Unique Affair

Pascin's preoccupation was women.

At the age of 16, he was already using girls from a Bucharest bordello as mod els. This in itself was nothing new: Toulouse-Lautrec had endlessly sketched prostitutes, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d' Avignon represents a famous brothel. But for Pascin, prostitutes be came both his main subject and a way of life, and in many ways he found his brush with life more important than his brush with the canvas.

Innocence & Enticement. Born in Bulgaria in 1885 as Julius Mordecai Pincas, the eighth of eleven children of a Spanish Sephardi and his Serbian-Italian wife, he was totally unconcerned with nationality. He Frenchified his name to Pascin, but he was equally at home in Paris, Munich and New York, where he eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1920. Nor did his riotous ways change with his location; everywhere he went, he liked to sponge up wine, Pernod and brandy, painted with 30 or 40 friends carousing about him in his studio. And mostly his subjects and companions were the girls of easily available virtue.

But if his subject matter never changed, his attitudes toward it did, as can be seen in his first major museum retrospective, now at the University of California at Los Angeles. For the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, he drew scathing, unsympathetic cartoons of prostitutes. Slowly, his vision of women softened to match their contours. As his nudes grew ever more evanescent in powdery pastels, they also waxed ever more erotic. "His palette is like a strip of fog," said another artist. In time, Pascin perfected the art of sfumato, the soft, smoky blending of tones from light into dark practiced by Da Vinci.

Pascin perfumed his canvases with a gently colored atmosphere. Trying to strike a sort of balance between innocence and enticement, Pascin veiled his women, like Salomes six times removed, in scanty teddies that turned to smoke under his brush.

A Determined Hanging. Much of Pascin's life was a Sisyphean search for satiation. He decorated his endless parties with nude girls, recalls one writer, "as one might place flowers in a vase." Under his perennial black derby, he was sensuously ugly, with heavy features that had the thick texture of Dromedary dates. As he began to age, his art more and more portrayed the image of an old man teased by willing sprites. Only fetishes could further inflame his nudes; lesbian poses and green stockings added a salacious veneer to his final fleshy visions.

At the end, he told his mistress, Lucy Krohg, who still runs a gallery on Paris' Right Bank, that he could no longer cross a street without her. The passage of time frightened him so much, she recalled last week, that he once threw a grandfather's clock out of the window. But time caught up with him. In 1930, at the age of 45, Pascin slashed his wrists, wrote "Lucy, Forgive me" on the wall with his own blood, and finding death too slow in coming determinedly hanged himself from his studio door.

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