Defining what constitutes a “portrait” in Picasso’s work is not a simple matter. . . . It may emerge that, after this exhibition, it will be even harder than before to define what Picasso meant by a portrait.
—William Rubin, “Reflections on Picasso and Portraiture”

Of the many striking things about the exhibition called “Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation,”¹ which William Rubin has organized at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, the most remarkable may be the large number of images that, by traditional standards, hardly qualify as portraits at all. It is of course the premise upon which the exhibition has been selected that, as Mr. Rubin writes on the first page of his “Reflections on Picasso and Portraiture,” “by redefining the portrait as a record of the artist’s personal responses to the subject, Picasso transformed it from a purportedly objective document into a frankly subjective one.” There can certainly be no question but that Picasso’s influence in this respect, as in others, has been immense. For as Mr. Rubin also observes: “Picasso invented or reinvented the abstract, surreal, classical, and expressionist portrait types as we know them in twentieth-century art.”

This may be a more questionable artistic legacy, however, than Mr. Rubin and the colleagues who have collaborated with him on this portrait project are prepared to acknowledge, and the complex issues that loom over this exhibition are not greatly clarified by his blithely consigning the entire history of pre-Picasso portraiture