Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What gives the exhibit its overwhelming character is the range and fecundity of Picasso's talent?the flashes of demonic restlessness, the heights of confidence and depths of insecurity, the relationships (alternately loving and cannibalistic) to the art of the past, but above all the sustained intensity of feeling. "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" contains good paintings and bad, some so weak that they look like forgeries (but are not), as well as a great many works of art for which the word masterpiece?exiled for the crime of elitism over the past decade?must now be reinstated...
They fill the building's three floors, displacing MOMA's permanent collection. "I felt that only with the whole museum could we have an exhibition worthy of Picasso's oeuvre," explains William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture. "I don't think there is any other artist whose work could sustain such an exhibition...
...become invisible as the museum audience for them expands, will work against this show. That is all the more ironical since this is not an affair of little scholarly value, like the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit seen by more than 8 million Americans, but an immense contribution to Picasso studies, done at the highest level of curatorial skill...
...painting to be provoked by political catastrophe. World War II and the Holocaust evoked nothing to match it, and the monuments to the Gulag are books, not paintings. Guernica's power flows from the contrast between its almost marmoreal formal system and the terrible vocabulary of pain that Picasso locked into it. It is shown at MOMA with all its preliminary studies, and to see Picasso developing these hieroglyphs of anguish, the horse, the weeping woman, the screaming head, the fallen soldier, the clenched hand on the sword, is to witness one of the supreme dramas of the injection...
...Picasso was 55 when he finished Guernica, and up to his 60th birthday or so he remained an artist worthy of comparison (if painters and writers can be compared) with Shakespeare. There was a similar range of feeling, from bawdry to tragedy, coupled with a rhetorical intensity of metaphor and a great depth of experience. After Guernica he could still paint very well: L'Aubade, in 1942, with its stark intimations of confinement and oppression, seems to distill the mood of occupied France. Some of his portraits of Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse's successor as his mistress...