Picasso: Painting the Blue Period at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Phillips Collection

Toronto: October 6, 2021 to January 4, 2022
Washington, DC: February 26 to June 12, 2022

“Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” seen by this reviewer at the Art Gallery of Ontario and headed to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, in February, conveys above all the young artist’s painful hunger. Some of those cravings were carnal. Rakish charm and stints of poverty made women easier to obtain at times than food, it would seem. In his  ambition to best every other artist, past and present, he bounced from style to style. Scanning the walls reveals a list of masters that Picasso was chasing down, all at once, from 1901 to 1904: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, and Daumier just for starters. A dive into the catalogue reveals that as a sixteen-year-old student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Picasso was already anxious to take on the whole circle of Catalan modernistes, principally Isidre Nonell, whose technique he pilfered aggressively.

Even the preternaturally talented Picasso could only digest so much at once. Consequently, a lot of the earlier Blue Period pictures fail to cohere. In 1901 he attempted a bold fusion of Cézanne and El Greco in Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901). The eponymous painter-poet friend, dead by suicide, is enshrouded on a hillside in front of a tomb, as mourners gather. One figure, wrapped in blue, may as well be the grieving Mary. In the upper portion of the picture, Casagemas is mounted on a white horse. His arms are outstretched, and a nude woman is smashing her face to his as her legs dangle in space. He gallops through the sky to his supernal reward, which is apparently a bevy of stockinged harlots. (From a certain standpoint that would be just recompense for Casagemas, who had been defeated in love by impotence.) This is rendered unconvincingly in the blocky hachure of Cézanne’s faceless bathers. It lacks the older master’s inner directives, it being instead a project of reverse engineering. Still, Picasso is such that it can be interesting even to watch him screw up. He never painted anything like this again, and while he lost the war, he won the battles, demonstrating that he had understood something significant about how both Cézanne and El Greco worked figures into their compositions.

Picasso was not a religious artist, but there’s a distinctly Catholic tone of mourning to Blue Period works that postdate Evocation. One catalogue author suggests that he attended an Ancient Art Exhibition that was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where he would have seen two thousand examples of Romanesque and Gothic work. The heavily robed female figures who appear around 1902 and ‘03 support the assertion. The subject matter was informed by visits to a women’s prison in Saint-Lazare. (Speculation continues as to whether the reason for them was because he didn’t have to pay the syphilitic models, or because he was being treated himself by a staff doctor. Not often proposed is that he felt genuine pity for the women’s plight, which ought to be considered.) Though secular, there is a Maria Dolorosa affect in A Woman with Bangs (1902), whose asymmetrical face suggests resignation to insanity.

She looks as though she was carved from jade. Picasso played to his natural strengths when he was modeling form. The hairdos of Two Women at a Bar (1902) rest along the top of the picture like storm clouds. The figures hanging in the cyan-tinged darkness beneath them, with their mass and angularity, seem to have been hewed with an ax. The cloak enshrouding Crouching Beggarwoman (also 1902) has more of a feeling of clay, even an entire cliffside. This is leagues beyond the work from 1901. It is also remarkable that someone this skilled at crafting dimensional form would eventually pioneer a genre of painting driven primarily by flat planes. It would be right to suspect that some kind of shape-making engine drives both projects, and Picasso’s was of an unusually high horsepower.

Blue served a Symbolist purpose, and Picasso likely adopted it due to his fascination with the painter Santiago Rusiñol, in whose work the employment of blue had become something of a trademark. But it also allowed Picasso to take a break for a couple of years from dealing seriously with color, which plagued him. His otherwise prodigious visual memory did not record details of hue, and his reflex was to put down full-strength, acidulous primaries. One of the 1901 still lifes, Chrysanthemums, is garish. Some Rose Period works, hung as a postscript to the exhibition, show his difficulties beginning to resolve. La Toilette (1906) is orders of magnitude more sophisticated in coloration. I contend that Picasso was so good at form that for a while he had a problem deciding what not to do with it. It wasn’t the Morisot-inflected Impressionism of the nude Jeanne from 1901, nor the post-Impressionist wedges of Cézanne. It was, finally, the sculptural calm of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Only when he worked that out did his color mature.

The AGO exhibition gives edifying attention to the influence of Puvis. Picasso became interested in how to establish full-length figures in a given space. He had accomplished this sporadically using licks cribbed from Cézanne, notably in The Blue Room (1901), but with them came Cézanne’s tendency to pop the planes at the viewer. Puvis’ spaces, in contrast, are architecturally sound. The Soup (1902) appears amid dozens of drawings, one of them worked until the artist dug through the paper. Picasso slaved at the 18-inch wide painting for months under conditions of cold and short funds, while figuring out how Puvis made his figures interact. The older artist’s influence was not just formal, but moral. Puvis had treated the theme of charity in magnificent canvases, and Picasso developed a heartfelt concern for the privation he had witnessed beyond his own. The space in this painting is also a touch askew but not by Picasso’s standards, and The Soup remains a Symbolist triumph, full of sympathy for its subject. Hungry ghosts can die, it is said, and be reborn into the human realm. That seems to be what’s happening here.

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April 21 to August 2, 2016
317 Dundas Street West (at McCaul Street)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 416 979 6648

Visitors to Thomas Ruff’s last exhibition at David Zwirner in New York this past spring may have been surprised by the latest exhibition of his press++ (2015) print series at the Art Gallery of Ontario. When presented independently, the series was a bit bewildering, but there was some sense of delayed gratification once one understood that they were enlarged, notated press photographs on the subject of space. As part of “Thomas Ruff: Object Relations,” however, the press++ series was preceded by several of his other bodies of work, so that this experimental approach to photography lost its novelty.

That loss would not have felt substantial had the introductory series been stronger. On display in the first gallery were several works that Ruff created upon the museum’s invitation to examine their collection and use it as a source for his process of altering found or appropriated photographic materials. For the photographs in Negative (2014–ongoing), Ruff inverted the light and dark areas of each historical photograph so that the new works appeared to be negatives. The series was effective in framing reversal as a key process for the rest of the show, but the works were otherwise unremarkable, feeling more like a reluctant answer to an uninteresting invitation.

That the prints in the press++ series were made from found newspaper clippings manipulated by Ruff comes as no surprise. Though the show’s curation reduced the novelty of this approach, it also allowed more interesting observations to emerge. In the series of “negatives,” for example, one noticed how Ruff’s manipulations flattened space and disrupted one’s ability to perceive animation (the artist’s body versus a statue). Similarly, in the press++ photographs, one may now notice how the superficial marks on the photographs (such as handwriting, copyright stamps, and remnants of glued paper) stand out as more “real” than the people depicted in the images.

In the next room, the ties between works were far more compelling. The series of inverted photographs continued, but here the original photographs were more visually dense, representing the interior of an artist’s studio. In neg◊artist_01 (2014), for example, an artist rests his right leg on the pedestal of a statue of a female body, whose original white color has been reversed into a deep navy. Her pose mimics his, as her right leg also rests on some other object formed as part of the statue. Additional portraits framed on the studio walls hover around them like ghostly presences. Somehow in these inverted images it is far more difficult to ascertain which bodies are real: the artist gets lost in his studio and becomes an object himself while those statues are imbued with life.

In the center of this room, a display case held several found photographs and objects from Ruff’s collection. Bowers and Lough’s 1909 gelatin silver print Electrocardiograms shows measurements of “fatigue of muscle from repeated single contractions” and “tetanic muscular contractions.” Their wavering lines are scientific graphs, but they appear abstract, as if they were studio drawings in ink made to illustrate how line density could convey the progression of light to dark. Opposite these hung Lucien Walery’s photogravures published in a book, Nus (1923). A naked woman holds several different poses as she lies on carpet; however, the carpet is not a floor but a backdrop, hung from an invisible ceiling and run into the foreground. After noticing this optical shift, one can sense the weight of the model’s body resting on the ball of her raised foot. This is another kind of inversion. In their high contrast of white subject (her skin could be polished marble) with dark ground (the Oriental rug was woven with deep hues), these photogravures are reminiscent of Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg’s photograms, which were, in another parallel, long “buried, filed under the generic heading ‘Nudes'” in Chicago, according to Michael Lobel, writing in Artforum in February. Other photograms appeared in this show, too, on the wall next to the display case: two of Arthur Siegel’s 1944 works. They do not depict bodies, but as photograms, none have any compositional negative. They relate well to Ruff’s inverted photo series, in which a false negative is created in lieu of the original.

The tension between surface and depth continues in the next room with Ruff’s Sterne (“stars,” 1989–92) series. Each print is an enlarged section of a negative from the European Southern Observatory in Chile depicting clusters of stars. Made larger than a human body, they echo the vastness of the galaxy. In their black depths, the viewer can see herself as well as the other galaxies hung on the opposite wall. Any artist who has dabbled in film photography or paid attention to the show’s thread of negatives might connect these images with dust on a negative. In any case, Ruff’s evident interest in revealing the apparatus behind photographic prints seems to be what links the Sterne series to the 2003 series Maschinen (“machines”) also occupying this room; all images are product photography from 1930s Germany in which, as the didactic asserts, the “close relationship between functional and artistic photography” is highlighted. In each image, a background curtain or veil of smoke focuses the viewer’s attention on the pastel machine to be sold. As with most advertising strategies, the function of these machines becomes less important than the fact that one should want them.

Indeed, Ruff mimics the product photographer’s intent to remove “extraneous” information when he attempts to remove the context from press photographs or re-display found objects. If Ruff is right, the most effective contemporary veils are those that separate image from text, art from media, and object from time.

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