The major cultural event in the United States this summer is the Metropolitian Museum of Art’s “Picasso and the Weeping Women,” an 84-piece exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture that reveals much of the great modern artist’s driving, even brutal obsession with females as an homme amoureux-truly a “man who loved women.”
A somewhat altered version of this forceful and emotional show was to have appeared at the Chicago Art Institute Oct. 8-Jan. 8, but was canceled when European collectors backed out of loan commitments for fear of exposing their works to risk.
The Metropolitan (5th Avenue at 82nd Street; 212-879-5500) was able to proceed with its exhibition, which was first organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by borrowing important works from other collectors to augment the show’s nucleus of Picassos key to the theme.
What they’ve assembled is the first major museum exhibition ever devoted to Picasso’s portraits of the women in his life between the years 1927 and 1943, a period encompassing some of his greatest achievements. It focuses on three women: Olga Koklova (1891-1955), a beautiful dancer from Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who the artist married in 1918; Marie-Therese Walter (1909-1977), who became Picasso’s mistress after he picked her up outside a Paris department store when she was 17; and Dora Maar (born 1907), an intensely intellectual surrealist photographer Picasso first met in 1936, who still lives in Paris.
A central component of the exhibition is Picasso’s “Weeping Women” series of the late 1930s. It evolved from the grieving, wailing women in his famous 1937 Spanish Civil War mural “Guernica,” a depiction of the devastation and suffering of a bombed Spanish town that became an icon to the anti-war movements that followed.
“The female figure and face are as central to Picasso’s art as they were necessary to his physical existence,” notes Metropolitan 20th Century art chairman William Lieberman. “His most constant subjects were the women that he successively possessed-mistresses, consorts and two wives. Each offered fresh inspiration to his art, each reaffirmed his dominating vigor. Rapture, however, was often followed by anguish and despair.”
Indeed. Three of the sketches in the show, all from 1920, present Olga as a doe-eyed, sensitive beauty. By 1927, her looks were fading, and he had come to find her shallow, bored, boring and a shrew. A series of 13 pictures he did of her between 1927 and 1930 have the title “The Screaming Head.”
The Metropolitan is also showing “Dali: The Early Years,” a 125-work exhibition of the early career of surrealist painter and ultimate pop celebrity Salvador Dali. It includes his famous 1925 “Seated Girl Seen from the Back,” which was the centerpiece of his first one-man show and admired by a fellow Spanish artist named Picasso.
Petersen car museum
America has a glittering new museum. It’s in Los Angeles and it’s devoted to-what else?-the automobile, which Southern Californians consider not only a high art form but a culture unto itself.
Built as an annex to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the four-story, 300,000-square-foot Petersen Automotive Museum (Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue; 213-930-CARS) has on display more than 200 historic and classic cars, plus racing machines, motorcycles, dream cars and futuristic models.
But, unlike so many auto museums that seem little more than garages, the Petersen goes to great pains to place the automobile in the context of its role in the development of modern American civilization-the California variation thereof.
The first-floor galleries contain an elaborate arrangement of life-size, full-scale automotive “scenes”-a 1901 Breer steam car sitting outside a replica of Mr. Breer’s blacksmith shop; a 1911 American Underslung stuck in the mud of Las Tuna Canyon along with its chauffeur and passengers; a 1915 Stutz racer on a board-surface track; a 1920s “Good Life” bungalow and garage with the family dream car of the time; and a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop lurking behind a 1930s billboard.
The five galleries on the second floor are showing French luxury cars of the 1930s, fabulous cars of Hollywood’s golden era and prototypes of cars to come. And, on its third floor, the museum has a fine collection of automotive art.
Kertesz retrospective
Just up the coast at the J. Paul Getty Museum (17985 Pacific Coast Hwy., Malibu; 310-459-7611), the centennial of the birth of the renowned Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) is being celebrated with a 60-year retrospective of his unique and imaginative works. The 50-photograph show reaches back to 1919 and his “Wine Cellar at Budafok,” with its peculiarly geometric, bird’s-eye view of the chamber. Also included are his 1929 “Clock of the Academy, Pont des Arts and the Louvre,” one of the most famous plazas of Paris seen through the face of a clock; and the 1937 “Arm and Ventilator” (a fan vent seems to have grown a muscular human arm).
`The Waking Dream’
If you missed “The Waking Dream”-the mammoth exhibition of Gilman Collection pictures from photography’s first century (1839-1939)-when it was at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, you will find it now at Washington’s National Gallery of Art (4th Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest; 202-737-4215), and it’s well worth the look.
The more than 250 images reveal 19th-Century photography as far more sublime and complex than the crude if compelling Civil War images of Matthew Brady, though several of these are included. The collection’s pictures, which include Edward Steichen’s misty photos of the Flatiron Building and sculptor Auguste Rodin at work, have a spiritual power that is very much missing in modern-day photography. This metaphysical aspect is pervasive in the 20th-Century representations in the show, too-impishly so in Man Ray’s translucent 1922 “Rayograph” of a seemingly transparent woman drinking from a wine glass, and Martin Munkaesi’s gravity defying “Fund During Coffee Break.” The exhibition, which closes Sept. 11, is the first photography show on the gallery’s first or main floor, and, appropriately, is next to their prized French Impressionist collection.
`Intimate Visions’
Also running through Sept. 11, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway; 215-763-8100), is a show of the poetic photographs of Dorothy Norman, a protege of the great modern art impressario Alfred Stieglitz, husband of Georgia O’Keeffe. Called “Intimate Visions,” the 93-image exhibit concentrates in large part on photographs she made of several of her fellow artists, who gathered at Stieglitz’s last New York gallery, “An American Place,” following his death in 1946.
