As a newlywed 80-year-old, Pablo Picasso withdrew from the glamour and publicity to a large house north of Cannes.
As an artist, he was at his zenith, notes Jo Widoff. He had stowed away art history for good. But instead of retiring, Picasso entered a period of enormous productivity. During his last 12 years, he made over 3,100 works. He painted with newspaper as a palette, he drew, made graphics and sculptures, some in concrete.
“Incoherent ramblings of a confused old man in the waiting room of death,” summed up his friend, the critic Douglas Cooper, of the last exhibition that became posthumous.
Young artists like David Hockney instead saw a new style of painting that today is perhaps even more appreciated than the "connoisseur Picasso" that Moderna had previously shown.
Painting like this is tough, he is 80 years old. But he also has an outstanding experience and can push the boundaries, says Jo Widoff.
It's drizzling.
Moderna in Stockholm opens with “The Peeing Woman” (La Pisseuse) from 1965. The genitals are exposed and the viewer can almost hear the drooling from the bare-breasted woman on the beach.
He is very keen on conveying physicality and scents and criticizes Georges Braque: "You understand his art as paintings, you can't feel that your armpit smells of sweat," says Picasso, who wanted his works to be understood as bodies.
He continued to paint nude studies but rarely had a model in front of him, says Jo Widoff. She describes the recurring motif of the artist together with the nude model in the studio as fiction.
What's interesting about this late period is that the women still have a kind of poise, even though they're naked and fragmented, while the men and images of Picasso himself are given the role of being a bit strange. I can't find a better word than impotent, says Jo Widoff, pointing to some musketeer-like men on the wall opposite.
"Across the border"
The oversexualized female bodies recur throughout his artistic career, she notes, and there are works where "he crosses the line."
But we don't have anything like this.
Moderna has not removed the nude studies from the version of the exhibition that was previously shown in Norway.
No. Quite the opposite, actually. I believe very strongly in transparency. It's more problematic when you try to embellish. It's no good. Picasso is who he is.
On display at Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 22/11–25 to 5/4–26. The exhibition will be the museum's third major Picasso exhibition, but the first to cover the last ten years of his artistic career. Picasso died in 1973, when he would have been 92.
Some 50 paintings and 30 works on paper are included, as well as an in-depth study of the concrete installation "Breakfast in the Green" from 1965, which stands in the museum's garden. There are also images from "Suite 347", often considered Picasso's best graphic suite, "incomparable" according to Jo Widoff.
The exhibition has been made in collaboration with PoMo in Trondheim, Kunstens Museum in Aalborg and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz Picasso.
