Art, Wit And Life Poem by gershon hepner

Technique is so important it
must stop existing, so Picasso said.
The same is true, of course, of wit,
and life, as we’ll find out when we are dead.

Art and wit and life have this
in common: none depend on our technique,
something that we only miss
when foolishly we ask for a critique.

Roberta Smith reviews an exhibition of 50 paintings and 49 prints on view at the Gagosian Gallery, produced by Picasso in the decade preceding his death in 1973 at 91 (Going All Out, Right to the End, ” NYT, April 17,2009) :
One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark. For some, his decline began as early as 1914, when he and Braque went their separate ways after inventing Cubism. Others deferred until the arrival of the bourgeois Olga Khokhlova in 1917, or the pliant Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, or the end of World War II. But the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return. That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here. The 50 paintings and 49 prints on view demonstrate that in the decade preceding his death in 1973 at 91, Picasso painted, as usual, for his life. But his life was drawing to a close, and pressure was mounting. He diverted it into paintings whose emotional rawness, physical immediacy and often wicked pictorial joyfulness were not quite like anything he had made before. They may not have changed the course of art, but give them time. First they deserve their due….
In his catalog essay Mr. (John) Richardson writes that Picasso said that technique was important, “on condition that one has so much... that it completely ceases to exist.” But according to a short film playing in a small side gallery, Picasso also said that “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good.” Some of the paintings are thickly built in caroming wet-on-wet strokes and stabs, as if aping the deft flourishes of the old masters. A prime example is the lavish “Portrait of a Man With Sword and Flower, ” which reinterprets one of Velázquez’s dwarfs. His comic legs are so splayed that the soles of his nailed boots point in opposite directions; his undulant grisaille face, taut and knowing, has fish-skeleton eyebrows. Other works are so sketchy as to be more bare canvas than paint. The light-to-heavy range is spelled out across four relatively pale gray and blue paintings on one wall; they offer female nudes, alone or not, and a bust of a beruffled court painter in profile. They culminate in an image of a nude accompanied by a musketeer and, behind them, a large phallic finger that may make you rub your eyes once or twice.

4/17/09