Picasso: Mosqueteros. At the Gagosian Gallery, New York City

Reading the first three volumes of John Richardson’s The Life of Picasso, an invaluable resource for understanding the chronology of this artist’s life and his influences, I became much more aware than I had been previously that throughout his lifetime Picasso was much in the company of poets …in his early days the Barcelona poets and later in Paris Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Andre Breton, and Jean Cocteau. In his mid to late career he wrote poetry. I have often wondered if anyone has considered Gertrude Stein’s influence on him: to what degree did her play of words and her restructuring of the language influence his restructuring of his subjects and the reorganization of picture space?

Made aware of that constant company of poets I have wondered to what degree he might have considered that his works were visual poetry, that he and his friends shared a common endeavor. I am unaware that anyone who has written about him has discussed his work from this perspective, although there was an exhibition recently at Yale University that did consider his work in this light because he incorporated letters and words into the paintings. Rather than those letters and words I am more focused on considering the images, the freedom with form, the reorganization of picture space, the dynamic of line, and the use of color as visual poetry.

From this perspective it could be more easily understood why he never forsook the representational in art: poetry is a human utterance and has as its subject the human experience. While a painting can be stripped of subject and anecdote and still express the sentiments, poetry without human sentiment is merely word play that often devolves into nonsense. Abstraction, non representational painting, is an area that Picasso would not enter. He insisted that he wanted there to be a reference in each of his works. And of all his subjects the most constant is the human form. That insistence on subject and that particular subject have inspired my curiosity as to his purpose.

Picasso’s paintings from the early forties through the sixties have often seemed inexplicable to me but looked at from the perspective of visual poetry they can be seen to follow a linear development that began with the loose and free composition of the turn of the century works, and continued with those from the blue period, and especially those of the rose period …which are his most lyrical works, through the deconstruction of form in the cubist works, the presence of expressive form he saw in African works, and in the reconstruction of the natural forms, with the emphasis on expressive form, in the works of the twenties. It is in seeing all of the elements from these periods as the syntax of visual poetry that I can better understand the later works.

In this exhibition of very late works at the Gagosian Gallery the poetic syntax is intact. The subjects are exclusively the human figure and Picasso works with his standard iconography …the hands, the feet, the fingers and toes, the eyes, the noses, the tangled limbs and the genitalia, the vaginas, the penises and the black void of the anus are all strongly indicated., but in many of these paintings the subjects, the human figures …the Mosqueteros, seem merely the motive for making the painting, there is not always a felt sentiment expressed, the expression of a sentiment being the essence of poetry. Here it seems as if Picasso was insistent that the act of painting is everything. With their great energy and with the obvious presence of the painter, these works often read as a record of the making of the paintings.

The Gallery owners and the curator, John Richardson, suggest that these works are worth our reconsideration and imply that there is something in them that we might have overlooked in previous exposures to Picasso’s late work. I am uncertain that I agree. What we see here is very much what Picasso showed us over and over again from 1930 onward. In many passages Picasso appears to be referencing Picasso …the parallel series of lines, hatching, that he borrowed from African art, the face that is full front and profile at the same time, the eyes one above the other …several of these figures very strongly reminded me of the portraits of his infant daughter Maya done many years before.

What I do sense strongly and what I have only sensed slightly in his other work is the desperation that drove him, his manic insistence to “get the work done”. But with an unending stream of creativity flowing through him and from him, the work would never have been completed even if he had lived to be 200.

In that desperation can be sensed as well a sense of frustration and rage: “I can’t get beyond this!” These painting, seen in a former industrial space with its hard white walls and its cement floor, have the hardness of the wall against which he hurled himself …repeatedly …and always with the same frustrating result: stasis. There is no breakthrough comparable to cubism and little that inspires as did his referencing African art or the early Iberian figures. These are wonderful paintings and some of them might well be great paintings …two awesome self portraits and a painting of a young boy on the beach in particular … but the frustration of that stasis is reiterated from one to the others of them overall.

Picasso is a master draftsman and the exhibition reconfirms this. Because of the dominance of line in the paintings, these are essentially drawings in oil on canvass, the approximately 60 paintings and 80 drawings can be understood as an exhibition of 140 drawings.

The making of lines seems to me to have been Picasso’s great love. Considering the vast number of his works, I think it is not far off the mark to suggest that his was a compulsion. In these paintings, drawings, and etchings, the line is dominant, every plane and form has been minimized or eliminated. There is no deep picture space; the activity in every one of these works is restricted to the surface, to the picture plane. Color seems very secondary as well as if a palette had been chosen arbitrarily or at random and where the sometimes resulting muddle of color has obscured the line Picasso often restated the line and most often very emphatically.

It is also readily apparent that he could look at a blank surface and begin a painting at once, almost simultaneously as the concept presented itself to him. There is no sense that there were ideas jotted down in a notebook or that there were preliminary or color sketches. Each of these paintings has the sense of their having been conceptualized and executed within a matter of minutes or hours. Spontaneity is the strongest impression here just as it is in the late work of other masters …Goya …Rembrandt …where the shorthand of a slash of color could sum up the lifetime experience of painting. For a man his age it is remarkable that there are no mistakes or wrong turns although there is evidence that many areas were painted over or rubbed out. Each of these paintings is a complete and finished work: each is the work of a master: each is as good as the work he had done during the previous seventy years.

Seeing these paintings I was reminded of the exhibition at the Frick Museum a few years ago, The Last Works of Goya, especially the drawings that he made using a conte crayon. Rarely have I felt so strongly an artist’s pleasure in and love of his life long involvement with drawing, although I have experienced that same love of drawing in the Vollard Suite. By contrast these last works of Picasso read as all work. Hard work. There is little sense that he took pleasure in making them. It is as if he had addressed not us, the viewers, but his God. I sense in these a violent protest of his mortality: whatever life gave him in his 90 years, it was not enough.

Despite what I feel is their lack of an expression of his sentiments within some of these works, as individual paintings each contains those elements that make me continue to see them as visual poetry. But seen as a group these works are an expression of his rage against the dying of the light. Certainly that is some kind of poetry!

In the twentieth century art world there was much hype but only a few masters. Let’s face it: Picasso was the preeminent master. To see any of his work in large numbers is always an inspiring occasion. This is an excellent exhibition of remarkable paintings in a wonderful gallery space and there is no need to invent for them virtues beyond their observable achievements. To the end the man was the master: period.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2009-03-26_pablo-picasso/