Picasso, the Stranger

Yes, there's more to learn and appreciate about the colossus of modern art.

L ast year, I wrote four stories about Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the subject of 50 exhibitions sanctioned by the Picasso Museum in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death. I didn’t realize I’d save the best for last. That’s A Foreigner Called Picasso at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street in Manhattan. The exhibition gathers about 70 works in nearly all of Picasso’s wide-ranging media. It’s a one-venue show, one of my few quibbles about it, but Gagosian pried pitch-perfect art from lots of private collections, and people want their treasures back.

How can something new be said about modern art’s premiere savant, lodestar, and lightning rod? Picasso has been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions and books. Contemporary eyes are known to roll over his hedonism — not fully understanding how expansive his talent and ambitions were and how his life in France complicated them.

What’s new to learn? Lots, and from A Foreigner Called Picasso. It delivers a nuanced, original encapsulation of Picasso as stranger, pariah, and the one who didn’t belong. How did this visionary draw from these perceptions and accommodate and circumvent them?

Since Picasso is the Colossus of modern art, and since A Foreigner Called Picasso is so rich and on target, I’ll write a two-parter. This piece takes us to 1939 and war drums not only in the air but banging in a chorus in les salons, salles à manger, toilettes, cuisines, et niches à chien. On Saturday, I’ll look at how the exhibition covers Picasso’s war and the years that follow until his death in 1973.

You’d need to be blind not to be awed by this exhibition. It’s a miniature retrospective, for starters, with small Picasso paintings from his teens in Barcelona, where his family lived after moving from Málaga so his father could direct the Catalan city’s fine-arts academy. By then, Picasso was a prodigy. He traveled to Paris for the first time in 1900 to visit the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair, where one of his paintings was displayed in the Spanish pavilion. Dazzled by the city’s glorious boulevards, seedy alleys, art, and electrification, he returned the next year for a long visit and then moved there in 1904.

I’d never seen the tiny — less than 4-by-4 inches — set of portraits in ink and watercolor of Picasso and his Barcelona set, part serious, part caricature, totally vivid. Yo, from 1901, is his intense self-portrait. He’s a rebel very much with a cause so it makes sense to put Yo next to Seated Harlequin, from 1901. Picasso is a natural amalgamator who, at 20, doesn’t borrow but draws from the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Degas but also from Watteau and low-life Paris street theater.

Picasso moves fast into bronze sculpture, his sad blue paintings, and his saltambiques, who were gypsies and acrobatic circus performers living in Montmartre, the Skid Row of Paris. All in a single gallery and covering about ten years, we go from these to studies for Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, from 1907, MoMA’s Reservoir, from 1908, an early Cubist landscape, and Man with a Guitar, from 1912, which is peak abstraction. These and a beautifully arranged group of drawings show us steps in Picasso’s fragmentation and reconstruction of the figure. We can see Picasso jump from representing the figure itself to refashioning it into icons and archetypes.

Two or three times, I walked back to the plaster cast of Picasso’s right hand at the beginning of the exhibition. Granted, it’s from 1937, when he’s pushing 60, but I look at it as if it were a magic wand. His wasn’t a pianist’s hand, elegant and attenuated, but a wrestler’s. It’s muscled. Lines gouge it and look like ultrafast, mega-capacity cables to the wiring in his brain.

In France, where he lived almost exclusively from 1904 until his death, and, I think, in the minds of most art lovers, whether they understood it or not, he was Spanish. He was Andalusian and Catalan, too, itself a weird mix. As a young man, he floated among anarchists. He was a Communist from the height of the Spanish Civil War and, after the Second World War, a committed comrade though wry when it came to Stalin’s cult of personality. By the 1960s, he was a champagne socialist but, then in his 80s, a quintessential horny old man, too, and an artist who kept producing new and exciting art. He was an international whose patrons weren’t French but American, Russian until the Bolshevik Revolution, and German until the days of the Nazis. At the Louvre and among most French collectors, critics, and art historians, he was reviled until the 1950s for his iconoclasm and his assaults on bourgeois aesthetics.

More than any ol’ foreigner, he was a stranger and a renegade. Picasso was under active French-police surveillance from 1901, when he was barely 20, until deep into the Cold War. His FBI file is 187 pages long and presents him as “a threat to the security of the United States.” Over time, as an artist and cultural celebrity, he dodged and weaved to avoid collision with powers that be, his creativity galvanized by an inner, tumultuous otherness.

Picasso’s first brush with the law was a case of guilt by association. Some of his early friends in Paris were young Catalan anarchists back home and, busybody police believed, importers specializing in trouble. In his early years in Paris, Picasso was poor. He lived in a slum among not only gypsies, tramps, and thieves, to borrow from Cher’s 1971 ditty, whom he painted as subjects, but also among informants and secret agents peddling tips and denunciations to the police.

After just a few years in Paris, Picasso was famous as a radical artist, and radical artists are suspicious characters. By the time he was 30, his art was the subject of exhibitions all over Europe but especially in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russia. His dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, was German and Jewish. Among his close Parisian friends were Leo Stein and his sister, Gertrude, both rich, Jewish, and American. During the First World War, Spain was neutral. Picasso, young and robust, stayed in Paris and worked as an artist. By 1915, a man in civilian clothes would have been pelted with garbage. Over and over, Paris police saw an insurrectionist.

Galleries often sell things on view in their shows, but that is not the reason that I rarely review gallery exhibitions. Dealers are essential in fashioning taste. Many are supreme connoisseurs, and some are scholars. Most gallery shows are small and focus on a single artist, so it’s hard to write a column on them. Most, by design, have no scholarly theme. Gagosian is another story. It’s the biggest art gallery in the world with shops in more than a dozen cities. It has the bucks to do serious, educational exhibitions. A bit like the Met, it has a vast array of contacts.

Nothing, by the way, was for sale in A Foreigner Called Picasso. It’s an exhibition that a museum would do and is based on Annie Cohen-Solal’s fascinating 2021 book, Picasso the Foreigner, for which she examined Picasso’s police files. It’s art history as well as sociology. She uses Picasso as a case study for the extraordinary and strident xenophobia in France from the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s to the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945.

Efficiently and effectively, the first gallery in A Foreigner Called Picasso teaches us about Picasso the art genius and revolutionary. I’d never seen Musical Instruments on a Table, a 50-by-34-inch picture made from oil paint and sand and once owned by Yves Saint Laurent. It’s from 1914 and one of the stars in the second gallery of the show. Sand? Picasso was a pioneer in subject matter, painting society’s dregs in a new way, and in style when he and Georges Braque fractured figures into pieces and then reassembled them as pieces of an abstract puzzle. His next move was collage, merging traditional oil paint with elements such as newspaper, chair caning, strips of fabric, and sand.

Musical Instruments on a Table is in the same gallery with a grisaille painting of a woman with her arms raised from 1922, a Minotaur tapestry from 1935, and etchings from The Dream and Lie of Franco series from 1937. The First World War didn’t put Picasso in the trenches, but it shattered his world. Kahnweiler fled. His Picasso inventory was confiscated by the police. Picasso’s Central European and Russian market evaporated. Among French avant-garde collectors, buying was on hold. France’s version of the FBI, meanwhile, felt that Picasso had all the raw material of a spy.

A Foreigner Called Picasso is strong on so many fronts, one of which is its deployment of little-known but superb art to project the issues, moods, and styles of the artist’s biggest hits. The Dream and Lie of Franco represents Picasso’s Guernica very nicely. Guernica itself, at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, would have overwhelmed everything, wouldn’t have fit, and wasn’t available. Neither was Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, a destination picture at Manhattan’s MoMA. The work on view is far from a substitute or a placeholder. It’s a thrill to see so many things from private collections, things of the highest quality, that we won’t see anytime soon.

Picasso’s serene, sculptural figures from the 1920s, with the look of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, are still said to be opportunistic. After the war, tastes turned conservative and toward the art of order, and Picasso responded. If anything, A Foreigner Called Picasso reminds us that Picasso, curious and imaginative beyond all artists, moved fast and freely, with buyers following him and not the other way around. His work in the Teens and ’20s for theater companies such as the Ballets Russes was, at first, partly from his needing money but mostly from his lust for new adventure and new media — not only stage sets, which he designed and made, but the merger of his art with music and dance.

In 1930, the New York Times called Picasso “the idol of collectors of modern art.” Under Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art starting in 1929, his renown grew and grew, and even the Depression couldn’t stop collectors. Barr’s 1939 retrospective of Picasso’s art, with 400 objects, drew crowds and international publicity. In the late ’30s, with yet another war looming, France entered yet another time of extreme paranoia and anxiety. The mood in Paris turned crepuscular.