GOAT SKULL AND BOTTLE
PABLO PICASSO, 1951
He's seventy. Decades of blowing art apart and putting it back together behind him. And here he is, down in the south of France, turning junk into animals. He'd just built a pregnant goat out of a basket and some old flowerpots. This is the follow-up. And it's darker. This time it's just a skull. Look what it's made of. The horns are bicycle handlebars. The eyes, two big bolt heads. The fur, faked with corrugated cardboard. Nails poke out where the tufts go, and more nails fan out from a candle stuck in a bottle beside it, like rays of light. A candle burning down. Painters have used that for one thing for centuries. Time running out. The old reminder that you're going to die. An old man, building a little skull out of scrap and setting a candle next to it. And here's where it leaves us. This is just about the last face in a lifetime of them. Think about the road. A boy leading a horse, a calm, ordinary human face, before he'd wrecked a single thing. Then the mask. The explosion. Faces chopped into planes. Faces in costume. A face the mirror lies to. And here, near the end, the face is a goat's skull, made of a bike and a fistful of nails. He never stopped doing the one thing. Taking whatever's lying around and making it stare back at you. Even when the thing staring back is death. He can't help it. He picks up the handlebars, and he sees horns.