Picasso’s legacy? It’s complicated
It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of Picasso in art history, as a new exhibition – which positions him alongside his friends, collaborators, lovers and rivals – shows.
Before we look at the Picasso exhibition that’s about to open at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, let’s consider what the world would be like had Picasso never lived.
Imagine for a moment that he wasn’t born in Malaga on October 25, 1881, and didn’t move to Paris in 1900 just as the city’s modernist revolution was cranking into high gear.
In this parallel universe, there was no meeting with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, or writer and patron Gertrude Stein, or impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
He would not have had his blue and rose periods, would not have invented cubism with Georges Braque, would not have made that searing condemnation of violence against civilians in Guernica, would not have changed images and media the way the rest of us change our clothes, from sculpture to ceramics, drawings, collage, poetry and theatre design.
Indeed, the art of the 20th century would look very different without this short Spaniard and his titanic creative gifts.
So essential is he to the story of modern art that the NGV’s exhibition is called The Picasso Century. Drawing on the collections of the Pompidou Centre and the Picasso Museum in Paris, the exhibition puts Picasso in a kind of dialogue with the times, and the times with him.
“It’s a long trip through the mind and the painting of a very particular man, who is of course Picasso,” says Didier Ottinger, the exhibition’s lead curator from the Pompidou.
“But it’s not Picasso as an isolated figure; it is Picasso showing how his art and his genius is existing because he was always changing – changing of context, changing of mind, because he was in contact with new generations, promoting new values for the arts. This is what we shall see.”
The large exhibition brings Picasso into conversation with the artists in his orbit, as well as poets, writers, collectors, producers, choreographers, composers, activists and art dealers – and his wives, mistresses and lovers.
It includes about 70 works by Picasso and another 100 by artists whose own careers coincided or collided with his: Apollinaire, Francis Bacon, Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Andre Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Wifredo Lam, Marie Laurencin, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and more – as well as work by two of his lovers, Francoise Gilot and Dora Maar.
“There are so many layers of connection between these artists,” says Miranda Wallace, the NGV’s senior curator of international exhibitions.
“One thing the show is trying to do is build up the idea of a community – the organic nature of collaboration and community among artists. Not everyone was always on the same page, and that’s what’s fascinating. Stylistically, the work is so diverse, and Picasso’s approach to his own work is hugely different from what he was doing five years before.”
In that spirit, let’s go to the start of the exhibition and Picasso’s early years in Paris, when he was in his 20s and living in Montmartre. Up on the hill was the gleaming white stone of the Sacre-Coeur basilica, still under construction. Down below was the bohemian world of brothels, cafes, studios and nightclubs, including the Moulin Rouge and the Lapin Agile.
This was Picasso’s stamping ground, the young artist hanging out with poets, writers and artists. He rented a studio at the Bateau Lavoir, the draughty artists’ colony where he made some of his most celebrated paintings, including Les demoiselles d’Avignon, the Boy with a Pipe, and his portrait of Stein. (If anyone doubted the picture was a good likeness of Stein, Picasso assured them: she will grow into it.)
While that portrait is not in the exhibition (it’s in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), The Picasso Century summons the atmosphere of those exciting, creatively fertile years of the first decade in Paris. Picasso’s astonishing versatility can be seen in paintings as various as his portrait of the debonair art critic Gustave Coquiot, his engraving of a couple sharing a simple meal in a cafe, The Frugal Repast, and a cubist rendering of the domes of Sacre-Coeur.
Another startling image is the death portrait, in tones reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh, of his friend Carles Casagemas, whose suicide cast a shadow over Picasso and moved him to produce the melancholy pictures of his “blue” period.
This first section of the exhibition, called La Boheme: Montmartre and the Bateau Lavoir, also includes Maurice Utrillo’s painting of the Lapin Agile, and photographs by Brassai which, although taken in the 1930s, depict the steep steps around Montmartre.
A painting by Laurencin, dated 1909, is a group portrait of Picasso’s milieu from those years. Sitting in the picture are Stein; Picasso’s girlfriend at the time, Fernande Olivier; Laurencin; and, at the centre, her lover Apollinaire.
The excellent exhibition catalogue gives biographical notes for many of the people Picasso mixed with – friends, collaborators, lovers and rivals.
The motivating idea of The Picasso Century is to show how Picasso was not a solitary genius but one who was constantly absorbing influences from around him – from art history and from his contemporaries.
His biographer, John Richardson, refers to this as “Picassification”: his borrowing and transforming of visual cues that continued throughout his long life.
“It’s a period of incredible experimentation – and what’s interesting with Picasso is that he continues to experiment,” Wallace says.
“Decade after decade he changes, whereas so many of the other artists – such as Andre Derain and Georges Braque, who had been in that initial ferment of creativity – tend to stabilise.”
So numerous are the personal connections, and multifarious the references to contemporary and historical art, that The Picasso Century is likely to repay repeat visits. His contributed directly or obliquely to many of the artistic currents of his time.
From his meeting with Jean Cocteau he collaborated on stage designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and through that company met composers such as Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky. It’s also where he met his future wife, the aristocratic ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whose portrait by Picasso – painted in a neoclassical, “Ingresque” style – is in the show.
Along with Julio Gonzalez and Giacometti, Picasso worked with bronze sculpture, which in turn seemed to lend shape to the monumental, violently coupling forms in paintings such as Figures by the Sea, 1931.
He never aligned himself with the surrealists although Andre Breton and others in that group – represented in the exhibition by Miro, Dali, Maar and others – wanted to claim him as one of their own.
“They felt he was innately surrealist,” Wallace says. “But Picasso didn’t want to be a surrealist – he wanted to be a realist. Through his career … he is always trying to approach some sort of better representation of the complex nature of his experience, both internal and external: his interior life, mixed with his personal relationships, mixed with his view of the world, and politics and art history. He is a complete polymath.”
With Matisse he enjoyed a friendly rivalry, the presence of one spurring the other to new ideas. After Matisse died in 1954 Picasso paid the older painter the compliment of adopting the odalisque as a subject – a motif Matisse had borrowed from Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – in pictures such as Nude in a Turkish Cap, 1955, and Woman Reclining on a Blue Sofa, 1960.
The exhibition has many examples of his ceramics made at Vallauris in the south of France, and of his late series of paintings of matadors and musketeers – imaginary reworkings of figures from old master paintings and characters from literature. Even as contemporary critics scorned Picasso’s figurative pictures as old school, he seemed to pre-empt the emergence of the next trend in the visual arts: postmodernism.
Two problematic aspects of Picasso’s life and art warrant attention. Picasso had already nailed his anti-fascist colours to the mast with his painting Guernica, but he went further and in 1944 joined the French Communist Party, his enthusiasm boosted by the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism. A pen drawing by Picasso shows a glass raised in a “toast” to Joseph Stalin.
The communists’ virulent opposition to supposed US imperialism also led Picasso to paint his unusual picture, Massacre in Korea, in 1951. It was a response to the US Army’s killing of up to 300 Korean civilians, mostly women and children, at No Gun Ri, apparently after orders to attack groups suspected of infiltration by North Korean operatives.
Picasso’s painting only refers to the Korean War in the title – the picture draws on art-historical models of firing squads in celebrated paintings by Francisco Goya and Edouard Manet – but for years it was regarded as an embarrassing equivocation. On the one hand, Picasso was seen to be a communist stooge; on the other, he frustrated the communists for his refusal to produce a piece of propaganda in the socialist realist style.
Ottinger says the contemporary reception of Massacre in Korea needs to be considered in light of the Cold War and prevailing orthodoxies.
“We have to relate the interpretation of this work through the political history, which of course was concerned by his involvement in the Communist Party, which was problematic during the Cold War – even for the most sophisticated scholars in the US,” he says.
“But we shall see it is a sophisticated and powerful painting. It has nothing to do with the propaganda of the Communist Party at the time.”
Probably more troubling for contemporary gallery visitors is Picasso’s female problem. Women to him were goddesses or doormats, he declared. Marie-Therese Walter was 17 when she met Picasso, then 45, and became his mistress. Maar suffered terribly because of Picasso’s infidelity, and there’s a suggestion he punched her in the eye.
Another of his lovers, Gilot, humiliated him first by leaving him, and then by writing a memoir about their life together. He tried to stop the book’s publication and cut off contact with their two children, Claude and Paloma. Two of the women in his life, Walter and Jacqueline Roque, killed themselves.
The Weeping Woman from the NGV’s own collection is famous as the painting stolen and returned by the “Australian Cultural Terrorists” in 1986, and is emblematic of an important period of Picasso’s career. The NGV painting is one of nine on the theme of the weeping woman. For Picasso, that woman was Maar, who it seems was always crying. (Richardson notes that Picasso “Picassified” people, too, using them as material for his art.) But the figure also draws on a motif from his monumental canvas Guernica, and the howling of women torn apart with grief.
As is usual with Picasso, life and images are complicated and intertwined, and Wallace urges caution against reducing the Weeping Woman to a “one-liner” – that is, seeing it as evidence of Picasso’s cruelty.
Still, in the era of #MeToo, his chauvinism is not easily dismissed.
In Europe, protests accompanied a recent exhibition where women wore T-shirts with the words “Picasso, Women Abuser”. The Picasso Museum in Paris, a lender to the NGV show, has mounted an exhibition by French artist Orlan, including her photographic series Weeping Women are Angry. And Hannah Gadsby called out Picasso’s seduction of an underage girl (Walter) in her Netflix show, Nanette: “Picasso f..ked an underage girl. That’s it for me – not interested.”
Debate about Picasso’s legacy, both good and ill, will be part of the public talks program that accompany NGV exhibition.
“Our basic policy is: we are not cancelling Picasso, so we need to question and understand how you can grapple with the problems of the man, and keep them in the discussion, while also appreciating his creative contribution,” Wallace says.
Calling an exhibition The Picasso Century possibly risks overstatement, but not by much. In his life and creative output he dominated so many decades of the 20th century that it would be impossible to erase him. But the title also has the effect of locating Picasso in the past. Another half-century, almost, has passed since his death in 1973 at 91. He belongs to art history, not to the world of contemporary art and artists.
Yet he remains a potent and unavoidable force, a maker of images that continue to seduce and challenge the eye.
The Picasso Century is at the NGV International, Melbourne, from June 10 to October 9.