Looking at some Cezanne drawings can be an interesting but a painful experience. Often he has a very tentative touch with a crimped and adolescent result. He seems incapable of establishing contours or proportions. Having seen last year in this same museum many hundreds of Picasso drawings, and having seen last month at the Frick Collection sixty some Rembrandt drawings and etchings, as well as some knock out Goya drawings there four years ago, I realize that Cezanne is not one of the worlds master draughtsman. However! When it comes to painting Cezanne more than holds his own in the company of those other three gentlemen. And so the moral of the story is that, for all his short comings as a draughtsman, Cezanne is a painter: he achieves his effects through the manipulation of oil paint. And in order to understand his achievement you must look at his work as painting, not as filled in drawings, not as expression with mythic implications, not as anecdote, and not as a dissertation of formal values.
Looking at those paintings it is not always immediately discernable what he was doing or attempting to do. And the longer he painted the more complex his paintings became. Many years ago, one of the first responses his paintings provoked in me was the question: what was his reference?
Among the stories told about him is that of visitors to his home in Provence who had gone walking into the woods where he was known to have painted and who found in the under brush paintings that had displeased him and which he threw away rather than go on with them. Because he painted in a way like no one else it was not immediately evident to me what there was about some paintings that he liked and kept, what there was about some that he did not complete …and there are a great many of his paintings in an unfinished state…and what there was about the paintings that he decided could not be salvaged. What was his standard for making those determinations? What was his reference?
In an effort to understand his work more intimately, I have made copies of two of them, one being the Metropolitan Museum version of The Card Players. What I have tried hard to understand and discern is what he referred to as his modulation of color. Every object has a local color as well as highlights and shadows and color reflected onto it by nearby objects. Rather than light and dark he saw highlights and shadows as warm and cool. Thus: how much can one elucidate the local color and its variants without losing the truth of the local color and the identity of the object? Roger Fry says that it was this fascination with color modulation that inspired Cezanne to make painting after painting.
On yet another level there is the matter of the tonal value of color. Josef Albers has written that the ability to discern similar tonal values among different colors is one of the rarest of all visual skills. Cezanne’s paintings are masterworks of the harmonious interplay of similar and different tonal values. Renoir stated that Cezanne had an infallible eye for color tonal values.
I have also become aware that for Cezanne a painting had a dual perception: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. The careful balance of those two created a sensation of vibration that made the surface of the painting appear to be alive. Further, there is his understanding that the left eye and the right eye saw two different things when they looked at an object and that by restating the contour lines the surface of the painting also began to suggest movement, living form in living space.
A Cezanne painting is essentially a field of colors broken into tiny brush strokes of color. Those strokes are applied side by side creating squares but not tessarea so that the look of a mosaic is avoided. As he worked into wet areas the color applied was changed with each subsequent stroke. When you copy one of his paintings or work in the same method you become aware that the application of those brush loads of color were applied in a rhythmic succession. In some of the early paintings the strokes had a relationship to the contour of the object being depicted, in later paintings the strokes are sometimes all parallel, but in the late paintings the strokes have no relationship to one another or to the contours of the object.
In his last years Cezanne lamented that he had finally found what he had been seeking to understand but that he no longer had sufficient years left to him to make use of it. One aspect of that discovery, as I understand it, was the technique he derived in which strokes of color layered over color could be manipulated to create an exciting field of color through which one can see the depths and the forms within the perception of color. When we see a painting the first thing we see is color: as we look at the world around us, the first thing we see is color. After color there is form and depth. Looking at his unfinished paintings we can see that he worked in a reverse order: depth, form, and color.
Some of those late paintings create the most electrified response in the viewer. After the visitors have seen this exhibition they should go upstairs to the Nineteenth Century European Painting Gallery and see Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, 1902-06. It is a perfect example of his late career achievement. You are dazzled by its surface and then slowly you fall into its depths: it is a sensation of the world but not as you have ever seen the world before.
One quality that all of Cezanne’s paintings have in common is that each of them is first and foremost a painting. There is never a suggestion that the format is a view into another world. The painting is always what we see on the surface of the format. And I think Cezanne is able to make that presence paramount because of his point of departure: his subject matter is never subject matter but always a motif, (he used this word often), for making a painting. He set out to make a painting and what was in front of him was the motive for the organization and development of the picture space. In his mind, all of his paintings are paintings. It was that perception that allowed him to work in all the various genres. And it was that perspective that allowed the painters who followed him to create modern art, the painting as an object in and of itself.
It is rare that a single painter is known as a master of all the various forms. Cezanne is among that rare group. He is known as a still life painter. He is known as a landscape artist. He is known for his portraits of himself, the members of his family, and a few close colleagues. He is known for his paintings using the human figure although those paintings are few and they come late in his life. (I am politely ignoring his earliest work.) And he created one series of paintings that can be referred to as genre paintings, The Card Players. That series of five paintings and some related works that are and that might possibly be studies for the paintings, are the subject of this exhibition.
An introductory gallery exhibits prints and drawings and small paintings of the French and Dutch genre schools showing us examples of the antecedents of these paintings and in the larger gallery there are three of the known five paintings of The Card Player series. There are as well drawings and oil portraits of some of the men who worked in his village or on his estate. Not shown is the Barnes Foundation Card Players: in his will Barnes prohibited his paintings being loaned to other institutions and exhibitions. He also prohibited photographic color reproductions but as reproduction techniques have become more sophisticated the Barnes seems to have been able to disregard that prohibition. (I had hoped that with the Barnes new home currently under construction that painting might have been made available.)That painting is included in the catalogue. Neither is the privately owned Card Players exhibited but it too is included in the catalogue.
There is much hypothesizing, in the catalogue, about the order in which the paintings were made. Lacking any comment or documentation from the artist, scholars and biographers have long contradicted one another as to that order. The Met takes the position that their painting came before the larger but very similar Barnes edition. I disagree. In the Met version all of the clutter in the Barnes edition has been removed …the backgammon board on the table, the shelf with the crockery jar, the gilt picture frame, and the little girl. In the Met version all four of the men are wearing hats and those shapes can be read as a visual rhyme. In the Barnes painting the man in the center is without a hat and the rhyme is broken, to the detriment of the painting. The brush work in the Met version is tighter and more “finished”; in the Barnes edition the brush work is so loose as to suggest that it was only a color sketch, albeit a very large one. The delineation of form in the Barnes version is also less sculptural: all of the forms in that painting have the same degree of development. In the Met version the figures at the table are given a pronounced suggestion of sculptural roundness and the man in the back is allowed to appear distant by giving him less roundness. Finally, the looseness and the clutter in the Barnes painting give it the quality of a rough hewn genre painting but the tightness and lack of clutter in the Met version, the more controlled sense of the brushwork, elevate it above the genre: the painting has the stature of major art, it has greater classical “repose”, it is simply more “monumental”.
I have seen the Barnes Collection and I have seen this painting there and as far as I am concerned it is a poor second to the Met version. I might be prejudiced in this view, however, as I am intimately acquainted with the Met version brush stroke by brush stroke.
The catalogue dates those two paintings to 1890-1892; the other three paintings are dated at 1892-1896. In these three later works there are only two card players. The palette changes as well, the dominant blue with brown and gold has now shifted to brown, gold, and green. The privately owned work is described as the largest of not only these in this series but of almost all of Cezanne’s other works. Again, like the Barnes painting, the brush work seems loose and somewhat meandering. (Perhaps, in the larger format, Cezanne was simply working beyond his comfort zone …his technique simply did not work for him as well at this scale, although I don’t sense that in the Large Bathers in Philadelphia.)
Of the three I would think that the large, privately owned version is the first. Technically it is more closely related to the earlier two paintings and can be seen as a bridge between the two versions whereas we can see very clearly in the Courtauld Gallery and the Musee d’Orsay paintings that Cezanne was working in his very late, post 1896, technique.
As a device to hook the audience in to the scholarly work the museum does, the curators as well seem to be questioning: what was his reference, why did he make this series, his only genre paintings? Several reasons are suggested but I think two of them are the most likely: the situation with his former friend Zola and his desire to create great art for museums.
Emil Zola, Baptistin Baille, and Paul Cezanne were boyhood friends, school fellows in Provence, known as “the three inseparables”. As overly romantic adolescents they dreamed of becoming great poets and of dominating the world of French literature. Zola was the first to graduate and go to Paris where he did indeed become an important figure in Parisian literary and social circles. Baille remained in Provence and became a minor government official. Cezanne made the decision to become a painter.
Through Zola’s encouragement Cezanne went to Paris to study painting but after several attempts to settle there he returned to Provence permanently. Eventually, despite his earlier encouragement, Zola seemed to weary of his old friend’s slow, plodding development and appears to have written him off. (On his part Cezanne, in mid life, began to see his old friend as having become a bourgeoisie.) In his novel, L’Oeuvre, the central character was a failed painter very much as he imagined Cezanne to be. As per his usual custom, he sent Cezanne a copy of that recent work. And as was his usual custom, Cezanne sent him a thank you note. But they never spoke again after that.
The following year, 1887, Zola published the novel Le Terre, a dark view of peasant life in France, and it must have seemed to Cezanne that Zola had betrayed not only his friend but his countrymen as well, the dramatis personae whose influence had contributed to the personality of the man the boy had become.
Cezanne was very familiar with the work of museums, especially the Louvre. He must have known that while there are great still life paintings and great landscape paintings and great portraits, the paintings most often referred to as the great paintings are paintings with the human figure, paintings that comment on the human condition be the subject historical, mythological, or religious. As he was as ambitious for immortality as any other painter, he was watchful for a human subject matter. As he wanted to paint nudes but did not because he was intimidated by nude models, he could turn to those around him, the workers on his estate and the men and women of Provence. I would think that Zola’s two books were a catalyst that set him to work with that material. Choosing a subject that had historic precedence, men at leisure, would relate his work to the works in museums, and summoning all of his energies, Cezanne could produce a great painting, or a series of great paintings, that would very quietly tell the world: Zola was wrong …about his countrymen …and about his former friend.
That all five of these paintings are extant tells us that Cezanne approved of them; they met his standard …so far as I know none of them was found in the underbrush or rolled up in a closet. What then is it about these five paintings, what do they have in common, that tells us that in regard to the artist finding them successful what his reference might have been? Is it that all of the pictorial elements create a harmony, a sense of balance? Is it because each stands on its own as an object in and of itself? Is it because they are as close as he was then able to make them to his personal understanding of the sensations he saw and felt.
Georges Braque said that a landscape depicts the relationship of the viewer to the subject whereas a still life depicts the spatial relationship amongst the objects: a landscape creates a desire to observe, a still life creates a desire to touch. In a Cezanne painting one shares the artist’s feeling for the atmosphere in which those relationships exist. After that time in his early career when Pissarro introduced him to the impressionist aesthetic Cezanne focused his attention on creating light and air …the atmosphere. In each of The Card Players there is an almost palpable sense of atmosphere. I wonder if the creation of that sensation might not have been yet another part of his reference.
If I have any complaint about this exhibition it is that I was promised Cezanne’s Card Players, of which I know that there are five and I am only shown three. What had promised to be a rare experience turned out to be something of a disappointment. It almost seems to be yet another example of museums luring an audience under false pretences. However, I was able to placate myself knowing that I have now seen four of the five and that the corollary paintings, some of which are wonderful, especially Peasant 1890-1892, Privately Owned, (Picasso must have swooned when he first saw this one!) had come from Paris, St Petersburg, London, and Fort Worth. The longer I live the greater the number of paintings I discover Cezanne to have made… to my great delight!
As it stands all of the material together gives us a better understanding of the antecedents and the work that went into making these paintings but the exhibition lacks a sense of eventfulness. Most of the museum going public is bewildered, even today, by Cezanne’s paintings …he is a painter’s painter …and I think that any exhibition of his work should devote a major share of its commentary to training the museum goers’ eyes toward an understanding of the complexities of his work. In the catalogue there is a discussion of his painting but it is not solely focused on his method of painting, rather on his having painted in isolation. I would love to see an exhibition in which, perhaps, photographs show us close up details of isolated areas of his brush work similar to the three examples in this catalogue.
Finally, location is everything, and this small first floor out of the way gallery, which always feels hermetically sealed and airless to me, just off the Greek and Roman galleries, too isolated from the other collections of paintings, enhances the impression that any exhibition here is a minor rather than the major exhibition it might have been.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7b92AB40A5-F3CB-423C-AB19-2B266B9EB362%7d
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Stieglitz,Steichen, Strand At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
An exhibition of the work of these three photographers who were contemporaries and colleagues affords a wonderful opportunity to study that era of photography when the approach shifted from pictorialism to pure photography. When I entered the galleries however I noticed that the visitors were slowly drifting about the room and not stopping to look at any one photograph. Most of them, in fact, wandered in, drifted about, and left the area. Initially I assumed it was because the visitors were senior citizens and reasoned that they had probably seen all these works many times before. However, when I began to look I realized that the exhibition was so badly lit no one could see the photographs, only the glare on the glass from the over head lights. A year ago when I saw the exhibition of Picasso prints in this same museum, there was not one light source reflected in any of those over two hundred works. I assumed then that that was an example of the Met’s high standards. I see now that I was wrong. Apparently the photography department has a different set of standards and the parent body is blind to the results of their efforts. On another level it indicates indifference: the museum will hang the art but you have to do the work and adjust yourself in order to see it. If the photography department truly doesn’t know what good lighting is I would recommend that they speak to the folks who did the Picasso show last year. Another example is even close at hand: if the staff would stroll down Fifth Avenue to 71st Street they would see in the Frick Collection that not one light is reflected in the glass over the sixty-six examples from the Ludt Collection of Rembrandt drawings and prints. (See below.) Good lighting is possible; it simply requires that one have the standards and the will to demand it. Without perfect lighting exhibitions like this are a complete waste of time for all concerned. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7bEC47F3BF-9FEB-444B-BBF6-E81E4748C49F%7d
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Rembrandt and His School. At The Frick Collection, New York City.
When the name Rembrandt comes up in conversation I find that it is not uncommon to hear someone exclaim: “Oh, I love Rembrandt’s drawings!” And if I turned to them and ask what it is that they like about them they will generally answer: “Because they are so wonderful!” If I then ask why they think they are so wonderful that person will look at me as if I were completely ignorant and say: “Well everyone knows he was a great artist.” That kind of commentary tells me nothing about Rembrandt’s drawings but something about the speaker: I strongly suspect he has an acquired opinion; he speaks with conventional wisdom.
From my earliest days I have been suspicious of conventional wisdom and so when I ask these questions, I am not playing the devil’s advocate but seeking enlightenment as to why this artist is so highly regarded by such a large cross section of society. I was a young man new to New York in the 1960’s when the Metropolitan Museum caused a scandal by paying two million dollars for the painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. For over fifty years the allure of that painting has eluded my understanding. Nor have I ever been much impressed by the two galleries of Rembrandt portraits in that same museum: there is a look of sameness ad infinitum about them. Yet when I have taken visitors to the city there they too have rhapsodized about the genius of this Dutchman.
I am initiated in Rembrandt’s technique: when I studied set design we were taught his way with pen and ink and wash as a method for making quick sketches that suggested lighting effects and three dimensional forms. We studied his work from books and plates of reproductions. And while I might have seen some of his drawings at the Morgan Library or the Metropolitan Museum over my years in New York, it was not until I was in Boston, in 2006, at the age of 67, and saw an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, on the occasion of his 400th birthday, that I was aware of experiencing the thrill of seeing them face to face. And one of the things that impressed me most is that they were so small …some of them only two or three by five or seven inches, about the size of a picture post card, but most of them smaller. In a few quick, joyful lines he captured the world as if in a rain drop.
To qualify that awakening I have to admit that I have a preference for the drawings …they are spontaneous, they express the artist’s enthusiastic response to an immediate stimulus, and they show a mastery of technique: pen and ink is his métier. I am less enamored, however, of the etchings. Granted they contain examples of his masterful draughtsmanship but I have always sensed, regardless of who has made them, that etchings are too fussy, over elaborated, precious, somewhat contrived, and made wholly in a spirit of commercial purpose.
This exhibition at the Frick Collection is the result of an occasion that has presented the opportunity for an extended appreciation. The occasion: the Frick’s Rembrandt Self Portrait, at age 52, has just been cleaned and restored and installed in the place of honor with the museum’s two other Rembrandt paintings in the Oval Gallery. The extended appreciation is an exhibit of 10 of the Frick Collection Rembrandt etchings in a small gallery on the main floor and works from the Lugt Collection in two galleries on the lower level.
While I am not enthusiastic about many of Rembrandt’s portraits, I am fascinated by his self portraits. (He made over 90 of them.) In fact one of my very favorite paintings is his self portrait, at age 23, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In that work the young artist looks out at us with quiet dignity, a mixture of temerity and self confidence, and a palpable yearning. He is already a master painter and there is not a flaw in the exquisitely executed work. The surface is smooth overall and the intricate detailing is magnificent. The portrait is a bust, down to the bottom of the rib cage and he appears low in the frame; his eyes are exactly at the centerline across the format. Atop his head of frizzled hair is a cap and standing up from that and arching over him is a large feather. Everything about this portrait is aspiration and ambition. As they say; if you’ve got it, flaunt it!
In the Frick portrait, thirty years later, clearly the man has had his life experiences. He is of course older, he is weathered, he is weary, and he is wiser. This painting is almost twice the size of the earlier work and here he sits high in the format with his body represented down to his knees. His arms spread wide from his torso pressing against the sides of the format. He dominates the format, he dominates the room in which the painting hangs, and he is dominant over us and all he surveys. Painted in the shorthand of the late style wherein a slash of color speaks with specificity and eloquence he lets us know that he is bloodied but unbowed and that he is, through the completion of this masterpiece, still very well able to get on with the profession of which he is the sole living master. Yet in all of this there is a very strong sense of the most profound sorrow in the man.
To the left of this painting is his portrait of Nicolaes Ruts. It was painted two years after the Stewart Gardner self portrait and it affords a wonderful opportunity to study the contrast between his early and late styles. To the right of the self portrait is the well known Polish Rider. Like his Aristotle, I have never been favorably disposed toward this painting, in fact, looking at it in this exhibition I began to wonder if there might not be something amiss in the execution of the horse…but who am I to criticize Rembrandt!
Two paintings across the room were once attributed to Rembrandt. However, now, one of them is known to have been painted by a former Rembrandt student, who was obviously very good to have been mistaken for the master for so long, and the other by an unknown artist. After reading the interpretive remarks the museumgoer can observe the details commented on and by comparing these to Rembrandt’s paintings, one can sharpen the eye.
By showing the two collections of works on paper the museum makes it possible for the viewer to compare the character of two collections. As I have said many times in other places, I am fascinated by small art collections and the character of the collectors that these reveal. Through this exhibition I have the additional ability to compare both of these collections to the works I saw at Harvard in 2006.
Apparently all of the Rembrandt works on paper in the Frick Collection are etchings. Ten of them are shown here. (I believe there are only eleven in the collection.) All of these are larger than the Rembrandt drawings made on his walks through the city and countryside and each of them appears to have been made as a commercial entity, a finish art work.
Most of these are very similar to his pen and ink drawings but with a more finished presentation and somewhat lacking in spontaneity. The stand out, for me, is the Landscape with Three Trees, which reminds me very much of the Harry Callahan photograph of three trees in Chicago …not in the composition but in the existential sense of what is expressed by the artist. And I like as well the Landscape With Three Gabled Cottages. It is close in compositional elements to one of his pen and ink drawings but with more fine detail. By contrast, The Goldweigher’s Field completely loses spontaneity and passes into the realm of the purposefully commercially made object.
Of the works with figures, Christ Preaching (The Hundred Guilder Print) is the most successful at transcending the medium. There is a lovely range of rich tonal values, there is a delightful fluidity in the flow of the lights and darks, and the whole is made interesting through the wonderful choreography of the many persons suggested in the setting. In fact, this presentation of a setting with dramatic lighting is exactly the kind of thing we were taught to emulate in our classes in set design. By contrast the larger Christ Presented to the People is so static in composition and so lacking in tonal values it looks to have been put on the market unfinished.
Comparing this collection to what I remember having seen at the Fogg, that collection had an overall sense of flowing line, spontaneity, and immediacy whereas the Frick etchings are stately, coolly remote, and conservative…safe. I should probably not compare either of those collections to the Lugt Collection: there are only 66 works displayed and I understand from the exhibition catalogue that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Mr. Lugt was only 14 when he first saw a Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898. Excluding the self portrait, the other four paintings in the Oval Room were in that exhibition. From that early age Lugt made himself into a connoisseur and expert and eventually catalogued the Dutch and Flemish works on paper at the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Ecole des Beaux Artes. He became an authority on Rembrandt’s life and work and wrote two biographies. He was a life long collector and amassed a body of over 30,000 works on paper, now in the care of the Fondation Custodia in Paris. He had an almost complete set of Rembrandt prints, of which there are approximately 290 known plates, only 80 of which are extant.
It is evident that the works shown from this collection were carefully chosen to represent a well rounded sample of Rembrandt’s work when seen in company with the Frick holdings. The pen and ink drawings include figure studies, landscapes, portraits, and religious legends. The selected etchings are nine self portraits, and one portrait each of his father, mother, and son Titus. The advertised highlight of the collection is the pen and ink with wash; Interior with Saskia in Bed. And while I responded to this very favorably, the highlight for me was the landscape The Grain Mill on the Bulwark.
All of those works are in the larger of the two downstairs galleries and in the back, smaller gallery there is a selection of works of Rembrandt’s students and contemporaries. (During my visit I was amused to notice that all of the visitors were in the larger room with the Rembrandt works: I had the back room to myself! New Yorkers are such snobs!)
The exhibition catalogue is reasonably priced, it contains reproductions of all the works shown, and the information in the essays greatly enhances an understanding of the individual works and the building of the two collections. I would recommend getting and reading it before going uptown. Also: I arrived at the museum somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 AM. I paid and walked into the galleries. The museum was not overly crowded and I had a very wonderful visit. A few days later I spoke to someone who had seen the exhibition and she said that she had arrived sometime after the lunch hour and that she had to wait in line for almost an hour starting a block away from the door. Forewarned is forewarned.
Built in 1914 in a classic revival style the Frick Museum is successful architecture if the visitor digests the exterior; having done that he will find that there are no surprises inside: as promised all is classical restraint, all is elegance defined, in both the interior of the building and in the collection. However, it is exactly the kind of edifice Louis Sullivan meant when he said that Daniel Burnham had set American architecture back fifty years with his classic revival 1892 Chicago Exposition. It is what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he described revival architecture as a copy of a copy of a copy…a Roman villa is hardly indigenous to New Amsterdam. If the visitor keeps the humor of those observations in mind he can have a pleasant visit: it is a very comfortable space and it is probably the finest art museum in New York City.
Since my last visit four years ago the Frick has done some restoration work in the galleries. I was extremely impressed by the new look in the large, about thirty by eighty feet, West Gallery and especially the new, very deep pile dark emerald green wall to wall carpet on the floor: truly, at the Frick, one walks in the nap of luxury.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/rembrandt/index.htm
The self portrait at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/collection/browse?filter=artist:3151
From my earliest days I have been suspicious of conventional wisdom and so when I ask these questions, I am not playing the devil’s advocate but seeking enlightenment as to why this artist is so highly regarded by such a large cross section of society. I was a young man new to New York in the 1960’s when the Metropolitan Museum caused a scandal by paying two million dollars for the painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. For over fifty years the allure of that painting has eluded my understanding. Nor have I ever been much impressed by the two galleries of Rembrandt portraits in that same museum: there is a look of sameness ad infinitum about them. Yet when I have taken visitors to the city there they too have rhapsodized about the genius of this Dutchman.
I am initiated in Rembrandt’s technique: when I studied set design we were taught his way with pen and ink and wash as a method for making quick sketches that suggested lighting effects and three dimensional forms. We studied his work from books and plates of reproductions. And while I might have seen some of his drawings at the Morgan Library or the Metropolitan Museum over my years in New York, it was not until I was in Boston, in 2006, at the age of 67, and saw an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, on the occasion of his 400th birthday, that I was aware of experiencing the thrill of seeing them face to face. And one of the things that impressed me most is that they were so small …some of them only two or three by five or seven inches, about the size of a picture post card, but most of them smaller. In a few quick, joyful lines he captured the world as if in a rain drop.
To qualify that awakening I have to admit that I have a preference for the drawings …they are spontaneous, they express the artist’s enthusiastic response to an immediate stimulus, and they show a mastery of technique: pen and ink is his métier. I am less enamored, however, of the etchings. Granted they contain examples of his masterful draughtsmanship but I have always sensed, regardless of who has made them, that etchings are too fussy, over elaborated, precious, somewhat contrived, and made wholly in a spirit of commercial purpose.
This exhibition at the Frick Collection is the result of an occasion that has presented the opportunity for an extended appreciation. The occasion: the Frick’s Rembrandt Self Portrait, at age 52, has just been cleaned and restored and installed in the place of honor with the museum’s two other Rembrandt paintings in the Oval Gallery. The extended appreciation is an exhibit of 10 of the Frick Collection Rembrandt etchings in a small gallery on the main floor and works from the Lugt Collection in two galleries on the lower level.
While I am not enthusiastic about many of Rembrandt’s portraits, I am fascinated by his self portraits. (He made over 90 of them.) In fact one of my very favorite paintings is his self portrait, at age 23, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In that work the young artist looks out at us with quiet dignity, a mixture of temerity and self confidence, and a palpable yearning. He is already a master painter and there is not a flaw in the exquisitely executed work. The surface is smooth overall and the intricate detailing is magnificent. The portrait is a bust, down to the bottom of the rib cage and he appears low in the frame; his eyes are exactly at the centerline across the format. Atop his head of frizzled hair is a cap and standing up from that and arching over him is a large feather. Everything about this portrait is aspiration and ambition. As they say; if you’ve got it, flaunt it!
In the Frick portrait, thirty years later, clearly the man has had his life experiences. He is of course older, he is weathered, he is weary, and he is wiser. This painting is almost twice the size of the earlier work and here he sits high in the format with his body represented down to his knees. His arms spread wide from his torso pressing against the sides of the format. He dominates the format, he dominates the room in which the painting hangs, and he is dominant over us and all he surveys. Painted in the shorthand of the late style wherein a slash of color speaks with specificity and eloquence he lets us know that he is bloodied but unbowed and that he is, through the completion of this masterpiece, still very well able to get on with the profession of which he is the sole living master. Yet in all of this there is a very strong sense of the most profound sorrow in the man.
To the left of this painting is his portrait of Nicolaes Ruts. It was painted two years after the Stewart Gardner self portrait and it affords a wonderful opportunity to study the contrast between his early and late styles. To the right of the self portrait is the well known Polish Rider. Like his Aristotle, I have never been favorably disposed toward this painting, in fact, looking at it in this exhibition I began to wonder if there might not be something amiss in the execution of the horse…but who am I to criticize Rembrandt!
Two paintings across the room were once attributed to Rembrandt. However, now, one of them is known to have been painted by a former Rembrandt student, who was obviously very good to have been mistaken for the master for so long, and the other by an unknown artist. After reading the interpretive remarks the museumgoer can observe the details commented on and by comparing these to Rembrandt’s paintings, one can sharpen the eye.
By showing the two collections of works on paper the museum makes it possible for the viewer to compare the character of two collections. As I have said many times in other places, I am fascinated by small art collections and the character of the collectors that these reveal. Through this exhibition I have the additional ability to compare both of these collections to the works I saw at Harvard in 2006.
Apparently all of the Rembrandt works on paper in the Frick Collection are etchings. Ten of them are shown here. (I believe there are only eleven in the collection.) All of these are larger than the Rembrandt drawings made on his walks through the city and countryside and each of them appears to have been made as a commercial entity, a finish art work.
Most of these are very similar to his pen and ink drawings but with a more finished presentation and somewhat lacking in spontaneity. The stand out, for me, is the Landscape with Three Trees, which reminds me very much of the Harry Callahan photograph of three trees in Chicago …not in the composition but in the existential sense of what is expressed by the artist. And I like as well the Landscape With Three Gabled Cottages. It is close in compositional elements to one of his pen and ink drawings but with more fine detail. By contrast, The Goldweigher’s Field completely loses spontaneity and passes into the realm of the purposefully commercially made object.
Of the works with figures, Christ Preaching (The Hundred Guilder Print) is the most successful at transcending the medium. There is a lovely range of rich tonal values, there is a delightful fluidity in the flow of the lights and darks, and the whole is made interesting through the wonderful choreography of the many persons suggested in the setting. In fact, this presentation of a setting with dramatic lighting is exactly the kind of thing we were taught to emulate in our classes in set design. By contrast the larger Christ Presented to the People is so static in composition and so lacking in tonal values it looks to have been put on the market unfinished.
Comparing this collection to what I remember having seen at the Fogg, that collection had an overall sense of flowing line, spontaneity, and immediacy whereas the Frick etchings are stately, coolly remote, and conservative…safe. I should probably not compare either of those collections to the Lugt Collection: there are only 66 works displayed and I understand from the exhibition catalogue that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Mr. Lugt was only 14 when he first saw a Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898. Excluding the self portrait, the other four paintings in the Oval Room were in that exhibition. From that early age Lugt made himself into a connoisseur and expert and eventually catalogued the Dutch and Flemish works on paper at the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Ecole des Beaux Artes. He became an authority on Rembrandt’s life and work and wrote two biographies. He was a life long collector and amassed a body of over 30,000 works on paper, now in the care of the Fondation Custodia in Paris. He had an almost complete set of Rembrandt prints, of which there are approximately 290 known plates, only 80 of which are extant.
It is evident that the works shown from this collection were carefully chosen to represent a well rounded sample of Rembrandt’s work when seen in company with the Frick holdings. The pen and ink drawings include figure studies, landscapes, portraits, and religious legends. The selected etchings are nine self portraits, and one portrait each of his father, mother, and son Titus. The advertised highlight of the collection is the pen and ink with wash; Interior with Saskia in Bed. And while I responded to this very favorably, the highlight for me was the landscape The Grain Mill on the Bulwark.
All of those works are in the larger of the two downstairs galleries and in the back, smaller gallery there is a selection of works of Rembrandt’s students and contemporaries. (During my visit I was amused to notice that all of the visitors were in the larger room with the Rembrandt works: I had the back room to myself! New Yorkers are such snobs!)
The exhibition catalogue is reasonably priced, it contains reproductions of all the works shown, and the information in the essays greatly enhances an understanding of the individual works and the building of the two collections. I would recommend getting and reading it before going uptown. Also: I arrived at the museum somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 AM. I paid and walked into the galleries. The museum was not overly crowded and I had a very wonderful visit. A few days later I spoke to someone who had seen the exhibition and she said that she had arrived sometime after the lunch hour and that she had to wait in line for almost an hour starting a block away from the door. Forewarned is forewarned.
Built in 1914 in a classic revival style the Frick Museum is successful architecture if the visitor digests the exterior; having done that he will find that there are no surprises inside: as promised all is classical restraint, all is elegance defined, in both the interior of the building and in the collection. However, it is exactly the kind of edifice Louis Sullivan meant when he said that Daniel Burnham had set American architecture back fifty years with his classic revival 1892 Chicago Exposition. It is what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he described revival architecture as a copy of a copy of a copy…a Roman villa is hardly indigenous to New Amsterdam. If the visitor keeps the humor of those observations in mind he can have a pleasant visit: it is a very comfortable space and it is probably the finest art museum in New York City.
Since my last visit four years ago the Frick has done some restoration work in the galleries. I was extremely impressed by the new look in the large, about thirty by eighty feet, West Gallery and especially the new, very deep pile dark emerald green wall to wall carpet on the floor: truly, at the Frick, one walks in the nap of luxury.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/rembrandt/index.htm
The self portrait at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/collection/browse?filter=artist:3151
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
John Marin: The Weehawken Sequence. At Meredith Ward Fine Art
For the past several years I have been making a renewed study of twentieth century American modern art and of the various schools I have narrowed my interest onto the Alfred Stieglitz stable of painters: John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler.
What I find so interesting about these painters is that all of them went to Europe at a young age at the beginning of the century and allowed themselves to be influenced by the latest trends there …Fauvism, cubism, and German expressionism, and having absorbed that, returned to America and explored ways in which that sensibility could be used to create an American idiom. I am coming to the understanding that these artists are the very best of twentieth century American painters and that they achieved a truly American art and exactly in the sense that Emerson called for in his essay, The American Scholar, an achievement akin to that of Frank Lloyd Wright who created an American architecture.
John Marin, The Weehawken Sequence, gives a perfect example of their process. Painted on his return from Europe between 1909 and 1912, there are obvious references to the European antecedents named above. Yet there is a real sense of his tenacity in refusing to give up the local or the regional elements either through the exclusive use of local color or in the references to the physical Weehawken waterfront or the Manhattan skyline across the river …or the river itself for that matter.
In all of these paintings it seems that Marin was attempting to comprehend “pure painting” through the use of paint used simply as paint whether it referenced the color of something or as an indication of a geometric volume. He appears to have been confirmed in his effort to use the motif in an effort to create an autonomous visual experience. It is also evident that he had mastered the craft of painting and that he was very able to manipulate the impasto in loose and spontaneous gestures, yet at the same time being able to put it exactly where he wanted it and in the specific way he wanted it to take its place within the format. That mastery, boldness, and fluency recalls in turn the late works of Manet, Rembrandt, Goya, and other European masters.
It is interesting that these paintings were made contemporaneously with the early work of Kandinsky. But where I find that painter’s work to become tiresome with its non-referenced shapes and too intellectually symbolic colors, the local color Marin used and the suggestion of observed shapes and volumes gives them a hook to hold the viewers interest: there might be a bit of Picasso in this as he too refused to forego his references or to lapse into pure abstraction. These paintings predate by many years the work of Hans Hoffman and there is a similarity in their suggestions of volumes and geography, the difference being that Hoffman limited himself to the three primaries and the three secondaries. I agree with Marin: local color is the way to go.
It seems to me that Marin is often best known for his watercolors, which I confess I cannot warm up to …I dislike almost all watercolor except Homer’s. And while there are things I like about some of Marin’s water colors I don’t like them well enough to do the work that appears to be required to better understand them …they look like a lot of work for the viewer. However I have seen some of his late oils when he brought the sensibility of the watercolors back into his oils and I like all of those very much.
These wonderful little paintings, or should I say studies, they are hardly more than en plein aire studies in oil on student painting boards all of them about 9 by 12 inches, will likely motivate me to take the deeper plunge to someday better understand the watercolors; that and my continuing admiration for Alfred Stieglitz who I find over and over again to have had a great comprehension of fine art.
The gallery is small, it is not much more than a 12 by 15 foot reception area, but for these paintings no greater space was needed. And I think it brings once again to our awareness that large is not always best: I’ve begun to think that too many modern American paintings done on the grand scale want us to mistake their size for their importance. Having seen many of those paintings for almost fifty years now their lack of real importance has become increasingly too obvious: many of them now look merely decorative. Small is better and in these paintings small is just perfect.
I was sorry that the exhibition catalogue, in a limited edition of 1500 copies, was sold out. It would make a great addition to any serious art library.
Thanks to the gallery for making this exhibition available and thanks to the New York Times for bringing it to our attention.
The New York Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/arts/design/18galleries-JOHNMARIN_RVW.html?_r=2&ref=design
The Meredith Ward Gallery:
http://www.meredithwardfineart.com/exhibitions.html
If you look at the list of past exhibitions you’ll find that this gallery shows some really wonderful modern American art and in what I would call the Stieglitz tradition. A+.
What I find so interesting about these painters is that all of them went to Europe at a young age at the beginning of the century and allowed themselves to be influenced by the latest trends there …Fauvism, cubism, and German expressionism, and having absorbed that, returned to America and explored ways in which that sensibility could be used to create an American idiom. I am coming to the understanding that these artists are the very best of twentieth century American painters and that they achieved a truly American art and exactly in the sense that Emerson called for in his essay, The American Scholar, an achievement akin to that of Frank Lloyd Wright who created an American architecture.
John Marin, The Weehawken Sequence, gives a perfect example of their process. Painted on his return from Europe between 1909 and 1912, there are obvious references to the European antecedents named above. Yet there is a real sense of his tenacity in refusing to give up the local or the regional elements either through the exclusive use of local color or in the references to the physical Weehawken waterfront or the Manhattan skyline across the river …or the river itself for that matter.
In all of these paintings it seems that Marin was attempting to comprehend “pure painting” through the use of paint used simply as paint whether it referenced the color of something or as an indication of a geometric volume. He appears to have been confirmed in his effort to use the motif in an effort to create an autonomous visual experience. It is also evident that he had mastered the craft of painting and that he was very able to manipulate the impasto in loose and spontaneous gestures, yet at the same time being able to put it exactly where he wanted it and in the specific way he wanted it to take its place within the format. That mastery, boldness, and fluency recalls in turn the late works of Manet, Rembrandt, Goya, and other European masters.
It is interesting that these paintings were made contemporaneously with the early work of Kandinsky. But where I find that painter’s work to become tiresome with its non-referenced shapes and too intellectually symbolic colors, the local color Marin used and the suggestion of observed shapes and volumes gives them a hook to hold the viewers interest: there might be a bit of Picasso in this as he too refused to forego his references or to lapse into pure abstraction. These paintings predate by many years the work of Hans Hoffman and there is a similarity in their suggestions of volumes and geography, the difference being that Hoffman limited himself to the three primaries and the three secondaries. I agree with Marin: local color is the way to go.
It seems to me that Marin is often best known for his watercolors, which I confess I cannot warm up to …I dislike almost all watercolor except Homer’s. And while there are things I like about some of Marin’s water colors I don’t like them well enough to do the work that appears to be required to better understand them …they look like a lot of work for the viewer. However I have seen some of his late oils when he brought the sensibility of the watercolors back into his oils and I like all of those very much.
These wonderful little paintings, or should I say studies, they are hardly more than en plein aire studies in oil on student painting boards all of them about 9 by 12 inches, will likely motivate me to take the deeper plunge to someday better understand the watercolors; that and my continuing admiration for Alfred Stieglitz who I find over and over again to have had a great comprehension of fine art.
The gallery is small, it is not much more than a 12 by 15 foot reception area, but for these paintings no greater space was needed. And I think it brings once again to our awareness that large is not always best: I’ve begun to think that too many modern American paintings done on the grand scale want us to mistake their size for their importance. Having seen many of those paintings for almost fifty years now their lack of real importance has become increasingly too obvious: many of them now look merely decorative. Small is better and in these paintings small is just perfect.
I was sorry that the exhibition catalogue, in a limited edition of 1500 copies, was sold out. It would make a great addition to any serious art library.
Thanks to the gallery for making this exhibition available and thanks to the New York Times for bringing it to our attention.
The New York Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/arts/design/18galleries-JOHNMARIN_RVW.html?_r=2&ref=design
The Meredith Ward Gallery:
http://www.meredithwardfineart.com/exhibitions.html
If you look at the list of past exhibitions you’ll find that this gallery shows some really wonderful modern American art and in what I would call the Stieglitz tradition. A+.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
Note: I have now seen all four of the current Picasso exhibitions and they are posted here in the reverse order in which I saw them, that having to do with the order in which they were written and posted. I believe they will make sense if read in this order. gm.
Many years ago I realized that one could get some kind of education in the arts by attending museum lectures and while I have always thought that that was a very good idea, when I saw the announcement for the series of three Picasso lectures accompanying this exhibition, I realized that in fifty years of visiting the Met I had never once stepped into the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. (My road to hell is otherwise handsomely paved as well.) Because I am so curious at present about the works of Picasso I decided to order tickets at once.
Recently I found the Met Museum page on You Tube and so I wondered if I might not be paying good money for something I could see for free on the internet, but as an old theatergoer I know that there is a difference between seeing something “live” and something on tape or film. And in this case there was a big difference. I have seen the speaker, Gary Tinterow, Englehard Chairman of Nineteenth and Twentieth century and Contemporary Art, on some of the You Tube tapes, but seeing him in person was a very different experience. On tape he looks small. (The camera is above him and looking down. Big mistake.). But in person he is large and has a commanding presence. He is also very amiable, he has a rich baritone voice, and he relates in a very professional and personal way to the members of the audience which charm he does not always have when speaking directly to a machine that only stares at him. He is an ideal spokesperson for the museum …the listener feels himself included in the work of the organization.
After the second lecture I bought the catalogue for the exhibition and when I got it home and began reading it I realized that Mr. Tinterow was merely repeating to us, seemingly without notes, the material that it contained. So it then became my hope that he might offer something in the way of an aside or two that would justify the expense and effort of my lecture-going. He did.
I would say that the most exciting moment in these lectures was that time when he first used the word “quotation”. When discussing architecture it is common for repeated and familiar details and forms in new buildings to be spoken of as references or as “quotations” of other and usually earlier works. Yet when discussing Picasso’s work it is most commonly said that he stole ideas from this person or that, theft being inferred as his common coin. Only a year ago I heard a docent at MOMA telling his tour group that Picasso would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. I was livid. Quotation! Quotation! Quotation! Well, bless Gary Tinterow for using the correct language. I hope this becomes standard museum practice …all over town!
He mentioned on two occasions that Picasso was an intellectual and an avid reader and specifically that he read Freud extensively. I would also think that he had read Carl Jung. Picasso makes so many references to classical mythology and to the figures within those mythologies that I would think he was working in his own way with components of the collective unconscious.
He mentioned that Picasso often used classical paintings or drawings as a source for making a new painting, that it merely offered him a starting point for a drawing or painting. That, I think, is an insight that needs to be followed up in regard to Picasso’s work. Yes he did reference or quote other works, as most artists have done, and he did it throughout his lifetime, not just in the series from master paintings he did late in his life. Despite those references he made the work his by working in his own painting vocabulary and by using the source as a means to express his feelings about something. But his is decidedly painting that often originates inside a museum and I am aware of his admiration for Cezanne and of Cezanne’s admonition to painters to get out of the museum and to redo Poussin “from life”. This dichotomy in Picasso’s work …from life/from paintings … is a very good area for future study.
Discussing the works of the young Picasso Gary Tinterow showed slides of the works that had inspired him, works by Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, Gauguin, and Toulouse Lautrec. What he did not mention but which was immediately apparent to me, sitting at a distance in the audience, was that all of those artists had one thing in common, beyond the fact that they were all very popular at that time, an attainment that would not have been lost on the very ambitious young Spaniard: namely, that each made very passive paintings. As a result we can see that same passivity in Picasso’s imitation Lautrec’s, and in his blue and rose period works. It is almost as if the young artist was tentative in all that he did, not quite certain exactly where he wanted to go with his talent. Quoting those particular passive painters gave him breathing space.
I say breathing space because originally when Picasso left Barcelona he had wanted to go to Munich but did not have the money to do so. Munich at that time was where all the action was in regard to modern painting. Paris, though desirable, was his second choice. (In American art see Marsden Hartley). And I say breathing space because of the fact that Picasso had been trained as an academic painter…he needed a period of time to feel his way into “something” different, if not different, something that spoke exclusively to his moment in time, to his “age”.
Another area where I think Picasso scholarship could focus its inquiry is in the way that Picasso painted. Having been trained academically his imitation and referencing earlier and well regarded modern painters would have shown him alternative methods for creating works on canvas with paint. The fame and approval given to the other painters would have legitimized his first explorations of similar paint application. In looking at the paintings in the galleries it can be seen that early on Picasso worked in a number of methods …from thin washes to thick impastos …and sometimes both. One of the very wonderful aspect of the catalogue is that for each work listed and shown there is at the end of each entry a set of technical notes describing in detail how each painting and drawing was made and with what and on what materials.
In regard to that “something” different I think we can accept as true the observation that from the 1907 Paris exhibition of Cezanne’s paintings Picasso would have seen that the surfaces of those paintings were not flat and passive but that they were broken up into a rhythmic dynamic. Picasso first exhibited his concept of surface dynamic in the cubist works he made with Braque beginning just after that exhibition.
I think if one were to follow his development as a painter, one would find that there are two dominates in his work: that which is expressed and the concept which permits the expressiveness. While the concept is very important I think it does not have more weight than the expressiveness. A third element of a painting, the finish, seems to have been of less importance to him.
As for his copying the “masters” of his day I was reminded of Emerson’s essay, The Uses of Great Men, in which he encouraged young artists and future public figures to choose a hero from the pantheon of great men and to model one’s life, to role play, until one found his own voice. The danger of this, of course was suggested by Ezra Pound who warned that many young writers begin their careers by imitating writers they admire and that most writers never get beyond this initial stage of imitation.
Finally, I was hoping that something would be said that would help me to better understand cubism. It is often spoken of as an amalgamation of different views of the same subject. While that might be true of the subject in the center of the format, it does nothing to explain those areas of the format between the subject and the edges of the format, the surround. One comment that Gary Tinterow made that I appreciated, was that in his referencing African art, Picasso was using repeated shapes, rhymes, from the figure, and incorporating them into the surround. Good clue. Add to that Cezanne’s surface dynamic and I think we might be on to something.
Before moving into the galleries, I want to repeat what was said at the opening of the lectures. With the economy being what it is there has been much talk about museums doing exhibitions now from their holdings as this is generally thought to be less expensive. Mr. Tinterow told us that in this case it was not. Every Picasso work in the museum was studied, reevaluated, and cleaned. All of the prints were reframed. He said that in the end the work done cost many times more than a loan exhibition would have cost.
In the New York Times review of the show the writer commented that by putting all of the Picasso works on view the museum and the benefactors could get a very clear idea what areas of this collection needed to be enhanced and expanded. While that might seem cynical on the face of it, it does seem a good idea nonetheless. Gary Tinterow stated that the museum collection was one of three in this country that covered the full range of Picasso’s career. Picasso is credited with having created thousands of art works …sometimes as many as 30,000. Despite its breadth of about 500 art works, (by contrast the Picasso Museum in Paris has three thousand works), in sum this collection looks very thin.
In part that has to do with an agreement back in the 40’s and 50’s among the three leading museums in New York City. But that is another story. If the Met Museum is at fault it is because some fifty years have passed since that agreement ended and it appears that they have not increased their Picasso holdings. As for there being Picasso works on the market I think any six paintings from the Late Paintings Exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery a year ago would make an obviously handsome addition to this collection. (See this blog, April 2009.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art cares for 34 Picasso paintings, 58 drawings, watercolors, and pastels, 2 sculptures, 10 ceramic plaques, and 400 Picasso prints. Seen altogether this is a very impressive collection. Yet considering the venue, one of the world’s foremost art museums, it seems inadequate. Perhaps the most stunning painting is the iconic and well known Gertrude Stein portrait. But there are others that are almost equally as good …Seated Harlequin, 1901, The Blind Man’s Meal, 1903, The Actor, 1905, Bust of a Man, 1908, Still Life with Bottle of Rum, 1911, (apparently one of only three analytic cubist paintings in the collection, albeit a very good one …but I can see five to a dozen in any other museum …you get my drift.), Woman in White, 1923, Mandolin, Fruit Bowl and Plaster Arm, 1925, Harlequin, 1927, Head of a Woman, 1927, The Dreamer, 1932, Reading at a Table, 1934, Woman and Musketeer, 1967. All of these are absolutely wonderful but, again, this is the Met, and with all of these filling, let’s say, Gallery One, lacking a Gallery 2, one feels himself coming up short much sooner than he had expected.
Among the best drawings are works from the Alfred Stieglitz collection, given to the museum in 1949 by Georgia O’Keefe. (See also the Philadelphia Museum Picasso exhibition below.) Considering the art works I’ve seen in the last year from these bequests to various museums I can’t think of an exhibition I would rather see than to have all of those works together again. Mr. Stieglitz seems to me to have had the very best eye of the twentieth century. Encore. Encore.
One wonderful surprise in this exhibition was the discovery of such a large number of pastels. Pastel is one of my favorite mediums and I had no idea that Picasso had made any if not so many. Each of them is splendid. Unlike his paintings, which often have the quality of having been dashed off in an afternoon, each of these looks to have been lovingly and carefully laid on the paper in a very academic frame of mind …Shades of Chardin! These raised a thousand questions but I won’t ask them here.
The gallery of cubist works is arranged in the order in which the works were made and it gives tremendous insight into the development of cubism and into the mind of the artist and what he was attempting to do.
One of the most exciting moments of this exhibition was walking into a gallery and being overwhelmed by number of prints on display from the 347 Suite. While it is only 118 prints filling a very large room, it seemed to be many hundreds more. I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s dictum: Nothing succeeds like excess. Picasso is considered one of the great twentieth century draughtsman credited with having created over 2,500 prints. The gallery with the 347 Suite brought home a small indication of the magnitude of that achievement.
I was also favorably impressed by the lighting in this gallery. Once again a museum is using the permanent ceiling track lights but here the lamps are closer to the wall, they are used to create a wall wash rather than to highlight each art work, and as a result there are no glaring reflections of light fixtures and no reflection of the viewer in the glass over the art works. I don’t know why other art museum cannot resolve the problems with their lighting in such a simple manner.
But the highlight of this exhibition was, for me, the Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kramer Collection of Picasso Linocuts. Over the years I have seen Picasso linocuts in books, but only a few of them, and I had no idea that he had made so many. In total, I believe, there are about 150 in this series. The Kramer collection has 140 of them. The linoleum surface is without grain and practically without resistant and to see what Picasso has carved into them, using what I ascertain from all of his work as his preference for a thick line, and printed in a very limited palette, is stunning. It is especially stunning when so many are seen occupying a single gallery.
One of the great pleasures I find in museum going is to be introduced to collections of works with a very limited focus …I think of the Bergman Collection of Contemporary Drawings in the Chicago Art Institute and the Schnitzler Collection of Han Dynasty tomb figures in the museum in Portland, Oregon. More so than the larger collections, the Chester Dale’s and the Samuel Kress’s, I find these small collections to be far more personal and exciting. Rather than overwhelming they are inspiring.
This is an excellent exhibition, well designed and laid out, well interpreted, and with good, professional lighting.
This is a link to a tour of the exhibit on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum
This is the link to the Met Museum page featuring the Picasso exhibit:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={CD70B3F0-D1B8-4501-9B63-085D213E0E9B}&HomePageLink=special_c2a
Many years ago I realized that one could get some kind of education in the arts by attending museum lectures and while I have always thought that that was a very good idea, when I saw the announcement for the series of three Picasso lectures accompanying this exhibition, I realized that in fifty years of visiting the Met I had never once stepped into the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. (My road to hell is otherwise handsomely paved as well.) Because I am so curious at present about the works of Picasso I decided to order tickets at once.
Recently I found the Met Museum page on You Tube and so I wondered if I might not be paying good money for something I could see for free on the internet, but as an old theatergoer I know that there is a difference between seeing something “live” and something on tape or film. And in this case there was a big difference. I have seen the speaker, Gary Tinterow, Englehard Chairman of Nineteenth and Twentieth century and Contemporary Art, on some of the You Tube tapes, but seeing him in person was a very different experience. On tape he looks small. (The camera is above him and looking down. Big mistake.). But in person he is large and has a commanding presence. He is also very amiable, he has a rich baritone voice, and he relates in a very professional and personal way to the members of the audience which charm he does not always have when speaking directly to a machine that only stares at him. He is an ideal spokesperson for the museum …the listener feels himself included in the work of the organization.
After the second lecture I bought the catalogue for the exhibition and when I got it home and began reading it I realized that Mr. Tinterow was merely repeating to us, seemingly without notes, the material that it contained. So it then became my hope that he might offer something in the way of an aside or two that would justify the expense and effort of my lecture-going. He did.
I would say that the most exciting moment in these lectures was that time when he first used the word “quotation”. When discussing architecture it is common for repeated and familiar details and forms in new buildings to be spoken of as references or as “quotations” of other and usually earlier works. Yet when discussing Picasso’s work it is most commonly said that he stole ideas from this person or that, theft being inferred as his common coin. Only a year ago I heard a docent at MOMA telling his tour group that Picasso would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. I was livid. Quotation! Quotation! Quotation! Well, bless Gary Tinterow for using the correct language. I hope this becomes standard museum practice …all over town!
He mentioned on two occasions that Picasso was an intellectual and an avid reader and specifically that he read Freud extensively. I would also think that he had read Carl Jung. Picasso makes so many references to classical mythology and to the figures within those mythologies that I would think he was working in his own way with components of the collective unconscious.
He mentioned that Picasso often used classical paintings or drawings as a source for making a new painting, that it merely offered him a starting point for a drawing or painting. That, I think, is an insight that needs to be followed up in regard to Picasso’s work. Yes he did reference or quote other works, as most artists have done, and he did it throughout his lifetime, not just in the series from master paintings he did late in his life. Despite those references he made the work his by working in his own painting vocabulary and by using the source as a means to express his feelings about something. But his is decidedly painting that often originates inside a museum and I am aware of his admiration for Cezanne and of Cezanne’s admonition to painters to get out of the museum and to redo Poussin “from life”. This dichotomy in Picasso’s work …from life/from paintings … is a very good area for future study.
Discussing the works of the young Picasso Gary Tinterow showed slides of the works that had inspired him, works by Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, Gauguin, and Toulouse Lautrec. What he did not mention but which was immediately apparent to me, sitting at a distance in the audience, was that all of those artists had one thing in common, beyond the fact that they were all very popular at that time, an attainment that would not have been lost on the very ambitious young Spaniard: namely, that each made very passive paintings. As a result we can see that same passivity in Picasso’s imitation Lautrec’s, and in his blue and rose period works. It is almost as if the young artist was tentative in all that he did, not quite certain exactly where he wanted to go with his talent. Quoting those particular passive painters gave him breathing space.
I say breathing space because originally when Picasso left Barcelona he had wanted to go to Munich but did not have the money to do so. Munich at that time was where all the action was in regard to modern painting. Paris, though desirable, was his second choice. (In American art see Marsden Hartley). And I say breathing space because of the fact that Picasso had been trained as an academic painter…he needed a period of time to feel his way into “something” different, if not different, something that spoke exclusively to his moment in time, to his “age”.
Another area where I think Picasso scholarship could focus its inquiry is in the way that Picasso painted. Having been trained academically his imitation and referencing earlier and well regarded modern painters would have shown him alternative methods for creating works on canvas with paint. The fame and approval given to the other painters would have legitimized his first explorations of similar paint application. In looking at the paintings in the galleries it can be seen that early on Picasso worked in a number of methods …from thin washes to thick impastos …and sometimes both. One of the very wonderful aspect of the catalogue is that for each work listed and shown there is at the end of each entry a set of technical notes describing in detail how each painting and drawing was made and with what and on what materials.
In regard to that “something” different I think we can accept as true the observation that from the 1907 Paris exhibition of Cezanne’s paintings Picasso would have seen that the surfaces of those paintings were not flat and passive but that they were broken up into a rhythmic dynamic. Picasso first exhibited his concept of surface dynamic in the cubist works he made with Braque beginning just after that exhibition.
I think if one were to follow his development as a painter, one would find that there are two dominates in his work: that which is expressed and the concept which permits the expressiveness. While the concept is very important I think it does not have more weight than the expressiveness. A third element of a painting, the finish, seems to have been of less importance to him.
As for his copying the “masters” of his day I was reminded of Emerson’s essay, The Uses of Great Men, in which he encouraged young artists and future public figures to choose a hero from the pantheon of great men and to model one’s life, to role play, until one found his own voice. The danger of this, of course was suggested by Ezra Pound who warned that many young writers begin their careers by imitating writers they admire and that most writers never get beyond this initial stage of imitation.
Finally, I was hoping that something would be said that would help me to better understand cubism. It is often spoken of as an amalgamation of different views of the same subject. While that might be true of the subject in the center of the format, it does nothing to explain those areas of the format between the subject and the edges of the format, the surround. One comment that Gary Tinterow made that I appreciated, was that in his referencing African art, Picasso was using repeated shapes, rhymes, from the figure, and incorporating them into the surround. Good clue. Add to that Cezanne’s surface dynamic and I think we might be on to something.
Before moving into the galleries, I want to repeat what was said at the opening of the lectures. With the economy being what it is there has been much talk about museums doing exhibitions now from their holdings as this is generally thought to be less expensive. Mr. Tinterow told us that in this case it was not. Every Picasso work in the museum was studied, reevaluated, and cleaned. All of the prints were reframed. He said that in the end the work done cost many times more than a loan exhibition would have cost.
In the New York Times review of the show the writer commented that by putting all of the Picasso works on view the museum and the benefactors could get a very clear idea what areas of this collection needed to be enhanced and expanded. While that might seem cynical on the face of it, it does seem a good idea nonetheless. Gary Tinterow stated that the museum collection was one of three in this country that covered the full range of Picasso’s career. Picasso is credited with having created thousands of art works …sometimes as many as 30,000. Despite its breadth of about 500 art works, (by contrast the Picasso Museum in Paris has three thousand works), in sum this collection looks very thin.
In part that has to do with an agreement back in the 40’s and 50’s among the three leading museums in New York City. But that is another story. If the Met Museum is at fault it is because some fifty years have passed since that agreement ended and it appears that they have not increased their Picasso holdings. As for there being Picasso works on the market I think any six paintings from the Late Paintings Exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery a year ago would make an obviously handsome addition to this collection. (See this blog, April 2009.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art cares for 34 Picasso paintings, 58 drawings, watercolors, and pastels, 2 sculptures, 10 ceramic plaques, and 400 Picasso prints. Seen altogether this is a very impressive collection. Yet considering the venue, one of the world’s foremost art museums, it seems inadequate. Perhaps the most stunning painting is the iconic and well known Gertrude Stein portrait. But there are others that are almost equally as good …Seated Harlequin, 1901, The Blind Man’s Meal, 1903, The Actor, 1905, Bust of a Man, 1908, Still Life with Bottle of Rum, 1911, (apparently one of only three analytic cubist paintings in the collection, albeit a very good one …but I can see five to a dozen in any other museum …you get my drift.), Woman in White, 1923, Mandolin, Fruit Bowl and Plaster Arm, 1925, Harlequin, 1927, Head of a Woman, 1927, The Dreamer, 1932, Reading at a Table, 1934, Woman and Musketeer, 1967. All of these are absolutely wonderful but, again, this is the Met, and with all of these filling, let’s say, Gallery One, lacking a Gallery 2, one feels himself coming up short much sooner than he had expected.
Among the best drawings are works from the Alfred Stieglitz collection, given to the museum in 1949 by Georgia O’Keefe. (See also the Philadelphia Museum Picasso exhibition below.) Considering the art works I’ve seen in the last year from these bequests to various museums I can’t think of an exhibition I would rather see than to have all of those works together again. Mr. Stieglitz seems to me to have had the very best eye of the twentieth century. Encore. Encore.
One wonderful surprise in this exhibition was the discovery of such a large number of pastels. Pastel is one of my favorite mediums and I had no idea that Picasso had made any if not so many. Each of them is splendid. Unlike his paintings, which often have the quality of having been dashed off in an afternoon, each of these looks to have been lovingly and carefully laid on the paper in a very academic frame of mind …Shades of Chardin! These raised a thousand questions but I won’t ask them here.
The gallery of cubist works is arranged in the order in which the works were made and it gives tremendous insight into the development of cubism and into the mind of the artist and what he was attempting to do.
One of the most exciting moments of this exhibition was walking into a gallery and being overwhelmed by number of prints on display from the 347 Suite. While it is only 118 prints filling a very large room, it seemed to be many hundreds more. I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s dictum: Nothing succeeds like excess. Picasso is considered one of the great twentieth century draughtsman credited with having created over 2,500 prints. The gallery with the 347 Suite brought home a small indication of the magnitude of that achievement.
I was also favorably impressed by the lighting in this gallery. Once again a museum is using the permanent ceiling track lights but here the lamps are closer to the wall, they are used to create a wall wash rather than to highlight each art work, and as a result there are no glaring reflections of light fixtures and no reflection of the viewer in the glass over the art works. I don’t know why other art museum cannot resolve the problems with their lighting in such a simple manner.
But the highlight of this exhibition was, for me, the Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kramer Collection of Picasso Linocuts. Over the years I have seen Picasso linocuts in books, but only a few of them, and I had no idea that he had made so many. In total, I believe, there are about 150 in this series. The Kramer collection has 140 of them. The linoleum surface is without grain and practically without resistant and to see what Picasso has carved into them, using what I ascertain from all of his work as his preference for a thick line, and printed in a very limited palette, is stunning. It is especially stunning when so many are seen occupying a single gallery.
One of the great pleasures I find in museum going is to be introduced to collections of works with a very limited focus …I think of the Bergman Collection of Contemporary Drawings in the Chicago Art Institute and the Schnitzler Collection of Han Dynasty tomb figures in the museum in Portland, Oregon. More so than the larger collections, the Chester Dale’s and the Samuel Kress’s, I find these small collections to be far more personal and exciting. Rather than overwhelming they are inspiring.
This is an excellent exhibition, well designed and laid out, well interpreted, and with good, professional lighting.
This is a link to a tour of the exhibit on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum
This is the link to the Met Museum page featuring the Picasso exhibit:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={CD70B3F0-D1B8-4501-9B63-085D213E0E9B}&HomePageLink=special_c2a
Celebrating the Muse; the Women in Picasso's Prints. The Marlboro Gallery, NYC
About twenty five years ago I began a more concentrated study of modern art than I had done prior to that time, especially the life and works of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. It soon became apparent to me that there were two schools of thought in which it was claimed that either Matisse or Picasso was the greatest artist of the twentieth century. In 1986 I visited the Pompidou Center where I saw the late, magnificent Matisse papiers colles, and on the next day I saw the nearby Picasso Museum. The strongest impression made in the latter venue was the ubiquitous presence of women in his art works and what I strongly felt was the artist’s blatant hatred for them. Comparing the work of the two artists seen back to back and considering the strong distaste I felt for the Spaniard’s misogyny decided me to throw my support to the Matisse camp.
However: on a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, merely reading the title for their permanent collection, From Matisse to the Present, and seeing a collection with an almost glaring omission of the work of Picasso, made me aware that with Matisse we might have some very pretty paintings but that without Picasso there is no modern art. In the insight of that moment Picasso rose to the summit of the pantheon. I have not however been able to divest myself of what I have perceived of as his strong misogyny; not, that is, until I began reading the Richardson biographies and especially not until I saw the exhibition at this gallery.
Richardson brings to our attention Picasso’s habit of using the women in his life as his present subject matter. Sometimes this is overt and obvious and at other times the identity of the subject is hidden or coded. And what is very clearly stated in all of those works, as it is in Picasso’s works as a whole, is that the artist has been very forthright and honest about expressing his feelings about his subject matter, in this case the woman who is the subject …whether those feelings are anger, tenderness, or more complex and conflicted.
When reading about Picasso’s early years I think there is a tendency for us to look on those years from the perspective of what we know of the later years. We might indeed be aware of his poverty, his hunger, and his struggles, but knowing that it all turned out well in the end lessens our understanding and our full appreciation of the reality of those years for him.
Those of us who have been to Paris are well aware that the Parisians can be among the rudest and most unfriendly persons on earth. If we do not speak Parisian French, god help us. The young Picasso did not speak French and so he would not have been made to feel welcome in his travels about the city. In addition he was extremely short …about five foot four. This would not have made him attractive to the women there, and for Picasso, who had a very strong attraction to women as well as a dependency from having been an only son, this would have been alienating as well. Living on a very meager income, if not in abject poverty, he would have felt a further alienation as he looked about him upon the glories of fin de siècle Paris. To find himself in Paris, in a foreign culture, without sympathy, without recognition, and without succor, must have been extremely unsettling for him.
He did have friends. He had traveled to Paris with friends from Barcelona; he lived in the Catalan section of Paris. But all of these friends appear to have been male. His first friends in Paris and his first patrons were males and they were almost exclusively homosexual males. At that time homosexuality was a criminal offense. While there might have been some encouragement from these early supporters, knowing that they were social outcasts might have mitigated the sense of support he received from them.
There was also, according to Richardson, a period of drug use, specifically opium, among his new found French friends. While that might be explained as a socially acceptable thing to do among members of that set, there are so many in similar circumstances who do not take drugs that we might consider agreeing with the view that drug abuse is a form of self medication: one takes drugs because he doesn’t feel well.
All of these feelings of alienation and isolation are evident in Picasso’s work of that period. Among the influences we can see evidence of Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, Toulouse Lautrec, and Gauguin. But while we see the influences we are aware that he has only used them to make works like works of theirs that he has seen, in few of them does he make the work his own. When he does, notably in the Blue Period, the works are extremely morose, if not morbid.
Clearly it was a period of despair and many sources attribute this to the death of his friend Casagemas. I think it is more likely that all of these factors contributed to his mood. And I think the only thing that likely kept him going was his desire to be an artist, and not merely an artist, but among the greatest of the artists …clearly a result of his family engendered sense of entitlement. …yes, young Caesar was ambitious.
In 1904 this all began to change. Not because he was just naturally moving on as an artist but because of the events in his personal life. In that year he met Fernande Olivier and began his first extended intimate relationship. Socially he began to be not merely a member of an exclusively male crowd but a man among men and women. With Fernande on his arm his Spanish male pride could be asserted.
From that time there is a lighter palette, a lightening of subject matter …his subjects are now the living rather than the dead and the dying. Something has opened him up and given him light and air. The work began to pour out of him …the saltimbanques, the Rose period…so much so that we might say he had been inspired.
In 1906 Picasso and Fernande spent the summer in Spain, in the village of Gosol. I think most sources consider this the moment when Picasso began to master modern art. From that time he first exhibited his responses to ethnic and prehistoric art and a new understanding of classical art. There followed very shortly his work with Braque which resulted in cubism. Fernande figures in many of the paintings of the Gosol period. In the catalogue for the Marlboro exhibition, Plate1, Tète de Femme, 1905, is, I believe, Fernande, in a very sweet, sensual, and loving portrait. Because of her presence in his life at that time I think it would be correct to think of Fernande as the first muse in his life … She salvaged him, she resurrected him, she inspired him, but most importantly she gave him permission to be creative.
From my own experience I know that a companion, a mate, can be a muse, an inspiration, or a completely destructive force, often both simultaneously. And while it was once common to refer to “the little woman” behind the successful man, there are probably many, many abject failures over the centuries who followed the siren’s lure of a jealous, possessive, selfishly misguided mate.
In Picasso’s life, where there were so many women with whom he was intimate, perhaps we should not think that he was by nature simply promiscuous, as most men are, but that like the well known artist’s works he studied and drew inspiration from, he might have exhausted the source of inspiration from each of those women as well. Thus not one woman but many women inspired him over the years and played the part of his muse.
As common as the presence of women in his work is the presence of the personal in his work; Picasso’s work is a life record of his emotional experience. Because women tend to be more concerned with the emotional temperature of their relationships than their men do …or so women have told me …it is tempting to think that it was the women in his life who encouraged him to be honest with them, with himself, and in his work. Clearly those women meant something to him and I think it behooves us to consider their individuality rather than to look on him as a man who used them for his own ends. Every relationship is an entity created by the other entities which compose the relationship, in this case by the man and by the woman. While Picasso might have found inspiration from each of the women who passed through his life, so did each of them find something of personal value in their relationship with him. But rather than viewing his life and work from the perspective of a sting of women subject to his whims, let’s give each of those women their individuality and agree that there is another perspective …that of individual women who over the course of their lives had at one time an intimate contact with an artist named Picasso.
Let’s think of all this as the experience of a very complex and talented genius who has enriched our lives and simply consider all of it as the story behind some remarkably magnificent art works, works that stand on their own whatever their inspiration might have been. That of course is always the test: does the work stand on its own? Is this drawing interesting as a drawing?
The Marlboro Gallery has mounted an exhibition of 205 Picasso prints featuring the women in his life, each described here as the muse of the moment. I don’t remember seeing one drawing here that was not interesting. And what struck me immediately was that there is no sense of misogyny in any of them. In fact the opposite is true: he loved these women, each in her turn. And working with them as the subject of drawings, of art works, he has made some incredibly wonderful art works.
In 2005 I saw the Vollard Suite at the Fort Worth Museum of Contemporary Art. It was my first encounter with an extended exhibition of his prints and I was bowled over by his sheer delight in seeing the results that issued from his marking device moving across the surface of a ground spilling out the contents of his imagination. Seen as components in an extended narrative each print was an arabesque of delight. I had not realized before seeing them again here at the Marlboro Gallery that Marie-Therese had been the inspiration for them, or if not the inspiration, that she had played so large a part in their ebullience. And seeing them again I suddenly realized that almost every one of them featured a little bowl of flowers. I had never suspected that Picasso could have been so … “sweet”.
Gary Tinterow, in his talk at the Metropolitan, mentioned on two occasions that Picasso had read Freud’s work avidly and was quite an adherent of his insights. If so, one can see humor in the 347 Suite: Freud has gone on record with the statement that the only unnatural sexual act is an act one cannot get into a position to perform. In this suite, which is blatantly sexual, executed when he was 87, Picasso shows us that there is in fact no position one cannot get into in order to fuck. I think Freud would have been amused. I know I was.
But all of these prints are wonderful. It is a full career retrospective and we are able to share in the artist’s delight in his subject matter and in his process, and to empathize with his emotional experience. In his book, Modern Prints and Drawings, Paul Sachs lists his criterion for determining the success of drawings and prints: is there clarity of form, is there flexibility and sensitiveness of touch, is there expressiveness, is there feeling for the medium, etc. In all of these prints the answers are yes. But there is an especial yes in the feeling for the medium: each medium has elicited from the artist a unique response that could only have been expressed in that particular medium. While the subject remains somewhat the same, the woman, the muse, the whole variety of the print making media is needed for this artist to honestly express his multifaceted emotional experience. And, in the end, I think it is that, his profound expressiveness, which earns for Picasso the title of the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
There are two things that enhance the pleasure of the seeing here. One of them is the gallery itself. This is a large space, basically a square divided into nine sections. On the north, east, and south walls there are large floor to ceiling windows. Thus the galleries are flooded with both natural and artificial light. There is a wonderful sense of variation in moving into and out of open and closed spaces. There is a wonderful sense of light and air in every part of the galley. There were no glaring lights on the glass nor were there reflections of the observer over the art works. Bravo!
But what was most wonderful the day I was there was that I was the only person there. (Later two others, each with a profound respect for quiet, ventured in.) Fifty years ago when I was new to New York, before museums became big time players in the tourist industry, this is what museums were like. Alas, alas, and rue the day! But perhaps that is the answer for those of us who appreciate seeing the fine arts: from now on let’s confine our fine art viewing to commercial galleries and let museums continue to rush headlong to their own self destruction. As ye sow…
Excellent. Excellent! Unfortunately this has now closed in New York. But it will be opening soon in London. If you have nothing better to do this summer…
http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/exhibitions/celebrating-the-muse-women-in-picassos-prints-from-1905-1968
However: on a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, merely reading the title for their permanent collection, From Matisse to the Present, and seeing a collection with an almost glaring omission of the work of Picasso, made me aware that with Matisse we might have some very pretty paintings but that without Picasso there is no modern art. In the insight of that moment Picasso rose to the summit of the pantheon. I have not however been able to divest myself of what I have perceived of as his strong misogyny; not, that is, until I began reading the Richardson biographies and especially not until I saw the exhibition at this gallery.
Richardson brings to our attention Picasso’s habit of using the women in his life as his present subject matter. Sometimes this is overt and obvious and at other times the identity of the subject is hidden or coded. And what is very clearly stated in all of those works, as it is in Picasso’s works as a whole, is that the artist has been very forthright and honest about expressing his feelings about his subject matter, in this case the woman who is the subject …whether those feelings are anger, tenderness, or more complex and conflicted.
When reading about Picasso’s early years I think there is a tendency for us to look on those years from the perspective of what we know of the later years. We might indeed be aware of his poverty, his hunger, and his struggles, but knowing that it all turned out well in the end lessens our understanding and our full appreciation of the reality of those years for him.
Those of us who have been to Paris are well aware that the Parisians can be among the rudest and most unfriendly persons on earth. If we do not speak Parisian French, god help us. The young Picasso did not speak French and so he would not have been made to feel welcome in his travels about the city. In addition he was extremely short …about five foot four. This would not have made him attractive to the women there, and for Picasso, who had a very strong attraction to women as well as a dependency from having been an only son, this would have been alienating as well. Living on a very meager income, if not in abject poverty, he would have felt a further alienation as he looked about him upon the glories of fin de siècle Paris. To find himself in Paris, in a foreign culture, without sympathy, without recognition, and without succor, must have been extremely unsettling for him.
He did have friends. He had traveled to Paris with friends from Barcelona; he lived in the Catalan section of Paris. But all of these friends appear to have been male. His first friends in Paris and his first patrons were males and they were almost exclusively homosexual males. At that time homosexuality was a criminal offense. While there might have been some encouragement from these early supporters, knowing that they were social outcasts might have mitigated the sense of support he received from them.
There was also, according to Richardson, a period of drug use, specifically opium, among his new found French friends. While that might be explained as a socially acceptable thing to do among members of that set, there are so many in similar circumstances who do not take drugs that we might consider agreeing with the view that drug abuse is a form of self medication: one takes drugs because he doesn’t feel well.
All of these feelings of alienation and isolation are evident in Picasso’s work of that period. Among the influences we can see evidence of Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, Toulouse Lautrec, and Gauguin. But while we see the influences we are aware that he has only used them to make works like works of theirs that he has seen, in few of them does he make the work his own. When he does, notably in the Blue Period, the works are extremely morose, if not morbid.
Clearly it was a period of despair and many sources attribute this to the death of his friend Casagemas. I think it is more likely that all of these factors contributed to his mood. And I think the only thing that likely kept him going was his desire to be an artist, and not merely an artist, but among the greatest of the artists …clearly a result of his family engendered sense of entitlement. …yes, young Caesar was ambitious.
In 1904 this all began to change. Not because he was just naturally moving on as an artist but because of the events in his personal life. In that year he met Fernande Olivier and began his first extended intimate relationship. Socially he began to be not merely a member of an exclusively male crowd but a man among men and women. With Fernande on his arm his Spanish male pride could be asserted.
From that time there is a lighter palette, a lightening of subject matter …his subjects are now the living rather than the dead and the dying. Something has opened him up and given him light and air. The work began to pour out of him …the saltimbanques, the Rose period…so much so that we might say he had been inspired.
In 1906 Picasso and Fernande spent the summer in Spain, in the village of Gosol. I think most sources consider this the moment when Picasso began to master modern art. From that time he first exhibited his responses to ethnic and prehistoric art and a new understanding of classical art. There followed very shortly his work with Braque which resulted in cubism. Fernande figures in many of the paintings of the Gosol period. In the catalogue for the Marlboro exhibition, Plate1, Tète de Femme, 1905, is, I believe, Fernande, in a very sweet, sensual, and loving portrait. Because of her presence in his life at that time I think it would be correct to think of Fernande as the first muse in his life … She salvaged him, she resurrected him, she inspired him, but most importantly she gave him permission to be creative.
From my own experience I know that a companion, a mate, can be a muse, an inspiration, or a completely destructive force, often both simultaneously. And while it was once common to refer to “the little woman” behind the successful man, there are probably many, many abject failures over the centuries who followed the siren’s lure of a jealous, possessive, selfishly misguided mate.
In Picasso’s life, where there were so many women with whom he was intimate, perhaps we should not think that he was by nature simply promiscuous, as most men are, but that like the well known artist’s works he studied and drew inspiration from, he might have exhausted the source of inspiration from each of those women as well. Thus not one woman but many women inspired him over the years and played the part of his muse.
As common as the presence of women in his work is the presence of the personal in his work; Picasso’s work is a life record of his emotional experience. Because women tend to be more concerned with the emotional temperature of their relationships than their men do …or so women have told me …it is tempting to think that it was the women in his life who encouraged him to be honest with them, with himself, and in his work. Clearly those women meant something to him and I think it behooves us to consider their individuality rather than to look on him as a man who used them for his own ends. Every relationship is an entity created by the other entities which compose the relationship, in this case by the man and by the woman. While Picasso might have found inspiration from each of the women who passed through his life, so did each of them find something of personal value in their relationship with him. But rather than viewing his life and work from the perspective of a sting of women subject to his whims, let’s give each of those women their individuality and agree that there is another perspective …that of individual women who over the course of their lives had at one time an intimate contact with an artist named Picasso.
Let’s think of all this as the experience of a very complex and talented genius who has enriched our lives and simply consider all of it as the story behind some remarkably magnificent art works, works that stand on their own whatever their inspiration might have been. That of course is always the test: does the work stand on its own? Is this drawing interesting as a drawing?
The Marlboro Gallery has mounted an exhibition of 205 Picasso prints featuring the women in his life, each described here as the muse of the moment. I don’t remember seeing one drawing here that was not interesting. And what struck me immediately was that there is no sense of misogyny in any of them. In fact the opposite is true: he loved these women, each in her turn. And working with them as the subject of drawings, of art works, he has made some incredibly wonderful art works.
In 2005 I saw the Vollard Suite at the Fort Worth Museum of Contemporary Art. It was my first encounter with an extended exhibition of his prints and I was bowled over by his sheer delight in seeing the results that issued from his marking device moving across the surface of a ground spilling out the contents of his imagination. Seen as components in an extended narrative each print was an arabesque of delight. I had not realized before seeing them again here at the Marlboro Gallery that Marie-Therese had been the inspiration for them, or if not the inspiration, that she had played so large a part in their ebullience. And seeing them again I suddenly realized that almost every one of them featured a little bowl of flowers. I had never suspected that Picasso could have been so … “sweet”.
Gary Tinterow, in his talk at the Metropolitan, mentioned on two occasions that Picasso had read Freud’s work avidly and was quite an adherent of his insights. If so, one can see humor in the 347 Suite: Freud has gone on record with the statement that the only unnatural sexual act is an act one cannot get into a position to perform. In this suite, which is blatantly sexual, executed when he was 87, Picasso shows us that there is in fact no position one cannot get into in order to fuck. I think Freud would have been amused. I know I was.
But all of these prints are wonderful. It is a full career retrospective and we are able to share in the artist’s delight in his subject matter and in his process, and to empathize with his emotional experience. In his book, Modern Prints and Drawings, Paul Sachs lists his criterion for determining the success of drawings and prints: is there clarity of form, is there flexibility and sensitiveness of touch, is there expressiveness, is there feeling for the medium, etc. In all of these prints the answers are yes. But there is an especial yes in the feeling for the medium: each medium has elicited from the artist a unique response that could only have been expressed in that particular medium. While the subject remains somewhat the same, the woman, the muse, the whole variety of the print making media is needed for this artist to honestly express his multifaceted emotional experience. And, in the end, I think it is that, his profound expressiveness, which earns for Picasso the title of the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
There are two things that enhance the pleasure of the seeing here. One of them is the gallery itself. This is a large space, basically a square divided into nine sections. On the north, east, and south walls there are large floor to ceiling windows. Thus the galleries are flooded with both natural and artificial light. There is a wonderful sense of variation in moving into and out of open and closed spaces. There is a wonderful sense of light and air in every part of the galley. There were no glaring lights on the glass nor were there reflections of the observer over the art works. Bravo!
But what was most wonderful the day I was there was that I was the only person there. (Later two others, each with a profound respect for quiet, ventured in.) Fifty years ago when I was new to New York, before museums became big time players in the tourist industry, this is what museums were like. Alas, alas, and rue the day! But perhaps that is the answer for those of us who appreciate seeing the fine arts: from now on let’s confine our fine art viewing to commercial galleries and let museums continue to rush headlong to their own self destruction. As ye sow…
Excellent. Excellent! Unfortunately this has now closed in New York. But it will be opening soon in London. If you have nothing better to do this summer…
http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/exhibitions/celebrating-the-muse-women-in-picassos-prints-from-1905-1968
Picasso: Themes and Variations, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
Picasso: Themes ands Variations
I have made my last visit to what was once known as The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. It has become nothing more now than a hyped up tourist venue down there with Times Square, the Empire State Building, and Coney Island.
On the day of my last visit, Monday, May 3rd, I discovered that if the building can comfortably accommodate one thousand visitors, they think nothing of packing in twelve to fifteen thousand people. The scene inside is a nightmare.
I was hoping to see the exhibition of Picasso prints but that gallery was so full of slowly shuffling zombies circulating in such a tight mass absolutely nothing could be seen but the wall high above the framed works.
Thinking I might catch something on the 5th Floor at the Henri Bresson exhibit I found a dead end room, sweltering with the heat of body humidity and packed as tightly as a subway at rush hour. Again, zombies.
Stopping on the way down at the early twentieth century painting gallery I merely threw myself into the surging mass, lifted my feet and let them carry me where they would.
The escalators, when you can find them, looked like scenes of the damned in Metropolis.
I would have lodged a complaint with the management but obviously they are Making Money and in America Making Money is the only measure of success. I am sure my complaint would have fallen on deaf ears. My only riposte could have been to quote H.L. Menken: No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. But I also noticed that all of these folks were speaking in foreign tongues. So perhaps it is the triumph of the American Century…our lack of taste and our vulgar commercialization of absolutely everything is now the basis of a world culture.
Well you can have it folks. I’ve had my fill of it. There is no better example of Reagan Republican sleaze and greed anywhere… so get out there, MOMA, and drill into the deep pockets of all those globe trotting wealthy tourists …drill, baby, drill.
Absolutely nothing could ever induce me to step into this place again. Fine art venue? I don’t think so.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/966
I have made my last visit to what was once known as The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. It has become nothing more now than a hyped up tourist venue down there with Times Square, the Empire State Building, and Coney Island.
On the day of my last visit, Monday, May 3rd, I discovered that if the building can comfortably accommodate one thousand visitors, they think nothing of packing in twelve to fifteen thousand people. The scene inside is a nightmare.
I was hoping to see the exhibition of Picasso prints but that gallery was so full of slowly shuffling zombies circulating in such a tight mass absolutely nothing could be seen but the wall high above the framed works.
Thinking I might catch something on the 5th Floor at the Henri Bresson exhibit I found a dead end room, sweltering with the heat of body humidity and packed as tightly as a subway at rush hour. Again, zombies.
Stopping on the way down at the early twentieth century painting gallery I merely threw myself into the surging mass, lifted my feet and let them carry me where they would.
The escalators, when you can find them, looked like scenes of the damned in Metropolis.
I would have lodged a complaint with the management but obviously they are Making Money and in America Making Money is the only measure of success. I am sure my complaint would have fallen on deaf ears. My only riposte could have been to quote H.L. Menken: No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. But I also noticed that all of these folks were speaking in foreign tongues. So perhaps it is the triumph of the American Century…our lack of taste and our vulgar commercialization of absolutely everything is now the basis of a world culture.
Well you can have it folks. I’ve had my fill of it. There is no better example of Reagan Republican sleaze and greed anywhere… so get out there, MOMA, and drill into the deep pockets of all those globe trotting wealthy tourists …drill, baby, drill.
Absolutely nothing could ever induce me to step into this place again. Fine art venue? I don’t think so.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/966
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