Commentary
The last great giant killer
By GARY WILLS
He jotted down masterpieces the way
executives do memos. He worked in job
lots, dropping twenty or so Madonnas into
his account, or a hundred guitars
chromatically disassembled. But no
matter how prolific or repetitive he
became, he was unchallengeably the
major visual artist of the century.
He was to the plastic art what Pound was
to poetry, Joyce to the novel, or Stravinsky
to music. Picasso’s death reminds us we
have lost three of these giants in roughly
the space of one year. Pound, Stravinsky
and Picasso had outlived most of their
contemporaries; and none of their suc
cessors has managed to lode like he
belonged in their league.
One reason for that is simply stated. Our
giants were giant-killers. They undid the
monumental art forms of the 19th century.
The old painting, or novel, or symphony
was accumulative, serial, and social; each
settled into the society it reflected and
criticized. Modern art is a matter of in
dividual raids and eccentric scurryings;
dry, analytic, critical — standing off from
everything else in a risky isolation.
The 19th century ended in a rich sunset
of painterly values. What came next was a
kind of nonpainting, light as the rapid
calligraphy of Matisse, airy and disem
bodied, cubist blueprints of reality, or X
ray photographs.
Picasso is, in his obituaries, being called
a painter. The word misleads. Painting is
the deliberation of a patina, textured,
growing, existing in its own haze. But color
is often an afterthought in Picasso, or a
distraction. There is little difference
between the sketch and the finished
painting for a work like “Boy With a
Horse.”
His pink and blue periods were created
by smearing a faint mist of those colors
over clean line drawings. In “Guernica”
and “Charnel House” he painted down to
the level of newsprint — these are horror
stories done in the style of a report.
Paintings were finished things. Picasso
created a thousand brilliant fragments.
Ongoing reports, or satirical asides. It was
not that he could not paint — he did an
apple for Gertrude Stein in the style of
Cezanne. But that style he would indulge
only as an exercise — for he had come to
destroy it, as surely as Stravinsky
destroyed the style of Brahms, or Pound
destroyed that of Tennyson.
Joyce might write a long novel, but it
was not the novel of Tolstoy or Flaubert or
Dickens. It was a weave of puzzles and
poetry held together from outside by
learning, not by internal energies of plot
and character. “Ulysses” is a loving satire
of the novel, as Stravinsky’s “Rake’s
Progress” is of the opera form.
No one has followed in the tracks of this
century’s giants because even they could
not go far beyond their first breakthrough
—beyond the “Rite of Spring,” the women
of Avignon, the first “Cantos,” or
“Ulysses.” Their breakthrough was, in
each case, something of a breakdown.
These men had a technique of critical
analysis and dissection. But when they
were through criticizing, they could not
put the corpse back together again. And no
one else has, either. They could only turn
their technique into a mannerism (e.g.,
“Finnegan’s Wake”), or scribble more
fragments in a kind of absentminded
frenzy (e.g., Picasso’s later etchings).
It is dangerous to master the art of not
painting. Picasso seemed, in each of his
actual works, to reveal something less
than his whole talent; he is never carried
beyond it. He stunned with a dazzling
variety of skills, but not with wisdom,
wholeness, or creation.
The giant-killers worked awesome
deeds, but our world is a bit duller for its
loss of giants. And now it is further
darkened by the dying of the last great
giant-killer.
Letters
Recalling Johnson
I am prompted to write as a result of
Barry Mitzman’s perceptive review, in the
April 6 issue of the Emerald of journalism
professor Ken Metzler’s new book, Con
frontation: The Destruction of a College
President (Nash, 1973).
Publication of Metzler’s analysis of the
tragic death of Charles E. Johnson, acting
president of the University of Oregon in
1968-69 has been the occasion of
recollecting my own “peculiar con
nectedness” to the man whose untimely
death occured on June 17, I960, when his
Volkswagen smashed head-on into a
logging truck on UJS. Highway 126.
Even now, almost four years later, the
circumstances surrounding that oc
currence remain indelibly etched in my
memory.
On that fateful morning, my family
heard the first news of the smash-up on our
car radio as we were leaving home for our
first extended drive out U .S. 126 toward the
Cascades. Initially the radio news report
did not identify the driver of the
Volkswagen or his condition, pending
notification of family. Our drive took us
past the almost totally demolished Volks
and upon seeing it we remarked that the
driver must certainly have perished, still
not knowing his identity. It was not until
late that evening that we learned that we
liad earlier seen the death car of Charles
E. Johnson.
I joined the University of Oregon faculty
In September 1968 after leaving another
university in the Pacific Northwest where
[ had become a catalytic irritant in an
academic freedom controversy. Against
that background, during the 1968-69 school
year I developed a deep respect for Acting
President Johnson as a pmuon who un
derstood the true character of a university
In a democracy and who was willing to
maintain a mature, unswerving loyalty to
the ideal of responsible academic freedom
even in the face of the damnable political
social pressures which characterized the
period of his tenure as administrative head
at the University.
As a constant reminder to myself of
what the University of Oregon should be
all about, I keep within easy reach on my
desk the following excerpt from a letter
sent by Charles Johnson to a legislator in
December 1968:
“A University must be a place where it
is possible to bring up for examination all
ideas, good and bad, offensive and inof
fensive, well expressed or badly ex
pressed, in the firm conviction that
through this process those of value will
find ultimate acceptance in a free en
terprise democracy and those of little or no
worth will find their rightful place in the
wastebasket.”
Ronald J. Rousseve
Professor, Education and CSPA
PRGhu inanity
Here in our Democracy we may
cheerfully burn each other up with wards
now and then...but that’s a notable im
provement over Calvin roasting Servetus
on a slow fire, Mary putting the torch to
Cranmer, and the imaginative
Elizabethan variation (hanging, drawing
and quartering).
I am the researcher “who made
Morality into a Science” and so am obliged
to speak “with authority and not as the
scribes”: (I didn’t say journalists, I said
scribes).
Both Tom Mascott’s “chaotic energy”
and Douglas Braton’s “ordered energy”
call for clarification: Religionists dote on
saying “All this civilization of ours and the
protoplasmic miracle of a live homo
sapiens (as distinguished from a homo
insapiens, not known to classifier Linnaeus
225 years ago but now discovered) could
not possibly have came to pass simply by
chance.”
Certainly not. Nor by the non-existence
of an “Almighty.” If there were such a
being existent, it is not possible but that its
existence could not avoid being detected
by cme of our five specialized senses...or
the unspecialized sixth one, commonly and
scientifically called ESP.
Here’s the answer: The reason we are
here is by the quite well known (except to
religious psychotics: people who would
rather speak of the disparate molecules of
the dead protoplasm of Jesus as “the
truth” (John 14:6) than so much as accept
a bit of paleontology from a paragraph
heading in Encyclo Brittanica: “THE
ROCK RECORD”) fact of Evolution.
We’re here by Evolution...and it’s not
discontinuous but continuous from non-life
mi into life. It happens thus always in an
Earth type of planet when cooling
produces the optimum temperature:
Certain highly Evolved forms of inanimate
matter Evolve right on into the first live
matter: Unicell.
ABILITY TO EVOLVE are the key
words and il*t watchword in this non
negligible matter. (The Stoic
...Philosophy Dept, please note and come
on in...were groping for exactly those
words when they said: “A universal
reason permeates everything, inanimate
as well as animate”).
I particularly hope Ronald Ronald will
join in rejoicing that our American free
enterprize has enabled us to Evolve
Marxism-Leninism-socialism-humanism
into this (practically perfect) dictum:
“From each according to his highest skill;
to each according to his worth to
PROhumanity.
PROhumanity is all will to defend the
interest of homo sapiens.” I’ll write a
commentary. Please don't wait for it.
PROhuman williams (sic; name ordered
by court)
Education ’36.
For Murray—Garrett
I am hpapy to strongly support the
election erf Darrell Murray as ASUO
president. I have known Darrell closely
for several years and have observed these
qyakutues in him:
First Darrell is industrious. He has had
to work hard to support himself through
high school and college. He knows what
hard work is, and he knows how to work
hard.
Second, Darrell is honest. He states his
opinions forthrightly, and bases them on
well thought-out reasons.
Third, Darrell is intellectually sharp.
He brings a good balance of knowledge,
perception, and judgement to the ASUO
presidency, a position which needs this
type of person.
Fourth, Darrell is concerned. He is
concerned about campus problems that
affect students, faculty and ad
ministration. I believe that Darrell can
effectively influence in a positive,
progressive way decisions as they relate to
student government leadership.
I am pleased to commend Darrell highly
to this position.
Glenn M. Gordon, M.D.
Former Chairman Eugene Committee to
End the War
'I WAS ALWAYS THANKFUL HE WASN'T A POLITICAL CARTOONIST!'