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Mike Bidlo Oil on canvas, 64.17 x 51.18 in. (163 x 130 cm) Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie Bruno Bischofberger |
I left After Picasso: 80 contemporary artists, the big show at Ohio State University's Wexner Center, thinking that for such a big show I felt very few moments of joy. I know Picasso gets pulses racing, and the exhibition builds on that: Witness His Artistic Impact. The show is weighed down by an impact that is much, much smaller than Picasso's achievement. Unfortunately, this academic location of influences, echoes and salutations brings us work that barely stirs the blood – and places interesting work in contexts where it seems lonely and small. In short, the show is weak on content that touches on primary human issues or emotions.
The occasion for After Picasso It's the 25th anniversary of Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Their celebration is this show: Huge artist and a subject that is more important in concept than the art that demonstrates it. Add loans from around the world and we have an Event.
This show unsuccessfully tries to cater to two audiences. While it may be a home run for academics, it is a show for a general and curious audience. In its conscious effort to conceive of every possible overlap of “Picasso” and “influence”, it wastes the viewer's space and patience in tedious appropriations of Picasso's work; in isolated figures or composition borrowed from Picasso; and in art that reacts to Picasso's icons or styles. Rarely do we see suggestions of how an artist's vision achieved an inconceivable plane in a world untouched by Picasso.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled 280, 1989-93. Color print, 140x94x8cm. Courtesy of Neda Young, New York. |
Picasso's greatness is not a problem, nor is it proven by the many demonstrations of his marks on artists who appropriate or borrow from his work. Except in an academic sense, we gain little appreciation for borrowers as creators of deeply interesting art in its own right. Our understanding of influence is further expanded by adapting some material to a curatorial narrative. Cindy Sherman's self-portrait for years shows her interest in art history broadly. Picasso's inspiration for Untitled 280 doesn't speak more to a fascination with Picasso specifically than his portraits using iconic images from a vast world of artists.
Deichtorhallen Hamburg director Dirk Luckow writes in the preface to the catalog (translated from German),
“The hypothesis of the exhibition is that the great influence that Picasso’s art has today is because his work and his person cannot be separated…”
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Galerie Leyendeker, Tenerife (T. Ü.) 1985, Screenprint, 83.8 x 59.4 cm Advertisements © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne |
There is no doubt about Picasso's personal fame. But I'm in favor of separating the work and the person. I found that by dedicating a portion of the show to its celebrity, the curators only reinforced my sense that they were less interested in what art is and can do than its pitfalls. Picasso's ego – like any artist's – rightfully resides in his work. This has to apply to all artists. Unfortunately, I fear, we find this to be true of his imitators and satirists as well.
The inspiration for a series of photographs by Martin Kippenberger was a photo of Picasso in his underwear, shown here on Kippenberger's show poster. In the exhibition (no images available) Kippenberger himself poses as Picasso, wearing similar shorts, at ease around an indescribable interior. Kippenberger's show, for better or worse, satirizes itself and its subject simultaneously.
It would be easy to replace Picasso with a shirtless photo of Vladimir Putin or Whitey Bulger on a poster like this, in such a wide stance, positioned just above the viewer: The grandiose manly stance didn't start with Picasso. Only to the extent that such characteristics are inherent in Picasso's works should curators move this theme from the catalog to the gallery. It's a footnote, a strange one; pitiful or amusing, as you wish to understand it.
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| Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011. Installation view, (IAAP) Ramallah. Courtesy of Khaled Hourani; Photo Khaled Jarar |
When such poses are performed by armed men protecting a work of art, then we are in a much more interesting and meaningful realm. I find this photo of a project that brought a Picasso to the West Bank much more moving than the many reiterations, imitations and reinterpretations of Guernica included in the show. Robert Longo was invited to create new work for inclusion in the exhibition, and his enormous charcoal Guernica Redacted claims a significant position. Compared to Hourani's photos (of which this is one of several), one feels that Longo has, beyond the conceptual, no pulsating connection with war, torture or even conflict.
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Roberto Longo, Redacted Guernica (After Picasso's Guernica, 1937)2014/2015 Charcoal on mounted paper, four panels, 111.4 x 248 in. (283 x 630 cm) Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris – Salzburg
© 2015 Robert Longo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Rather than being stunted (or stunned) by Picasso's greatness, Hourani was genuinely inspired by Picasso's art. Furthermore, it uses an apolitical painting by Picasso to focus its anti-war message, to make it as localized and universal like art itself. The installation was a complex act of creativity that not only responded to Picasso, but built on him and beyond him.
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| Folkert de Jong, Les Saltimbanques: Old Son “Jack T.”Styrofoam, polyurethane foam and pigment; 69.6 x 21.6 x 19.6 in. (176.86 x 54.94 x 49.86 cm) Private collection, New York. Image courtesy of Deichtorhallen Hamburg. |
The sculpture by Folkert de Jong, Les Saltimbanques: Old Son 'Jack T,' is another of the highlights of the exhibition – a piece with a clear and recognized connection to Picasso, but independent of this due to its vitality. It is launched by associations, but is not limited by them. The difference in dimensions—sculpture suggested by multiple figures in a painting (The family of saltimbanques, 1905)— in itself frees the piece from the supposed original. De Jong's art in his to have medium creates a single figure that condenses the impact of several into a solid exemplar of debilitating isolation. Like Hourani, de Jong begins with Picasso and follows his own path under his unique lights.
The best works in the show, those that most clearly demonstrate Picasso's reach into the minds of later artists, appear both to the eye and to logic like those in which Picasso's images did not to appear. In John Stezaker's photo collages, we have one of the few opportunities in this enormous show to encounter work by an artist who so completely digested Picasso that we, as admiring spectators, would, outside of this show, probably be surprised to have him singled out in these pieces. In an exhibition with few surprises, Stezaker's work stands out, and certainly delivers the best didactic moment of the exhibition. Appropriation, celebrity and imitation aside, what have contemporary artists chosen to keep from Picasso? What about it has become unconscious/inevitable until now?
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John Stezaker Wedding I2006 Collage 9.25 x 11.22 in. (23.5 x 28.5 cm) Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery, London |
“Marriage 1” is composed of a collage of two black and white photographs that neither match nor match. We can study the piece constantly for long periods; it will remain the same, but we will never be sure of defining the subject (he/she/him), describing the spatial orientation of the image, or answering any “normal” questions about identity from the image.
The cubist perspective is invoked fluently and elegantly in the photographs. The feeling of comforting reality that the images give us is more persistent than Cubist disorientation. The eyes capture us intensely: how can we not know this person; How can it be that we are not intimately known by someone who can look at us so deeply? While the eyes provide deep focus, we assume order in everything around us. Our eyes jump around anything strange, out of place, incongruous, weird… For the better? For worse? Wedding 1, like marriage for many, is stuck and changing. The technique, the way of seeing, was new with Picasso and his friends. The subject and its presentation via an insight presented to the world more than a century ago are brilliantly Stezaker's. It's fresh and new and deeply informed.
I don't envy the task of planning a season at Wexner or any similar contemporary art space on a college campus. Balancing the claims of academic artists and art historians with those of an informed public—including nonspecialist college students, faculty, and staff—must be a delicate and difficult task. This time the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, I think.
Among the works included, many may be secondary or irrelevant to the main themes of the individual artists' works. But even so, what is there After Picasso: 80 contemporary artists is clearly of genuine and legitimate interest to art historians and curators. But as the show brings with it galleries and galleries of art much less interesting than the one that inspired it – art with messages diluted from its sources – to see it is to work hard for the few rewards of content that exist.
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My deepest thanks to Erik Pepple, media and public relations manager at the Wexner Center for the Arts, for his extended efforts in providing special request images for this article.