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12/11/12 10:36 PM‘Picasso Black and White’ at the Guggenheim Museum - NYTimes.com
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2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York, Gassull Fotografia,
via Museu Picasso, Barcelona
The first of Picasso’s variations on“Las Meninas,” inspired by Velázquez,is on loan from the Museu PicassoBarcelona.
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2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York, David Heald, via
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"The Kiss," a Picasso work from 1969.
ART REVIEW
Colorless Panorama Widens Vistas of Picasso‘Picasso Black and White’ at the Guggenheim Museum
By KAREN ROSENBERGPublished: October 4, 2012
You might expect “Picasso Black and White,” at the Guggenheim, tofeel like a glamorous gimmick — the museum-blockbuster version ofTruman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
Happily the exhibition, billed as thefirst monochromatic look at Picasso’swhole career, is much more than aclever conceit. It’s as eye-opening as itis elegant, especially among the laterworks on the upper ramps, whichpush well past the obligatory Neo-Classicism and Analytic Cubism intobracingly sensual explorations of thefigure, strident political cries de coeur à la Guernica, andwinking homages to Delacroix and Velázquez.
“Picasso Black and White” is, furthermore, a refreshingchange from the parade of shows about Picasso’srelationships with women (as in Gagosian’s recent series ofexhibitions) or with other artists (“Matisse/Picasso,”“Picasso and American Art,” “Picasso and the Avant-Gardein Paris”). Here there is just Picasso, stripped down andessentialized, his classical lines and radical sense ofpainting as sculpture both heightened by the restrictedpalette.
And in places that palette is more liberating than limiting.As Gertrude Stein put it, “There is infinite variety of gray inthese pictures, and by the vitality of painting the graysreally become color.” She was talking about Picasso’s earlygray still lifes, but her words could easily describe laterworks like “Marie-Thérèse, Face and Profile” (1931), aportrait of the young and pliant muse we know from bold-hued paintings like “Le Rêve.”
Also extraordinary: the vast majority of the show’s worksare private loans, about half of them secured from thePicasso family in what is certainly a remarkable feat by theshow’s curator, Carmen Giménez. (Ms. Giménez, themuseum’s curator of 20th-century art and a former directorof the Museu Picasso Malaga, organized the show with help
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12/11/12 10:36 PM‘Picasso Black and White’ at the Guggenheim Museum - NYTimes.com
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Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía,Madrid, Bequest of the artist, 2012 Estate ofPablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
Picasso's “Head of a Horse, Sketch forGuernica," at the GuggenheimMuseum.
from the associate curator Karole Vail.) Thirty-eight of theshow’s 118 works have never been exhibited in this country,and 5, among them the sharply angular “Bust of a WomanWith a Hat” (1939) have never been seen anywhere inpublic.
The implication is that we are seeing a more personal sideof Picasso in his black-and-white paintings, most of which,Ms. Giménez suggests in the catalog, have wound up in thehands of the family and the Musée National Picasso inParis because the artist was unwilling to part with them.
The few loans from other museums do not disappoint. Theyinclude “The Milliner’s Workshop” from the Pompidou in Paris; the first of Picasso’svariations on “Las Meninas,” from the Museu Picasso Barcelona; and three studies for“Guernica” from Reina Sofía in Madrid. Together these works support a theory, voiced bythe critic David Sylvester, that Picasso often turned to black and white in his busier, moreambitious paintings. It was his elegant solution to crowded compositions, “just as thereduction of color to grisaille in Analytic Cubism resulted from the pressure of its intricateproblems of form.”
“Picasso Black and White” puts forth other ideas about his reasons for paring down hispalette, as he did on and off over his career. He had Blue and Rose periods but nothingresembling a “black-and-white period,” as Ms. Giménez reminds us. Or, as thephotographer Brassai observed, he had several black-and-white periods: “A period ofpainting on a flat surface with a bright and varied palette was regularly followed by asculptural period with little color.”
One possible motivation for these colorless phases concerns the centuries-old tradition ofgrisaille, a form of gray or brown tonal painting. Often it was meant to create the illusionof sculpture, as works like Picasso’s “Bust of a Woman, Arms Raised” (1922) seem to do.(A valuable lesson of this show is that Picasso’s interest in fusing painting and sculpturedid not begin and end with Cubism.)
The black-and-white paintings may also owe something to ancient history, namely thePaleolithic cave paintings that Picasso is known to have visited and admired. The figuresin “The Lovers” (1923), for instance, are thickly outlined on a brushy gray ground thatcould pass for limestone.
You might also see, in parts of the show, a less classic and more contemporary Picasso —an artist who used a black-and-white palette because he saw it everywhere, in newsreelsand newspapers and images in art books. Looking at “The Milliner’s Workshop” (1926),with its interlocked biomorphic forms in many shades of gray, you have the uncanny sensethat you are looking at a black-and-white reproduction of a colorful abstract painting.
The obvious explanation, however, is the show’s most haunting one: that Picasso usedblack and white to reconnect to his Spanish heritage. This is clear from the Guernicastudies and the Velázquez-inspired “Meninas,” of course, but also from the series of seatedwomen that he painted in Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s. They may have teeth on thesides of their heads and eyes that stare in different directions, but they are, unmistakably,heiresses to Goya’s gray ladies.
The experience of “Guernica” seems to have intensified Picasso’s black-and-whitepainting. His large narrative works, like the “Rape of the Sabines” (1962), reveal anexpanded tonal range, with high contrast reserved for areas of particular urgency. And in
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12/11/12 10:36 PM‘Picasso Black and White’ at the Guggenheim Museum - NYTimes.com
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A version of this review appeared in print on October 5, 2012, on page C32 of the New York edition with the headline:Colorless Panorama Widens Vistas of Picasso.
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smaller paintings like the vanitas-themed “Skulls,” the grays thicken to thunderclouddensity.
Inevitably “Picasso Black and White” is also a judgment on Picasso the colorist,repackaging a long-held criticism — that he was indifferent to or indiscriminate with color— as a virtue. “The fact that in one of my paintings there is a certain spot of red isn’t theessential part of the painting,” Picasso himself once said to Françoise Gilot. “You couldtake the red away, and there would always be the painting.”
The Guggenheim has put Picasso’s words to the test, filtering color out of the pictureentirely. And, just as he promised, the painting is still there.
“Picasso Black and White” continues through Jan. 23 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.
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