On the hit-list of artists guaranteed to pack the house, Picasso is near the top. But the current show at the Guggenheim, “Picasso Black and White,” deserves extra points for ingenuity. This artist, whose work spans no less than eight decades and a near-infinity of media, paintings and drawings, sculpture and pottery, maintained one constant throughout his long career: he always worked in black and white. He was a master draftsman. His drawings, with their fine, elegant, expressive lines, and his use of grisaille (painting in shades of black and gray) help to define this master of 20th century art. These works trace his journey from realism to abstraction. Whatever the Picasso period, rose, blue, cubist, realist, neoclassical, surrealist, or abstract, black and white art was an ongoing and vital means of both planning and expression for this artist.
Curated by Carmen Giménez, who is the Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of 20th Century Art at the museum, the works in this landmark exhibit have been culled from many public and private collections. Amazingly, it is the first time an exhibit focusing on the black and white works of the artist has ever been mounted. Many of the works in it are on public view for the first time. The exhibit demonstrates that Picasso was not only harking back to the earliest charcoal cave paintings in Europe, but, the curator notes, “also was faithful to a centuries-long Spanish tradition, following in the footsteps of earlier masters…, El Greco, José de Ribera, Diego Velásquez, Francisco de Zurbaran and Francisco de Goya.” (El Greco, she stresses, had an especially strong influence on Picasso.)
The exhibit has 118 works, arranged in a cogent and chronological way that parallels the development of art throughout the 20th century. Many works in the exhibit are warmly familiar, “Woman Ironing” from 1904 and “ Man, Woman, and Child” from 1906, while others are striking in their unfamiliarity. There are many nudes in multiple media, which demonstrate the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the human figure. The starkness of the art Picasso created during World War II is also clearly on view, from studies before and after his iconic“Guernica” to “The Charnel House,” painted in Paris in 1944-45, a graphic meditation on the devastation of war.
The crowds at the Guggenheim are awed by this exhibit. It forces us to look at the work of the master in an entirely new way.
(“Picasso Black and White” is on view at the Guggenheim until January 23, 2013. A beautiful catalogue, published by the Guggenheim in conjunction with Delmonico-Prestel, complements the exhibit.)