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©Pablo Picasso - Painter and his palette 1967

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From Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:
Painted in an expressionist manner, Two Doves with Wings Spread and a later, second version were completed while Picasso was staying at La Californie, where he had built a dovecote on the third-floor balcony. Doves and pigeons figure in a number of works in Picasso’s oeuvre (and interestingly, in that of his father, José Ruiz Blasco), such as his poster depicting a dove for the 1948 Peace Congress and several ceramic works from 1953.
The last twenty years of Picasso’s life are marked as much by the enormous number of canvases the artist produced as by the controversial reception of these works. Criticized for the pictorial shorthand he developed to preserve the spontaneity and expressive value of his work, this period of Picasso’s production is often neglected. However, as has been suggested, Picasso’s formal explorations—a brushstroke that is sometimes stenographic and abbreviated, or frequently thick and flowing—is a continuation of the artist’s lifelong challenge to stylistic convention, and evidence of his drive to convey vitality, liberation, and the desire to make fewer decisions as a defense against the fleeting nature of time: “I have less and less time and I have more and more to say."