“Incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death.” That was the verdict on the late work of Pablo Picasso, according to Douglas Cooper, a friend and collector of the artist. Indeed, Picasso’s late work has always had its detractors. In 1965, almost a decade before the artist’s death, British art critic John Berger published his book The Success and Failure of Picasso, which suggested that Picasso’s time had already passed. Berger claimed the Spanish painter’s earliest works, from the Blue Period to the creation of Cubism, had defined his career. His late works, on the other hand, were “a mounting horror.”
With such scathing criticism hanging over them, it’s little wonder Picasso’s later works have received less attention from institutions and the market than his most famous paintings, like Guernicaand Portrait of Dora Maar (both 1937). Though the artist’s final years were prolific— yielding as many as 3,100 works between 1961 and 1973—they are underrepresented in many presentations of his oeuvre. For example, there were barely any later works included in his major 1980 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It took until 2006 for this final phase of Picasso’s career to have a major museum show (“Painting Against Time” at the Albertina Museum in Vienna). And auction prices for such works continue to lag behind earlier examples. In June, Nu assis dans un fauteuil (1964–65) sold for £7.11 million ($9.57 million). Compare that to the jaw-dropping $139.4 million paid for Femme à la Montre (1932) in 2023.
However, there are signs that collectors and curators are slowly warming up to Picasso’s late period. “Picasso: The Code of Painting,” a new show touring Scandinavia, continues the reassessment of these controversial works, ranging from paintings to ceramic plates. On view at the brand new museum PoMo in Trondheim, Norway, through October 25th, the show will travel to Sweden’s largest national gallery, Moderna Museet; as well as Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, in Denmark. One among many reevaluations that Picasso’s work has undergone in recent years—from feminist reappraisals to debates about his use of African motifs—this exhibition explores the experimental frenzy of Picasso’s ageing practice. It points to the meaning behind his desperate acts of creation as he felt death come closer.
Picasso’s final years
In the early 1960s, Picasso moved to the remote town of Mougins in the south of France with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. There, isolated in the countryside without many visitors, he created artwork at a mad pace for the final 12 years of his life. Archival film footage in the exhibition shows the artist sorting through hundreds of canvases, some marked with just brief scribbles.
The show explores the frenetic experimentalism that defined Picasso’s later years. Often, the artist tried out vastly different styles from day to day. At PoMo, this is evident in a series of self-portraits that are all shown next to one another. One, a gestural deconstructed face in primary colors, was made just a few days before another, where he poses in his signature blue-and-white-striped marinière. “He did those [self-portraits] in proximity of a few months. But when you look at them…each is extremely different,” said Dr. Dieter Buchhart, who co-curated the show with Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, in an interview.
In addition to painting, Picasso created ceramics in his studio and drew endlessly during this chapter. “The Picasso late period, in my opinion, represents much more than the extensive series of portraits; rather it demonstrates the total freedom in his creation, exploring new creative territory in each subject he focused his attention on,” said Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s grandson, whose Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso collaborated with the museum on the show.
Themes of Picasso’s later work
While his style of working was experimental, many of Picasso’s later works returned to subjects that he had depicted throughout his career: portraits, night scenes, and nudes among them. One room in the show highlights nudes from this late period. While the artist’s earlier works, like the famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), presented recognizable bodies and sensual curves, these nudes are more grotesque, deconstructed even beyond the boundaries of Cubism. For example, in Nu assis dans un fauteuil, les bras levés (1963), a woman’s body is depicted in pale blue, sprawled on a striped towel. Such a pose normally implies relaxation, but here the jumble of misshapen body parts creates an almost farcical impression.
Another typical subject for Picasso was the artist and model: a classic art historical setup where artists depict themselves at work, usually painting nude women. Picasso was particularly focused on this subject between 1963 and 1965. As the artist kept frantically creating work, perhaps to fend off dread around his own looming mortality, he portrayed himself playing the creative role he always had, apparently devoted to cementing his legacy as he reached the end of his life. For example, in the work Le peintre et son modèle (1964), he depicts himself painting, lost in black and white swirls, as a nude female figure stands, rendered in pink and green, before him. The contrast is striking: The aging artist is sapped of color, while his (presumably young) subject is vibrant.
Notably, Picasso’s dedication to his legacy in this time was focused solely on creating new work, rather than engaging with the art world. In 1970, he skipped his own final major show in Paris, the curators of “The Code of Painting” explained. “He didn’t care. He didn’t even want to see his old works,” said Dr. Buchhart. “He cared about what he was doing now, while he was still alive.”
Picasso also began working on a new subject matter during the 1960s and ’70s: his “Musketeers” series. These paintings were influenced by Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Three Musketeers, which Picasso read while recovering from surgery in 1965. When he began painting again, he was drawn to Dumas’s virile and flamboyant characters. Symbols of a new creative phase, they are shown in bright technicolor, with ostentatious moustaches and elaborate costumes, in many of Picasso’s final works.
The legacy of Picasso’s final years
In Picasso’s final decade, a new influence emerged: television, which the curators of this show credit for much of the experimentation of the artist’s late period. (The curators claimed that the artist watched a Three Musketeers film adaptation on TV, for instance.) He was still influenced by the masters who had shown him the way early on (such as Velazquez, Goya, and Rembrandt), but now, making art at a crazy pace, he found new ideas through mass media. “He didn’t go see exhibitions. He was watching TV. It’s really interesting how that led to a loosening,” said Dr. Buchhart.
According to the curators, this is part of the reason that Picasso’s late works didn’t receive the acclaim the rest of his work did: He was bucking the trend of what is expected for an aging artist. Rather than settling into a more conservative mode, he kept trying to create something new. “It doesn’t look like an old man’s oeuvre... it looks like a young person’s,” said Dr. Hofbauer. “It’s an explosion of color, of form, of convention. And that makes it so difficult for people to understand.”
One of the most striking works on view is the scribbled, monochrome drawing Tête (Head), made on July 2, 1972—less than a year before he died. Hanging in a room entirely by itself, this unpolished, raw work functions as a reminder of Picasso’s philosophy: To finish an artwork was “to kill it,” he purportedly said. As he reached the end of his life, this mentality hung over everything he did. The more he could create, the further away death appeared.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/ZwfvhAY
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