Much of Picasso's work in his old age used earlier art
as its subject matter, as he had earlier used Grünewald's "Crucifixion."
The present vanishes to make room for the past. Perhaps this
let him work through his own development as an artist and his place
in art history, which, it was clear, he had secured. He was, himself,
the Old Master of his day; the work of his predecessors provided
him with apt material. After making paraphrases and variations
of the seventeenth century French painter Poussin's "Bacchanale"
in 1944, he used this method almost continuously through the latter decades
of his life. Sometimes he turned to the works that first inspired
him when he was very young; he made some 44 paintings derived from
Velázquez's "Las Meninas," which had impressed him so much when
he visited the Prado as a young student in Madrid.
After the upset of Françoise's departure, Picasso settled
into his last and most harmonious liaison, with a young divorcée
named Jacqueline Roque. In 1955, Olga died, leaving him free of
matrimonial ties; he quietly married Jacqueline in 1961.
Seeking peace and quiet, the two bought a lovely castle
in the countryside, the Château de Vauvenargues. Here, in his
final years, Picasso had a tremendous last burst of productivity;
he was almost compulsively creative, as if trying to paint his
way out of death, or at least to make the most of life before it
was too late. He again painted with the phenomenal speed that
he had had as a teenager in Barcelona; and simplifying his forms,
he used repetition as a creative device, creating whole series
around a theme or compositional idea, varying it throughout the
set as a motif is transformed in music, instead of making single
masterpieces. He continued with his favorite themes, using his
art-making about love-making (he saw the terms as reversible) to
fight death; he continued painting scenes of the male artist with
his female muse, the configuration around which he had composed
his life. Picasso had long equated painting with sexual potency.
Perhaps it was not so much death as impotence that he fought against
in his last work.
Continuing this burst of prodigious creativity to the
end, Picasso died at a very ripe old age in 1973.
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