‘Well, they can’t cancel Picasso.’ That was my optimistic take some months ago when a friend in the art world said: ‘Watch out, they’re coming for him next.’
It doesn’t really matter that, like Paul Johnson – late of this parish – I don’t feel unadulterated admiration for Pablo Picasso’s work. The late period seems to me a commercial art factory that would have made Andy Warhol blush. But the fact he was a cast-iron genius is beyond doubt, proven by the fact that no one who came after him could go around him. Like Stravinsky in music, you couldn’t continue afterwards as though nothing had happened; Picasso had happened, and for a long time that was that.
If you are a person of exceptional talent it’s expected that you’ll break certain things, including conventions
Everybody always knew that the great Spaniard was not a great human being – and with the 50th anniversary of his death this month it appears that those facts are going to be more than rehearsed.
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