Another self portrait, drawn when he was 90 or 91. Probably my favorite of his self portraits. Titled "The Young Painter":
It was incredible to see it live unprepared. When you look chronologically through his paintings, you see basically every modern style there is - the guy participated in a lot of art movements over the twentieth century—and was proficient and productive in several of them. He starts classically, but soon descends into surrealistic nightmares and all the other things he became famous for. And then, finally, in the end, after all this insanity of lines and cubes and shapes and trying to figure out meanings (or at least subjects), you come to the last painting in the exhibition, and it really looks like something a talented ten-year-old could draw - full of life and innocence and optimism.
Something I saw when I visited the Picasso museum a few weeks ago:
"When visiting an exhibition of children's drawings, Picasso (according to Roland Penrose) said: ``When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.''"
Might be an unpopular opinion but to me the series of portraits aged great, became more and more stylized and interesting to look at. first one is done well for sure but is kinda boring imo.
i think the takeaway is that the post is a joke founded on the mistake of interpretting all of the portraits as directly representative, implying that, as an old man, picasso looked like a cubist nightmare in real life, when he actually probably just looked like an old human.
Man I find this fascinating. I deeply wonder how the evolution of his art style relates to his age, the expansion of his viewpoint and potentially even the degradation of his own mind.