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The Old Savage
1963-1973
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Things make a similar impression in the graphic work. Never before
had Picasso done as many etchings as he did in the last years of his
life. The command of Picasso the craftsman was plainly un-diminished.
Using various etching and aquatint techniques, linear and otherwise,
he was still drawing figures with a single line and a steady hand as
late as summer 1971. This may be the best place to identify Picasso's
subtle intentions. Many of the etchings betray formal inconsistencies,
with carefully worked areas appearing alongside negligently scrawled
details, and there are visible gaps in Picasso's handling of
compositional questions. But the sheer number of his supposed slips is
enough to preclude all possibility of spontaneity in his work.
The main subject is sexuality. It is so obsessive that the public
has continued to find this area of Picasso's work problematic to this
day. Picasso was probing at a great social taboo. The public reception
of his late work (this only proves how disturbing this work seems) has
been masterly in its repression of this part of his oeuvre. In 1980,
for instance, the great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York almost entirely excluded his sexual material. It still
strikes many as so provocative that on the occasion of the first
retrospective of his late work, in 1988, debate centred on whether
Picasso was a pornographer. Whenever it has not been possible to avoid
the sexual pictures, the orthodox Picasso reception has dictated that
biographical reasons be adduced for Picasso's obsessive treatment of
sex, implying that Picasso had to get a dirty old man's fantasies out
of his system.
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None of this is convincing, and in fact the truth of the matter is
far more intractable. Picasso's explicit pictures were part of the
Sixties revolution. The rebellion against taboos at that time must
almost inevitably have reminded him of similar currents earlier in his
life. Tellingly, he started from works in which, agreeing with his
friend Apollinaire's radical views, he had used pornography to combat
encrusted bourgeois morality. It was not that Picasso's 1968 etchings
were a direct contribution to the struggles of the young generation:
the work was not political in nature. But he did nonetheless, in his
seclusion, follow events on television, and the general mood of
rebellion confirmed him in his own refractory individualism.
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Picasso's sexual etchings and paintings followed a line of thought
that involved transformational effects, among them those of costume.
Behind this lay not only the anarchist mood of early studies done in
1902 but also the major artist and model series done in the late
Twenties and early Thirties. Again, in his work of the Sixties and
Seventies, Picasso combined allusions to the art of the past with
themes and motifs that were constants in his own repertoire: the
theatre, the circus, ancient mythology. Though this late work
initially strikes us as rudimentary and chaotic, the form and content
are in fact subtly judged. Thus in 1966 we find him commenting on
sexuality in his etchings by peopling sexual organs with figures.
Gustav Klimt had already availed himself of this method at the
beginning of the century. Still, in almost all Picasso's pictures the
voyeurist element is dominant. The artist and his female nude model
are almost invariably being ob-Nerved by ugly old men in various kinds
of costume. This has led people to infer that it is the old Picasso we
are seeing, humorously burlesquing his own physical impotence by
casting himself in the role of voyeur.
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Untitled
1966
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Nude Man and Nude Woman
1966
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Suite 347, Plate I
1968
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Suite 347, Plate 6
1968
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Suite 347, Plate 8
1968
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Suite 347, Plate 290
1968
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Suite 347, Plate 298
1968
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Man and Nude Woman
1969
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Couple
1970
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No doubt the artist was expressing personal problems; but too
simple a one-to-one identification would be wrong. It would be apt, in
fact, to drawings of a like nature done in the Fifties. In the late
work, the observers are of too various a sort, and at times the
figures exchange roles, too. A baroque nobleman will become an artist
and paint the beautiful model himself. The painter always remains the
creator. This fact expresses Picasso's view of art as an act of (pro)creation
presented to a public itself incapable of creative endeavour. In view
of the intimacy of the act of (procreation, it is tantamount to
shamelessness if the urge to expose is constantly being satisfied, the
private secrets revealed. Picasso rarely expressed the role of the
modern artist, under constant observation by the omnipresent mass
media, with such illuminating force. The painter under public scrutiny
(i.e. Picasso himself) is obliged constantly to play new roles. He is
the knight and the sailor, the circus artiste and the nobleman, but
above all he is the "new Rembrandt". In the work of his old age,
Picasso took the 17th-century Dutch painter as the artist par
excellence with whom it was possible to identify. "Rembrandt and
Saskia" heralded a lengthy series of paintings which to a greater or
lesser extent constituted masked self-portraits of Picasso. He was
returning to the outmoded idea of the productive, creative person as
genius.
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