The Brooklyn Rail

In March 1921, revered British art critic Roger Fry, in correspondence with artist Vanessa Bell, lauded Pablo Picasso’s penchant for unsettling artistic norms, stating, “Picasso goes and does things which disconcert everyone, which I admire. He's always chucking his reputation.” Already a provocateur in Paris with his Cubist works flooding the market, Picasso, accompanied by his wife Olga Khokhlova and newborn son Paulo, sojourned to Fontainebleau that summer where he would demonstrate Fry’s observation even more acutely. What emerged from a humble garage studio during their three-month stay—two iconic works blending Cubist and classicizing styles concurrently—is the focal point of the Museum of Modern Art's latest exhibition, Picasso in Fontainebleau, offering a nuanced exploration of this seminal artistic juncture.

Fontainebleau is a city located a short train ride from Paris and is known for its large and scenic forest and the medieval Château de Fontainebleau. During the late French Renaissance, King François I invited artists to decorate the palace, which led to the formation of the School of Fontainebleau, laying the groundwork for French classicism. Walking into the exhibition, visitors are greeted by Picasso’s interpretation of this classicizing style through two works—a large-scale charcoal drawing and an oil painting—both titled The Spring (both 1921), depicting a female figure reclining in a landscape, holding an amphora that pours water into the spring. The trope of a woman in a white gauzy tunic, leisurely lying down in a landscape is classical in its iconography: perhaps she is a water nymph or an ancient Roman or Greek woman. But in typical Picasso fashion, though she may be a classical figure, she is rendered with Cubist notions in mind: her body is bulbous, with shoulders and legs of awkward proportions, and her figure reads as immensely heavy, as if she is not human, but rather a chiseled giant sculpture in relief.

Surrounding these works in the first gallery are Cubist drawings and sketches made prior to Fontainebleau, including stage design sketches and maquettes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and commedia dell’arte figures painted in the Cubist style (readers can view a full-sized stage curtain from the period, Le Tricorne, at the New York Historical Society). These works help to ground the show’s main objectives: first, to show how Picasso was involved in multiple avenues and engaged with various styles in the months prior to his stay in Fontainebleau, and second, to demonstrate how these contrasting styles came together in the major works installed in the following gallery. Take the small Cubist painting, Harlequin, from late 1915: it is a figure that Picasso had depicted from the beginning of his career, and often considered a symbolic alter-ego of the artist himself. In this version, Harlequin takes on a Cubist rendering, in which its body is made up of flat planes of alternating colors. This work is a small glimpse into Picasso’s mind and will show up later in Three Musicians, which is a centerpiece of the exhibition.

Connecting the two main galleries is a small hallway that has been transformed into a recreation of the garage where Picasso worked during his stay. Curators were able to configure the garage from archival photographs that show Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring (both 1921), whose dimensions are known. This made it possible to estimate the studio’s size, roughly twenty by ten feet. The space, complete with to-scale reproductions of the major works on view in the following gallery, allows us to imagine what it was like for Picasso to exist and contemplate his work in such a compressed area.

Out of the garage and in the final gallery, we are met with the monumental works, Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring. During his stay in Fontainebleau, Picasso painted two versions of Three Musicians and created a large-scale red chalk drawing and oil painting of Three Women at the Spring. All four canvases jut out into the gallery space on support walls, which help orient their massive presence as major curatorial accomplishments: this is the first time these works have been brought together since they were tacked up in Picasso’s Fontainebleau studio in 1921.

Viewers are afforded the unprecedented chance to compare and contrast the two versions of both works. In Three Musicians, we see a Cubist trio of commedia dell’arte characters: Pierrot known for melancholy, Harlequin known as a trickster, and the monk, who might seem out of place from its cohort, dressed in a Benedictine robe. The characters hold up their instruments and gaze out at the audience as if they are performing for us. From a close viewing, though almost identical in form, composition, and style, the MoMA-owned work gives off a somber mood, whereas the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Three Musicians exudes joy.

In Three Women at the Spring and in the surrounding preparatory sketches in the gallery, attention is given to the classical study of the human figure, a complete departure from the Synthetic Cubist style of Three Musicians. Picasso’s choice of materials, including pastel, pencil, and charcoal, also reflects his response to the work of classical artists. The large, red chalk drawing of Three Women at the Spring, for example, harkens back to Michelangelo’s extensive use of the medium. Amongst the tens of preparatory drawings of the various figures, limbs, and details that line the exhibition wall are five extraordinary, large, formal pastel drawings of women’s heads, all bearing a resemblance to the artist’s wife, Olga. In shades of blue, red, and brown, these Antique statue-esque portraits are emblematic of Picasso’s experimentations with different formats, scales, and monumentality, showcasing his technical versatility and ongoing dialogue with artistic innovation and tradition.