Pablo Picasso

IT IS DOUBTFUL whether any other painter in history produced so much in such a long lifetime as Pablo Picasso. Titian lived to be 99, but only an artist of such diverse styles, such daring experimentation, such natural feeling for his media as Picasso could show such rich variety and consistent excellence in an oeuvre spanning almost 80 years. Always, this production was at the forefront of art in the twentieth century. Picasso was the last, and possibly the greatest of the modernist giants.

Born in a small town in southern Spain, Picasso became the single most influential, the best known, and the most versatile figure of modern art. A constant self-overcoming from his earliest period to his latest bore witness to a mind of astonishingly original genius. In the years between the beginning of the century and World War I, he led modernism through the initial innovations of cubism, and carved out a territory which the painting of today continues to inhabit.

There is no easy list of what he achieved; there is no real measure of the breadth of his influence on the way we see. He was the maker of masterpieces like Guernica or Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, but also of posters, prints, and sketches familiar around the world -- the Don Quixote, the doves. For many of us he was probably the first great artist we ever heard of.

The night before his death he had dinner with friends and then returned to his studio to work through the late hours of the night -- the routine he had followed for years. He worked continually, made sketches as naturally as speaking, and finally every scrap he signed, every napkin he doodled on had its value.

His politics were as sensitive as his art: although a strong Spanish nationalist, he became a Communist because, he said, he knew what it was to be poor. He resisted the anti-modernist dogmas of the left, and continued to despise the barbarism of Franco and others on the right.

He was, above all, a last link to the great age of modernism, and we have to see his death not only as the end of one of painting's most fertile careers, but as the mark of a great wave of art at its ebb. Continual, radical change has become a constant for all the arts, but the leading figures of what now appears as the classical period of modernism are gone: two years ago Stravinsky; after the bitter silence of his last years, Pound; and now Picasso. Not for a long time, and perhaps never again, will any single artist create a revolution as fundamental as Picasso's.