Proliferate, Poetic, Picasso

Entry to the SAM exhibit

The Musee National Picasso in Paris

Picasso's "Jester" Bronze

You guessed it, this is a cubist "Guitare"

Man Playing Guitare

Picasso Exhibit, Seattle Art Museum, October 8 – January 17

Amsterdam, May 1988. A friend says, “If you’re taking the train to Paris tomorrow, you MUST see the Picasso Retrospective at the Center Pompidou before it closes tomorrow night.” So I did. A genius curator had arranged the massive proliferation of Picasso drawings, etchings, paintings, sculpture, and ceramics in chronological order, through a vast maze of halls and galleries. You could actually step through the years of Picasso’s development as an artist. It wasn’t until that day in Paris that I fully registered his true genius and his impact on Art. (The Seattle Art Museum show is a smaller but no less interesting version of that.)

So, the day after that, I had to visit the Musee National Picasso which is a museum in a grand old mansion in the heart of Paris dedicated entirely to works by Picasso. The mansion is surrounded by a grove of old trees, and it’s not until you enter the driveway that it opens onto a large gravel parking de la region where they used to bring up the horse-drawn carriages. Many of the thousands of works in the museum were bequeathed by the artist from his own personal collection. It is from these works that the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibit is drawn. The SAM exhibit also includes some wonderfully obscure found-object sculpture, and a nice sampling from the other various mediums. And, we're spared the endless shelves of ceramics endured at the Musee National.

Did you know Picasso created on average three works of art per day? And that he lived to be 92? You do the math! Whether it was a drawing, a vase, sculpture, or painting, the guy was busy! And it’s not widely recognized what a superb draftsman he was. Many skeptics believed he defaulted to "primitive" cubism because he couldn't really draw. But, his early studies of nudes and hands easily rival those of the best renaissance artists. He was also a great mimic: you can see nods to the impressionists Cezanne, Degas, and Manet, as well as sculptural references to DuChamps, and African primitive art, and psychedelic morphings a la Dali.

Of course, the innovation that indelibly stamped Picasso on the art map was his kaleidoscopic cubism; he was a litmus of his times--the machine age--and he was the first to capture instantaneous views of the same object on one canvas, forcing us to see in a new way.

Some of his later works are very political, or even strongly psychedelic. A bit like an IQ test, it’s fun to stare at some of the paintings and wonder, Hmm, how did he get a guitar out of that?

Photos, except Musee National Picasso, courtesy of John Best.