'Picasso: Mosqueteros' show ripened vision of painting master

In his final decade, Pablo Picasso produced a prodigious body of work at Notre Dame de Vie, his retreat in the South of France. These dreamy portraits and drawings remain some of the artist’s most imaginative—and most often overlooked—works.

Gagosian Gallery’s newest show, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” at its 21st Street space, brings together an impressive amount of these late pieces, and attempts to bring about some new understanding of them.

Not since the Guggenheim’s 1984 show, “Picasso: the Last Years: 1963-1973,” has such a huge number of late Picassos been amassed in the U.S. Culled mainly from private collections, these works depict the colorful court of circus acts, prostitutes, Baroque matadors, and of course, musketeers, that Picasso filled his final works with.

Scholars have previously dismissed these pieces as the somewhat perverted and irrelevant excesses of an aging artist long addicted to the art of painting. Indeed, there are many explicit works (crude little drawings, bluntly articulated swirls of sexuality), and true, this moment in Picasso’s life remains one of his busiest. Still, the works in “Mosqueteros,” even the simple and naked fantasies, are far from a retreat into Picasso’s own world of imagination. Instead, they seem to furiously and genuinely reach, as Leo Steinberg argues in his essay Picasso’s Endgame, for some kind of preservation in the well-acknowledged face of death.

Works such as the broadly sketched Portrait d’homme du 17ème siècle or the colorful Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur also remain deeply engaged with not only Picasso’s own oeuvre, but with a vast and external art history as well. The subjects dress like Velazquez and other Old Masters, in ruffled collars and curled hair, while their style mix and match the techniques used by Picasso throughout his career. These bold and expressionistic brushworks even seem to prefigure such major figures as Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Meanwhile, other works throughout the show make coy references to art history—a borrowed composition from Cranach or Manet, for example—and demonstrate Picasso’s own keen awareness and deep engagement, even at a time when most critics deemed his work forgettable.

While the aim of “Mosqueteros” is to generate interest and admiration for these important late works, curators John Richardson and Dakin Hart seem to have undertaken this by way of quantity over quality. Though perhaps expected from a power gallery like Gagosian, the Picasso show can be numbingly expansive, and at worst, redundant.

Still, visitors should make sure to catch a unique display of cartoons, etchings, and drawings that highlight the twin threads of smutty playfulness and resonant self-awareness in the late Picasso. Nearby, a solitary portrait of Picasso’s wife, Jacqueline Roque is also a must-see.

Most impressive though, is the show’s second gallery (a straight forward shot from the front entrance), where a salon-style wall presents a variety of peculiar portraits of deliriously dreamy creatures that surround the viewer. Here, we cannot help but feel something like the sailor Picasso sketched in his early studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon who steps into to a wild salon of staring, disjointed prostitutes. We are at once part shocked intruder and part delighted guest, part mischievous voyeur and part old acquaintance. We are, in the end, always drawn inextricably in.