emotional formalism week 3

EMOTIONAL FORMALISM

WEEK 3

BHQFU

RANDOM SAMPLING OF RECENT CRITICISM BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

SHOCK ARTIST SIGMAR POLKE

WRITING ON THE WALL

CHRISTOPHER WOOL

IN THE HEAD BALTHUS AND MAGRITTE

ANOTHER DIMENSION

PICASSO SCULPTURE

9/19/15 3:51 PMShock Artist - The New Yorker

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The Art World APRIL 28, 2014 ISSUE

Shock ArtistA Sigmar Polke retrospective.BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

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A The Palm Painting(1964). Polke couldseem to hit a resetbutton from phase tophase.COURTESY ESTATE OFSIGMAR POLKE / ARS, NY /VG BILD-KUNST, BONN,GERMANY; PHOTO: ALISTAIR OVERBRUCK

libis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, a wondrousretrospective of the lateGerman artists work at the

Museum of Modern Art, is the most dramaticmuseum show of the century to date. It mayalso be the most important, if its lessons forcontemporary art, both aesthetic and ethical,are properly absorbed. I fancy that young artists will feel put to a test. Evenlongtime Polke fans may be amazed by the cumulative power of the twohundred and sixty-five works on view, in painting, sculpture, graphic art,photography, and film. The modes range from the cartoonishly figurative tothe augustly abstract, and the mediums from paint and pencil to toxicchemicals and meteorite dust. There is no Polke style, but only a distinctiveforce of talent and mind. With caustic humor and cultivated mystery, he couldseem to hit a reset button from phase to phase, and even from piece to piece,and he regularly frustrated the efforts that curators, dealers, and critics madeon his behalf, in ways that blurred his public image and hobbled his sales. Hewould still be at it, if he had lived to finish collaborating on Alibis withKathy Halbreich, MOMAs associate director. (Polke died, of cancer, in 2010,at the age of sixty-nine.) Halbreich says that Polke rejected a chronologicalarrangement of the work. Theres no telling what sort of unnerving layout hewould have demanded. Mercifully for viewers, Halbreich has imposed aconventional order, except for an olio of big works, from different periods, inthe museums atrium. The effect is intensive and intense. We may now beginto understand an artist who, like a fugitive throwing dust in the eyes ofpursuers, took pains not to be understood.



Polke was of a generation of Germans who inherited a defiled national culture.The alibis in the shows title start, in Halbreichs telling, with a postwarGerman mantra: I didnt see anything. Polke came from the East, likeGerhard Richter, his peer and, for several years in the nineteen-sixties, hisclose friend. (Its a bit distorting, but irresistible, to deem Richter the cunningApollo, and Polke the rampaging Dionysus, of the periods renaissance inGerman art.) Polke was born in 1941 in Oels, Silesia, the seventh of eightchildren of a father who trained to be an architect. In 1945, the family fled toSoviet-occupied Thuringia, during an expulsion of Germans from Silesia,which became part of Poland. In 1953, abandoning nearly all their possessions,they escaped to the West on a train, with young Polke ordered to feign sleep,to deflect suspicion. They settled in Dsseldorf, where Polke apprenticed to astained-glass manufacturer and entered the Dsseldorf Art Academy in 1961.Modern art was then enjoying a lofty prestige in West Germany, as acounterweight to the scalding memories of the Reich and to the menacingideology of the East. Polke embraced the art but scorned the piety, resistingeven the utopianism of the academys charismatic guide and teacher, JosephBeuys. Polke quickly became a galvanic presence in a cohort that includedRichter, who, nine years older, and living on refugee assistance, had recentlyescaped the East after having been schooled unhappily in Socialist Realism.

Young German artists were stirred by the emerging Pop art of Andy Warholand Roy Lichtenstein. Polke took to painting proletarian consumer goodschocolate bars, soap, plastic bucketsand ordinary news and magazinephotographs, in a rugged variant of Lichtensteins Benday dots. The first was ascrappy image of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1963, Polke, Richter, and two artistfriends, unable to interest galleries in their work, mounted a group show, in aformer butcher shop, of what they termed Junk Culture, Imperialist orCapitalist Realism. The last two words resonate with an exquisiteambivalence, skewering both parties to the Cold War: the commercial Westand the dogmatic East. Polke and Richter, like Warhol, conveyed underclassperspectives on popular spectacles of commerce and glamouroutdoing eachother in terms of the lowest forms of banality, according to the German arthistorian and critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who knew both men at the time,and is interviewed in the shows catalogue. But they did so with laceratingskepticism, which, in Polkes case, abided no distinction between thevulgarities of mass culture and the pretenses of fine art. What Polke didntraise up he brought down, as in a work of 1968 that might qualify as the



Demoiselles dAvignon of postmodernist sensibility: Moderne Kunst, apainting of generic abstract shapes, lines, squiggles, and splashes, with a whiteborder like that surrounding a reproduction in a book. It is both savagelysarcastic and seductively lovely. Time and again, Polke projects the unlikelycomic figure of a would-be destroyer of art who keeps being ambushed byonsets of beauty and charm. He is angry, but his anger makes him cheerful.His lunges become dances.

Polke was a big man with the twinkle of a gamin. I met him a few times andfound him dazzlingly intelligent, funny, and exhausting. As Buchloh says,You could not have a conversation with Polke without his continuouslydestabilizing your sense of self, without his suggesting that it rested on sometype of oblivion or disavowal. In 2008, I sat through much of an afternoon inhis chaotic warehouse studio and home in Cologne while, pulling books fromthe shelves of his immense library, he discoursed on ancient philosophical andtechnical sources for a suite of stained-glass windows, in the Protestantcathedral of Zrich, which became his last major project. I felt awash in a seaof exotic erudition and ungraspable logic, listening to Polke as, withabsorption and course-correcting irony, he listened to himself. My profit wasan inkling of how he made art, monitoring an internal crossfireor a chorusof ideas.

There was a fearless, spooky otherness to his cast of mind, in key with anattraction to mysticism. Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper-RightCorner Black! is the title of a canvas in the show from 1969; the corner isblack. In the early seventies, he shared a farmhouse with many friends andindulged heavily in hallucinogenic drugs, which caused a dip in his career, but,in contrast to the more commonly dicey toll of such a regimen, plainlynourished the brainstorms of his later work. These include: huge atmosphericabstractions, incorporating details of the signature of Drer; pinkphotographic prints, made by exposing film to uranium; majestic panels ofglass, smudged with soot; paintings that orchestrate antic images fromnineteenth-century engravings; and, in a slide show, the beautiful Zrichwindows, some of them made of slices of agate and other stones. TheChristological symbol of the scapegoat, seen both arriving in the frame andleaving it, hints at a spiritual crisis without end.

Polke trashed the conventions of painting throughout his careeroverlayingimages on printed fabric in lieu of canvas, for instance, or using resins that



Peter Schjeldahlhas been a staffwriter at TheNew Yorker since1998 and is the

magazines art critic.

rendered cloth semi-transparentand in the process revitalized a medium thatwas discounted, in the sixties, by iconoclastic minimalism and Conceptual art.His influence was slow to cross the Atlantic, though, owing partly to hisprincipled elusiveness, and largely to the insularity of the New York art world.But by the early eighties young Americans were plundering his inventions tofeed the resurgence in painting that was known as Neo-Expressionism. Thebelated discovery of Polkes work came as a shock. I remember my first look atPaganini (1981-83), a riotous painting, more than sixteen feet long, in whichthe musician, on his deathbed, and the Devil, playing a violin, areaccompanied by swirls of skulls and tiny swastikas. It struck me then as a one-upping of Neo-Expressionism. Here it is again, at MOMA, in a room thatHalbreich has brilliantly crowded with tours de force from the artists middleperiod. Now I see it as an acrid burlesque of the movement, purging Polke ofpaternal responsibility for it and, by sheer excess, mocking his own virtuosity.Nearly everything he did reacted, somehow, against something. Celebrity wasonly one of the threats to the probity of his independence which required anemergency response. He was, and he remains, heroic.

9/19/15 3:59 PMWriting on the Wall - The New Yorker

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The Art World NOVEMBER 4, 2013 ISSUE

Writing on the WallA Christopher Wool retrospective.BY PETER SCHJELDAHL


L Untitled (1990-91).Word painting has ahistory; Wool made itnew.ART COURTESYCHRISTOPHER WOOL

ike it or not, Christopher Wool, nowfifty-eight, is probably the mostimportant American painter of hisgeneration. You might fondly wish,

as I do, for a champion whose art is richer inbeauty and in charm: Wools work consistsprimarily of dour, black-and-white pictures ofstencilled words, in enamel, usually on aluminum panels; decorative patternsmade with incised rollers; and abstract, variously piquant messes, involvingspray paint and silk screens. Lets get over it. A dramatic retrospective at theGuggenheim Museum confirms, besides the downbeat air, the force and theintelligence of a career that, according to legend, caught fire in 1987, afterWool saw the words sex and luv spray-painted in black on a white deliverytruck. His stencilled repetition of those words, on paper, is among the earliestworks in the new show. A cutely vandalized truck would seem a pretty humbleepiphany, as epiphanies go, but it inspired a way of painting that quietlygained authority, while more ingratiating styles rose and fell in art-worldesteem. If you are put off by the harshness of Wools rigor, as I was, it meansthat you arent ready to confess that our time admits, and merits, nothingcozier in an art besieged by the aesthetic advances, as well as the technicaladvances, of photographic and digital mediums. Once you stop resisting thegloomy mien of Wools work, it feels authentic, bracing, and even, onoccasion, blissful.

Wool was born in Boston, to a molecular-biologist father and a psychiatristmother, and grew up in Chicago, enthralled by art. In 1972, he entered SarahLawrence College, where he won permission to take two exacting studiocourses, in painting and photography, promising that he would buckle down



to required courses the next year. Instead, he dropped out, moved toManhattan, and enrolled in the New York Studio School, the diehardacademy of Abstract Expressionist technique and style. That training servedhim well. In a fine catalogue essay, Katherine Brinson, the curator of theGuggenheim show, notes a standard emphasis of Studio School instruction:the rendering of forms in charcoal by partial erasure. (Wools later paintings dowonders with passages that are thinned, rubbed, overpainted, or wiped away.)Meanwhile, he plunged into the emerging East Village scene of punk rock,underground film, gallery graffiti, performance art, and up-all-nightdissipation, as immortalized in the photographs of Nan Goldin. His friendsand sometime collaborators included the painter James Nares, the writerGlenn OBrien, and the poet-rocker Richard Hell. Wool briefly studiedfilmmaking at New York University, but by 1981 he had settled into painting,at first producing gawky abstract shapes that were influenced by the sculptorJoel Shapiro, who employed him as an assistant.

The efflorescence in downtown art was racked with schisms. Hot neo-expressionist painters like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat went oneway, feeding a vogue that became a market frenzy; and cool Picturesconceptualists, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, went another.Money that instantly favored the former eventually got around to the latter. Itcant have been clear at the time that Wools middle way, of earnest painterlyinvention, which was anything but seductive, would triumph. Several othergifted paintersamong them Peter Halley, David Reed, and Jonathan Laskergained success with conceptually alert abstract styles. Those artists nowseem a bit dated. Wool doesnt. His works ace the crude test that passes forcritical judgment in the art market: they look impeccable on walls today andare almost certain to look impeccable on walls tomorrow. Lately fetchingmillions at auction, Wools art leaves critics to sift through the hows and thewhys of a singular convergence of price and value. Would that the expensivewere always so good.

Renunciation benefitted Wool. He did not use color, or expressive gesture;their meanings could not be controlled. Nor did he indulge, as his friendsRobert Gober, Richard Prince, and Jeff Koons did, in the easy ironies ofadopting themes and images from mass culture. (Koons wrote the press releasefor Wools solo show, in 1986, at the short-lived Cable Gallery; he keenlyobserved that Wools work contains continual internal/external debate within



itself.) Wool liked the clat of Pop-influenced art, but not its borrowedsubject matter. Around the time of his delivery-truck eureka, he hit on a wittymeans of grounding high art in the everyday: the incised paint rollers oncecommonly used by slumlords to give tenement halls and stairwells theappearance of having been wallpapered. The tall paintings that resultedfloralor grille-like patterns, with skips and smears suggesting hastehave just abouteverything you could want of an all-over abstraction, plus the humor of theirabsurd efficiency. Can painting be so simple? It can for an artist who hasdespaired of every alternative. The expedient of the rollers, like that of thewords that Wool proceeded to paint, suggests the ledges to which a rockclimber clings by his fingernails.

Word painting has a history, from the snatches of newspaper text favored bythe Cubists to Ed Ruschas portraits of words that pique the minds incapacityto look and read in the same instant. Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer haveworked primarily with language; Lawrence Weiner does so exclusively. ButWool made it new. He merged the anonymous aggression of graffiti with thestateliness of formal abstract painting. Selecting words and phrases thatappealed to him, he leached them of personality, by using stencils, and ofquick readability, by eliminating standard spacing, punctuation, and, in onecase, vowels (TRBL). The effort required to make out the messages may berewarded, or punished, with a sting of nihilism: CATS IN BAGS BAGS INRIVER or SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.(The latter is from a deranged officers letter home in Apocalypse Now.)Once read, the words dont stay read. When you leave off making sense ofthree stacked blocks, HYP/OCR/ITE or ANA/RCH/IST, they snap backinto being nonsensical graphic design. Were not talking about a majordifficulty here, but just enough to induce a hiccup in comprehension, lettingthe physical facts of the painting preside. The effect calls to mind JasperJohnss early Flag paintings, with their double-bind readings of paint-as-image(its a flag) and image-as-paint (its a red-white-and-blue painting).

Traces of past American mastersRauschenbergs sprawling montage,Twomblys sensitive scribble, Warhols off-register printing, Gustons clunkyanimation, and even some dynamics recalling the god of the Studio School, deKooningabound as the show unreels up the Guggenheims ramp. Woolincreasingly mixes and matches mechanical and freehand methods in layeredcompositions. Thus, rolled patterns interact with splotches, transferred by silk





screen from earlier paintings, and with interweaving skeins of spray paint.Wool no longer eschews gesture; sprayed lines curl and buckle in taut relationto the scale of the pictures. (Thats de Kooningesque.) Colorsyellow,brownish maroonhave begun to make eloquently sputtering appearances.With no hint of pastiche, and still less of nostalgia, he is reinventing certaincharismatic tropes of mid-century New York paintingor recovering them, asif they had been wandering around loose all this time.

I question the choice to mount many of the big paintings on cantileveredstruts, so that they appear to float, in some of the museums curved, top-lighted bays. Its like a magic trick that delights once. Deprived of flat walls,the pictures look lost. In a more apt tour de force, hundreds of black-and-white photographs are arrayed at intervals. Wool took them on nocturnalrambles between his studio, in the East Village, and his loft, in Chinatown.They are dismal with a vengeance, an encyclopedia of wrack, ruin, and squalor,wanly bleached by flash illumination. To make the world appear uniformlyhorrible requires rare discipline. Wools grim shutterbugging suggests apeculiar creative psychology. When he feels bad, it would seem, he perks up.And when he feels worse hes golden.

9/19/15 4:00 PMIn the Head - The New Yorker

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The Art World OCTOBER 7, 2013 ISSUE

In the HeadBalthus and Magritte reconsidered.BY PETER SCHJELDAHL


T Thrse Dreaming(1938). Balthusclaimed a quality ofsacredness for hisangels.COURTESYMETROPOLITAN MUSEUMOF ART

he superb Polish-French painterBalthusan anti-modernist belovedof modernists, including Picassocharms the eye and rattles thought.

For more than six decades, until his death, in2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthusdepicted young girls in gamy poses,attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds. His otherperennial subject was the cat, his totem animal. A fat feline nuzzles his leg in aself-portrait made when he was twenty-seven; the artist cuts an imperiouslyRomantic figure and dubs himself, in an inscription in English, The King ofCats. It is the first painting in Cats and Girls, a focussed retrospective,finely curated by Sabine Rewald, at the Metropolitan Museum. Then comegirls, by the dozen, often with cats in attendance. Was Balthus a pedophile?His interest, if not lust, didnt stir before his subjects pubescence, but it wanedin their late teens. The show occurs at a cultural moment that is stretchedbetween sexualizing the young and reacting with horror and anger to the latelyabundant cases of their sexual exploitation. If you can shrug off that tension atthe Met, I salute your detachment. I sure cant. Balthus puts me in two minds,attracted and repelled, in search of a third. He strains the moral impunity ofhigh art to an elemental limit, assuring himself an august, unquiet immortality.

He was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 in Paris. He added de Rola to hisname, fancifully claiming noble birth; he was given to pretension all his life.He had a remarkably enriched childhood: his father, an art historian, and hismother, a painter who went by the name Baladine, hobnobbed with theliterary and artistic lites. In his teens, he was mentored by the poet RainerMaria Rilke, a family friend and a lover of Baladines, while his older brother,



Pierre, became Andr Gides secretary. (Pierre went on to be a cult hero ofFrench intellectuals as a devoutly obscene philosopher, novelist, graphic artist,and exegete of the Marquis de Sade.) When Balthasar was eleven, his adoredpet cat, Mitsou, ran away. He made forty ink drawings detailing his memoriesof the animal and his fruitless search for her. In the last, he stands alone,crying. Displayed at the Met, for the first time anywhere, the suite isfantastically talentedthe most precocious art I believe Ive ever seen, withboldly rhythmic compositions like those in German Expressionist woodcutsand uncanny affinities to Matisse. Rilke arranged for the publication, in 1921,of a handsome book of the Mitsou images, for which he wrote the preface.The artist was identified by his nickname, Baltusz. Imagine being thirteenyears old and bathed in such glory. A year later, Balthus wrote in a letter, Godknows how happy I would be if I could remain a child forever.

Balthus was a largely self-taught artist, who learned what he needed fromcopying paintings and frescoes in Italy, especially those of Piero dellaFrancesca. Besides the loftily serene Piero, his other major influence was theguttural messiah of realism, Gustave Courbet. That improbable pairingregisters throughout Balthuss work as classical elevation infused with sensualvigor. The style doesnt feel conservative; it feels outside historical time. Yourealways off balance with it, sometimes as if you were being subjected at once toa high-church orison and a dirty joke. Balthus learned to soft-pedal the latterquality after his first gallery show, in Paris, in 1934. Craving attention, he gotall too much of it with The Guitar Lessona painting not in the Met showin which a bare-breasted woman holds a schoolgirl, naked from the waistdown, across her lap and strums the girls genitals. (In one study, the guitaristis male.) Strangely, Balthus was unprepared for the outraged critical response.Meanwhile, Antoinette de Watteville, a girl from a socially prominent Swissfamily whom he had desperately wooed for four years, told him that she wasengaged to a diplomat and to stop writing her. He attempted suicide withlaudanum; his friend Antonin Artaud found him in time. He resumedpainting only gradually, with commissioned portraits that bored him.

Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thrse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughterof a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings ofher, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhooddreaming, restless, sulkyas only adolescent girls may authoritativelyunderstand. (Ive checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a



R

short-skirted Thrse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We needntreflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than wemust wonder about the empathic author of Alices Adventures inWonderland. But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for hisangels, as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at thepaintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: A bad man is the sort ofman who admires innocence. Its an odd relief of uncertainty, if nothing else,to learn that Balthuss later relationship with his teen-age model LaurenceBataille, a daughter of the writer Georges, was frankly carnal. The paintingThe Week of Four Thursdays (1949), in which a loosely robed Laurencereclines in abandon and plays with a smiling cat, commemorates days whenschool was out and she came to pose. She grew up to become a psychoanalyst,like her stepfather, Jacques Lacan.

In 1937, Antoinette de Watteville, having shed her diplomat, gave in andmarried Balthus. They had two sons. In the one painting of her in the Metshow, Girl in Green and Red (1944), she looks half her age of thirty-two.Wearing a vaguely harlequin costume, she sits at a table, grasping a candlesticknext to a loaf of bread with a knife thrust deep into it. The picture marks oneof Balthuss closest approaches to Surrealism, a movement whose leadersadmired and courted him. He rebuffed them, but the equivocal sexuality of hisart anchors it in a time, defined by Surrealism, of avant-garde evangelism foran anti-bourgeois, liberated libido. His reticence, in a classicizing styletremulous with carefully observed light, preserves his power to provoke, whilethe would-be-shocking sallies of, say, Max Ernst have become period curios.Eroticism fades in Balthuss later work, with simplified figures and rather dull,tortuously worked surfaces of matte pigment, archly evoking Renaissancefrescoes. His pretentiousness survived his passion.

en Magrittewhose most creative years, 1926 to 1938, aresurveyed in a wonderfully entertaining show, entitled The Mysteryof the Ordinary, at the Museum of Modern Artis the mostpopular Surrealist among people who dont opt for Salvador Dali.

What Dali is to outrageous fantasy, Magritte is to conceptual conundrums ofappearance and reality. The Treachery of Images (1929), the painting of apipe with the inscription This is not a pipe, has served generations ofbudding aesthetes as a training-wheels introduction to philosophical wit inmodern art. Its a brittle sort of classic. Once you get the point that words and



pictures are separate languages, and that both relate only notionally to things,youre pretty much reduced to whatever joy there is in feeling superior topeople who dont get it. But, in the MOMA show, curated by Anne Umland,that picture proves to be a minor skirmish in an amazingly varied andsustained assault on the complacencies of common sense.

Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898, to a textile-merchant fatherand a milliner mother, who committed suicide when he was thirteen. Havingdrawn since childhood, and after training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts,in Brussels, he worked through Futurist and Cubist styles while supportinghimself with jobs in illustration and advertising. Then, inspired by the rise ofFrench Surrealism, he made a leap to such inventions as The Lost Jockey(1926), a collage that depicts a rider racing through a forest of trees,resembling chess pieces or table legs, that are cut from sheet music. With thelarge painting The Menaced Assassin (1927)an elegant young gent turnsfrom a murdered woman to listen to a gramophone, unaware of bowler-hattedmen who lurk with a club and a nethe staked his claim as a pioneer in thenew world of forthrightly irrational, waking dreams. His chosen mode wastraditional-looking painting, which makes seamless wholes of contradictoryfigures, objects, and, often, words.

Magritte moved to Paris in 1927, with his wife, Georgette Berger, for threeyears of prodigious output and social frustration. He remained an outsider tothe inner circle of Surrealism, at first welcomed but then alienated by themovements tyrant, Andr Breton. The break was said to have come during ameeting, when the militantly atheistic Breton demanded that Georgetteremove a family-heirloom crucifix that she was wearing, and the offendedMagrittes stormed out. They soon returned to Belgium, but the artists soberpicturing of outlandish subjectsa kissing couple whose heads are wrapped incloth, a locomotive projecting from a fireplace, a birdcage containing an eggbecame central to Surrealist research, as Breton termed the movementssystematic exposures of the supposed unconscious mind. Archival publicationsand photographs, in the show, stir vicarious nostalgia for a time when thecrazily unpredictable was a workaday pursuit. Magritte appears always taciturn,like a bureaucrat out of Kafka.

Sex figures frequently in the MOMA show, as with The Rape (1934), apainting of a face in which breasts, a navel, and a pudendum stand in for theeyes, the nose, and the mouth. But its sex in the head. Magritte stayed





married to Georgette for forty-five years, until his death, in 1967. He enjoyedstriking the figure of a bourgeois gentleman, though one who, during leanyears after the Second World War, engaged in art forgery and currencycounterfeiting. As with the joke of the not-pipe, the sneaking humor ofMagrittes persona so saturates the imaginings of subsequent artistsPop artwouldnt be the same without him, and Conceptualism would be an orphanthat he can seem old-shoe ordinary. The surging energy of this show dispelsthat impression.

9/19/15 3:49 PMPicasso the Sculptor - The New Yorker

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The Art World SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ISSUE

Another DimensionReconsidering Picasso the sculptor.BY PETER SCHJELDAHL


P Pablo Picasso, c. 1932.PHOTOGRAPH BY MANRAY / CORBISicasso Sculpture, a show atthe Museum of Modern Artof nearly a hundred and fiftyworks by the definitive artistof the twentieth century, always figured toimpress. It turns out to astound. I came awayfrom the exhibits, which date from 1902 to 1964, convinced that Picasso wasmore naturally a sculptor than a painter, though all his training and earlyexperience, and by far most of his prodigious energy, went into painting. Hemade mere hundreds of three-dimensional works, in episodic bunches, amid aceaseless torrent of about four and a half thousand paintings. When moved tomold, carve, or assemble, he sometimes borrowed artist friends studios andtools and enlisted their collaborationmost notably, starting in 1928, withJulio Gonzlez, who worked in iron. Picasso could be feckless about thestandards of the craft. (The director of the ceramics workshop in Vallauris,where, in the late forties, Picasso took up the medium of fired clay, noted thatany apprentice who went about things as the artist did would never be hired.)But, because Picasso was an amateurnearly a hobbyistin sculpture, itrevealed the core predilections of his genius starkly, without the dizzyingsubtleties of his painting but true to its essence. At this magnificent show,curated by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, I began to imagine the artistspictures as steamrolled sculpture. Most of his paintings conjure space that iscunningly fitted to the images that inhabit it. When the space becomes real,the dynamic jolts.

The shows first gallery features the best known and, instructively, the leastsuccessful of Picassos early forays into the medium: Head of a Woman(1909), a bronze, cast from clay, which is complexly rumpled, in the manner of



incipient Cubism. The work fails because the energetic surface articulationbears no organic relation to the heads sullen mass; it amounts to a wraparoundrelief. The piece is a painters folly, which Picasso did not repeat (except withthe similarly hapless plaster Apple, of the same year), even as its style vastlyinfluenced such subsequent sculptors as the futurist Umberto Boccioni. (Noinnovation of Picassos was too tangential to spawn a modern-art clich.)Picasso put sculpture aside for a few years, then returned to it as an extensionof his breakthroughs, with Georges Braque, in the revolutionary aesthetics ofcollage. Two versions of the large, wall-hung Guitar (1912-14)the first incardboard, paper, and string; the second in sheet metal and wiredid forsculpture something of what Picasso had already done for painting: theyturned it inside out. The term negative space, for the air that he let into theanatomized musical instrument, doesnt suffice to describe the effect. Thevoids register as active forms, which the shapes passively accommodate. Nolonger set apart from the world, forward-looking art after Guitar adds theworld to its inventory.

Head of a Woman (1909).COURTESY ALFRED STIEGLITZ COLLECTION / ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO / 2014 ESTATE OF PABLO

PICASSO / ARS, NY.

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Then came the most talismanic of modern bibelots: Glass of Absinthe(1914), a small bronze of a cubistically fissured, ridged, and whorled vesselwith, atop it, a filigreed metal spoon bearing a bronze sugar cube. Picassocreated it the same year that the liquor was banned in France, in the mistakenbelief that it made people crazy. (It was really just fancied by people who wereprone to craziness.) All six casts of the work, from as many collections, areconvened here for the first time since their creation. Each incorporates adifferently designed spoon and is differently slathered or dappled with paint.The brushwork, especially in sprightly dot patterns, blurs the objects contours,rendering them approximate in ways that wittily invoke intoxication. But theseare true sculptures, as judged by the essential test that they function in theround. Circle them. Each shift in viewpoint discovers a distinct formalconfiguration and image. Picasso here steps into the history of the art that, inorder to move a viewer, requires a viewer to move. The best of his otherCubism-related works, such as Still Life (1914), which fringes a tipped shelfwith upholstery tassels, run to assembled and painted reliefs, like pop-uppictures. Their dance of everyday stuff with august formreality marryingrepresentationhas never ceased to inspire generations of visual hybridists,from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg and Rachel Harrison, and itnever will. But these works mainly harvested ideas from Picassos painting. Hisattention to sculpture lapsed again, until 1927.

Picassos creations in plaster, wood, and metal between that banner year andthe mid-thirties belong in the first rank of sculpture since ancient times. Mostare massy: female forms that can seem swollen to the point of bursting, ortumescent and writhing with sexual abandon. A glory of the show is thenumber of works rendered in fragile plaster, straight from the artists hand; herarely paid much attention to the surface quality of the final bronzes, whichtend to be dull. His initial masterworks of the period, made with Gonzlez,are open networks of thin iron rods, vaguely suggesting jungle gyms, whichgave rise to the somewhat misleading catchphrase drawing in space, coinedby Picassos dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. More truly, the rectangulararrays encage space. They yield an imagecoalescing into a kind of drawing,of a geometrically abstracted figurewhen viewed from either end. Thatsdelightful. But the wonder of the works is their appearance from other angles:the image pulled apart, accordion fashion, to drink in the ambient air. Again,emptiness becomes substance.



Notice, incidentally, how the rods meet the bases. As always, when a Picassosculpture rests on more than one point each footing conveys a specific weightand tension, like the precisely gauged step of a ballerina. It presses down orstrains upward in a way that gives otherwise inexplicable animation to theforms above. Few other sculptors play so acutely with gravity. David Smith isone. Another is Alberto Giacometti, whom Picasso befriended, admired, andmightily affected. Works in this show directly anticipate Giacomettis skinnyfigures and even, by a few months, his classic, harrowing Woman with HerThroat Cut (1932).

Of the scores of pieces that merit lengthy discussion, Ill cite one: Womanwith Vase (1933), a bronze of a plaster sculpture that, cast in cement,accompanied Guernica at the Spanish Pavilion of the Worlds Fair in Paris,in 1937. She stands more than seven feet tall, with a bulbous head, breasts,and belly, on spindly legs. Her left arm is missing, as if ripped off. Her rightarm extends far forward, clutching a tall vase. Seen from the side, the gesturesuggests a tender offering. Viewed head on, it delivers a startling, knockoutpunch. What isnt this work about? It conjoins Iberian antiquity and Parisianmodernity, love and loss, hope and anger, celebration and mourning. Anotherbronze cast of it stands at Picassos tomb, in the Chteau de Vauvenargues, asa memorial and, perhaps, as a master key to the secrets of his art. Certainly, itovershadows the somewhat indulgentand, now and then, plain sillysculptural creations of his later years, such as the gewgaw-elaborated bronzeLittle Girl Jumping Rope (1950). Exceptions from that time include astunning selection of his riffs on ceramic vessels, lively bent-metal maquettesfor public art, and a group of six Bathers from 1956: flat figures, one almostnine feet tall, made of scrap wood and standing in a shared, beachlike bed ofpebbles. Its clat might well sink the hearts of contemporary installationartists.

The herky-jerky intermittence of Picassos involvement with sculpture mightseem an obstacle to a reconsideration of his achievement, but it proves to be aboon. Each generation looks at Picasso in its own way. This show gives us aPicasso for an age of cascading uncertainties. The story it tells is messier thanthe period-by-period, not to mention mistress-by-mistress, narratives of thepast. Instead, each piece finds the artist in a moment of decision, adventuringbeyond his absolute command of pictorial aesthetics into physical and socialspace, where everything is in flux and in question. We are in Picassos studio,





looking over his shoulder, and wondering, along with him, What aboutthis?

emotional formalism week 3

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