PICASSO AND COMPANY

Henry Miller introduces Brassai here as a man with an uncanny ability to take in everything at once and a sly humor that is ""a malicious benevolence;"" Roland Penrose calls his photographs ""blood samples."" Brassai met Picasso in 1932 when the artist had just passed his fiftieth birthday and was beginning to be famous. Asked to photograph Picasso's sculpture for a new magazine, Minotaure, he walked into the life of Picasso and company--the people of art, theater, literature whose lives were contiguous. Among them the diplomatic, ever-present Sabartes, Picasso's women, Dali, Matisse, Kahnweiler, Prevert, Gala, and Brassai has resurrected this recall from scraps of paper consigned to a huge vase every night after his talks with Picasso. Picasso emerges as a student of Cezanne, lover of El Greco, concerned not only with his painting but with the ""science of man"" (dating each work so that some day he may contribute that to science). Picasso permitted himself to be subjugated by women only so that he might free himself of them through his art; he took his mother's name because of the double ""s"" (""imagine Pablo Ruiz""). Brassai's ""blood samples"" of Picasso are expectedly more objective than Gilot's Life with Picasso (1964) but they will contribute to the legend of the prodigious man.