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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 541, 4 November 1949, Page 5

Sir,-I wonder how many of your correspondents have seen a Picasso-not a reproduction, however good, but a genuine original? I am prepared to hazard that 50 per cent. will have had to have been content with a Listener teproduction in monochrome, while probably not less than a further 40 per cent have seen anything better than a four-colour reproduction. How, then, can they judge something which they have seen only as a counterfeit? How can they deprecate something which they have never seen? : Could they ever imagine the sense of awe one feels on being confronted with ‘a canvas twenty feet by ten, glowing richly as a stained glass window (and by that I don’t mean the milk-and-water leadlights of our present-day churches), or the delight one feels on seeing for the first time a sketch in pure, vibrant, sensitive line by the modern master Picasso? It is little short of bad taste to suggest that a man who can accomplish these things would stoop to delude the public with his painting. In a semibarbarous community, such as ours, Picasso is bound to be criticised; but if the cultured world acknowledges him should not we try not to deride him, but rather try to understand what makes him great? Sometimes the very great things need little understanding — ‘the abstract beauty of a mass of flowers for instance, After all, apart from the fact that he set the ball rolling, why pick on Picasso? Without his influence, and the influence of others like him, the visual arts would still be wallowing in a morass of sentimental neo-classic-ism or Gothic romanticism, neither of which had much contact with reality.

JOHN PINE SNADDEN

(Wellington).