Recently, I've added a complementary series, "Towards the End," dealing with an artist's late, rather than early work. So now seems to be as good a time as any to add the remaining bookend to Picasso's career.
Considering that he died aged 91, it's a little unfair to select a start-point ten or even 15 years before his death. So what I did was rummage through images of paintings made after 1950, when he was nearly 70. Below are some examples from what I found.
I include this painting Picasso made when he was about 60 to serve as a benchmark for the later ones. "Dora Maar with Cat" sold at auction for one of the highest prices ever.
True to his form, Picasso never went purely abstract; each painting includes a subject or subjects potentially identifiable via the captions.
To my eye, there was no real stylistic progression or sense of direction over the 20 years covered by the example images above. This ties into the thesis of my e-book "Art Adrift" that once the elements of modernist painting had been established by around 1920, aspiring modernists and even established ones such as Picasso had no real sense of what to do next.
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