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Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Cy Twombly Willem de Kooning Henri Matisse Frank Stella Louise Bourgeois Ellsworth Kelly

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This past spring in New York, approximately 100,000 viewers flocked to see "Picasso: Mosqueteros" at the Gagosian Gallery’s West 21st Street branch. It was the first in-depth presentation of the master’s late works in the U.S. in more than two decades. The well-received show had as its curator the acclaimed Picasso biographer John Richardson and included 53 paintings and 39 prints, most with notable provenances such as the Museum of Modern Art and the collection of the artist’s heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. One of the exhibition stars was Homme à la pipe, 1968, loaned by the hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen, who paid $16.8 million for it at Christie’s New York in November 2007 (on its most recent auction appearance before that, at Sotheby’s New York in May 1987, it had brought $880,000, a hefty sum considering that most late Picassos were then trading at between $150,000 and $200,000). It is probably no coincidence that late Picassos were the top lots of two major Impressionist and modern auctions that same season: Mousquetaire à la pipe, 1968, brought $14.6 million at Christie’s New York in May (while the Gagosian show was on view), and Homme à l’épée, 1969, earned £7 million ($11.5 million) at Sotheby’s London in June.

Picasso’s output from the mid-1960s onward was not always greeted with such enthusiasm. Many experts considered these paintings unmarketable, the visual equivalent of an old man’s ramblings. When some of the works, including the $11.5 million Sotheby’s painting, debuted in 1970 at the Palais des Papes, in Avignon, "there was huge opposition," says Richardson. One detractor was the critic and longtime champion of the artist Douglas Cooper, who, Richardson says, felt that "Picasso had somehow been disloyal to Cubism" and that the work was "reprehensible." In Richardson’s eyes, in contrast, "Picasso was so ahead of the game that in a way it took all this time for people to catch up."

Consensus is rare on the hotly debated and highly subjective topic of late-career production. From Henri Matisse’s vivid paper cutouts to Andy Warhol’s fright-wig self-portraits and Willem de Kooning’s ribbony abstractions, such works have elicited a range of responses from critics, collectors, dealers and the public. And their reception often changes with time. What in one decade might be dismissed as minor, anomalous or even embarrassing may in the next be crowned as an underappreciated masterwork, and priced accordingly.

"It often takes either a major reevaluation in terms of an exhibition or a new price point to get people to start refocusing on a different period of an artist’s work," says Brett Gorvy, cohead of the postwar and contemporary department at Christie’s in New York. Banking on the allure of swan songs, in 1989 the Fondation Maeght, in France’s Saint Paul de Vence, mounted "L’oeuvre ultime de Cézanne à Dubuffet," which included late pieces by 24 modern masters. "Deadline," opening on the 16th of this month at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, focuses on a dozen artists, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jörg Immendorff and Joan Mitchell, who were acutely aware of their imminent deaths and whose creations reflect that knowledge. And a survey of Warhol’s late works is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum through January 3, 2010, after which it will travel to other venues in the U.S.

"Some artists sustain their power longer than others. I think there’s a cutoff point where they can’t maintain it any longer," says the New York dealer and longtime market observer Richard Feigen, who believes Picasso began his dip after 1954. "But the world doesn’t agree with me. It thinks the late Picassos are fabulous." Richardson defines Picasso’s late period as 1966 to 1973, the year of the artist’s death, and attributes to him "this whole concept of a late period. Instead of being meditative, reflective, like Georges Braque, who became like a hermit saint, Picasso reversed the notion of the great late period and turned it into a celebration.