The Dying White Male

Picasso's Mosqueteros

If timing is everything, MOMA's epic Picasso retrospective had it all. Almost thirty years later, he again has perfect timing.

"Picasso's Mosqueteros" selects from only his last decade. It shows an artist confronting death and still eager to paint. In a way, it also reconsiders his whole career. Once Picasso stood for the genesis of Cubism and modern art, followed by fifty years of slack. He also stood for the arrogant male artist looking down on his wives and mistresses. Now the dead white male has become the dying white male—and a poignant one at that.

Has the pendulum swung the other way? Jerry Saltz, for one, has a problem with that. He loved the show, but the critic also notes how little women have entered the Museum of Modern Art. Maybe anyone riding the pendulum should take heart: his readers shared his anger, and even MOMA has changed since 1970. Feminist criticism is alive and well, and it had better be.

A bad boy's old age

That epic retrospective came in 1980, just shy of one hundred years after the artist's birth. It also came just as Modernism's unanimity was shattering into today's cacophony. It returned to Modernism's icon, a great white male, and he had never looked better. It was not, however, a typical modernist history. It did not show Cubism as a single, isolated great experiment. It did not show only egotism and conservatism before and since.

Each room came as a fresh start, as Pablo Picasso teased out what he had done and what to do next. I was pretty new to art then. I knew the hard-line account, as in John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso. I had spent free Mondays with the Modern's permanent collection. But I had seen nothing like this. It managed to be both exhausting and invigorating.

"Picasso's Mosqueteros" is not likely to exhaust anyone, although the lines outside might. It is, though, invigorating. The large show covers just the artist's final decade. Even staunch supporters have largely given up on him by then, and a 1984 show at the Guggenheim did not make many converts. Always prolific, Picasso churned things out, perhaps with an eye to the value of his estate. Yet for all the truly awful work of his on the market, this time his very glibness feels gutsy—and even a little too relevant to the present.

The curator, John Richardson, presents the final decade as not a fresh start but a self-conscious ending. He sees the artist, who died in 1973, taking on the roles of a younger man from his art and others. One last time, he plays the lecher. One last time, he poses as a musketeer out of Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, or Edouard Manet—who was already playing against the Old Masters. In the process, the old tricks of Cubist portraiture become an act of defiance, against the art-historical competition and against death. They also represent an old man's fragility.

He can seem jaunty, scarred, or confused. With those eyes simultaneously facing and in profile, he can seem all of them at once. As a jester out of Velázquez, he looks little more than a clown. As a seated musketeer, his sword on his lap sprouting a flower, he looks like a peevish child. In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his many wives and mistresses, and his echoes of "the primitive," critics have slammed his ever-confident male gaze. Here he turns the same gaze on himself.

For all that, Picasso stays confident enough to dress for the occasion and to play. He allows self-exposure, but never lyricism or terror. He paints mostly in bright colors and thick, rounded forms. He plays down the anguished gestures from Guernica. He never reduces himself to an empty mask, as in Three Musicians. Rather, his eyes are everywhere, taking it all in.

Dressing for his own funeral

They also take in his last wife, Jacqueline Roque. And she, too, comes off as confident and exposed. She toys with a cat, while posing as an odalisque with naked crotch. In my favorite painting, Picasso brightens and effaces her with a smear of color. Modernism was never all that unanimous anyway. His manipulations alone would have seen to that.

Modernism had more than enough movements at war with one another. By contrast, Chelsea's paradigm of installation art gets stifling. MOMA's first Picasso retrospective already covered "Fifty Years of His Art," although it necessarily had to stop in 1946, at the height of his influence on a new American art. Richardson's biography of Picasso thus far covers three volumes and takes him only to 1936. The 1980 retrospective made him the first and most persistent appropriation artist—not just of Cubist newsprint, but of his own life in art. His last decade tells much the same story.

This show will not settle the controversy. Cubism really did mean something special, and Picasso really does get glib. Some critics have found the exhibition fierce and jarring, as I do not. Even with careful selection, it repeats too often his virile role as a Greek seaman or satyr. Others find it stirring and insightful, but with maybe half a dozen great pictures. It says something that they cannot agree on which pictures.

Still, the show brings the aging artist alive. It brings him alive specifically as a painter, despite a separate display of drawings. If one thinks of Picasso and Matisse as line and color, here he works very much in color. Even in black, he insists on its texture as paint. At its brightest, it gets cakiest. In a wall of mostly pale blue, it thins almost like watercolor.

He comes alive, too, with his timing. He gets a "museum quality" gallery show, with lines, just as the economy has people wondering about the role of the market. He plays the bad boy, just when bad boys are everywhere. Martin Kippenberger at MOMA and Dana Schutz both rework Picasso self-portraits as emblems of an artist's exhaustion. Sure enough, he had done the same before them. All this helps explain the excitement this show created.

Yes, Richardson did his homework, and yes, too, a new generation is always ready for a new Picasso. Through his late work, a wider audience for art may discover his tricks for the first time—after they no longer fooled anybody. Mostly, though, the applause says something about art now. No longer driven by ideology, it accepts and rebels against almost anything. It depends on big shows about bad boys, and Picasso is still the biggest and baddest. Almost thirty years after his retrospective, he anticipates the best and worst of the present.

Four percent

He also cannot settle yet another myth that he contributed to Modernism: while males rule and misrule. On Facebook, Jerry Saltz has made waves with a simple statistic: of the 383 works on the fourth and fifth floors of MOMA's permanent collection, only 19 are by women. The representation grows a bit if one counts the relative numbers of artists—from four to six percent. If no one can challenge Picasso, can anyone still challenge Modernism? The Modern has a founding mission to present the modern and to keep it up to date, It is getting harder and harder to do both.

Saltz confirms his passionate art journalism, and yet my first impulse was to stifle a yawn (or to check statistics on his own columns). And that impulse was wrong. True, after some forty years of feminist criticism, this counts as old news. The Guerilla Girls made statistics like this famous. The very idea of Modernism, the basic subject of those two floors at MOMA, now comes in scare quotes. The sheer pile-up of Facebook comments in agreement could make anyone, like the wise old advice about America's involvement in Vietnam, declare victory and run.

The Modern offers plenty of evidence of change all by itself. Marina Abramovic, Janet Cardiff, Chéri Sambahave, Dana Schutz, Cindy Sherman, and Rachel Whiteread all left a profound mark on "Take Two," the museum's very first display of art after 1965 since its 2004 expansion—a show co-curated by a woman. (MOMA had snapped up Sherman's Untitled Film Stills well before "The Pictures Generation" became history.) A display of Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody in the museum atrium meant to shake up postwar art history, and it did. Just this half year, MOMA has exhibited Pipilotti Rist, Mira Schendel, and Klara Liden. P.S. 1 has been busy with Yael Bartana, Lutz Bacher, and an epic display of women's art, WACK!—not to mention signs of diversity in NeoHooDoo and Jonathan Horowitz, a gay artist.

A feminist should be wary of statistics anyway. Feminism has always had to juggle several critiques, without falling into contradictions. The canon has failed to recognize women, and women have not often had the chance to become artists, much less great ones. The very notion of broadening the canon can enshrine it—and so enshrine an ideal of fine art that excludes craft and design. Linda Nochlin meant all these when she asked Why Are There No Great Women Artists? To its credit, MOMA was pioneering in making design a part of Modernism's history, although a better museum design in 20004 would not already find itself so short of space.

Saltz refers specifically to art before 1970. One can argue that the older collection can and should expand only slowly, given MOMA's role in creating a modernist canon. One can argue that it will expand even more slowly now, given outlandish auction prices and recession economics. And yet the data persist. Saltz had no trouble listing interesting artists in the collection who do not make it onto the walls—including Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Dorothea Rockburne. It broke my heart that, for several years after the museum's vast expansion, it no longer had room for Janet Sobel.

What can one do? For starters, one can still keep all of feminism's balls in the air. (Right off, this proves that feminism has balls.) Feminism can also change how one appreciates male artists. Saltz rightly asks, too, that prominent bloggers (among which, I confess, I did not rate) get the numbers out. As someone who honestly hoped to make gender a priority of this Web site from its beginning in 1994, let me do so, too.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Work from Picasso's last decade ran at Gagosian through June 6, 2009, Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer through April 25. Jerry Saltz's hotly debated Facebook threads centered around the last weekend in May.