Picasso: The Last Picture Show

By ROBERT HUGHES

At Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, the final decade

That Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most prodigally gifted artist of the 20th century can hardly be in doubt, even among those who can make the effort to see him with a measure of skepticism or detachment. But his last years have always posed a problem. When the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was filled with Picasso's last paintings in the summer of 1973, they caused as much disappointment as surprise. Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse. The walls were covered with 17th century dwarfs and musketeers, puffing on pipes and goggling at pudenda. They were painted coarse and quick, with what seemed to be a kind of narcissistic perfunctoriness, as though the old man had become so obsessed with filling out his Don Giovanni catalogue that he could not stop long enough to finish the last entries. The paintings seemed, in the art jargon of the '70s, more process than product, but none the more palatable for that. Nor did the market like them much; collectors who saw the late work as much more than the repetitive spoutings of an old man raging against death were few and far between. Lear `a l'espagnol, no doubt, but one need not queue for tickets.

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 in the last three years of his life. And yet it draws the profile as it had not been drawn before. Not even the most hard-bitten viewer can contemplate this oeuvre without a degree of awe--a sensation not always identical with aesthetic pleasure. No doubt about it, Picasso painted many bad and some flatly absurd pictures at the end of his life. But the good ones are so good, and in such a weird way, that they utterly transfix the eye, while the drawings (and some of the vast outflow of etchings) possess an assurance, a sensuous ferocity that no other living artist could approach, let alone rival.

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."

Why the hyperbole? Because of inflation. Now that every squawking neo-expressionist turkey is treated as an eagle, Picasso, whose angry, abbreviated late style is grandfather to the mode of the early '80s, has to be deified, and never mind the language. (One wonders what Schiff would say about late Titian or the old age of Michelangelo.) Actually, Picasso's last decade contains little that can compare with his work in the 30 years after 1907, when his transformation not only of modernist style but of the very possibilities of painting was so vast in scope, deep in feeling and authoritative in its intensity. Then as now he was influencing Pabloids, but the earlier ones had better material to work with.

The drawings and prints are the most accessible part of the late work. A large enough part too: even without the famous "Suite 347" etchings of 1968, they run into the thousands and probably have not all been -- counted even yet. Picasso drew with an immediacy that, in most of us, is reserved only for daydreaming, and anyone who supposes that the rough, wobbly-looking handling of the late paintings is due to the shaky fist of age should look at the drawings, whose linear control is absolute. They make up a theater of characters, some familiar and others not: nudes from the imaginary seraglios of Delacroix and the real brothels of Degas, comic in their pillowy availability; inhabitants of Picasso's Hesiodic arcadia, little whopstraw gods, satyrs, nymphs; musketeers and majas, dwarfs and Velasquez aristocrats. Then there are his own inventions of years before pulled in for a final bow--the women from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for instance. Picasso was saying goodbye to sex, and could never see enough of its emblems; so his seenes galantes are imbued with a heavy, nostalgic, undeceived randiness.

The paintings are a somewhat different matter. There, despite the apparent outwardness of his vehemence, Picasso was almost crazily hermetic. Later and younger artists could mimic the expressive urgency but not earn the reasons for it. He was an old, ravening, isolated and tough man in a world without resistances. He had always been preoccupied with the spectacle of himself as Primitive Man: a fiction, but (as worked out across the long panorama of Picasso's oeuvre) a consoling and sustaining one. He wanted to go a step further: to paint something that, in defiance of the secular, spiritually exorcised conditions of modern life, would not just challenge but actually invest the viewer with its iconic power--the lost power of the mask. As Andre Malraux recounted in his memoir of Picasso, La Tete d'Obsidienne (and as Art Critic Jed Perl reminds us in a splendid essay on late Picasso in the New Criterion), Picasso was obsessed by this project in old age: "I must absolutely find the mask."

Except for a few intense and contorted still lifes, all the paintings in this show are of the human figure, usually centered, glaring outward with the dilated mania of the eye that first transfixed its audience in the preparatory paintings for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon three generations before. No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects). The late work attacks and reattacks art-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.

The 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 of Picasso (let alone Schiffs "apotheosis"), they are to be valued as fragments of the kind of talent that today seems as distant as the moon itself. --By Robert Hughes