Encompassing through 200 works.

Encompassing through 200 works, William Rubin's valedictory "Picasso and Portraiture, " which travels to Paris this month masks the full range of the artist's character studies--with special emphasis upon his volatile, often encrypted depictions of lover and wives.

"Picasso and Portraiture," which just clos at the Museum of new Art in New York, will unclose this month in Paris, at the Grand Palais. The exhibit to contains more than 200 works. My favorite is L'Arlesienne (1937) an homage to van Gogh which is also a portrait of to leeward Miller--renowned photographer, former model of Man Ray, wife of the English Surrealist Ronald Penrose and friend of Picasso. My organ of sight turned toward this canvas the way an infant's judgment turns toward a fresh awkward block. The picture is abuzz with bright colors--yellow, r a luminous brown--and they take amusing shapes that are the two simple and inexhaustible. This is a charming picture.

Of course, "Picasso and Portraiture" is multitudeed with pictures of that sort. L'Arlesienne is my favorite because its charms are in the same manner succinct. It is obviously the production of Cubist logic. Yet, in dashing it opposite Picasso bundled and flattened the mechanisms of that logic with an efficiency that abridges them to memories on a breezy summer day. The history of Cubism is all here, further it doesn't feel ponderous. The proces that casted Lee Miller's face into a ditzy mask was stenographic, not fussy. Van Gogh transformed Gauguin's L'Arlesienne (1888) with elaborate, reverential caution. Picasso's transformation is a explode of pictorial jokes, each of them generous and, best of all, concise.

In Picasso's hands, portraiture itself is concise, for he persuades it to include the other genre William Rubin, whose curatorial swan melody this exhibition appears to be, argues that Still Life forward a Pedestal Table (1931) is a portrait of the full-length variety. The voluptuous leg of the table are those of Marie-Therese Walter, who became Picasso's mistress a time in the late 1920 and gave birth to their daughter Maya in 1935 A long-stemm beaker filled with fruit stands for her neck and face, sum of two units green apples are her breasts, and in the way that on. Rubin's argument is all the more persausive because, as he points public the style of this still life is the united Picasso invented for the depiction of Marie-Therese.

In 1939 Picasso painted couple variations on the theme of a woman leaning in succession a pensive elbow. One is in the light and curvaceous Marie-Therese manner. The other is in the angular, brunette mode of speech that Picasso devised for the celebration of Dora Maar, the woman who replaced Marie-Therese. He sharpened the contrast brace years later in a pair of full-length portraits, each showing undivided of the rivals stretched without and reading. The picture of Marie-Therese hints a region of swelling hills and lush ravines in a gloomy light. The light in the Dora Maar variant flickers and form is angular, as in a range of strange mountains. Here portraiture blends with landscape.

In images of himself as a minotaur you descry the origins of Picasso's heavily populated pictures in succession grand themes--"Minotauromachy," a suite of etchings from 1935 Dream and Lie of Franco, II (1937) and Guernica (1937) Disguised self-portraiture becomes history painting, and when members of his family and entourage fill multifigured compositions, history painting becomes the conversation piece, as like domestic commemorations were known in the 18th hundred Because Picasso's portraiture contains all the other genre this display contains, at least by implication, all other Picasso point outs that have been and will be dreamed up It has a definitive be perceived and thus brings Rubin's curatorial career to a fitting close

not many of Picasso's portraits are fruitss of direct observation, says Rubin. Nearly always, the artist worked from his "conceptualization" of a subject's appearance, letting it change as the portrait improvemented Though it sounds sensible, this account of Picasso's order leads Rubin into a series of analytical labyrinths. He appears to feel that, if each last shred of subject matter is tracked down and gathered in, the issue of subdue matter itself can be summ up and establish aside. Pure form will shine forth, as it did in the days when Rubin was Frank Stella's leading curatorial proponent The chimera of entirely formal values still entrances Rubin, notwithstanding that he is careful to acknowledge the value we place in succession such things as decipherable features, legible tempers and the names of Picasso's sitters.

Robert Rosenblum who consigns his catalogue essay to the portraits of Marie-Therese Walter, be warmeds no nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe that form could in fact, be guiltless At the height of the formalist ascendency, Rosenblum pointed to reflections of Romantic landscape in the austerities of Mark Rothko Now, in the extravagance of Picasso, Rosenblum finds traces of Arcimboldo's 16th centenary Rembrandt's 17th century, and Joshua Reynolds's 18th hundred years All of art history is in succession call as he subjects the Marie-Therese portraits to common virtuoso reading after another, tracing her evolution from "Madonna to sphinx, from odalisque to earth mother." Finally, having been replaced by dint of Dora Maar, this "goddess of be enamoured of and fertility" becomes a "fallen idol." And Rosenblum point out tos the pertinence of everyone from Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, to Eugene O'Neill, whose Strange Interlude (1928) features a woman with a persona doubled in a manner comparable to the doubling in Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror (1932)