Word: picassos
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...Bavaria once commissioned a bronze cast of a whole basketful of flowers, much admired by Graves. But the idea of making modern sculpture by these means had not been tried on a full scale before, although, like nearly everything else in the past 50 years, it was foreshadowed by Picasso...
Because of this indifference, it is only now, eleven years since Picasso's death, that a properly done museum show of his last decade can be seen in New York City. It nearly foundered on the way: organized by Art Historian Gert Schiff for New York University's Grey Art Gallery, it was first canceled for lack of funds, and then revived by the Guggenheim Museum, where it opened March 2. A show like this cannot pretend to contain all the evidence; apart from a huge output of drawings and prints, Picasso made perhaps 400 paintings...
Schiff s catalogue essay does an excellent job of dissecting and analyzing the themes of late Picasso, but there are moments when he goes right off the edge. The last period, he declares, "is not a 'swan song,' but the apotheosis of his career." A ten-dollar word: it means transformation into a god. It is what mad Nero dreamed of; and now, on the theological authority vested in the Guggenheim Museum and its trustees, it has come to "Ol' Cojones...
...history themes, figures by Rembrandt, Poussin, Manet, Delacroix, Rousseau. It is culturally saturated, as well as drenched in his macaronic, theatrical and self-mocking sexuality. And yet its obsessive project is to so generalize the image of the figure as to remove it from the sphere of "culture." Picasso hardly ever used models; every figure comes out of the head, and each face (despite the occasionally recognizable features of his last wife, Jacqueline Roque) aspires to the conceptual impact of the "primitive." As paintings, they do not necessarily get better as they get more masklike...
...picture that may be destined to become the most famous late Picasso (his supposed last self-portrait, green and mauve, stubble on the withered, tight ape flesh) is merely banal in its theatricality. But when, as in The Artist and His Model, 1964, the grinding contradictions of his formal system lock at last, when the haste and incompletion of the surface are overcome by the tensions of their massive underpinning, late Picasso has great visceral power-if not, necessarily, the magical efficacy he sought. Even in travesty, he knew the tragic; and though these late paintings are not the best...