IN The New Republic for April twenty-third, Mr Leo Stein, of whom we learn that he "has made a life study of painting," writes at some length upon Picasso. This is not the place to consider his argument as a whole. I desire merely to quote the last half of one paragraph:
"As for his intellectuality, that is rubbish. His intellectual baggage is of the slightest, and the total output of intellect in his work is negligible. Picasso is thoroughly intelligent in the ordinary human way, and is ingenious to the last turn, but he is in no serious sense a thinker."
I recall Mr Stein's anecdote of how another critic sent Auguste Renoir the numbers of a certain journal containing a series of articles by that critic upon Renoir, and of how these journals were later discovered, uncut, serving to prop the model's stand; and I recall how Mr Stein drew from these data the logical conclusion that Renoir was not a man of intellect—"in no serious sense a thinker."
It seems to some of us that Mr Stein has not yet discovered the direction in which his own talents lie. Why sulk in Florence? Why not quit a continent which, according to Mr Stein himself, has, since the Renaissance, produced no artist of intellect? Why not return to America, which is, after all, the Land of Opportunity? And—a thought strikes us—why not try that most intellectual of modern fields, Advertising? Why not enquire at The New Republic? Surely The Editors of The New Republic have always gone in passionately for "intellectual baggage": I have even heard it whispered, The Editors of The New Republic go to bed with wardrobe trunks, "just to sleep on them."
Of course Mr Stein's advertisements will not be attractive to the eye (for that one must have aesthetic sense) but at least they should be logical, to the point, and not ignoble.
