Picasso's Private Park

Picasso seemed like the last man in the world for the job. In 1937, art dealer Ambroise Vollard was looking for someone to illustrate Buffon's classic, 18th Century Histoire Naturelle. Picasso, who once remarked that "through art we express our conception of what nature is not," had just finished his grotesque, horribly unrealistic Guernica (TIME, Nov. 18).

But Picasso's 31 illustrations, on exhibition in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week, proved again his capacity for contradicting himself and making it stick. All 31 etchings (reinforced with aquatint) were reasonably naturalistic and most of them were minor masterpieces as well.

When Madame de Pompadour's pet Comte de Buffon began the first encyclopedic natural history, he simplified his task by casually describing each species in terms of one specimen. Two centuries later, Picasso has embellished the Count's manuscript in the same spirit: by etching each creature with easy, sometimes careless familiarity, as if it were an ancient inhabitant of his own private park.

Picasso's Oriental Deer is delicate and fleet enough to outrun one of Buffon's best rhapsodies. His Grasshoppers--which, like Buffon, he conceives as armored leaping machines--are pictured with the immediacy of a farmer awakening from a nap in the field to find them right under his nose. The vital, trembling Horse looks exactly like what Buffon must have meant when he said horses were "the noblest conquest man has ever made."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.