Picasso Show MOMA 2015 – 2016

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• published: 13 Jan 2016
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Many exhibitions are good, some are great and a very few are tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom. The show, which opens on Monday, is the latest in a string of landmark Pablo Picasso exhibitions for which the Modern has been justly famous since 1939. It is full of loans that perhaps only this museum has the clout to secure, including about 50 pieces from its collaborator, the Musée Picasso in Paris. The approximately 140 sculptures here were made between 1902 and 1964; encompass at least 10 media — among them wood, plaster, sheet metal, clay, beach-smoothed pebbles — and, in assemblage, all manner of found objects great and small. The galleries are dotted with works never before exhibited in New York, and reunite related efforts not seen together since they were in Picasso’s studio. The show’s two grandest, most thrilling reunions are the gathering in its second gallery of all six “Glass of Absinthe” sculptures of 1914, those tiny weirdly Keatonesque charmers of painted bronze that can suggest drunken faces and profiles; and in its fourth, the five monumental tumescent heads in white plaster of Marie-Thérèse, more than have ever been shown together, at least in the United States. High points aside, there hasn’t been a Picasso sculpture survey of this scope in this country since 1967. The inexplicably beloved bronze “Man With a Lamb” of 1943 may strike you as the best Leonard Baskin ever, or maybe a monument to John Cleese, but the big clumsy hands with which the man grasps the struggling creature are extraordinary. And, in fact, Picasso mastered bronze when he personalized it by painting it, as he had with the absinthe glasses. That’s just one way he brought painting with him to sculpture. In the show’s eighth gallery, covering 1945 to 1953, he paints with glaze on ceramic vessels in the shape of figures and animals, on bronze casts of assemblages, including the shovel-backed “Crane.” He also always cut his losses. In this first gallery, the 1909 bronze “Head of a Woman” is powerful as ever, but also more clearly one of the great dead ends in early modernism: a futile attempt to bring the flickering facets of Analytical Cubism, and Cézanne into three dimensions. The future of sculpture lay with Braque’s innovation, Cubist collage. Goaded by African art, Picasso then arrived at the groundbreaking “Guitar” by coaxing collage’s flat clean shapes into three dimensions. This mirage of hovering planes, voids and shadows in sheets of cutout, darkly rusted ferrous iron is simultaneously a mask, a body and a musical instrument. In addition to breaking open sculptural space, it made self-evident structure almost de rigueur. Next to it hangs its crucial dry run, an exact but radiant replica in creamy paper and paperboard. They preside over the absinthe glass bronzes like proud parents. The guitars’ planar composition is explicit in the proto-installation piece “The Bathers,” whose six flattened sentinels Picasso made in 1956, using more decrepit lumber and the occasional ingeniously placed open frames. Others served as tensile canvases for color, most notably, “Woman With Hat,” a pop-out reprise of a frequent Picasso motif: a woman in an armchair. “Picasso Sculpture” has been wrested into being by Ann Temkin, chief curator, and Anne Umland, curator, both in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture, and Virginie Perdrisot, the Musée Picasso’s curator of sculpture and ceramics. We are in their debt. Each gallery of this brilliantly installed effort is an exhibition unto itself, full of subtle links, allusions and contrasts that tie the works together or hold them apart. The last gallery delivers you back to the entrance and the circular path — a great chain of being in art — is fitting: Picasso’s sculptural progress was nonlinear, and, anyway, one’s impulse is to keep circling through, taking in more and more with each rotation. This is one of the best exhibitions you’ll ever see at the Museum of Modern Art, especially in its current iteration. The fourth-floor galleries, which usually house the permanent collection, postwar division, have never looked better. The show’s spacious installation — every piece (save wall pieces) can be seen in the round — redeems at least this part of the museum’s soul-killing 2004 expansion. It also suggests that too many works on display may mean that people look less, because they move faster and more obliviously. If the Modern’s curators can reinstall fewer works after the close of this show, visitors might stand a better chance of becoming genuine art lovers rather than art tourists wielding smartphones. New York Times By ROBERTA SMITH SEPT. 10, 2015