One-man show: Picasso exhibits on both sides of the Atlantic

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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With financial constraints making it difficult to mount blockbuster shows, many museums are resorting to a tried-and-true formula, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. “When in doubt, haul the Picassos out.” Several major American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum, have created exhibitions dedicated to this towering figure of 20th-century art, mostly drawn from their own collections. The Met, in fact, doesn’t have the greatest Picasso collection—there are hardly any of his revolutionary cubist paintings and too many lesser works. This exhibition does, however, include plenty of earlier, more traditional paintings from his Blue and Rose periods, created while he was still an impecunious artist in Paris. We watch as Picasso moves from sentimental scenes like Seated Harlequin to the more detached, “carved, compartmentalized naturalism” of his 1905 portrait of Gertrude Stein. His colors change from blue and pink to “earthen browns and grays,” and he shifts from an essentially realistic style to a more modernist mode, influenced by Paul Cézanne. As the young Picasso groped his way toward a new style, a pattern emerged that the rest of his career would follow: “tame, high polish, followed by brain-rattling innovation, followed by a retreat to safety before the next revolution.”

In a sense, we shouldn’t be surprised that Picasso was deeply influenced by impressionist Edgar Degas, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. “Picasso absorbed influences in the same way that Bill Clinton absorbed doughnuts: There was no stopping him.” But the connection between the two artists never received serious consideration prior to this show, “one of the most revelatory exhibitions on American soil this year.” From the older artist’s sophisticated scenes of Paris, Picasso learned to view the French capital as “a rolling spectacle of popular and erotic entertainments, offering up endless subjects for pictures.” Yet side-by-side canvases here show the two artists approaching similar subjects in very different manners. Degas’ In a Café (L’Absinthe) (1875–76) seems to observe its two drunken subjects from a distance, catching them unaware. In Picasso’s Portrait of Sebastian Juner Vidal (1903), by contrast, the subject and his prostitute companion “stare out at us with dark, soulful eyes, emphasizing their pitiful plight.” During his cubist years, Picasso would explicitly reject the impressionists’ atmospheric effects. Later in his career, however, he took up two of Degas’ favorite subjects—female bathers and ballet dancers—and made the debt he owed the older artist clear. “The intimate acts of bathing and hair brushing are transposed by both these artists into a kind of dream of rebirth.”

As a painter, Picasso was a relentless innovator, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. In his black-and-white prints, however, he was more of a traditionalist, creating evocative scenes that teem with mythic figures and suggest exotic (or erotic) narratives. “And what a cast of characters!” Nymphs and satyrs, bulls and matadors, sculptors and models all crowd one another in this “gem of an exhibit,” which draws upon the Museum of Modern Art’s peerless Picasso collection. “The most unforgettable character” here, though, is the Minotaur, usually considered an alter ego for Picasso himself. Picasso’s Minotaur is not quite the “monstrous and ferocious” beast of Greek mythology; he’s “more cosmopolitan, sometimes merrily raising a champagne glass, other times jumping into orgiastic piles” of sketchily rendered bodies. Still, the most touching Minotaur scene is a less risqué one, in which a “blinded, bellowing Minotaur” is led by a young girl along a Mediterranean beach. The themes of the print—“monster and child, suffering and kindness, darkness and light, doom and redemption—are as rich as those in any myth, fairy tale, or Greek tragedy.”

In London, “the most exciting and enjoyable exhibition of the summer” is this one of late Picasso works, said Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard. In the years after World War II, Picasso retreated to a Mediterranean villa in the South of France, “with hardly a care in the world to affect his work.” Living with his young mistress Françoise Gilot and frequently surrounded by his four children, he created works in which the psychological angst and formal anxiety of his earlier career are replaced by a sense of “joy, freedom, and contentment.” He dabbled in different artistic forms as the mood struck him, prodigiously producing sculptures, prints, and other, unclassifiable works.

He drew lines on a door, for instance, to create “the simple, life-size figure of a woman.” He took a toy car and turned it into a monkey’s skull. In such works, it’s hard not to admire “the comparative calm of his imagery, his willingness to be frivolous,” and his unsentimental desire to amuse his family. Still, Picasso was also creating serious paintings all this time, developing visual themes and ideas he’d experimented with for years. He even, occasionally, looks back at the Cézanne-influenced innovations of his earlier career—“so that one may reasonably argue that all that is fulfilled by the mellow old Picasso was forecast by the young.”