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Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic. One needs colossal self-confidence to expose such insecurities.
Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.
Picasso was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him—from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky—an almost indescribably fruitful one. Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga.