Last year, I wrote four stories about Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the subject of 50 exhibitions sanctioned by the Picasso Museum in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death. I didn’t realize I’d save the best for last. That’s A Foreigner Called Picasso at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street in Manhattan. The exhibition gathers about 70 works in nearly all of Picasso’s wide-ranging media. It’s a one-venue show, one of my few quibbles about it, but Gagosian pried pitch-perfect art from lots of private collections, and people want their treasures back.
How can something new be said about modern art’s premiere savant, lodestar, and lightning rod? Picasso has been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions and books. Contemporary eyes are known to roll over his hedonism — not fully understanding how expansive his talent and ambitions were and how his life in France complicated them.
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