ABSTRACT
WE ARE TOLD that in extreme old age Pablo Picasso was strongly preoccupied with the fate of Vincent van Gogh (Hess, 1971). Yet, characteristically, the great Dutch expatriate did not appear undisguised among the personae who populate Picasso's late works, nor did Picasso use van Gogh's oeuvre as a source of subject matter as he used those of Delacroix, Manet, and, above all, Velázquez. If Picasso's life work is overwhelmingly autobiographical, as the artist himself proclaimed (Brassaï, 1966, p. 100), much of the subject matter of his last years amounts to retrospective meditations on the creative life. Reportedly, he was consciously brooding about the contrast between his achievement of international fame before the age of 30—a celebrity that was to endure and grow uninterruptedly for almost seven decades—and Vincent's lonely, tragic existence and untimely death (Parmelin, n.d., pp. 106-107).
