Word: picasso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Pablo Picasso, 91, protean genius of 20th century...
...this century, critics have been writing about Pablo Picasso in the present indicative. He was 91 years, six months and 17 days old when the tense changed and "is" finally became "was." It seems like a malfunction of language itself. But by now the doors of the pantheon are sealed, the first wave of reminiscences has rolled by, the wreaths are laid. The dealers have gone down to their storage racks to rewrite the price tickets. The last Picassos have been painted, drawn, etched, cast, welded, thrown or glazed, and the most generous display of creative exuberance in several hundred...
That is not an easy fact to grasp. The world has taken Picasso's presence for granted for so long, in the 50 or more years since he became, or was made into, a culture hero, that it seemed natural to assume that he would not die. So might Tibetans take the daily sight of Anapurna as routine. The gap left by Picasso is not immediately measurable. Since the best of his long life's work survives, very little is physically lost; not even the paintings of his last years, most of which-to judge from what...
...Self. Like some pharaoh taking his goods with him into the winding darkness below the sand, Picasso in dying has removed an idea of artistic activity from the West-an idea of which he was the last great exponent. It has to do with a passionate omnivorousness, a scale of experience not limited by a priori definitions of what painting or sculpture can carry; with an energetic and Mediterranean humanism. The life springs from the appetites, and the art from both. Or now, "sprang"; for no artist left alive has been able to rival Picasso's cultural embodiment...
...great wave of art at its ebb. Continual, radical change has become a constant for all the arts, but the leading figures of what now appears as the classical period of modernism are gone: two years ago Stravinsky; after the bitter silence of his last years, Pound; and now Picasso. Not for a long time, and perhaps never again, will any single artist create a revolution as fundamental as Picasso...