Museums Are Just A Lot of Lies

TWO PAINTINGS HANG at the entrace to the galleries housing the exhibition Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. On one wall the imposing "boy Leading a Horse" (1905) walks purposefully forward, a self-assured youth guiding the beast forward by the certain force of his pure and adolescent figure. His gaze and grace look to the opposite wall, where his grown-up self seems to stare back from the commanding eyes of a self-portrait of the painter, urging the viewer to join the horse behind an innovative spirit embarked on a journey of artistic adventure. The self-portrait dates from 1901. Gertrude Stein remembers this year,"...one day we were discussing the dates of his pictures, and I was saying to him that all that could not have been painted during one year (1901). Picasso answered, you forget we were young and we did a great deal in a year."

The show at the MOMA happily questions the possibility that Picasso has ever been anything but young, despite his 91 years. The exhibit attests to the fact that one of the most prolific and revolutionary artistic spirits of our century did a very great deal more in the next 70 years of his career, interpreting the world of visual reality in new ways with the intellect that glares so defiantly from the eyes of his self-portrait. Yet these same eyes could see their owner in more unlikely lights. "...I really do look like your president Lincoln," Picasso informs an amused Alice B. Toklas in her Autiobiography. Like this trompe-l'oeil version of his own self-image, many quirks of his personal vision could trick his mind's eye into the surrealistic jokes and psychic mutations of physical reality which join so much humor and psychological dimension to the more analytical samplings of his art.

With the knowledge that Picasso values his subjective experience more than his work--a lesson largely ignored in the composition of the show--and in the recognition that he claims each of his works to be a phial filled with his own blood, it is also often easier to approach the rather bloodless monochromes, the complex intellectuality that produced his early Cubism. Possessing, too, a heart that bled for humanity, he turned not only to the art, but also to the politics of the avant-garde, to Communism. He painted his sympathy for the political or social underdog in shades of mournful blue and used the fragmented vision of his Cubism to illustrate the emotional chaos generated by the bombing of the small fishing-town Guernica.

Given the quality and quantity of the Museum's Picasso collection, the retrospective reads like a standard textbook on the art of Picasso, a major volume on masterpiece and medium in twentieth century art. Every phase in his career--some unfortunately more than others--is represented by some artwork familiar to both MOMA habitue and reproduction monger alike. Transfixing one in either aesthetic or emotional horror, the famous "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), flanked as it is by examples of the Iberian monumentality and primitivism Picasso assimilated into the savage proto-Cubism of his brothel scene, illustrates the creative process which brought him to his more mature forms of analytic art. The studiedly severe colors of his "Reservoir Horta" (1909) and "Girl with a Mandolin" (1910) show the progression from Cezanne's architectonics to the crystalline space-time continuum that was to break up the contemporary universe into the figurative metaphors of the Cubists' conceptions of art.

HAVING LEARNED the language of pictorial hieroglyphics, Picasso elaborated his games with perception by dropping words and letters into his pasted or painted collages. Grouped together they form a telegraphic narrative of Picasso's life in Paris; "Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum" (1914) or "The Architect's Table" (a fitting description, too, of Picasso's idea of the Cubist painter as architect) evoking the bohemian conviviality of pre-war France; clippings from French or Spanism newspapers contrasting the national characteristics of a dapper "Man with a Hat" with a Spanism-speaking guitar. Picasso's use of musical motifs is evidenced by the many studies of guitars; Cubist fragments, staccato rhythms in line and space, the illusion of projected sound created by the protruding opening in his "Guitar" sculpture. Blazing color and musical notes, his "Three Musicians" link abstract shape to abstract shape to become the instruments they are holding, while his multi-planar "Harlequin" dances jerkily to the tune of bright diamonds and squares.

But Picasso's clowns and cubes, though often playful, contain a seriousness of their own, they are participants in the tragedy of modern life. The pathos and existential incongruities of his earliest cicus figures, painted in the poignancy of his Blue Period, never made it to the happier atmosphere of the Left Bank. In their wanderings along the empty beaches of a pictorial and spiritual vacuum, their sad-eyed slouch re-appears on the roads of Fellini's La Strada, their shabby existence is spot-lighted in the arena of The Clowns. On the beach, they will later encounter Picasso's "Seated Bather" (1930), a skeletai nightmare perched at the water's edge, turning the earlier symbol of the beach as social wasteland into the psychic boundary between the conscious and sub-conscious. Picasso's surrealism, captured also in the implicit and explicit imagery of the theme of the artist and his studio, or in his "Girl before a Mirror", raised the question of identity through images now hauntingly familiar from Bergman's Persona; the struggles of the psyche distorting the very appearance of a person's face.

"In art," Picasso once said, "there is no evolution...to me there is no past or future in art." And so his ties with the past prove just as integral as his futuristic influence without forcing lines of cause or chronology. A subscriber to classical mythology, Picasso often lets his fascination with bullfights leave Hemingway's virile temporality for the era of the Minotaur. As a symbol of male sexuality for Picasso, the monster figures in a large number of paradoxically delicate etchings, ranting and raping through beds of Grecian flowers and maidens; sexual prowess incarnate of a man notorious for his series of wives and women. Fluctuating between cultivated neo-Classicism and the primieval wildness of his Iberian style, the works on display reveal his ultimate success in blending his findings into the

THE PLACING of paintings and related sculptures next to one another ("Green Still Life" and "Glass of Absinthe"), or the juxtaposition of studies and finished works in the show aids the instructive chronology employed inthe manner of exposition. It attempts to reproduce the artist's creative process and represent the simultaneity of his works in various different mediums to exemplify the structural essence of Cubism as translatEd into similar renditions in sculpture.

Though successful as a life-size Picasso textbook, the show lacks the human dimension so important to Picasso himself. It is a passage in art history devoid of autobiographical data. No explanations, statements, or personal details relieve the impersonally exhibited mass of masterpieces. Picasso would disapprove:" It's not what an artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Emile Blanche, even if the apples he had painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest in Cezanne's anziety that's Cezanne's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh--that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is sham.

A compatriot of Don Quixote, Picasso, too, possesses a Romantic belief unique among his contemporaries, in his case the notion that the creative spirit is supreme, that the man inside the artist's guise is most important. Regrettably, the MOMA's pedestrian predictability denies this aspect of Picasso's character. For all its wide scope, the show threatens to reinforce Picasso's statement that "museums are just a lot of lies."

At the exit from the galleries housing the exhibition Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art hand three sketches. They are portraits of Honore de Balzac, a writer whose work Picasso has illustrated, a literary figure who in trying to encompass la comedie humaine in his novels inspired Picasso to a similar undertaking in art. Perhaps if these studies had been placed at the entrance to the show, they would have served as a hint to make this anniversary retrospective more all-inclusive