I made no journal entry after seeing the Pablo Picasso retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art on June 4, 1980. It had a profound impact on me nonetheless. To see his work presented in mostly chronological order was astounding and relevant to my own creative endeavor.

I had paused journaling while on a trip out east with a high school friend. The idea was to take a break from patterns of life developed since returning to Iowa from military service in Germany the previous October. The trip burned some things into memory, not the least of which was experiencing the Picasso exhibit. I’ll let the exhibition fact sheet tell the story:

PABLO PICASSO: A RETROSPECTIVE is the realization of an idea first conceived of in 1972 by William Rubin as a result of his visits with Picasso during the last years of the artist’s life. Having had the good fortune to observe how Picasso lived among the many works he kept to himself, Mr. Rubin hoped to be able to share with the public this image of the artist he experienced.

Picasso died April 8, 1973 and the retrospective was the most comprehensive exhibition of his art ever shown. We hadn’t planned the trip around it. I didn’t know about it until we arrived in Wyckoff, New Jersey where we stayed with some of my roommate’s friends. It became the main attraction of our trips into Manhattan.

Many words have been written about the retrospective, including a long piece I clipped by John Richardson in The New York Review. What interests me today is the role Picasso played in my own creative life after seeing his work en masse that June.

The Manhattan my friend and I visited was much different from what it became. We discussed visiting Times Square yet decided against it because of reports we had heard about the old movie palaces, peep shows, massage parlors, and its reputation for crime. The skyline was dominated by what was then the relatively new Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. We managed to see two Broadway shows, Sugar Babies, with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, and Barnum with Jim Dale and newly arrived Glenn Close. Other trips included time at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace. On our last night in the city we had drinks at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center, overlooking New York Harbor.

When I visited the Montmartre arrondissement of Paris during my grand tour in 1974, I sought the artistic world Picasso had inhabited when he arrived at the turn of the century, but couldn’t find it. This period of his early work, including the Blue Period, was before he became a global artistic superstar.

During graduate school and the early years of my marriage, I keep returning to the Picasso retrospective for inspiration. After its 1981 release, I spent significant time with David Douglas Duncan’s Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration 1881-1981 seeking alignment with Picasso’s creative process as presented therein. While I don’t have the wealth Picasso did, or studios in expansive locations, I divided my life into creative spaces that persist: my writing room, garage bench, kitchen, and yard and garden. Few would find art in what I do, yet as I consider Picasso again, it seems clear his influence continues through today.

As many words as I have written about so many things, it seems unusual I wouldn’t have journaled about the Picasso retrospective. Nonetheless, I feel its reverberations long after the show closed, even without those journal entries by a younger me. Some things become a part of you, and Picasso’s legacy is one of them.