Satyr’s Progress

When Time magazine’s cover story on Pablo Picasso dubbed him “MOMA’s Boy,” it hit on the mot juste. In a real sense the Museum of Modern Art under its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., did as much as anyone, if not more, to focus critical attention on Picasso’s role as the principal creator of the twentieth century aesthetic revolution. It was Barr who acquired for the museum its most significant Picassos: among them Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—the picture that signaled his crucial break with conventional realism and forecast the emergence of abstract art—and, for a temporary stay that lasted forty years, Guernica, the mural memorializing the victims of the Spanish Civil War, now about to find a

permanent home in the Prado. Barr’s book, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, published in 1946, remains definitive; it helped make the Modern into a Picasso headquarters decades before the artist was officially recognized in either his native Spain or his adoptive France. It is thus altogether fitting that MOMA should celebrate its fiftieth anniversary with the most comprehensive Picasso exhibition ever assembled, surpassing even last year’s Paris display by including thirty hitherto unknown works, as well as objects belonging to Barcelona’s Museo Picasso loaned for the first time. This is an extraordinary event, one that merits all the hullabaloo the museum is making about it.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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When Time magazine’s cover story on Pablo Picasso dubbed him “MOMA’s Boy,” it hit on the mot juste. In a real sense the Museum of Modern Art under its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., did as much as anyone, if not more, to focus critical attention on Picasso’s role as the principal creator of the twentieth century aesthetic revolution. It was Barr who acquired for the museum its most significant Picassos: among them Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—the picture that signaled his crucial break with conventional realism and forecast the emergence of abstract art—and, for a temporary stay that lasted forty years, Guernica, the mural memorializing the victims of the Spanish Civil War, now about to find a

permanent home in the Prado. Barr’s book, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, published in 1946, remains definitive; it helped make the Modern into a Picasso headquarters decades before the artist was officially recognized in either his native Spain or his adoptive France. It is thus altogether fitting that MOMA should celebrate its fiftieth anniversary with the most comprehensive Picasso exhibition ever assembled, surpassing even last year’s Paris display by including thirty hitherto unknown works, as well as objects belonging to Barcelona’s Museo Picasso loaned for the first time. This is an extraordinary event, one that merits all the hullabaloo the museum is making about it.