24. Pablo Picasso, March 16, i97i, etching. Image Not Available for Publication 43 pictures to sexual abstemiousness, if not to dysfunction, on Degas's part. In the summer of 1888, while in Aries, Vincent wrote the following to Emile Bernard: "Degas lives like a small lawyer and does not like women, for he knows that if he loved them and fucked them often, he, intellectually diseased, would become insipid as a painter. Degas's painting is virile and imper- sonal for the very reason that he has resigned himself to be nothing personally but a small law- yer with a horror of going on a spree. He looks on while the human animals, stronger than himself, get excited and fuck, and he paints them well, exactly because he doesn't have the pretention to get excited himself."44 Picasso acquired his first brothel prints by Degas in 1958, eventually owning eleven of them (all now in the Musee Picasso), but it was not until the spring of 1971 — between March and May of his ninetieth year — that he began making etchings (about forty of them) based 45 upon his Degas monotypes. The project was inspired to some degree by Eugenia Janis's 1968 monotype catalog and also by his reexamining the prints in his collection with Brassai and (on another occasion) with William Rubin early in 1971. At this point Picasso asked, "What do you 46 think Degas was doing in those places?" Picasso's answer to this question is in the prints he made in 1971. In the etchings, Picasso often includes Degas as an outsider (as in the case of the work reproduced here in fig. 24). He is represented as an awkward wallflower who stands at the mar- gin of the sheet looking on, watching, but never participating. In an exchange with Pierre Daix concerning the etchings, Picasso is reported to have said: "Degas would have kicked me in the pants if he'd seen himself like this."47 According to the old Picasso, Degas is not just an out- 49