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The retrospective was put together by Rubin and Dominique Bozo, curator-in-charge of the future Musée 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 Musée 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.
In short, no exhibition like this can ever be mounted again. Bozo's main work with the Musée 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 Cézanne 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.
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 Málaga in 1881, the son of a painter named José Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned inglés 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.