The Success and Failure of Picasso - John Berger

   An interesting analysis of the work of Picasso through the course of his life.
   He makes a number of points around certain ideas.
   He sees Picasso as having been shaped by the feudalistic political and economic system still operating in Spain during his youth with a very different system of values and view of poverty than the one current in industrialized France at the time.  In Spain, there was poverty but one still had dignity, like that of the peasants in Pig Earth.  In industrialized France, poverty was simply a kind of desperation without dignity, a failure.  Berger sees this behind both the subjects and the style of Picasso's Blue period when he first moved to Paris. 
   Berger sees this sense of being an outsider, a "primitive", as critical to Picasso's overall career - a self-image as anarchistic social critic, as a noble savage, as an iconoclast.  Berger sees this as the driving force in much of Picasso's work, rather than the influence of an artist attempting to rework, rethink, expand the form and language of painting (outside the Cubist period, where he worked collaboratively with others on a formalized problem or new conception of the relation between painter/painting and subject).  As Berger puts it, Picasso became focused on the act of painting and creating as a confirmation of his noble savage status, of his social critic status, rather than on the paintings themselves and the more formal or conceptual side of the work.
    I tend to agree with his overall analyses.  Picasso did produce some important, focused, almost revolutionary pieces - Demoiselles, Guernica, post-cubist works too - but while much of his work, especially later in his career, exhibits a great deal of energy in terms of both style and sheer output, the works themselves are not so distinct or noteworthy.

   A victim of his own legend, and also of the one built around him by friends and society.