Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are several ways of skirting this disagreeable fact. The first is to remind oneself of Picasso's energy, which stayed with him right to the end. That in itself is impressive: Don Juan at 91, creakily fornicating with his succession of blank canvases, struggling and failing, but then struggling again to trans form the too compliant image into a shield against death...
Another is, so to speak, iconographic: you can trace the motifs-the women and children, the reclining lovers, the toreadors and satyrs-and observe in what relationship they stand to the rest of Picasso's long dialogue with such themes. Unfortunately, none of this makes the paintings themselves any better. Under the pressure of haste, the Picassian style became a parody and at last a forgery of itself...
There is, for instance, a whole group of bullfighters whose shapes, except for a brusque vitality of placement that was always Picasso's hallmark and never quite left his fist, might almost have been produced by David Stein, Elmyr de Hory, or some other moderately gifted faker. Every artist has the right to his own cliches, but the last Picassos are only startling as cliche...
There is no observed or experienced reality in Picasso's last works, only an enfeebled meditation on style...
Looping and chopping its way through the repertory of shorthand for the human face and figure that he himself had developed decades before, Picasso's brush encountered no resistances. The twisting and displacement of a torso or an ear, the mock-cubist overlapping and profiling related to nothing except earlier paintings that he had made but seemed to have half forgot ten. The drama of assimilation, of that prehensile eye clawing at the world's very guts, dissolved. He ran out of subjects and fell back as never before on stock dummies - troglodytic clowns and kidney-profiled women...