The New Yorker:

Fifty years after the artist’s death, his influence has waned, but his approach to the past remains deeply affecting.

By Jackson Arn

Before we enter the room, let’s talk elephants. This year, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death, museums and galleries advanced every interpretation of the man but the big, unsayable one: he has been of weirdly little importance to the past half century of art-making, at least given how important he remains to art history and the art market. One reason is surely his misogyny—the cigarette burn on Françoise Gilot’s face, the lovers who were bullied and discarded (two died by suicide). None of this makes the living eager to emulate his work, or announce when they do. Back in the spring, when the Times interviewed ten prominent artists about Picasso’s influence, several struck an embarrassed note, as though admitting that they shared vestigial DNA with a warthog.

Most of the ten were painters, which brings us to the other reason for Picasso’s subdued legacy. He was a painter first and last, and painting ain’t what it used to be—no longer the champ but one of a dozen sweaty contenders. The Brooklyn Museum’s otherwise dunderheaded “It’s Pablo-matic” hinted at this point when it invoked Marcel Duchamp, the conceptual artist whose repurposed urinals and bicycle wheels earned him a reputation that, per the wall text, “arguably outstripped Picasso’s in the later twentieth century.” The early twenty-first, too, I’d say. “The Echo of Picasso,” a show at Almine Rech supposedly about the artist’s influence, contained plenty of pieces that owed more to winking Marcel than to hot-blooded Pablo (Jeff Koons’s “Split-Rocker,” for example). When you walked out of “It’s Pablo-matic,” you were greeted with a cold lump of kitsch by kaws, the Duchamp of the TikTok age.

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