Picasso's Worst

By ROBERT HUGHES

The opening day of Pablo Picasso's last exhibition of new works resembled a French state funeral: a crowd whispering and shuffling beneath the lofty medieval arches of the papal chapel in Avignon, orations, bereaved friends; and afternoon light, the color of dusty honey, sifting in benediction through the lancet windows.

The centerpiece of the summer's Avignon Festival, L'Exposition Picasso consists of 201 paintings. They date from September 1970 to June 1972, and may be said to form Picasso's last testament as an artist. The show bears signs of haste. The installation is confused, the catalogue scrappy, and its preface, by Rene Char, is a tangle of the glutinous verbiage that some French poets exude like silkworms when in the Spanish presence. Nevertheless, the exhibition will certainly be a tourist success. These are, after all, the last Picassos. They are also the worst. It seems hardly imaginable that so great a painter could have whipped off, even in old age, such hasty and superficial doodles. One enters in homage and leaves in embarrassment.

There are several ways of skirting this disagreeable fact. The first is to remind oneself of Picasso's energy, which stayed with him right to the end. That in itself is impressive: Don Juan at 91, creakily fornicating with his succession of blank canvases, struggling and failing, but then struggling again to trans form the too compliant image into a shield against death.

Another is, so to speak, iconographic: you can trace the motifs--the women and children, the reclining lovers, the toreadors and satyrs--and observe in what relationship they stand to the rest of Picasso's long dialogue with such themes. Unfortunately, none of this makes the paintings themselves any better. Under the pressure of haste, the Picassian style became a parody and at last a forgery of itself.

There is, for instance, a whole group of bullfighters whose shapes, except for a brusque vitality of placement that was always Picasso's hallmark and never quite left his fist, might almost have been produced by David Stein, Elmyr de Hory, or some other moderately gifted faker. Every artist has the right to his own cliches, but the last Picassos are only startling as cliche.

No Reality. The famous line seems to have had very little left to describe.

By a cruel paradox, a painter who was the master of visual sensation--able to pack more concrete feeling of weight, rotation, sharpness, elasticity and vibration, color or smell into a shape than any other man of his time--found himself, at the end, painting with only the most tenuous relationship to the world.

There is no observed or experienced reality in Picasso's last works, only an enfeebled meditation on style.

Looping and chopping its way through the repertory of shorthand for the human face and figure that he himself had developed decades before, Picasso's brush encountered no resistances. The twisting and displacement of a torso or an ear, the mock-cubist overlapping and profiling related to nothing except earlier paintings that he had made but seemed to have half forgot ten. The drama of assimilation, of that prehensile eye clawing at the world's very guts, dissolved. He ran out of subjects and fell back as never before on stock dummies -- troglodytic clowns and kidney-profiled women who now and then remind one that the man who painted them also made Guernica and Girl Before a Mirror.

The bullfighters (stuck in permanent fantasy, clutching their swords in one hand and their naked majas in the other) seem to be done in some spirit of homage to Goya, but they are not a homage that Goya would have accepted: they are too badly painted, sentimental and cursory for that. Thus, losing his specificity, Picasso had literally nothing left to paint.

What remained for him was the fact of painting, the reflex actions of being a painter -- turning out canvases rather as a scalp, having no choice in the matter, grows hair. The subjects are only nominal, shallow receptacles for Picasso's prodigious instinct to survive. Their existence owes itself to fate, not to necessity. In this way, Picasso's last show is a depressing commentary on the idea that it is better to paint any thing than nothing; two years of silence would have rounded off that singular life better than these calamitous daubs. Yet in its way, the Avignon show may perform some service to Picasso's reputation. It is hard to see it and retain as workable the myth that everything he painted was touched with genius, and of importance. Unlike Titian or Michelangelo, Picasso failed in old age. To perceive this is to be freed, to some extent, of the hagiographic icing that still obscures him. But it does not reduce the dimensions of his actual achievement.

sbRobert Hughes

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