Art: Anatomy of a Minotaur

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undemanding odalisque; and with her Picasso, then 50, found a pitch of sexual happiness, which, if he had enjoyed it before, had not shown so conspicuously in his work. Marie-Thérèse inspired a sequence of erotic images which are unique in modern art. Not since Ingres's Bain Turc had sexual feeling been made so concrete in painting. The slow, swelling, profoundly organic rhythms of Nude on a Black Couch, 1932 (41) are a visual equivalent to Blake's praise of "the lineaments of satisfied desire"; even the philodendron, which rises behind Marie-Thérèse's sleeping body, seems to have just had an orgasm.

Epic Gesture. What the paintings of Marie-Thérése are to pleasure, the portraits of Dora Maar that cluster round Guernica and continue through World War II are to pain. One cannot look at the terrifying, dislocated features of Weeping Woman, 1937 (42), or Picasso's cat tearing up a live bird (46), without recognizing them as indictments of war. The climax of Picasso's concern was of course Guernica, 1937. This enormous canvas was Picasso's counterpart to Goya's Third of May and Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People, and it has become, if anything, more famous than either. Thirty-five years separate us from the Spanish Civil War and its slaughters, and in that time the painting has cooled somewhat: its austere range of black, gray and white, its noble struggle with monumental form and the strange, universalizing archaism (there are no bombs or guns, only a broken sword; the most modern image in the painting is an electric light, which is also the most ancient, for it becomes a pitiless Mithraic sun) belong more to the world of the Greek pediment and the Roman battle sarcophagus than to that of the Kondor Division, whose bombs demolished Guernica. But it remains a passionate and epic work, and it was Picasso's sole politically effective gesture. The best comment on Picasso's later (and continuing) role as a painter laureate to the French Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, was made by Salvador Dali: "Picasso is a Spaniard—so am I! Picasso is a genius—so am I! Picasso is a Communist—nor am I!" For Picasso's political naiveté is extreme, and his role in the party has never been more than ornamental.

The likely verdict of history will be that Guernica was Picasso's last great painting. He was 56 when he produced it; since then he has made thousands of works of art. Yet, curiously enough, he is one of the few major artists who, living to a healthy old age, changed restlessly but did not develop at all. Michelangelo, for instance, was working on the sublime testament of the Rondanini Pietà when he died at 89. One of the key changes in Matisse's career, the découpages, took place in his last years.

Lust for Work. Picasso's immense facility and control of gesture is still there; the wit, the Aristophanic irony, the ebullience and the capacity to fix an image remain. But he is apparently so infatuated with the spectacle of his own prodigious improvisation that, by one of the paradoxes that infest his life, he cannot focus it in any significant way. Picasso's reign over his images is such that no resistances are left—and that is his problem. Most of Picasso's variations on Velásquez's Las Meninas, Manet's Le