Pablo Picasso, quite possibly the most famous artist in all western culture, died 50 years ago this month. By the time of his death his name had become all but synonymous with art itself.
Because this is such an anniversary, there’s a rash of Picasso exhibits in museums, not just across the country, but literally around the world. They all take a slightly different angle, limited either by time, or by style, or by topic; he doesn’t seem to have one giant retrospective up anywhere.
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in the Spanish city of Malaga on the Mediterranean coast. He lived most of his life in France where he was a key player in most of the modern movements in art that evolved over the first 7/10th of the 20th century. He died in France in April 1973
Writing in the Washington Post recently, critic Sebastian Smee called the prolific Picasso “the ultimate shapeshifter.” He was so wildly variable as to almost defy whatever category you sought to put him in. His output was nothing less than incredible. He made around 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 700 sculptures and more than 4,000 ceramics. (By contrast, last month we talked about Vermeer, whose overall output comprises about 37 paintings.)
Basically, the critic said, to the general public Picasso has come to embody nothing less than “unfettered creativity.”
But there’s something else.
“Picasso was a genius—and a beast,” noted a story in the Economist a few weeks ago, asking if the two could ever be separated. “Many shows and events will mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death,” the magazine said. “Attend one, and you will encounter his revelatory vision—and, indivisibly, his misogyny.” A show at the Brooklyn Museum this summer takes this on squarely. The museum says it will “engage some of the compelling questions young, diverse museum audiences increasingly raise about the interconnected issue of misogyny, masculinity, creativity and ‘genius’.” The exhibit is co-curated by someone who has said she hates him.
Regarding Picasso’s misogyny, Smee says “he made his art narrower, less interesting, by turning so much of it into a bizarrely obsessive index to the churning hysteria of his ambivalence toward women.” Others would say it was far worse than ambivalence and that it’s as much a part of him as his visionary art.