Shouts

The first big group show of the Paris season was dominated by a single painting. Bernard Lorjou's huge (12 ft. by 18 ft.) Atomic Age made everything else at the Salon des Tuileries last week look either timid or oldfashioned; it was a direct challenge to the aging moderns who have so long shaped French art. By its size, its dull coloring and its air-war theme, the picture was clearly intended to invite comparison with Picasso's famous canvas of the Spanish civil war, Guernica. Lorjou is no admirer of his elder. "Picasso is called a god," he storms. "In reality he is a monster!"

Nonetheless, Lorjou had followed Picasso's symbolism, while challenging him in treatment. Like Guernica, Lorjou's Atomic Age features a horse and a bull; but while Picasso's horse writhes wounded, Lorjou's flies above the scene, whipped on by a skeleton. And while Picasso's bull stands threatening, Lorjou's is decapitated; the head sleeps on a striped pedestal, a plucked rooster between its horns. "Both Picasso and I," Lorjou explains, "went to the same source--Spain."

Fish, Fruit, Ham. It is in their approach to picture-making that the two part company. Picasso seldom needs a model, worries very little about what he means to communicate. Lorjou spits on abstraction; he paints from life, loads his work with literary ideas. "The art of Lorjou," says French Critic Waldemar George, "is a shock which returns us to reality." His new painting, wrote another reviewer, "is disturbing to the extreme . . . because of the oracle that it demonstrates and makes shout."

Presumably the shouting was about a world threatened by the atom bomb. Lorjou meant his painting to convey a hopeful message. If there is an atomic war, he says, "afterwards there will still be men. It will be necessary to nourish them . . ."

For nourishment, his picture boasts a table laden with fish, fruit, ham, chicken, lobster and a skinned hare. The rest of the painting seems to show that it takes all kinds to make a world: there are a broad-beamed model, a shepherd boy with a goat, a Negro with a wheelbarrow, a bishop, a gargoyle, a rat, a frog, a monkey, a barking dog and a girl with a bouquet, whom Lorjou describes as "the pretty woman one sees every day some place."

Chicken or Rat? At 42, Lorjou is a solitary, dead-serious Parisian who makes his living designing fabrics. His Atomic Age rates an "A" for effort, but it is clumsily drawn, and not so much composed as thrown together. Eying the crammed confusion of Lorjou's canvas, one unmoved gallerygoer remarked: "One atom bomb and all that will be left is the chicken, or perhaps only the rat."

Old Man Picasso, who declined to send anything to the show, might have conveyed more with a quiet little sketch of either the chicken or the rat. Yet Paris gallerygoers, bored stiff with disciples of past masters, were welcoming Lorjou's rebellion last week by beating a path to his big, brash canvas.

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