The following article is from our March 2007 issue.

Painting Against Time Düsseldorf exhibits Picasso's late works - By Brigitte Sträter

"Picasso - Painting Against Time" is the name of the current exhibit at the Kunst­sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (The North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection). It includes about 200 paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, perhaps the most famous painter of the 20th century. The works date from 1960 to 1973, when he died at the age of 91.

Curator Werner Spies specifically chose the ambiguous title to imply an artist doing his work both in opposition to current styles and to the passage of time's ever increasing speed in old age." Spies is an acknowledged Picasso expert and one of the few who had personal access to the artist in his later years. This is why he wants to reassess Picasso's later works in two specific ways. First, he wants to address the vehement rejection by Picasso's friends and contemporaries to the paintings' explicit sexuality and apparent formlessness. American art historian Douglas Cooper regarded these works as "incoherent scrawls done by a frantic old man in death's antechamber."

In the 1960s, "objective" painting was considered outdated. The zeitgeist celebrated conceptual performance art, minimalist and pop art. Marcel Duchamp preached the rejection of painters "drunk on turpentine."

Spies also wants to clear up a long-standing misconception. Picasso's furious sprawling paintings that often appeared more like sketches were not due to any age-related incapacity. According to Spies, the painter reacted with fright and resistance to aging and his impending death. In a true ecstasy of creativity, Picasso always put an equal amount of time into each of his works.

This resulted in the apparent contradiction of expressive, large-formatted painting that often only suggests details, are over-painted and leave unpainted surfaces with smaller, joyously narrative, meticulously executed drawings. It is a clash of the contrasts between youthful vitality, eroticism and beauty with the melancholy, even the ugliness of age and the knowledge of one's own transience.

On June 1, 1972 Picasso painted his last painting, "The Embrace" ("Étreinte"), thus knowingly bringing his oil painting to an end. Two colors, blue and rose, dominate the love scene set in a strange perspective-less room.

Blue and rose were the fundamental keys of his art. The playful "rose period" represented the blush of life, while the "blue period" was more melancholic, representing death. Their bodies entwine in the height of passion, their body parts a jumble. A blue wave of death is approaching the couple. The curtain falls. The game is over. The background is white nothingness. But at the same time this painting is the epitome of cubism's modern perspective.

"What will the art world do when I am no longer," Picasso once asked and answered: "They'll have to go over my dead body! They've no way of getting past it, have they?"

It would take 30 years to be able to interpret Picasso's late works properly. They are a manifestation of a radically renewed painting style. Today we no longer see just the shocking carnality. What remains is the ecstatic genius.

- Brigitte Sträter is a freelance writer who lives in Düsseldorf.



Picasso - Painting Against Time

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 in Düsseldorf
Until May 28, 2007
Catalog ?29