Picasso and Marie-Therese. At The Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

Leaving the Picasso Museum in Paris after my visit in 1986, I was overwhelmed by the shocking evidence that the man hated women. I could not recall having seen art works that so successfully expressed an artist’s feelings for his subject…with the exception, perhaps, of Guernica, which always greatly disturbed me as well whenever I saw it at MOMA. The impact of those feeling were so strong that that Paris visit turned me off his works for many years. It was not until 2005 when I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, looking at his etchings from the Vollard Suite, where I fell madly in love with his love of drawing, that I began to give him some reconsideration.

Leaving the Gasgosian Gallery after seeing this exhibition, I had an exactly opposite response: I have never known Picasso, or anyone else for that matter, who has made so many loving portraits of one particular woman. It seems inconceivable that a man could express his feeling for another person so nakedly and so publically. And what is so odd is that from the John Richardson biography I know that this was indeed a very strange and perhaps very unpleasant relationship throughout its history. Richardson’s written evidence to the contrary, these paintings indicate that Marie Therese might very well have been the only woman Picasso ever really loved. You have to go back to the Fernande era to see anything similar.

To refresh your memory, Picasso met Marie Therese in the streets in Paris when he was a successful 45 or 49 and she was, or was pushing, 18. He said to her: “I am Picasso.” Her reply was wordless and blank: the name had never crossed her mind. Marie was a large, strapping, blond German girl, Picasso a short, five foot four, Spaniard. He immediately set her up in her own apartment where he kept her for many, many years. According to the sources this was a boisterously physical and purely sexual relationship. Keeping her always at hand but always in a separate dwelling, introducing her to none of his friends, Marie Therese overlapped his wife Olga, his mistresses Dora Maar and Francoise Gilot, and lost place only with the arrival of Jacqueline Roque. MT was the mother of their daughter, Maya.

During the last several years that I have been giving Picasso’s work a lot of renewed attention, I have been awestruck by his ability to walk up to a blank canvas and with seemingly no preparation or forethought, take bush loads of paint and whip out a masterpiece. The Clouzot film, The Mystery of Picasso, available on Netflix, shows you exactly what I mean. Beginning with a simple line, the man sees something that he allows to draw him in and as the spontaneous work progresses, he corrects and changes until he finally steps back with a fully realized work. I find it uncanny that anyone can do that. Well, I guess that shows us why Picasso is a genius. That process was also seen in Picasso’s Last Paintings, seen at this same gallery two years ago, see below.

To continue the list of contradictions: even though Picasso could be so unpremeditated and so immediate, there are in this exhibition two charcoal drawings that are among the most controlled works Picasso ever produced. The two drawings are very carefully and lovingly made and are respectful of both the subject and the medium. They are among the best portraits any artist ever produced.

And whereas in his usual slap dash painting style of wet color over wet color he  seems to be totally indifferent to the choice of those colors, there is a small, elegant still life,1936, also carefully executed, in the most specifically chosen and harmonious hues. If nothing else the man is a contradiction and I suspect that it is the element of the lurking unexpected that infuses all of his work with excitement. If further evidence is wanted, there is in this exhibition a primed canvas over which has been laid a charcoal drawing of Marie Therese. That’s it. That’s all. He saw a finished work and walked away from it.

In another a thick impasto of white paint has been smeared over the surface of the ground and, using a pointed object, the drawing has been incised into the impasto.

And in yet another the canvas has a charcoal drawing on a white ground that has been wiped out and another drawn over it. That too is it: nothing more is needed to express what he felt at that time. Now, perhaps that is a part of his genius: he knew when to stop, which would imply that he knew what he had done.

As in the Last Paintings there is in these paintings as well strong indications that for Picasso, who so loved the act of drawing, the concept of the painting as a drawing in oil on canvas. Once again his bold freely drawn black lines have been stated and, when lost, restated. There is some exploration in which each of the lines is drawn in a different color, an idea I and I am sure other artists have had. Picasso tried it several times and gave it up. Yes, it doesn’t work except as an experiment.

In only one of the painting have the shapes been allowed to touch without there being any lines around them, or elsewhere in the painting at all. After that one attempt, they returned: Picasso loved drawing, he loved those lines.

In looking at the work of various artists over the years it is interesting how one becomes attuned to the interests of the artists. When considering his use of the plastic elements it can be seen that for Cezanne he ranked their importance as …color color color, form …line. In Diego Rivera we see form form form, color …line. But In Picasso it is all line line line line, color …and sometimes form.

Most of these paintings are labeled as privately owned. There is one from the Metropolitan Museum, one from MOMA, one from Philadelphia, and a pen and ink drawing, featuring Picasso at his most slap dash, spontaneous, and manic best, from the Morgan Library.

What I noticed missing however was any sample from the Vollard Suite, The Artist and his Model. MT was that model. But over the past few years we have had more than ample opportunity to see the Suite in all of the other Picasso exhibitions, see the several entries below, so much so that it might have been thought to be unnecessary this time around. But what we have in the paintings, most of which the public has never seen before, that is so prominent in all of those etchings are the flowers, the little vases of flowers here and there and the garlands of flowers that encircle her head. And as in the etching where she is almost always nude, here she is also nude or almost nude and in almost every one of these paintings the circle of her breast is a recurring motif…the circle of her breast, her athletic body …and her watching eye. That eye speaks volumes.

Finally, the written record suggests that in their relationship Picasso envisioned himself as MT’s lord and master, he gave himself the role of the demanding and dominant personality. However: the pictorial evidence is quite the contrary: as you walk through these galleries you have a very real sense of this being a temple and of these paintings as being an homage to a goddess. Clearly, as his muse, as the eternal feminine spirit, Marie-Therese lived beyond his reach. And I think he knew that: that eye speaks volumes…and he painted it again and again and walked away from a finished painting every time. She must have driven him to a frenzy of frustrated egotism.

This lovely, lovely exhibition has been extended to July 15^th. Don’t miss it.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011-04-14_picasso-and-marie-thrse/

Louis I. Kahn: Building a View. Lori Bookstein Fine Art Gallery, NYC.

The story is told that when Mr. Kaufman called to say that he was on his way from Chicago to Taliesin, a trip of about five hours, to see the designs and drawings for the house he had commissioned in Pennsylvania about eighteen months earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright asked a colleague to bring him paper and his colored pencils whereupon he then sat down at his desk and drew out the design of what was to become Fallingwater, completing it just as Mr. Kaufman walked through the door. “Ah, Mr. Kaufman,” Mr. Wright is said to have exclaimed, laying down his pencil, “we’ve been waiting for you.” Other projects from the Wright studios had finished drawings at different times in the design process, some early, some somewhat late…but perhaps none with such a good story attached to them. But whatever the project, it was not always a given that the drawings would have been from the hand of Mr. Wright himself. Every architectural firm has a staff, Cesar Pelli suggests that a staff of 100 is a good size for most firms doing corporate work and large public projects, and on each staff there are three of four persons whose job it is to make the architectural drawings which sell the projects to the clients. But what is a given is that every architectural firm has a consistent style in its presentational drawings.

How that style is achieved and established has everything to do with the man whose name is on the door. Just as that man’s sense of architectural excellence achieves a personal idiom during the years of his apprenticeship so the renderings must be correlative to that personal take: there must be a consistency of style from rendering to completed edifice. In addition the drawings must achieve what all good drawings achieve and that is they must read as expressive form…as understood by that architect.

Now, it might seem unfair to hire an artist and ask him or her to make drawings in a particular style, rather than to display their mastery and to express themselves, but every artist academically trained has mastered the classical styles, a variety of styles, and they accept the work knowing that they will be working for that particular architect and in his personal voice.

As to how the architect achieved that style we must go to the archives.

About four years ago I visited the Architectural Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I am fascinated by the concept of the architectural museum: as you cannot bring buildings into a gallery which parts do you feature and how do you determine which of the parts are most expressive of the whole? The immediate and obvious answer is that you select from the drawings and the models. And the museum in the Frank Furness designed Fisher Library has the Kahn drawings and the models and it is a wonderful experience to see them face to face. But you must keep in mind that the models were made by model makers often off the premises and the drawings were possibly made by the members of the staff.

Drawn to scale the drawings were impressively large, about three by five or six feet if not larger. But more impressive was the draughtsmanship. Done, many of them, surprisingly, in charcoal, they displayed an absolutely fluid mastery of drawing. Tonal values were rendered not with hatching and cross hatching but with a freely drawn waving line. Encountered as stand alone drawings each not only elucidated the project at hand, each expressed the poetry of the concept. In fact, they were so eloquent of their love of drawing that I realized immediately that they had been made, if not by Louis Kahn, then to his specific instructions. If so, not only was he a great draughtsman, he understood great drawing and how to instruct someone to achieve it. He had, as Moholy Nagy called it, visual literacy.

This exhibition at the Lori Bookstein gallery, which I saw this past week, has a very nice overview of Louis Kahn’s development as a draughtsman. There are two strictly academic drawings of buildings of a historic period, the kind of tedious work every young student must master at the academy, there is one pen and ink drawing of California houses that is an out and out reference to Rembrandt’s villagescapes, and there are works that reference drawing styles, the southwestern desertscapes and New England seascapes, fashionably current in the years they were made. There are two drawings made in Italy, in charcoal or conte, which show Louis Kahn mastering the descriptive stroke. Obviously Louis Kahn was a well informed man of his day and unafraid to work in a variety of styles on his way to being able to expressing his ideas freely in his own hand.

While none of these drawings show us that moment when he made the transition from drawing like another artist, or artists, to making Louis Kahn drawings, and I suppose those are buried more deeply in the archives, what does becomes evident while looking at these drawings is that Mr. Kahn loved drawing, the physical act of drawing. I have had the same response while looking at the work of Goya, Rembrandt, and Picasso.

It is also evident that he was a colorist, that the drawings achieve their effect through the use of color, and that he loved color, and I felt somewhat sad thinking that he rarely used such colors in his buildings as he did here. I am a firm believer that architecture could be done in colors other than the colors of natural building materials. Fine art requires a mastery of the three plastic elements, color, line, and form, and I see no reason why a great architect could not work with color to create forms harmonious with their environment. But of course the corporate world, the play it safe conservative client, has the last word in modern architecture. It is regrettable that the example of Luis Barragon or Richardo Legorreta cannot find an enthusiast in this country. As Louis Kahn so loved color I wonder if hidden in the archives there might not be something of this nature, some kind of sketch pad musing, something like Frank Lloyd Wright’s original concept for the Guggenheim Museum rendered in lobster pink. Yes, well, perhaps that was not such a great idea. Then again…

Unfortunately this exhibition has closed but the on line exhibition is here:

http://www.loribooksteinfineart.com/exhibit_artwork.php?pageNum_exhibit=0&totalRows_exhibit=17&id=160

See good old Wikipedia to refresh your memory of Louis Kahn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn

Sketch for the Kimbell Art Museum:

http://www.design.upenn.edu/archives/majorcollections/kahn/kimbell3.gif



Revolutionary Film Posters Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constuctivism 1920 -1933 The Tony Shafrazi Gallery NYC.

American museums have all become so look alike and all show such similar works by the same small handful of artists, all of whom apparently knew how to Make Money in the best free market sense, that it is absolutely refreshing to go to the art galleries and to see things that have limited commercial value and that are hardly ever seen under the strictures of corporate America sponsorship. This exhibition of Soviet film posters is a good example of what I mean. I suppose that in a more liberal era we might once have seen these at MOMA, but certainly not in this current climate so rigidly proscribed by lock step Reagan Republicanism. So much for the GOP claim that it is the one true and only path to freedom of expression.

In the standard American museum, and in most of the really commercially successful galleries, each art work is placed one in each vertical unit of space …unlike the old style museums in which the massive paintings were “skied”, or splattered over the whole surface of the walls. Here most of these very large posters are hung in pairs, one above the other, on all four walls of each of the two galleries (there are fifty in each room …Count them 50!). The effect is overwhelming but, frankly, my dear, I don’t mind being overwhelmed by art. Add to that that the style is dynamic, bold, and in your face, meant to grab your attention and to encourage your participation, and you have a gallery going experience through which it is impossible to drift along in a somnambulist state or to chit chat merrily with your cousin Betty who is in town visiting from Louisville. (“This one’s nice. Oh I know a wonderful place where we can have lunch!”)

If that style, the Russian constructivists school of thought, is successful at capturing the essence of each of these films, none of which I have seen outside the Harold Lloyds, the Buster Keatons, and the Eisenstein classics, I could not say. But I have my doubts. The poster for Buster Keaton’s The General shows us Keaton twice against on an all-over ground of small steam engines and suggests a benign working class drama about what might be a pair of twins who work in a toy factory. Others so blatantly promise studio manufactured modern day horror, chills, and thrills that, when one recalls that these were Party agenda docudramas, it could be surmised that the Soviet film industry was the Fox News of its day.

As regards the aesthetic, I find most of these designs too self consciously constructed, as in nearly synonymous with contrived. It is almost as if these were the result of an ongoing art school project in which the search for a unique style lead down many interesting dead end streets. In fact the dread “interesting” is about as attention commanding as the individual posters become. Nothing is completely “outrageous”, nothing is “magnificent”, nothing is “beautiful”, nothing really “sings”. There’s never the sense in any of these that the perfect concept has been married to line, form, and color resulting in the expression of a sentiment for the subject (the film). And while the aesthetic is “interesting” I did not find it in any way inspiring. I was most favorably impressed with #84, Living Corpse. It is more Baus Haus than constructivist and I’m afraid that was my prejudice going in. I suspect that the design has nothing to do with the film. Furthermore, even though it’s a nice design, but it didn’t induce me to want to see the film: there is a decided sense that each was a separate entity.

In fact, none of them induced me to want to see any of these films. So have they done their work? No, they haven’t.

As for their all being of a specific style, an objection I could imagine being raised by those who continue to view the dead Soviet world as the still viable evil empire and who denounce it as the command post of conformity, I have only to remember that when I was growing up in the 50’s it was a simple matter to know which studio, Fox, MGM, Warners, etc, produced the proffered film simply by looking at the one sheets: every studio had it own aesthetic yet none of them too very much different for their time. It wasn’t until the demise of the studio system in the late fifties that each film, produced independently, had a poster with an individuated design: I still remember being jolted out of my childhood movie going reverie by the art work for The Man with the Golden Arm. More than that, it was one of those events that awakened me to “art”.

All of the posters appear to be in mint condition and I assume none of them is a reproduction although there are reproductions of some of them for sale. They are lithographs and as that is beyond my area of interest or expertise, I’ll not go on about it.

Typical of galleries in our time each poster has a very heavy bevel cut matte and is glazed in a swank black museum style frame. As the posters are all so similar stylistically, this repetition in the presentation is, I suppose, laudatory. However, I wondered, sitting there, if it might not be wonderful to see an exhibition of skied art works in which all the mattes were in a different material, all of the frames riotously colored, and all of the art works in different styles, a field of chaos that referenced the heavens above our heads. This union of two conformities saddened me with the realization that in eighty years the political pendulum has swung from one kind of conformity to its polar opposite and all the while the human race appears to be content in being merely a huddled mass of dispassionate spectators.

Ralph Waldo Emerson; wherefore art thou?

On the left of this page is an “images” link where you can see these posters.    

http://www.tonyshafrazigallery.com/index.php?mode=current&object_id=206&view=pressrelease