ingenious and sterile curiosity” by Soffici: of this impression so persistent after thirty-eight years (he wrote thirty-six, not the only inaccuracy; it is then interesting that twice there recurs that ironic “amusing” used by Salvemini), he made the cue for a short essay of rare vehemence against Picasso. Of whose work, he specified, he did not intend "to make a properly critical examination but, as they used to say, a physiology." Published on June 11, 1949 in Mario Pannunzio’s Il Mondo, it was aggressive right from the title, Picasso despot and tyrant, with that sophisticated doubling of epithets synonymous with one another. A more derogatory title in reality, having been reduced certainly for typographical exigency, as will be seen from the reprint in Critical Essays (Mondadori 1962): Picasso, that is, the modern artist as despot and advertising tyrant.

The article corresponded perfectly to the line of the weekly, created by Pannunzio to promote an intransigently anti-communist political “third force.” The demolition of Picasso is in fact a sumptuous, baroque sample of the cultural cold war, given the condition of the vast popularity he had achieved in Italy in that 1949, culminating in major exhibitions in Rome and Milan (here above all, thanks to the rocambolic obtaining of Guernica, which Rachele Ferrario’s recent book has again documented).

It followed and preceded a variety of contributions: Piero Dorazio, for example, argued that Picasso, as well as Cézanne and Matisse, was responsible for that “fracture that exists today between the public and art”; the philosopher Panfilo Gentile declared that he belonged to the “zootechnical plebs (who) until today have failed to admire Picasso”; Paolo Monelli, who had accompanied Picasso on a visit to the Vatican and sat next to him at a famous lunch at the trattoria “La Cisterna” after the Council for Peace, indignantly reported that “the young Picassians had looked at Picasso like the actor at the prompter.”

Picasso’s Italian popularity had begun with an exhibition at the 1948 Biennale, which was followed by three very successful gallery shows in Venice, Rome (this one, it seems, traveling) and Milan. In Rome, moreover, Picasso, who had been a member of the French Communist Party since 1944, participated precisely on October 30, 1949, in the Council of Partisans for Peace, for which he had drawn the symbol of the Dove, rising, as in France, to the emblem (not unchallenged ) of the artist engagé . The Corriere d’Informazione, for example, on March 29 had taken up from the Parisian Figaro the announcement that “the Communists have urged the painter, to design a sign on which the dove of peace will appear,” pointing out how the conservative newspaper had “favorably emphasized it.”

Precisely this appears to be the opportunity seized by Bacchelli: “Picasso’s art will not be saved by political posters, which it seems he intends to access. But in this regard it must also be said that Picasso’s communism, about the sincerity of which I do not allow myself to raise the slightest doubt, is an intimidating instrument.” The medium through which it realizes and imposes itself is publicity: “he constitutes in this age of publicity to the point of bawdiness, a true enigma of reserve and discretion” [but] he is in fact the most indiscreet and flamboyant and flamboyant artistic phenomenon of today’s garrulous and meddlesome publicitarianism. [...] He is condemned to be the ’creator,’ in the sense that one uses the word precisely in the emphatic and fatuous and pretentious jargon of the ’great tailors,’ of the ’models’ of a fashion, of his own. ’Models’ equally seasonal."

In the conclusion, Bacchelli returns to the political aspect of the phenomenon: “That his art is as unpopular as can be imagined, one need not even say, but it is worth noting how communism is apt to disconcert the Picassians and its true public [...], making the hypothesis that Picasso’s painting is assumed and imposed as art for communists. Arriving by such a hypothetical way to the people, it would baffle the communists even more than the capitalist and snobbish bourgeois. By now it is quite well known, indeed a commonplace, that the historical defect of the bourgeois classes is fear. On the fear of not understanding it, which is widespread, the Picassian vogue works effectively, which works, also effectively, on that other fear, also widespread, which weak artists and intellectuals in general have, of not being in the vanguard.”

So much bitterness and fury against an international sacred monster of art and politics, by a national sacred monster of literature, was completely ignored, except for the bare record in the Bibliographical Endorsements of the encyclopedic Enrico Falqui (and to say that, for Picasso, Falqui had a transport of his own). Francesco Arcangeli himself, who was a friend of his, would not mention him in the 1953 essay, Picasso, a “reciting voice,” 32 dense pages two of them of exergue, from Argan to Lionello Venturi, to “briefly take the reader to the heart of the enormous wave of resonance that the master’s work has provoked within the minds of the intellectuals of our time.” Thus, at the very moment of being published, Bacchelli’s Physiology sank (equally after the volume reprint).

The first trace, which remained solitary, would surface in 1979, in the book Intellectuals and the PCI. 1944-1958 by Nello Ajello, who in the “World” had written and had the political intelligence to appreciate the value of that critique of Picasso: “His qualification as a ’comrade,’” he writes, “makes him palatable to militants, but, if he really became popular, his painting [ed: so imagines in 1949 a ”conservative“ like Riccardo Bacchelli] would baffle the communists even more than the capitalist, snobbish bourgeoisie.” For more news we will then have to wait for two fine university researches by Lorenzo Nuovo (2009), who also gave a brief summary, and Romina Viggiano (2018).

The communists (artists, critics, party leaders starting with Togliatti) were in 1949 at the height of an ideological controversy on realism, cubism and abstractionism that dated back to 1944, in newly liberated Rome, and that had seen at its center the judgment on Picasso; a controversy all the more delicate and insidious because of the aversion and distrust of which he was the object in the Soviet Union, under the accusation of decadent formalism. On one side were the Guttuso, Trombadori, Mario De Micheli; on the other were the Turcato and Corpora. Togliatti had opened the controversy with a scathing “Note” on the group exhibition set up in 1948 in Bologna: “a collection of horrors and nonsense... perhaps they think that in order to appear ’men of culture’ it is necessary, in front of these things, to give oneself the air of connoisseur and superman and to babble nonsensical phrases.” To a resentful protest from the artists (including Guttuso), Togliatti replied, “would you rather be among yourselves, attributing unsuspected metaphysical or polemical values to your geometric and anatomical oddities? Too bad for all of us: we will find relief not in a collection of photographs, but in an album, if you will, of the most paradoxical Goya.”

The sarcasm of the “anatomical oddities,” the quotation of Goya, ring of unequivocal allusions. After the 1946 election defeat, Togliatti, in a speech found by Ugo Finetti, had lashed out among others against “the so-called intellectuals of high culture, who are sometimes oddballs, the intellectuals who appreciate Picasso’s paintings.” “He laughed at Picasso,” wrote Italo De Feo, then his secretary, “saying that in only one thing had he been very good: in having given it to foolish people.”

“We understand nothing,” the retort to the artists concluded, “of your studied, cold, inexpressive and ultra-academic extravagances, they speak of nothing to us and to the common of men except perhaps of an unattained intellectual and artistic equilibrium.” That is to say, Bacchelli had caught and struck a central nerve in communist cultural policy, which explains (beyond other reasons that can be surmised, but it would be a futile exercise) the absolute silencing of the despot and tyrant Picasso in the very rich, then, PCI press and publicity. In support of the political inappropriateness, will have then played the euphoria of worldliness, not without grotesque tips, that was spread over Picasso’s Roman sojourn. Mention has already been made of the lunch at the “Cisterna,” which L’Unità of October 30 chronicled on its third page, pointing out among the guests Guttuso, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, who made “the toast on behalf of the Roman intellectuals,” Palma Bucarelli alongside Picasso, Moravia, Giulio Einaudi. There had been another one, the day before, at Piperno’s, in the Ghetto: Carlo Muscetta recounts it in his memoirs. The table was “presided over by Picasso, who had next to him a young Calabrese, Rita Pisano,” whom he made a pencil portrait of at the suggestion of Muscetta himself, who was then “ready,” as he writes, “to take it out of his hand.” A great evening took place at Luchino Visconti’s house, recounted in a small book by Ugo Pirro, in which Picasso figures as the prize of a treasure hunt between Turcato and Consagra, who wanted to convince him to their artistic-political reasons.

Acute, and this anticipatory, was then Bacchelli’s denunciation of “publicitarianism” as the heart of Picasso’s art, the reduction of art to spectacle or fashion atelier phenomenon. But no one cared about this, if anyone noticed.

Or probably Giovanni Papini did notice (and plagiarized it), in the “new diary of Gog” published just two years later (1951, Il libro nero, Vallecchi), in which there is an apocryphal interview with Picasso that will have even international aftermaths until the mid-1960s, as reported by the usual Falqui. “By dint of having a good time,” put Papini in Picasso’s mouth, “with all these games, these funambulisms, with the puzzles, the rebuses and the arabesques, I became famous quite soon. And celebrity means, for a painter, sales, earnings, fortune, wealth... I am only an ’amuseur public’ who understood his time and exploited, as best he knew how, the imbecility, vanity and greed of his contemporaries.”

The exhibition, in 1953. at the National Gallery in Rome, will instead give Pasolini the material for a vast exercise in painful populism(Picasso), elaborated in a very literary language and rhetoric, with which he reproaches Picasso for “failing,” Carlo Salinari will comment, “to escape the voluntaristic error.” “... He - among the enemies / of the class he mirrors, the most cruel, / as long as he remained within the time of it / - enemy by fury and by babelic / anarchy, necessary caries - goes out / among the people and gives in a nonexistent time: / ... Ah, it is not in the feeling / of the people this ruthless Peace of his, / this idyll of white urangues. Absent / is from here the people: whose buzz is silent / in these canvases, in these halls, how much / outside happily explodes....”

The literary appendix to the “Italian” Picasso ends in 1957. Published by Garzanti, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de viaMerulana comes out in bookstores, where Bacchelli’s indictment receives a pyrotechnic homage, tacit but unequivocal. In chapter nine, page 293 (now Adelphi 261), during Brigadier Pestalozzi’s chaotic search of Zamira’s hovel. Bacchelli had written that Picasso “is estranged or lied to by the human; if he seeks it out, he substitutes it with a squalor, unintentionally caricatured and grotesque, of exacerbated and expressionistic signs.”

“The devil, for the girl [the Mattonari Camilla], had turned into a hen,” his great friend Gadda now wrote. “She was recording with a mad pupil and reckoning with a retina: with that side-eye that chickens have that looks like a Picasso gimmick, a toilet porthole, of a toilet empty of all understanding and all aptitude for spying, port or starboard.”

Bibliography

Nello Ajello, Intellectuals and the PCI. 1944 - 1958, Laterza, Bari 1979

Francesco Arcangeli, Picasso, “acting voice,”“Paragone,” no. 47, 1953

Alberto Asor Rosa, Writers and the People. Saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Samonà e Savelli, Rome 1965

Luciano Caramel (ed.), Art in Italy 1945 - 1959, Vita e Pensiero, no. ed., Milan 2013

Italo De Feo, Three years with Togliatti, Mursia, Milan 1971

Enrico Falqui, Criticism, in Pezze d’appoggio, Casini, Rome 1951

Enrico Falqui, Papini versus Picasso, in La gran baraonda, Aldo Martello, Milan 1966

Rachele Ferrario, La contesa su Picasso. Fernanda Wittgens and Palma Bucarelli, La Tartaruga, Milan 2024

Ugo Finetti, Togliatti and Amendola. The political struggle in the PCI, Ares, Milan 2008

Andrea Guiso, The Dove and the Sword. “Fight for peace” and anti-Americanism in the politics of the Italian Communist Party (1949 - 1954), Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2006

Luisa Mangoni, Thinking about Books. The Einaudi publishing house from the 1930s to the 1960s, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1999

Nicoletta Misler, The Italian Way to Realism. La politica culturale artistica del P.C.I. dal 1944 al 1956, Mazzotta, Milan 1973

Carlo Muscetta, L’erranza. Memoir in the form of letters, edited by Salvatore S. Nigro, Sellerio, Palermo 2009

Lorenzo Nuovo, The art page of Mario Pannunzio’s “Il Mondo” (1949 - 1966), Edizioni della Laguna, Mariano del Friuli 2010

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Picasso, “Botteghe Oscure,” XII, November 1953, later in Le ceneri di Gramsci, Garzanti, Milan 1957

Chiara Perin, Guttuso and Realism in Italy. 1944 - 1954, Silvana, Cinisello Balsamo 2020

Ugo Pirro, Osteria dei pittori, with a note by Angelo Guglielmi, Sellerio, Palermo 1994

Giuseppe Prezzolini, Il tempo della Voce, Longanesi-Vallecchi, Milan-Florence 1960

Carlo Salinari, The Question of Realism. Poets and narrators of the twentieth century, Parenti, Florence 1960

Marco Veglia, La vita anteriore. Family and literary history of Riccardo Bacchelli (1891-1914), Il Mulino, Bologna 2019

Romina Viggiano, Spain at the First Biennales after World War II. La ricezione della stampa, “Storie della Biennale di Venezia,” Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, Venice 2019

RICCARDO BACCHELLI

Picasso, or the modern artist as despot and advertising tyrant

Thirty-six years ago I was editing the Voce fiorentina, and so it was that I found myself passing in composition and putting on the page an article by Soffici, with reproductions, giving news of the latest Parisian artistic novelty: the Cubism of the painters Picasso and Braque.

It seemed to me an ingenious and sterile curiosity, a clever and intellectual contrivance, an aberration of critical rationalism, exasperated and driven by its own emptiness to become a consequential mania. And today, at least in its original geometrizing orthodoxy, by all, if I am not mistaken, judged in the same way.

They say: necessary experience. I will say that, too; but how many curious referees pass under this label! Drama, it is also said; and certainly the sterility of imagination surrogated by intellectualistic abstractions, is drama of the artists who suffer from it (by which is meant those who do not speculate on it), and of the age, and of the spirit; but how many such dramas are useless, painful chiefly in that they are useless!

And they did not begin today. The history of arts and letters is full of them, especially in epochs, like ours, of intense aesthetic culture and exhaustion of the imagination: conditions both favorable to forced cultivation. From which arises that statistical abundance of products in themselves scarce and destitute, that application of technical and stylistic formulas on the deficiency of creative force, which are the affliction and misfortune of ’epoch of ours, There arises from it, indeed, that sterile and superfluous search for formulas contrived in and out of emptiness,1 that search for novelty, where what is properly lacking is any new thing to be said; and the error, there arises from it, of so much of thepresent-day literary and figurative and musical and architectural art, which ignores and despises in principle that the search for new forms and expressions, and in short for new languages and techniques, has to follow and not precede a richness and novelty of intuition and imagination and feeling; and that the search for novelty must be conditioned and necessitated by that which is already possessed, naturally new, for originality is a thing that belongs to the originating nature, while to the intellectual belongs the rule; and when they exchange parts, they harm each other. Finally, if native originality will never be too much, reflective intellect will never be sober enough. In the opposite practice, which is of so much of today’s artists, even the major ones, consists and originates an intellectualistic disease, dramatic certainly, like any disease, but which for that matter does not cease to be a disease.

As a deviser of forms, Picasso is the greatest and least sober, and most ingenious and most intelligent: for this, the most morbid of all. So that his case is not so much artistic and aesthetic as psychological, moral, social and political. In saying political, I am not referring to his professed communism, just as in saying that he is not an artistic case I do not mean to deny that he is an artist.

He is an artist, exactly, as much as is necessary and sufficient for the execution of formulas, of finds, which serve to impose a program of domination and intellectual overpower. Picasso is both admirable and detestable. Admirable is the consistency and logical and formal rigor with which he inhibits himself and rejects any quality that, betraying the formule, makes it in any way persuasive and unintimidating; detestable in itself, the intimidation. And, for me, I both admire and detest the man and the artist, lucid, cool, highly intelligent, voluntary; in art and in life, and in the style in which they propose themselves to the world, lofty, austere, reserved, so much so that he constitutes, in this age of publicity to the point of bawdiness, a true enigma of reserve and discretion.

I am far, therefore, from explaining offensively and crudely his reserve as the most astute and effective advertising and reclamation gimmick. For otherwise, in the effects, such that enigma succeeds, such it is doomed to succeed, in effect, because in itself, inevitably, Picasso’s art is an effective, an imperious, a lucid, cold, intelligent, voluntary authoritarian imposition, a magisterial of intellectual despotism, a tyranny.

That it spreads and imposes itself so widely, on both sides of the Atlantic, means that it is the success of a fashion, of one in more fashions, as many as there are with which Picasso, varying his own fundamental monotony, continually contradicting his own manners, always baffling the mass of his followers and admirers and his own opponents, those refractory to his charms and reticent to his approaches, refreshes the world Picassian fashion. Nor should this be attributed, grossly and offensively, to a cunning and deliberate calculation. It is an inevitable, it is the very original and natural principle of him as man and artist, that condemns him to such a success, which is of a vogue, of a fashion, indeed, of ten or a hundred vogues in a fashion: as such, altogether contrary to what is the success of true artistic works and personalities. So that the very discreet and very reserved Picasso, the perpetual contradictor of his own manners, as he is inevitably monotonous and invariable in his own mutation, is indeed the most indiscreet and clamorous and flamboyant artistic phenomenon of today’s loud and meddlesome publicity.

Precisely the essential nature of Picassian thought, precisely in that and with that he takes, in good faith, deceived by error today more than widespread, almost universal, for a perennial and strenuous seeking and surpassing himself; precisely in that and with that Picasso is condemned to be the “creator,” in the sense in which one adopts the word precisely in the emphatic and fatuous and pretentious jargon of the “great tailors,” of the “models” of a fashion, of his own. “Models” equally seasonal.

Of course, everything can be imagined of the Picassian vogue, except that it reaches and subsides and is composed in that luminous and quiet understanding, in that contemplative communication, which is of the worldly lot of true artists. In it imagined, transferred into it, the Picassian vogue could only die out. Since I do not intend to make a properly critical examination of Picasso’s work, but, as was once said, a “physiology” of the work itself, I am not going to list the Picassian variations, from Cétusks cubistized (artfully), to Negro fetishes, to Ingres, to Pompeian paintings, and to any other specimen, except to note that this stylistic exercise, rigorous and sincere always, becomes false and unphased and unmade, those times when the author wants to represent, to narrate, to express something human and not purely, sterilely artistic.

The aesthetic principle of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the work of art, which came to Picasso not as a concept of thoughtful cultivation but as anatelier motto, what is commonly called pure art or art for art’s sake, in him, in his arid and sparse nature, was translated into the arbitrariness and absurdity of a practice of art understood as a depletion of alienated and empty forms and styles, of art experienced in an abstract formalistic and indifferent intellect, in the curiosity, iridescent as it is inert, of art implemented in a vacuum. Logical consistency, acumen of taste, finesse and technical finesse, great breadth of cognizance and news, with an acrid and icy genius of inventive simulation and stylistic adaptation, he has as much as is needed and sufficient to make of himself the ingenious and arid monster capable and worthy of imposing himself, as he has imposed himself, on the world, on this of today, his succubus.

Picasso’s is a rigid, and perhaps grandiose, scientific experiment out of place: a kind of in vitro reduction of the figurative arts to patterns. It was natural that the most significant experiment should be geometrizing and tend to resolve itself in the arabesque.

The arabesque itself, it is the most boring thing there is. This can give us, I think, the key to such art, the true and dominant feeling of it and in it, and of that experiment, in everything contrary, not that to true art, to the very concept of modern aesthetics, which excludes perhaps only one genre, that of “mannerism,” while Picasso is “mannerist” par excellence, in that special sensibility of his, of a kind of abstract sensibility, which invented his relentless and indifferent eclecticism.

And it may have been, has been, intellectually, amusing invention; but from boredom it springs, and it flows into boredom. Indeed, we saw it spring from Picassian painting most his own, and the only truly and naively felt one; from his frankly and melancholically decadent and charged beginnings; from that very macero e mézzo[literary, for drunk] color, from that faint, satiated, bloodless weariness.

Had he confined himself in this, now remote, elegy of an exquisite and somewhat rotten tedium[sic, literary, for rotten], the case would be artistic, and slender somewhat. He became moral, inane but enormous, inasmuch as boredom itself, by its own inescapable nature, had to force him to develop what generated it itself: his manneristic virtuosity, manneristic even of his own manners, making of it what only could be born of it, the istrument of a despotic mania.

I go back to saying, not out of speculation nor out of vanity: out of fatality, out of pride; out of vice, not out of affectation; not out of fatuity, for he is indeed disconsolately serious.

For in his painting, as much endowed with intelligence as it is devoid of soul, as there is neither pleasure nor joy nor unexpectedness nor fantasy, there is then, above all, a lack of irony, that irony which is the health of art and poetry when they are influenced and undermined by the intellect. I have said that Picassian painting tends to the dullest thing, the arabesque: it is also the least witty, the least humorous. And as to his disconsolate seriousness the human is foreign or lied about, if he seeks it, he substitutes it with a bleakness, unintentionally caricatured and grotesque, of exacerbated and “expressionistic” signs. And this is where it becomes false and irritating.

It will not be saved by political manifestos, which it seems she intends to access. But in this regard it must also be said that Picasso’s communism, about the sincerity of which I dare not raise the slightest doubt, is an intimidating tool. Indeed, that his art is as unpopular as can be imagined, need not even be said, but it is worth noting how communism is apt to baffle Picassians and his true audience. It is always the same fatality; and we can consider it entire, making the assumption that Picasso’s painting is assumed and imposed as art for communists. Arriving by such a hypothetical way to the people, it would baffle the communists even more than the capitalist and snobbish bourgeois.

By now it is quite well known, indeed a commonplace, that the historical defect of the bourgeois classes is fear. On the fear of not understanding it, which is widespread, the Picassian vogue works effectively, which works, also effectively, on that other fear, also widespread, that weak artists and intellectuals in general have, of not being in the vanguard and in the mainstream. Add to this the essentially intellectualistic vice of the eagerness to understand for the sake of understanding, of that real profligacy proper to the idle intelligence, and you have the elements of etiquette, of ceremonial, of world Picassian ritual.

They may have frivolous or ridiculous aspects, in themselves they are serious. as serious is every tyrant, obliged to consider and practice etiquette and ceremonial as a ritual, the ritual of his authority and, secretly, of his boredom. This in fact Picasso deludes and satiates in the ritualistic and processionary gravity to which he obliges the crowds, and the crowds of imitators, and the hosts of critics. And in varying the contrivances of his forms, obliging those who follow him to a supreme bewilderment, he satiates that last and supreme which is of every despotic passion: the secret contempt for his own subjects.

Hated though feared, is the motto of every despot; but an intellectual Caligula should supplement it: To be better feared, they must also love me. Picasso is beloved, precisely, it seems to me, in an unconscious and perverse yearning for liberation, in a secret and incensed hope or foreknowledge that he will kill art, that art which is now such a widespread source of humiliation and fear, that art which now imposes on millions of people the insulting, improper, deleterious fear, which fascinates them, of passing for people who do not understand: so that in order not to pass for fools, they make fools of themselves.

And when the end implied in Picasso’s art, which is to hysterilize and kill art, was fully and surely achieved, Picassians on this side and across the Atlantic would breathe a sigh of ineffable relief, human, after all.

And it will be human, when it is written that the error, indeed the fate, of which Picasso is exemplary actor and victim, has to kill all art in the world of today and tomorrow.

• Picasso despot and tyrant, “The World,” No. 17, June 11, 1949, p. 9

• Picasso, or the modern artist as despot and advertising tyrant, in Saggi critici, “Tutte le Opere di Riccardo Bacchelli,” vol. XIX, Milan, Mondadori 1962, pp. 187-93

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