YMMV / Pablo Picasso

• Archive Panic: He worked from a young age until his death at age 91 and was exceptionally prolific throughout that entire span.
• Awesome Ego: See the page quote. Picasso was among the greatest and most prolific artists in history, and he damn well knew it.
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: Picasso was already a millionaire during his lifetime, but after his death his work become more profitable than ever before.
• Protection from Editors: The English writer and art critic John Berger argued in his book Success and Failure of Picasso that Picasso suffered from this. He quotes examples of the kind of grotesque and fawning adulation that art writers used to heap on Picasso, and claimed that the artist had become so rich and successful that, as far as most critics were concerned, he could essentially do no wrong — which meant that Picasso's work inevitably became mannered and empty because it ceased to be about anything except how famous and successful Picasso was. Berger goes on to argue persuasively that much of Picasso's late work (for instance, the whole series of drawings showing a beautiful girl, a clownish, ridiculous old man and sometimes a monkey) were about the artist's own self-hatred.

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