Art

The Show of Shows Picasso, modernism's father, comes home to MOMA

In imaginative force and outright terribilit`a, it is quite possibly the most crushing and exhilarating exhibition of work by a 20th century artist ever held in the U.S. Beginning this week, over the next four months nearly a million people will queue outside New York City's Museum of Modern Art to get a glimpse of it. Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973, is being honored in a show of nearly 1,000 of his works, some never exhibited before, drawn from collections the world over.

What gives the exhibit its overwhelming character is the range and fecundity of Picasso's talent--the flashes of demonic restlessness, the heights of confidence and depths of insecurity, the relationships (alternately loving and cannibalistic) to the art of the past, but above all the sustained intensity of feeling. "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" contains good paintings and bad, some so weak that they look like forgeries (but are not), as well as a great many works of art for which the word masterpiece--exiled for the crime of elitism over the past decade--must now be reinstated. It is the largest exhibition of one artist's work that MOMA has ever held, or probably ever will. It contains pieces ranging in size from Guernica, Picasso's 26-ft.-wide mural of protest against the fascist bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, to a cluster of peg dolls he painted for his daughter Paloma. Paintings, drawings, collages, prints of every kind, sculpture in bronze, wood, wire, tin, paper and clay; there was virtually no medium the Spaniard did not use.

Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911 run close to total abstraction. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field of vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs for themselves--a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound hole of a guitar. This sense of multiple relationships was the core of cubism's modernity. It declared that all visual experience could be set forth as a shifting field that included the onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the theory of relativity.

After World War I, Picasso would depend wholly on himself and his feelings. The corollary was that Picasso gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity, so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage, castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong to the Spaniard. This frankness--allied with Picasso's power of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a ravenous, animistic vitality--is without parallel among other artists.

Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic. One needs colossal self-confidence to expose such insecurities.

Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.

Picasso was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him--from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky--an almost indescribably fruitful one. Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.