Before I am misunderstood let me say that this is an excellent exhibition and I would think that any serious Picasso student would want to see it. It is well worth the trouble of getting there. The Frick is one of the loveliest of art venues in New York and over the years I have maintained my fondest for it. But… There are issues here that I think are worth making a public consideration.
This exhibition raises questions which are more about exhibitions than about the art works. I think we assume that every exhibition has an appeal to the lay public and a separate appeal to connoisseurs, to scholars, or to those who work within the art world. It is likely that as each exhibition is designed thought is given to all those audiences and that efforts are made to find a happy balance amongst them. While that is my assumption I have to say that in the galleries I most often feel that I am surrounded by laymen. Very, very few of the visitors spend more than a few seconds with each art work, the statistical average is thirty seconds, and I have rarely seen two persons conferring about a work who give the impression that they are scholars or art world professionals. Perhaps that elite audience has different hours.
Those thoughts come to mind in this exhibition because it includes so many works that are working drawings, musings, and half finished experiments rather than bravura finished works. As per the title, Reinventing Tradition, we see that Picasso was not a magician, as he sometimes claimed to be, but that he labored over his efforts and we have a better sense of the time quotient in his time line of accomplishment. That should come as sheer delight to scholars who have the opportunity to study rarely seen examples of process in the important stages of his development: one catalogue item is described as never having been exhibited to the public. But I wonder if the lay public, without having read the catalogue and without the aid of the head set guided tour, understand exactly what they are seeing or if they might not think that, as they might have long suspected, Picasso wasn’t always all that good after all.
This exhibition runs the risk of appealing primarily to the specialists. I wondered: Should an exhibition be too unbalanced in favor of the scholars, et al, would there be a risk of alienating the layman and thereby reducing the potential audience for future exhibitions? And that in turn raises the question: would that be a bad thing?
A gallery for what is hoped will be a “big ticket” show should be easily accessible to a large and disparate audience. As most gallery visitors appear to me to be retired senior citizen, elevators and instant access to rest rooms are a must. I would like to suggest that the cellar of a Fifth Avenue mansion is probably not the ideal space to have “big ticket” exhibitions of art works on paper. Unless it is well hidden there is no elevator in the Frick and one must descend and ascend a long curving staircase. There is to my knowledge no restroom on this floor. But more importantly, there needs to be a better system of climate control than provided in these rooms.
On a cool autumn day I arrived at the museum upon the stroke of noon, as per the time stamp on my ticket, and after about thirty minutes downstairs in rooms that were far too overcrowded, perspiration was running down my face. The room was so hot and humid I could hardly breathe. Now: is that good for the art work? It’s certainly not good for seeing them. I have seen in these rooms as well the Late Goya and the Rembrandt exhibitions and suffered nearly the same heat.
Seeking relief I went upstairs to find a quiet, uncrowded space and to my astonishment found that the entire museum was filled to brimming with milling hordes. I remember the Frick from fifty years ago and recall that I loved it because it was a quiet to the point of solemn home in which one could ramble at will without being jostled by overexcited tourists. Because of the crowds I have given up going to MOMA, which I now consider as merely an extension of Times Square, and if The Met, which I also recall as a wonderful once deserted out of the way space, gets any more congested I may have to give that up too. Hence my next question: is all this foot traffic necessary?
What is the reason for all this foot traffic?
I have often suspected that it has to do with the corporate take over of America, including the art institutions on whose boards the captains of the corporate world sit, and the need on the part of management, answerable to said boards of directors, to prove to the businessmen that, yes, an art institution can turn a profit, even though it has nonprofit status, and to pay its own way. Is the Republican worldview, Making Money, the proper yardstick for measuring the success of museum offerings?
It is my understanding that a person is wanted on a board of directors because of their access to both money and privately held art works. Once they are onboard, I am certain that they in turn make demands on the institution. But when does this relationship begin to be a liability rather than a dividend? When do the expanded programs made possible by corporate donors create an unwieldy infrastructure that changes the character of the organization and deter it from its established mission? When do the physical plant and the artworks in custody begin to suffer physically from the too constant and too large audience? Doesn’t the incessant foot traffic lead to an endless round of expansions and renovations?
At times it seems as if the much vaunted Conservative talking point, competition, might be the culprit. But what benefit accrues from competition among museums for the largest numbers of visitors? Free publicity in The New York Times? …Five Hundred Thousand Visitors Establish new Record at the Met! Or is it, as in the corporate world, competition with a goal of winning just for the sake of winning, an endless Pyrrhic game of one-upmanship? Or do those record numbers attract the corporate powers that can bring even more loot to the table? Yet another vicious cycle!
I suppose it’s good for the convention and visitors bureaux to be able to rely on cultural institutions to augment the host city’s offerings, but I wonder if they need to play such a primary part. Viewing art was once considered a quiet and contemplative activity. Viewing art elicits two questions: what is expressed? What is experienced? If the art cannot be seen that process is disrupted. Lately it seems to have become an overly boisterous athletic race to the finish. At the end of the day the tourist can tick off his list of accomplishments: I saw this and this and this and this. And then the question becomes: yes, you looked at many things, but what did you actually see?
The problem of a too large audience is extremely obvious at the Frick which has a fixed collection with a fixed presentation. In order to fit in special exhibitions alternatives spaces have to be found. Many years ago special exhibitions were mounted in the East and Oval Galleries. That would certainly be a wrong choice for a “big ticket” show today. By contrast, The Morgan Library has never had a fixed presentation and they are at liberty to book special exhibitions and to hang them in whatever gallery they think best. But what is missing now at the Morgan, aside from the actual library, is any sense of a permanent collection. Now the Morgan is like an empty Broadway theatre that merely books shows.
Over the years, going to a museum has become a less pleasant experience than it once was. I would hate to think that it is only because over the years I have become old and cranky. In my defense and as I have tried to indicate, I believe the evidence of the problems lies elsewhere. Something, on the part of museums, has to be done. For myself I have taken to going to commercial art galleries and if you’ve never seen art works these past twenty or thirty years in quiet, large, deserted rooms, you have no idea how wonderful that can be. Unless the artist is Picasso.
Well, yes, perhaps problem is Picasso. He certainly packs them in. This is the eighth large Picasso exhibition I’ve seen in the last three or four years and every one of them have been jammed. What other artist could sustain that number of visitors to that number of shows and likely be building larger audiences with each succeeding exhibition?
And why now? Has the lay public who longs for bucolic scenes with deer grazing beside sky blue lakes finally thrown in the towel and decided that he is here to stay? Have they accepted the truth at last that modern art is not a passing phase and that they had better start to understand it by going back to the source? Has it dawned on them that although there are acknowledged Picasso masterpieces to be seen daily in any number of museums, in each new exhibition there are as well rarely seen masterpieces coming out of an endless number of closets? Has the staggering evidence of the sheer magnitude of his achievement finally cowed everyone into submission?
The sheer magnitude of his achievement. I can sit here and imagine any number of future Picasso exhibitions. This one is showing us only 60 (67 total in the two venues) drawings from his first thirty years. Yet to come are the second thirty years, the last twenty years, Guernica Revisited, the drawings for Guernica, the weeping women, the pottery, the sculpture …the early, the middle, and the late periods, the shaped and the assembled from found objects…as well as the drawings for same, the portraits, the children, the landscapes, the bull fights, the still life’s …it is conceivable that there will never be a time when a Picasso exhibition is not on view or in the planning stages. (In January the Guggenheim will present Picasso in Black and White.) And once the full cycle is completed I’m certain there will be new audiences wanting to see them repeated from the beginning.
I highly recommend this exhibition. It begins with an accomplished drawing from a cast by a nine year old wunderkind and carries on through a drawing quoting Ingres in graphite: Madame Georges Wildenstein. In the catalogue that drawing is compared to the Ingres drawing of Madame Louis-Nicolas Marie Destouches, in the collection of the Louvre which, by some great fortunate ordering of things, is presently on view at the Morgan Library offering the art lover the opportunity to compare the two side by side with the interstice of but 35 city blocks.
If, amongst this demonstration of the man at work, you should want masterpieces, they are to be had. On the main floor in what is referred to at the Frick as The Cabinet, (I love museum nomenclature!) you will find a series of portraits of women in pastel …yes he was a master as well in pastel …and in gouache, pen and ink, pencil, graphite, charcoal, etc, etc, etc …portraits in pastel and among them Two Women in Hats in which the light within the work shimmers above the surface of the paper. Indeed. He was a magician!
Then there is Pierrot and Harlequin, Sleeping Peasants, Two Dancers, etc, etc, etc. But I ramble.
I recommend getting the catalogue and reading it before seeing the exhibition. The making of each work is well documented and they are often shown with the works of those artists who inspired Picasso. But I especially recommend that when you go that you be at the door at 10:00AM when they open. For some reason the New York museumgoer does not appear at the Frick until closer to lunchtime. And then it’s every man for himself…especially those with the head sets. Exercise caution when you pass near those people because, believe me, they won’t: they are all alone like babes lost in cyberspace. Multiply that by 100 head sets in two small rooms and I think you will see what I am getting at.
Why the august Frick Collection wants to participate in this museum madness is a mystery to me.
All of the works in this exhibition can be seen in the museum’s online gallery. If you can’t make it to the actual site this and the catalogue are good second choices. But keep in mind that there is nothing like seeing them from the same distance as the man who made them. Photographs of drawings and digital reproductions can show you an image but it cannot convey the experience of seeing a work face to face. Up close one can see and almost feel the texture of the ground and the texture and patina of the medium, the powdery softness of the pastel and the rich flat mural like hardness of the gouache. Reproductions do not have the intimacy of the actual works: knowing Picasso on an intimate basis is an incomparable experience.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/picasso/works.htm
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