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/