In his last decades, Pablo Picasso issued a series of challenges to some of the most acclaimed painters of the past—Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet—as if asserting his preeminence not only in the history of Modernism but also in the entire history of Western art. Picasso boldly took on some of these masters’ most celebrated works—Las Meninas, Les Femmes d’Algers, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, among others—either wholesale or as single figures extracted from well-known compositions, translating the originals into bulbous, multi-scaled anatomy, graphic shapes, and exuberant patterns. The resulting images were part Oedipal father-slaying, part homage, part satire, and part parody. (It could be argued that the great majority of Picasso’s works after the 1950s were parodic of his own earlier inventions, with phenomena such as two-eyed profiles, which were once formal imperatives necessitated by a desire to express perception in new terms, now turned into stylistic mannerisms—but that’s another matter.)

Was Picasso identifying with Degas—the suite was made when Picasso was ninety—or acting as a rival?

There are, however, other masters with whom Picasso had a different, more complex relationship, artists whose signature works he never reprised directly, but whose example haunted him throughout his long working life, both as an ambitious young newcomer and as an internationally revered figure. Paul Cézanne was obviously one of these looming giants. Anyone with a minimal interest in the history of Modernist art knows that Picasso’s and his “pard” Georges Braque’s joint invention