Tag Archives: Pablo Picasso

UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE

Vincent van Gogh, “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise,” oil on canvas, 1890 (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Collection Antell)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, suggested admission $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org

In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s 2014 biopic about British artist J. M. W. Turner, the controversial landscape painter (played with a splendid curmudgeonly gruffness by Timothy Spall) examines a canvas of his hanging at the Royal Academy, approaches it with his brush, and dabs on one last bit of color, as if adding a period to complete the painting. But what really determines whether a work of art is finished? That is the question asked by the Met Breuer in its inaugural exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” The show, which features nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, explores various aspects of completion while referencing the Met’s takeover of Marcel Breuer’s building, originally built for the Whitney, which recently moved to its new home in the Meatpacking District. (At the very least, the downstairs of the Met Breuer has not been finished.) “A work is complete if in it the master’s intentions have been realized,” Rembrandt said. However, Pablo Picasso asserted, “To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.” The exhibition, spread across two floors, includes several canvases by Rembrandt and Picasso as well as works by Titian, Pollock, Velázquez, Monet, Homer, Whistler, Friedrich, Hesse, Gericault, Ruscha, Bourgeois, Cézanne, Sargent, Matisse, Szapocznikow, Tuymans, Richter, Johns, Twombly, Dumas, and many others, from the Renaissance to the present, a fascinating journey into the creative process. But the majority of the pieces on view — divided into such sections as “The Infinite: Art Out of Bounds,” “To Be Determined: Painting in Process,” and “Decay, Dwindle, Decline” — are not immediately identifiable as being incomplete, especially given curators Andrea Bayer, Kelly Baum, and Nicholas Cullinan’s wide employment of the concept of “unfinished.”

Janine Antoni, “Lick and Lather,” chocolate and soap, 1993-94 (collection of Jill and Peter Kraus)

Edouard Manet kept repainting the face of “Madame Edouard Manet” and eventually gave up, not satisfied with the results. James Tissot’s “Orphan” etching was made from a painting that is now lost. Elizabeth Peyton’s “Napoleon (After Louis David, Le General Bonaparte vers 1797)” was based on an unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis David. Lucian Freud continually reworked the face in a 2002 self-portrait with oil paint, leaving the rest of the canvas as a charcoal sketch. Gustave Courbet chose not to give definition to his visage in “The Homecoming.” Alberto Giacometti made significant changes to “Annette” after it was first shown publicly. Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” is an unsigned piece that mirrors the vision problem the artist was suffering from. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Dirty Bride or The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa” was a design for a woodcut. Gustav Klimt’s “Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III” was commissioned half a dozen years after the subject committed suicide, and then Klimt died before it was complete. Janine Antoni licked and washed with the two busts of “Lick and Lather,” but the materials she used (chocolate and soap) will eventually disintegrate on their own. It is not known why Albrecht Dürer did not finish “Salvator Mundi” after he fled Nuremberg for Venice and later returned. Camille Corot’s “Boatman among the Reeds,” a finished work, looks unfinished when seen from up close; one critic noted, “When you come to a Corot, it is better not to get too close. Nothing is finished, nothing is carried through. . . . Keep your distance.” Meanwhile, X-radiographs have revealed an earlier state underneath Corot’s signed “Sibylle.” Vincent van Gogh committed suicide before completing “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise.” Edgar Degas reworked the 1866 “Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” in 1880-81 and again around 1897; the artist reportedly said to Katherine Cassat, mother of Mary Cassat, “It is one of those works which are sold after a man’s death and artists buy them not caring whether they are finished or not.” Indeed, the nature of death, the ultimate finality, hovers over many of the works. “The painting raises fundamental questions regarding the transitional nature of the moment of death and the inherent ‘unfinishedness’ of human life,” the wall label says about Ferdinand Hodler’s “Valentine Godé — Darel on Her Deathbed,” a poignant oil depicting the Swiss artist’s ailing lover.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Rough Sea,” oil on canvas, ca. 1840-45 (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856)

The centerpiece of the show is a side room — missed by many museumgoers — that contains five glorious later canvases by Joseph Mallard William Turner, abstract seascapes and landscapes painted between 1835 and 1845. Pre-Impressionist, they seem to stand at a sort of gateway to the modern and a transition between earlier ideas of “unfinished” related to product and later notions associated with process. There are few definable objects in the works — “Margate (?), from the Sea,” “The Thames above Waterloo Bridge,” “Rough Sea,” “Sun Setting over a Lake,” and “Sunset from the Top of the Rigi” — and there is debate over whether they are non finito (intentionally unfinished), never completed for various reasons, or in fact finished paintings. Given the experimental nature of the glowing canvases, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Spall walked into the room, carefully surveyed the canvases, then added a dab of paint here, a splotch of color there. It also makes one question whether it even matters if a work is finished or not; without knowing any of the background behind these five Turner paintings, you’d be hard-pressed to consider them unfinished; Turner’s magnificent use of light and color and exquisite brushwork take your breath away, filling every bit of you with emotion, leaving nothing untouched, even if, to Turner, they were not done. As Barnett Newman said, “The idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.”

The exhibition finishes September 4; be sure to also check out Tatsuo Miyajima’s first-floor installation, “Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life),” which was specially commissioned as a companion piece for the show; it consists of approximately 250 red, numeric LEDs hanging from the ceiling, counting down from nine to one over and over at different intervals, an endless cycle evoking life, death, and rebirth. Miyajima named the piece after Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s theory concerning thermodynamics and entropy and was inspired by the Buddhist notion of samsara, which fits right in with the theme of the Breuer’s first major exhibit.

PICASSO SCULPTURE / FRANK STELLA: A RETROSPECTIVE

(© 2015 by Frank Stella / photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FRANK STELLA: A RETROSPECTIVE
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through February 7, $18-$22
212-570-3600
whitney.org

This is the last weekend to see two major exhibitions, retrospectives of artists who bucked trends and did things their way, two seminal figures in the history of twentieth-century art, one of whom is still at it. “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” continues at the Whitney through February 7, while “Picasso Sculpture” ends the same day at MoMA. “In 1970, when Mr. Stella was thirty-four, the Modern celebrated his haloed progress with an eleven-year survey,” Roberta Smith pointed out in her October 29 article about the Stella show. “In 1987, when the sheen was fading, the museum devoted a second survey of the intervening seventeen years of work. He was beginning to seem like the Modern’s fledgling Picasso replacement.” So it is rather appropriate that the two shows are running concurrently. The Whitney closed its uptown location last October with a controversial Jeff Koons retrospective that had critics wetting their lips waiting to tear it apart. The Whitney has now followed its downtown inaugural “America Is Hard to See” show, which highlighted works from the museum’s collection, with a survey of another artist whom many critics have tired of. A Massachusetts native and longtime New Yorker, Stella has dedicated his six-decade career to abstract painting on multiple surfaces and using a wide range of colors, in an endless array of series. He was very involved in the Whitney retrospective, which is essentially chronological until it’s not. Approximately one hundred works are on view, from such series as “Black Paintings” (“Die Fahne hoch!”), “Irregular Polygons” (“Empress of India,” “Harran II”), “Exotic Birds” (“Eskimo Curlew”), and “Moby-Dick” (“Gobba, zoppa e collotorto”), as well as such one-offs as the massive forty-foot acrylic on canvas mural “Das Erdbeben in Chili [N#3].” Even as Stella’s work grew more sculptural and three-dimensional, with metal constructions that jut out from walls, he still considered them paintings. “Most people would call this a sculpture, but in many respects, this is still painting for Frank,” exhibition organizer and Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg says on the audio guide to “Raft of the Medusa (Part I).” “This is really about using three‑dimensional form for almost two‑dimensional purpose. He’s very interested in the surfaces, the light, and reflection, and the idea that these elements though then spring forward, and yet stay clinging to the raft of the grid.” Stella once famously said, “What you see is what you see.” If you look hard enough, you might even see the seventy-nine-year-old Stella himself, who has been known to drop by the exhibition to see how much people are enjoying it, even if the reviews have been decidedly mixed.

(© 2015 the Museum of Modern Art / photo by Pablo Enriquez)

PICASSO SCULPTURE
Museum of Modern Art
Floor 4, Painting and Sculpture II Galleries
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through February 7, $14-$25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

You’re not going to see Pablo Picasso at MoMA’s stunning survey of his sculptures, which has deservedly received rapturous reviews. But you are going to experience some 141 works arranged chronologically in 11 galleries, beginning in 1902 and concluding in 1964, set up like a lovely forest you can wander through at your own pace, filled with marvelous creatures, many of which have never been in the United States before and were rarely, if ever, displayed publicly during the artist’s lifetime. “An emphasis on the sculptures’ absence has eclipsed a rich body of evidence underscoring the vitality of their presence,” organizers Ann Temkin and Anne Umland write in the exhibition catalog. “One might say that Picasso’s sculpture stands apart from the paintings and works on paper in the remarkable efficiency with which it accomplished its many reinventions and redefinitions. But in its ongoing dance between the private and the public, the intimate and the monumental, the experimental and the definitive, the sculpture reveals itself as a quintessential rather than exceptional aspect of Picasso the artist.” Each gallery contains masterful treasures, from 1909’s “Head of a Woman” to 1913’s “Still Life with Guitar,” from 1929-30’s “Woman in the Garden” to 1943’s “Man with Lamb,” from 1951-52’s “Crane” to 1950-54’s “Woman with a Baby Carriage.” One of the most charming displays is the six-piece “Bathers” series, a half dozen abstract wooden figures made in Cannes in 1956 and arranged amid white rocks as if on the beach in the French Riviera. Picasso is one of those geniuses whose work lives up to all the hype, and this exhibit is no exception. Get your timed tickets now and don’t miss it.

THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100: MODERN ART AND REVOLUTION

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” oil on canvas, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection)

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th St.)
Daily through February 23, $18 (pay-as-you-wish Friday 6:00 – 8:00)
212-873-3400
www.armory.nyhistory.org

It was a seminal moment in the way contemporary art was introduced to the American public. “New York will never be the same again,” Arthur B. Davies said, while Walt Kuhn proclaimed, “We will show New York something they never dreamed of.” On February 17, 2013, the Armory Show opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. and Twenty-Sixth St.; organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which was headed by Davies, the show brought the European avant-garde to the America public. The New-York Historical Society is celebrating the transformative event’s centennial with “The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution,” a wide-ranging exhibition that includes approximately one hundred works from the original presentation, by such innovative and influential European artists as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch in addition to such American painters and sculptors as Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Sloan, and Charles R. Sheeler. “The Armory Show at 100” delves into the fascinating behind-the-scenes battles between Davies, Kuhn, J. Alden Weir, Walter Pach, Guy Pène du Bois, and the National Academy through quotes, postcards, and letters that detail the controversial selection process and purpose of the show while also placing it firmly within the context of the sociopolitical climate and evolving culture (including literature and film) of early-twentieth-century New York City as WWI loomed on the horizon.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, “Pastoral Study,” oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 1897 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Many of the works on view, arranged thematically in clever ways, are simply sensational: Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” “The Red Studio,” and “Goldfish and Sculpture,” van Gogh’s “Mountains at Saint-Rémy” and “La salle de danse à Arles,” Redon’s “Silence,” Bellows’s “Circus,” Ryder’s “Pastoral Study,” Eugène Delacroix’s “Christ on the Lake of Genesareth,” Degas’s “After the Bath,” Munch’s “Madonna,” Charles Henry White’s “The Condemned Tenement,” and Francis Picabia’s “The Procession, Seville.” The free audioguide adds additional insight to the lasting importance of “The Armory Show,” while the catalog features thirty-one essays, with contributions from curators Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt along with Leon Botstein, Avis Berman, Barbara Haskell, Francis M. Naumann, Casey Nelson Blake, and others. “Criticism, both for and against modern art in the exhibition — now considered one of the most important art exhibitions ever mounted in the United States — was impassioned, and it seemed as if everyone from the most seasoned collector or established artist to the uninitiated viewer had an opinion,” Kushner writes in her piece, “A Century of the Armory Show: Modernism and Myth.” The thoughtful, well-organized show continues through February 23, with timed tickets available in advance, which is definitely the way to go to avoid the lines. As a bonus, the New-York Historical Society will be open on Monday, February 17. (Next month, the Armory Show comes back to town, running March 6-9 at Piers 92 and 94 as part of Armory Arts Week, but it’s nothing like its namesake.)

AN ANIMATED WORLD — CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF GKIDS CLASSICS: THE PAINTING

Ramo and Claire attempt to overcome class boundaries and find the creator in Jean-François Laguionie’s THE PAINTING

THE PAINTING (LE TABLEAU) (Jean-François Laguionie, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, December 30, 6:15
Series continues through January 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.gkids.tv

Jean-François Laguionie’s award-winning animated film, The Painting, has a very cool premise: The characters inside one of a painter’s works have organized a rigid class structure of the Alldunns, who have been completed and have sole access to the ritzy castle; the Halfies, who are not quite finished and are not allowed to join them; and the Sketchies, outlined figures who are terribly abused by the Alldunns. At the center of it all is an impossible Romeo and Juliet-like love story between the Alldunn Ramo (voiced by Adrien Larmande) and the Halfie Claire (Chloé Berthier). With the power-hungry Alldunns, led by the Great Chandelier (Jacques Roehrich), on the rampage, Ramo, the Sketchie known as Quill (Thierry Jahn), and Claire’s best friend, the Halfie Lola (Jessica Monceau), are on the run, trying to reunite the lovers and find the real-life painter so he can finish the Halfies and Sketchies and bring peace to the land. But soon they have fallen out of their painting and into the artist’s studio, where they meet characters from other works, including a reclining nude (Céline Ronte) and a self-portrait (Laguionie), and enter different canvases during their adventurous, and dangerous, search for the creator. Laguionie (Rowing Across the Atlantic, A Monkey’s Tale), who has been making animated films for five decades, has fun mimicking Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and other major artists, but his world-building doesn’t quite hold together as the characters continue on their colorful journey. He successfully walks that fine line between playful parable and melodramatic morality play, but things ultimately get away from him as the resolution nears. The Painting is screening December 30 at 6:15 at the IFC Center as part of the series “An Animated World: Celebrating 5 Years of GKIDS Classics,” paying tribute to GKIDS’ ongoing New York International Children’s Film Festival, which continues with such other animated works as Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba’s Chico & Rita, Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill, and Jacques-Remy Girerd’s Mia and the Migoo.

ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER SCULPTURE GARDEN: THE MODERN MONUMENT

Katharina Fritsch’s “Group of Figures” is back in MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which is now open for free every morning from 9:00 to 10:30 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Early hours: open daily 9:00 – 10:30 am, free
www.moma.org

Designed in 1953 by architect Philip Johnson, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden resides on the site that was once the town-house home of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. A socialite and philanthropist who married John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1901, Aldrich was the mother of Abby, John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David Rockefeller. The garden has been one of the great, peaceful respites of New York City for sixty years, its multiple levels and reflecting pools, which Johnson called “canals,” along with its birches and beeches, offering visitors a beautiful space to commune with both art and nature en plein air. Beginning September 9, the sculpture garden will be open for free starting at 9:00 each morning, ninety minutes before the rest of the museum opens to paying customers. Early risers can buy coffee and other drinks and enjoy the garden’s current arrangement of sculptures, “The Modern Monument,” which consists of old favorites as well as newer delights. Walking around the garden, one will encounter Alberto Giacometti’s “Tall Figure, III,” Jenny Holzer’s “Granite Bench,” Joan Miró’s “Moonbird,” Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk,” and Pablo Picasso’s “She-Goat.” Aristide Maillol’s “The River” still dangles over one of the pools, while Hector Guimard’s “Entrance Gate to Paris Subway (Métropolitain) Station, Paris, France” stands in its longtime space at the far east end and Henri Matisse’s stunning quartet, “The Back,” lines its usual wall, celebrating the human body. Also on view are Mark di Suvero’s “For Roebling,” Tony Smith’s “Die,” Claes Oldenburg’s “Geometric Mouse, Scale A,” Picasso’s “Monument,” and Katharina Fritsch’s colorful “Group of Figures.” The most recent addition to the garden is Stephen Vitiello’s audiovisual installation “A Bell for Every Minute,” which was created for the High Line and now resides outside at MoMA, a collection of different bells from around the city chiming minute after minute. In 2004, when the museum returned to Midtown after a major renovation and expansion (and temporary move to Queens), architect Yoshio Taniguchi restored the garden to its original dimensions, explaining that it is “perhaps the most distinctive single element of the museum today.” And now entrance to this most distinctive element is free every morning from 9:00 to 10:30.

ART SEEN: F FOR FAKE

Orson Welles explores cinematic reality and artistic forgery in F FOR FAKE

F FOR FAKE (Orson Welles, 1976)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
April 20-21, 12 noon
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

Orson Welles plays a masterful cinematic magician in the riotous F for Fake, a pseudo-documentary (or is it all true?) about art fakes and reality. Exploring slyly edited narratives involving art forger Elmyr de Hory, writer Clifford Irving, Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso, and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, the iconoclastic auteur is joined by longtime companion Oja Kodar and a cast of familiar faces in a fun ride that will leave viewers baffled — and thoroughly entertained. Welles manipulates the audience — and the process of filmmaking — with tongue firmly planted in cheek as he also references his own controversial legacy with nods to such classics as Citizen Kane and The Third Man. It’s both a love letter to the art of filmmaking as well as a warning to not always believe what you see, whether in books, on canvas, or, of course, at the movies. F for Fake is screening April 20 & 21 at noon as part of the new Nitehawk Cinema monthly series “Art Seen,” which continues May 18-19 with Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters and June 22-23 with The Cool School and Paul McCarthy’s The Black and White Tapes. Each program will begin with an “Artist Film Club” presentation that includes one video from the 2013 Moving Image Art Fair.

PICASSO BLACK AND WHITE

Pablo Picasso, “The Milliner’s Workshop (Atelier de la modiste),” oil on canvas, January 1926 (© 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through January 23, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

“You capture more of the reality of a picture in black and white,” says Maya Widmaier-Picasso on the audioguide to the illuminating exhibition “Picasso Black and White,” which continues at the Guggenheim through January 23. The excellent audio tour, featuring contributions from Picasso’s daughter with muse and mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter as well as curator Carmen Giménez and longtime Picasso friend and art critic Carlos Casagemas, is a splendid accompaniment to the gorgeous visuals, more than one hundred sculptures, paintings, and drawings that focus on Picasso’s rich, passionate use of black, white, and gray. Arranged chronologically, the show also reveals how Picasso’s personal life, from his relationships with women to his strong antiwar, anti-Franco stance, informed his work. The monochromatic canvases allow viewers to rejoice in Picasso’s revolutionary use of line, form, and composition, from the stark simplicity of “The Lovers” and “Sleeping Woman” to such more dense and complex pieces as “The Milliner’s Workshop” and “The Charnel House.” While “Composition and Volume” and “Head Seen Three-Quarters from the Left (Figure)” are oil paintings of sculptures that attain a compelling three-dimensionality, “Head” and two versions of “Sylvette” are like three-dimensional paintings, the ponytail on the latter two said to have influenced Brigitte Bardot. The exhibition also examines how Picasso went through a long period of creating works based on those of other artists, reclaiming them for himself, from Eugène Delacroix (“The Rape of the Sabines”) to Diego Velázquez (“The Maids of Honor [Las Meninas]”).

Pablo Picasso, “Marie-Thérèse, Face and Profile (Marie-Thérèse, face et profil), oil and charcoal on canvas, 1931 (© 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: Béatrice Hatala)

Featuring still-lifes, portraits, and vibrant depictions of horrific actions (“Mother with Dead Child II, Postscript to Guernica”), the show explores the strong emotions that Picasso put into his work — and those that are taken away by the viewer. Along the way, Widmaier-Picasso shares charming stories about her father, calling him “a blockhead,” describing how he’d walk on tiptoe away from a painting he was working on in order to see it better, and recalling his fondness for making late-night fried eggs. “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them,” Picasso once famously said. “Picasso Black and White” delves into the deep thought processes that went into this impressive body of work. “Picasso Black and White” comes to a close with an afternoon/evening symposium on January 23, “Monographic Motifs: One Artist, One Theme, 1900-1970,” with presentations from Richard Schiff (“De Kooning: The Kick, the Twist, the Woman, the Rowboat”), Genevieve Hendricks (“Le Corbusier’s Fantastic Femmes”), Anna Ferrari (“From Mosaics to ‘Magic’: Henri Laurens’s Red-Ochre Drawings,” with a response by Kenneth Silver), Fernando Herrero-Matoses (“Antonio Saura and the Crucifixion: Facing Picasso in Black-and-White”), Catherine Spencer (“Prunella Clough’s Cold War Cartographies,” response by Anne Umland), and Giménez, Diana Widmaier Picasso (Maya’s daughter), and Gary Tinterow (“Picasso: A Conversation”), followed by a reception and a final viewing of the exhibition.