Exhibitions: The Minotaur & the Maze

He has already lived 18 years longer than Leonardo da Vinci and 22 years longer than Rembrandt. He bears the best-known name in 20th century art; yet he seeks an anonymous existence. At the age of 85, he amuses himself by taking masterpieces of the past, pulling them apart and reassembling them in his own style. Having invented or conquered style after style, he continues attacking the canvas with bull-like strength as if he were ready to invent yet another. He is, of course, Pablo Picasso, and last week in Paris he received homage by way of a vast retrospective larger than any other artist has had while alive. And, of course, he wasn’t there.

Just the logistics of assembling the nearly 1,000 works valued at $60 million were staggering. Jean Leymarie, Geneva University art professor and longtime Picasso friend, who undertook the task of amassing the works, insisted that the exhibition include Picasso’s full range, from a finished academic portrait done when Pablo was 14 to landscapes as recent as last year. The Soviets lent nine cubist paintings, making it the first time—and probably the last—that the complete series of great cubist portraits could be seen in sequence. From the U.S. came 46 key paintings from private collections and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art’s pivotal 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting that heralded the beginning of cubism. Only outstanding omission: the Modern’s 1937 Guernica, which the museum considered “too fragile to travel.”

100 Hinges. But what makes the exhibition a once-in-a-lifetime event was the reluctant agreement by Picasso to open up his own cache of Picassos. Nearly two-thirds of the 284 paintings, 205 drawings, pastels and watercolors, 186 sculptures, 115 ceramics, 157 etchings and lithographs come from Picasso himself, most of which, though photographed, have never before been exhibited. Picasso had many of them close at hand in his villa at Mougins; for others he had to return to his old house in Cannes. Entering it to see again his works of the distant past, Picasso said with a shiver: “This is like visiting the Valley of the Dead in Egypt.”

For most visitors, jostling their way through the huge crowds in Paris’ Grand Palais, Petit Palais and Bibliothèque Nationale, it was more like threading a path through a maze presided over by the commanding, and at times terrifying, 20th century Minotaur. To guide viewers, Paris newspapers were running floor plans, and a TV program highlighted the “100 hinges,” or turning points, in Picasso’s career. Critics could have doubled that number; yet the overwhelming impression was that, for all of Picasso’s protean changes, what is essentially Picasso is now well known.

Beauty & the Beast. In a sense, seeing the totality of Picasso’s work establishes the various boundaries of his domain, but it does nothing to diminish the wizardry with which he exploited the subjects that caught his imagination. “Picasso’s life work is the greatest enterprise of destruction and creation of forms of our time, and perhaps of all time,” said France’s Culture Minister André Malraux.

Picasso never lost his fascination with the human figure, but there are few portraits of the great public of his time. For Picasso to become involved with passion and feeling, he had to know his subjects intimately. As a result, he principally records his own friends, fellow artists, wives, mistresses, children, or dealers and collaborators. Even when his subjects become most mythic—whether huge, sculpted Cycladic heads or etchings confronting fragile female beauties with bullheaded male monsters—the impetus can be traced to concerns in Picasso’s personal life. No painter alive has recorded the exact day he falls in love, or turns against a woman, with more precision.

The inevitable result has been to turn Picasso himself into a living legend, and for this he largely has photographers to thank. As a stocky, bare-chested figure with burning black eyes who would strike poses as dramatic as his paintings and don any kind of outlandish costume, he has at times come perilously close to being taken for a poseur. What the cult of personality obscures is the degree to which Picasso has always been his own self-generating man.

Instincts & Desire. With the exception of cubism, which Picasso invented in collaboration with Georges Braque, Picasso created no school and leaves behind few disciples. After 1914, modern art would have existed with or without Picasso, much as 17th century Dutch painting would have continued with or without Rembrandt.

The absence of the age’s central figure in each case would have had the same result: an impoverishment of art through the deletion of the single commanding talent whose work outshone all others by its virtuosity and brilliance. As to what prompts Picasso to warp space, torture and distort the image of man and reconstruct the world according to his own dictates, even Picasso himself is not certain. “Painting is stronger than me,” he says. “It makes me do whatever it wants.”

In looking over works, many shown in the current retrospective, Leymarie recalls Picasso’s exclaiming, half in frustration, half in despair: “How can a spectator live a picture the way I have lived it? How can anyone enter my dream, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts? Above all, seize what I put into them, perhaps against my own will?”

The answer is that if the Minotaur cannot fully comprehend the maze, neither can the viewer, who remains trapped in the paintings’ distortion and violence. Thus Picasso’s work continues to evoke both anger and adulation from critics and the public alike. But it is the fact that the world still tries to comprehend, despite a sense of outrage and shock, that is the final gauge of Picasso’s genius.