The Brooklyn Rail

So much is here, and not really too much, for seeing these all together makes a difference worth making. Right away, and then on … Picasso l’l'étranger indeed, having been denied citizenship in 1940, with Maurice Barrès declaring, “the foreigner who, like a parasite, is poisoning us,” in the terrible times of the Nazi occupation of Paris. Picasso was too much beyond the bounds of normal art-making. So much about peace, like the dove held by the couple (Couple à l’oiseau [1970]) and that dove at the Congrès de la Paix in 1943. How not to think about Paloma, “the dove,” Picasso’s daughter. In times of violence and war-torn everywhere-ness, heaviness in moments, such as that of the black feet and the marching steps of the 1914-15 Instruments de musique sur un guéridon. So many persons with notably knowing faces surrounding me at the gallery: nothing like writing on the master to get you swamped and marched with and at times upon! Some details that instantly struck me as I made my slow way around in my rollator, trying not to interfere with the sight of the impressive others. Even the first canvas shown here, the Seated Harlequin of 1901, strikes you with a smash: look at the way that table cuts into the clown-harlequin’s performative body. And then the Tête d’arlequin of 1927, this forever-remaining clown: what sadness is here in this face gently turned to the left, with so very few strokes…. It doesn’t take much to move the margin to the present dis-ease.

In the Procession vers l’ermitage de San Salvador of 1899, I glommed onto the white brushstrokes and the tree stalks and the strokes on the sweep of the road on the upper right side. The stark whites leap out at you, it seems to me. In the justly celebrated Self-portrait (Yo) (1901), that odd white slash on the left middle edge and the right edge felt different, when surrounded by all the other portraits, of self and other. I was overcome by those two nudes on the same wall, the Femme au peignoir de bain (1901), as she was looking shamed and made the observer feel so, and the Vieillard nu (1908), who looked barer than bare, older than old. And right after that, Corps de femme de face (1908) displayed such strength in those separated and yet repeated markings from her bust to her waist, down to the left leg and even the shoes, that I found myself to be longing to write that way, however one would define or determine “that way.” And oh my, that carnet Daumier, with those x’s all over her thin body!

Even the poster with Picasso’s always recognizable half-face photographed by Dora Maar in the dark surroundings in her studio of 29, rue d’Astorg, (arousing all sorts of powerful memories for my years of writing about Picasso’s Dora Maar) could send you into a scary position about art and artists.

Some real creepiness: try that Nu au miroir jaune of 1927–28, with that skeleton in its orange body and its teeth in the form of a comb. How not to appreciate the fashion in which this painter makes us make the comparisons we might not previously have made? To say nothing of the ways L’acrobate of 1930 twists and swerves like some baroque object, giving new athletic life to the stretched legs of the famous Minotaure of 1935, residing, as a minotaur or a human equivalent might happily reside, in Antibes.

How not to remember the poster announcing Homage to Pablo Picasso in the Grand Palais in 1966, from November 19 of that year to February 12 of 1967. How I remember that exhibition for his Oeuvres de 1970–1972 at the XXVIIe Festival d’Avignon, his last works in his lifetime. Grownups wept, and some of us there remembered our New Yorkers’ distress at Guernica being taken out of MoMA to be restored to Spain after Franco was no more. Picasso has brought tears and exaltation to us here.