PICASSO: THE MEDITERRANEAN YEARS, 1945-62 Gagosian Gallery, WC1 WOMEN IN PICASSO'S PRINTS Marlborough Gallery, W1 WHEN I was young and many of London's art dealers were as much interested in the history of art as in the profit to be made from it, their frequent exhibitions were an invaluable resource to all who wished to expand their knowledge and experience of historic painting. Then, half a century ago and more, it was possible for dealers to mount, for example, exhibitions that distinguished Rembrandt from his pupils or defined every painter in the Brueghel family, and to show off their stock in the company of masterpieces borrowed from great country house collections. Rembrandts and Brueghels in the 1950s were, if not quite two a penny, tiny fractions of their prices now, and it has been the rise in these prices and associated costs that put an end to this wholly beneficial private enterprise and brought about a shift of interest into fashionable contemporary art and the celebrity artists who are now the subjects of their exhibitions. These are the Replica balenciaga Handbags fields in which the art dealer still has the active role of exhibition organiser, education now playing second fiddle to bewilderment.

Where does Picasso stand in this? Old Master or Fashionable Modern? In the four decades or so since his death at 91, his reputation has inexorably shifted from that of outrageous old playboy so long fooling in the antechamber of death that all respect for him had withered, the Blue, Pink and Cubist Periods seeming to belong to an altogether other being, to that of a man of such extraordinary coherence and infinite complexity that we feel compelled to see virtue in everything he did. The youthful prodigy developed into the persistently enquiring and pragmatic intellectual; then, equally ingenious and ingenuous, he set on a course that seemed to mock academic traditions and ancestral art, and yet he constantly exploited them, often borrowing their beauty to redeem his deliberate ugliness. Driven by the playful as much as by the selfish compulsions of his libido, eroticism was a lifelong and conscious obsession in his work, subtly haunting in the beginning, crudely dominant at the end, everpresent in between. In subject and painterly attack he tried his hand at the whole range of erotic response, from the playful to the selfishly compelling, from tenderness to rape, to such an extent that the sane man must wonder whether imagemaking stimulated him to copulation or copulation inspired and animated his images, and consider the possibility that these activities were interchangeable. In simple terms, did he draw, paint and respond to his own pornography, or did Replica Jacques Lemans Watch he purge his imaginings by making art of then? Or is he, for our amusement, informing us of the dilemma confronted by a painter who is constantly eye-to-eye with the vulva? With a working life of more than seven decades and general agreement on his eminence, Picasso might now be expected to be exclusively the property of such great institutions as Tate Modern and the National Gallery and something of an Old Master rather than a New, yet this most expensive and prolific of 20thcentury painters is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, one of the most powerful international dealers in contemporary art. With little hesitation I dare describe it as the most exciting and enjoyable exhibition of the summer, aesthetically challenging and satisfying in equal measure, instructive and enlightening in its concentration on what is, if not the least studied period of Picasso's work, the most easily ignored.

THIS formidable commercial space is filled with paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics and a handful of prints
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