Matthew Biro remembers working at the Museum of Modern Art as a 19 year old in 1981 during a Pablo Picasso retrospective. “That was when I first understood what a blockbuster show was. The high attendance, the audience’s excitement: Picasso’s work managed to attract people who likely wouldn’t spend an afternoon at the museum.”
Biro, age 51, is now chair of LSA’s History of Art Department. With April 8 marking the 40th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Biro sat in his oak-paneled office, located in the 119-year-old Tappan Hall, reflecting on some of the reasons Picasso still resonates with the public.
Biro's admiration for Picasso stems back to one of his first published articles, in 1990, an analysis of different readings and interpretations of cubism. "He was instrumental in changing the way we understand visual representation between 1909 and 1913," Biro says. Picasso incorporated language into art at a time when few, if any, artists thought about linguistic models of representation. “He was getting us to think about how visual art has a linguistic component or how it functions like language,” says Biro, referencing the way that Picasso incorporated text, such as newspapers, into his work.