Word: picasso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...image for this owl-eyed, leathery stump of wrinkled vitality was Proteus: the Odyssey's old man of the sea, whose power was to assume any form -beast, wave or tree-at will. He is the tutelary saint of virtuosos, and Picasso's virtuosity is the one fact of modern art that everybody knows something about. Stories about it begin in his early childhood. It is said that his father, a provincial art teacher in La Coruna, Spain, turned over his own brushes and paints to this alarming offspring, confessing that little Pablo had already surpassed...
...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...
Eros. The view that Picasso's main contribution to modernity was Cubism is not, however, just. Cubism was an inexpressive system, and therein, admittedly, lay much of its beauty. But Picasso was also a master of expression. He could give a bronze skull a terrible, impacted and bulletlike solidity, the 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...
...full sweep of Picasso's effect on modern art will probably never be documented-not because it is unapparent, but simply because nobody, for 30 years or more, has been untouched by him, so that the lesser details involve meaningless talents and run out in peripheries and shallows. He established collage as a formal device. His Cubist constructions steered the course of modern sculpture away from mass and toward open forms and rigging. His sheet-metal Guitar of 1912 was as prophetic of future sculpture as Demoiselles had been of later painting. His combination of found objects with metal...
...Picasso's effect on the sociology of art was in no way 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...