Pablo Picasso is relaxing in the back seat of a Hispano-Suiza, his once-luxurious motorcar. The door is open, the car is in a garage, and, as he often did when wanting to be alone, Picasso merely came to sit. This time, however, a camera has followed him; through the half-open door, it catches his far-away look.
Picasso once said: ”Of all–hunger, misery, incomprehension by the public–fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad, it is true.”
It also is true that Picasso basked in fame and played to its prying cameras out of the sense that an artist`s works were not enough. This characteristic was what made his dealer, D.H. Kahnweiler, call him
”fanatically autobiographical.” He was not satisfied until everything that happened to him, as well as the myth that he created, was put at the center of his art.
Picasso did not believe that Cezanne or Van Gogh set out to do what all the scholars find in their works. He said they did what they did because they were unable to do anything else. After all, being precedes doing, and to Picasso, that was the important thing, for being is life itself.
His friend Maurice Jardot has written that ”Picasso`s work appears as a diagram of great sensibility, in which are inscribed successive liaisons, family events, residences, indeed even stopover places.” All of it is true, but seldom have exhibitions been organized on that account. For example, both the huge retrospective at New York`s Museum of Modern Art (1980) and the Guggenheim Museum`s show of late paintings (1984) celebrated the man by honoring the master–exhibitions assembled by art historians can do nothing else. Anyone who saw them came away exhausted. The genius of the master was never in doubt.
MOMA`s show had the participation of all but two desired lenders. One was the Soviet government, which canceled its loan after the invasion of Afghanistan put a stop to cultural relations. The other was the artist`s widow Jacqueline. Several of her pieces were only reproduced in the catalog.
Why Jacqueline demurred has never been explained. There she was, the owner of hundreds of rare Picassos, and she chose to keep them to herself. But perhaps she knew something that no one else had considered: In a show as large as the Modern`s, the personal element would be lost.
This personal element is Jardot`s ”diagram of sensibility” with the added meaning that each piece had to the artist and his wife. Jacqueline`s view of Picasso is like none other. Simply by showing pieces from her collection, she can give a picture at once more intimate and less prying than that of any camera–and this she now has done.
”Pablo Picasso: Meeting in Montreal,” the exhibition that opened last Friday at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, includes 82 of Jacqueline`s works. The collaborators were museum director Alexander Gaudieri and curators Louise d`Argencourt and Pierre Theberge, but everyone agrees that it is Jacqueline`s show. She restricted the field to painting, made the choices and determined the installation. The decision to include one Picasso drawing and one small canvas by his father also was hers.
Montreal is, of course, the world`s second-largest French-speaking city, and although Jacqueline never had visited, she said, ”Je suis Francaise.”
(”I am French.”) This apparently was enough to keep the exhibition from traveling to the United States and to exclude virtually all catalog references to American shows. When the organizers say that 81 of the works never have been exhibited in North America, we have to take them at their word.
We also have to accept that a thematic installation is the best way to communicate Jacqueline`s view, for strict chronological arrangement is confined to the catalog. Each of five rooms presents aspects of the artist`s temperament. A small introductory gallery includes works both early and late as a kind of resume. Then come paintings of the bullfight juxtaposed with images of sleeping women. The next gallery holds seated women, and the following, late paintings of couples and musketeeers. A coda is provided by a room of still lifes, more women, a landscape and a portrait of Paulo, the artist`s son.
A possible key was given by one of Jacqueline`s remarks. Entering the first gallery during a preview, she confronted the 1965 ”Seated Man” and
”Bust of a Woman” by saying, ”Monsieur et Madame recoivent.” (”Mister, and Mrs. receive.”) Given that the pictures are portraits of Picasso and herself, the intention came clear: Jacqueline`s installation welcomes viewers with an ease more common to a home than a museum.
Interestingly, when a chronological arrangement later is adopted, it pretty much follows the comings and goings of Picasso`s women beginning with a classical portrait of Olga Khoklova (his first wife) and ending with no fewer than 11 canvases of Jacqueline. There is little vanity in this; the emphasis is precisely where Picasso would want it to be, on his autobiography. Jacqueline was with him from 1954 until his death in 1973, twice as long as any of the others.
Does she know the historical nuances: that Nush Eluard is wearing a gown by Schiaparelli, or that Paulo`s Pierrot costume belonged to painter Gerald Murphy`s son? Can she confirm that the paom tree in a 1928 landscape really grew in Brittany? Should she have to be clear about any of it? Jacqueline chose the paintings, and everything is there, bright and wonderful and often betokening fun.
Her vision of Picasso is, in fact, softer than any this viewer recalls. And the presence of only a single example from his ”Blue” period combined with an absence of great Cubist works does diminish him. Anyone expecting to see paintings that changed the course of history will be disappointed. But so great was Picasso`s invention that it also took many lighter forms. The show celebrates them as if to prove that neither his life nor his art was all upheaval.
We proceed from ”Rest During the Flight to Egypt,” painted when Picasso was 14, to ”Musketeer and a Man,” completed less than a year before his death. But fully half the works date from Jacqueline`s time with Picasso, and a great many were executed during his final decade.
The late pictures shown in other exhibitions often conveyed a frenzy that is not the case here. Jacqueline`s selection is altogether more pacific, extending even to the sexual subjects, specifically two ”Couple” paintings, from 1967 and 1971. This cannot diminish the role of erotic violence in Picasso`s work, but it does shed light on how the sex in his late paintings was something more than compensation for failing physical powers. In the 1967 ”Couple” picture, sexual potency clearly is equated with the act of painting.
Whether the late works are as potent as anything else the artist had done is still a matter of dispute; this viewer adds his voice to the chorus that maintains they are not. The urgency of most of the examples on show is that of an artist flailing amid historical sources rather than finding the strength to give new life.
”You can smell them,” said Picasso about some of Degas` subjects. Here, very little has that vivid a presence.
In the framework of the exhibition, Picasso`s conjuring trick is more tender, even domestic; and this finds beautiful expression in a 1960 canvas,
”The Fish Stew.”
Photographer David Douglas Duncan was witness to how the artist, in scarcely more than a half hour, painted a still life that commemorated Jacqueline`s purchase and preparation of three eels for lunch. The
accompanying dedication, proudly written in an elegant French tense, is as much a joy as the painting.
Of course, Picasso was not always so solicitous. Much of his life was spent alternating between the roles of monster and monument, the one endurable because of the other. Jacqueline knew all the shades between–and they are what made the man. Her exhibition presents her man plainly, and that is not at all a bad way to be remembered.
”Pablo Picasso: Meeting in Montreal” continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1379 Sherbrooke St. West, through Nov. 10.
