FROM THE ARCHIVES:His fellow contributors to The Irish Times were regular butts of Myles na Gopaleen's Cruiskeen Lawn column. In this case, it was a piece by journalist Kies van Hoek. –
JOE JOYCE
I WAS thinking of taking a libel action against van Hoek-qui est-ce?-arising out of a recent attack he made on my good friend Picasso.
In this regard I am in the hands of my legal advisers – how ghostly and wide those palms! – but this much I can vouchsafe – I knew Picasso well, the two men respected their divergent and irreconcilable artistic creeds, but this did not mean that they could not drink together. (Drink together? I remember drinking together in Paris when your man was in Madrid!)
We are all Irish here but that is not necessarily an excuse. Picasso has been my friend but since the old days the two men have gone different ways and no news has percolated to my house in Santry until there appeared in The Irish Times a document described as a “vignette” by Mr. Kees van Hoek on the subject of my former friend.
The vignette says: “In anti-chambers that are a shambles of disorder, people wait every morning for the honour to be received.” I will tell you one thing about my friend Picasso – he is about the only man in all the world who could paint a shambles of disorder. I wonder could Picasso paint an order of shambles?
There was one thing funny about my pal and Irish confrère, Picasso. He put the “O” at the end of his name. His correct title was “O’Picass,” I believe, a Limerick man born and bred. Mr. van Hoek proves that he was Irish by a physical description.
The vignette says that Picasso was “square rather than big, he is well-knit with his sturdy sandalled feet firmly planted on the ground.” I take the initial “s” of the quotation to be a misprint – he was Irish and therefore “quare rather than big” – isn’t it in God’s name a description of the whole lot of us?
Hear further about Picasso’s hibernicicity.
“His legs and torso are as brown as a nut, as is the bald head fringed with short-clipped white hair.”
Quite. Nobody but the same PIcasso would have succumbed to the effeminacy of wearing a hairless, bald head! Never was creature so Irish!
Mr. van Hoek, author of this famed vignette, is worried about Picasso’s “cultural schizophrenia” .
I don’t believe, for a start, in using faces when it comes to painting women. The offence is not diminished by using two.
At the same time I can sense the general nature of this complaint.
Beginning “to puzzle out” is the heart of the matter. You then have this most vexed question of what part of the anatomy belongs where. It seems to be a terribly European exigency. God be with the old days, if you like, when people painted what they were told to paint.
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