PICASSO AND MR. AYRTON
SIR,—May I attempt to explain in a few words why I think that Mr. Michael Ayrton has misinterpreted the true meaning of Picasso's ex- hibited pictures at the Victoria and Albert Museum. While he is pre- pared to 'acknowledge that " the man has not given up drawing," Mr. Ayrton's chief criticism rests on " the dirty tones of grey " and " dung- colour " of which Picasso's above-mentioned pictures are full. From here Mr. Ayrton derives the conclusion that Picasso has given up painting. Picasso is above all an artist who lives in his own times, he does not voluntarily exile himself like Matisse in a world of splendid pattern and oriental symphonies. In his famous " Guernica "—a mural of all time— as well as in his new canvases, Picasso reminds us with the integrity of a great artist of the times in which we live. I beseech Mr. Ayrton to think of the ruins of hundreds of cities in this country and all over Europe ; to remember the tragedy of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki ; I ask Mr. Ayrton to think of the human ruins of Belsen and Dachau and to try to see these facts with the intensity of an .artist.
Goya and Delacroix, romantic artists like Picasso, were fortunate enough to be able to paint the scenes of the-revolutions of their times in magnifi- cent colours, because those were days of colourful fighting. To-day, however, this does not apply, because the victims of the concentration camps, the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the starved and gassed millions all over the world, have not bled in picturesque red ; nor have they worn the dazzling uniforms of the chivalrous pre-camouflage era. What Picasso has drawn is the ashen misery of our civilisation and its wars ; and this he has done with the swift hand of, a master, using the
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