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- <text>
- <title>
- (1980) The Show Of Shows:Picasso Retrospective
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1980 Highlights
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- May 26, 1980
- ART
- The Show of Shows
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Picasso, modernism's father, comes home to MOMA
- </p>
- <p> In imaginative force and outright terribilita, it is quite
- possibly the most crushing and exhilarating exhibition of work
- by a 20th century artist ever held in the U.S. Beginning this
- week, over the next four months nearly a million people will
- queue outside new York City's Museum of Modern Art to get a
- glimpse of it. Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, is being
- honored in a show of nearly 1,000 of his works, some never
- exhibited before, drawn from his estate as well as from
- collections the world over.
- </p>
- <p> What gives the exhibit its overwhelming character is the
- range and fecundity of Picasso's talent--the flashes of
- demonic restlessness, the heights of confidence and depths of
- insecurity, the relationships (alternately loving and
- cannibalistic) to the art of the past, but above all the
- sustained intensity of feeling. "Pablo Picasso: A
- Retrospective" contains good paintings and bad, some so weak
- that they look like forgeries (but are not), as well as a great
- many works of art for which the word masterpiece--exiled for
- the crime of elitism over the past decade--must now be
- reinstated. It is the largest exhibition of one artist's work
- that MOMA has ever held, or probably ever will. It contains
- pieces ranging in size from Guernica, Picasso's 26-ft. wide mural
- of protest against the Fascist bombing of a Basque town during
- the Spanish Civil War, to a cluster of peg dolls he painted for
- his daughter Paloma. Paintings, drawings, collages, prints of
- every kind, sculpture in bronze, wood, wire, tin, string, paper
- and clay; there was virtually no medium the Spaniard did not use,
- and all are profusely represented.
- </p>
- <p> They fill the building's three floors, displacing MOMA's
- permanent collection. "I felt that only with the whole museum
- could we have an exhibition worthy of Picasso's oeuvre,"
- explains William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and
- sculpture. "I don't think there is any other artist whose work
- could sustain such an exhibition."
- </p>
- <p> Most visitors will agree, even if they find the presentation
- exhausting and nearly indigestible, streamed as they must be
- through the galleries at a speed dictated by an attendance of
- 8,000 people a day. In such circumstances, no one can absorb
- the scope and the depth of the man. How can one "see" in two
- hours what took nearly 80 years of such obsessive activity to
- produce? The "Tut Law," or curse of the mummy, by which works
- of art become invisible as the museum audience for them expands,
- will work against this show. That is all the more ironical
- since this is not an affair of little scholarly value, like the
- traveling Tutankhamun exhibit seen by more than 8 million
- Americans, but an immense contribution to Picasso studies, done
- at the highest level of curatorial skill.
- </p>
- <p> The retrospective was put together by Rubin and Dominique
- Bozo, curator-in-charge of the future Musee Picasso in Paris. The
- effort could have succeeded only at this moment. By now the
- fights over Picasso's estate between his heirs and the French
- government--which have kept a score of lawyers fat, tired and
- happy since the old man died without leaving a will--have been
- resolved, yet the final disposition of his work has not been
- locked into an institutional frame. When the Musee Picasso,
- which received the cream of the work from Picasso's own estate,
- opens in Paris next year, it will not be able to make further
- loans of this magnitude; some 300 of its works have come to MOMA
- for the present show. Moreover, 1980 is likely to be the last
- year in which Guernica, lent to MOMA by Picasso in 1939, can be
- seen in the U.S. It will go to Spain, probably to the Prado in
- Madrid, in accordance with Picasso's wishes.
- </p>
- <p> In short, no exhibition like this can ever be mounted again.
- Bozo's main work with the Musee Picasso is still before him.
- For Rubin, the MOMA show is the climax of a career; to have
- brought off, within three years, two exhibitions at such a level
- (the other being his Cezanne show in 1977) is in some measure
- to have altered the history of curatorship itself. Rubin, the
- Iron Chancellor of MOMA, has set new standards of detail and
- historical cogency within the museum, and the Picasso exhibit
- and its admirable catalogue reflect them at every point. It is
- a final vindication of a program started by Alfred Barr Jr.,
- MOMA's first director, 50 years ago: the assumption that
- modernism, whose supreme exponent was Picasso, was as worthy of
- detailed and serious consideration as the culture of baroque
- Rome or quattrocento Florence.
- </p>
- <p> Not all great painters are precocious, but Picasso was. In a
- technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his
- precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation.
- He was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of a painter named Jose
- Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned ingles face, nothing like Pablo's
- simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so
- good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his
- own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the
- story is true, it goes some way to explain the mediumistic
- confidence with which Picasso worked. "Painting is stronger
- than I am," he once remarked. "It makes me do what it wants."
- Painting had won him the Oedipal battle before his career had
- begun. If one were told that Science and Charity, Picasso's
- sickbed scene from 1897, with its rather conventional drawing
- but adroit paint handling (especially in the details, like the
- frame of the mirror above the bed), had been done by a 30-year-
- old Spanish academician, one would have predicted a competent
- future for the man. Once one realizes that it was painted by
- a boy not yet 16, the skill seems portentous, like a
- visitation--and that is the general impression conveyed by
- Picasso's earliest work.
- </p>
- <p> The point is not that Picasso, as an art student in Barcelona
- and, after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was
- markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than
- other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the
- influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he
- needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative
- line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its
- liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the
- pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his
- Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of
- remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a
- fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god
- of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in
- a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred
- by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to
- predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German
- expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little
- Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a
- Velazquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example.
- </p>
- <p> For a young artist in Paris at the turn of the century, such
- material could not last forever, and not all Picasso's
- experiences were gaslight and garters. Living in poverty in the
- little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified
- himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out
- of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful miserabilisme,
- verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue
- Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures,
- using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue
- boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted from
- Japanese decorative art. By 1902 the blueness of this line had
- spread to dominate the whole painting. It had a symbolic value,
- of course: it spoke of melancholy, of the "blues." But it also
- enabled Picasso, as the pervasive brown-gray monochrome of
- analytical cubism later would in a different way, to take color
- out of his work, so that he could make a compromise between
- decorative flatness and sculptural volume in terms of pure tone.
- </p>
- <p> The influence of one artist dominates the Blue Period. He was
- Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky
- allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and
- somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh,
- Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks
- like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon,
- and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big
- allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally
- the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso
- turned it into the face of Carlos Casagemas, the friend who had
- come with him to Paris from Barcelona and then committed
- suicide for love of an artist's model.)
- </p>
- <p> Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form,
- since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But
- it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at
- some of his intense moments--not only the death of Casagemas,
- but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which
- began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great
- interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his
- "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and
- horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs.
- Allegory was the conscious, intelligible form of Picasso's vast
- instinctive talent for metamorphosis, whereby a single form
- could harbor two or more literal meanings: a glass of absinthe
- including a drunkard's head, a guitar turning into a torso or
- a vagina, a bicycle seat becoming a bull's head. Moreover, the
- ability to handle allegory was the proof of high ambition:
- Gauguin had gone to Tahiti to paint huge emblems of human fate,
- not just to see papayas.
- </p>
- <p> By the age of 25, Picasso was an able and gifted artist, but
- not yet a modern one. He had managed to tame the mannerism of the
- Blue Period, with its wistful elongations and neurotic passivity
- of form, by studying Degas. In the Woman with a Fan, 1905, with
- its "Egyptian" gesture of the raised hand and gravely extended
- fan, or in the robust columnar body of the Boy Leading a Horse,
- 1906, Picasso's digestion of Puvis was complete. At that point
- he could have kept painting such pictures for the rest of his
- life and died in honors.
- </p>
- <p> What happened was very different. The detachment of expression
- in his Rose Period hardened: through 1906 the faces took on an
- increasingly masklike air, blank, inexpressive, with empty eye
- sockets. Picasso had been looking at archaic Spanish carvings
- from Osuna. Now he stressed the sculptural, instead of the
- linear and atmospheric: solid impacted form, not fleeting mood.
- His 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, almost leaden in its
- pictorial ineloquence, marked the start of this change, and the
- pink stony torsos of Two Nudes, 1906, delineate the period's
- end. In between lay some magnificent paintings, such as the
- Seated Female Nude with Crossed Legs, 1906, whose solidities
- of thigh, trunk and breasts anticipate the swollen torsos of
- Picasso's "classical" women 15 years later. It was one more
- element in the predictions, recapitulations and variations of
- theme that composed the tissue of Picasso's imagination.
- </p>
- <p> Having brought solid form to such density, having set so
- absolute a division between figure and field, what choice did
- Picasso have but to break it all down again? Les Demoiselles
- d'Avignon, 1907, was the painting that provoked cubism, and one
- of the most astounding feats of ideation in the history of art.
- These days the word radical is patched on to any newish
- artistic gesture, no matter how small: a puddle of lead on the
- floor, or a face pulled on video tape, or an array of bricks.
- This use of the word cannot begin to convey the newness of Les
- Demoiselles. No painting has ever looked more convulsive and
- contradictory, and, though one can follow its development
- through Picasso's early studies, which are part of the MOMA
- exhibit, the sheer intensity of its making is beyond analysis.
- </p>
- <p> Les Demoiselles is a brothel scene; there had been a whore-
- house on the Carrer d'Avinyo, or Avignon Street, in Barcelona,
- and Picasso and his friends frequented it. But the picture has
- none of the social irony or even the sensuality with which
- Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas invested their brothel paintings.
- More vividly than ever, against the backdrop of earlier
- Picassos, it becomes clear why his friends thought he had gone
- crazy, why the painter Andre Derain actually predicted that
- Picasso would hang himself behind the big picture. The painting
- is freighted with aggression, carefully wrought. The nudes are
- cut into segments, as though the brush were a butcher knife.
- Their look, eyes glaring from African-mask faces, is accusatory,
- not inviting. Even the melon in the still life looks like a
- weapon. The space between the figures is flattened, like a
- crumpled box: it was in this play of code between solid and
- void (one apparently as "tactile" as the other) that the formal
- prophecies of Les Demoiselles lay. Though he plundered African
- motifs such as masks and Bakota funerary figures for Les
- Demoiselles and its sequels, Picasso neither knew nor cared
- about their tribal meanings or uses. To him, they were merely
- shapes, conceptually opaque, with perhaps a secondary use as
- emblems of "savagery" to disrupt the field of "culture." The
- idea that Picasso had some sympathetic interest in African art
- as such is a complete illusion. All that counted for him was
- its ability to furnish alienated examples of form that clearly
- owed nothing to Raphael.
- </p>
- <p> No Demoiselles, no cubism. But there was a long stretch
- between them while Picasso, grappling with late Cezanne, crossed
- from an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis.
- In a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso
- picked up on Cezanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant
- to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to
- Cezanne's Cardplayers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the
- sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop,
- the bread loaves and fruit and napkin have a plastic intensity
- that makes one feel ready to pluck them away.
- </p>
- <p> Gradually this jutting, sculptural quality dissolved in ever
- more complicated faceting, "cubifying"--though there are no
- real cubes in cubism--through the landscapes he painted at
- Horta de Ebro in 1909. By 1910 the cubist surface was reached,
- with a sort of gray-brown plasma, the color of fiddle backs, zinc
- bars and smokers' fingers. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field
- of vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things
- penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs
- for themselves--a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound
- hole of a guitar. This sense of multiple relationships was the
- core of cubism's modernity. It declared that all visual
- experience could be set forth as a shifting field that included
- the onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the
- theory of relativity or to the principles of narrative that
- would emerge in Proust or Joyce. The supremacy of the fixed
- viewpoint, embodied for 500 years in Renaissance perspective,
- was challenged by the new mode of describing space that Picasso
- and Braque had developed in a supreme effort of teamwork.
- </p>
- <p> As with painting, so with sculpture. Picasso's Guitar of 1912,
- an array of cut and folded metal sheets that opened to let space
- in, was the first constructed sculpture in the history of art.
- It abolished the solidity, the continuous surface that had
- been, until then, the essential narrative of sculpture. From
- that unpromising-looking piece of rusty tin, a 60-year tradition
- of open-form sculpture was born that spread from Russian
- constructivism to the work of Anthony Caro in England and David
- Smith in the U.S.
- </p>
- <p> Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His
- instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would
- have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush
- in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911
- run close to total abstraction, depending on such slender clues
- as a glass or a pipestem to pull them back to reality. As he
- moved forward, he found in collage a way of linking cubism back
- to the world. Collage, which simply means gluing, brought
- fragments of modern life--newspaper headlines, printed labels--directly into the painting. Cut them out, put them in. The
- tonal values of some of his finest collages have been ruined by
- age. The newsprint, once gray on white, is now cigar-brown.
- But in better preserved ones, like Violin and Sheet Music, 1912,
- the original effect remains: a magnificently Apollonian
- interplay of blue, gray, white and black on its ocher ground,
- stable and forceful at the same time.
- </p>
- <p> The sense of the cubist moment can never come again. It is
- almost as distant, in its dulcet and inexhaustible optimism, as
- the faith that built Beauvais. Cubism was the climax of an
- urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the
- mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and
- shifting modes. It was Art's first response to the torrent of
- signs unleased by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso
- inscribe "Our future is in the air" on several of his cubist
- still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was
- "Wilbur," after Wilbur Wright. "The world has changed less
- since the time of Jesus Christ," remarked the French writer
- Charles Peguy in 1913, "than it has in the last 30 years."
- Picasso and Braque took it for granted that reality had changed
- more than art, but their relation to the art of the past was not
- one of simple conflict. It was more tentative, precise and
- subtly felt. Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of cubism, evoked
- the sentiment in his collection of Calligrammes:
- </p>
- <qt>
- <l>You whose mouth is made in God's image</l>
- <l>Whose speech is Order itself</l>
- <l>Be easy with us, when you compare us</l>
- <l>To those who were the perfection of order,</l>
- <l>We who looked for adventure everywhere</l>
- <l>We are not your enemies</l>
- <l>We want to give ourselves vast, strange territories...</l>
- <l>Pity us, skirmishing always at the frontiers</l>
- <l>Of the limitless, and of the future,</l>
- <l>Pity our errors, pity our sins.</l>
- </qt>
- <p> That sense of being "always at the frontiers" of history
- itself is volatile, and it began to evaporate from Picasso's work
- before the end of World War I. It left behind a residue,
- however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first
- public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame
- he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more
- influential than the poets and painters around the studios of
- the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the
- cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens.
- Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-
- garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was
- reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean
- Cocteau, a rappel a lordre (call to order), which would place
- art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia.
- "Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th
- Arrondissement after October 1917.
- </p>
- <p> The Picasso of 1918-24 was made for this situation. With
- ebullience, he threw himself into the role of the maestro,
- designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
- marrying one of its dancers, and allowing a conventional style
- of portraiture, often as insipid as the $3 million Acrobat sold
- to Japan in last weeks's Garbisch auction, to alternate with a
- highly decorative form of cubism. "Decorative," of course, is
- no longer a cuss word, and his best flat-pattern cubist
- paintings of the early '20s, with their gravely shuttling
- collage-like overlaps of bright and dark color, are marvels of
- pictorial intelligence. The two versions of his Three
- Musicians, 1921, show what Picasso could do when his sense of
- form was fully engaged. The classicizing drift of the early
- '20s took its most explicit shape in the Three Women at the
- Spring, 1921. Their dropsical limbs resemble a Pompeian fresco
- inflated with an air hose, even though the full-size sanguine
- drawing for the painting, which Picasso kept for himself, has
- the genuinely classicist air of unforced, continuous modeling.
- </p>
- <p> As solitary virtuoso, Picasso would from now on depend wholly
- on himself and his feelings. There would be no more
- collaborations, as with Braque. The corollary was that Picasso
- gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity,
- so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage,
- castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong
- to the Spaniard. This frankness--allied with Picasso's power
- of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a
- ravenous, animistic vitality--is without parallel among other
- artists and explains his importance to a movement he never
- joined, surrealism.
- </p>
- <p> Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its
- discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and
- the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to
- penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they
- were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the
- "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his
- life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers
- grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic
- randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy
- terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that
- emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated
- Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic: they project fears
- that no French artist (and outside France, only Edvard Munch)
- would even admit to. One needs colossal self-confidence to
- expose such insecurities.
- </p>
- <p> On the other side of these chthonic appetites lay some of the
- most haunting images of metamorphosis and erotic fulfillment in
- the history of Western art. They were provided by his affair
- with Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman whom Picasso picked
- up outside a Paris department store in 1927. He was 45, feeling
- trapped in a sour marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova;
- Marie-Therese was 17.
- </p>
- <p> "Pictures are made the way the prince gets children," Picasso
- remarked a little later, "with the shepherdess." In Marie-
- Therese, he found a shepherdess--a placid, ill-educated and
- wholly compliant blonde, who had never heard of him or his work,
- and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret
- as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His
- images of Marie-Therese reading, sleeping, contemplating her
- face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings)
- for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an
- extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned. In
- one sense, the body of Marie-Therese, curled up in Nude Asleep
- in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it--a
- lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings,
- nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual
- signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint.
- Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Therese,
- Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations.
- The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of
- desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot
- do.
- </p>
- <p> His metamorphic sculptures of Marie-Therese from the early
- '30s, involutes of swollen dreaming bronze in which cheek is
- conflated with buttock, mouth with vagina, have a wonderful
- tenderness and power as plastic surfaces. Even the plumpness
- of the bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the
- slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not
- with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways,the
- shapes of Marie-Therese, smooth and closed, are like the totemic
- bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the
- projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized
- building along the Cote d'Azur. But their whole import is
- different. There is no dislocation or fear in them: they are,
- as William Blake put it, "the lineaments of gratified desire."
- </p>
- <p> The climate of sexual politics has changed so irreversibly in
- the past 50 years that one cannot imagine a painter trying such
- images today. In that sense, Picasso closed another tradition
- in the act of reinventing it. The same applies to his visions
- of the classical Mediterranean from the 1930s. Picasso felt the
- Greeks in the ground and was the last modern artist to raise
- them. The river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads
- that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable
- drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional
- decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of
- autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification.
- Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a
- Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of
- his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean
- images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols
- of that once Arcadian coast.
- </p>
- <p> Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its
- way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike
- effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it
- is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely
- seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary
- bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the
- documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's
- body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.
- </p>
- <p> Guernica was the last masterpiece of painting to be provoked by
- political catastrophe. World War II and the Holocaust evoked
- nothing to match it, and the monuments to the Gulag are books,
- not paintings. Guernica's power flows from the contrast between
- its almost marmoreal formal system and the terrible vocabulary
- of pain that Picasso locked into it. It is shown at MOMA with
- all its preliminary studies, and to see Picasso developing these
- hieroglyphs of anguish, the horse, the weeping woman, the
- screaming head, the fallen soldier, the clenched hand on the
- sword, is to witness one of the supreme dramas of the injection
- of feeling into conventional subject matter that the century has
- to offer. Indeed, the effort was such that it carried him past
- the end of the picture into a series of weeping women's heads,
- which show, even more clearly than Guernica, how Picasso could
- saturate a motif with meaning, to the point where it could hold
- no more truth. This free passage from feeling into meaning was
- the essence of his genius. Even when he was painting below
- form, he could always find significance in commonplace
- sensations, however distorted the actual form: the death in a
- goat's skull or the spikiness of a sea urchin, the feather
- softness of a dove, the looming stupid menace of a bull, a
- toad's lumpish slither.
- </p>
- <p> Picasso was 55 when he finished Guernica, and up to his 60th
- birthday or so he remained an artist worthy of comparison (if
- painters and writers can be compared) with Shakespeare. There
- was a similar range of feeling, from bawdry to tragedy, coupled
- with a rhetorical intensity of metaphor and a great depth of
- experience. After Guernica he could still paint very well:
- L'Aubade, in 1942, with its stark intimations of confinement and
- oppression, seems to distill the mood of occupied France. Some
- of his portraits of Dora Maar, Marie-Therese's successor as his
- mistress, are of ravishing and edgy beauty.
- </p>
- <p> Yet the inventions of necessity slowly gave way to the needs
- of mere performance. Picasso's sculpture retained its intensity
- almost to the end, but his painting did not, and this became
- clear after 1950. Without doubt, MOMA's great exhibition ends
- on a dying fall. The Picassian energy is still there,
- masquerading as inspiration, but too often it ends as a form of
- visual conjuring. Was he growing bored with his own virtuosity?
- Impossible to know. Since anything could be converted into a
- Picasso, and thence into gold, he suffered the dilemma of Midas
- twice over. This was the inevitable result of the fame he
- enjoyed in the last quarter-century of his life, a fame such as
- no artist in history had known. It could only have been
- created by the pressures of the 20th century, with its mass
- magazines, its art market, its mania for promiscuity among
- famous names combining in the most sustained exercise in
- mythmaking ever to be visited on a painter. In the end he was
- trapped by his own reputation, the idol and prisoner of his
- court of toadies and dealers, fawned on and denied the ordinary
- resistances against which an artist, to survive at all, must
- push.
- </p>
- <p> It showed in the work. But do the irresolutions of his old age
- really matter? Picasso shaped his century when it, and he, was
- younger, and all its possibilities were open to his ravening
- eye, in those three decades between 1907 and 1937. He was the
- most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures
- a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him--from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile
- Gorky--an almost indescribably fruitful one.
- </p>
- <p> Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows
- signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his
- own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it
- was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga.
- </p>
- <p>-- Robert Hughes
- </p>
- <p>PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
- </p>
- <p> In terms of sheer administrative labor, "Pablo Picasso: A
- Retrospective" is the most taxing show the Museum of Modern Art
- has ever installed. The idea for it came in 1972, when Art
- Historian and Picasso Expert William Rubin was visiting the
- artist in his villa at Mougins, in the south of France. In the
- sculpture-jammed studio, on the ground floor of the house, Rubin
- recalls, "I almost had a sense of vertigo. There was so much
- invention contained in so small an area. I thought to myself:
- There should be a really great Picasso show that combines
- Picasso's own holdings with things he let out of the studio."
- The following year, Rubin offered to clear the whole Museum of
- Modern Art and for four months, in effect, turn it into a
- Picasso museum. Picasso, who had never seen MOMA, chuckled and
- said yes. A few months later he died, leaving no will and all
- the "Picasso's Picassos" (45,000 works) awaiting cataloguing by
- the experts. Eventually, after a six-year-long legal bout, the
- estate, valued at up to $400 million, was distributed among the
- various heirs, with the French government scooping up, in lieu
- of taxes, 3,488 works, representing one-third of the estate's
- value, for the proposed Musee Picasso in Paris.
- </p>
- <p> Rubin, 52, set to work with the future head of that museum,
- Dominique Bozo, 45. Beginning in late 1977, they whittled their
- huge exhibition of 940 works from the Spaniard's colossal
- output. The logistics of getting it to New York were daunting.
- They involved hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance
- (MOMA will not reveal exactly how much), the work of 30
- couriers, and some 75 air shipments from different corners of
- the world. The cost of the exhibition was $2 million. Of the
- 152 lenders, among them 56 museums, only two sources balked.
- One was Picasso's widow Jacqueline, who, taken ill two weeks
- before the exhibition paintings were to be picked up, locked the
- gates of her villa. At the last moment Rubin wheedled the two
- portraits he needed from her. The other was the Soviet
- government, which, in the chilling of cultural relations with
- the U.S. that followed the invasion of Afghanistan, canceled the
- loan of twelve major Picassos.</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-