What a performer on a pianoforte does in his concerts is to give you a selection of the works of a variety of musical composers. Now, apart from giving us very complete interpretations of Cézanne, Daumier, El Greco, Puvis, as Picasso has done, there are other ways, and far more convincing ones, in which a painter can betray the distinctively interpretative character of his gift. What do all these phases and very serious flutterings of Picasso’s imply? To dash uneasily from one seemingly personal mode to another may be a diagnostic of the same highly sensitive but non-centralized talent as you would think that a playing first in the mode of El Greco and then of David probably implied. These are difficult things to decide since painters _are_, through the nature of their art, at the same time composers and executants. And you must usually get at this by consideration of, and sense for, the man’s work as a whole. What has happened in this volatile and many-phased career of Picasso’s? Has he got bored with a thing the moment it was within his grasp? And he certainly has arrived on occasion at the possessive stage. If it is boredom, associated with so much power, one is compelled to wonder whether this power does not mechanically spring from a vitiated and tired source. He does not perhaps _believe_ in what he has made. Is that it? And yet he is tirelessly compelled to go on achieving these images, immediately to be discarded. But when we consider one by one, and with a detailed scrutiny, the best types of work representing his various periods, we must admit that he had certain reason in abandoning them. However good a pastiche of El Greco may be, it is not worth prolonging indefinitely this exercise. The same applies to his Daumieresque period. Splendid paintings as the Miss Stein and Monsieur Sagot undoubtedly are, they are still pure Cézanne. And although many artists, among his dilettante admirers or his lesser brethren, would give their heads to produce such pure and almost first-hand Cézannes, once you _can_ do this as easily as Picasso, it can hardly seem worth while to continue to do it. Very likely, at the present moment, his Ingres or David paintings will induce the same sensations of boredom in him (I can imagine David inducing _very_ dismal feeling in an interpreter), and have a similar fate. All that remain to be considered are the less easily deciphered works of his more abstract periods. I think his effort of initiation and obstinacy in this brand of work showed a different temper to the other set of things that we have been considering. But they, again, are open to question. They reduce themselves to three principal phases. The first, or Cubist, phase, really a dogmatic and savage development of Cézanne’s idiosyncrasy (example: “Dame jouant de la mandoline”) is in a way the most satisfactory. But I am not convinced that Cézanne gains anything by what is a very interesting interpretation of his vision.