When magic doesn’t work, and why
Picasso’s “Self-Portrait Facing Death”
Pablo Diego Jose Santiago Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispin Crispiniano de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz Blasco y Picasso Lopez died 34 years ago today, peacefully but at the end of a long, long storm.
As is typical with celebrity deaths, the myth of a great man survived and swelled. Of admirers he had more than enough in his later years, and they stoked the legend so efficiently that the engine became a perpetual-motion machine.
Of the painting above, Calvin Tomkins of the the New Yorker wrote: “Picasso’s lifelong terror of disease and death did not keep him, in the end, from confronting these enemies directly, without self-pity or special pleading. The 1972 crayon ‘Self-Portrait’ is an exorcism image — a livid skull with wild, half-blind eyes and a mouth like the muzzle of a doomed animal.”
It has also been widely seen as a picture of sheer and honest terror.
Whether a bold confrontation with death or a frank admission of fear, it was no doubt another example of something that’s been observed and shared often in recent years, Picasso using art as magic. The paintings and sculptures and even the chintzy ceramics were from early on totemic, banked up with symbols that only he and his demons could interpret.
Picasso died on April 8, 1973. The self-portrait was done on the last day of June 1972. He nurtured death in his womb for nine months. See the rest.
