Volume 27, Number 12 · July 17, 1980
Your Show of Shows
By John Richardson
Picasso: Oeuvres reçues en paiement des droits de succession 1979 to January 7, 1980
catalogue of an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, October 11,
Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 325 pp., 120 F
"Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" 1980
an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, May 22 to September 16,
Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective
edited by William Rubin, chronology by Jane Fluegel
The Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 464 pp., $45.00
Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907-1916 A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works
text by Pierre Daix, catalogue compiled by Pierre Daix, by Joan Rosselet
New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown, 375 pp., $125.00
Some twenty-five years ago, Picasso had the contents of his Paris studio shipped to the villa he had recently bought at Cannes. Among the treasures, household goods, and accumulated rubbish—the artist was a compulsive hoarder—were seventy portfolios. The day Picasso decided to go through these, I happened to be present. Few had been opened since 1939, some not since 1914. Although Picasso was vague about what was in the portfolios, there was reason to believe that they contained most of the works on paper that he had kept for himself, because they were too precious, personal, exploratory, or else too scabrous to exhibit, let alone put on the market. And here we should bear in mind that, as he grew older, Picasso retained much of his best work, drawings especially. So it was with the trepidation felt by Howard Carter when the first pick-axe probed Tutankhamen's burial chamber that we watched Picasso fiddle tantalizingly with the knots.
Review, 6897 words
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