Dilek Yalcin
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was not just an artist, he was a seismic force in the history of modern art. Born in Malaga, Spain and active primarily in France, he produced more than 20,000 works over his lifetime, spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and drawing. From his melancholic Blue Period to the radical invention of Cubism, from Guernica’s anguished protest to his relentless stylistic reinvention, Picasso reshaped what art could look like and what it could mean. He was celebrated as a prodigy, feared as a provocateur and remains, decades after his death, one of the most debated figures in art history.
But what do we actually see when we look at Picasso now? And who helps us see him more clearly?
John Berger’s 1965 essay “The Success and Failure of Picasso” remains one of the most ambitious and incisive attempts to answer this. Berger who is a fierce essayist, Marxist, art historian and seer, approached Picasso not to glorify him, but to grapple with him. His verdict was paradoxical: Picasso was a revolutionary who retreated. A genius whose early artistic innovation eventually collapsed under the weight of self-mythology and bourgeois comfort.
For Berger, Picasso’s early periods the melancholic Blue Period, the graceful Rose Period and most significantly, the radical invention of Cubism – represented the painter’s true genius. These moments showed a man in conflict with the world, searching for a new language of expression. Cubism, developed alongside Georges Braque, did not merely challenge Renaissance perspective; it obliterated it. In its place, it offered a multifaceted reality – fragmented, simultaneous, open-ended. It demanded not just new ways of seeing, but new ways of being. For Berger, this was Picasso at his most political: not in message, but in method.
But then something happened. After World War I, Berger argues, Picasso abandoned the artistic and intellectual courage of his youth. He turned inward, away from revolution, toward mythology and personal symbolism. The painter who once fractured the visual field into angles and ambiguities began producing allegorical nudes and Minotaurs, increasingly repetitive in form, increasingly isolated from history. Picasso, in Berger’s view, allowed himself to be seduced by wealth, fame, and self-importance. He became a solitary genius trapped in his own legend.
The critique is not without empathy, Berger does not hate Picasso. Rather, he mourns him. He sees in him a potential unfulfilled: an artist who had the tools to be the visual conscience of a century but who chose the comfort of mastery over the discomfort of evolution. In Berger’s words, Picasso’s failure was not aesthetic – it was moral. He ceased to risk.
It’s a compelling argument. And yet, nearly 60 years after Berger’s essay, I find myself both admiring its clarity and resisting its conclusion.
As an artist today, navigating a world of algorithmic visibility, AI-generated aesthetics and NFTs – I often return to Picasso not as a relic, but as a provocateur. Yes, Berger’s critique holds weight: Picasso’s later works can feel indulgent, at times hollow. But I cannot help but see his life’s work as a sustained battle with the very question of relevance, of repetition, of reinvention. He didn’t retreat from risk; he redefined what risk looked like in a society that had already absorbed the shock of Cubism.
And if Picasso were alive today? I do not imagine him as a traditionalist, refusing to adapt. On the contrary, I think he would thrive in this era of fluid identity, technological play and conceptual complexity. He would be – if anything – one step ahead, as he always was.
I imagine him with a phone in his hand, not for distraction but for disruption. Social media would not dilute his vision – it would extend it. He would fragment his own image across platforms, mocking the idea of the “brand” before anyone else had the language for it. He would use Instagram as a kind of living sketchbook: layering visual experiments, posting provocations, commenting with absurdity. Where others curate perfection, he would post chaos – remixing his own legacy in real time.
As for NFTs, I think he would be both wary and fascinated. Picasso would understand the digital token not just as a means of ownership but as a medium in itself. He might mint an NFT that evolves every time it is viewed, or one that decays over time, questioning permanence. He would mock the fetish of “authenticity” in the digital age, as he once challenged the idea of fixed authorship by painting like El Greco one day, and a child the next. The NFT would not be his product – it would be his provocation.
And I believe he would continue to ask the same fundamental questions that defined his entire life: What is real? What is a face? What is the line between distortion and truth?
This is where I part ways with Berger. While his analysis is deeply illuminating, it is also fixed in time. He saw Picasso from the vantage point of the postwar 20th century through the lens of Marxist expectations, political struggle, and the tension between private vision and public responsibility. But today, in the fragmented, hyper-mediated culture we now inhabit, Picasso’s restless reinvention seems newly relevant. His very contradictions – his shifts in style, his refusal to be pinned down – feel prophetic.
Of course, he was not without fault. His personal life was marred by cruelty, misogyny and a possessive ego that hurt many of the women who loved him. We cannot – and should not – separate these facts from the work. But we can read them as part of a more complicated truth: that genius is rarely clean and that art history is often shaped by flawed men asking brilliant questions.
In our time, we no longer need to declare Picasso either a success or a failure. We can hold both truths. He was a man who exploded visual language – and sometimes recycled it. A man who gave us Guernica and also a thousand minor variations of himself. A man who changed what art could be, and sometimes refused to change with the world.
What matters is not whether Picasso was perfect, but whether he still compels us to look harder, to think differently, to feel more deeply.
He does. And perhaps that is the only success that lasts.
Courtesy: Dailysabah
