Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Homer's Proteus was more than a quick-change artist. Once pinned down-and the problem was in the pinning-he would revert to his original shape and utter prophecies. So with Picasso; and some of the deepest and most durable work he produced was made when he was, if not pinned down, at least constrained by shared responsibility. Thus his co-invention, with Braque, of Cubism: that system of anchoring and interlocking forms in space that proved to be the first workable (though less systematic) alternative to Renaissance perspective in modern...
...very reductio of death; or paint a jug so that it seemed distended with anxiety; or confer on the rounded limbs of his mistress in the '30s, Marie-Therese Walter, a rhythmic and sensuous languor that might otherwise have vanished from the nude after Ingres. No modern artist has been able to pack more sensation into a form than this Spaniard, engaged in his lifelong conversation with Eros and Thanatos...
...less radical. That restless inventiveness provoked in collectors the expectations about stylistic "turnover" that, now built into the market, are such a strain on more single-minded talents. It is to Picasso that we owe, in no small way, the oppressive image of the artist as a superstud that only now is coming under attack. He has even had a degree of political effect: Guernica, the mural canvas he painted in protest against the fascist ruin of Spanish democracy, is certainly the most disseminated work of political art made in this century...
...Picasso was the most famous artist in the world; by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived, in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven...
...before he died had been a day like many others at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, his hilltop villa at Mougins on the French Riviera. Late in the afternoon the artist had taken a walk in the little park that surrounds his sprawling stone house overlooking the reddish foothills of the Maritime Alps. He liked now and then to gather flowers and vegetables in the garden, often taking them inside to draw. "That day I showed him the anemones and pansies, which he particularly liked," recalls Jacques Barra, Picasso's gardener...