Art: Anatomy of a Minotaur

PABLO PICASSO is nearly as old as the electric light bulb. He was nearing his quarter-century by the time the Wright brothers lumbered into the air at Kitty Hawk. He was well known by the start of World War I and a celebrity when it ended. Since then, his reputation has increased exponentially, to the point where the shape of 20th century art is unimaginable without him. This week Picasso turned 90, and his birthday summoned a procession of tribute bearers. The Louvre has turned over its Grande Galerie to a selection of Picasso's work, the first time in its history that this honor has been extended to a living artist. Said President Georges Pompidou, opening the show: "This is not a Picasso exhibition; this is an homage from France to the great artist who has chosen our country to live and work in." In New York, the offerings range from a loan show sampling the past 70 years of his work, shared between the Marlborough and Saidenberg galleries, to a facsimile edition of some Picasso sketchbooks from 1964, containing a few dozen mildly erotic but trivial scribbles, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. at $500 a copy. Across the world, paeans rise to assure everyone that Picasso is younger and more exuberantly creative than ever, that he is still the supreme culture-hero of our century.

"We feel that no hand has ever possessed a greater gift of wonder, of revealing in one single, decisive stroke the mystery of life in all its profundity," writes a critic named José Bergamin in one of the new books, Picasso at 90. "The most perfect, absolute, authentic Picasso, the Picasso par excellence, it seems to me, is the latest one."

The Legend. Such bombast is familiar because Picasso has not been a subject of serious controversy for at least 35 years. The man has become a monument, rising from a reflecting pool of undiluted praise. For Picasso is not merely the most famous artist alive. He is the most famous artist that ever lived; more people have heard of him than ever heard the names, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Cezanne while they were alive. His audience is incalculable. By now, it must run into hundreds of millions—including, admittedly, the many people who have heard of him but have no idea of his pictures. The old man with the monkey face and the black, insatiable eyes squats at the center of this reputation, proclaimed and hidden by its coils: the archetypal Minotaur in his maze.

Occasionally he prances out, wearing a funny hat. What he is validates what he does: he has so long been saddled (not unwillingly) with the task of being the vitality-image or phallus of the West that every sketch, painting or dish tends to be greeted with the same ritually stupefied reverence. Hence la légende Picasso, which has been energetically prodded along by writers like Hélène Parmelin and photographers like David Douglas Duncan and Gjon Mili. From their breathless accounts a satyr rises, mythic, Gargantuan, and fatally easy to parody. The Maestro's working day, one might suppose, begins with a light breakfast of goat's testicles and salade niçoise. Then, surrounded by a flock of admiring tame doves, he descends to his studio and executes 30 engravings, two murals and a still life. At lunch, having done a zapateado before the avid lenses of a team from Paris Match, he gives Dominguin some