Picasso in the City of Lights

Y oung Picasso in Paris is the new exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) died 50 years ago this past April 8, an anniversary propelling dozens of new exhibitions in New York, Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid. I’ll cover some of them, starting with the Guggenheim’s, and I’ll try to keep it chronological.

It’s a small exhibition, about ten objects, but it’s very, very good. Anchoring Young Picasso is the sparkling, titillating Moulin de la Galette from 1900, his first Paris painting and in the Guggenheim collection. Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec had tackled the Montmartre dance hall, so Picasso knew he was attempting to stride among giants. The 19-year-old Catalan, still only a visitor to Paris, proves he’s the ultimate in savants.

Picasso first arrived in Paris in the closing weeks of the World’s Fair to see Last Moments, a picture he did in 1898 that was accepted for display at the fair’s Spanish pavilion. It depicted a dying woman in bed attended by her priest. Picasso was a child prodigy, with an art professor for a father. His very early work is best described as a moody, dark brand of Symbolism showing some debt to El Greco, who had just been rediscovered, after nearly 300 years in obscurity, as a provincial Toledan religious painter and portraitist.

Seeing his work on view was only Picasso’s explicit reason for going to Paris. Paris was the center of the art world, a magnet for young avant-garde artists much as New York would be starting in the 1940s. It was ordained by the gods that he go there.

There’s no catalogue, but that’s fine. Picasso is the last century’s most written-about artist. Whistler, another celebrity, savant, and revolutionary, is the artist over which 19th-century critics splashed the most ink. They’re so very different, but both, while still young men, changed art’s possibilities the way an earthquake can change the course of a river. Young Picasso doesn’t concern itself with Picasso’s subsequent periods in blue and pink, or his and Georges Braque’s invention of Cubism. Rather, it’s the story about art from a time when Picasso was unknown, before he was a star, before art historians, collectors, critics, and Gertrude Stein blushed and gushed over the wild man from Barcelona.

Picasso knew very little French, but Paris was an international city. During his two months there, he immersed himself in the City of Lights. Yes, he visited museums and galleries but also, or I should say mostly, experienced the Paris of bars, dance halls, and nightclubs in Montmartre, where he was based.

Le Moulin de la Galette is the marquee picture he painted in late 1900 and is a summation of his Paris visit and salute to the city. Renoir’s version from 1876 is peak Impressionism, with pastel colors, a juicy surface, and brilliant — and daytime — light. Toulouse-Lautrec’s take from 1889 is an evening interior, and seedier than Renoir’s. Figures are gaunt, but they’re also static, which makes them look like colored sculpture. Most of Renoir’s figures are dancing.

Picasso’s version is different still. For Picasso at that moment, it’s big — 35 by 46 inches — and the crowd’s mixed. It’s a demimonde world of bourgeois men in top hats, high-end and low-end sex workers, and dancing couples. Picasso’s palette is brilliant, with women dressed in green, red, and yellow alternating with men in black. The look’s gaudy and the feel’s decadent but the picture’s not seedy. It’s alive, much as Picasso was alive and a new force.

The Guggenheim cleaned and restored the painting for Young Picasso. Now refreshed, its palette seems itself electrified. I don’t like video and audio guides but the Guggenheim’s is great, starring as it does the curators and the painting conservators. They take us capably through exercises in close looking.

Picasso painted at least four self-portraits in 1901, after he returned to Barcelona but was making longer visits to Paris. Yo, owned by the Museum of Modern Art, presents the artist with a strong, confident gaze. A self-portrait from late 1901 is also intense, but the artist looks tired, even hollowed out, and introspective. Writing about Picasso, the artist and critic Maurice Utrillo said that he came to Paris in 1900 to conquer it. Back in 1901, he knew he was there to learn. By the time he painted his late-1901 self-portrait, he was entering his austere, melancholy Blue Period, stimulated in part by poverty, botched love affairs, and the suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas.

The rest of the art in the exhibition isn’t earth-shattering but, rather, Toulouse-Lautrec infused. But, hey, Picasso was just a kid!  By 1904, he was living in Paris. He painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. By then he was a star.

A group of tangential if not entirely irrelevant wall texts deals with colonialism at world’s fairs and gender visibility. The 1900 Exposition Universelle “included displays of colonized peoples as living examples of racist human hierarchies that placed whiteness at the top and blackness at the bottom.” What, pray tell, does this have to do with the price of a baguette, or with Picasso’s early Paris work? Hint: The answer’s “nada.” Picasso might have “encountered” these displays, but he very well might have skipped them, and how does his art from 1900 and 1901 absorb them?

Next to it is a wall text noting that “queer and trans people may be hiding in plain sight in paintings from this period.” Is that the case in this exhibition? At 19, Picasso was very much a narcissist, beyond what’s normal for teenagers, and his self-image as the horniest straight man alive runs the length of his long life. How does a label on “queer and trans people” help us understand either Picasso or his art?

These odd moments aside, it’s a well-done exhibition. I expect at some point this summer I’ll get to Madrid to write about the Prado’s El Greco and Picasso exhibition.

This is a good moment to address the relevance of Picasso’s character and behavior in looking at his art. Picasso was a game-changing artist who produced thousands of works of art. He moved fluidly from painting to print-making, sculpture, and ceramics. He was a notorious lush, likely a predator who cruelly dropped the women in his life. Should this matter in how we look at his work? I don’t think so. He might have been a monster in some respects, and certainly had a very naughty mind, but the only thing that matters is his art.

Not everything Picasso painted is good. Some of his late paintings are actually bad, and a hefty chunk of his work is redundant. Putting the emphasis on the art rather than the artist isn’t an indictment of the viewer. The art’s simply the only thing we can experience directly.