“The privilege of confronting the Demoiselles as the work of a living man has been rescinded,” rued the art historian Leo Steinberg upon Pablo Picasso’s death at age ninety-one on April 8, 1973. The subsequent issue of Artforum included an essay by Theodore Reff on Eros and Thanatos in the Spaniard’s early work, from the enigmatic elegies of his Blue Period; to the harlequins, jesters, and saltimbanques of his Rose era; to the famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which Reff links to the trope of the memento mori. Vanitas also haunts the issue’s cover, where the artist holds his pet owl (an injured
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