Featured in the New Yorker, September 1, 1980
At the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the crowd one hot afternoon resembled a tropical garden of extravagant blooms and gay colors. It was as though in deciding how to dress for the heat everyone had been seized by Picasso’s reckless willingness to try anything. We overheard someone say, “Form was to Picasso what color was to Matisse.” Matisse, too, must have been involved in this scene, we thought—especially when it came to pink: neon pink, Day-Glo pink, hot pink, Shocking pink. We saw pink-flowered pants suits; pink trousers of velours; a glowing pink Picassosignature T-shirt; pink plaid slacks; a very tiny woman in bright-pink pants and baby-size pink spike heels; a young man in jeans with a pink belt and red patent-leather shoes; a woman in pink plastic open-toed, backless heels; a trio of women in pants suits of the same flesh tones as “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; a girl in loud-pink basketball shoes with red laces; a man in rainbow-striped pants, a red shirt, and flamingo-pink shoes. One young woman was wearing an unobtrusive brooch in the form of a tube of paint with plastic paint oozing out. The tube was labelled, “Orange,” but the color was more like that of a pinkish Elberta peach.
And green, a Cézanne-ish sort of green, was just about as popular as pink. It was Picasso’s favorite green, the green of his “Still-Life with Hat (Cézanne’s Hat)” and “Green Still-Life,” from Avignon. A woman was wearing a tank top of this hue, and it was peeking out from her yellow seersucker jump suit, which had a dashing design of large jelly beans on it. Another woman’s green sun dress exactly matched the green earplug of the museum tape-cassette tour she was carrying. But our favorite was a dress patterned with green frogs and pink strawberries.
Picasso’s Blue Period was strangely somber—this group was wilder than that. And in the gray Cubist rooms the colors were dancing: Hawaiian shirts, splendid purples, a black sun dress with palm trees on it, and a white skirt with purple birds flying across it. In the Garden Café, a woman in a red-and-white hibiscus-flowered muumuu and white gloves and marble-size beads was smoking a cigarette while standing in line to buy grapes and cheese—a Saran-wrapped still-life.
Picasso’s harlequins had leaped out of the paintings. Most of the sun dresses that did not have flowers or birds on them had harlequin designs in flashy colors. One notable shirt had large pink and green diamonds. Even the plaid shirts were cut on the bias, making diamonds instead of squares, and one man’s shirt, made from a patchwork-quilt top, imitated the wallpaper collage in “Women at Their Toilette.”
For relief, the museum guards wore black and white, and one stationed in the Sculpture Garden sported reflecting sunglasses just like those of the prison guard in “Cool Hand Luke.”
It was only a simple red, white, and blue, but our favorite blouse pictured twenties-style flappers standing on stair steps, and lists of names zigzagging beside them: Julie, Jeanne, Marcelle, Georgette, Germaine, Suzanne, Rose, Paulette, Camille, Blanche, Marthe, Thérèse, Agnès, Juliette, Claire.
Finally, before the gray agonies of the “Guernica,” a startling sight: a woman in pumps of a linen fabric with a design like a Jan Brueghel stilllife—one of those botanically impossible combinations of flowers. As she moved on, we tried to catch up with her, for it seemed as though she were the leader of all these mad expressions of the heat of summer, but she flitted away, her feet like birds of paradise.