| 5 MINI-ESSAYS
PICASSO'S LEGACY
PICASSO'S LATE STYLE
PICASSO'S APPROACH TO PAINTING
PICASSO'S LAST DECADES IN REVIEW 
PICASSO'S APPROACHES TO PRINTMAKING
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PICASSO'S LAST DECADES
IN REVIEW
Throughout Picasso's last decades, the media fascination with his celebrity,
genius, and lifestyle never lets up. Praise for, or doubts about, the
merits of his late works variously engaged critics, art historians, museum
professionals and his intimates.
Here is a brief survey:
December 1956 |
Renowned American art critic Clement Greenberg declares:
'It has been many years since Picasso has been revolutionary
in any real or relevant sense... The shock value of his art has derived...
mostly from its illustrative effect.' |
May 1957 |
The Picasso retrospective exhibition held at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York is widely publicised. Time and
Newsweek magazines feature Picasso on their covers and devote
many lavishly illustrated pages to the 'millionaire' artist. |
July 1960 |
Roland Penrose mounts a Picasso retrospective at
the Tate Gallery, London. Lawrence Gowing responds: 'How lucky
we are! There has never been an exhibition like this... Recovering
image-making as a natural impulse [Picasso] recovers the primitive
virtue of the image itself.' |
1965 |
Francoise Gilot publishes her insightful memoir,
Life with Picasso. She reports one of his aphorisms and it
passes into feminist folklore: 'For me there are only two kinds
of women - goddesses and doormats.' Soon after, John Berger's
Success and Failure of Picasso criticises Picasso as a spent
force: 'He has surrounded himself with a court... The effects
of the consequent flattery and insulation have been devastation.' |
November 1966 |
In Paris, the largest retrospective of Picasso's
work ever mounted attracts over 800,000 visitors, breaking all attendance
records for an art exhibition. |
1973 |
An exhibition of Picasso's last paintings at the
Papal Palace in Avignon provokes this outburst from Douglas Cooper,
a previous admirer: 'These are incoherent scrawls executed by
a frenetic old man in the antechamber of death'.
Referring to the same exhibition, Picasso's biographer and cataloguer,
Pierre Daix refutes the judgements of his time: 'Picasso here
throws himself into new adventures, questions old forms, destroys
and rebuilds like someone with his whole future ahead of him... To
be capable of this after 75 years of painting is an impressive victory.' |
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