This exhibition is
in two parts: one uptown and one downtown. I have seen only the downtown
section.
Some persons must
always be living with someone; other persons must always live alone. Picasso is
definitely in the former group while the latter describes me very well: not
only can I not understand why anyone who had been married once would want to be
married twice, I do not even like having a guest stay too long after dinner.
Picasso was 75 when he met Jacqueline, then 25 five. It is easy to understand
why he would be attracted to such a young woman; she had a European beauty
similar to that of Irene Pappas, or Anouk Amie, she was an anima figure, an
archetype. However; I am 75 and I personally would find it a complete turnoff
to be in the company of someone, in comparison to my life experience, so
inexperienced, uneducated, and naive. Perhaps he, by contrast, needed that.
The
exhibition is subtitled The Evolution of Style, in other words Jacqueline, we are
told, gave him a new, late in life burst of creativity and achievement. I must
confess I did not see it. As per usual with a new muse, Picasso first used her
as a model for some very common, though excellent, representational portraits.
Before long he distorted and displaced the features in what became, in this
case, a rather standard repertoire of modernist drawings …this is not to say
that they are not good drawings but that they are, for Picasso, common …the
usual thing. In fact the first modernist efforts are two portraits, one from
1955, Jacqueline in Turkish Costume, and the other from 1956, Woman by a
Window, and they both look to be Matisse inspired works, perhaps each an homage
to the older man, recently deceased.
As for the
suggested development of style, Picasso was so adept at working first in one
style and then another, that there really doesn’t seem to be anything new here.
In fact, it was commonly held that late in life he was merely repeating himself
and the evidence here suggests that this
was a correct assessment. The evidence from the exhibition, Picasso and the
Mosqueteros, at the Gagosian in 2007, however, disproved it. Perhaps the moral
of this tale is that Jacqueline, while generating a lot of paintings, offered
nothing to help him advance the boundaries of modern art.
The
one example of a really great painting here is the Woman of Algiers from the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This one gallery in the exhibition is
filled with examples of Picasso’s efforts to make something modern of this
Delacroix icon. After many starts and stops and shiftings from one medium to
another, often merely retracing what he had previously wrought, rather than
build something as the drawings to Demoiselle or Guernica show us, he at one moment lays out a
painting on a canvas with all the style and finish of the modern master Pablo
Picasso. Indeed, it looks like the most successful of this lot of efforts
because it is such a familiar Picasso effort. We feel that we have come home.
As
regards the paintings in this exhibition they are like the Mosqueteros,
drawings in oil on canvas. But here the palette is more limited than in those
other paintings. Here there are rarely more than three colors and the predominant
colors seem to be black and gray and white. On occasion another color, blue, or
pink, or green might be laid on to fill a white space, but never to define
form, one of the most pleasing being Seated Woman, September 14, 1974, in black
and gray and Naples yellow. (Yes, Picasso and Jacqueline were together twenty
years!) In fact in all of these paintings the three elements, color, line, and
form, are changed to color (very limited), line, (in full majestic sweep), and
shape, smack dab flat on the surface.
It
is always wonderful to see more of Picasso’s work.
No comments:
Post a Comment