Picasso: The Berggruen Album
May 3-June 26, 2004
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
1018 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10021
By JOHN
GOODRICH
Pablo Picasso Album:
Two Men and a Woman, 5.11.70 1970
pen and ink with felt pen on paper, 9-3/8 x 12-5/8 inches
Courtesay Mitchell-Innes & Nash
It's safe to say
that no artist has been so over-exposed as Picasso. It isn't simply
the seemingly countless exhibitions and critical studies; his styles
(all of them!) have so thoroughly infiltrated popular culture that no
one thinks twice about the Picassoid typefaces in travel posters or
the Picasso doves on hand-woven rugs from Mexican villages.
This makes it pretty
difficult for any presentation of his work to seem new. Yet, to a surprising
extent, "Picasso: The Berggruen Album" does just that. It
helps that none of the 26 drawings have been publicly exhibited before
this year. But the real novelty of the exhibition lies in the story
that connects the drawings. They represent the entire contents of a
sketchbook that Picasso filled over the course of eight days in 1970,
in his ninetieth year. Acquired by collector Heinz Berggruen, the drawings
were exhibited this March in San Francisco at the John Berggruen Gallery.
(John Berggruen is the son of Heinz.) Currently lining Mitchell-Innes
& Nash's dimly lit walls, the drawings-all about nine by twelve
inches, all horizontal-present a provocative, compressed capsule of
the energy of a great master in his twilight years.
Most of the drawings
were executed in pen and ink, but on some days Picasso added ink washes
or switched to pencil. Taking these works in one by one amounts to a
lesson in a kind of drawing, and it reminds us why Picasso so dominated
much of the last century. While the theatrics of the artist's late paintings
often seem heavy-handed and rehearsed-they're practically parodies of
his earlier, stronger paintings-the supple tautness and invention in
these drawings often lend an astonishing power to the images we've come
to expect from Picasso: nude women in erotic poses, with leering, hairy
male faces often intruding from the edges.
"Man and Woman,"
dated November 9, shows off the expansive, muscular rhythms particularly
well. Despite (or, really, partly because of) the distortions of scale
and placement, Picasso gives a riveting energy to the gestures of the
two figures: the weighty, bicycling legs of the female figure anchor
the long, steady stretch of her torso towards an upper corner, from
where her head twists suddenly back; the male figure becomes, through
some brilliant act of artifice, a bundle of horizontally compressed
forms, one meaty arm groping above the female figure and one below,
with the face darting in-between to plant-almost-a kiss (or lick?) on
a taut midpoint of her back. In the telling, the scene sounds faintly
ridiculous-it is, as sheer narrative-and yet the authority of rhythm
makes the forms compelling. Who ever caught more vividly and economically
the dance of pursuer and fleer, and the criss-crossing trajectories
of appetite and flirtation? Other modern artists worked in this idiom
of spare pen-and-ink arabesques (Calder and Ellsworth Kelly come to
mind), but never equaling this electricity of tightening and releasing
contours, of focus and interval.
Other notable drawings from November 9 include a series of paired female
nudes variously reclining and dancing or leaping, their gestures mirroring
or opposing each other in dynamic fashion, limbs and breasts swelling
through space in restless contradiction of the flatness of their arabesques.
Ink washes in drawings from November 10 add a richness of atmosphere
to the proceedings, but also dilute the galvanizing spareness of line;
for me, these images become vulnerable to Picasso's often schmaltzy
imagery-in this case, an intrusion of the broad-hatted musketeers that
he favored at the time. A November 6 pencil drawing features planes
of filigreed patterns that might be a nod to Matisse. (Picasso called
such effects "un peu Matisse," according to John Richardson's
illuminating catalogue essay, though the aggressive instability of Picasso's
design actually gives the sketch a much different flavor. Perhaps no
painter so completely melded machismo and artistic facility as Picasso,
and while even Matisse's most rigorous drawings seem to long for their
consummation in color, Picasso's, like Rembrandt's and Seurat's, can
make color seem almost redundant.)
It must be said
that watching Picasso at work may be something like observing Barry
Bonds at batting practice. The mastery astounds, but there's not necessarily
much suspense. Or perhaps a better comparison would be to the more voluble
Reggie Jackson, whose famous musing about "the magnitude of me"
broadcasts the same apparently unconflicted hugeness of ego.
This publicness
of ego does gnaw at one's enjoyment of the work. Picasso assumes our
rapt attention every time he steps to the plate. While he claimed that
he habitually dated every work by the month and day in order to understand
his own creativity, one can't help wondering: isn't it really so we
can't avoid monitoring it, too? The nifty catalogue, which re-creates
the effect of the original spiral bound pad, reveals that not a single
drawing here has an image on the reverse; they're exhibition-friendly
(unlike Rembrandt drawings, which often grace both sides of sheets that
the master stored tucked into books for his own private purposes.)
The catalogue essay takes a rather kind view of Picasso's frolicking
narcissism, but many viewers may be put off another manifestation of
Picasso's ego. His unabashed sexual predatoriness suffuses the exhibition.
In some drawings, women absently lift legs with the only discernible
purpose of exposing genitalia. It can be fascinating to guess whether
an artist's images are drawn from life or imagination-the giveaway tends
to be in the particularity of detail-and Richardson suggests that Picasso's
wife Jacqueline may have amicably posed for some of these drawings.
In any event the faces tend to be anonymously classical, while the sex
organs are loci of attention; if these are portraits, they're not portraits
of faces. The final three drawings (in both the sketchbook and the exhibition)
feature the same vacantly staring model, identically posed except for
the area below her waist. In the first, it's covered by a bit of fabric.
In the second, genitalia are exposed. In the third, hands cover the
crotch. The three states of woman, Picasso-style?
Picasso probably
didn't consider such drawings to be confessional self-indictments or
political statements. More likely he viewed them as morsels of universal
poetic truths. Having spent a lifetime Picasso-fying everything from
ancient Greek figures and African sculptures to Velazquez and Delacroix,
it had become for him a reflexive act. But so great is his genius at
energizing lines on a surface that his drawings usually prevail over
the clichés of their own prurience. To put it another way, much
as his motifs served to focus his energy, and his Bacchanalian pose
to give him cover, it was the vigor of his line that really makes such
works remarkable.
John Berger believed that Picasso started to fail once he'd exhausted
his stock of motifs. But banalities of theme apart, the drawings in
the Berggruen album reveal not the slightest faltering of mind or hand
in an eighty-nine year old. In that same "Man and Woman" drawing,
Picasso at one point briskly limned the contour of the male's forearm,
and then, apparently without lifting pen, swerved to incise a distant
section of the horizon line. It's a horizon line that, seen in total,
jags up and down crazily, placing one male foot at a enormous distance,
while crowding a female one close to our viewpoint, and yet acting as
perfect energizing foil to the figures' roiling gestures. Was Picasso
showing off? The answer, of course, is that he never stopped showing
off.
To wish for a modest Picasso, however, is to wish for no Picasso at
all, and perhaps even to wish away what he helped so much to create:
the modern mythology of the artist as contrarian genius, that urbane
bohemian who, part soothsayer, part rapscallion, makes us march to his
different drummer. Picasso ended up catering to our laziest impressions
of art history and wowing us with his sheer virtuosity of attack, as
if he never really trusted our response anyway. But perhaps he underestimated
his public. Go see this bite-sized sampling of a giant at Mitchell-Innes
& Nash, just to treat yourself to some great drawings, and to remind
yourself of why we'll always talk about Picasso.
