Outside Event 3

The opportunity to see a large body of work by one of the most recognized artists of the past 100 years is rare for most people. When the artist happens to be Pablo Picasso, it’s reason for even the most jaded art enthusiast to take notice. The exhibition, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris was recently showing at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco. It was part of a traveling tour that began in 2008 of roughly 150 original works by famous 20th century artist, Pablo Picasso. Stopping at various museums around the world, this collection-- on loan from the Musee National Picasso, in Paris-- boasts a huge number of paintings from every period of the famed artist’s nearly eighty year career.
One of the most interesting aspects of this particular show was that Picasso was one of the most prolific artists of the last century- and as innovative as his famously faceted cubist paintings were- they were only representative of a small percentage of his artistic output over the course of eight decades. From early sketches, to late-career sculptures and everything in between. Famous wartime painting “The Weeping Woman” (1930) represents one of his more well-known cubist works included in the exhibition, complete with angular lines (to illustrate volume), contorted facial features, eyeballs practically sitting on top of each other, and adorned with paisley-shaped tears. This contrasts dramatically with equally famous Blue Period portrait “La Celestine” (1904) with it’s monochromatic, realistic rendering of an old woman in a hooded cape with a massive cataract covering one eye. And yet further into the exhibit, another well-known, minimal work in black and white, “The Acrobat” (1930) shows an almost comically exaggerated pose of a nude contortionist. And elsewhere one can view early studies for “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) which was one of Picasso’s earliest paintings that foreshadowed the future development of cubism.
Of course the drawbacks to such an expansive collection of a single artist’s work are varied: such as trading quality for quantity. As big and comprehensive as this collection is: I would gladly trade the opportunity to see about a quarter of some of these paintings, rough sketches, and studies in exchange for a chance to see the massive “Guernica” (1937) which can be seen in Spain, or the finished “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon“ painting- which lives at the MoMA in New York. Now obviously, this isn’t possible since this exhibition represents only part of a collection from a single museum in Paris, but it also illustrates another missed opportunity: with such a huge collection of work from a single artist (shown chronologically from earliest to latest), it’s hard to fully comprehend the scope of work by this master of European modernism without comparing and contrasting this work to his contemporaries’ work at similar moments in history.
The exhibition itself, is unfortunately not optimized for such a small space. In it’s short 4-month stay, this exhibit was surely visited by hundreds of thousands of eager museum-goers. Needless to say, the exhibit was constantly overcrowded by a steady stream of visitors from open to close, day-in and day-out. The collection of work could have benefited from more room to be observed by such large crowds, not to mention the opportunity to provide more informational placards near the paintings for more thorough explanations- of course this would have been a missed opportunity for the museum to obnoxiously push it’s overpriced audio tours onto the curious public. Equally irritating is the way in which the tour inevitably ends up in a gift shop which sells refrigerator notepads and mouse pads with images of Picasso paintings on them for $10 each. Overlooking these avoidable (or unavoidable in some cases) shortcomings, the exhibit was generally well presented and certainly provided a rare opportunity to view a large number of works by Pablo Picasso for a much more reasonable price than a trip to Europe would cost.
The modernist obsession with the new, and the inevitability of obsolescence is perfectly illustrated in this chronological presentation. The linear march of artistic progress, the birth of new ideas at the expense of the death of old ideals seems to be an underlying theme of the show. As much as he constantly looked forward, Picasso seldom looked back. Revisiting the old never seemed to be a concern for him, perhaps more so than any other modernist. Whether it was modernism’s greatest strength or it’s greatest weakness, perhaps no other painter of the last century represented this idea as thoroughly (or as enduringly) as Pablo Picasso.