DUSSELDORF, GERMANY.-Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents Picasso – Painting Against Time, on view through June 10, 2007. Virtually no other artist received as much public attention as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), whose epochal oeuvre continues to challenge and provoke. This exhibition focuses on the fulminant, overabundant late works of this artist, who retreated to Mougins in 1961 with Jacqueline Roque, his last companion and wife. There, he created paintings whose painterly execution is characterized by gestural violence and accelerating speed, and whose explicit eroticism and apparent formlessness initially encountered vehement critical rejection.

In 1973, American art historian Douglas Cooper regarded these works as “incoherent scrawls done by a frantic old man in death’s antechamber”. Only gradually – with encouragement from a series of exhibitions and publications beginning in the 1980s – did the significance of these images penetrate the public's awareness as manifestations of a radically renewed manner of painting.

Werner Spies - a distinguished connoisseur of these works and the exhibition’s curator – presents Picasso the exuberant master draftsman, the creator of fantastically detailed etchings, as an equal alongside Picasso the painter. His selection of paintings, drawings, graphic works and folding sculptures offers a complex image of a highly mercurial and multifaceted oeuvre, one in which antitheses clash forcefully and the serial evolution of motifs seemingly represses definitive formalization. Picasso invested a specific quantum of time in each work, resulting in an apparent division respectively between painterly and graphic styles. Mirrored in this dual configuration of working time are both a horror of decrepitude and death and a resistance against them.

Nude figures, pastoral lovers’ idylls, incongruous couples, cloak-and-dagger masquerades: these are the themes which dominate the late works. These images echo with profound melancholy: the provocative sensuality of the female nude contrasts starkly with the autobiographically-inflected figure of the voyeur, who makes his appearance attired as a painter, sculptor, musketeer or old man. Manifesting themselves in this polarity are both a growing sense of longing and an awareness of impotence in the face of inexorably elapsing time. Emerging from the seclusion of Mougins - and impressed by a masterful and hard-won painterly freedom, a meticulous draftsman’s technique, and a singular delight in storytelling - was a dense, only apparently contradictory body of works, and one whose astonishing dialectic still remains to be discovered today.