Jed Perl reviews the exhibition Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through January 23, 2012.

Perl writes that "if black and white was sometimes a shorthand for Picasso – and even occasionally a copout – it was also a way of cutting away the fat, of getting to the essentials… for Picasso the monochromatic palette fueled both a classical reticence and austerity and a romantic feverishness and hyperbole. Although black and white can surely be a vehicle for virtuosic display, there is a nakedness about Picasso’s greatest black-and-white works, a sense that this supreme artistic trickster has decided to deny himself some of the tricks of the trade. Of course in the context of this exhibition, black and white encompasses a rainbow of grays, from silken to inky, from plangent to opaque."