Books, Arts & Manners

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, by Norman Mailer (Atlantic Monthly Press, 400 pp., $35)

MAILER’S Picasso is an account not merely of the man but of his art, which is reproduced on nearly every page and discussed at length. Somehow the author has gotten the subversive idea that painting is important enough for a major writer to treat seriously, and not merely in a gossipy biography or a bunch of occasional pieces but in a big, idea-containing, theme-developing book. This book is an affront to the specialists who swarm over art like ants on a layer cake. They tend to write badly, in bristling, heavily fortified sentences designed to keep mere artlovers at bay. “The near-impenetrability of the critical jargon,” Mailer notes, “is startling to anyone schooled in a literary tradition”; but it is perfectly in keeping with the ideology of “expertise” that dominates modern culture. Decades ago, our dazzled-by-science intellectual elite decided that only specialists are worth listening to, and the way you recognize specialists is that you can’t understand them. Mailer objects; in his view, to love art and be capable of careful, original thought and powerful prose are sufficient qualifications for interpreting Picasso.

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About the Author

David Gelernter

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Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, by Norman Mailer (Atlantic Monthly Press, 400 pp., $35)

MAILER’S Picasso is an account not merely of the man but of his art, which is reproduced on nearly every page and discussed at length. Somehow the author has gotten the subversive idea that painting is important enough for a major writer to treat seriously, and not merely in a gossipy biography or a bunch of occasional pieces but in a big, idea-containing, theme-developing book. This book is an affront to the specialists who swarm over art like ants on a layer cake. They tend to write badly, in bristling, heavily fortified sentences designed to keep mere artlovers at bay. “The near-impenetrability of the critical jargon,” Mailer notes, “is startling to anyone schooled in a literary tradition”; but it is perfectly in keeping with the ideology of “expertise” that dominates modern culture. Decades ago, our dazzled-by-science intellectual elite decided that only specialists are worth listening to, and the way you recognize specialists is that you can’t understand them. Mailer objects; in his view, to love art and be capable of careful, original thought and powerful prose are sufficient qualifications for interpreting Picasso.