“Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973,” opening this month at the Guggenheim Museum, almost didn’t happen. Organized originally by the Grey Art Gallery, a small museum at New York University, and scheduled to open there in November, the show ran into funding problems and, in their wake, postponements. In late December, just as the catalogue was being published, the Grey Art Gallery was forced to cancel—and the Guggenheim, with its far greater resources, stepped in to save the day.[1]

Nothing Picasso ever did is exactly overlooked, but it is significant that the first museum in the United States to plan a show of Picasso’s last works is small, adventuresome, and rather underfunded. In the United States late Picasso does not, generally, get its due. Everybody knows the etchings of Suite 347and the brash, gaping faces of the late oils. Because these things are signed “Picasso” they are accepted (or, at least, forgiven). Since the 1960s the works have had a following among some art historians, who have emphasized their pyrotechnical feats of historic reference. Recently, trend spotters in the painting world, thinking of Neo-Expressionism, have been calling the late style prophetic. But the terms used to describe the work suggest a kind of disappointment. When a genius starts being called brilliant or prophetic the real message may be that he’s lost his genius. In France, André Malraux spoke movingly and most convincingly of the oil paintings done between 1968 and 1972. In the United States, Clement Greenberg