Picasso: Mosqueteros--Gagosian Gallery

Younger Than Jesus--New Museum

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984--Metropolitan Museum of Art

Compass in Hand--Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian's huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, well-heeled professionals, and European and Asian tourists, gathered together in a way I do not recall seeing before, certainly not in Chelsea. People did not just come and look. They stayed and talked about the quickening, raucous power of the paintings and prints that Picasso was making in his late eighties and early nineties. Anything by Picasso is of course a draw, and it helped that John Richardson had organized the exhibition. He knew Picasso in his later years, and the Gagosian show, while it surely had its commercial motivations, was given an intellectual lift by Richardson, whose magnificent biography of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared, is written in a prose as elegant, easy, and exact as any being produced today.