Enough Poem by gershon hepner

When you think you’ve said enough,
and the going gets too rough,
think of Delacroix who said
it’s not enough until you’re dead,
or words to that effect, in French.
Too many words can cause a stench,
like death, but saying far too few,
unusual problem for a Jew,
can also bring you to bad odor,
if you have got, unlike Picasso,
a heart, no uom’ di sasso.

I hope I’m middle-of-roader,
except when on the 405,
where I prefer to stay alive
by sticking to my lane as I
stick to my word. If I should die,
think only this of me: “It’s tough,
he died, but he had lived enough.”
More than enough is worse
for years than even Hepner verse.

Inspired by words of Delacroix cited in the NYT on October 29,2008 by Michael Kimmelman in a review of an exhibition in Paris (“In a Faceoff, the Masters Trump Picasso”) :

No show in Europe at the moment bids to be more spectacular, or ends up being more exasperating, than “Picasso and the Masters, ” sprawling here through the Grand Palais. If there’s good news to the financial meltdown, it’s that maybe bloated blockbusters like this one should become harder to organize… The Grand Palais, never mind the accompanying displays at Orsay (Picasso and Manet) and the Louvre (Picasso and Delacroix) , trumps those events, gathering together hundreds of Picassos along with far-flung trophies that inspired or ostensibly inspired him: pictures by Cranach and Titian, Poussin and Ribera, Chardin and Zurbarán, El Greco and Courbet, Degas and le Douanier Rousseau. The list goes on. I lingered in the last room, watching visitors stumble a bit bleary-eyed from the earlier galleries to find Manet’s “Olympia, ” Rembrandt’s painting of Hendrickje Stoffels bathing in a brook, Ingres’s grisaille “Odalisque” and Goya’s “Naked Maja” vying with a slew of late, mostly slapdash nudes by the great matador of Modernism. The whole ensemble of pictures was dazzling and fatuous. “Overkill” doesn’t adequately describe the effect. Let it first be said that Picasso, having taken on history as if fated to do so from childhood, embraced such extravagant comparisons — which isn’t to say he survives the competition altogether intact. “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, ” he once said, “but what instinct and the brain imagine quite apart from the canon.”…
The canon, in other words, remained his starting point but increasingly became his crutch. His achievements were Promethean and unparalleled in the last century, but having said that, as the show proves almost despite itself, Picasso ended up often mired in vain, backward-looking riffs on grander achievements. Perhaps it’s as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once put it, talking about Picasso’s failure to appreciate Bonnard. “Picasso had no heart, ” he said. That’s pretty harsh. On the other hand, there are his copies of Velazquez’s “Méninas.” From the 1950s, they tinker with variations on his familiar devices — the fractured, faux-childish faces; the swift, sketchy brushwork; the primary colors set often against black; the clattery scaffolding of faceted planes and accordion space — to produce what looks clever but finally cartoonish when considered against the grave dignity and humanity of the original. Granted, comparing anything with “Las Méninas” is unfair, but then, Picasso invited the comparison, and from it one gets Cartier-Bresson’s point. Even that remark about the canon, as it happens, recalls what a century before one of Picasso’s canonical heroes, Delacroix, wrote: That great art derives both from humility before the past and a conviction that “what has already been said is not enough.”

10/29/08