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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October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

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February 12 to May 15, 2011
1600 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
202-387-2151

Philip Guston: Roma features a selection of paintings the artist made during his residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970-71. The residency was presented as a respite from critical reception of the breakthrough 1970 exhibition with its return to figuration.  The imagery is derived from both his American and Italian experiences, burrowing into an obtuse iconographic language of fragmented objects such as detached eyes, hands, shoes, paintbrushes and light bulbs. This exhibition provides a wealth of historical context but tends towards overly literal explanations of specific Italian influences.

We see Guston developing his visual vocabulary and palette, while intermingling bits of his Roman surroundings. He was also distilling lessons in overlapping form and space from his trips to Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca’s otherworldly frescos, which he perceived as structurally organized like comic strips. What is most fascinating about this body of work is how worlds of antiquity and the contemporary meld through Guston’s touch and organization of objects in space. Often, these ambiguous images feel at once like landscapes and still lives.

In Italy, Guston’s palette remained mostly monochromatic, faithful to his penchant for pinkish coral reds. Even gardens with Farnesian umbrella trees – curiously resembling his Klansman hoods in shape – such as Untitled (Wall) (1971) were depicted in this rosé palette. When asked why these colors, back in 1966, the artist had replied that “it took a couple of years to get the feeling of red, and particularly cad red medium, which I happen to love. I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why. I like cad red medium. It has a certain resonance to it.”

Guston often explained contradictory impulses in his work with such stream of consciousness associations. Was he saying that the color was inspired by pastrami, which happened to be a similar hue? Not exactly, but pastrami came to his mind when explaining the color choice. He might or might not have made similar connections between the peach color in a painting such as Ancient Rock, Osatia (1970) and the influence of Italian light.

When Klansman-like hoods show up in the Italian paintings, curator Peter Miller Benson traces these forms, in his catalog essay, directly to Giorgio de Chirico, G.B. Tiepolo, and Gaudenzio Ferrari, artists whom Guston admired and studied while in Italy. Benson’s scouring for Italian influences can go to idiosyncratic extremes: that the open cloak in Piero della Francesca’s Mother of Mercy inspired Guston’s hoods, the wood plank in Untitled (Wood and Wall) 1971 mimics the wood cross in Piero’s The Legend of the True Cross cycle, that Guston’s pared-down palette echoes the tones in Piero’s frescoes.

These are far-flung comparisons that represent a revisionist attempt to enforce a literal set of assumptions in disregard of the artist’s complex, layered intent. They also pose the question: Was Guston more interested in the hood’s form or what it signified? Considering the rich ambiguity of these shapes, which morph across this body of work from hoods into triangular trees into stone fragments of antiquity, Guston was primarily interested in these motifs because they could not effortlessly be decoded. Furthermore, Guston was more concerned with making deeply considered, sensuous paintings.

Benson briefly discusses Guston’s visit to the Scialoja collection in Rome where he was said to have seen Morandi and proceeds to connect a Morandi painting’s pink palette to Guston’s use of the same color, which he had long used prior to Rome. This is a stretch. The exhibition’s wall text is absent of any more detailed discussion of Morandi other than his name listed in the introductory text as visual stimuli Guston saw, perhaps because there is little evidence of Guston discussing his work. David McKee, who represents Guston’s estate, told me in an e-mail exchange, “I hesitate to elaborate on a point which others have always brought up but to which I cannot fully or reliably respond.  In all my conversations with Philip I don’t recall him ever praising or being interested in Morandi… his sole interest in going to Bologna was to EAT.  I can’t help but feel that at some time he must have visited Morandi’s studio, but there is no record.” Although in a more general sense, Guston shared a similar touch and scale to Morandi’s still life-landscape hybrids, there is little evidence that Guston looked beyond the Italian masters, at one time declaring “I am not interested in looking at Modern art.” In Pantheon (1973), after all, in which Guston lists his influences, only de Chirico is outside of a classical cannon.

What is compelling, however, is a 1960 photograph of Guston in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome standing near a colossal pointing marble finger the size of a man. That Untitled (Foot) (1971) resembles a smoothed, pyramidal-shaped Roman marble foot is hard to ignore. It is cases like this, requiring no back-up argument, of the obvious influence of Roman antiquity on Guston’s symbolic vocabulary that make this show an enlightening delight.

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1967 was the summer of love.  2009 – despite the weather – was the summer of flesh.  On the eastern seaboard of the United States, that is, and in selected art galleries.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston sported some of the most libidinally charged rooms of painting in recent art world memory in the exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.  Sumptuous naked flesh was paraded before viewers rather in the way the three goddesses vied for Paris’s apple, with such glories as Titian’s Danaë from the Capodimonte, the same violated princess by Tintoretto from Lyon, and scrumptuous Venuses before the Mirror by Titian (National Gallery of Art) and Veronese (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.)

When Willem de Kooning famously quipped that “flesh was the reason that oil painting was invented,”  he was of course referring to the Northern tradition, and the mythic inventor of oils, Van Eyck.  But if the Flemish masters who pioneered the new material used it with exquisite skill in the depiction of pearly skin and attendant (contrastive) fabrics, it was thecolorito early-adopters on the Adriatic a century later who truly consummated the equation of painterliness and fleshiness, the voluptuous correspondence of visual and tactile satisfaction.

New York’s contribution to the skin fest of ’09 took the form of a Francis Bacon retrospective.  Bacon is the artist who spoke of wanting to create “rivers of flesh” in his paintings, and who dramatically reified that ambition through metaphorical gouging of faces and literal splurges of paint on otherwise fastidiously neat, dry surfaces.  Also in New York, no rival to the Venetian rivals but a scintillating summer treat nonetheless, was an eclectic orgy of an exhibition, Naked, organized by Adrian Dannatt and hung cheek by jowl at Paul Kasmin Gallery.

But for the apotheosis of this idea of equivalence we must turn further south, to the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, with Paint Made Flesh, an exhibition entirely premised upon de Kooning’s dictum.  This show surveys the postwar love affair between a material painters use and the material all of us are.

Curated by Marc W. Scala, Chief Curator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. where the exhibition originated, Paint Made Flesh kicks off with Picasso and proceeds, via assorted Americans, German Neo-Expressionists and three generations of School of London painting, inexorably in the direction of John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and the German Daniel Richter.  It was a stimulating show and surprisingly late in coming, considering how relevant the subject has been since at least the 1980s.  Of course, the major international surveys of that decade such as the New Spirit in Painting in London and Berlin (1981) laid the ground for the fleshly commonality between expressive realist groups and schools (and individuals) of markedly disparate intentions and politics.

Late Picasso is a perfect place to start because this period of his work is like a Janus face looking in two directions, back at his own career (and life) and forward to a resurgence in painterly, old master-obsessed, “bad” – as in late, indulgent, sloppy, nonchalant, near-impotent, desperate, and bravura – painting.  “The Artist and His Model” (1964) locates meditation on age and youth in the studio, a place where paint and nakedness cohabit.

De Kooning himself is represented by one of his classic “Woman” paintings of 1953-54 (Brooklyn Museum), a work in which the urge to engage with the body both subverts and consummates abstract expressionism.  A pair of tall, thin works in oil on paper mounted on canvas from 1966 and 1971 more forcefully get across the sensation that the actual matter on the canvas is flesh, rather than just being fleshlike.  The reds and whites and resultant, commingling pinks show De Kooning in joyful and ecstatic mode.

A somewhat ghoulish corner at the Phillips, a sideshow in the Carnival sense (carne valeindeed) has a Soutine-recalling dissection painting by Hyman Bloom, a mercilessly macabre self-portrait of Ivan Albright, and a coquettish pair of vaudeville performers by Jack Levine.  The main thrust, on the other hand, of the trajectory of De Kooning’s corporeality is taken up by Alice Neel and David Park in  paintings where emphatic impasto both works with and against the succulent smear of brushstroke, as in the flick of lighter paint on the dark forehead of “Randall in Extremis” (1960) by Neel, to depict and to express.   Philip Guston, in MoMA’s “Web” (1975) takes his cue from De Kooning in distending fleshtones across the composition, as if the tone cannot be contained by the body but bleeds all-over.  The tremulous, fidgety, awkward unease of little brushstrokes conveys angst about the human condition and alienation from the flesh. Guston’s touch, palette and attitude find direct reverberation in paintings by Susan Rothenberg that hang across the way in the show’s largest gallery, filled with German and American Neo-Expressionists.

In this central gallery the show’s curatorial thrust dissipates, as there seems almost to be some kind of obligation to include all and sundry member of the latter school regardless of whether the individuals, or the works selected, pull their bodily weight.  Sure, there are bodies in A.R. Penck’s grafitti stick figure monochrome “Sketch” (1983) or Markus Lüpertz’s Wilfredo Lam-ish personages in “Springtime (After Poussin)” (1989), but there isn’t much flesh on them.

Bacon and Freud, whose paintings share somber, dingy, studied interiority, appropriately get to share a closet of a small side gallery.  Freud, like Bacon and De Kooning, spoke words that pay his dues, so to speak, to the ethos of this show when he said: “I want my paint to work as flesh.”  In his tortuously slow (to make, to see, to sit for) figure studies, such as “Standing by the Rags” (1988-89), on loan from the Tate, the paint is mottled and encrusted at those places, such as the face or breasts, where the burden of perceptual truth exacted its (literally) heaviest toll.  Bacon, exploiting speed and chance, splatters glistening paint on otherwise dry, calculated surfaces to generate a visceral, heightened sensation of naked presence.

Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, with their extreme collisions of the haptic and optic dimensions of paint, get to share a room with two young (and more to the point female) Turks who extend the School of London aesthetic into funky, postmodern/neo-conceptual terrain: Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville.  Brown is given her perfect – you could say, her sink or swim – art historical context here, with the insolently agitational anti-aesthetic of Albert Oehlen ahead, and the expressionist forebears upon whom she habitually riffs behind.  With two choice pieces from 2001 and 2002, I’d say she swims.  Jenny Saville, however, whose “Hyphen” (1999), a self-portrait with her sister, is sported on the catalogue cover, dives.  Sure, it is an arresting image, in scale, intensity of gaze, and emotional ambivalence.  She too has said the right things to warrant inclusion: “paint mixed a flesh color suddenly became a kind of human paste;” her work uses “pots of liquid flesh.”  Conceptually, she probes relevant issues of fat as a feminist issue, of contested notions of balance and beauty in the female body.  But she presents an academic rendering of flesh in an art historically polite realist idiom that is too slick and formulaic to do more than illustrate her themes.  In a show that is all about fleshlooking like paint, and paint being like flesh, hers are simply paintings of flesh that look like painting.

The same criticism can be extended to some of the other young artists who conclude the show such as Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin and Michaël Borremans: their works are about style, technique, the power of images, the language of art; Currin’s “The Hobo” (1999) is delectable in its rendering of thin fabric over an arousingly taut, lithe body.  But each of these artists, in their painterly finesse, are, so to speak, skin deep.  In their actual handling of paint there is an absence of incarnation.

It is not that the paint has to be laid on thick to be somatic: after all, bodies are contained and smooth, like paintings, in their way.  The silken surface of Francesco Clemente’s “Self-Portrait with Two Heads” (2002) intimates the voluptuous sheen of flesh; Eric Fischl’s weirdly absent, ethereal “Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection” (1996) uses the slipperiness of paint to evoke a sense of imminent demise.

It is disappointing, though, that a show that opens with the radical fleshly abstraction of De Kooning becomes an apology, fairly quickly, for increasingly conservative figurative painting.  The rendering of skin is one way in which flesh can be made in paint.  But abstract painters can also be attuned to bodily sensation, the feel and smell of flesh, the distilled resonances of old master painting.  Sean Scully and Howard Hodgkin are painters who get right to the bare bones of flesh.  Either would have been a powerful way to conclude this show.

other exhibitions mentioned in this review:

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 15 to August 16, 2009, and at the Musee du Louvre, Paris, September 14, 2009 to January 4, 2010

Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 20 to August 16, 2009; previously at Tate Britain, London, and the Prado, Madrid

Naked at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, July 9 to September 19, 2009

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