Anatomy of a Minotaur
By ROBERT HUGHES
PABLO PICASSO is nearly as old as the electric light bulb. He was nearing his quarter-century by the time the Wright brothers lumbered into the air at Kitty Hawk. He was well known by the start of World War I and a celebrity when it ended. Since then, his reputation has increased exponentially, to the point where the shape of 20th century art is unimaginable without him. This week Picasso turned 90, and his birthday summoned a procession of tribute bearers. The Louvre has turned over its Grande Galerie to a selection of Picasso's work, the first time in its history that this honor has been extended to a living artist. Said President Georges Pompidou, opening the show: "This is not a Picasso exhibition; this is an homage from France to the great artist who has chosen our country to live and work in." In New York, the offerings range from a loan show sampling the past 70 years of his work, shared between the Marlborough and Saidenberg galleries, to a facsimile edition of some Picasso sketchbooks from 1964, containing a few dozen mildly erotic but trivial scribbles, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. at $500 a copy. Across the world, paeans rise to assure everyone that Picasso is younger and more exuberantly creative than ever, that he is still the supreme culture-hero of our century.
"We feel that no hand has ever possessed a greater gift of wonder, of revealing in one single, decisive stroke the mystery of life in all its profundity," writes a critic named Jose Bergamin in one of the new books, Picasso at 90. "The most perfect, absolute, authentic Picasso, the Picasso par excellence, it seems to me, is the latest one."
The Legend. Such bombast is familiar because Picasso has not been a subject of serious controversy for at least 35 years. The man has become a monument, rising from a reflecting pool of undiluted praise. For Picasso is not merely the most famous artist alive. He is the most famous artist that ever lived; more people have heard of him than ever heard the names, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Cezanne while they were alive. His audience is incalculable. By now, it must run into hundreds of millions--including, admittedly, the many people who have heard of him but have no idea of his pictures. The old man with the monkey face and the black, insatiable eyes squats at the center of this reputation, proclaimed and hidden by its coils: the archetypal Minotaur in his maze.
Occasionally he prances out, wearing a funny hat. What he is validates what he does: he has so long been saddled (not unwillingly) with the task of being the vitality-image or phallus of the West that every sketch, painting or dish tends to be greeted with the same ritually stupefied reverence. Hence la legende Picasso, which has been energetically prodded along by writers like Helene Parmelin and photographers like David Douglas Duncan and Gjon Mili. From their breathless accounts a satyr rises, mythic, Gargantuan, and fatally easy to parody. The Maestro's working day, one might suppose, begins with a light breakfast of goat's testicles and salade nic,oise. Then, surrounded by a flock of admiring tame doves, he descends to his studio and executes 30 engravings, two murals and a still life. At lunch, having done a zapateado before the avid lenses of a team from Paris Match, he gives Dominguin some tips in the art of gracefully demolishing a bull. Now it is pottery time, and 83 ceramic owls later, Picasso summons his chauffeur and picks up three virgins on the beach. They are deflowered during the siesta, and retire, twittering gratefully, to write their memoirs. Refreshed, the Maestro fills in the yawning hours before dinner with a dozen portraits. The omelette palpitates under his fork, unable to believe its luck. It, too, will be converted into a Picasso. A green, nocturnal silence reigns in the garden, broken only by the muffled clamor of Greek shipping millionaires stuffing $1,000 bills through the letter box in the hope that Picasso will draw on one of them. But the day is over . . .
Lost Passion. Life is not like this, and neither is Picasso's. The elaborate fiesta that the mayor and citizens of Vallauris have prepared for his birthday will go largely unrecognized by Picasso, predicted his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 87, who has known the artist since 1907. "I'm sure that he will disappear for his birthday this year as usual. Perhaps he won't even leave his house. But he will cut the telephone; he will start saying that he is traveling somewhere. He always does." Picasso still dresses with a dandyism beyond the wildest dreams of King's Road: trousers with one blue and one red leg, dragon shirts, Oriental headgear. "He is a little model," says his tailor, Michel Sapone. "I have made him velvet robes, kilts, jackets embroidered in the Yugoslav manner. I assure you, he wears them with majesty." But all desire to be public, to act in front of the camera, is gone. The group of friends and colleagues has dwindled, for Picasso has outlived them. Matisse, Braque, Gris, Leger, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Gide, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Eluard, Breton, Sabartes, Gertrude Stein--almost all the friends and legendary figures who made the "heroic" years of the French avant-garde and constituted the tribunal against which Picasso could measure himself--are dead. "When I see you," he recently told one friend, Photographer Georges Brassai, "my first reaction is to reach in my pocket for a package of cigarettes to offer you one, like the old days. I know very well that we don't smoke any more. Age has obliged us to renounce them, but the desire remains! Same thing for making love. One doesn't do it any more. But the desire remains."
Narrow Circle. The cercle Picasso is narrow now, and it has not changed in years--the painter Edouard Pignon, his wife Helene Parmelin, Sir Roland Penrose (who wrote a biography of him), the British collector and art historian Douglas Cooper and Kahnweiler himself. Casual visitors, even ones who have known Picasso for years, are generally turned back by the intercom at the electronically controlled gates of his villa at Mougins, Notre-Dame-de-Vie.
Picasso still owns the Chateau de Boisgeloup near Gisors, which he bought in 1931; a sumptuous Belie Epoque villa at Cannes, La Californie (which he quit in pique when a real estate developer put apartment blocks on the land below the garden, ruining the view); and the enormous castle of Vauvenargues on the north flank of the hill that Cezanne often painted, Mont St.-Victoire. But Mougins has become his cloister. "He doesn't travel any more. He hardly even goes into Cannes except for the dentist," says Kahnweiler. "And he doesn't see bullfights any more because, he says, 'when I leave home it disturbs my work.' "
Work and Isolation. For time is of the essence; though Picasso is in good health (he eats sparingly in the big farmhouse kitchen at Mougins and rations himself to one glass of wine with meals), he hides. "If I received everyone who wanted to see me for just ten minutes, it would last every day till midnight," he says. Picasso's 41-year-old wife, Jacqueline Roque, is his shield: for the past ten years at Mougins she has borne the punishing weight of answering and filtering Picasso's mail, keeping his clippings up to date, dealing with the telephone, the cataloguing, the buying of food, supplies, canvas, paint and, on top of it all, calming the nerves of a high-strung and tetchy nonagenarian painter. They have produced no children. Jacqueline has a 22-year-old daughter from her previous marriage, who often visits them. But Picasso's isolation from his own offspring is nearly absolute. His first son, Paul, is now 50 and lives in Paris; his daughter by Marie-Therese Walter lives in Spain; and his two children by Franc,oise Gilot, Claude, 24, and Paloma, 22, were cut out of his life and virtually deprived of support from their millionaire father during one of his fits of rage over their mother's memoirs, Life With Picasso. Only work remains.
The energy with which Picasso can still attack his work is demoniac. He still, on occasion, paints until 2 or 3 a.m., and regularly puts in eight hours a day in the studio. "I painted three canvases this afternoon," Picasso once told his amanuensis, Helene Parmelin. "What's necessary is to do them, to do them, to do them! The more you paint, the nearer you get to something. You must do as many as possible." This obsessed machismo resembles nothing so much as a displacement of sex into art: the furious production of Picasso's old age is an exact pictorial counterpart to the catalogue of seductions by Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose promiscuity was a shield against death:
In Italy, six hundred and forty, In Germany, two hundred thirty-one, A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one: But, but in Spain--One thousand and three!
Picasso is not only the most famous artist in history, he is also the richest. "Currency is worth less in Picasso's hands than a sheet of blank paper," remarked the English artist and critic Michael Ayrton, "and this condition promotes the problems with which the legendary Midas had to contend." Picasso can get anything by drawing for it. Shortly after World War II, he acquired one of his Midi villas, now relinquished, by exchanging it for a set of lithographs. His own collection of Picassos, several hundred oils (not counting his sculpture, much of which he has kept, his collection of work by other artists and the thousands of drawings that lie in bales throughout the rooms of Mougins, Vauvenargues and La Californie), is now worth anything from $50 million to $100 million. The value of his whole estate has been estimated at around $750 million. His income is immense. Between Jan. 5, 1969 and Feb. 2, 1970, he produced 167 oils and 45 drawings, which were shown in the Papal Palace at Avignon the following summer. Since (according to Marlborough Gallery) the current price for a recent Picasso oil ranges between $50,000 and $150,000, and for a drawing up to $25,000, the gross market value of that one year's work may be put at around $15 million.
Nobody knows how big his output has been. The catalogue raisonne of Picasso's work, begun by his friend Christian Zervos 39 years ago, cannot keep up with this immense, almost monotonous fecundity; it runs to 23 volumes, and has only reached the early 1960s. Some two-thirds of this oeuvre is privately owned by dealers and collectors. Thus, in terms of investment, literally billions of dollars hang upon the survival of his reputation, a fact that accentuates the general reluctance to breathe a word against his work.
How Modern? But whether Picasso's reputation will survive in its present form is an open question. Sir Anthony Blunt, one of England's leading art historians, flatly declares that "Picasso is no longer a modern painter," and that "after 1945, he ceased to hold the leading position in modern painting." Says Manhattan Dealer Leo Castelli: "Picasso is not an important force in modern painting now. But he is still an incredibly important figure because of what he's been. He's not just a great painter. He's one of the towering figures of this century and all times. He goes along with Velasquez and Rubens." Demands Sir Roland Penrose: "What do people expect of a modern painter? Whenever painting of the image is considered, Picasso is of vital importance. His influence is not as strong as it was 20 years ago. But times and influences change. His will swing back."
There is little doubt about the direction of the swing today. Forty years ago, Picasso was a presence that every living artist had to cope with. His Promethean spirit was written into the idea of modernism itself. Not now. The only men of Picasso's generation whose work still exerts pressure on modern painting are Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). To artists nurtured on Duchampian irony, the very idea of the culture-hero, which Picasso embodies, is suspect. The last 15 years have seen a reaction against the cult of expressive personality in art, and Picasso has caught the backlash. He took the virtuoso's role, enlarged it, identified it with himself, and reamed out all its possibilities. Hence nobody else can play it: there is no act left to follow. Picasso's current work means little or nothing to other artists, and no living painters influence him. He inhabits an iso lation which is as extreme as his fame. The history of art, which Picasso brilliantly raided throughout his career, has now enfolded him. He is an Old Master before his death, contemplating the spectacle of a posterity which has already come.
The Prodigy. Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispin Crispiniano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was born at Malaga, under the sign of Scorpio, on Oct. 25, 1881. His mother claimed that the first word he uttered was "piz"--baby talk for lapiz or pencil. "When I was twelve," the artist boasted later, "I could draw like Raphael." He could not, of course. But when he was 15, he had already exhausted the limits of academic teaching, as is amply shown in The Altar Boy, 1896 (No. 1 in TIME's survey of his work on pages 71-74). It is said that Picasso's father, a provincial art teacher, turned over his brushes and paints to this terrifying offspring, confessing that Pablo had surpassed him, and he could work no longer. This Oedipal story (the child castrating the father) crops up often in the legends of genius, but it is quite possibly true of Picasso. He was as startling a child prodigy as Mozart.
That sense of prodigy never left him. It is central to his imagination, as one of the most interesting books on him, The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger, points out. "Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants," Picasso has said. His experience of self is predicated on that sensation of bearing, in the literal sense, "a gift," for gifts come from outside, and the artist is their medium. Prodigy is analogous to the divine right of kings--always present, a force beyond argument or development. Hence Picasso s most often quoted remark: "I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in modern painting. In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting; to find is the thing."
When he was not quite 19, before he first left Spain for Paris, Picasso wrote on a self-portrait "Yo el Rey"--the King. This motif runs through his art and life. To think that Picasso has ever been embarrassed by the homages paid him would be naive. Though prone to fits of self-doubt, he is the most naturally egotistic artist since Benvenuto Cellini, a standing refutation of the cozy untruth that geniuses are rather humble at heart. Significantly, he read Nietzsche when he was young, and there is an exhortation in Zarathustra that could well serve as the epigraph to his career: "You must become a chaos if you would give birth to a dancing star."
Inflated Blues. Picasso's immature work has benefited greatly from hindsight and feedback. The slides flick, the familiar images succeed one another--the young painter chewing his way through Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Gauguin, Munch, Steinlen and a host of other influences that crowded upon him in Barcelona and, after 1900, in Paris. There is no consolidated style in Picasso's career until, aged 21, he starts moving into the Blue and Pink periods.
These have long been the public's favorite area of Picasso's work; to some degree they still are, and the desire to treat Picasso as if he had been a master from birth has absurdly inflated them. Thus Alfred Barr once wrote that a Picasso of 1905, Boy Leading a Horse (10), "makes the official guardians of the 'Greek' traditions such as Ingres ... seem vulgar or pallid." Rather, the Blue and Pink periods contain the most accessible images Picasso ever produced--sensitive, mannered and drenched in pathos. Those who have problems decoding the intricate Cubist structure of a 1912 still life have none with the consumptive laundresses, wistful acrobats and delicately shaded cripples who populate Picasso's canvases between 1902 and 1906. On one level, they record his experience of the miserable and dehumanizing poverty that lay around him in Paris and Barcelona; on another, the beggar-as-outcast is equated with the artist-as-outsider.
The figures of the Blue Period, especially, have no identity beyond their tremulous suffering. Some, like Woman Ironing (6), are so excruciatingly sentimental that they stand to Picasso's work rather as the death of Little Nell does to Dickens'. At this early stage one can see, especially in the Rose Period, that urge toward nostalgic generalization that repeatedly crept into Picasso's art in later years. The circus performers in Family of Saltimbanques (8) are conceived in the manner of a Watteau fete champetre, and Picasso apparently tried to rival the psychological tension of glance and gesture in that master's work; their fragile simplicity is idealized; it is a bruised, poor Arcadia, but Arcadia still, inhabited by a species of post-industrial Noble Savage.
Immovable Object. If everything Picasso painted up to 1906 were subtracted, it would leave no real gap in the history of modern art. But in that year Picasso began his advance to Cubism. Perhaps the first unqualified masterpiece in his career was his portrait of Gertrude Stein (14). "Picasso," Stein recalled, "sat very tight on his chair and very close to the canvas, and on a very small palette, which was of uniform brown-gray color, mixed some more brown gray and the painting began."
Picasso's irresistible fluency now struck its immovable object. The portrait took 80 sittings to finish. It taxed Picasso's concentration to the limit, and the result was one of the few indisputably great portraits that he, or anyone else in this century, has produced: a densely sculptural image, hieratic and masklike, more compact almost than matter itself. Picasso's absorption of "primitive" shape (he had spent a lot of time with Iberian and Egyptian sculpture that year) was now complete, and the way to Cubism was open.
Financially this moment was the nadir of Picasso's life. He was living in the Bateau Lavoir, a studio building in Rue Ravignan. "No one," Kahnweiler recalls, "could ever imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios. The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls. There was dust on the drawings and rolled-up canvases on the caved-in couch. Beside the stove was a kind of mountain of piled-up lava, which was ashes. It was unspeakable."
But if the studio was squalid in those days of 1907, the painting in it, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (16), struck Picasso's fellow artists as little short of mad. Andre Derain feared it presaged Picasso's suicide, and its hacked dislocation alarmed Braque, who compared the performance to "someone drinking gasoline and spitting fire." Perhaps it is too simple to say that Cubism "came out of" Demoiselles, for the raggedness, fury and inconsistencies of the canvas were alien to the spirit of calm inquiry that afterward pervaded Cubist painting. But Demoiselles was so extreme that it presented the artists in Picasso's circle with a coup d'etat against every visual convention they knew. It was a totally radical painting--so much so, indeed, that even Picasso withdrew slightly from it, and for the next several years worked to stabilize the buckling planes and shallow space in such magnificent canvases as After the Ball (18) and Still Life with Liqueur Bottle (19). Braque, unable to ignore the challenge of Demoiselles, did likewise. By 1911 they were working together, joined, in Braque's phrase, like mountaineers on a rope.
Unique Moment. For Picasso, Cubism was a turning point. Before, he had been the Prodigy. After, he would become the Maestro, imitated instead of imitating, a unique figure whose work gradually separated from the culture around him. But from 1911 to around 1917, for the first and only time in his life, his motto about finding, not seeking, was reversed: Cubism brought him into a field of mutual, symbiotic research and thus sublimated his virtuoso instincts. In the '20s and '30s, and rather less in the '40s, Picasso continued to pour forth major works of art, but their collective impact on the history of art, and on the whole sum of our culture, does not quite equal the modest-looking canvases, with their brown facets and yellowing patches of newsprint, that survive from his Cubist years.
For what Cubism attempted, and brought off, was a wholly new approach to visual language, to the methods of representation itself. It was not abstract art. It was not interested in mysticism or metaphysics. It tried, instead, to be as specific as possible about the location, shape and density of real objects in a real world.
Kahnweiler gave an elegant account of their basic aims: "The Impressionists would have painted a house in the distance with a blue roof that one would see simply as a blue blob. It was against this that the Cubists initially rebelled. They said to themselves: 'But this house is a cubic construction that is turned in a certain direction. All this must be communicated to the spectator.' So they immediately tried to give an image of objects that was more detailed, more precise, more true than can be seen in a single glance. They painted at least partially what we know of the object, and not only what we see of it."
Cubism was the first full demonstration in art that our sensations come from multiple viewpoints, that we inhabit a field of experience, not a fixed perspective. Picasso's achievement was to state, and then brilliantly develop, this vision. With his paintings and collages of 1910-14, he solved the problem of how to keep the painted surface as real as what it depicted (21-29). In short, he cut through the fiction of illusionism.
Sculpted Candor. His Cubist sculptures were equally prophetic: Guitar, 1911-12, with its flat tin planes and open spaces, proposed an alternative to nearly everything that, classically, sculpture was supposed to be. Guitar was not modeled, not a monolith, not of bronze or marble; it had neither armature nor skin; it declared its own crude structure with total candor. These are the characteristics of all the "constructed" sculptures that were to be made after Cubism--from Gonzales to David Smith and Anthony Caro. It was an extraordinary prediction, which stands to modern sculpture rather as Demoiselles does to easel painting.
In the same way, Picasso's wire constructions of the late '20s lead to Giacometti and many another later sculp tor; that darting, inventive energy was always at play. How many junk assemblers have taken their cue from the bike saddle and handlebars that Picasso combined into a bull's head in 1943, or the Baboon of 1951, with a toy car for face and a soccer ball for stomach? Picasso's sculpture, once considered a footnote to his painting, may turn out to possess a longer span of influence within its own medium.
Public Man. Impressive as Picasso's Cubism now seems, it won no immediate public recognition for its creator. That came only in 1917, when Impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Picasso to design a new ballet, Parade, with music by Erik Satie. Picasso went to Italy with the ophidian prodigy of the salons, Poet Jean Cocteau, to work on the sets and costumes. The motifs he encountered there inspired a series of stout, monumentalized "neoclassical" compositions (33-35). From then on, Picasso had a repertory for his Arcadia: the vine-wreathed gods and nymphs, the Minotaurs and classic busts, the disjecta membra of antiquity that he was to superbly transmute in the Vollard etchings of 1932 and return to, at intervals, for the rest of his life.
Parade created a scandal and launched Picasso as a public personality. Cocteau's milieu absorbed him, and he became a social lion, resplendent in dinner jacket and red sash, surrounded by titled groupies. During this "bourgeois" phase of Picasso's life, he made a disastrous marriage to one of Diaghilev's dancers, a Russian girl named Olga Koklova. Picasso, as several of "his" women have made clear, was never an easy man to live with. As he put it bluntly to his later mistress Franc,oise Gilot, women are for him "either goddesses or doormats." (Picasso, not Mailer, is the century's monument of narcissism and male chauvinism.)
But in Olga he picked exactly the wrong wife. She was pretty, inflexibly respectable and snobbish; she tried hard to reform Picasso's bohemian habits. His portraits of Olga when they were in love (32) are among the few completely insipid Picassos that exist. As the marriage disintegrated, the great figure paintings and still lifes (31, 36, 37) began alternating with a sequence of brutally distorted female heads. Woman's Head and Self-Portrait, 1929 (38) is nothing less than a pictorial act of revenge: the savage, angular profile of Olga, with its chisel teeth and spike tongue about to devour the undistorted silhouette of Picasso's own profile. Its delirium is prolonged, in a different way, in the Surrealist beach scenes at Dinard, like Bather Playing with a Ball, 1932 (39), populated by elephantine, grotesque she-bathers who balloon on the sand or fiddle intrusively at the keyholes of locked beach huts.
Erotic Images. These are among Picasso's more evident gifts to Surrealism. But they also exemplify his astounding power to make images of sensation. In fact, his painting from 1920 onward seems increasingly to draw its power from emotion fed back into the object--sexual or not--that had provoked it. Wrote Critic John Berger: "He has been able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse's head than many artists have found in a whole Crucifixion." His paintings approach autobiography, a vivid graph of his reactions to public issues and private relationships.
Thus they indicate, among other things, how he felt about his successive loves. In the early '30s, for instance, Picasso fell in love with a blonde Swiss girl named Marie-Therese Walter, 33 years younger than he. Marie-Therese--unlike the social-climbing Olga, who preceded her, and the sharply intelligent, gifted and nervous Dora Maar, who was her successor--presented no threat to him at all. She was a passive, 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-Therese 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-Therese's sleeping body, seems to have just had an orgasm.
Epic Gesture. What the paintings of Marie-Therese 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 naivete 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 Piet`a when he died at 89. One of the key changes in Matisse's career, the decoupages, 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 Velasquez's Las Meninas, Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (55), and Delacroix's The Women of Algiers (50), let alone the tedious parade of dwarfs, jesters, harlequins, Castilian grandees and copulating troglodytes that has been issuing from Mougins since 1969, survive in the world's attention for one reason alone: they have been painted by Picasso.
Many a lesser Picasso, of course, is still better than many a lesser man's best, and the conventional response is that Picasso may yet surprise us. Perhaps, but the likelihood dwindles, and in any case it no longer matters: the issue of final greatness in art does not pivot on surprise but rather on its opposite--the authority of the still center. You cannot invade history, as Picasso has done, without some idea of what to do with it, and Picasso's aim rarely faltered. It was to reconcile history with Eros, to live as both gratified savage and historically dissatisfied modern. The insatiable will of the child prodigy and the old man's lust for work are, in the end, the same.
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