Becoming Picasso @ Courtauld
[Digital media consistently use images from Twombly's Untitled/Bacchus series as illustrative content to accompany stories about the money dispute with the Twombly Foundation. They put me in mind of the violent sea (an unsurprising association if one considers the artist's Hero and Leandro inter alia), turned red like that horrific scene in Lord of the Flies following the fall of Piggy, or photographs I think I remember of unreal-red, carmine seas, dyed with the blood of whale-hunting. Additions to the dispute story have been in the press today, and so I think the world's emphasising value.]
Courtauld's Picasso exhibition is tiny, comprised of two rooms or a vestibule and a room in which are hung 19 or so paintings. The arrangement is systematic and logical, although I must confess to having been influenced by the large-print booklet of the painting labels, which I always pick up because I feel awkward standing too long trying to read and consider what they say when they're on the wall. This is an interesting point. Reading the booklet one is guided through a narrative of the paintings and at the end one feels familiar with this apparently monumental year 1901 when a man named Picasso became Picasso and a youth with a brush became artist. Nineteen hundred and one consisted of two parts during which the painter embraced colour and experimented with antecedent styles like those reminiscent of Degas, Cézanne and Seurat before abandoning it and tending away towards blue. Blue defines Picasso. This is a satisfying story to ingest and especially if one reads it, jots down some preliminary remarks and then puts one's eyes to the pictures.
The majority of the hour or so I spent in the exhibition passed in room 2. First I sat opposite Seated Harlequin (1901), but by accident since only that space became free and I seized on it for my initial research. It is a bright and powerful painting, enigmatic and affecting, full of colour, not dull like the reproductions with which I was familiar suggested. Then I swung around to sit opposite Yo - Picasso (1901), the larger and more traditional of the two self-portraits in the gallery; I shall return to this mention of traditionalism later. Brilliance, potency, mystery and emotion combine here too with the assistance of colour contrasts, but the subject suggests urgency, defiance and confrontation, not the harlequin's patient cunning veiled beneath an affected languorousness. From the bench I was able to view all the paintings, however, both because of the scale of the room and by virtue of the gallery's timed entry system for ticket-holders. As promised, references to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were identifiable, for example, in The Tub (1901); use of outlining, for example, in Harlequin and Companion (1901) imparted a special definition to the work; fields of flat colour contrasted with the pointillistic technique of some other pictures; and the disjunction between subject matter and brushwork in Girl Holding a Dove (1901) was important to notice. More exciting were other unlisted suggestions, however.
Does the first self-portrait recall Goya? Does Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901) recall El Greco? Doesn't The Tub by contrast with Yo - Picasso identify the artist as comfortably using a range of different techniques? Does the "compressed energy"--a term I have borrowed from the labels' blurb referring to Spanish Woman/El Tango (1901)--of Seated Harlequin, Harlequin and Companion and Absinthe Drinker (1901) lend the paintings an urgency or emotional intensity that brings action to what is a stolen still moment; and is the point of these moments their capture in time, their immediacy, their ugliness (by contrast, for instance, with the staging for time and attempted prettiness of pre-Impressionism)? Don't the geometries of the second self-portrait, the last piece in the show according to the booklet, suggest the turn to abstraction that would come; that is, don't we leave this show with a sense of Picasso the abstract artist as well as the 'blue' artist? What is the role of ugliness in the work of 1901?
Tradition is engaged with in terms of medium and technique in the work of 1901, arguably pre-Impressionist and newer, Impressionist traditions together; the self-portraits demonstrate this quite well enough, I think. It was a year that witnessed an evolution in Picasso's chromatic sensitivities, too, as he moved away from the muted tones of works like Portrait of Bibi la Purée (1901) and Portrait of a Man (1901; not Gustave Coquiot or Ambroise Vollard it seems) to the relative vivacity of Dwarf Dancer (1901) and Spanish Woman/El Tango, and thence into the muddiness of his blue period. Placing this exhibition on the same floor as the Impressionists and 20th-century art enables one to contextualise the 1901 work more readily, and this is a useful curatorial decision.
Courtauld's Picasso exhibition is tiny, comprised of two rooms or a vestibule and a room in which are hung 19 or so paintings. The arrangement is systematic and logical, although I must confess to having been influenced by the large-print booklet of the painting labels, which I always pick up because I feel awkward standing too long trying to read and consider what they say when they're on the wall. This is an interesting point. Reading the booklet one is guided through a narrative of the paintings and at the end one feels familiar with this apparently monumental year 1901 when a man named Picasso became Picasso and a youth with a brush became artist. Nineteen hundred and one consisted of two parts during which the painter embraced colour and experimented with antecedent styles like those reminiscent of Degas, Cézanne and Seurat before abandoning it and tending away towards blue. Blue defines Picasso. This is a satisfying story to ingest and especially if one reads it, jots down some preliminary remarks and then puts one's eyes to the pictures.
The majority of the hour or so I spent in the exhibition passed in room 2. First I sat opposite Seated Harlequin (1901), but by accident since only that space became free and I seized on it for my initial research. It is a bright and powerful painting, enigmatic and affecting, full of colour, not dull like the reproductions with which I was familiar suggested. Then I swung around to sit opposite Yo - Picasso (1901), the larger and more traditional of the two self-portraits in the gallery; I shall return to this mention of traditionalism later. Brilliance, potency, mystery and emotion combine here too with the assistance of colour contrasts, but the subject suggests urgency, defiance and confrontation, not the harlequin's patient cunning veiled beneath an affected languorousness. From the bench I was able to view all the paintings, however, both because of the scale of the room and by virtue of the gallery's timed entry system for ticket-holders. As promised, references to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were identifiable, for example, in The Tub (1901); use of outlining, for example, in Harlequin and Companion (1901) imparted a special definition to the work; fields of flat colour contrasted with the pointillistic technique of some other pictures; and the disjunction between subject matter and brushwork in Girl Holding a Dove (1901) was important to notice. More exciting were other unlisted suggestions, however.
Does the first self-portrait recall Goya? Does Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901) recall El Greco? Doesn't The Tub by contrast with Yo - Picasso identify the artist as comfortably using a range of different techniques? Does the "compressed energy"--a term I have borrowed from the labels' blurb referring to Spanish Woman/El Tango (1901)--of Seated Harlequin, Harlequin and Companion and Absinthe Drinker (1901) lend the paintings an urgency or emotional intensity that brings action to what is a stolen still moment; and is the point of these moments their capture in time, their immediacy, their ugliness (by contrast, for instance, with the staging for time and attempted prettiness of pre-Impressionism)? Don't the geometries of the second self-portrait, the last piece in the show according to the booklet, suggest the turn to abstraction that would come; that is, don't we leave this show with a sense of Picasso the abstract artist as well as the 'blue' artist? What is the role of ugliness in the work of 1901?
Tradition is engaged with in terms of medium and technique in the work of 1901, arguably pre-Impressionist and newer, Impressionist traditions together; the self-portraits demonstrate this quite well enough, I think. It was a year that witnessed an evolution in Picasso's chromatic sensitivities, too, as he moved away from the muted tones of works like Portrait of Bibi la Purée (1901) and Portrait of a Man (1901; not Gustave Coquiot or Ambroise Vollard it seems) to the relative vivacity of Dwarf Dancer (1901) and Spanish Woman/El Tango, and thence into the muddiness of his blue period. Placing this exhibition on the same floor as the Impressionists and 20th-century art enables one to contextualise the 1901 work more readily, and this is a useful curatorial decision.
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