“Picasso at Seventy-Five”

It’s one of my favorite Greenberg essays, read a number of times before. It’s appreciative but also highly critical of a purported fall-off in Picasso’s quality after 1927, and especially after 1938. The underlying complaint is that people are so in the habit of treating Picasso as a prodigious freak of nature that they don’t do a sufficient job of sorting the good works from the bad ones. (Below is an example of one that Greenberg finds bad. And sorry, the first image I put up was one from a different year, though even worse than this one.)

Interestingly, it’s the same basic critique made of Goethe by Ortega y Gasset in “In Search of Goethe from Within”: such gushing admiration for Goethe’s breadth and dexterity as a prodigious freak of nature that we often don’t get a reasonable assessment of his genuine successes and failures.