Pablo Picasso, Creator/Destroyer as the title of one of his many biographies observed. Pablo Picasso, selfish prick or genius… or both? If any artist of the twentieth century “contained multitudes” in the way Walt Whitman observed about actualizing the many lenses of human potential, it was Picasso.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a fantastic, deep collection of Picassos. They have put over twenty of them in one room on the third floor of their still-standing Broad wing. The Picasso room is part of a larger, sprawling reveal of their early twentieth century art collection that takes up the whole third floor.
This Picasso room is a stunner. Go see it, now. It lets wonder seep into the viewing experience. Picasso, so daring in the 1910s, is suddenly conservative in the 1920s with an utterly conventional portrait of Sara Murphy (Woman with Blue Veil, 1923). I’ve been going to LACMA regularly for close to forty years. I have seen this painting on a hundred visits along with many of these Picassos, hung in various contexts, usually three or four of his works hung amidst a scattering of early modernists. This is the first time that I recall the institution freeing these pieces from the arbitrary art history chronology jail and celebrating the multitudes of the second greatest* artist of the twentieth century. Seeing this reductive portrait amidst the cacophony of Cubism and the chaos of his postwar painting did more to trigger wonder about what the world must have been like after a World War and a pandemic back-to-back. Sound familiar? Why so quickly abandon over a decade of wild experimentation if a collective desire for conservative order was not palpable among the public and present among the artists? The wall labels do a little more than describe but they don’t pontificate. They allow for pondering, for enjoying the work on its merits and the context you create for it.
Because this is Picasso, LACMA’s wall labels make sure to keep everyone informed about who he was banging and who he had just dumped and who he was thinking about sleeping with after he finished this picture but before the paint was dry. Matisse’s mistresses never get these sorts of headlines. Rouault’s monogamy doesn’t get a paragraph on every wall label. The fascination with Picasso remains. The work is so singularly interesting that scholars just insist on getting in his pants to explain it; there is too much there–and usually in simple compositions–that formal explanations do not suffice, historical allusions don’t feed the beast and the intrusion of biography must therefore abound. The sad residue of this is how biography became central to the story of art by artists who were not sinister forces of nature like Picasso; that I know more about Rothko’s relationship with his mother than his painting process I feel somewhere somehow Picasso scholars are to blame.
There are a few sculptures, his groundbreaking 3D post-cubist bust of a woman’s head, his monumental Centaur, and for the tourists and people who go to LACMA once a decade, these are certain to be mindblowers, but again, I’ve seen these in buildings at LACMA that were torn down for other buildings to house them that were then torn down. These works are not as much like old friends as they are when you are a regular at a local tavern and there’s this guy who is a regular at the same bar and he has a co-worker who comes in with him a few times a year for forty years. Oh yeah, that guy works with Picasso, comes here a few times a year, drinks Michelob Light. There might have been a time or place where these pieces would have been interesting and impactful but to see them over there each time I walked by to examine the Pollock more closely renders them just that friend of a friend, that Michelob Light.
The big room (with ample sitting arrangements) also has a selection of later Picasso paintings that are stunning for many reasons, primarily for me being that I had not seen them a hundred times before. They were fresh, they are fresh! They are less than sixty years old and they carried none of my viewing baggage. That scorned late period of Picasso’s turns out to have been impossibly fertile. The works from the 1960s and 70s have the touch, the feel and complexity of form in a reductive composition that a Picasso carries. These late works also carry a late-in-life attitude like he knows some profound truth about not only who he is in the fairy tale we call “art history” but also where he is in art history as he stands there painting. He is still in love with the 1600s, with Velasquez and Rembrandt, he is dialoguing with them like only an immortal or a fool can. And he’s got to know the clock is ticking, that mortality howls at his studio window and he makes paintings to be hung alongside them, not with mere early modernists.
Consider for example the astounding Man and Woman, 1969 that was a generous gift of the Lazarofs like many later Picassos in this room. Picasso is talking with the past, he’s got the man wearing a Three Musketeers hat, there is romance for a bygone world. But it is also 1969, they are sending a man to the Moon, Paris burned last summer, Picasso knows he has to top the typical trendy stuff out there. To be the bridge between what we see in The Prado and what we will see for the next 300 years, he has to paint for the future, he knows he will be the event horizon, that one day future generations will not understand what came before him without seeing it through the lens of what he accomplished and he knows he must appeal to the future by exploding the present. In Man and Woman all painterly finesse is dead, all pretense to mannered courting between the sexes is gone. He has climbed into her dress, her breasts are out, she pulls his beard, his cock is a dagger pointed right at her labial gates, is that a sphincter blowing in the wind behind it? Their faces are glassy-eyed dead, succumbing all humanity to brute animal instincts. No wonder the scolds want to cancel Picasso, he is the sex they cannot imagine and cannot allow you to imagine.
LACMA is to be applauded for seeing the multitudes of a great painter in an era of rigid, narrow curatorial vision. I wish the names of their curators were more prominent (this is Hollywood, the director’s name goes above the title) on the wall in order to laud with praise. That Picasso is superficially cancel-friendly is outweighed when an institution has a solid collection of his work and is emboldened to show that the good in his paintbrush far outweighed the disasters his dick wrought.
*Second Greatest. Everyone has their favorite 20th century artist. Think about it and then name your great one. That person becomes more important and an argument for their greatness can be best articulated when you compare and contrast their achievements to those of Picasso, the second greatest artist of the twentieth century next to your choice for greatest.