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<text>
<title>
(1970s) Pablo Picasso:The Painter as Proteus
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
April 23, 1973
Pablo Picasso: The Painter as Proteus
</hdr>
<body>
<p> All this century, critics have been writing about Pablo
Picasso in the preset indicative. He was 91 years, six months
and 17 days old when the tense changed and "is" finally became
"was." It seems like a malfunction of the language itself. But
by now the doors of the pantheon are sealed, the first wave of
reminiscences has rolled by, the wreaths are laid. The dealers
have gone down to their storage racks to rewrite the price
tickets. The last Picassos have been painted, drawn, etched,
cast, welded, thrown or glazed, and the most generous display
of creative exuberance has stopped. Picasso's death has closed
the period of history known as modernism.
</p>
<p> It is not an easy fact to grasp. The world has taken
Picasso's presence for granted for so long, in the 50 or more
years since he became, or was made into, a culture hero, that
it seemed natural to assume that he would not die. So might
Tibetans take the daily sight of Anapurna as routine. The gap
left by Picasso is not immediately measurable. Since the best
of his long life's work survives, very little is physically
lost; not even the paintings of his last years, most of which--to judge from what has been exhibited--would not be much
of a loss in any case. But a myth has vanished.
</p>
<p> The Self. Like some pharaoh taking his goods with him into
the winding darkness below the sand, Picasso in dying has
removed an idea of artistic activity from the West--an idea
of which he was the last great exponent. It has to do with a
passionate omnivorousness, a scale of experience not limited by
a priori definitions of what painting or sculpture can carry:
with an energetic and Mediterranean humanism. The life springs
from the appetites, and the art from both. Or now, "sprang";
for no artist left alive has been able to rival Picasso's
cultural embodiment of the self. The confidence in which Picasso
lived--that everything really pleasurable or painful to the
senses or central to one's social experience could be rendered
in painting and sculpture--has disappeared. That certainty
about the inclusiveness and eloquence of art was shared to some
extent by every figure in the heroic years of modernism from
(roughly) 1900 to 1940, by Joyce no less than by Picasso, by
Matisse and Breton as well as by Stravinsky, Braque, Pound and
Magritte. When it faltered, art suffered a slow leakage and
underwent that loss of possibility and (worse) necessity that
nearly everyone involved with its production, inspection,
distribution and consumption feels today.
</p>
<p> The image for this owl-eyed, leathery stump of wrinkled
vitality was Proteus: the Odyssey's old man of the sea, whose
power was to assume any form--beast, wave or tree--at will.
He is the tutelary saint of virtuosos, and Picasso's virtuosity
is the one fact of modern art that everybody knows something
about. Stories about it began in his early childhood. It is said
that his father, a provincial art teacher in La Coruna, Spain,
turned over his own brushes and paints to this alarming
offspring, confessing that little Pablo had already surpassed
him as a painter and that he thus could work no longer. This
Oedipal story (the child castrating the father) crops up often
in the legends of genius, but it is possibly true of Picasso;
he was almost as remarkable a child prodigy as Mozart. The
precocity continued, through his studentship in fin de siecle
Barcelona, into the Blue and Rose periods, with their
dystrophied and consumptive clowns, absinthe addicts and
acrobats. By 1907, Picasso's combativeness and his goading sense
(which never entirely left him) of being up against history's
wall resulted in the wrench of imagination that provoked Cubism
and provides an arbitrary point of departure for all that is
most convulsive in Picasso's art and modernism generally: Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon. His eclecticism--another of the
virtuoso's traits--produced incessant raids on other styles,
from Pompeian murals, 17th century Dutch etchings and Ingres
drawings to Dogon masks and Mogul miniatures. Few great artists
since Rembrandt had amassed, and used, such a hybrid pile of
objects from art or nature as Picasso; variety was his sauna.
He had a mysterious capacity, now documented through an almost
limitless range of motifs and graphic flourishes, to become
whatever caught his attention.
</p>
<p> But Homer's Proteus was more than a quick-change artist.
Once pinned down--and the problem was in the pinning--he
would revert to his original shape and utter prophecies. So with
Picasso; and some of the deepest and most durable work he
produced was made when he was, if not pinned down, at least
constrained by shared responsibility. Thus his co-invention,
with Braque, of Cubism: that system of anchoring and
interlocking forms in space that proved to be the first workable
(though less systematic) alternative to Renaissance perspective
in modern art.
</p>
<p> Eros. The view that Picasso's main contribution to
modernity was Cubism is not, however, just. Cubism was an
inexpressive system, and therein, admittedly, lay much of its
beauty. But Picasso was also a master of expression. He could
give a bronze skull a terrible, impacted and bullet-like
solidity, the very reductio of death, or paint a jug so it
seemed distended with anxiety; or confer on the rounded limbs
of his mistress in the '30s, Marie-Therese Walter, a rhythmic
and sensuous languor that might otherwise have vanished from the
nude after Ingres. No modern artist has been able to pack more
sensation into a form than this Spaniard, engaged in his
lifelong conversation with Eros and Thanatos.
</p>
<p> The full sweep of Picasso's effect on modern art will
probably never be documented--not because it is unapparent,
but simply because nobody, for 30 years or more, has been
untouched by him, so that the lesser details involve meaningless
talents and run out in peripheries and shallows. He established
collage as a formal device. His Cubist constructions steered the
course of modern sculpture away from mass and toward open forms
and rigging. His sheet-metal Guitar of 1912 was as prophetic of
future sculpture as Demoiselles had been of later painting. His
combination of found objects with metal, wood or string, such
as his Figure of 1935, gave clues to later junk assemblers--such a summary could go on for pages.
</p>
<p> Picasso's effect on the sociology of art was in no way less
radical. That restless inventiveness provoked in collectors the
expectations about stylistic "turnover" that, now built into the
market, are such a strain on more single-minded talents. It is
to Picasso that we owe, in no small way, the oppressive image
of the artist as a superstud that is only now coming under
attack. He has even had a degree of political effect: Guernica,
the mural canvas he painted in protest against the fascist ruin
of Spanish democracy, is certainly the most disseminated work of
political art made in this century.
</p>
<p> Picasso's wealth created a flamboyant archetype of success
that has affected every creative life for the worse, though
nobody expects to be as rich as Picasso. Not even the
conspicuous earners of the past, like Rubens or Titian, made
that kind of money. Thus out of the production of one year,
1969-70, he exhibited 167 oils and 45 drawings; in all, the
gross market value of that fragment of his output was probably
about $15 million, and the value of Picasso's whole estate has
been guessed at $750 million or more. Although Picasso had long
since parted with it, his Nude Woman of 1910 recently fetched
a reported $1.1 million from the National Gallery. That is
believed to be the highest price yet paid for a Picasso and a
clue to future price tags.
</p>
<p> By 1940 Picasso was the most famous artist in the world;
by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived,
in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard
the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne
while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be
guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is
necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms
that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last
years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven major
women in his life, Jacqueline Roque, 47, whom he married in
1961. The old man made his final dive into the preclassical
past, becoming more than ever the inaccessible Triton or satyr,
Homo Mediterraneus padded in nymphs; that myth was his official
interface with an insatiable and by now meaningless public, and
the work went on behind it.
</p>
<p> Now that Picasso is dead, his life achieves a fleeting
equality with the massive profile of the work. Whatever the
verdicts on Picasso's achievement may be (there could be no
single judgment on his stupendous diversity), his life was
epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such demonic
intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once
observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants."
There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now
homeless dybbuk may next descend.
</p>
<p>Pablo Picasso's Last Days and Final Journey
</p>
<p> "Death holds no fear for me," Picasso recently told a
friend. "It has a kind of beauty. What I am afraid of is falling
ill and not being able to work. That's lost time." Right up to
the end, Picasso lost no time.
</p>
<p> The day before he died had been a day like many others at
Notre-Dame-de-Vie, his hilltop villa at Mougins on the French
Riviera. Late in the afternoon the artist had taken a walk in
the little park that surrounds his sprawling stone house
overlooking the reddish foothills of the Maritime Alps. He liked
now and then to gather flowers and vegetables in the garden,
often taking them inside to draw. "That day I showed him the
anemones and pansies, which he particularly liked," recalls
Jacques Barra, Picasso's gardener.
</p>
<p> Later that evening Picasso and his wife Jacqueline
entertained friends for dinner. Picasso was in high spirits.
"Drink to me; drink to my health," he urged, pouring wine into
the glass of his Cannes lawyer and friend, Armand Antebi. "You
know I can't drink any more." At 11:30 he rose from the table
and announced: "And now I must go back to work." In recent
weeks, he had been working hard, preparing for a big show of
his latest paintings at the Pope's Palace in Avignon in May. On
this night, before he went to bed, he painted until 3 a.m.
</p>
<p> On Sunday morning Picasso awoke at 11:30, his usual hour,
but this time he could not rise from his bed. His wife
Jacqueline rushed in and then called for help. At 11:40, before
a doctor could get there, Pablo Picasso was dead. Dr. Georges
Rance, who arrived shortly afterward, attributed his death to
a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema, fluid in the
lungs.
</p>
<p> At daybreak on Tuesday, as an unseasonable snowfall
blanketed the south of France, a small cortege left Mougins and
carried Picasso's body to his 14th century chateau at
Vauvenargues in the bleak Provencal countryside. Accompanying
the body were Picasso's widow; her daughter by her first
marriage, Catherine Hutin; and Paulo, 52, Picasso's son by his
first marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova. After the
110-mile journey, the mahogany casket, without ceremony, was
placed in the chateau chapel to await the building of a
mausoleum.
</p>
<p> But the shroud of estrangement from three of his grown
children that had clouded Picasso's last years also marred his
death. For reasons never entirely clear, Maya, Picasso's
daughter by his longtime mistress Marie-Therese Walter, and
Claude and Paloma, his children by Francoise Gilot, had been
prevented from seeing their father in recent years. Last week
the same sad situation prevailed. Indeed, this time police were
on hand to turn away Marie-Therese and other old friends who
came to pay their respects.
</p>
<p> Later that day, Maya, Claude and Paloma drove to
Vauvenargues and placed a large wreath of vivid flowers in the
cemetery overlooking the chateau. "That was as close to our
father as we could get," Maya said. "It's sad. The whole
situation is very delicate." The next day, Paulo's son, Pablo,
24, of nearby Golfe-Juan, was reported in serious condition
after drinking a bottle of chloric acid. According to his mother
(who has long been separated from Paulo), Pablo had been
despondent about being kept from seeing his grandfather. Others
said he had also been depressed about financial troubles.
</p>
<p> The choice of Vauvenargues as the burial site both
delighted and surprised the village's 300 residents, since
Picasso had rarely visited there in recent years. "We chose it
partly because my father loved the Provencal light," explained
Paulo. "Besides, the majestic surroundings were more worthy of
him than Mougins, where he had sordid arguments with the village
council. If ever a Picasso Museum is created," he added,
"Vauvenargues would be a fine place."
</p>
<p> Picasso had been enchanted with the austere medieval
chateau when he acquired it in 1958. It included 2,500 acres on
the north slope of Mont Sainte Victoire, and, as he told a
friend at the time, "I have just bought myself Cezanne's view."
He liked the vast rooms, since he was always running out of
space for his paintings and sculptures. But he soon changed his
mind. Few friends dropped in as they did on the Riviera, and it
was too far from the sea to enable him to take an occasional
swim. Finally, in 1961, Picasso decided to move to Notre-Dame-
de-Vie and the balmier climate of the Riviera back country.
There he kept up his prodigious pace, filling one room after
another with paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures--and building on to the house when necessary.
</p>
<p> In the morning, he sometimes sketched in bed, and he
delighted in going through the mail to see what outrageous
request or oddity someone might have sent him. Like a good
Spaniard, he lunched around 2 o'clock, then occasionally went
for a walk in the garden with Jacqueline and their two Afghan
hounds. After a siesta, there was tea, and when he was not
expecting friends, Picasso read or worked until two or three in
the morning. "Work is what commands my schedule," he told a
friend. "Daylight is perfect to contact friends--which is
always a must with an artist--and go out. In our modern times,
we can obtain excellent light at night--which we could never
do with the yellowish shade of old lamps--and I also have
silence."
</p>
<p> "Picasso always lived," said a friend, "for now--right
now," which may explain why he left no will. That surprising
fact probably guarantees legal battles concerning his enormous
estate for years to come. To be sure, he had already disposed
of some of his paintings while he was alive. In 1970 Picasso,
who never lost his affection for his native Spain through his
long years of self-imposed exile against the Franco regime,
donated some 1,000 works from his early years to a new Picasso
Museum set up by his late secretary, Jaime Sabartes, in a
palatial mansion in Barcelona. Picasso also decreed that his
famed mural Guernica, which has been on temporary loan to
Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art since World War II, be returned
to Spain when civil liberties have been restored. Last week, as
Spain mourned him as its own, his countrymen expressed regret
that Picasso had not ensured that more of his major works would
one day be seen in his homeland.
</p>
<p> In Paris, Picasso's lawyer announced that his widow and his
son Paulo would respect a wish expressed by Picasso and donate
the artist's valuable personal collection of great painters to
the Louvre. Picasso jokingly referred to the collection, which
includes 800 to 1,000 works by Corot, Courbet, Cezanne, Braque,
Matisse, and others, as "bric-a-brac," but Prime Minister Pierre
Messmer quickly accepted the priceless gift on behalf of France.
</p>
<p> As for Picasso's Picassos, no one knows exactly how many
there are, and cataloguing them may take years. The estimates
of the number of his works squirreled away in his villas range
from 12,000 to 25,000. That ought to be enough to enrich museums
in both Spain and France--and the rest of the world as well.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>