The Brooklyn Rail

The history of Picasso in America conventionally begins with the spring 1911 exhibition of his drawings at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, uncovers a surprising prequel. It turns out that Stieglitz’s friend Hamilton Easter Field (a Brooklyn-based artist, critic, and collector) met Picasso in Paris in 1909 and commissioned a suite of “decorations” for the library of his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Picasso’s letters to Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, and his gallerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler confirm that he began work on the project in 1910 and continued at least through the end of 1912. If the suite of paintings had been completed and installed in Brooklyn, it would constitute a monument in the history of decorative art comparable in importance to James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room of 1876–77 and El Lissitzky’s Proun Room of 1923. Alas, Picasso never finished his decorative suite. Some of the large canvases called for in the commission are visible in period photographs of his studio but seem to have been destroyed. The smaller ones remained in Picasso’s studio. Some were eventually sold to other collectors; others were still in the artist’s possession when he died.

Researchers came across the letters documenting Field’s commission in the late 1980s, but the exhibition at the Metropolitan, organized by independent scholar Anna Jozefacka with Associate Curator Lauren Rosati, is the first to bring together the surviving canvases, giving a vivid sense of what his library might have felt like if the commission had been completed. It is, in effect, a counterpart to the final room of Picasso in Fontainebleau at MoMA, where different versions of Women at the Spring, Three Musicians, and related works from summer 1921 are installed in an enlarged version of the arrangement visible in photographs of Picasso’s studio. The installations encourage the viewer to travel back in time, imagining the work as it appeared at the moment of its creation.

Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn is a small gem of an exhibition, occupying the last room in the Met’s nineteenth-century galleries. (Often devoted to early masterpieces by Picasso and Matisse, the room entices visitors to head downstairs to the early twentieth-century galleries.) An old-fashioned vitrine in the center of the room contains copies of Field’s July 1910 correspondence with Picasso, explaining the dimensions of his library and the spaces available for Picasso’s “decorations.” The long side walls of the library were divided by doors and covered with bookcases from floor to around waist height, leaving room above them for four tall, broad canvases. Field also asked Picasso to paint smaller horizontal pictures to go over the doors, and two or three tall narrow canvases to fill in spaces adjacent to a door and a window. While the museum gallery is bigger and squarer than Field’s library, the curators have installed a chair rail running around the room and painted the walls light brown so that it feels like a domestic space of the era.

Three walls display the works from the Field commission that have survived unaltered. Because Picasso worked on the commission primarily from 1910 through 1912, the exhibition focuses on Analytic Cubism, the most hermetic phase of his career and therefore the one least often studied or displayed.

On the wall to the right, as one enters, there are five figure studies demonstrating Picasso’s radical evolution from spring through summer 1910. Over these months, the coherent contour of the body disappears, leaving behind a column of geometric forms floating in space. Here and there, a curve evokes a breast or a buttock; opposing angles suggest bent arms; tilted, parallel lines indicate the axes of a face. As Kahnweiler wrote in 1916, Picasso “had taken the great step; he had pierced the closed form.” These studies culminate in a tall narrow canvas of a Nude Woman completed in summer 1910, meant to go next to one of the library’s doors. Careful examination reveals a linear schema closely related to the drawings, but the canvas is divided into rectangular patches shaded with horizontal strokes of brown, ochre, and gray, making the figure almost impossible to see.

Nude Woman is displayed on the second wall of the gallery, where it is accompanied by the three horizontal overdoors. The first of these, also from 1910, depicts a Reclining Woman on a Sofa, reduced to rising and falling angles of elbows and knees. Once again, the figure is concealed within patches of flickering brushstrokes. The other two overdoors, painted a year later, are tabletop still lifes, with bottles and glasses accompanied by a panoply of books, papers, hand fans, and musical instruments. As Jozefacka observes in the catalogue, both compositions are densely layered and shaded in the center, thinning out at left and right, where a pipe rack or a curtain tieback with a tassel evokes the surrounding room.

The third wall is devoted to 1911 pictures depicting a Man with a Guitar and a Man with a Mandolin, motifs probably inspired by the nineteenth-century painter Camille Corot. Curiously, Picasso began both canvases in a conventional portrait format, but enlarged them with additional patches of canvas at bottom to approximate the dimensions of the 1910 Nude Woman. Repainting the upper sections, he added layer after layer of geometric figuration, with the result that each picture seems like five or six different representations of the same musician, compressed into one canvas. They are Cubist multiverses, evoking everything everywhere all at once. In contrast, the lower sections remain schematic, thinly painted images of feet and chair legs. The didactic texts on the fourth wall are accompanied by two more tall, narrow drawings of Cubist figures, plus a Rose Period drawing of a nude purchased by Field from Stieglitz’s 1911 exhibition.

Why didn’t Picasso finish this suite of “decorations” for Field? One answer, already suggested by earlier scholars, is that Analytic Cubism, with its dense proliferation of small forms, was inherently unsuited to the large formats that Field requested for his library. The lost works visible in photographs of Picasso’s studio suggest that he completed one or two large canvases for the commission and then destroyed them. Conversely, he painted at least five tall canvases depicting figures, when the library had space for only two or three. When I asked Jozefacka about this discrepancy, she suggested that Picasso may have considered replacing the failed large canvases with rows of vertical figures.

What, then, was the appropriate style for such “decorations”? In the catalogue, Jozefacka notes that, in 1908–09, the Post-Impressionist Maurice Denis painted a cycle of decorative panels for the music room of a Russian merchant, Ivan Morozov, while Henri Matisse painted a large Dance (1910) for the staircase of another Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin. (MoMA’s 1909 Dance is an outtake from this project.) Denis and Matisse followed in the footsteps of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose influential murals featured large figures painted with minimal shading and matte surfaces, so that they respected the flatness of the wall instead of creating an illusion of sculptural form. However, Jozefacka also cites the example of eighteenth-century artist Jean Siméon Chardin, whose decorative panels consisted of tabletop still lifes with three-dimensional musical instruments and other paraphernalia, silhouetted against blank walls. As she points out, these are direct antecedents for the two 1911 still lifes that Picasso painted for the Field commission. But they didn’t scale up.

Only in his large Harlequin of 1915 (MoMA) did Picasso arrive at a Cubist equivalent to Matisse’s large figures painted with simplified outlines and flat colors. He quickly reworked a tall, narrow Woman with Guitar, apparently begun in 1910 or 1911, in his new decorative style. Three years later, he similarly reworked a 1910 canvas of a Woman with a Fan. (Unfortunately, neither of these works could be borrowed for the exhibition at the Met; they are reproduced in the catalogue.) By 1918, Picasso seems to have lost touch with Field, but he continued to pursue the ideal of a monumental, “decorative” Cubism. The two versions of the 1921 Three Musicians currently on view at MoMA might be seen as the culmination of the Field commission.