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Except for a few intense and contorted still lifes, all the paintings in this show are of the human figure, usually centered, glaring outward with the dilated mania of the eye that first transfixed its audience in the preparatory paintings for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon three generations before. No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects). The late work attacks and reattacks art-history themes, figures by Rembrandt, Poussin, Manet, Delacroix, Rousseau. It is culturally saturated, as well as drenched in his macaronic, theatrical and self-mocking sexuality. And yet its obsessive project is to so generalize the image of the figure as to remove it from the sphere of "culture." Picasso hardly ever used models; every figure comes out of the head, and each face (despite the occasionally recognizable features of his last wife, Jacqueline Roque) aspires to the conceptual impact of the "primitive." As paintings, they do not necessarily get better as they get more masklike.
The picture that may be destined to become the most famous late Picasso (his supposed last self-portrait, green and mauve, stubble on the withered, tight ape flesh) is merely banal in its theatricality. But when, as in The Artist and His Model, 1964, the grinding contradictions of his formal system lock at last, when the haste and incompletion of the surface are overcome by the tensions of their massive underpinning, late Picasso has great visceral power—if not, necessarily, the magical efficacy he sought. Even in travesty, he knew the tragic; and though these late paintings are not the best of Picasso (let alone Schiffs "apotheosis"), they are to be valued as fragments of the kind of talent that today seems as distant as the moon itself. —By Robert Hughes