Picasso Woman in White Museum of Modern Art Reproduction

And Dead All Over

John Haber
in New York City

Picasso in Black and White

Matisse is color; Picasso is line. As clichés go, i just falling in beloved with mod art could practise worse. Who did more than with color lone than Matisse? And who fabricated line take as many sudden directions within a single work as Pablo Picasso? With Cubism, even the black and white of newsprint counts.

At present the Guggenheim takes the side by side step: when information technology comes to Picasso, it ditches the color. Or rather, it takes that as a pretext for an eccentric retrospective, with well over a hundred works, many from rarely seen individual collections or the Reina Sofía in Madrid. With "Picasso Black and White," it claims to have found the real impulse for an entire life—and, by extension, for modern fine art itself. Still, a cliché is a lousy premise for whatever exhibition, and "the existent impulse" makes a mockery of the impulsive reality of Picasso and modern art. The result is blackness and white and dead all over.

Cutting back

Of course, there is more to Henri Matisse than the green stripe on his wife'southward nose—the stripe of La Raie Verte in 1905 that divides her entire face, festers along her lips, penetrates the sockets of her optics, and upsets everything 1 knew about portraiture, realism, low-cal, colour, and fine art. In that location is more than the blue of Blueish Nude, the entirety of Scarlet Studio, or the flat backdrop of Dance. For one thing, in that location is the circle of joined hands in the dance. And in that location is a lot more than to Matisse and Picasso than a rivalry, like fine art as sports event or high-school popularity contest. Still, the colors are hard to forget.

Pablo Picasso, though, is a dissimilar story. He could boast now and so of reducing painting to what matters. (He could boast now and then of practically anything.) And he did take a habit of starting over, beginning as a young artist from Barcelona, a perpetual reinvention that itself helps to define Modernism. Casting out resource is very much office of that—including, David Sylvester has argued, casting out color. Maybe he had an awkward merely heated human relationship with color all along, like his long concatenation of problematic relationships with women.

I can point to the Blueish and Rose Periods as muted in colour, like Joaquín Torres-García in Barcelona before him, and the museum does. 1 can see the fragmentation of Analytic Cubism and Picasso sculpture as a progressive development from Paul Cézanne and Cézanne drawing through the ambivalent planes of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and nonetheless life by Picasso and Georges Braque in 1909. Or ane can see Picasso and Braque equally dropping the masks to discover the structure of the known globe in the vibration of calorie-free and nighttime alone. And so come up lettering, newsprint, and a settling into eye age. His nigh famous afterward work (and a great loss to New Yorkers) was in black and white, Guernica of 1939. The curator, Carmen Giménez, also points to the night grays of Still Life with Blood Sausages in 1941 or The Charnel House in 1945 every bit expressing the horrors of Fascism and war.

Some other artist might have a step back in crises, too, but in a different way. He could work through the thoughts in his head on paper. And he did, but part of Picasso'southward impact lay in destroying the distinction between the inner and outer world—or betwixt sketches and painting. Surrealism, Surrealist cartoon, and Activity Painting, hither we come. All this puts a great deal of weight on black and white, as if it freed Picasso to discover himself in the plough from color, like Marking Wiener in contemporary art. But will the show bear up under that weight, and why does it wait so anticipated?

The problem is non the size of the evidence or a prolific artist'southward glibness. For once, painting along the ramp looks unhurried and approachable. The Frank Lloyd Wright tilted trophy never make life easy for fine art, but the hanging is terrific. The problem is that the whole show is a cliche, pandering to a public that, the Guggenheim hopes, cannot get enough of a proper name artist. Information technology is an excuse to show more, but as Warhol's influence is an excuse for the Met to trot out more than of Andy Warhol. It is art equally tourism and commerce.

Like nigh clichés, also, information technology is also a half truth or simply a lie. The half truths start with the obvious need for drawings and sculpture. Sure charcoal, pen, plaster, and bronze tin accept a patina of black and white, and so what? Nearly of the prove dares to stick to painting, merely that only makes things worse. The sheer reliance on private holdings suggests a forced thesis. It also makes the most famous creative person of his century expect almost second charge per unit.

The absence of color?

Black and white is not simply an absence of color. One speaks of a Blue and Rose Flow for a reason, and the 1904 Woman Ironing includes yellows equally well. Les Demoiselles, non on view, has its own green stripes down a woman's cheek. A dryad with the influence of African art and primitivism has a sharp orange, Cubism its gradations of brown. A continuing nude from the Albright-Knox in Buffalo twists off-centre and dissolves into abstraction, and the Guggenheim's Accordionist in 1911 is more daring still thanks to its dejection and greens. With Neoclassicism in 1923, the Met's Woman with Folded Arms has her share of pink.

By now, the newsprint has yellowed to brown, and ane can hardly see it whatsoever other way. Could that explain why the exhibition has and so little from all those crucial years—and so footling from major museums? In older histories, Picasso filled the residual of his career with casual color, later the sentimentality of his early on work and Cubism'south austere revelations, just at a cost. John Berger once built a volume effectually that history, The Success and Failure of Picasso. Here, paradoxically, a history turns abroad from thrift in search of black and white, and it ends reinforcing the failure. Paradoxically, too, information technology has to leave out the most intense black, in thick brushstrokes that thrived alongside bright color, because Picasso never merely painted by number after outlines in black and white.

The color is of passion, from all those relationships. A 1996 show of "Picasso and Portraiture" tried to rescue him from the accusation that he used ambivalent colors to demean women. Recent shows of Picasso's last decade and his years with Marie-Thérèse Walter found his amour fou in red. No wonder his honey diplomacy here seem then bloodless. Scene afterward scene depicts the easy entertainments of tumblers, swimmers, and beachballs. Walter herself looks passive or asleep.

One tin see exceptions, as Picasso turns from love to labor and state of war. A Milliner's Workshop from 1926 is an intricate play of grays. A tumbler of forks bars the way to the blood sausages. In the largest of dozens of interpretations of Diego Velázquez, from 1957, the painter at his easel in Las Meninas cannot control his own bear witness. An outsize extravaganza, he presides over a flood of white from the windows and in the broad dress of a princess. The perspective plummets past him toward the shadowy presence in a doorway. No one is in command of this art, non least the walrus confront of the rex in a mirror.

I gains insight before, too, when blackness and white may seem nigh an afterthought. White serves non and so much for highlights, simply rather as the layer and texture of cloth and skin. Even its marvel, though, helps to undermine the prove. In old master cartoon, line is a window onto the artist's idea or a more than disciplined realism—as in the technique of grays called grisaille. With Georges Seurat, the colorist to stop all colorists, drawings in Conté crayon unfold tonality and flesh every bit the mystery of two and three dimensions. The Guggenheim, in contrast, tin can never clear the uniqueness of blackness and white.

One sees mostly laziness, and it is tempting to see a fatally lazy artist. I prefer to see a compulsive one, who could never dream of when to quit, and an unceasing experimenter, on the mode toward a greater risk. Sometimes, late in life, the blackness as watercolor even starts to drip. Rather, the lazy political party is the museum, out for a inexpensive cadet and a good fourth dimension. The 1980 Picasso retrospective at MoMA seemed never to end, because it kept hitting one with another shock, long subsequently Berger had promised only failure. This bear witness goes quickly, because existent life is never a thing of blackness and white.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Picasso Black and White" ran through Jan 23, 2013, at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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Source: https://www.haberarts.com/picassbw.htm

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