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.

The post When Women were easier to obtain than food: Picasso’s Blue Period appeared first on artcritical.

February 9 to April 6, 2019
522 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

What do we expect from the late work of great painters? If you are a Romantic, your proof of greatness might be evinced by a final letting go——a pure abandonment to the id, a total acceptance of the painter’s deepest urges. No second guesses, no capitulation to analytical thinking, no recycling of past successes; just allowing the body, with its supposedly pure inner wisdom, to do what it needs to do. A Romantic might appreciate the arid grace of dementia-afflicted late de Kooning, or the brazen “blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry,” as the painter Carroll Dunham once wrote of libidinous late Picasso. For a Romantic, this might seem the heroic response to the knowledge that one’s time is about up.

But are we getting something different from the late work of Jasper Johns? Johns has never been a Romantic. Don’t expect to find a “rage against the dying of the light.” Which is not to say there is no passion in these paintings, it’s just that his relentless denials have conditioned us to be circumspect about making any claims about them at all. So how do we react to Johns’s late work? Despite the startling complex simplicity of his initial paintings of flags and targets, he has gradually developed a quality of rigorous self-examination and reflection on the processes through which he has created his work.

Alexi Worth, in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, discusses what he terms as Johns’s “scrupulousness”: writes of how

Johns seems to be allergic to the nervous approximations that characterize much art talk — not to mention ordinary conversation. He would rather say nothing than assent to a banality; would rather deconstruct a question than accept a false premise. The more one talks with him, the more his scrupulousness seems distinctively extreme: not just a mannerism, but a deeply ingrained reservoir of feeling.

Looking at these latest works, Johns’ scrupulousness seems to have intensified rather than been left behind. You can almost hear him ask himself, “What am I doing today?” or “Now what happens if I do it this way?” As the artist approaches 90, these questions take on poignant urgency. Though each image might address a new subject, every piece here is filled with references to images, marks, and tropes from earlier work. Even without the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons that peak out of many of these works, it is almost impossible to look at them and not think that here is a person patiently and systematically facing the prospect of death: The completion of the content of his artistic life.

A whole series of work in this show centers on an image of grief. The words “Farley Breaks Down After Larry Burrows,” stenciled on each of the untitled canvases and drawings and prints in this group, refer to an image in a famous LIFE magazine photo essay by Larry Burrows of Farley, a mission leader during Vietnam. Johns has chosen the particular photo of Farley burying his sobbing face in his arms after a battle where comrades were killed and wounded. But curiously, the original title of the Burrows photo was “Farley Gives Way,” not breaks down. What we see in these paintings, drawings, and prints is a literal breaking down of the image’s surface; not just an emotional breakdown but an actual disintegration of the image into marks and puddles of paint, and sometimes, silkscreened cartoons and play money.

Understanding this photographic moment of grief is not only about the grief, but the effect of death on the living. Each image can be seen as a completed text which — like a life itself — is unified, but composed of many small, seemingly random experiences whose relationships to each other, upon examination, become infinitely complex.

Other references to his own earlier works abound: For instance, the vase/silhouettes figure/ground optical illusion image. Do you see two symmetrical facing profiles, or the vase that exists as the negative space between them? Johns favors optical illusions that, depending on one’s attention, flip between two images such as a vase or a pair of silhouettes, or a duck and a rabbit, or (but not here) a young woman and an old crone. In the context of these paintings, the conundrum of contemplating these dualities of image from a single point of view could be a metaphor for one’s inability to imagine the disintegration of one’s own consciousness. We can grieve for the dead, we can know that we will die, but we can’t imagine being dead. It’s reminiscent of the title of Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Not only do we have this examination of a man burying his face in his arms in the “Farley Breaks Down” paintings (ironically, the photographer himself later died in a helicopter crash), but there is also a series of works based on John Deakin’s photograph of a young Lucian Freud on a bed, with his face held in his right hand. The photo, which had belonged to Francis Bacon, is paint-spattered, creased, folded and torn. Johns already used this photo for a series of paintings titled “Regrets” that were shown at MoMA a few years ago. In it are newspapers on the floor, and a diamond patterned quilt on the bed. You can see why it spoke to Johns——it has so many iconographic elements that he already uses. The folds, patterns, newsprint, and splotches create a very Johnsian, mark-abstracting surface. Curiously, the resulting images in both these series reminded me of the way Bonnard broke down his painting surfaces into a series of abstract shapes and marks, which adds the possibility of another layer of meaning, as Bonnard’s paintings, though in a different way, also explored quotidian daily life. By horizontally mirroring the image of the torn photo, Johns further abstracts it and turns a part of a white wall into a shape that becomes a skull.

The ideas of mirroring and reflection have occupied Johns’s process for a long time. In treating an area as a mirror, he turns the formal idea of flatness into a more sophisticated and useful concept that the surface of the canvas is a field, with properties that the painter assigns to it. Mirroring might have to do with his long involvement with printmaking but it is worth remarking upon because it seems to be another way of breaking down an image, making forms abstract, and destabilizing a single reading.

Despite flashes of mordant humor – a whole series of dancing skeletons, for instance – we don’t have the pleasure in this late work of the lush encaustic surfaces familiar in early Johns, or the startlingly opaque conundrum of a simple, ubiquitous pop image to offset the lugubrious tone. Some of these paintings even have dispiriting harsh acrylic texture, and if you didn’t know the photographic references some were based on, you might not have a clue of what you were looking at.

Deconstructing these images is an endless task,  and trying to find the Easter eggs of hidden references and relationships keeps a viewer in a submissive, student-like relationship to the artist. For instance, Johns constantly references Picasso. The double silhouettes could be Picasso profiles, or Johns’ own profile, or both. There is a series that uses a Picasso figure with a hand to its mouth. Is the point to identify his artistic stature as equal to that of Picasso, or does he have other motives?

In place of solipsistic questions like, “Do those ASL hand signs of letters stand for significant initials?” or “What image did those stick figures holding torches or brushes come from?” we are better off asking “What do I feel when looking at this and why am I feeling that way?”

Conversely, we could also use these paintings to consider the nature of grief and mortality. What is a life? What is regret?  What is it that we grieve? Perhaps the feelings we are left with mirror our struggles with our own mortality. The paintings are the intense crackling evidences of a lively mind, pushing and probing and asking uncomfortable questions about what it feels like to be alive and continue to relentlessly produce, after having lived so long.

The post Uncomfortable Questions: Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

September 14, 2015–February 07, 2016
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, moma.org

In this edited exchange of emails, artcritical’s David Cohen expected — and received — multiple insights into MoMA’s unparalleled exhibition,  Picasso Sculpture. The three practioners on his panel, Alain Kirili, Michelle Segre and Rebecca Smith, are sculptors of markedly distinct aesthetic outlooks but one thing they share is that they work very directly in materials whose intrinsic qualities are integral to their final result. A maker’s perspective permeates the discussion that follows. At the time of this exchange last month, Segre was the subject of a solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, Kirili was taking part in two-person exhibitions at Art Omi (with James Siena) and at Hionas Gallery (with Bobbie Oliver), and large-scale works by Smith and her father, David Smith, had recently been installed together in a year-long display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, in the museum’s atrium (through March 1, 2016).

DAVID COHEN
A wonderful thing about Picasso as a sculptor is that we are not looking at three-dimensional equivalents to images resolved already in what we take to be the master narrative, his paintings, but rather a viable, fully-fledged parallel career. If Picasso had only made sculptures, and predominantly those on view at MoMA, he would still be one of the giants of Modern Art.

At the very least, the sculptures hold their own to his painted and drawn imagery—even if his turns to sculpture are episodic. Regarding episodes, each process/material is like a new chapter, generating phases in his sculpture career analogous to the (arguably quaint, if not sexist) division of his oeuvre into “epochs” defined by his female partners! Of course, we might want to argue that divisions of the oeuvre by medium are moot: that any medium contains the DNA of the artist, and that his protean creativity is better divided by time than stuff, and that in a given moment he would express himself through whichever medium made sense and was to hand. But that is to miss a vital point in Picasso, the profound importance of the resistance of materials and processes, and not just their fluency.

The Surrealist writer André Breton famously dubbed Picasso a “creator of tragic toys for adults”. I don’t know if that characterization works especially well for his sculpture necessarily, but in the sculpture we definitely have a sense of serious play. We experience the artist at his most technically inventive, not just in terms of wizardry but also in the directness of his response to materials. Without implying indifference to the physicality of paint in his paintings, maybe a degree of novelty of, say, plaster or steel or ceramic brings out a child-like marvel and whimsicality in his sculptural inventions. Do you all agree?

REBECCA SMITH
Picasso was always inserting the story he wanted to tell regardless of the observable reality.  In two-dimensional works he showed the profile of the nose, the full mouth, and both ears, for instance, attempting to do in a flat medium what sculpture can do — that is, describing the head in the round.  But he goes further with sculpture, adding “distortions” that tell a story different from the real.  In the amazing Cat made during World War II he juts out a rib on one side, communicating motion by showing the form of the Cat turning to one side, though the predominant posture is straight, stepping ahead, perhaps stalking.  That’s how Picasso puts time into sculpture.  This happens also with the Death’s Head of the same period in which the facets of the skull reveal themselves seemingly at slightly different speeds and with different relationships to the description of the subject.  There is the full frontal effect of the face, but one side is thinner and bends in towards the profile view.  When it proceeds to the several rounded facets of the skull, they drop off from looking head-shaped and look more like an abstract form.  The skull was very convincing as a human remnant from the frontal view, but became less so from other views — perhaps the artist suggesting a rock that had never been animate — or possibly retreating from a grisly subject by mutating into an abstract form.   David mentioned the importance of working directly with materials; the agility and layered meaning in these sculptures happen by thinking with your hands and your head at the same time.

ALAIN KIRILI
Anne Umland and Ann Temkin have succeeded in a beautiful and rare installation for a sculpture exhibition: seeing all the sculpture in the round we can appreciate the circumvolution within each work. Truth be told, most curators are afraid of sculpture so they put them up against the wall, flattening them.

Picasso was protean and had a real love for diversity. It feels particularly present in his sculpture because he was free from dogmatic formalism and technical know how. At times, he could even create sculpture conceptually, employing the best craftsmen to execute the pieces for him.

MoMA’s show represents all the different materials Picasso used to amazing effect. But I would say that I regret that Head of Woman (1934) is over exposed in a way that flattens and whitens the concrete, with a loss of gravitas. I could feel this major sculpture much better in its original setting at the Musée Picasso of Antibes where interior lighting brings out contrast and density of material.

I was partly raised in the South of France and I did run into Picasso at Madoura in the 1960s. I also enjoyed seeing the sculpture Man with the Lamb on top of a base in the middle of Vallauris, at the market place where farmers would come and leave a cup of coffee or vegetables at the base of the sculpture as if it were an offering, part of a cult for life. Pierre Daix once wrote to me in a letter that Picasso would have liked to see this sculpture in a public setting “accessible to children and dogs”.

My wife, Ariane Lopez-Huici and I have one of Picasso’s bronze sculptures in Woman (1945) series in our collection. We keep it with prints from the Vollard Suite in our bedroom. It is one where he puts pressure with his thumb into clay to represent a head, something that I’m reminded of in the details in my own forged pieces. MoMA’s sculpture show really reveals in depth that Picasso is about solar incarnation, where Eros fights and wins against Thanatos: the way Ariane and I strive to be, consistently, in our art and life.

I would say that the success of the show owes a lot to the exceptionally generous loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. This show reflects a very fruitful and great cooperation between these institutions. Before the creation of the Picasso Museum and the publication of Werner Spies’s volume, “Pablo Picasso: The Sculptures”, a large portion of Picasso’s work in sculpture was neglected by the general public. I always knew that Picasso as a sculptor was the best-kept secret in 20th century art!

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to mention that while we all know that Picasso’s art was influenced by African sculpture, I hadn’t known that he saw African and Oceanic art during his earliest sculpture-making days and in fact collected it.  Matisse, Picasso and their generation of artists were perhaps the first to integrate African and Oceanic art into their sensibilities and practices — no one more so than Picasso.  Did any other European artist comprehend, appreciate and integrate the art of another culture into his practice so fully and at such an early date as Picasso?

Pcasso’s 1914 Guitar (ferrous sheet metal and wire) is for me his most important sculpture. It is tremendously compelling in several distinct ways.  It opens up a constructed object into its separate layers, splaying them out like turning pages in a book.  He pushes collage, recently invented by Braque, into the more three-dimensional manifestation of constructed sculpture. Apart from extending the forms of sculpture, this work addresses itself to the viewer in a unique way, phenomenologically.  One experiences the simultaneity of object recognition and its opposite — the abstract exploration of its forms.  It announces itself as a guitar then seduces you into the exploration of its busy surface, curves, shifting rectangular planes, and rivets you with a dark circle in its center.  Most of what you experience visually has nothing to do with a guitar.  The sheet metal and wire are so thin and fragile, the velvety surface almost tangible, that they almost belie their physicality.   Yet the presence of many deep shadows insist you are looking at an object.  This work opens the door to Jasper Johns’s green and orange American flag; David Smith’s burnished stainless steel surfaces; any art object that does one thing and “says” another.

The 1914 Guitar, the Absinthe edition, Guitar (Paris, 1924), the black-and-white painted Head (Paris, October, 1928) the late folded sheet-metal works are parts of a stream of assemblage works that played with illusionism in sculpture.  This is another aspect of Picasso’s extending the sculptural language by adding on what painting does.  Picasso opened up the space of reliefs into what for me is an extremely rich place that many artists work in today with an enormous range of expression.  Composition with Glove, 1930, is made up of a tableau of real objects attached to the back of a stretched canvas over a wooden frame.  The objects are unified with a coat of sand painted predominantly white with a little light blue.  The sandy surface recalls the presence of color (rust red in the case of Guitar) and both share an overall finely-textured surface.  And like that sculpture, Composition with Glove denies its apparent identity (as a painting) and declares itself something else —a sculptural assemblage.  It is the literalization of image-making in that it gives you the objects behind the flat, imaginary window of the painting plane.  Still within the frame of the picture, the tableau of real things exists as object and picture — most especially the hand of the artist (i.e., the glove).  There is a feeling of fullness, richness and integration about this artwork.  The real object co-exits with illusion and metaphor.  It overflows the shallow space of the stretched canvas — it comes in through the back door, so to speak.  It breaks the imaginary space of the stretched canvas painting and renders it a sculpture, stuffing it with real things.

MICHELLE SEGRE
This Picasso show really did feel like a rare treat.  It’s already unusual to see any major sculpture shows in museums, probably for the physical threat Alain mentions, which is ironic, since our human environment is so full of “objects” and “bodies,” and then the physicality and materiality of this show is like a welcome punch in the face.  Picasso’s ability to project a kind of hyper energy in his work can be quite thrilling and I think in his sculptures in particular there is a sense of freedom, and even joy, like someone working outside the constraints of a program.  The combination of his lack of formal training in sculpture, and his incredible resourcefulness at self-teaching and exploiting the knowledge and technical prowess of others, as well as literally seeming to devour materials and techniques to get his visions realized…all these things contribute to the power of the work.  I was struck by how often he went back and forth between skinny line and flat planes, and bulbous, fat blobs, mirroring the trajectory of his paintings.  But the kinds of distortions and flattening of space and form that he invented in his painting, when carried over into sculpture, have a different kind of relationship to the real world in that they are objects competing in an environment in the round– unlike the paintings, that set up a formal presentation of an illusion of an object, the sculptures are in fact objects that occupy their environment, so they have a kind of earth-bound connection that feels very organic, even as he is playing with pictorial issues.  Rebecca, you touched on this aspect of his work too…I like your description of experiencing the guitar piece.

DAVID COHEN
I’d like to say something more about the general issue of sculpture and what I call the expressive impulses: the graphic, the chromatic, the plastic. Picasso is a great gamesman, and also of course inveterately restless. I used to have a secret theory that – counter to his actual development or career path – he was first and foremost a sculptor, and that painting, for which he is of course best known and celebrated, is, in a renewed one-man paragone debate, the subservient medium. What this show is making me think about is the possibility that he is actually a constant subverter of medium: in painting he is often drawing or sculpting, and his painterliness – the visceral enjoyment of paint, the scumbling, the scatological aspect of smear – is essentially haptic; but then when he is actually sculpting there is so much that is actually painterly: the absinthe glasses, individually colored, essentially make of the edition a 3D print, but also the post-war flat steel pieces, sensationally displayed at the entrance to the show, become supports for graphic or painterly marks. Should we be thinking of him simply as an unbounded creator indifferent to the boundaries of medium, or as playing an active with (against) medium definitions and boundaries?

REBECCA SMITH
I would love to hear more about the skull.  It was done during World War II of course — and to have it cast in bronze was illegal because it was against the war effort — so there you have art sabotaging warfare!

I also thought the man with the lamb was about the war experience.  Picasso said it wasn’t the Lamb of God but I can’t believe that in a Catholic country in those days a work by a Catholic could use a lamb in this way and not having it to be about sacrifice and a symbol of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Here is a man who is cradling a stricken symbol of peace, the animal is crying out, and he is stolidly standing there holding this burden — expressionless, almost faceless, and he has no penis.  I can imagine feeling impotent living during wartime in an occupied country.

ALAIN KIRILI
You are absolutely right about the illegal context of his creation and his status as a degenerate artist in that time. The sculpture, Death’s Head (1941) is a bomb. That’s the way it reads in Brassaï’s photograph. Picasso is a fighter, a terrorist in some very profound way. Robert Capa photographed Picasso with Death’s Head in his hand.

Death’s Head is much bigger than a human skull, and it had another purpose and meaning: to me, Death’s Head needs to be viewed as  extremely dangerous, like some sort of grenade. Spanish artists love skulls but with Picasso it is not melancholic but rather a weapon of massive destruction, which is heavy and solid. I am not an art historian, but what I can offer is personal testimony as an artist. The work of Picasso is deeply autobiographical and we feel it so well in this show. His different loves appear at each step of his life and his art, here in his sculptures Fernande, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse, Sylvette.

But David, to pick up on your question: For me Picasso’s art and each sculpture are revealing signs of my own evolution through time, sexually, and emotionally. With Picasso sexual desire is present until the end of his life: he spoke about that matter with Brassaï in a New York Times interview in 1971: “we always think about it even if we don’t do it”. And elsewhere in the same interview: “Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to reach in my pocket to offer you a cigarette, even though I know very well that neither of us smoke any longer. Age has forced us to give up but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it any more, but the desire for it is still with us.”

At the same time, Simone de Beauvoir was the first to write on the subject of old age as pariah in our western society in her book  “La Vieillesse”. Picasso treats that subject constantly with gusto and immense drive for creation, even when the old king turns into a voyeur. This is the trajectory from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of his youth to the bacchanals of the king/voyeur particularly focused on the female sex. On one of his white sheet metal sculptures, the female sex and its hair are drawn with the flame of a torch that cuts into the surface of metal.

His granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso wrote a fantastic book on the eroticism of her grandfather: “Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic” (2005). Picasso’s Boisgeloup period is so celebratory of sexuality. These monumental heads of Marie-Thérèse transform the nose and eyes into sexual attributes in a way that is just amazing! I remember when Beyeler and Reinhold Hold exhibited a show of 20th century sculptures in Riehen, Switzerland (the show included my own work), the Jeannette heads bronze series by Matisse were placed in confrontation with the Boisgeloup heads. What a great moment of art and of sculpture in that century.

The models of this sculpture are in the show and the enlargement is nearby in MOMA’s garden. It is a rare experience of a successful enlargement, which is rare in sculpture. We have to keep in mind another very successful enlargement and interpretation by the betograve concrete sculptor Carl Nesjar of the Bust of Sylvette in cement (at 36 feet high, it weighs in at 60 tons!). Nesjar produced 30 works of Picasso on a monumental scale, including the Head at Princeton University. It would have been a good idea, in my opinion, if MoMA had included as a suggested itinerary of the monumental sculptures for which they have maquettes in the show.

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to respond to what David said about Picasso’s way of bringing in sculpture when he’s painting and vice versa.  You bring up the question of motivation; I don’t think Picasso is oblivious to the boundaries of medium, or even that he is deliberately “subverting”.  It seems to me that he is blending because these boundaries came down for him and why?  Is it because he absorbed African art so fully that it seemed natural to paint sculpture and add materials like sand fiber to paint?   That’s part of it but there is also the way technology was changing the world.  His blending of two and three dimensions is accomplished in a more realized way than traditional relief at the time of a technological revolution — the telegraph, photography, telephone, film.  Rosalind Krauss has written about Picasso’s work in relation to film.  Space was conquered by technology, spewing images everywhere.  This seems to me to be the underlying change that blurred the boundaries.

I feel that I have occupied a place that blends two and three dimensions for almost my whole art-making life.  Even when I purposely undertook the project of making three-dimensional sculpture — a body of work consisting of large, bulbous plaster sculptures built around globelike armatures — I added the pigment to the plaster and dripped it like thick paint.  It wound up being very painterly sculpture.   An early body of work was two-sided, painted reliefs that basically offered alternate views that were never either flat or in the round.  I have found different ways of manifesting that sense of art-making space ever since.  While constructed as an object or sculpture it also partakes of painting space, a metaphorical space, window, page of text, electronic screen.  We are looking in and looking at.

ALAIN KIRILI
What I find very successful in the show is the great selection of small sculptures. For instance, the whole group of small glazed earthenware from 1947, the terracotta Standing Woman (1945), and the tinted foundry plaster Standing Woman (also 1945) are great examples of the subtle distinction in materials that Picasso did appreciate. In addition, knowing that a number of those sculptures exist in bronze, I regret that we did not see any of the bronzes.

Of course, I am an admirer of the very linear work by Picasso and the nice series of studies for the monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, Figure (1928). It pleases me very much because we can see various ways to express the head or hands. But most of all I, of course, really like Figure (1931) in iron and iron wire, materials Picasso used very early on because he could work it “cold”, in other words by hand and without heavy equipment.

I would like to highlight the term Werner Spies coined as “The Encyclopedic Sculpture”, which are sculptures from the 50s that use a huge diversity of objects for an assemblage-sculpture: The she-goat in bronze is really beautiful, but the stage before in plaster is extraordinary and that is true for all the other sculptures by Picasso for that time. It would have been fantastic to have a number of them to fully appreciate how Picasso could go from a stage of heterogeneity of material to the unifying version in bronze.

But those remarks are in no way a critique of the show. On the contrary, it proves that the show is so exciting that we want to express all the possibilities to celebrate the most autobiographical and protean artist of our time.

MICHELLE SEGRE
The question of subversiveness is an interesting one in Picasso.  On one hand his work can be emotionally neutral and formally analytical.  The coolness (temperature) is very seductively off-set by the sensuality of the artist’s touch.  On the other hand, he has a psychologically heavy side to his work that uses distortion and caricature to bring in emotion in a frozen, theatrical display.  There’s often a comic, absurd aspect…I’m thinking of those crazy plaster heads, so proud and strong in their stature and yet profoundly ugly—mutated, spastic body parts with sexualized noses and butts for cheeks.  The welded pieces from the Julio Gonzales days also play with this kind of re-imagining of human form– the figure becomes a giant, mechanical insect with precariously balanced limbs and extensions.  This kind of dismantling of one’s expectations of what the human figure looks like feels so fresh and contemporary, it could have been made by a young artist working today.  Certainly this qualifies as subversive for its time in the sense that it is intentionally turning topsy-turvy any traditional, academic approach to the human form (or animal or plant, etc), and I can’t imagine that he didn’t know he was doing this!  The influence of African and Oceanic art is huge here and I think Picasso looked at this work and found a way to sublimate emotion into the destruction and re-arrangement of the figure.  At the same time this supposedly intentional subversion appears to be coming so naturally and unforced, like someone who is exploring every vision coming to their head in the mechanics of inventing.  This is part of Picasso’s appeal—that he seems to just do whatever the fuck he wants!

The post Picasso in 3-D: A Roundtable of Sculptors, with Alain Kirili, Michelle Segre and Rebecca Smith appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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August 7 to September, 12 2015
7561 Sunset Blvd #103
Los Angeles, 323 378 6842

Pain’ing. In casual parlance that’s how we usually pronounce it, isn’t it? The “t” drops off the lazy American palate, moored on the tip of the tongue. How’s your pain’ing going? Are you still pain’ing?

Margaux Ogden makes pain’ings. It’s a convenient contraction for thinking about the young New York-based artist’s work. There’s pain there, definitely. But there’s also an ease about her work. I don’t mean to imply that she paints with blasé indifference. No, these are real pain’ings — full of struggle, anxiety, sadness, confusion, redemption, turmoil — but they’re not agitated, overworked, or even particularly expressive. Rather, they’re composed of fluid and confident freehand gestures, in evenly fragmented compositions, rendered in blocks of cool mint pastels, luxe lavenders, rich burgundies, and little pops of fluorescence. Sleek but not slick, there’s nothing jarring or discordant in these paintings. They’re easy on the eyes, is one way to put it.

But get a little closer, close enough to read the Basquiat-like texts embedded within the composition, and you find blips of neurosis, little obsessions, anxious mantras, mysterious notes and numbers. The phrase “high hopes for ya” floats in bright pink script at the top of a painting, ominously titled Cursed from the Start (all works 2015), almost sardonically out of reach, while the message “5/386 RELATIONSHIP SABOTEURS” screams slightly from the side. A kind of symbolic shorthand emerges throughout the suite of seven paintings, on view now at ltd los angeles: dollar signs, rectangular forms that resemble open laptops, a little desert cactus, a yin yang symbol, winking eyes — “emoji lyf,” she writes. Some forms are more inscrutably evocative: a four-legged shape is repeated among several of the canvases, like little Lascaux cave paintings, or maybe they’re representations of the “analytic sofa” whispered in pastel blue on a canvas called Being Human is Embarrassing.

One pseudonymous observer of Ogden’s first solo exhibition, at Freight + Volume in New York earlier this year, proclaimed that her work “speak[s] to our generation, the millennial.” It’s an apt characterization, in fact. These paintings pulse with pieces of the fragmented, distracted, abstract self, out there fixed in the digital ether or reverberating ad nauseam in your skull. Overheard phrases, something your ex said, awkward text messages, ephemeral Snapchats you just can’t forget. “THANK U FOR THE SEX.” Ogden’s paintings exhibit a cool and calm exterior, punctured with stabs of anxiety, humiliation, worry. A visual approximation of the gap between the real you and the you of your Instagram account. One composition, with its contrasting blocks of vivid turquoise and raw canvas, stands like a Guernica (1937) for a generation that’s never experienced war firsthand: equivocal, conflicted, chameleonic.

The title of Ogden’s Los Angeles show is “Chekhov’s Gun,” referring to the dramatic principle that you should only put a gun on the stage if at some point in the narrative it goes off. No element is superfluous, she suggests. But I don’t know if I take her word for it. Perhaps the invocation of this dramatic device serves more as a way to reassure us: all this is necessary. All the pain and drama and failure and elation and fucked up dreams. All the promissory notes and overdrawn bank accounts and paranoid thoughts. This whole collection of material objects, this paint on canvas: it’s all vital, needed, intentional. But in the end, it’s all theater.

Ogden paints on unprimed canvas. Mistakes and missteps can’t be gessoed over. There’s no “undo” button in her pain’ing. Like life, of course.

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Click the image above to view Dda

Publication of Dda marks the occasion of Michael Heller’s acceptance of the role of Poetry Editor at artcritical. Mike — who succeeds Bill Berkson in this position — is no stranger to these pages: In 2011 we posted Within the Open Landscapes: Words for the Etchings of Jane Joseph, a segment of his 2010 collection, Beckmann Variations & Other Poems with images by Joseph.

Dda is a poetic sequence including eight graphic works by the artist couple alpert+kahn (Renée Alpert and Douglas Kahn) taken from their Dda series, the visual product of alpert+kahn’s intense study of Pablo Picasso’s seminal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. The text (something of a dialogue/montage juxtaposing passages on the Picasso with those on the Dda series and other sources) and the integrated images take up themes of creativity, tradition and artistic transmission.

Renee Alpert and Douglas Kahn began their collaborative work as alpert+kahn in 1987 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Renee Alpert was encouraged and supported by Jacob Lawrence and Michael Spafford to pursue a career in art after receiving her undergraduate degree in philosophy. In 1984, she was awarded an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two Ford Foundation grants. An architecture graduate of Pratt Institute, Douglas Kahn worked for Marcel Breuer and Richard Meier before establishing his own firm. After leaving New York in 1980 he showed as a fine arts photographer as well as working as an architectural photographer, and he has appeared in such publications as Architectural Record, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arbitare and Domus. alpert+kahn’s collaborative work has been shown and is in the collection at The Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, The Cinema Institute of Moscow, Fine Arts Center @ Cheekwood, Roswell Arts Center and other museums and galleries. In 1991 they were chosen by Van Deren Coke to be one of 20 New Mexican photographers to be shown at Vision Gallery in San Francisco. More recently in 2012 Charting the Sage and Uncharted, two gallery-size installations, were exhibited at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado. More information and examples of their work can be found at alpertandkahn.com.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami Beach, Michael Heller was educated as an engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His poems first appeared in the 1960s while he was living in a small village on Spain’s Andalusian coast. Since then, he has published over 20 volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. Among his most recent works are This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010, Eschaton (2009), the mixed genre work, Beckmann Variations & other poems (2010) and Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008, expanded edition, 2012). His collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson include the multimedia works Constellations of Waking (2000), based on the life of the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, This Art Burning (2008) and Out of Pure Sound (2010), all of which premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Among his many awards are grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America and The Fund for Poetry. He is married to the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.

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Report from… San Francisco

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde, organized by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, Rebecca Rabinow and Gary Tinterow for the following venues: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (to September 6); Réunion des Musées Nationaux––Grand Palais, Paris (October 3-January 16, 2012); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 21-June 3, 2012).

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, organized by Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (to September 6); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (October 14-January 22, 2012).

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, organized by the Musée National Picasso and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. De Young Museum, San Francisco (to October 9); travels last to Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, November 12-February 19, 2012.

How great is this? In downtown San Francisco, within three blocks of each other, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Jewish Museum have concurrent, eyepopping and hugely detailed shows on the activities of Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, their older brother Michael and his wife Sarah, and, finally, Gertrude’s great love Alice B. Toklas, in furthering and collecting early twentieth-century art in Paris. And to top it off, across town, on the near edge of Golden Gate Park, the De Young Museum is hosting an equally astonishing set of 150 Picasso paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris. The contents of all three shows together should be enough to put some soul in anybody’s summer.

“Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” at the CJM is mostly just that. For those not already interested in Stein and how her looks, manner and the company she kept changed with age, the walk-through experience might feel a bit so-so. As it was, they changed considerably, and not just with age, but with her literary achievements and her own self views, as well as with how others saw her. Studying her strong face and massive physique, remarkable as they were, or the dust jackets of her books won’t help you enjoy her writings any better, although the recordings of her reading some of her work, as well as the electrifying footage of the original 1934 production of her and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, surely will. Curated by Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer, who also wrote alternating chapters for the accompanying book, “Five Stories” is more a procession of essays to be read––sumptuously illustrated and exhilarating at that––than a show to go see.

Under subheads like “Bohemian Stein,” “Matron Stein,” and  “Imperial Stein,” you find a person––insistently, by her own lights, a genius––alternately courageous and wary, endlessly (often haplessly) self-promoting, too regularly enthralled by her own pronouncements. She could be all smiles and warmly persuasive in her public appearances during her legendary mid-1930s American lecture tour, and yet long before then her demands on any self-respecting caller had become famously insufferable. In the book and wall texts, both Corn and Latimer stress as exemplary in its forthrightness and ardor the way she and Alice Toklas settled into their lesbian life together for nearly 40 years: “By 1910, Stein and Toklas had privately pledged themselves to each other as husband and wife. From now on, they used the language of conventional marriage to describe their love, calling each other hubby and wifey and dividing up domestic chores strictly along traditional gender lines.”

Stein may well have been the most portrayed writer of her era. The range of painters and photographers who sought her out as a sitter––from Picasso to Picabia, from Man Ray to Cecil Beaton––says something about her allure. By the late 1920s, her main artistic affiliations were with photography and sculpture (though strangely, despite the efforts of both Jacques Lipchitz and Jo Davidson, no sculptural image quite brings home the scale and force of her presence). “Painting now after its great moment must come back to be a minor art,” she declared in 1931. It was in light of such dim prospects that when she did buy pictures they tended to be works by lesser painters who came her way––most famously, the hyper-opportunist Sir Francis Rose, out of whose 130 works in Stein’s collection, only one on view, an atypical, Jess-like portrait hanging at the CJM, has serious merit.

“The Steins Collect” is epic. Besides delivering the goods in sheer density and depth, a plenum of marvelous objects to look at, the installation, a high-wire performance by SFMoMA curator Janet Bishop, allows healthy, albeit sometimes heated, dialogue between on-site appreciation and what has come to be advanced as museological significance. Late in life, Gertrude Stein confided what was first apparent in her approach to art and artists, that she had “always wanted to be historical.” The inevitable tension between how to historicize oneself as an artist and other, institutional ideas of history is implicit in her unqualified response to Alfred Barr’s attempts early on to get her to give her collection to the Museum of Modern Art: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”

“The Steins Collect” is historical as not just a telling array of art works but also the story of the people connected with them, who seem bent on being interesting in infinitely compelling ways. Combine this with the documentation of Gertrude and Alice at the CJM, and you get an aggregate saga in perpetually interweaving parts, not least of which are the adventures of some members of a well-off but not super-rich second-generation Jewish family from the San Francisco Bay Area in building collections of such magnitude. Gertrude and Leo took the lead, and Sarah and Michael soon matched them. In and around Paris beginning in 1905 and after returning permanently to California thirty years later, Sarah Stein lived out her special passion for the art of Matisse (who in turn dubbed her “the really intelligently sensitive member of the family”­­), while Michael tended to the financial end so that everyone’s income from the family businesses (street cars and rental properties back home) could be adequately maintained.

The early galleries at SFMoMA, as well as those at the De Young, serve as reminders of how hard-won were the glories of the avant-garde’s pre-World-War-I Golden Age. To contemplate what took place just within the first half of the decade leading up to 1914 is dizzying. It was in Gertrude and Leo’s salon in 1906 that Picasso and Matisse met and where, more often than not, over the next few years, each one saw some painting by the other, a shocker, deep within the terms of painting, that left both artists and their immediate audiences, too, wondering what turn the art would take next. In this brief epoch of largely abandoned or otherwise imploding masterpieces, it’s easy to imagine the two of them repeatedly scaring themselves and each other, courting catastrophe in a kind of delirious one-up-manship (the point being not to scare off or win but to further heighten the game). The most scarifying of all, of course, was Picasso’s “first exorcism picture,” Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, an abrupt, nightmarish inversion of the Arcadian dream––that dear sad fantasy of liberality and ease adapted from Cézanne by Matisse, who carried it over from his Fauvist-psychedelic phase to the classic grandeur of the pictures (Sarah’s and Michael’s Le Luxe I was one) done after summering with the Steins in Italy in 1907, the same year Demoiselles got started. The demoiselles may have no clothes on, but they are not in a grove by a stream; Picasso’s brothel concoction is a B-side enactment of an un-modern earthly paradise.

Would Demoiselles have been to Gertrude’s liking? Leo hated it and all of Picasso that followed from it; hated, too, Gertrude’s writings that ran close parallels to Picasso in invention, plus, he had zero tolerance for the fact of Alice in Gertrude’s life––so finally he moved out, taking his Renoirs and many choice Cézannes with him. In the Autobiography, Gertrude records Alice’s first impression of Demoiselles as of “something painful and beautiful there and oppressive but imprisoned.” By the time Picasso let the picture out of the studio, some nine years after stopping work on it, Gertrude couldn’t afford her old friend’s prices, and anyway it was too big, rough and imposing to be accommodated in any grouping on her household walls. Accordingly, the Demoiselles itself has no wall space in any of these shows. Instead, although physically absent, it haunts every one of them. What we see in its place at SFMoMA, are the related paintings and drawings that at one point formed a single line along the wall behind where Gertrude sat at her writing desk.

At some distance from the Matisse-Picasso agon, the most refined of the Arcadians––and the only one who brought the mode to flower in cubism proper––was Juan Gris. Softer and subtler than either, with what Gertrude Stein rightly called his “clarity and exaltation,” Gris achieved the serenity that Matisse frantically reached for and something extra that even Picasso never managed, the confidence that true mystery can come embedded in design.

“Sensitive” is not a word commonly applied to Picasso’s art but many early works here answer precisely to that description, among them the portrait of young Allan Stein, Michael and Sarah’s son. Matisse’s two depictions of Allan, two rooms later, are bold but comparatively impersonal exercises in picture making, although in the case of Boy with Butterfly Net, seemingly empathetic to the boy’s mad plunge into adolescence. Matisse’s best moments would occur soon enough; the great shorthand portraitist he would become is visible the images he made in 1916 of Michael and Sarah themselves, gems of SFMoMA’s permanent collection.

At the De Young you get a freshly impressive, quickstep survey of Picasso’s manifold achievement, affording, in the process, the chance to see many familiar works in a new light for being seen in a new place. (Given the pleasures of all that, it’s for the loveliness of small works, some unfamiliar and many still unframed as Picasso apparently preferred them, that one feels especially grateful.) Enough has been written about Picasso’s faults as a man, and even as an artist, his well-known monstrous side. There is far more to be gleaned from the deep humanity of his art, which, when it shows, is prodigious: this time around, for instance, for how, as a dramatist, he wrote the book on being and reflection, making them manifest in the simultaneity of pictorial form. In the Seated Woman of 1920, for instance, amazingly stately for all the systematic chunkiness of foreshortened body parts, and in the beautifully lost look of the couple in Village Dance (1922), how his characters’ eyes rest somewhere other than on the viewer (or other than, when accompanied, on one another), the whole gesture imbued with some large, slow turn in inner life.

“Picasso made me tough and quick and the world”––this line from Frank O’Hara’s “Memorial Day, 1950” echoes as I walk through the galleries. What a world: That no special theory emerges from any one or several visits may be part of what makes the serendipity of having all three shows here at once so happy and right. You look and look, and your sense of each picture and the next and the one across from that––or on yet another wall across town––gathers; together they click and make a constellation of shimmering details in and out of time. As Gertrude Stein herself said, concluding her 1923 portrait of her most constant artistic bedfellow, “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

The post What are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Many of Them? appeared first on artcritical.

Is it possible to admire the body of work unwrapped by “Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros” at Gagosian for what it is––a heroic sowing of wild oats to the very end by an ageless, workaholic satyr––while refusing to wallow in cult-of-personality recidivism?  To judge by buzz and critical reaction, a complete rapprochement between contemporary art and its erstwhile maximum superstar has been engineered by the Gagosian machine , laying claim in the process to a nearly exhaustless market of sudden masterpieces.

Until now, the prevailing opinion has undervalued Picasso’s late work, as quantified by economist David Galensen’s hybrid analysis, Old Masters and Young Geniuses.  In his formulation (derived from an observation of Roger Fry’s), Picasso exemplifies the “conceptual” artistic innovator whose contributions diminish with age.  Cézanne would be the “experimental” exemplar who gets better over time.  Cézanne searches, perception by neurotic perception, for a truth he knows he can never find, while Picasso thinks with his gut, stakes out positions which compel others to follow, destroys painting in order to remake it again and again.  “I do not seek, I find,” he claims.  Charts of auction prices and frequency of reproduction in history books correspond, Galensen demonstrates, to typically distinct life cycles: conceptual artists peak early and experimental ones peak late.  It all gets a bit teleological when specimen artists are conveniently shoehorned into one or the other camp––e.g., if Picasso is conceptual then what is Duchamp?––but the regression-analyzed data seem robust enough to signal a distinct phenomenon.  At any rate, while Cézanne’s final Mont Sainte Victoire paintings fetch his highest prices, Picasso’s decline progressively for paintings after 1907.  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, of that year, is the most reproduced work of 20th Century art according to Old Masters (Guernica is second); MoMA’s Mona Lisa, the Demoiselles is a fame machine within a fame machine and is literally priceless.  At the far end of the scale, Picasso’s rarely reproduced late work has commanded the smallest fraction of overall market value.

But the problem with late Picasso is real.  It has to do with his stubborn insistence on diaristic expressionism increasingly isolated from changing times.  Duchamp moved to New York, to the future, Picasso to the Mediterranean, the past.  (Try finding a single contemporary artifact depicted in these works.  No beer cans or soup cans here.)  And anyway, didn’t Warhol, finishing what Duchamp started, drive a stake of ridicule into the heart of sincerity, into merely “optical” talent?  From a postmodern point of view, Picasso’s restless hand, even at its most thrillingly uningratiating, even at its most goofy and cartoony, simply runs into a wall when it hits irony, as if trying too hard.  To an extent, you can laugh uncomfortably at the current exhibition’s musquetero/clowns with their limp swords, their Marcel Marceau flowers, but is this really the game Picasso means to play or have we been conditioned by Jim Shaw’s thrift store art, Richard Prince’s sad jokes, Kippenberger, Koons, and so on?  Picasso’s pretty girls and boys watched by old men seem rather prudish in light of sexual radicals like Aubrey Beardsley and Hans Bellmer, or even the gooey seductions of Lisa Yuskevage.  As for tapping into an unbroken stream of blood and sand descending from Minoan funeral games by way of Goya, the lonely torero staring death in the face is, surely, an existential cliché. There are Jackson Pollock paintings from around 1940 of minotaurs’ heads, homages to Picasso by way of Jung, that are so full of punishing psychic fury that the master’s versions in comparison can seem like Cotes D’Azur tourist ceramics.

Speaking of ceramics, it has been said that Picasso’s slumming in that medium prepared him for the painting-a-day speed of his final push, but if so it’s a mixed blessing, and another reason to hesitate before indulging in King Midasism.  Picasso, in his terrible, wonderful hurry to put another knot in the calendar––bunching up some of the threads of painting history while extending his dominion over another day––didn’t stop to tarry over hits or misses.  There are a going to be a fair number of the latter among the flurry, especially given his reliance on shorthand motifs.  That ubiquitous moonwoman profile glyph, which crops up often in the show, is a tip off.  I am unashamed to say that I love MoMA’s antecedent “Girl Before a Mirror,” but something about that glyph is just plain icky, fairly begging to be swallowed whole as a logo of beauty, and it reminds one of the far more cringeworthy pandering of Picasso’s warmest essays in domestic bliss.  Picasso paintings lacking in lust, paranoia, and competitiveness are usually prettified abominations.

So much is made of Picasso’s reckoning with the past in his deconstruction of Dutch and Spanish old masters, whereas the revelation of the Guggenheim’s achronistically hung 2006 exhibition, Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History was how the well-engineered salvos of Miró and Gris crisply held their own beside Goya and Velasquez, and how fresh and potent Dalí’s early work seemed.  The abundant Picassos, on the other hand, looked unintentionally out of place, undercooked in the company of their cussedly elegant forebears and rivals.  The current show takes aim more at Hals and Rembrandt, and the perverse feeling I got was that Picasso had it backwards, channeling the anguished depths of the former and the shimmering felicity of the latter.  InMousquetaire et femme à la fleur (4/18/1967) a version of a recurring lace-collared, mustachioed voyeur is scribbled with a certain self-regard.  This rote construction feels inflated in its “mastery,” conjuring the ghastly specter of Dali doodles from his pitiful decline.

Now for the good news: the current exhibition is a beautifully installed, justly scaled selection by a superb biographical advocate, John Richardson, and it delivers spleen and charisma.  An argument of rapprochement can indeed be made for late Picasso’s bearing on the renewed flourishing of bold pictorial improvisation in current painters such as Dana Schutz, Neo Rauch, Sue Williams, and Amy Sillman.  A still life of prickly flowers from 1969, for instance, makes you wonder what Picasso might have concocted had he loosed his grip on the familiarly self-contained terrain of the figure more often.  It is scathing with black whorls and stems that cut space like swords, and for once there is a dialogue between figure and ground, the glass vase refracting and congealing what passes through its lens, the scrawl of stalks grappling with the viscous, puffy ether around, behind, within.  This is something new, vintage Cubism plus hot graffiti expedience.  A neighboring room of prints pounds the point home with endless varieties of inky haste.  (The showstopper there is La Celestine from 1970, a matrix of 50 or so assorted small impressions on a single large sheet adding up to a comic book page of sorts, or a textbook on the possibilities of bitten copper;  it also recalls Gertrude Stein’s salon wall bristling with competing takes on Modernity.)

The more typical painting in the show settles for a kind of rough, porous collage that begs the question of space with sketchy aplomb.  Often he seems to be in a séance with Matisse, attempting quotations from his fond rival’s luxurious dance with pattern that feel, however, more like speedreading for the purpose of setting something decorative behind a figure, or, as in a racket-shaped patch of fabric on the Homme à la Pipe (11/7/1968), filling in a dead zone.  Still, this prevailing approach highlights the lively clash of touch, color, and attack well, and in Homme assis au fusil (9/17/1968) the stark green and white chevrons of this intergallactic warlord’s uniform stun with martial ferocity.

A couple of strong paintings that are signed with two day’s work confirm one’s suspicion that broad is not always better than deep. The Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur, worked on in sessions 58 days apart in 1969, densifies and squeezes the sheepish figure and his loopy flower, and they push right back.  One leg juts diagonally into space with an authority Picasso rarely bothers to assert elsewhere and in the process he gets to a kind of bone-dry hyper-liquidity of light, like quicksilver.  The brilliant compression of this textural effect is hard to pin down.  Let’s say that it transmutates your eyes into psychedelic readiness, bracing for shocks by turns gorgeous or monstrous.  We see moments of this intensity in other paintings, but here it dominates.  Clearly, certain painterly options can only develop with drying time; just as much, some kinds of visions arise only from a second look.  Femme nue couchée, jouant avec un chat from 1964, also the issue of two days, is a cartoon of Manet or Titian or Ingres, the body crumpled but provisionally luxurious, the cat a deft napkin sketch.  What sets this painting above casual parody came out of the second day’s consideration, I’d wager: the whacky furrows of the face, routed into the canvas with slow curls of black and set off with a crisp Al Capp coiffure, and even more, the thick, jaggedly precise outline of a jutting hand which dangles a testicular ball of yarn.  The soft gray cat might be miles––or years––distant from that ferocious Art Brut mitt, and chilly sparks shoot from the spacetime gap.

The body of Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s 1906 portrait took ninety sittings, a Cézannian apprenticeship.  The face was solved in a day, apprenticeship over.  While one wonders what savage beauty might have arisen from picking harder at the scars had he lingered awhile in his last works, one can also admire the choice to be more Picasso than ever at the end.  Rather than a final magnum opus we inherit a thousand new loose ends.  His broad strokes resolve better at a distance, and their clashing, naked facture thrives in reproduction, to judge by an incident I witnessed: full security had to be called in to handle some novice art tourists intent on taking a souvenir snapshot of Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur, evidently now a viral image.  Maybe Picasso was paying attention to Warhol after all, trusting to a strategy of sheer proliferation to seed the future; only a few images need achieve celebrity to buoy up the whole accumulation, and indeed, a sea change in the reception of the late work is clearly underway.  Picasso’s age-price profile in future editions of Old Masters and Young Geniuses will surely need revision.  The speculative dichotomy of the book’s title bears reappraisal as well, at least in Picasso’s redoubtable case.

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November 17, 2006 to March 28, 2007

What to think of yet another in the procession of general surveys the Guggenheim has served up?  In 2000, the late, great Robert Rosenblum presented the 1900 show as an expansive index that mirrored our own pluralistic, institutionalized, post avant-garde era.   The current exhibition, of Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso, includes a magnificent array of  paintings and again puts the onus on us, by questioning how historical painting is currently viewed.  Can we truly accept a portrait of the artist as a ravenous, time-traveling marauder who steals and cannibalizes the immediate and distant past in an attempt to break new ground?  In 2004 the Guggenheim answered affirmatively in the smaller-scaled, less ambitious exhibition, Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, which charted Mapplethorpe’s course as he pillaged classical sources depicting the sexually objectified male nude.

This time, Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez unfurls Time, Truth and History –  El Greco to Picasso, a theme-based show positing that the historical avant-garde, as exemplified by Picasso and Gris, was fueled by Spanish painting and cultural memory from as far back as the 16th century. And that cubism is, as Gertrude Stein quipped, Spanish.  The same claim is made for surrealism here.

While Gimenez’ thematic strategy does project continuity of subject matter, such as still-life or women, throughout centuries of Spanish painting, it doesn’t support the idea of an inherent Spanishness in Modernism.  And although the nationalist agenda is a stretch, the exhibition is a refreshing and bracing challenge to the notion that the contemporary epoch of the last 100 or so years sprung from Picasso’s head in an immaculately conceived rupture with the past. The usual suspects and heirs exemplar from Barr’s and Berenson’s cannons are trotted out and extolled, but this time they not only kiss and make up but have a roll in the hay.  We are treated to a celebratory mix of painting that reveals 350 years of swirling influences, and the sheer enormity of the presentation allows for other conversations, about foreign influence and formal innovation, to happen between the paintings.

The advertisements in the subway for the show offer an introduction.  The copy reads “El Greco to Picasso,” beneath which are two portraits, presumably one by each artist.  The Picasso looks like a Picasso –  a man’s bespectacled head, sporting a ruff collar, twists in a cubo-surreal tug-of-war.  Juxtaposed is an exquisitely observed portrait of a man in a sumptuous ruff collar.  But contrary to the headline, the image is not in fact by El Greco, but by Velazquez.  This thwarted expectation underscores the curator’s unfortunate preference for thematic rather than formal comparison.  Happily, El Greco painted a ruff collar too, albeit a less flamboyant – and less photogenic – one, in his Portrait of a Man (1600), which is installed in the exhibition with the other two portraits. And the conversation here is clearly between El Greco and Picasso — decidedly two-way and thoroughly modern, although the traditionally buttery Velazquez can listen in.

Establishing an unadulterated Spanish line of painterly influence is ultimately compromised by the looming presence of the Italians.  By Caravaggio’s death in 1618, Velazquez had fully embraced the Lombard’s use of dramatic snapshot naturalism and concentrated detail set in a dark vacuum of space. Velazquez’s superb Peasants at the Table (1619) exhibits all these qualities.  Caravaggio’s influence was so pervasive that as late as (1660) even Murillo, who was known for his fondness for Raphael’s classical idealism, was employing the new naturalism in Four Figures On A Step.

Ribera, perhaps Caravaggio’s greatest admirer, had a particularly ravenous appetite for cannibalizing Italian sources.   In Apollo and Marsyas (1637), Ribera directly borrows from Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in the treatment of Marsyas in the lower half of the painting.  And Marsyas’ facial expression is influenced by the Bamboccianti school in Rome of the 1620’s. Yet in the upper half of the painting, the rich color and loose paint handling of the sky, background figures and flowing drapery of Apollo, is an homage to late Titian.  It is a breathtaking combination of opposing influences. Yet somehow Ribera makes it all work beautifully.

Despite the overwhelming Italian influence on the major Spanish masters, some lesser known painters expressed a more distinctly Spanish aesthetic.  It is here that this remarkably expansive exhibition taps the intrinsic power of Spanish painting, the power to evoke with deafening silence a heightened psychological state of existential quietude and foreboding.   Spain’s long-term political and cultural isolation spawned a reflective, insulated environment that drove Spanish still-life painters to develop their own darkened stage-set.  Amazingly, the stark, reductive space and dramatically lit volumes associated with Caravaggio were concurrently used by the marvelous Spanish still-life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan as early as 1602.  It was Cotan, with his hard-boiled observation and simplified compositions, who deflected the influence of Dutch still life’s over-abundance.  Cotan’s paintings, along with those of his brilliant follower Juan Van Der Hamen, are installed here with Gris and Picasso. But the hyper-real bent of 17th century Spanish still life was part of a different trajectory from that of Cubism’s inter-planar agitation. Eschewing the use of overlap, Cotan often staged his objects like overdetermined ducks in a row, and to great effect.  Most of the museum goers prefer to hover around Cotan’s and Hamen’s glistening gems rather than the more demanding examples by Picasso or Gris.  The Spanish preference for spare, evocative still life finds expression in Salvator Dali’s precisely defined bread-basket table settings and blood-and-sand landscapes, the final and decidedly uncubist destination of Cotan’s trajectory.

The unnerving yet magical stage-set of 17th century Spanish still life may have affected Francisco de Zubaran as well. The small atrium off the Guggenheims lower ramp is filled with Zubaran’s haunting paintings and has never looked quite this good.  Interestingly, Zubaran, the master of the aura-drenched lone figure, could not breathe a sense of interpersonal dynamics into his figural groups.  Instead they remain isolated, and psychologically dissociated from each other as if they are objects inhabiting the strictly compartmentalized, separately ordered world of Spanish still life. (Zubaran’s own still lifes were entirely indebted to Cotan.) One example where this tendency toward alienation works to great advantage is in the sense of foreboding between Jesus and Mary in his House of Nazareth (1644), of which there is an equally splendid second version in Cleveland.

The bold expressions of individual Spanish genius from Las Meninas to Guernica are astonishing.  And Zubaran, with his unique vision, reductive impulse and expressive power, is still greatly underrated.  Zubaran’s remarkable use of white hadn’t been approached until Robert Ryman’s assessment in the late twentieth century.  And in the midst of continued national isolation, Goya emerges, presaging symbolism, expressionism, and late Guston , and surpasses every European painter in  penetrating  the human condition.  Manet certainly thought so when he modeled The Execution of Maximillian (1869) on Goya’s  The Third of May (1814).  And it is Manet who perfectly exemplifies the roving art-historical eye.  By single-handedly resurrecting El Greco and touting him along with Velazquez and Goya as a magnificent triumvirate, Manet changed the way we look at art history.  When Manet brazenly stole the figural group from Raimondi’s TheJudgment of Paris (1520), and inverted the identities of the flagrantly sexualized male nude and modestly poised female, for his seminal modern work Luncheon on the Grass some 350 years later, he showed how a modern artist could re-evaluate painting tradition, charting the way for Picasso and Matisse.  In the wake of Manet’s and Picasso’s connections with historicism it should not be startling how much Lucian Freud’s Leigh Bowery and Fernando Botero’s figures owe to Juan Carreno’s excellent full length portraits of “La Monstrua” (1680) in the Freaks section of the exhibition.  Carreno’s monumental sense of proportion, framing and scale are remarkably contemporary.

In spite of the specific themes and domestic schools of Spanish painting emphasized by the curators, international cross pollination of style within historical movements has a messy life of its own.  Ribera, though born in Spain, lived all his adult life in Naples and adopted Caravaggio’s practice of using live models.  And what of El Greco, born in Greece and active in both Spain and Italy?  His greatest influence is undoubtedly Tintoretto, whose compression of figure and ground, use of elongation and diaphanously sketchy painting technique can at times appear agitated to the point of seeming unfinished.  Of course this is something Tintoretto, El Greco, Cezanne and Picasso all have in common.  Does that make Cubism Italian?  Aren’t El Greco’s figures in Vision of St. John , on loan here from the Met, and Lacoon, at the National Gallery, the template for Matisse’sDance and Cezanne’s bathers?  Surely many of Cezanne’s paintings satisfy the defined criteria of analytical cubism.  Does the fact that Picasso spent the vast majority of his life and all his innovative years outside of Spain determine his artistic nationality? If not, El Greco is Greek.

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It’s safe to say that no artist has been so over-exposed as Picasso. It isn’t simply the seemingly countless exhibitions and critical studies; his styles (all of them!) have so thoroughly infiltrated popular culture that no one thinks twice about the Picassoid typefaces in travel posters or the Picasso doves on hand-woven rugs from Mexican villages.

This makes it pretty difficult for any presentation of his work to seem new. Yet, to a surprising extent, “Picasso: The Berggruen Album” does just that. It helps that none of the 26 drawings have been publicly exhibited before this year. But the real novelty of the exhibition lies in the story that connects the drawings. They represent the entire contents of a sketchbook that Picasso filled over the course of eight days in 1970, in his ninetieth year. Acquired by collector Heinz Berggruen, the drawings were exhibited this March in San Francisco at the John Berggruen Gallery. (John Berggruen is the son of Heinz.) Currently lining Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s dimly lit walls, the drawings-all about nine by twelve inches, all horizontal-present a provocative, compressed capsule of the energy of a great master in his twilight years.

Most of the drawings were executed in pen and ink, but on some days Picasso added ink washes or switched to pencil. Taking these works in one by one amounts to a lesson in a kind of drawing, and it reminds us why Picasso so dominated much of the last century. While the theatrics of the artist’s late paintings often seem heavy-handed and rehearsed-they’re practically parodies of his earlier, stronger paintings-the supple tautness and invention in these drawings often lend an astonishing power to the images we’ve come to expect from Picasso: nude women in erotic poses, with leering, hairy male faces often intruding from the edges.

“Man and Woman,” dated November 9, shows off the expansive, muscular rhythms particularly well. Despite (or, really, partly because of) the distortions of scale and placement, Picasso gives a riveting energy to the gestures of the two figures: the weighty, bicycling legs of the female figure anchor the long, steady stretch of her torso towards an upper corner, from where her head twists suddenly back; the male figure becomes, through some brilliant act of artifice, a bundle of horizontally compressed forms, one meaty arm groping above the female figure and one below, with the face darting in-between to plant-almost-a kiss (or lick?) on a taut midpoint of her back. In the telling, the scene sounds faintly ridiculous-it is, as sheer narrative-and yet the authority of rhythm makes the forms compelling. Who ever caught more vividly and economically the dance of pursuer and fleer, and the criss-crossing trajectories of appetite and flirtation? Other modern artists worked in this idiom of spare pen-and-ink arabesques (Calder and Ellsworth Kelly come to mind), but never equaling this electricity of tightening and releasing contours, of focus and interval.
Other notable drawings from November 9 include a series of paired female nudes variously reclining and dancing or leaping, their gestures mirroring or opposing each other in dynamic fashion, limbs and breasts swelling through space in restless contradiction of the flatness of their arabesques. Ink washes in drawings from November 10 add a richness of atmosphere to the proceedings, but also dilute the galvanizing spareness of line; for me, these images become vulnerable to Picasso’s often schmaltzy imagery-in this case, an intrusion of the broad-hatted musketeers that he favored at the time. A November 6 pencil drawing features planes of filigreed patterns that might be a nod to Matisse. (Picasso called such effects “un peu Matisse,” according to John Richardson’s illuminating catalogue essay, though the aggressive instability of Picasso’s design actually gives the sketch a much different flavor. Perhaps no painter so completely melded machismo and artistic facility as Picasso, and while even Matisse’s most rigorous drawings seem to long for their consummation in color, Picasso’s, like Rembrandt’s and Seurat’s, can make color seem almost redundant.)

It must be said that watching Picasso at work may be something like observing Barry Bonds at batting practice. The mastery astounds, but there’s not necessarily much suspense. Or perhaps a better comparison would be to the more voluble Reggie Jackson, whose famous musing about “the magnitude of me” broadcasts the same apparently unconflicted hugeness of ego.

This publicness of ego does gnaw at one’s enjoyment of the work. Picasso assumes our rapt attention every time he steps to the plate. While he claimed that he habitually dated every work by the month and day in order to understand his own creativity, one can’t help wondering: isn’t it really so we can’t avoid monitoring it, too? The nifty catalogue, which re-creates the effect of the original spiral bound pad, reveals that not a single drawing here has an image on the reverse; they’re exhibition-friendly (unlike Rembrandt drawings, which often grace both sides of sheets that the master stored tucked into books for his own private purposes.)

The catalogue essay takes a rather kind view of Picasso’s frolicking narcissism, but many viewers may be put off another manifestation of Picasso’s ego. His unabashed sexual predatoriness suffuses the exhibition. In some drawings, women absently lift legs with the only discernible purpose of exposing genitalia. It can be fascinating to guess whether an artist’s images are drawn from life or imagination-the giveaway tends to be in the particularity of detail-and Richardson suggests that Picasso’s wife Jacqueline may have amicably posed for some of these drawings. In any event the faces tend to be anonymously classical, while the sex organs are loci of attention; if these are portraits, they’re not portraits of faces. The final three drawings (in both the sketchbook and the exhibition) feature the same vacantly staring model, identically posed except for the area below her waist. In the first, it’s covered by a bit of fabric. In the second, genitalia are exposed. In the third, hands cover the crotch. The three states of woman, Picasso-style?

Picasso probably didn’t consider such drawings to be confessional self-indictments or political statements. More likely he viewed them as morsels of universal poetic truths. Having spent a lifetime Picasso-fying everything from ancient Greek figures and African sculptures to Velazquez and Delacroix, it had become for him a reflexive act. But so great is his genius at energizing lines on a surface that his drawings usually prevail over the clichés of their own prurience. To put it another way, much as his motifs served to focus his energy, and his Bacchanalian pose to give him cover, it was the vigor of his line that really makes such works remarkable.

John Berger believed that Picasso started to fail once he’d exhausted his stock of motifs. But banalities of theme apart, the drawings in the Berggruen album reveal not the slightest faltering of mind or hand in an eighty-nine year old. In that same “Man and Woman” drawing, Picasso at one point briskly limned the contour of the male’s forearm, and then, apparently without lifting pen, swerved to incise a distant section of the horizon line. It’s a horizon line that, seen in total, jags up and down crazily, placing one male foot at a enormous distance, while crowding a female one close to our viewpoint, and yet acting as perfect energizing foil to the figures’ roiling gestures. Was Picasso showing off? The answer, of course, is that he never stopped showing off.

To wish for a modest Picasso, however, is to wish for no Picasso at all, and perhaps even to wish away what he helped so much to create: the modern mythology of the artist as contrarian genius, that urbane bohemian who, part soothsayer, part rapscallion, makes us march to his different drummer. Picasso ended up catering to our laziest impressions of art history and wowing us with his sheer virtuosity of attack, as if he never really trusted our response anyway. But perhaps he underestimated his public. Go see this bite-sized sampling of a giant at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, just to treat yourself to some great drawings, and to remind yourself of why we’ll always talk about Picasso.

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