Art Review: Picasso Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby is the new, much contested exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I like the Brooklyn Museum. It’s had a crazy trajectory over its 125-year history. It has morphed from a staid high-establishment museum in a McKim, Mead & White pile to cutting-edge, bleeding-edge, and populist adventures, perennially broke, now woke, with a lovely collection, and what I think is a needed role in the reappraisal of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) 50 years after his death. Pablo-matic isn’t a bad — or awful or seditious or dumb — exhibition. It’s worth seeing.

“Pablo Picasso, like our audiences, can handle complexity,” said the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, as scalding reviews poured from that Parnassus where critics scribble. The museum’s digital communications director wrote, “Come at us, haters.” One of the curators said male critics felt threatened to the point of twisted knickers.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby is the new, much contested exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I like the Brooklyn Museum. It’s had a crazy trajectory over its 125-year history. It has morphed from a staid high-establishment museum in a McKim, Mead & White pile to cutting-edge, bleeding-edge, and populist adventures, perennially broke, now woke, with a lovely collection, and what I think is a needed role in the reappraisal of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) 50 years after his death. Pablo-matic isn’t a bad — or awful or seditious or dumb — exhibition. It’s worth seeing.

“Pablo Picasso, like our audiences, can handle complexity,” said the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, as scalding reviews poured from that Parnassus where critics scribble. The museum’s digital communications director wrote, “Come at us, haters.” One of the curators said male critics felt threatened to the point of twisted knickers.