Art

By ROBERT HUGHES

In imaginative force and outright terribilita, it is quite possibly the most crushing and exhilarating exhibition of work by a 20th century artist ever held in the U.S. Over the next four months a million people will queue outside New York City's Museum of Modern Art to get a glimpse of it. Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, is being honored in a show of nearly 1,000 of his works, some never exhibited before, drawn from collections the world over.

What gives the exhibit its overwhelming character is the range and fecundity of Picasso's talent--the flashes of demonic restlessness, the heights of confidence and depths of insecurity, the relationships to the art of the past, the sustained intensity of feeling. "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" contains good paintings and bad, some so weak that they look like forgeries, as well as works of art for which the word masterpiece--exiled for the crime of elitism over the past decade--must now be reinstated.

--BY ROBERT HUGHES May 26, 1980