TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capart.1

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                                                                                May 26, 1980

ART

The Show of Shows


Picasso, modernism's father, comes home to MOMA


In imaginative force and outright terribilita, it is quite
possibly the most crushing and exhilarating exhibition of work
by a 20th century artist ever held in the U.S. Beginning this
week, over the next four months nearly a million people will
queue outside new York City's Museum of Modern Art to get a
glimpse of it. Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, is being
honored in a show of nearly 1,000 of his works, some never
exhibited before, drawn from his estate as well as from
collections the world over.

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.
It is the largest exhibition of one artist's work that MOMA has
ever held, or probably ever will. It contains pieces ranging
in size from Guernica, Picasso's 26-ft. wide mural of protest
against the Fascist bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish
Civil War, to a cluster of peg dolls he painted for his daughter
Paloma. Paintings, drawings, collages, prints of every kind,
sculpture in bronze, wood, wire, tin, string, paper and clay;
there was virtually no medium the Spaniard did not use, and all
are profusely represented.

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."

Most visitors will agree, even if they find the presentation
exhausting and nearly indigestible, streamed as they must be
through the galleries at a speed dictated by an attendance of
8,000 people a day. In such circumstances, no one can absorb
the scope and the depth of the man. How can one "see" in two
hours what took nearly 80 years of such obsessive activity to
produce?  The "Tut Law," or curse of the mummy, by which works
of art 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.

The retrospective was put together by Rubin and Dominique Bozo,
curator-in-charge of the future Musee Picasso in Paris. The
effort could have succeeded only at this moment. By now the
fights over Picasso's estate between his heirs and the French
government--which have kept a score of lawyers fat, tired and
happy since the old man died without leaving a will--have been
resolved, yet the final disposition of his work has not been
locked into an institutional frame. When the Musee Picasso,
which received the cream of the work from Picasso's own estate,
opens in Paris next year, it will not be able to make further
loans of this magnitude; some 300 of its works have come to MOMA
for the present show. Moreover, 1980 is likely to be the last
year in which Guernica, lent to MOMA by Picasso in 1939, can be
seen in the U.S. It will go to Spain, probably to the Prado in
Madrid, in accordance with Picasso's wishes.

In short, no exhibition like this can ever be mounted again.
Bozo's main work with the Musee Picasso is still before him.
For Rubin, the MOMA show is the climax of a career; to have
brought off, within three years, two exhibitions at such a level
(the other being his Cezanne show in 1977) is in some measure
to have altered the history of curatorship itself. Rubin, the
Iron Chancellor of MOMA, has set new standards of detail and
historical cogency within the museum, and the Picasso exhibit
and its admirable catalogue reflect them at every point. It is
a final vindication of a program started by Alfred Barr Jr.,
MOMA's first director, 50 years ago:  the assumption that
modernism, whose supreme exponent was Picasso, was as worthy of
detailed and serious consideration as the culture of baroque
Rome or quattrocento Florence.

Not all great painters are precocious, but Picasso was. In a
technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his
precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation.
He was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of a painter named Jose
Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned ingles face, nothing like Pablo's
simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so
good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his
own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the
story is true, it goes some way to explain the mediumistic
confidence with which Picasso worked. "Painting is stronger
than I am," he once remarked. "It makes me do what it wants."
Painting had won him the Oedipal battle before his career had
begun. If one were told that Science and Charity, Picasso's
sickbed scene from 1897, with its rather conventional drawing
but adroit paint handling (especially in the details, like the
frame of the mirror above the bed), had been done by a 30-year-
old Spanish academician, one would have predicted a competent
future for the man. Once one realizes that it was painted by
a boy not yet 16, the skill seems portentous, like a
visitation--and that is the general impression conveyed by
Picasso's earliest work.

The point is not that Picasso, as an art student in Barcelona
and, after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was
markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than
other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the
influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he
needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative
line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its
liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the
pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his
Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of
remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a
fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god
of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in
a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred
by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to
predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German
expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little
Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a
Velazquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example.

For a young artist in Paris at the turn of the century, such
material could not last forever, and not all Picasso's
experiences were gaslight and garters. Living in poverty in the
little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified
himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out
of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful miserabilisme,
verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue
Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures,
using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue
boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted from
Japanese decorative art. By 1902 the blueness of this line had
spread to dominate the whole painting. It had a symbolic value,
of course:  it spoke of melancholy, of the "blues."  But it also
enabled Picasso, as the pervasive brown-gray monochrome of
analytical cubism later would in a different way, to take color
out of his work, so that he could make a compromise between
decorative flatness and sculptural volume in terms of pure tone.

The influence of one artist dominates the Blue Period. He was
Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky
allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and
somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh,
Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks
like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon,
and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big
allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally
the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso
turned it into the face of Carlos Casagemas, the friend who had
come with him to Paris from Barcelona and then committed
suicide for love of an artist's model.)

Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form,
since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But
it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at
some of his intense moments--not only the death of Casagemas,
but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which
began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great
interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his
"Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and
horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs.
Allegory was the conscious, intelligible form of Picasso's vast
instinctive talent for metamorphosis, whereby a single form
could harbor two or more literal meanings:  a glass of absinthe
including a drunkard's head, a guitar turning into a torso or
a vagina, a bicycle seat becoming a bull's head. Moreover, the
ability to handle allegory was the proof of high ambition:
Gauguin had gone to Tahiti to paint huge emblems of human fate,
not just to see papayas.

By the age of 25, Picasso was an able and gifted artist, but not
yet a modern one. He had managed to tame the mannerism of the
Blue Period, with its wistful elongations and neurotic passivity
of form, by studying Degas. In the Woman with a Fan, 1905, with
its "Egyptian" gesture of the raised hand and gravely extended
fan, or in the robust columnar body of the Boy Leading a Horse,
1906, Picasso's digestion of Puvis was complete. At that point
he could have kept painting such pictures for the rest of his
life and died in honors.

What happened was very different. The detachment of expression
in his Rose Period hardened:  through 1906 the faces took on an
increasingly masklike air, blank, inexpressive, with empty eye
sockets. Picasso had been looking at archaic Spanish carvings
from Osuna. Now he stressed the sculptural, instead of the
linear and atmospheric:  solid impacted form, not fleeting mood.
His 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, almost leaden in its
pictorial ineloquence, marked the start of this change, and the
pink stony torsos of Two Nudes, 1906, delineate the period's
end. In between lay some magnificent paintings, such as the
Seated Female Nude with Crossed Legs, 1906, whose solidities
of thigh, trunk and breasts anticipate the swollen torsos of
Picasso's "classical" women 15 years later. It was one more
element in the predictions, recapitulations and variations of
theme that composed the tissue of Picasso's imagination.

Having brought solid form to such density, having set so
absolute a division between figure and field, what choice did
Picasso have but to break it all down again?  Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, 1907, was the painting that provoked cubism, and one
of the most astounding feats of ideation in the history of art.
These days the word radical is patched on to any newish
artistic gesture, no matter how small:  a puddle of lead on the
floor, or a face pulled on video tape, or an array of bricks.
This use of the word cannot begin to convey the newness of Les
Demoiselles. No painting has ever looked more convulsive and
contradictory, and, though one can follow its development
through Picasso's early studies, which are part of the MOMA
exhibit, the sheer intensity of its making is beyond analysis.

Les Demoiselles is a brothel scene;  there had been a whore-
house on the Carrer d'Avinyo, or Avignon Street, in Barcelona,
and Picasso and his friends frequented it. But the picture has
none of the social irony or even the sensuality with which
Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas invested their brothel paintings.
More vividly than ever, against the backdrop of earlier
Picassos, it becomes clear why his friends thought he had gone
crazy, why the painter Andre Derain actually predicted that
Picasso would hang himself behind the big picture. The painting
is freighted with aggression, carefully wrought. The nudes are
cut into segments, as though the brush were a butcher knife.
Their look, eyes glaring from African-mask faces, is accusatory,
not inviting. Even the melon in the still life looks like a
weapon. The space between the figures is flattened, like a
crumpled box:  it was in this play of code between solid and
void (one apparently as "tactile" as the other) that the formal
prophecies of Les Demoiselles lay. Though he plundered African
motifs such as masks and Bakota funerary figures for Les
Demoiselles and its sequels, Picasso neither knew nor cared
about their tribal meanings or uses. To him, they were merely
shapes, conceptually opaque, with perhaps a secondary use as
emblems of "savagery" to disrupt the field of "culture."  The
idea that Picasso had some sympathetic interest in African art
as such is a complete illusion. All that counted for him was
its ability to furnish alienated examples of form that clearly
owed nothing to Raphael.

No Demoiselles, no cubism. But there was a long stretch between
them while Picasso, grappling with late Cezanne, crossed from
an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis. In
a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso
picked up on Cezanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant
to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to
Cezanne's Cardplayers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the
sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop,
the bread loaves and fruit and napkin have a plastic intensity
that makes one feel ready to pluck them away.

Gradually this jutting, sculptural quality dissolved in ever
more complicated faceting, "cubifying"--though there are no real
cubes in cubism--through the landscapes he painted at Horta de
Ebro in 1909. By 1910 the cubist surface was reached, with a
sort of gray-brown plasma, the color of fiddle backs, zinc bars
and smokers' fingers. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field of
vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things
penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs
for themselves--a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound
hole of a guitar. This sense of multiple relationships was the
core of cubism's modernity. It declared that all visual
experience could be set forth as a shifting field that included
the onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the
theory of relativity or to the principles of narrative that
would emerge in Proust or Joyce. The supremacy of the fixed
viewpoint, embodied for 500 years in Renaissance perspective,
was challenged by the new mode of describing space that Picasso
and Braque had developed in a supreme effort of teamwork.

As with painting, so with sculpture. Picasso's Guitar of 1912,
an array of cut and folded metal sheets that opened to let space
in, was the first constructed sculpture in the history of art.
It abolished the solidity, the continuous surface that had
been, until then, the essential narrative of sculpture. From
that unpromising-looking piece of rusty tin, a 60-year tradition
of open-form sculpture was born that spread from Russian
constructivism to the work of Anthony Caro in England and David
Smith in the U.S.

Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His
instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would
have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush
in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911
run close to total abstraction, depending on such slender clues
as a glass or a pipestem to pull them back to reality. As he
moved forward, he found in collage a way of linking cubism back
to the world. Collage, which simply means gluing, brought
fragments of modern life--newspaper headlines, printed labels--
directly into the painting. Cut them out, put them in. The
tonal values of some of his finest collages have been ruined by
age. The newsprint, once gray on white, is now cigar-brown.
But in better preserved ones, like Violin and Sheet Music, 1912,
the original effect remains:  a magnificently Apollonian
interplay of blue, gray, white and black on its ocher ground,
stable and forceful at the same time.

The sense of the cubist moment can never come again. It is
almost as distant, in its dulcet and inexhaustible optimism, as
the faith that built Beauvais. Cubism was the climax of an
urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the
mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and
shifting modes. It was Art's first response to the torrent of
signs unleased by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso
inscribe "Our future is in the air"  on several of his cubist
still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was
"Wilbur," after Wilbur Wright. "The world has changed less
since the time of Jesus Christ,"  remarked the French writer
Charles Peguy in 1913, "than it has in the last 30 years."
Picasso and Braque took it for granted that reality had changed
more than art, but their relation to the art of the past was not
one of simple conflict. It was more tentative, precise and
subtly felt. Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of cubism, evoked
the sentiment in his collection of Calligrammes:

You whose mouth is made in God's image Whose speech is Order
itself Be easy with us, when you compare us To those who were
the perfection of order, We who looked for adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies We want to give ourselves vast, strange
territories... Pity us, skirmishing always at the frontiers Of
the limitless, and of the future, Pity our errors, pity our
sins.

That sense of being "always at the frontiers"  of history itself
is volatile, and it began to evaporate from Picasso's work
before the end of World War I. It left behind a residue,
however:  his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first
public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame
he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more
influential than the poets and painters around the studios of
the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the
cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens.
Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-
garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was
reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean
Cocteau, a rappel a lordre (call to order), which would place
art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia.
"Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th
Arrondissement after October 1917.

The Picasso of 1918-24 was made for this situation. With
ebullience, he threw himself into the role of the maestro,
designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
marrying one of its dancers, and allowing a conventional style
of portraiture, often as insipid as the $3 million Acrobat sold
to Japan in last weeks's Garbisch auction, to alternate with a
highly decorative form of cubism. "Decorative," of course, is
no longer a cuss word, and his best flat-pattern cubist
paintings of the early '20s, with their gravely shuttling
collage-like overlaps of bright and dark color, are marvels of
pictorial intelligence. The two versions of his Three
Musicians, 1921, show what Picasso could do when his sense of
form was fully engaged. The classicizing drift of the early
'20s took its most explicit shape in the Three Women at the
Spring, 1921. Their dropsical limbs resemble a Pompeian fresco
inflated with an air hose, even though the full-size sanguine
drawing for the painting, which Picasso kept for himself, has
the genuinely classicist air of unforced, continuous modeling.

As solitary virtuoso, Picasso would from now on depend wholly
on himself and his feelings. There would be no more
collaborations, as with Braque. The corollary was that Picasso
gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity,
so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage,
castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong
to the Spaniard. This frankness--allied with Picasso's power
of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a
ravenous, animistic vitality--is without parallel among other
artists and explains his importance to a movement he never
joined, surrealism.

Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its
discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and
the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to
penetrate, to abandon:  these were the verbs of his art, as they
were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the
"goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his
life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers
grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic
randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy
terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that
emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated
Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic:  they project fears
that no French artist (and outside France, only Edvard Munch)
would even admit to. One needs colossal self-confidence to
expose such insecurities.

On the other side of these chthonic appetites lay some of the
most haunting images of metamorphosis and erotic fulfillment in
the history of Western art. They were provided by his affair
with Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman whom Picasso picked
up outside a Paris department store in 1927. He was 45, feeling
trapped in a sour marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova;
Marie-Therese was 17.

"Pictures are made the way the prince gets children,"  Picasso
remarked a little later, "with the shepherdess."  In Marie-
Therese, he found a shepherdess--a placid, ill-educated and
wholly compliant blond, who had never heard of him or his work,
and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret
as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His
images of Marie-Therese reading, sleeping, contemplating her
face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings)
for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an
extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned. In
one sense, the body of Marie-Therese, curled up in Nude Asleep
in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it--a
lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings,
nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual
signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint.
Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Therese,
Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations.
The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of
desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot
do.

His metamorphic sculptures of Marie-Therese from the early
'30s, involutes of swollen dreaming bronze in which cheek is
conflated with buttock, mouth with vagina, have a wonderful
tenderness and power as plastic surfaces. Even the plumpness
of the bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the
slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not
with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways,the
shapes of Marie-Therese, smooth and closed, are like the totemic
bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the
projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized
building along the Cote d'Azur. But their whole import is
different. There is no dislocation or fear in them:  they are,
as William Blake put it, "the lineaments of gratified desire."

The climate of sexual politics has changed so irreversibly in
the past 50 years that one cannot imagine a painter trying such
images today. In that sense, Picasso closed another tradition
in the act of reinventing it. The same applies to his visions
of the classical Mediterranean from the 1930s. Picasso felt the
Greeks in the ground and was the last modern artist to raise
them. The river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads
that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable
drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional
decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of
autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification.
Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a
Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of
his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean
images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols
of that once Arcadian coast.

Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its
way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike
effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it
is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely
seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary
bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the
documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's
body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.

Guernica was the last masterpiece of 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
of feeling into conventional subject matter that the century has
to offer. Indeed, the effort was such that it carried him past
the end of the picture into a series of weeping women's heads,
which show, even more clearly than Guernica, how Picasso could
saturate a motif with meaning, to the point where it could hold
no more truth. This free passage from feeling into meaning was
the essence of his genius. Even when he was painting below
form, he could always find significance in commonplace
sensations, however distorted the actual form:  the death in a
goat's skull or the spikiness of a sea urchin, the feather
softness of a dove, the looming stupid menace of a bull, a
toad's lumpish slither.

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-Therese's successor as his
mistress, are of ravishing and edgy beauty.

Yet the inventions of necessity slowly gave way to the needs of
mere performance. Picasso's sculpture retained its intensity
almost to the end, but his painting did not, and this became
clear after 1950. Without doubt, MOMA's great exhibition ends
on a dying fall. The Picassian energy is still there,
masquerading as inspiration, but too often it ends as a form of
visual conjuring. Was he growing bored with his own virtuosity?
Impossible to know. Since anything could be converted into a
Picasso, and thence into gold, he suffered the dilemma of Midas
twice over. This was the inevitable result of the fame he
enjoyed in the last quarter-century of his life, a fame such as
no artist in history had known. It could only have been
created by the pressures of the 20th century, with its mass
magazines, its art market, its mania for promiscuity among
famous names combining in the most sustained exercise in
mythmaking ever to be visited on a painter. In the end he was
trapped by his own reputation, the idol and prisoner of his
court of toadies and dealers, fawned on and denied the ordinary
resistances against which an artist, to survive at all, must
push.

It showed in the work. But do the irresolutions of his old age
really matter?  Picasso shaped his century when it, and he, was
younger, and all its possibilities were open to his ravening
eye, in those three decades between 1907 and 1937. He was the
most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures
a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with
him--from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile
Gorky--an almost indescribably fruitful one.

Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows
signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his
own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it
was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga.

--Robert Hughes

Putting It All Together

In terms of sheer administrative labor, "Pablo Picasso:  A
Retrospective" is the most taxing show the Museum of Modern Art
has ever installed. The idea for it came in 1972, when Art
Historian and Picasso Expert William Rubin was visiting the
artist in his villa at Mougins, in the south of France. In the
sculpture-jammed studio, on the ground floor of the house, Rubin
recalls, "I almost had a sense of vertigo. There was so much
invention contained in so small an area. I thought to myself:
There should be a really great Picasso show that combines
Picasso's own holdings with things he let out of the studio."
The following year, Rubin offered to clear the whole Museum of
Modern Art and for four months, in effect, turn it into a
Picasso museum. Picasso, who had never seen MOMA, chuckled and
said yes. A few months later he died, leaving no will and all
the "Picasso's Picassos" (45,000 works) awaiting cataloguing by
the experts. Eventually, after a six-year-long legal bout, the
estate, valued at up to $400 million, was distributed among the
various heirs, with the French government scooping up, in lieu
of taxes, 3,488 works, representing one-third of the estate's
value, for the proposed Musee Picasso in Paris.

Rubin, 52, set to work with the future head of that museum,
Dominique Bozo, 45. Beginning in late 1977, they whittled their
huge exhibition of 940 works from the Spaniard's colossal
output. The logistics of getting it to New York were daunting.
 They involved hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance
(MOMA will not reveal exactly how much), the work of 30
couriers, and some 75 air shipments from different corners of
the world. The cost of the exhibition was $2 million. Of the
152 lenders, among them 56 museums, only two sources balked.
One was Picasso's widow Jacqueline, who, taken ill two weeks
before the exhibition paintings were to be picked up, locked the
gates of her villa. At the last moment Rubin wheedled the two
portraits he needed from her. The other was the Soviet
government, which, in the chilling of cultural relations with
the U.S. that followed the invasion of Afghanistan, canceled the
loan of twelve major Picassos.