(Thank you Dawyne and Joyce. Testing list patience for art talk...)
Here is a review of the show I saw Saturday, from its Whitney version, which included several pieces that were missing in the San Francisco show.
(http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/finch9-28-06.asp):
PICASSO THE CONSERVATIVE by Charlie Finch
"Picasso and American Art," Sept. 28, 2006-Jan. 28, 2007, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021
Leave it to the Whitney Museum to present an exhibition, "Picasso and American Art," which dryly presents Pablo as a conservative influence on the praxis of artists.
The show examines the influence of Picasso's work during his lifetime on nine American artists. The effect is to watch Pablo wrestle, strangle and put a hammerlock on the work of these artists, as they struggle under the weight and mass of his output, rather than releasing artists such as Pollock and de Kooning into free-form flight.
Such is the power of hindsight in looking at art. We simple spectators are granted godlike vision in judging the visual and creative struggles of our best-known artists under the beastly Picassodon. It is painful to see small early de Koonings which mimic Picasso's In the Studio or perversely fascinating to watch Arshile Gorky produce Cubist paintings which are better than Picassos!
Early efforts by Louise Bourgeois attest to her lifelong incompetence in drawing, while Jasper Johns' retardataire defenestrations of Picasso's Woman in a Straw Hat with Blue Leaves seem redundant and unnecessary exercises in light sadomasochism.
As in all such shows in the current curatorial merry-go-round, in which museums such as the Whitney borrow accolades from the circus ("Ten years in the making!" "Sights never seen before on these shores!"), the delight is in the details. Hence, Arthur Dove's Nature Symbolized No. 1 contains an orgasmic color that one has never seen before, a kind of burgundy black. John Graham's Harlequin, Playing Card and other pieces are a revelation and one of the few examples in the show of work that simultaneously evades, transcends and ignores the limits of Picasso's iconography on the creative head and hand. (The other is Lichtenstein, whose erotic beach bunnies stir the blood.)
A cute little Marsden Hartley landscape tries to inch its way into your pocket and a tiny Pollock horse, clipped from Guernica, dances on your shoulder. It is essential to infiltrate the grandiosity around such a noble effort such as "Picasso and American Art" to find your own reward -- such as Picasso's bronze Absinthe Glass, which saucily spritzes Johns' moldy cans of ale in a wall vitrine. Or tip your hat to Lee Krasner's two efforts, which do Pablo better than Dora.
Weirdly enough, Picasso, through the template of this exhibition, comes across as a reactionary influence on some great artists. You will never look at the work of Stuart Davis with quite the same joy again. Such are the unintended consequences of an intriguing show.
----------
We both enjoyed the same show for some of the same reasons, but not all. Yes, there certainly are quite a few delights. It is an excellant show. But I think there is an important difference between what I saw and what Charlie Finch saw and the differance is almost summed up in this:
``...Arthur Dove's Nature Symbolized No. 1 contains an orgasmic color that one has never seen before, a kind of burgundy black.''
I noticed this color too and its utterly sensual quality, which is something like an exotic very dark chocolate, closely resembling a very dark African skin that has been out in the sun a lot. It's like black satin with deep violet highlights.
But here is why I noticed it. I've made this color before. Here is how. You use vermillion red dark, ivory black, and a lot of ultramarine violet. I made this color to do pretty much the same thing that Arthur Dove did with it---creat a mystery color that you can't quite identify, but is absolutely beautiful, rich, exotic and extraordinarily dense. It does what most blacks rarely do, which is like the equivalent of a black hole to a normal gravitational field---that is, it punches a hole in regular space or the painted surface. It turns out that you can't quite see this color in photographs or very well under normal gallery or museum lighting. It needs direct sunlight to really illuminate it and give its full intensity and density. On the other hand violets are particular prone to damage by sun light. So it is rarely illuminated correctly.
This is the kind of insight that takes a working (class?) view of art that few see or know about, unless someone has told them about it. Arthur Dove wanted to cut an hole in his painting, so he painted this shape the darkest color he could mix, and it wasn't really black. It was better than black.
But this view provides a way to mount a critique of criticism and art writing in a more general direction. It is also a reason I used to like reading Peter Plagens, although I usually ended up saying a lot of yeah, but's.
Let's go to the main theme of the show which was the so-called influence of Picasso on several generations of American painters. I use the word so-called, because influence is the wrong word. The painting of other painters, to painters who are trying to learn is not just an influence. It is the medium through which they learn how to paint. You have to learn it some where because most teaching doesn't teach it. It's one of those things you learn by doing it over and over. You need to live in someone else's world of paint, in order to learn how to paint. So then that's what Picasso did for the Americans. He taught them how to paint, or in David Smith's case, how to draw and make sculpture.
What attracted so many painters to Picasso was not his stunning style so much as the fact that he made you believe you could be a painter. Well, he made me believe it, whether it turned out to be true or not. Some artists, writers, dancers, actor/esses do that. They open up the craft for all to see and Picasso was one of those painters. In the popular imagination, then this feature which is very mysterious to me, is often dismissed as, well anybody could do that. The real answer to that dismissile is show me, dude. Let's see what you got. Stand and deliver, as it were.
Finch isn't saying this of course, but he also hasn't quite figured out why Picasso was so influencial. I think, or it's my theory the reason Picasso was so influencial was because he could teach you how to paint. Of course you can get stuck painting like Picasso as all these Americans did. But most of them got off that particular stylistic or design influence after awhile and created other ways to paint for themselves. It was just a matter of time and practice. And it is also true that some did a better job of Picasso, than Picasso. Also, Picasso always moved on and stayed Picasso, as did de Kooning, Gorky, Dove, E de Kooning and Lee Krasner--and they were almost always lovely painters.
So, I agree with Finch on his selections of those works where the Americans out did Picasso. And I agree with him on Louise Bourgeois's life long incompetence. On this latter point, what I got out of Picasso, because he also taught me to paint, was he also taught me to draw and that drawing was the foundation of his painting---and it took a fuck of a long time to figure out how to do painting without drawing. Well, I never did figure that out. But I did manage to trace where Picasso got that strong graphic quality from, and it was Van Gogh. Van Gogh painted like he was doing a drawing, only he used his paint brush. So it was Van Gogh and Cezanne who taught Picasso how to paint. See, this is the tradition. This is how the craft is handed down from generation to generation as long as there are painters around.
And as a side note, my only real teacher of painting in the above sense of how to actually make colors, draw with a brush, form a composition out of the mess and get to some moment of greater than just a depiction of objects/people was Hans Burkhardt at Cal State Northridge. He was a minor league guy in LA (also in Mexico with my stepfather) in the fifties through seventies who never strayed very far from the guy who taught him to paint---Archile Gorky. So when I looked at the Gorkys in the show, I already knew how those shapes were made because I had trained my hand to make them, and re-make them over and over until the paint surface was thick with rehearsals. Needless to say, Burkhardt was very unpopular among the art students because he would walk up to your work, look at your palette, grab a brush, mix a color and paint on your work like it was his---in order to show you how it was supposed to be done. Nobody liked that but me and few others. I would never do that if I ever got a teaching job because I know it only alienates most students--who are idiots for being offended---but I understood that was Burkhardt's way to teach painting. A good painter's hand is something else to watch in action. It's like a ballet teacher who does the move for you, so you can see what's right and what's wrong with your attempts.
(There is a whole subtext of LA art history to when Peter Plagens and Walter Robinson took over the dept at Northridge, just after I left for Berkeley and must have fought bitterly over/with my favorite teachers, Ernest Freed, Hans Burkhardt and Saul Berstein. On the other hand, Robinson was the only guy who ever paid me for a review. It was of Tim Clark's Abstract Expressionist show and lecture that dissected Hans Hoffman at Berkeley's MOMA in the mid-90s. It was never published. The fee was a rejection fee due to length and its inappropriateness for a web column. Thank you Walter, I love you madly.)
Back at the museum yesterday, one of the older women next to me as I was studying Gorky's version of The Studio said as she saw the large, deep cracks in the painted surface, well there's restoration job waiting to happen. I was tempted to tell her that such restoration might not be possible without remounting the whole painting on board, gluing it down and thus destroying it forever as a painting---so that these cracks could be filled in---which never quite works. The reason was that the paint was probably close to a half-inch thick and probably cracked within a very few years (possibly only months) after it was finished. Likewise the dull coloring of the late 30s early 40s de Kooning and Gorky self portraits with their extremely muted color range. Their dullness was a consequence of using too much turpintine, pigment that was too thin, and probably too much drier along with waxes that Brice (not Bruce) Marden used. All of that kills the color, but it also makes it possible to do a lot of revisions without a lot of paint thickness and all those annoying paint edges that show up in the surface of the finished work.
In the end, I don't think painters can be released as Finch would have it, unless they have been under submission in the grip of another painter. You just don't know how to release the beast, until it's been chained down and trained by a master. Jazz musicians, dancers, actors all go through a similar training.
And then a last point. Finch complains that, ``Jasper Johns' retardataire defenestrations of Picasso's Woman in a Straw Hat with Blue Leaves seem redundant and unnecessary exercises in light sadomasochism.''
Here is where Picasso shows another side of painting that few moderns have managed to follow sucessfully---probably because the narrative aspect of painting has been institutionally forgotten.
Johns was a narrative painter and he got that from Picasso's form of narrative. It was and wasn't social commentary and this traces back to Van Gogh at least. By contrast Cezanne really wasn't a narrative painter at all. He was a formalist by default. It was certainly something that Zola never understood about his friend. Cezanne just didn't understand that aspect of art. But Van Gogh, Picasso and Johns did. Go to the above site and look at John's The Fall (It wasn't in the SF show). Tell me that isn't a great icon for the US empire in collapse---well the heroic, greco-roman (neoliberal and Straussian) ideal of it anyway. Probably in John's mind, that painting is not about America at all, but about the nature of war and its only consequence which is the destruction of civilized life. On the other hand, Guernica is not about civilized life, but its most human and deepest authentic themes, village life in a pastoral that was stunningly exploded by the mass horror machine of war/industry/death under the ubiquitous rural electrification projects or the electric light at the center of the painting---which was a symbol or icon of communist modernization of the rural interior. Once upon a time in New York, when I saw the real Guernica I was stunned at how big it was. It taught me how to compose mural size work---something I did for Freed on an independent study...
Thinking back on my previous post, the martinis glass controversy, I think now on reflection, if I had to identify the triangular shape in the off-center right, I would name it a bowl with a piece of fruit, probably a lime in a ceramic bowl, next to the marble (aka white) bust. There is something about limes that are definitely Spanish or Mexican---it's a Latin thing.
But Picasso's The Studio is above all a narrative on making art, like Velasquez's Las Minias and Antonioni's Blow-up. All three apparently unrelated works depend on the story behind the story, which is the story of the artist trying to figure out how to do art.
And lastly, this narrative quality is what the absurd and pathetic renditions of concept crap crave, but can not deliver. You don't need video, or the trashing of religious and traditional icons in order to satisfy this narrative rage against the machine.
What you need is practice in the tradition of narrative painting---something that is sorely lacking because it has been forgotten. Over a few years of practice, you do re-learn this lost tradition and you do figure out how to mount a narrative project, like Jasper John's The Fall. It just takes patience and time. A kind of winnowing and distilling of the irrelevant. Shadowy figures who gaze upon a fallen horse and an arm in a battle shield, a broken wagon wheel... These are the icons of war, fallen empires, the deep history of all glory. They fade into the fragments of lost murals, like the broken fresco wall fragments in the closing scene of Fellini's Satryricon.
CG