Volume 35, Number 12 · July 21, 1988

The Triumph of Picasso

By John Golding
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1988
an exhibition at the Musée Picasso, Paris, January 26-April 18,. Picasso Museum, Barcelona, May 10-June 14, 1988, Catalog of the exhibition by Hélène Seckel, by William Rubin. others

Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2 vols, 712 pp., fr490

Le Dernier Picasso: 1953-1973 16, 1988
an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, February 17-May. Tate Gallery, London, as "Late Picasso," June 21-September 18, 1988, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac, by Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, by David Sylvester

Editions du Centre Pompidou, 388 pp., fr290

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer
by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington

Simon and Schuster, 558 pp., $22.95

When the Museum of Modern Art mounted its huge Picasso exhibition in New York in 1980, it obtained the full support of the Picasso museums in Paris and Barcelona on condition that the Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), in a sense the cornerstone of New York's collection, might be allowed to cross the Atlantic for a final time for display in these two cities. The New York exhibition was a triumph—the greatest Picasso exhibition there has ever been or ever will be, even though the late work was inadequately represented. Many of the great works seen together will never be reunited: Guernica, for example, was afterward restored to Spain, according to the artist's ultimate wish, and is now permanently installed in a dependency of the Prado, its rage and its passion muffled inside a grotesque bullet-proof cage. The relatively small Demoiselles exhibition shown in Paris and Barcelona was a triumph of a different kind. It is accompanied by a two-volume catalog, which makes the Demoiselles, after Guernica,[1] the most extensively documented twentieth-century painting.



Review, 10546 words

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