Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inventions of necessity slowly gave way to the needs of mere performance. Picasso's sculpture retained its intensity almost to the end, but his painting did not, and this became clear after 1950. Without doubt, MOMA'S great exhibition ends on a dying fall. The Picassian energy is still there, masquerading as inspiration, but too often it ends as a form of visual conjuring. Was he growing bored with his own virtuosity? Impossible to know. Since anything could be converted into a Picasso, and into a Picasso, and thence into gold, he suffered the dilemma of Midas twice over. This...
...showed in the work. But do the irresolutions of his old age really matter? Picasso shaped his century when it, and he, was younger, and all its possibilities were open to his ravening eye, in those three decades between 1907 and 1937. He was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him ? from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky ? an almost indescribably fruitful...
...retrospective was put together by Rubin and Dominique Bozo, curator-in-charge of the future Musée Picasso in Paris. The effort could have succeeded only at this moment. By now the fights over Picasso's estate between his heirs and the French government?which have kept a score of lawyers fat, tired and happy since the old man died without leaving a will?have been resolved, yet the final disposition of his work has not been locked into an institutional frame. When the Musée Picasso, which received the cream of the work from Picasso's own estate, opens...
...short, no exhibition like this can ever be mounted again. Bozo's main work with the Musée Picasso is still before him. For Rubin, the MOMA show is the climax of a career; to have brought off, within three years, two exhibitions at such a level (the other being his Cézanne show in 1977) is in some measure to have altered the history of curatorship itself. Rubin, the Iron Chancellor of MOMA, has set new standards of detail and historical cogency within the museum, and the Picasso exhibit and its admirable catalogue reflect them at every point...
...great painters are precocious, but Picasso was. In a technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation. He was born in Málaga in 1881, the son of a painter named José Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned inglés face, nothing like Pablo's simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the story is true...