It seemed at least for a time, as if Picasso had lost himself in mystical communion with pure painting. He called upon his art to express a hidden, unfathomable life; he refined and intensified it until all that remained was a pure, eminently satisfying interplay of lines, shapes and colours in space, with no attempt to suggest normal spatial recession. In his quest of perfection, the kinks of his own personality ceased to affect the picture......... The painter's hand worked on alone, utterly detached and sure of itself.