Picasso's desperate obscenities: show of late works captures a still raging genius

Atelier Picasso, Bastian Gallery, London
This thrilling, gruelling exhibition lays bare Picasso’s twilight years in a palatial villa in Cannes – outrageous, tortured and searching for the priapic energy of his youth

Everyone runs out of steam eventually. In the case of Pablo Picasso, the process was lengthy and he fought it with flashes of fury, lust and wit. He obviously didn’t think of himself as old when, in his 70s, he posed bare-chested for the photograph that appears at the start of Bastian Gallery’s nostalgic tribute to his last studio, in postwar Cannes. Picasso would work as energetically as ever, right up to his death aged 91, leaving a heap of late works. But does the last quarter-century of his career actually add anything to the miracles that came before?

In 1900, as a teenage prodigy from Malaga via Barcelona, he visited Paris for the first time and painted brilliantly lurid scenes of dance halls and brothels. In 1907, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, torching centuries of western art in a savage conflagration that simultaneously invents cubism and surrealism. Still to come were stupendous orgies of destruction and creation and his most unexpected transformation of all, from sensual diarist of private life to public painter of modern history in Guernica.

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