Springtime for Pablo

"When I paint," Pablo Picasso once said, "my object is to show what I have found, and not what I am looking for. In art, intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons." A new edition of Verve, in U.S. bookstores last week, showed proofs of Picasso's recent finds and loves.

The paintings and drawings, done on the Riviera in 1946, had none of the nightmare violence that characterized Picasso's wartime work. Goats, nymphs, centaurs, children and satyrs, drawn loosely in dancing lines or painted with soft smears of cool color, sang and played pipes, swam, fished, ate dinner and slept under the trees. The one warlike note was a comic-strip series of sketches showing a duel between centaurs, which ended with the loser crumpled across a broken arrow and the horned winner looking downcast. The figures were almost all distorted, but never cruelly so. The surprising twists of their bodies seemed to spring from inner drunkenness rather than artistic rage. Picasso had pulled and twisted their limbs like taffy, but in making them pinheaded, they also seemed agreeably lightheaded.

A stunt pilot of painting, Picasso, now 66, has made some of the fastest, furthest flights, most resounding forced landings and crashes in art history. He can also, as the new Verve demonstrates, make short, slow, sweet canoe trips when he chooses.

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