At Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, the final decade
That Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most prodigally gifted artist of the 20th century can hardly be in doubt, even among those who can make the effort to see him with a measure of skepticism or detachment. But his last years have always posed a problem. When the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was filled with Picasso's last paintings in the summer of 1973, they caused as much disappointment as surprise. Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse. The walls were covered with 17th century dwarfs and musketeers, puffing on pipes and goggling at pudenda. They were painted coarse and quick, with what seemed to be a kind of narcissistic perfunctoriness, as though the old man had become so obsessed with filling out his Don Giovanni catalogue that he could not stop long enough to finish the last entries. The paintings seemed, in the art jargon of the '70s, more process than product, but none the more palatable for that. Nor did the market like them much; collectors who saw the late work as much more than the repetitive spoutings of an old man raging against death were few and far between. Lear à l'espagnol, no doubt, but one need not queue for tickets.
Because of this indifference, it is only now, eleven years since Picasso's death, that a properly done museum show of his last decade can be seen in New York City. It nearly foundered on the way: organized by Art Historian Gert Schiff for New York University's Grey Art Gallery, it was first canceled for lack of funds, and then revived by the Guggenheim Museum, where it opened March 2. A show like this cannot pretend to contain all the evidence; apart from a huge output of drawings and prints, Picasso made perhaps 400 paintings in the last three years of his life. And yet it draws the profile as it had not been drawn before. Not even the most hard-bitten viewer can contemplate this oeuvre without a degree of awe—a sensation not always identical with aesthetic pleasure. No doubt about it, Picasso painted many bad and some flatly absurd pictures at the end of his life. But the good ones are so good, and in such a weird way, that they utterly transfix the eye, while the drawings (and some of the vast outflow of etchings) possess an assurance, a sensuous ferocity that no other living artist could approach, let alone rival.
Schiff s catalogue essay does an excellent job of dissecting and analyzing the themes of late Picasso, but there are moments when he goes right off the edge. The last period, he declares, "is not a 'swan song,' but the apotheosis of his career." A ten-dollar word: it means transformation into a god. It is what mad Nero dreamed of; and now, on the theological authority vested in the Guggenheim Museum and its trustees, it has come to "Ol' Cojones."