The Show of Shows
By ROBERT HUGHES
Picasso, modernism's father, comes home to MOMA
In imaginative force and outright terribilit`a, it is quite possibly the most crushing and exhilarating exhibition of work by a 20th century artist ever held in the U.S. Beginning this week, over the next four months nearly a million people will queue outside New York City's Museum of Modern Art to get a glimpse of it. Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, is being honored in a show of nearly 1,000 of his works, some never exhibited before, drawn from his estate as well as from collections the world over.
What gives the exhibit its overwhelming character is the range and fecundity of Picasso's talent--the flashes of demonic restlessness, the heights of confidence and depths of insecurity, the relationships (alternately loving and cannibalistic) to the art of the past, but above all the sustained intensity of feeling. "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" contains good paintings and bad, some so weak that they look like forgeries (but are not), as well as a great many works of art for which the word masterpiece--exiled for the crime of elitism over the past decade--must now be reinstated. It is the largest exhibition of one artist's work that MOMA has ever held, or probably ever will. It contains pieces ranging in size from Guernica, Picasso's 26-ft.-wide mural of protest against the fascist bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, to a cluster of peg dolls he painted for his daughter Paloma. Paintings, drawings, collages, prints of every kind, sculpture in bronze, wood, wire, tin, string, paper and clay; there was virtually no medium the Spaniard did not use, and all are profusely represented.
They fill the building's three floors, displacing MOMA's permanent collection. "I felt that only with the whole museum could we have an exhibition worthy of Picasso's oeuvre," explains William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture. "I don't think there is any other artist whose work could sustain such an exhibition."
Most visitors will agree, even if they find the presentation exhausting and nearly indigestible, streamed as they must be through the galleries at a speed dictated by an attendance of 8,000 people a day.* In such circumstances, no one can absorb the scope and the depth of the man. How can one "see" in two hours what took nearly 80 years of such obsessive activity to produce? The "Tut Law," or curse of the mummy, by which works of art become invisible as the museum audience for them expands, will work against this show. That is all the more ironical since this is not an affair of little scholarly value, like the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit seen by more than 8 million Americans, but an immense contribution to Picasso studies, done at the highest level of curatorial skill.
The retrospective was put together by Rubin and Dominique Bozo, curator-in-charge of the future Musee Picasso in Paris. The effort could have succeeded only at this moment. By now the fights over Picasso's estate between his heirs and the French government--which have kept a score of lawyers fat, tired and happy since the old man died without leaving a will--have been resolved, yet the final disposition of his work has not been locked into an institutional frame. When the Musee Picasso, which received the cream of the work from Picasso's own estate, opens in Paris next year, it will not be able to make further loans of this magnitude; some 300 of its works have come to MOMA for the present show. Moreover, 1980 is likely to be the last year in which Guernica, lent to MOMA by Picasso in 1939, can be seen in the U.S. It will go to Spain, probably to the Prado in Madrid, in accordance with Picasso's wishes.
In short, no exhibition like this can ever be mounted again. Bozo's main work with the Musee Picasso is still before him. For Rubin, the MOMA show is the climax of a career; to have brought off, within three years, two exhibitions at such a level (the other being his Cezanne show in 1977) is in some measure to have altered the history of curatorship itself. Rubin, the Iron Chancellor of MOMA, has set new standards of detail and historical cogency within the museum, and the Picasso exhibit and its admirable catalogue reflect them at every point. It is a final vindication of a program started by Alfred Barr Jr., MOMA's first director, 50 years ago: the assumption that modernism, whose supreme exponent was Picasso, was as worthy of detailed and serious consideration as the culture of baroque Rome or quattrocento Florence.
Not all great painters are precocious, but Picasso was. In a technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation. He was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of a painter named Jose Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned ingles face, nothing like Pablo's simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the story is true, it goes some way to explain the mediumistic confidence with which Picasso worked. "Painting is stronger than I am," he once remarked. "It makes me do what it wants." Painting had won him the Oedipal battle before his career had begun. If one were told that Science and Charity, Picasso's sickbed scene from 1897, with its rather conventional drawing but adroit paint handling (especially in the details, like the frame of the mirror above the bed), had been done by a 30-year-old Spanish academician, one would have predicted a competent future for the man. Once one realizes that it was painted by a boy not yet 16, the skill seems portentous, like a visitation--and that is the general impression conveyed by Picasso's earliest work.
The point is not that Picasso, as an art student in Barcelona and, after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a Velazquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example.
For a young artist in Paris at the turn of the century, such material could not last forever, and not all Picasso's experiences were gaslight and garters. Living in poverty in the little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful miserabilisme, verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures, using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted from Japanese decorative art. By 1902 the blueness of this line had spread to dominate the whole painting. It had a symbolic value, of course: it spoke of melancholy, of the "blues." But it also enabled Picasso, as the pervasive brown-gray monochrome of analytical cubism later would in a different way, to take color out of his work, so that he could make a compromise between decorative flatness and sculptural volume in terms of pure tone.
The influence of one artist dominates the Blue Period. He was Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh, Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon, and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso turned it into the face of Carlos Casagemas, the friend who had come with him to Paris from Barcelona and then committed suicide for love of an artist's model.)
Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form, since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at some of his intense moments--not only the death of Casagemas, but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs. Allegory was the conscious, intelligible form of Picasso's vast instinctive talent for metamorphosis, whereby a single form could harbor two or more literal meanings: a glass of absinthe including a drunkard's head, a guitar turning into a torso or a vagina, a bicycle seat becoming a bull's head. Moreover, the ability to handle allegory was the proof of high ambition: Gauguin had gone to Tahiti to paint huge emblems of human fate, not just to see papayas.
By the age of 25 Picasso was an able and gifted artist, but not yet a modern one. He had managed to tame the mannerism of the Blue Period, with its wistful elongations and neurotic passivity of form, by studying Degas. In the Woman with a Fan, 1905, with its "Egyptian" gesture of the raised hand and gravely extended fan, or in the robust columnar body of the Boy Leading a Horse, 1906, Picasso's digestion of Puvis was complete. At that point he could have kept painting such pictures for the rest of his life and died in honors.
What happened was very different. The detachment of expression in his Rose Period hardened: through 1906 the faces took on an increasingly masklike air, blank, inexpressive, with empty eye sockets. Picasso had been looking at archaic Spanish carvings from Osuna. Now he stressed the sculptural, instead of the linear and atmospheric: solid impacted form, not fleeting mood. His 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, almost leaden in its pictorial ineloquence, marked the start of this change, and the pink stony torsos of Two Nudes, 1906, delineate the period's end. In between lay some magnificent paintings, such as the Seated Female Nude with Crossed Legs, 1906, whose solidities of thigh, trunk and breasts anticipate the swollen torsos of Picasso's "classical" women 15 years later. It was one more element in the predictions, recapitulations and variations of theme that composed the tissue of Picasso's imagination.
Having brought solid form to such density, having set so absolute a division between figure and field, what choice did Picasso have but to break it all down again? Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, was the painting that provoked cubism, and one of the most astounding feats of ideation in the history of art. These days the word radical is patched on to any newish artistic gesture, no matter how small: a puddle of lead on the floor, or a face pulled on video tape, or an array of bricks. This use of the word cannot begin to convey the newness of Les Demoiselles. No painting has ever looked more convulsive and contradictory, and, though one can follow its development through Picasso's early studies, which are part of the MOMA exhibit, the sheer intensity of its making is beyond analysis.
Les Demoiselles is a brothel scene; there had been a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo, or Avignon Street, in Barcelona, and Picasso and his friends frequented it. But the picture has none of the social irony or even the sensuality with which Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas invested their brothel paintings. More vividly than ever, against the backdrop of earlier Picassos, it becomes clear why his friends thought he had gone crazy, why the painter Andre Derain actually predicted that Picasso would hang himself behind the big picture. The painting is freighted with aggression, carefully wrought. The nudes are cut into segments, as though the brush were a butcher knife. Their look, eyes glaring from African-mask faces, is accusatory, not inviting. Even the melon in the still life looks like a weapon. The space between the figures is flattened, like a crumpled box: it was in this play of code between solid and void (one apparently as "tactile" as the other) that the formal prophecies of Les Demoiselles lay. Though he plundered African motifs such as masks and Bakota funerary figures for Les Demoiselles and its sequels, Picasso neither knew nor cared about their tribal meanings or uses. To him, they were merely shapes, conceptually opaque, with perhaps a secondary use as emblems of "savagery" to disrupt the field of "culture." The idea that Picasso had some sympathetic interest in African art as such is a complete illusion. All that counted for him was its ability to furnish alienated examples of form that clearly owed nothing to Raphael.
No Demoiselles, no cubism. But there was a long stretch between them while Picasso, grappling with late Cezanne, crossed from an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis. In a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso picked up on Cezanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to Cezanne's Cardplayers, but the image mutated into still life, leaving the drinkers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop, the bread loaves and fruit and napkin have a plastic intensity that makes one feel ready to pluck them away.
Gradually this jutting, sculptural quality dissolved in ever more complicated faceting, "cubifying"--though there are no real cubes in cubism--through the landscapes he painted at Horta de Ebro in 1909. By 1910 the cubist surface was reached, with a sort of gray-brown plasma, the color of fiddle backs, zinc bars and smokers' fingers. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field of vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs for themselves--a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound hole of a guitar. This sense of multiple relationships was the core of cubism's modernity. It declared that all visual experience could be set forth as a shifting field that included the onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the theory of relativity or to the principles of narrative that would emerge in Proust or Joyce. The supremacy of the fixed viewpoint, embodied for 500 years in Renaissance perspective, was challenged by the new mode of describing space that Picasso and Braque had developed in a supreme effort of teamwork.
As with painting, so with sculpture. Picasso's Guitar of 1912, an array of cut and folded metal sheets that opened to let space in, was the first constructed sculpture in the history of art. It abolished the solidity, the continuous surface that had been, until then, the essential narrative of sculpture. From that unpromising-looking piece of rusty tin, a 60-year tradition of open-form sculpture was born that spread from Russian constructivism to the work of Anthony Caro in England and David Smith in the U.S.
Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911 run close to total abstraction, depending on such slender clues as a glass or a pipestem to pull them back to reality. As he moved forward, he found in collage a way of linking cubism back to the world. Collage, which simply means gluing, brought fragments of modern life--newspaper headlines, printed labels--directly into the painting. Cut them out, put them in. The tonal values of some of his finest collages have been ruined by age. The newsprint, once gray on white, is now cigar-brown. But in better preserved ones, like Violin and Sheet Music, 1912, the original effect remains: a magnificently Apollonian interplay of blue, gray, white and black on its ocher ground, stable and forceful at the same time.
The sense of the cubist moment can never come again. It is almost as distant, in its dulcet and inexhaustible optimism, as the faith that built Beauvais. Cubism was the climax of an urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and shifting modes. It was art's first response to the torrent of signs unleashed by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso inscribe "Our future is in the air" on several of his cubist still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbur," after Wilbur Wright. "The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ," remarked the French writer Charles Peguy in 1913, "than it has in the last 30 years." Picasso and Braque took it for granted that reality had changed more than art, but their relation to the art of the past was not one of simple conflict. It was more tentative, precise and subtly felt. Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of cubism, evoked the sentiment in his collection of Calligrammes:
You whose mouth is made in God's image
Whose speech is Order itself
Be easy with us, when you compare us
To those who were the perfection of order,
We who looked for adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies
We want to give ourselves vast, strange territories...
Pity us, skirmishing always at the frontiers
Of the limitless, and of the future,
Pity our errors, pity our sins.
That sense of being "always at the frontiers" of history itself is volatile, and it began to evaporate from Picasso's work before the end of World War I. It left behind a residue, however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, a rappel `a l'ordre (call to order), which would place art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia. "Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th Arrondissement after October 1917.
The Picasso of 1918-24 was made for this situation. With ebullience, he threw himself into the role of the maestro, designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, marrying one of its dancers, and allowing a conventional style of portraiture, often as insipid as the $3 million Acrobat sold to Japan in last week's Garbisch auction, to alternate with a highly decorative form of cubism. "Decorative," of course, is no longer a cuss word, and his best flat-pattern cubist paintings of the early '20s, with their gravely shuttling collage-like overlaps of bright and dark color, are marvels of pictorial intelligence. The two versions of his Three Musicians, 1921, show what Picasso could do when his sense of form was fully engaged. The classicizing drift of the early '20s took its most explicit shape in the Three Women at the Spring, 1921. Their dropsical limbs resemble a Pompeian fresco inflated with an air hose, even though the full-size sanguine drawing for the painting, which Picasso kept for himself, has the genuinely classicist air of unforced, continuous modeling.
As solitary virtuoso, Picasso would from now on depend wholly on himself and his feelings. There would be no more collaborations, as with Braque. The corollary was that Picasso gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity, so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage, castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong to the Spaniard. This frankness--allied with Picasso's power of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a ravenous, animistic vitality--is without parallel among other artists and explains his importance to a movement he never joined, surrealism.
Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic: they project fears that no French artist (and outside France, only Edvard Munch) would even admit to. One needs colossal self-confidence to expose such insecurities.
On the other side of these chthonic appetites lay some of the most haunting images of metamorphosis and erotic fulfillment in the history of Western art. They were provided by his affair with Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman whom Picasso picked up outside a Paris department store in 1927. He was 45, feeling trapped in a sour marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova; Marie-Therese was 17.
"Pictures are made the way the prince gets children," Picasso remarked a little later, "with the shepherdess." In Marie-Therese, he found a shepherdess--a placid, ill-educated and wholly compliant blond, who had never heard of him or his work, and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His images of Marie-Therese reading, sleeping, contemplating her face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings) for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned. In one sense, the body of Marie-Therese, curled up in Nude Asleep in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it--a lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings, nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint. Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Therese, Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations. The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot do.
His metamorphic sculptures of Marie-Therese from the early '30s, involutes of swollen dreaming bronze in which cheek is conflated with buttock, mouth with vagina, have a wonderful tenderness and power as plastic surfaces. Even the plumpness of the bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways, the shapes of Marie-Therese, smooth and closed, are like the totemic bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized building along the Cote d'Azur. But their whole import is different. There is no dislocation or fear in them: they are, as William Blake put it, "the lineaments of gratified desire." The climate of sexual politics has changed so irreversibly in the past 50 years that one cannot imagine a painter trying such images today. In that sense, Picasso closed another tradition in the act of reinventing it. The same applies to his visions of the classical Mediterranean from the 1930s. Picasso felt the Greeks in the ground and was the last modern artist to raise them.
The river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast.
Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.
Guernica was the last masterpiece of painting to be provoked by political catastrophe. World War II and the Holocaust evoked nothing to match it, and the monuments to the Gulag are books, not paintings. Guernica's power flows from the contrast between its almost marmoreal formal system and the terrible vocabulary of pain that Picasso locked into it. It is shown at MOMA with all its preliminary studies, and to see Picasso developing these hieroglyphs of anguish, the horse, the weeping woman, the screaming head, the fallen soldier, the clenched hand on the sword, is to witness one of the supreme dramas of the injection of feeling into conventional subject matter that the century has to offer. Indeed, the effort was such that it carried him past the end of the picture into a series of weeping women's heads, which show, even more clearly than Guernica, how Picasso could saturate a motif with meaning, to the point where it could hold no more truth. This free passage from feeling into meaning was the ing into meaning was the essence of his genius. Even when he was painting below form, he could always find significance in commonplace sensations, however distorted the actual form: the death in a goat's skull or the spikiness of a sea urchin, the feather softness of a dove, the looming stupid menace of a bull, a toad's lumpish slither.
Picasso was 55 when he finished Guernica, and up to his 60th birthday or so he remained an artist worthy of comparison (if painters and writers can be compared) with Shakespeare. There was a similar range of feeling, from bawdry to tragedy, coupled with a rhetorical intensity of metaphor and a great depth of experience. After Guernica he could still paint very well: L'Aubade, in 1942, with its stark intimations of confinement and oppression, seems to distill the mood of occupied France. Some of his portraits of Dora Maar, Marie-Therese's successor as his mistress, are of ravishing and edgy beauty.
Yet the inventions of necessity slowly gave way to the needs of mere performance. Picasso's sculpture retained its intensity almost to the end, but his painting did not, and this became clear after 1950. Without doubt, MOMA'S great exhibition ends on a dying fall. The Picassian energy is still there, masquerading as inspiration, but too often it ends as a form of visual conjuring. Was he growing bored with his own virtuosity? Impossible to know. Since anything could be converted into a Picasso, and into a Picasso, and thence into gold, he suffered the dilemma of Midas twice over. This was the inevitable result of the fame he enjoyed in the last quarter-century of his life, a fame such as no artist in history had known. It could only have been created by the pressures of the 20th century, with its mass magazines, its art market, its mania for promiscuity among famous names combining in the most sustained exercise in mythmaking ever to be visited on a painter. In the end he was trapped by his own reputation, the idol and prisoner of his court of toadies and dealers, fawned on and denied the ordinary resistances against which an artist, to survive at all, must push.
It showed in the work. But do the irresolutions of his old age really matter? Picasso shaped his century when it, and he, was younger, and all its possibilities were open to his ravening eye, in those three decades between 1907 and 1937. He was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him -- from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky -- an almost indescribably fruitful one.
Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga.
*The show runs until Sept. 16, and is open to the general public daily except Wednesday. Tickets ($4.50 for adults, $2.50 for students, 75-c- for senior citizens) must be purchased in advance either from MOMA or 600 Ticketron outlets in the U.S. and Canada.
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