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Why the hyperbole? Because of inflation. Now that every squawking neo-expressionist turkey is treated as an eagle, Picasso, whose angry, abbreviated late style is grandfather to the mode of the early '80s, has to be deified, and never mind the language. (One wonders what Schiff would say about late Titian or the old age of Michelangelo.) Actually, Picasso's last decade contains little that can compare with his work in the 30 years after 1907, when his transformation not only of modernist style but of the very possibilities of painting was so vast in scope, deep in feeling and authoritative in its intensity. Then as now he was influencing Pabloids, but the earlier ones had better material to work with.
The drawings and prints are the most accessible part of the late work. A large enough part too: even without the famous "Suite 347" etchings of 1968, they run into the thousands and probably have not all been — counted even yet. Picasso drew with an immediacy that, in most of us, is reserved only for daydreaming, and anyone who supposes that the rough, wobbly-looking handling of the late paintings is due to the shaky fist of age should look at the drawings, whose linear control is absolute. They make up a theater of characters, some familiar and others not: nudes from the imaginary seraglios of Delacroix and the real brothels of Degas, comic in their pillowy availability; inhabitants of Picasso's Hesiodic arcadia, little whopstraw gods, satyrs, nymphs; musketeers and majas, dwarfs and Velásquez aristocrats. Then there are his own inventions of years before pulled in for a final bow—the women from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for instance. Picasso was saying goodbye to sex, and could never see enough of its emblems; so his sèenes galantes are imbued with a heavy, nostalgic, undeceived randiness.
The paintings are a somewhat different matter. There, despite the apparent outwardness of his vehemence, Picasso was almost crazily hermetic. Later and younger artists could mimic the expressive urgency but not earn the reasons for it. He was an old, ravening, isolated and tough man in a world without resistances. He had always been preoccupied with the spectacle of himself as Primitive Man: a fiction, but (as worked out across the long panorama of Picasso's oeuvre) a consoling and sustaining one. He wanted to go a step further: to paint something that, in defiance of the secular, spiritually exorcised conditions of modern life, would not just challenge but actually invest the viewer with its iconic power—the lost power of the mask. As André Malraux recounted in his memoir of Picasso, La Téte d'Obsidienne (and as Art Critic Jed Perl reminds us in a splendid essay on late Picasso in the New Criterion), Picasso was obsessed by this project in old age: "I must absolutely find the mask."