"Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde' at the Art Museum (2nd review)

I'm always suspicious when someone says that Picasso is his or her favorite artist. It's a bit like claiming the Renaissance as a favorite period of art. Uh… which Renaissance? Early? High? Northern? Proto?

Picasso, himself a modern renaissance, presents a similar range of options. Choosing your favorite Picasso period is a kind of litmus test. You say you like his Blue Period? Then clearly you tend toward the melodramatic, the sentimental, even the overly gloomy. The Rose Period? You're a bit inclined toward the chirpy and sweet, perhaps a little naÓ¯ve. Analytical Cubism? You like the hard stuff; you're an intellectual, a lover of mathematical puzzles.

And those are just the easily classifiable periods. After World War I it becomes much more difficult to justify the "favorite" label, because it becomes almost impossible to pin Picasso down. The expansive, roving nature of his eye, mind, imagination and libido sets a Picasso fan on a jolly chase through the rest of his life. Up and down the hills we go, watching Picasso process lovers, places of residence, and political and social events, not to mention a dizzying list of materials and techniques.

Truth in clichés

The Picasso show at the Philadelphia Museum provides a fresh reminder that there's always something more to learn about this phenomenon of 20th Century art. The more we see, the more there is to see, even when the last 30 years of Picasso's output is left off the dance card.

With Picasso, it seems that all the clichés are true— both the good and the bad. Did he really reinvent the meaning of art, shape the way all of us now see, and change the expectations for artists? Not entirely on his own, but Picasso certainly played a large part in all those things.

Is some of his late work crassly commercial? And did he enjoy playing harsh games with those who peopled his life? Sure. There's plenty of evidence. Must we either love or hate everything about this complicated man? No.

Sense of relief

Once Synthetic Cubism officially begins, Picasso continues exploring time and space, but his sense of relief in letting go of the tight reins of Analytical Cubism is palpable. All that new color and the play of form and material with the collages"“ he and Braque and their followers were having a lot of fun, even if there was a war going on not far beyond their studio walls.

Picasso favorites after World War I are often more about individual works than periods. I was delighted to find several of my choices at the Art Museum show, including his little sculpture, the Absinthe Glass. I've always been a fan of its sister at the Museum of Modern Art, so it was fun to see another version of his six originals, each one painted differently.

Three other musicians

Similarly, to see the match to the New York version of the Three Musicians was a thrill. The blocky, cut and pasted mix of bright and somber conveys a compelling balance of constrained, serious loss coupled with the sheer joy of creation.

This quality— the ability to be serious, even dark and cruel, and yet keep a sense of play— certainly figures in the reaction Picasso prompts in viewers. At the end of the show, his great Man with a Lamb (1939) looms up like a dark angel of doom, yet even that retains a gentle sense of the childlike.

Picasso never felt constrained to make the narrow choices of style and material that many artists do. He could be a Classicist when he felt like it, or a painter of ceramic vases, an etcher, a supreme Cubist, and so on. His freedom of choice gives the rest of us license to roam across the vast landscape of his art, making choices, hating some work and loving others. That freedom is as much a marker of the modern period he helped to create as the works themselves.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Richard CarreÓ±o, click here.