The OTHER Picasso Museum

Pablo Picasso
in Lucerne

WITHOUT THE CROWDS

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]
Lucerne, Switzerland
Many Pablo Picasso fans have already made the pilgrimage to the newly-opened Musée Picasso in Paris, and thus, surrounded by scores the artist's works, have encountered the hordes that flock to museum. Like most museums in Paris, these galleries double as tourist attractions, especially when they feature marquee artists (Picasso) or iconic paintings (Mona Lisa at the Louvre). The result are crowds. Big crowds. Sometimes, in the summer, especially, titanic crowds that can put off even the most hardy museum-goer. (Ssshh... The solution are skip-the-line tickets. Sometimes costly. But always well worth the expense).

 

Or, for true, die-hard Picasso dévotees, how does immediate access to one of the best, small collections of his works anywhere sound? And with no crowds. In fact, hardly any fellow museum-goers to contend with.

Guernica

Guernica

ART AS POLITICS

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]

MADRID -- Guernica, Pablo Picasso's masterpiece at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía here, often ranks as the artist's most famous,  if not greatest, work. The picture, depicting the anilation by aerial bombing of the small Basque peasant village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is also frequently cited as the most famous anti-war painting in the pantheon of Western Art. With such superlatives, Guernica has become one of those iconic paintings that everyone seems to know. And everyone wants to see. It has its own immense showcase gallery. Guards are stationed at attention on either side of the canvas. No photography permitted. Something like the Mona Lisa, without, at least when I visited recently, the Louvre-like crowds.

But is Guernica really just an anti-war statement, as it is most often portrayed? Or even, for that matter, the most powerful iteration of that admirable sentiment ever rendered in 20th-century modern art? Maybe, not so much

 

Simply put, Guernica doesn't escape being, as is the case with much war-related art, politically motivated. As such, it ranks too as arguably the most famous poster child for advocacy art. In a word, propaganda. Righteous propaganda. But propaganda nonetheless.

Gassed

The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid

Picasso Museum, Paris

CROWD CONTROL

By RICHARD CARREÑO

Waiting
Photo: WC News Service

 

PARIS [WC News Service] -- The newly-reopened Musée National Picasso-Paris, closed for expansion and remodelling after an incredible (count em!) five years, is unarguably the world's most comprehensive and numerically superlative collection anywhere of works by Pablo Picasso, the prolific, long-time Parisian. There are, of course, many iconic pieces of the Picasso's canon elsewhere, with pride of place in museums from Madrid to New York. But for sheer number (more than four hundred objects) -- including great examples of the Spanish modern's oeuvre over a lifetime of artistic mastery --  the 'new' Picasso Museum is the place to show up. If you can get in. 

No, the Picasso is not a timed-ticket establishment. But I'm wondering whether it really should be. Actually, putting up with the longish entrance queue is the easy part. (Full disclosure: As a reporter, I got to skip the line in a visit earlier this month). What's harder for everyone, even those credentialed as press, is seeing the works with any ease. Forget contemplation. Communion? Not in this lifetime. Even just trying to get up close and personal with any of the art is a spirited, athletic art form in itself. In weaving and bobbing among other museum-goers (many seem to be garden clubers on private tours), being built like a line-backer will definitely help. So will a periscope to see over the heads of fellow galleristas.

Francisco Goya

 Whimsy with Bite

By RICHARD CARREÑO Bio
[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 16 September 2014

Philadelphia

Tony Auth's recent death got me thinking about an exhibit of cartoons by Goya I visited about a fortnight ago at the Allentown Art Museum.

 

Auth, a former editorial cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Francisco Goya, Spain's great 19th century court painter, in the same breath?

 

Yes, because Goya (1764-1828), though often best known for such full-figure portraits such as the Duchess of Alba and the Nude Maja and Clothed Maja, was also an early social realist and Spain's first, yes, first, modern painter. It's hard not to to think of the horror of war depicted in Picasso's Guernica when viewing Goya's equally horrific scene of bloodshed in his Third of May, 1808. Goya's spirit imbued a new form of political and societal criticism that flowed in subsequent centuries from the sharpened quills of such penny-press English sharpshooters as William Hogarth,  George Cruikshank, James Gilray, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman, and Steve Bell.

 

Editor's Sketchbook

'MODERN' ART TURNS 100

New York

What do Constantine Brancusi's Muse endormie, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (N0.2), François Picabia's Dances at the Spring, and Jacques Villion's Young Girl have in common? These works, then contemporary works, were all part of scores of now 'modern' paintings and sculptures that were displayed in the ground-breaking Armory Show, held in New York 100 years ago and now recreated at the New-York Historical Society Museum &; Library, 170 Central Park West at 77th Street.

 

There's another commonality: These and other sculptures and pictures, more than a dozen in all, are now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the single best-represented repository of Armory Show submissions, all part of the museum's stellar Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

 

'The Armory Show at 100' is one of the best art exhibits I've ever had the privilege of attending. It's a time capsule of what modern art was to become. I was transported to 1913 and 69th Regiment Armory (1906), still functioning at 68 Lexington Avenue, between 25th and 26 streets. Imagine, if you will, being an attendee at that time, seeing, aye savouring, early first works by Picasso, Matisse, and Van Gogh. Add a Renoir or two, a picture by Goya, even an Augustus John, the under-appreciated English portraitist. In all, scores of artists are represented. Still, only a fraction of the total collection in the show itself. 

The 'Other' Picasso Show at the PMA

Museum's 1958
Picasso Exhibit Recalled

By Richard Carreño
Junto Staff Writer Bio 

When the Pablo Picasso exhibit closed, the Philadelphia Museum of Art declared the show a rousing 'success.' Despite snowstorms. Snowstorms?

No, 'Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde,' which just ended a two-month plus run, was hardly the victim of unseasonal snow.

What the Philadelphia Museum was referring to was the other Picasso show in 1958 -- the first blockbuster introduction of works by the Spanish artist to a Philadelphia audience.

In many ways, 'Picasso at 75,' a reference to the artist's age at the time, was an even more ambitious show that the 'Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde,' which concluded this month.

For starters, it was co-produced by the PMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. (The recent show was an in-house installation). It was fully comprehensive, including a representative retrospective of the complete Picasso oeuvre, on canvas, prints, ceramics, and illustrated books. It featured a requisite catalog. And  it featured Guernica, Picasso's most famous public work.

Even before the paint has dried on curator Michael Taylor's 'Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde,' the PMA is referencing that first Picasso exhibition with an other exhibit, a smallish display in several showcases in the museum's library, the Albert M. Greenfield Visual and Digital Resources Center. The library is located in the Perelman Building, and the exhibit runs to June 12.

The library exhibit traces the museum's association with the Picasso (1881-1973) as it attempted to bolster its modern art collection -- and bona fides -- under the legendary directorship of Fiske Kimball. It was a 'new' emphasis, as it was described. 

The museum had acquired its first Picasso, Woman with Loaves, in 1931. But it wasn't until the 1940s and 1950s that the PMA was able to field a Picasso line-up to write home about, thanks to the genius and generosity of A.E Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg, who respectively settled their eponymous collections to the museum.

Besides having to battle snowstorms, 'Picasso at 75,' held more than 50 years ago from January 8 to February 23, 1958, had to face a vastly different audience than one that attended the museum's recent show. 'Modern' was still identified in many circles -- especially in uptight Philadelphia -- as outre, even deviant. Picasso, with his band-name recognition, often became the 'poster child' for this view.

Fresh from viewing 'Picasso at 75,' a female Philadelphian -- I can picture her now as a Helen Hokinson battle-axe figure in The New Yorker -- wrote in, 'Just mention Picasso's name in a crowd and a ripple of laughter flows thru it. Now I know why! I went to the exhibit to see how you defended yourself in allowing an exhibit like this to be show at such a fine Art Museum.'

Such reaction wasn't unexpected. All along, it seemed, there was an underlying 'educational' theme to the show, introducing Picasso's art to the museum's audience for both 'enjoyment and scholarship.' (Emphasis mine).

And what enjoyment! What scholarship!

Especially since the Philadelphia Museum was able expand the trunk show with supplementary artwork. Picasso, writing in French from the south of France, gave the PMA specific permission to display a group of of ceramics that were then housed in the Rotterdam-based museum Boijmans.

The highlight, of course, was Guernica (1937), Picasso's legendary canvas that commemorates the sacrifice of republicans bombed by Nazis aligned with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Picasso had decreed that he, nor the painting would ever set foot in Spain as long as Franco ruled his homeland. At the show, Guernica held pride of place, installed at the top of the Great Stair Hall.

I can almost attest to how breathtaking a viewing experience, looking up at the stark painting, must have been. Some years later, I visited Guernica, which was then still permantently housed in MoMA, and where it remained until Franco's death in 1975. I've also seen the painting at the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, in Madrid, where it now resides. Still, I can't help but think that encountering Guernica in the stunning, majestic Great Hall would have been the best thrill of all.

The museum noted that 79,484 people attended 'Picasso a 75.' Of these, 13,112 were admitted free of charge. (In those days, the museum was open seven days a week. Mondays were free. Otherwise, admission cost 75 cents).

'Despite several snowstorms, Picasso aficionados and curiosity seekers alike showed up, and the exhibition was a success,' the museum reported. 

PMA's Picasso Show...

... Gets Slammed
by New York Times

By Richard Carreño
Junto Staff Writer Bio
More than a month after 'Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris' opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New York Times got around last week to reviewing the exhibition. The PMA probably wished that the newspaper hadn't bothered.

'The outcome,' says Karen Rosenberg, a New York-based freelance arts writer, 'is deeply unsatisfying....'

Rosenberg argues that the show, drawn exclusively from the PMA's permanent collection, many works in which were closeted away in the museum's attic for many years, is too thin to do the thematic justice to exhibition's conceit.

'It's an endurance test without the major loans that typically reward a long slog through the galleries,' she noted, in her review 'Picasso Leads the Way Through a Maze of Cubism.'

It's all downhill from there.

Important?

The Times is the ultimate arbiter of national main-stream cultural values, and pretty much the 'decider' on which arts events get middle-brow public approval. That's important because shows, like the PMA's Picasso exhibit, need to rely on a national audience for a strong gate and overall monetary success. That's why -- despite no review until last week -- the museum has been heavily advertising in The Times.

Sure. While a negative review like Rosenberg's can't 'close' an arts event, as reviews by Times theatre reviews used to putatively spell the kiss of death for Broadway shows, they affect national ticket sales, especially from East Coast cultural meccas like Boston, New York, and Washington.

Fortunately, the PMA doesn't have to worry about critical comment from The Inquirer, the Delaware Valley's most influential voice. When it comes to the PMA, The Inky can always to be counted on for favorable, wall-to-wall coverage. (In fact, in the one-sixth-page ad the PMA has been regularly running in The Times, The Inky gets billing for proclaiming, 'IT'S EXCEPTIONAL').

In fairness, my review of the show, which appeared on-line at Examiner.com, the BroadStreetReview.com, and Junto.blogspot.com, was also positive. Still, like Rosenberg, I thought that the museum skimped too much by not publishing a show bulletin.

Rosenberg makes another interesting point about expectations arising from a 'mini-blockbuster.'

Like other museums now strapped for cash, the PMA shaved considerable cost by mounting the Picasso installation by simply showcasing the family jewels already in its A.E. Gallatin and Walter Arensberg collections. Expenses such as that for the rental of visiting artwork, international travel, insurance, licensing fees, and the like are thus eliminated. Moreover, in-house shows take less time to put together. Again, saving money.

Yet, as Rosenberg notes, '... [T]his is a special exhibition, with special admissions charge and timed tickets, and viewers will expect all the curatorial sifting and string-pulling that such productions normally entail.'

In other words, if a museum-goer pays for special, the visitor should get special.

Rosenberg makes a solid point regarding expections, and she doesn't think that the exhibition's curator, Michael Taylor, meets the test.

As my review, here and elsewhere, demonstrates though, Rosenberg and I have differing opinions about Taylor's success was in shaping the show's content and narrative. Besides some glitches (not publishing a special bulletin, some poor lighting, and some un-needed thematic excursions), Taylor, to my mind, skillfully used the permanent collection to craft an important story-line that I haven't quite seen before.   

Oh, yeah. Besides the delay in publishing the review (whether ultimately it was good, bad, or indifferent), The Times took another editorial swipe by not showcasing the Rosenberg's article in Friday arts section. Instead of a front-page treatment, the review was buried inside. Below the fold, no less. Ouch!

Picasso at the PMA

Curator Taylor offers American
'Context' to Artist's European Creation

By Richard Carreno
Junto Staff Writer Bio

No one can fault the PMA's modern art impresario, Michael Taylor, for picking as much low-hanging fruit as possible from the Pablo Picasso vine. As demonstrated by the current show of Picasso's seminal work in his pre-World War II years in Paris, the art museum is fabulously rich in works by the artist. That's largely thanks to gargantuan donations by A.E. Gallatin and Louise and Walter Arensberg.

But curator Taylor also wanted to do more, creating what he calls 'context' to his Picasso homage.

The result is a small 'sidebar' exhibit to main-stage event, utilizing lesser-known collections donated by Georgia O'Keefe and the estate of Paul Strand.

These works, paintings and photographs (by Strand) occupy the long, narrow hallway leading to the American art collection. Unfortunately, the day I visited earlier this week, this ancillary exhibit wasn't getting the follow-up it deserves. (It was me, another museum-goer, and a friendly guard).

Before that, I had spotted Taylor amongst the crowds. As ever ebullient and jolly, and loaded with facts, he was confounding a female reporter from a local television station. 

I also spied a small sign announcing 'Picasso in Context.'

The context that Taylor is referring to is how Picasso, Cubism, yea, modernism came to be introduced to the United States.

And that, according to Taylor, can be largely attributed to the pioneering American photographer Alfred Stieglitz who figuratively and literally opened the doors to Picasso, George Braque, Cubism -- and mamma mia! -- European modernism to America. (Think The Beatles introduced on The Ed Sullivan Show).

In 1911, Picasso got his American debut at Stieglitz' 291 gallery/studio (291 Fifth Avenue, New York). In 1914, Stieglitz turned over the gallery to a joint show of Picasso and Braque.

Meantime, Stieglitz was also showing (and promoting) works by other emerging home-grown modernists like Marsden Hartley and his paramour and, later, wife, Georgia O'Keefe. (Their relationship was stormy. Enough said).

Taylor has hung a couple of works by O'Keefe. Hardly brilliant. But interesting.

In sharp contrast is the lensmanship of mid-20th century American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976). Between 1955 and 1957, Strand visited Picasso (at his Cannes villa) and Braque (at his Normandy house), and snapped extraordinary images. All capturing the men and their moments.

A Picasso head-and-shoulders shot, a stationery-sized black-and-white portrait, is a must-see. Picasso is pictured in an intense moment. His beady eyes are penetrating. I'm titling the picture 'The Evil Eye.'

It is said that Strand and the artist failed to kindle a friendship. Well, surely, well short of a Facebook hook-up.