EMOTIONAL

FORMALISM
WEEK 3
BHQFU

RANDOM SAMPLING
OF RECENT CRITICISM
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
SHOCK ARTIST
SIGMAR POLKE
WRITING ON THE WALL
CHRISTOPHER WOOL
IN THE HEAD
BALTHUS AND MAGRITTE
ANOTHER DIMENSION
PICASSO SCULPTURE

Shock Artist - The New Yorker

9/19/15 3:51 PM

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The Art World

APRIL 28, 2014 ISSUE

Shock Artist
A Sigmar Polke retrospective.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

libis: Sigmar Polke 1963- The Palm Painting

(1964). Polke could
2010, a wondrous
seem to hit a reset
retrospective of the late
button from phase to
German artists work at the phase.
Museum of Modern Art, is the most dramatic COURTESY ESTATE OF
SIGMAR POLKE / ARS, NY /
museum show of the century to date. It may VG BILD-KUNST, BONN,
GERMANY; PHOTO: ALISTAIR OVERBRUCK
also be the most important, if its lessons for
contemporary art, both aesthetic and ethical,
are properly absorbed. I fancy that young artists will feel put to a test. Even
longtime Polke fans may be amazed by the cumulative power of the two
hundred and sixty-five works on view, in painting, sculpture, graphic art,
photography, and film. The modes range from the cartoonishly figurative to
the augustly abstract, and the mediums from paint and pencil to toxic
chemicals and meteorite dust. There is no Polke style, but only a distinctive
force of talent and mind. With caustic humor and cultivated mystery, he could
seem to hit a reset button from phase to phase, and even from piece to piece,
and he regularly frustrated the efforts that curators, dealers, and critics made
on his behalf, in ways that blurred his public image and hobbled his sales. He
would still be at it, if he had lived to finish collaborating on Alibis with
Kathy Halbreich, MOMAs associate director. (Polke died, of cancer, in 2010,
at the age of sixty-nine.) Halbreich says that Polke rejected a chronological
arrangement of the work. Theres no telling what sort of unnerving layout he
would have demanded. Mercifully for viewers, Halbreich has imposed a
conventional order, except for an olio of big works, from different periods, in
the museums atrium. The effect is intensive and intense. We may now begin
to understand an artist who, like a fugitive throwing dust in the eyes of
pursuers, took pains not to be understood.

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Polke was of a generation of Germans who inherited a defiled national culture.

The alibis in the shows title start, in Halbreichs telling, with a postwar
German mantra: I didnt see anything. Polke came from the East, like
Gerhard Richter, his peer and, for several years in the nineteen-sixties, his
close friend. (Its a bit distorting, but irresistible, to deem Richter the cunning
Apollo, and Polke the rampaging Dionysus, of the periods renaissance in
German art.) Polke was born in 1941 in Oels, Silesia, the seventh of eight
children of a father who trained to be an architect. In 1945, the family fled to
Soviet-occupied Thuringia, during an expulsion of Germans from Silesia,
which became part of Poland. In 1953, abandoning nearly all their possessions,
they escaped to the West on a train, with young Polke ordered to feign sleep,
to deflect suspicion. They settled in Dsseldorf, where Polke apprenticed to a
stained-glass manufacturer and entered the Dsseldorf Art Academy in 1961.
Modern art was then enjoying a lofty prestige in West Germany, as a
counterweight to the scalding memories of the Reich and to the menacing
ideology of the East. Polke embraced the art but scorned the piety, resisting
even the utopianism of the academys charismatic guide and teacher, Joseph
Beuys. Polke quickly became a galvanic presence in a cohort that included
Richter, who, nine years older, and living on refugee assistance, had recently
escaped the East after having been schooled unhappily in Socialist Realism.
Young German artists were stirred by the emerging Pop art of Andy Warhol
and Roy Lichtenstein. Polke took to painting proletarian consumer goods
chocolate bars, soap, plastic bucketsand ordinary news and magazine
photographs, in a rugged variant of Lichtensteins Benday dots. The first was a
scrappy image of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1963, Polke, Richter, and two artist
friends, unable to interest galleries in their work, mounted a group show, in a
former butcher shop, of what they termed Junk Culture, Imperialist or
Capitalist Realism. The last two words resonate with an exquisite
ambivalence, skewering both parties to the Cold War: the commercial West
and the dogmatic East. Polke and Richter, like Warhol, conveyed underclass
perspectives on popular spectacles of commerce and glamouroutdoing each
other in terms of the lowest forms of banality, according to the German art
historian and critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who knew both men at the time,
and is interviewed in the shows catalogue. But they did so with lacerating
skepticism, which, in Polkes case, abided no distinction between the
vulgarities of mass culture and the pretenses of fine art. What Polke didnt
raise up he brought down, as in a work of 1968 that might qualify as the
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Demoiselles dAvignon of postmodernist sensibility: Moderne Kunst, a

painting of generic abstract shapes, lines, squiggles, and splashes, with a white
border like that surrounding a reproduction in a book. It is both savagely
sarcastic and seductively lovely. Time and again, Polke projects the unlikely
comic figure of a would-be destroyer of art who keeps being ambushed by
onsets of beauty and charm. He is angry, but his anger makes him cheerful.
His lunges become dances.
Polke was a big man with the twinkle of a gamin. I met him a few times and
found him dazzlingly intelligent, funny, and exhausting. As Buchloh says,
You could not have a conversation with Polke without his continuously
destabilizing your sense of self, without his suggesting that it rested on some
type of oblivion or disavowal. In 2008, I sat through much of an afternoon in
his chaotic warehouse studio and home in Cologne while, pulling books from
the shelves of his immense library, he discoursed on ancient philosophical and
technical sources for a suite of stained-glass windows, in the Protestant
cathedral of Zrich, which became his last major project. I felt awash in a sea
of exotic erudition and ungraspable logic, listening to Polke as, with
absorption and course-correcting irony, he listened to himself. My profit was
an inkling of how he made art, monitoring an internal crossfireor a chorus
of ideas.
There was a fearless, spooky otherness to his cast of mind, in key with an
attraction to mysticism. Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper-Right
Corner Black! is the title of a canvas in the show from 1969; the corner is
black. In the early seventies, he shared a farmhouse with many friends and
indulged heavily in hallucinogenic drugs, which caused a dip in his career, but,
in contrast to the more commonly dicey toll of such a regimen, plainly
nourished the brainstorms of his later work. These include: huge atmospheric
abstractions, incorporating details of the signature of Drer; pink
photographic prints, made by exposing film to uranium; majestic panels of
glass, smudged with soot; paintings that orchestrate antic images from
nineteenth-century engravings; and, in a slide show, the beautiful Zrich
windows, some of them made of slices of agate and other stones. The
Christological symbol of the scapegoat, seen both arriving in the frame and
leaving it, hints at a spiritual crisis without end.
Polke trashed the conventions of painting throughout his careeroverlaying
images on printed fabric in lieu of canvas, for instance, or using resins that
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rendered cloth semi-transparentand in the process revitalized a medium that

was discounted, in the sixties, by iconoclastic minimalism and Conceptual art.
His influence was slow to cross the Atlantic, though, owing partly to his
principled elusiveness, and largely to the insularity of the New York art world.
But by the early eighties young Americans were plundering his inventions to
feed the resurgence in painting that was known as Neo-Expressionism. The
belated discovery of Polkes work came as a shock. I remember my first look at
Paganini (1981-83), a riotous painting, more than sixteen feet long, in which
the musician, on his deathbed, and the Devil, playing a violin, are
accompanied by swirls of skulls and tiny swastikas. It struck me then as a oneupping of Neo-Expressionism. Here it is again, at MOMA, in a room that
Halbreich has brilliantly crowded with tours de force from the artists middle
period. Now I see it as an acrid burlesque of the movement, purging Polke of
paternal responsibility for it and, by sheer excess, mocking his own virtuosity.
Nearly everything he did reacted, somehow, against something. Celebrity was
only one of the threats to the probity of his independence which required an
emergency response. He was, and he remains, heroic.

magazines art critic.

Peter Schjeldahl
has been a staff
writer at The
New Yorker since
1998 and is the

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Writing on the Wall - The New Yorker

9/19/15 3:59 PM

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The Art World

NOVEMBER 4, 2013 ISSUE

Writing on the Wall

A Christopher Wool retrospective.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

ike it or not, Christopher Wool, now Untitled (1990-91).

Word painting has a
fifty-eight, is probably the most
history; Wool made it
important American painter of his
new.
generation. You might fondly wish, ART COURTESY
as I do, for a champion whose art is richer in CHRISTOPHER WOOL
beauty and in charm: Wools work consists
primarily of dour, black-and-white pictures of
stencilled words, in enamel, usually on aluminum panels; decorative patterns
made with incised rollers; and abstract, variously piquant messes, involving
spray paint and silk screens. Lets get over it. A dramatic retrospective at the
Guggenheim Museum confirms, besides the downbeat air, the force and the
intelligence of a career that, according to legend, caught fire in 1987, after
Wool saw the words sex and luv spray-painted in black on a white delivery
truck. His stencilled repetition of those words, on paper, is among the earliest
works in the new show. A cutely vandalized truck would seem a pretty humble
epiphany, as epiphanies go, but it inspired a way of painting that quietly
gained authority, while more ingratiating styles rose and fell in art-world
esteem. If you are put off by the harshness of Wools rigor, as I was, it means
that you arent ready to confess that our time admits, and merits, nothing
cozier in an art besieged by the aesthetic advances, as well as the technical
advances, of photographic and digital mediums. Once you stop resisting the
gloomy mien of Wools work, it feels authentic, bracing, and even, on
occasion, blissful.
Wool was born in Boston, to a molecular-biologist father and a psychiatrist
mother, and grew up in Chicago, enthralled by art. In 1972, he entered Sarah
Lawrence College, where he won permission to take two exacting studio
courses, in painting and photography, promising that he would buckle down
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to required courses the next year. Instead, he dropped out, moved to

Manhattan, and enrolled in the New York Studio School, the diehard
academy of Abstract Expressionist technique and style. That training served
him well. In a fine catalogue essay, Katherine Brinson, the curator of the
Guggenheim show, notes a standard emphasis of Studio School instruction:
the rendering of forms in charcoal by partial erasure. (Wools later paintings do
wonders with passages that are thinned, rubbed, overpainted, or wiped away.)
Meanwhile, he plunged into the emerging East Village scene of punk rock,
underground film, gallery graffiti, performance art, and up-all-night
dissipation, as immortalized in the photographs of Nan Goldin. His friends
and sometime collaborators included the painter James Nares, the writer
Glenn OBrien, and the poet-rocker Richard Hell. Wool briefly studied
filmmaking at New York University, but by 1981 he had settled into painting,
at first producing gawky abstract shapes that were influenced by the sculptor
Joel Shapiro, who employed him as an assistant.
The efflorescence in downtown art was racked with schisms. Hot neoexpressionist painters like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat went one
way, feeding a vogue that became a market frenzy; and cool Pictures
conceptualists, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, went another.
Money that instantly favored the former eventually got around to the latter. It
cant have been clear at the time that Wools middle way, of earnest painterly
invention, which was anything but seductive, would triumph. Several other
gifted paintersamong them Peter Halley, David Reed, and Jonathan Lasker
gained success with conceptually alert abstract styles. Those artists now
seem a bit dated. Wool doesnt. His works ace the crude test that passes for
critical judgment in the art market: they look impeccable on walls today and
are almost certain to look impeccable on walls tomorrow. Lately fetching
millions at auction, Wools art leaves critics to sift through the hows and the
whys of a singular convergence of price and value. Would that the expensive
were always so good.
Renunciation benefitted Wool. He did not use color, or expressive gesture;
their meanings could not be controlled. Nor did he indulge, as his friends
Robert Gober, Richard Prince, and Jeff Koons did, in the easy ironies of
adopting themes and images from mass culture. (Koons wrote the press release
for Wools solo show, in 1986, at the short-lived Cable Gallery; he keenly
observed that Wools work contains continual internal/external debate within
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itself.) Wool liked the clat of Pop-influenced art, but not its borrowed
subject matter. Around the time of his delivery-truck eureka, he hit on a witty
means of grounding high art in the everyday: the incised paint rollers once
commonly used by slumlords to give tenement halls and stairwells the
appearance of having been wallpapered. The tall paintings that resultedfloral
or grille-like patterns, with skips and smears suggesting hastehave just about
everything you could want of an all-over abstraction, plus the humor of their
absurd efficiency. Can painting be so simple? It can for an artist who has
despaired of every alternative. The expedient of the rollers, like that of the
words that Wool proceeded to paint, suggests the ledges to which a rock
climber clings by his fingernails.
Word painting has a history, from the snatches of newspaper text favored by
the Cubists to Ed Ruschas portraits of words that pique the minds incapacity
to look and read in the same instant. Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer have
worked primarily with language; Lawrence Weiner does so exclusively. But
Wool made it new. He merged the anonymous aggression of graffiti with the
stateliness of formal abstract painting. Selecting words and phrases that
appealed to him, he leached them of personality, by using stencils, and of
quick readability, by eliminating standard spacing, punctuation, and, in one
case, vowels (TRBL). The effort required to make out the messages may be
rewarded, or punished, with a sting of nihilism: CATS IN BAGS BAGS IN
RIVER or SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.
(The latter is from a deranged officers letter home in Apocalypse Now.)
Once read, the words dont stay read. When you leave off making sense of
three stacked blocks, HYP/OCR/ITE or ANA/RCH/IST, they snap back
into being nonsensical graphic design. Were not talking about a major
difficulty here, but just enough to induce a hiccup in comprehension, letting
the physical facts of the painting preside. The effect calls to mind Jasper
Johnss early Flag paintings, with their double-bind readings of paint-as-image
(its a flag) and image-as-paint (its a red-white-and-blue painting).
Traces of past American mastersRauschenbergs sprawling montage,
Twomblys sensitive scribble, Warhols off-register printing, Gustons clunky
animation, and even some dynamics recalling the god of the Studio School, de
Kooningabound as the show unreels up the Guggenheims ramp. Wool
increasingly mixes and matches mechanical and freehand methods in layered
compositions. Thus, rolled patterns interact with splotches, transferred by silk
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screen from earlier paintings, and with interweaving skeins of spray paint.
Wool no longer eschews gesture; sprayed lines curl and buckle in taut relation
to the scale of the pictures. (Thats de Kooningesque.) Colorsyellow,
brownish maroonhave begun to make eloquently sputtering appearances.
With no hint of pastiche, and still less of nostalgia, he is reinventing certain
charismatic tropes of mid-century New York paintingor recovering them, as
if they had been wandering around loose all this time.
I question the choice to mount many of the big paintings on cantilevered
struts, so that they appear to float, in some of the museums curved, toplighted bays. Its like a magic trick that delights once. Deprived of flat walls,
the pictures look lost. In a more apt tour de force, hundreds of black-andwhite photographs are arrayed at intervals. Wool took them on nocturnal
rambles between his studio, in the East Village, and his loft, in Chinatown.
They are dismal with a vengeance, an encyclopedia of wrack, ruin, and squalor,
wanly bleached by flash illumination. To make the world appear uniformly
horrible requires rare discipline. Wools grim shutterbugging suggests a
peculiar creative psychology. When he feels bad, it would seem, he perks up.
And when he feels worse hes golden.

magazines art critic.

Peter Schjeldahl
has been a staff
writer at The
New Yorker since
1998 and is the

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In the Head - The New Yorker

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The Art World

OCTOBER 7, 2013 ISSUE

In the Head
Balthus and Magritte reconsidered.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

Thrse Dreaming
he superb Polish-French painter
Balthusan anti-modernist beloved (1938). Balthus
claimed a quality of
of modernists, including Picasso
sacredness for his
charms the eye and rattles thought. angels.
For more than six decades, until his death, in COURTESY
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthus
OF ART
depicted young girls in gamy poses,
attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds. His other
perennial subject was the cat, his totem animal. A fat feline nuzzles his leg in a
self-portrait made when he was twenty-seven; the artist cuts an imperiously
Romantic figure and dubs himself, in an inscription in English, The King of
Cats. It is the first painting in Cats and Girls, a focussed retrospective,
finely curated by Sabine Rewald, at the Metropolitan Museum. Then come
girls, by the dozen, often with cats in attendance. Was Balthus a pedophile?
His interest, if not lust, didnt stir before his subjects pubescence, but it waned
in their late teens. The show occurs at a cultural moment that is stretched
between sexualizing the young and reacting with horror and anger to the lately
abundant cases of their sexual exploitation. If you can shrug off that tension at
the Met, I salute your detachment. I sure cant. Balthus puts me in two minds,
attracted and repelled, in search of a third. He strains the moral impunity of
high art to an elemental limit, assuring himself an august, unquiet immortality.
He was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 in Paris. He added de Rola to his
name, fancifully claiming noble birth; he was given to pretension all his life.
He had a remarkably enriched childhood: his father, an art historian, and his
mother, a painter who went by the name Baladine, hobnobbed with the
literary and artistic lites. In his teens, he was mentored by the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke, a family friend and a lover of Baladines, while his older brother,
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Pierre, became Andr Gides secretary. (Pierre went on to be a cult hero of

French intellectuals as a devoutly obscene philosopher, novelist, graphic artist,
and exegete of the Marquis de Sade.) When Balthasar was eleven, his adored
pet cat, Mitsou, ran away. He made forty ink drawings detailing his memories
of the animal and his fruitless search for her. In the last, he stands alone,
crying. Displayed at the Met, for the first time anywhere, the suite is
fantastically talentedthe most precocious art I believe Ive ever seen, with
boldly rhythmic compositions like those in German Expressionist woodcuts
and uncanny affinities to Matisse. Rilke arranged for the publication, in 1921,
of a handsome book of the Mitsou images, for which he wrote the preface.
The artist was identified by his nickname, Baltusz. Imagine being thirteen
years old and bathed in such glory. A year later, Balthus wrote in a letter, God
knows how happy I would be if I could remain a child forever.
Balthus was a largely self-taught artist, who learned what he needed from
copying paintings and frescoes in Italy, especially those of Piero della
Francesca. Besides the loftily serene Piero, his other major influence was the
guttural messiah of realism, Gustave Courbet. That improbable pairing
registers throughout Balthuss work as classical elevation infused with sensual
vigor. The style doesnt feel conservative; it feels outside historical time. Youre
always off balance with it, sometimes as if you were being subjected at once to
a high-church orison and a dirty joke. Balthus learned to soft-pedal the latter
quality after his first gallery show, in Paris, in 1934. Craving attention, he got
all too much of it with The Guitar Lessona painting not in the Met show
in which a bare-breasted woman holds a schoolgirl, naked from the waist
down, across her lap and strums the girls genitals. (In one study, the guitarist
is male.) Strangely, Balthus was unprepared for the outraged critical response.
Meanwhile, Antoinette de Watteville, a girl from a socially prominent Swiss
family whom he had desperately wooed for four years, told him that she was
engaged to a diplomat and to stop writing her. He attempted suicide with
laudanum; his friend Antonin Artaud found him in time. He resumed
painting only gradually, with commissioned portraits that bored him.
Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thrse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughter
of a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings of
her, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhood
dreaming, restless, sulkyas only adolescent girls may authoritatively
understand. (Ive checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a
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short-skirted Thrse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We neednt

reflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than we
must wonder about the empathic author of Alices Adventures in
Wonderland. But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for his
angels, as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at the
paintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: A bad man is the sort of
man who admires innocence. Its an odd relief of uncertainty, if nothing else,
to learn that Balthuss later relationship with his teen-age model Laurence
Bataille, a daughter of the writer Georges, was frankly carnal. The painting
The Week of Four Thursdays (1949), in which a loosely robed Laurence
reclines in abandon and plays with a smiling cat, commemorates days when
school was out and she came to pose. She grew up to become a psychoanalyst,
like her stepfather, Jacques Lacan.
In 1937, Antoinette de Watteville, having shed her diplomat, gave in and
married Balthus. They had two sons. In the one painting of her in the Met
show, Girl in Green and Red (1944), she looks half her age of thirty-two.
Wearing a vaguely harlequin costume, she sits at a table, grasping a candlestick
next to a loaf of bread with a knife thrust deep into it. The picture marks one
of Balthuss closest approaches to Surrealism, a movement whose leaders
admired and courted him. He rebuffed them, but the equivocal sexuality of his
art anchors it in a time, defined by Surrealism, of avant-garde evangelism for
an anti-bourgeois, liberated libido. His reticence, in a classicizing style
tremulous with carefully observed light, preserves his power to provoke, while
the would-be-shocking sallies of, say, Max Ernst have become period curios.
Eroticism fades in Balthuss later work, with simplified figures and rather dull,
tortuously worked surfaces of matte pigment, archly evoking Renaissance
frescoes. His pretentiousness survived his passion.

en Magrittewhose most creative years, 1926 to 1938, are

surveyed in a wonderfully entertaining show, entitled The Mystery
of the Ordinary, at the Museum of Modern Artis the most
popular Surrealist among people who dont opt for Salvador Dali.
What Dali is to outrageous fantasy, Magritte is to conceptual conundrums of
appearance and reality. The Treachery of Images (1929), the painting of a
pipe with the inscription This is not a pipe, has served generations of
budding aesthetes as a training-wheels introduction to philosophical wit in
modern art. Its a brittle sort of classic. Once you get the point that words and
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pictures are separate languages, and that both relate only notionally to things,
youre pretty much reduced to whatever joy there is in feeling superior to
people who dont get it. But, in the MOMA show, curated by Anne Umland,
that picture proves to be a minor skirmish in an amazingly varied and
sustained assault on the complacencies of common sense.
Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898, to a textile-merchant father
and a milliner mother, who committed suicide when he was thirteen. Having
drawn since childhood, and after training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts,
in Brussels, he worked through Futurist and Cubist styles while supporting
himself with jobs in illustration and advertising. Then, inspired by the rise of
French Surrealism, he made a leap to such inventions as The Lost Jockey
(1926), a collage that depicts a rider racing through a forest of trees,
resembling chess pieces or table legs, that are cut from sheet music. With the
large painting The Menaced Assassin (1927)an elegant young gent turns
from a murdered woman to listen to a gramophone, unaware of bowler-hatted
men who lurk with a club and a nethe staked his claim as a pioneer in the
new world of forthrightly irrational, waking dreams. His chosen mode was
traditional-looking painting, which makes seamless wholes of contradictory
figures, objects, and, often, words.
Magritte moved to Paris in 1927, with his wife, Georgette Berger, for three
years of prodigious output and social frustration. He remained an outsider to
the inner circle of Surrealism, at first welcomed but then alienated by the
movements tyrant, Andr Breton. The break was said to have come during a
meeting, when the militantly atheistic Breton demanded that Georgette
remove a family-heirloom crucifix that she was wearing, and the offended
Magrittes stormed out. They soon returned to Belgium, but the artists sober
picturing of outlandish subjectsa kissing couple whose heads are wrapped in
cloth, a locomotive projecting from a fireplace, a birdcage containing an egg
became central to Surrealist research, as Breton termed the movements
systematic exposures of the supposed unconscious mind. Archival publications
and photographs, in the show, stir vicarious nostalgia for a time when the
crazily unpredictable was a workaday pursuit. Magritte appears always taciturn,
like a bureaucrat out of Kafka.
Sex figures frequently in the MOMA show, as with The Rape (1934), a
painting of a face in which breasts, a navel, and a pudendum stand in for the
eyes, the nose, and the mouth. But its sex in the head. Magritte stayed
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married to Georgette for forty-five years, until his death, in 1967. He enjoyed
striking the figure of a bourgeois gentleman, though one who, during lean
years after the Second World War, engaged in art forgery and currency
counterfeiting. As with the joke of the not-pipe, the sneaking humor of
Magrittes persona so saturates the imaginings of subsequent artistsPop art
wouldnt be the same without him, and Conceptualism would be an orphan
that he can seem old-shoe ordinary. The surging energy of this show dispels
that impression.

magazines art critic.

Peter Schjeldahl
has been a staff
writer at The
New Yorker since
1998 and is the

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The Art World

SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ISSUE

Another Dimension
Reconsidering Picasso the sculptor.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

icasso Sculpture, a show at Pablo Picasso, c. 1932.

BY MAN
the Museum of Modern Art PHOTOGRAPH
RAY / CORBIS
of nearly a hundred and fifty
works by the definitive artist
of the twentieth century, always figured to
impress. It turns out to astound. I came away
from the exhibits, which date from 1902 to 1964, convinced that Picasso was
more naturally a sculptor than a painter, though all his training and early
experience, and by far most of his prodigious energy, went into painting. He
made mere hundreds of three-dimensional works, in episodic bunches, amid a
ceaseless torrent of about four and a half thousand paintings. When moved to
mold, carve, or assemble, he sometimes borrowed artist friends studios and
tools and enlisted their collaborationmost notably, starting in 1928, with
Julio Gonzlez, who worked in iron. Picasso could be feckless about the
standards of the craft. (The director of the ceramics workshop in Vallauris,
where, in the late forties, Picasso took up the medium of fired clay, noted that
any apprentice who went about things as the artist did would never be hired.)
But, because Picasso was an amateurnearly a hobbyistin sculpture, it
revealed the core predilections of his genius starkly, without the dizzying
subtleties of his painting but true to its essence. At this magnificent show,
curated by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, I began to imagine the artists
pictures as steamrolled sculpture. Most of his paintings conjure space that is
cunningly fitted to the images that inhabit it. When the space becomes real,
the dynamic jolts.
The shows first gallery features the best known and, instructively, the least
successful of Picassos early forays into the medium: Head of a Woman
(1909), a bronze, cast from clay, which is complexly rumpled, in the manner of
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incipient Cubism. The work fails because the energetic surface articulation
bears no organic relation to the heads sullen mass; it amounts to a wraparound
relief. The piece is a painters folly, which Picasso did not repeat (except with
the similarly hapless plaster Apple, of the same year), even as its style vastly
influenced such subsequent sculptors as the futurist Umberto Boccioni. (No
innovation of Picassos was too tangential to spawn a modern-art clich.)
Picasso put sculpture aside for a few years, then returned to it as an extension
of his breakthroughs, with Georges Braque, in the revolutionary aesthetics of
collage. Two versions of the large, wall-hung Guitar (1912-14)the first in
cardboard, paper, and string; the second in sheet metal and wiredid for
sculpture something of what Picasso had already done for painting: they
turned it inside out. The term negative space, for the air that he let into the
anatomized musical instrument, doesnt suffice to describe the effect. The
voids register as active forms, which the shapes passively accommodate. No
longer set apart from the world, forward-looking art after Guitar adds the
world to its inventory.

VIEW FULL SCREEN

Head of a Woman (1909).

COURTESY ALFRED STIEGLITZ COLLECTION / ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO / 2014 ESTATE OF PABLO
PICASSO / ARS, NY.

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Then came the most talismanic of modern bibelots: Glass of Absinthe

(1914), a small bronze of a cubistically fissured, ridged, and whorled vessel
with, atop it, a filigreed metal spoon bearing a bronze sugar cube. Picasso
created it the same year that the liquor was banned in France, in the mistaken
belief that it made people crazy. (It was really just fancied by people who were
prone to craziness.) All six casts of the work, from as many collections, are
convened here for the first time since their creation. Each incorporates a
differently designed spoon and is differently slathered or dappled with paint.
The brushwork, especially in sprightly dot patterns, blurs the objects contours,
rendering them approximate in ways that wittily invoke intoxication. But these
are true sculptures, as judged by the essential test that they function in the
round. Circle them. Each shift in viewpoint discovers a distinct formal
configuration and image. Picasso here steps into the history of the art that, in
order to move a viewer, requires a viewer to move. The best of his other
Cubism-related works, such as Still Life (1914), which fringes a tipped shelf
with upholstery tassels, run to assembled and painted reliefs, like pop-up
pictures. Their dance of everyday stuff with august formreality marrying
representationhas never ceased to inspire generations of visual hybridists,
from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg and Rachel Harrison, and it
never will. But these works mainly harvested ideas from Picassos painting. His
attention to sculpture lapsed again, until 1927.
Picassos creations in plaster, wood, and metal between that banner year and
the mid-thirties belong in the first rank of sculpture since ancient times. Most
are massy: female forms that can seem swollen to the point of bursting, or
tumescent and writhing with sexual abandon. A glory of the show is the
number of works rendered in fragile plaster, straight from the artists hand; he
rarely paid much attention to the surface quality of the final bronzes, which
tend to be dull. His initial masterworks of the period, made with Gonzlez,
are open networks of thin iron rods, vaguely suggesting jungle gyms, which
gave rise to the somewhat misleading catchphrase drawing in space, coined
by Picassos dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. More truly, the rectangular
arrays encage space. They yield an imagecoalescing into a kind of drawing,
of a geometrically abstracted figurewhen viewed from either end. Thats
delightful. But the wonder of the works is their appearance from other angles:
the image pulled apart, accordion fashion, to drink in the ambient air. Again,
emptiness becomes substance.

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Notice, incidentally, how the rods meet the bases. As always, when a Picasso
sculpture rests on more than one point each footing conveys a specific weight
and tension, like the precisely gauged step of a ballerina. It presses down or
strains upward in a way that gives otherwise inexplicable animation to the
forms above. Few other sculptors play so acutely with gravity. David Smith is
one. Another is Alberto Giacometti, whom Picasso befriended, admired, and
mightily affected. Works in this show directly anticipate Giacomettis skinny
figures and even, by a few months, his classic, harrowing Woman with Her
Throat Cut (1932).
Of the scores of pieces that merit lengthy discussion, Ill cite one: Woman
with Vase (1933), a bronze of a plaster sculpture that, cast in cement,
accompanied Guernica at the Spanish Pavilion of the Worlds Fair in Paris,
in 1937. She stands more than seven feet tall, with a bulbous head, breasts,
and belly, on spindly legs. Her left arm is missing, as if ripped off. Her right
arm extends far forward, clutching a tall vase. Seen from the side, the gesture
suggests a tender offering. Viewed head on, it delivers a startling, knockout
punch. What isnt this work about? It conjoins Iberian antiquity and Parisian
modernity, love and loss, hope and anger, celebration and mourning. Another
bronze cast of it stands at Picassos tomb, in the Chteau de Vauvenargues, as
a memorial and, perhaps, as a master key to the secrets of his art. Certainly, it
overshadows the somewhat indulgentand, now and then, plain silly
sculptural creations of his later years, such as the gewgaw-elaborated bronze
Little Girl Jumping Rope (1950). Exceptions from that time include a
stunning selection of his riffs on ceramic vessels, lively bent-metal maquettes
for public art, and a group of six Bathers from 1956: flat figures, one almost
nine feet tall, made of scrap wood and standing in a shared, beachlike bed of
pebbles. Its clat might well sink the hearts of contemporary installation
artists.
The herky-jerky intermittence of Picassos involvement with sculpture might
seem an obstacle to a reconsideration of his achievement, but it proves to be a
boon. Each generation looks at Picasso in its own way. This show gives us a
Picasso for an age of cascading uncertainties. The story it tells is messier than
the period-by-period, not to mention mistress-by-mistress, narratives of the
past. Instead, each piece finds the artist in a moment of decision, adventuring
beyond his absolute command of pictorial aesthetics into physical and social
space, where everything is in flux and in question. We are in Picassos studio,
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looking over his shoulder, and wondering, along with him, What about
this?

magazines art critic.

Peter Schjeldahl
has been a staff
writer at The
New Yorker since
1998 and is the

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/another-dimension

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