Hannah Gadsby’s new Picasso exhibition is a joke

Hannah Gadsby is best known internationally for Nanette, the 2018 Netflix stand-up special in which the comedian announced that they were quitting comedy due to the fatigue of making themselves the perpetual butt of the joke, and in the process, revealed the significant trauma underneath their humour.

But the show’s viral success saw Gadsby ditch their retirement plan to create two more Netflix specials – 2020’s Douglas, which includes an art history lecture, and the recent Something Special, a feel-good show where the finest moment is an aside that “netball is for sluts”.

Hannah Gadsby is a noted hater of Pablo Picasso.Credit: Ben King/Tony Vaccaro via AP

Gadsby is also an art history graduate and a noted Picasso hater. In Nanette, they question the father of Cubism’s common valorisation as a tortured genius and how this framing excuses the troubling misogyny of his personal life and artistic lens.

It’s classic separating the art from the artist discourse, and Gadsby makes it clear that, given Picasso “f---ed an underage girl”, they’re no longer interested in his work. (In 1927, 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter met and entered into a relationship with Picasso, who was in his 40s. According to a plaque at the Brooklyn Museum, the legal age of consent in France was 13 at the time. This does not, of course, excuse the relationship, but highlights the arbitrary and moveable nature of social norms.)

Gadsby then dismisses Picasso’s work as “circular Lego nudes” and jokes that by critiquing the master they’ve ruined any chance of ever working at an art gallery. Yet, five years later and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Gadsby has landed an unlikely gig curating a major Brooklyn Museum exhibition, It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.

Ostensibly, the purpose of this irksomely titled show is to highlight the sexist lens through which Picasso depicted women and remind audiences that there are many artists of merit who are, in fact, women. Unfortunately, Gadsby does neither effectively.

Next to Reclining Nude (1932), which depicts Walter in abstract form and is one of eight Picasso paintings in the show, Gadsby writes that the image makes them uncomfortable because of “the way her breasts can look like a sideways owl and two doughnuts – at the same time”.

Speaking on the exhibition’s audio guide about selected sketches from Picasso’s Vollard Suite – a series of hundreds of prints inspired by mythology that heavily feature the half-man-half-beast figure of the minotaur – Gadsby says: “I’m not going to sell these works by contextualising them in terms of PP’s technical prowess because I just don’t care.”

Ignoring Gadsby’s grating insistence on referring to Picasso as “PP”, their statement captures the exhibition’s central problem: Gadsby simply can’t be bothered, or lacks the skills, to present a thorough and illuminating explanation of Picasso’s shortcomings as an artist and person. They’d rather make high-school-level comments about how Cubism is akin to “putting a kaleidoscope filter on your dick” and belittle the potential for art to meaningfully impact the world. It’s a tiring position for a curator to take, even one as reluctant as Gadsby, who admits: “I said yes to this job because I could see the value of it in terms of my public profile. Now that push has come to shove, I won’t lie, creatively I’m not not bored.”

That’s not a heartening sentiment to hear after dishing over your hard-earned cash to see the exhibition.

Comedian Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum where they co-curated the exhibition It’s Pablo-matic.Credit: Instagram

It’s Pablo-matic also showcases a range of feminist art, mainly from the 1970s onwards. Speaking on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Gadsby argued that given Picasso died in 1973 and missed the last three decades of the 20th century, his status as the greatest artist of that era disrespects those who came after him, hence their decision to focus on their art. To borrow from the casual parlance of Gadsby’s museum labels, “weird flex”, but OK.

Work by Nina Chanel Abney, Guerrilla Girls, Faith Ringgold, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas and others is arranged in a cluttered and aimless fashion, with whatever connections that exist – beyond being vaguely feminist art by women – often unclear. When prompted to reflect on Picasso’s legacy, unlike Gadsby, these women do not feel the need to pretend he was a shitty artist because he was a bad person: “I love a great deal of Picasso’s work, and I’m always learning from it,” reflects Kiki Smith; “We could cancel Picasso for some of the things he did, but what he created continues to affect people and inspire them,” says Rachel Kneebone; and “I have always loved his work and marvelled at the ground it has broken, opening new doorways into seeing,” offers Semmel.

By proactively adopting a dismissive attitude towards the project of It’s Pablo-matic, Gadsby attempts to position themselves above the significant critique the exhibition is attracting.

In response to scathing reviews from The New York Times and Artnet, Brooklyn Museum curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris posted a selfie with the caption “that feeling when IT’S PABLO-MATIC gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist”, as if the exhibition is being panned because it’s speaking truth to power and is too radical in its messaging. To the contrary, the show has little to say, bar that Picasso was a bad guy and that good women artists exist.

Given the Brooklyn Museum exists within one of New York City’s most historically and culturally rich boroughs and claims to champion diversity and access, it’s a perplexing decision to hand over the reins of a major exhibition to a white Australian comedian with no ties to the community, who seems to think the whole thing is one big joke.

In one section of the exhibit, attendees were invited to share their thoughts in post-it note form. One perplexed pundit questioned, “Why give Hannah such a voice?!?!?!”, a sentiment which this reviewer wholeheartedly has to agree with.

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