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A Summer Away from Cubism
John Haberin New York City
Pablo Picasso in Fontainebleau and Brooklyn
What do you do as a follow-up after inventing modern art? Do you take the summer off or reinvent yourself?
Pablo Picasso pulled off both. He and his young family rented a villa in Fontainebleau, a privileged Parisian's weekend or summer getaway. Kings had stayed at a palace still worth seeing and hunted in the forest nearby. This artist, though, never could stop working, and he turned out two of his most ambitious paintings, each in two remarkably different versions. Just to focus on them with a bit of context would be an excellent excuse for a show, and "Picasso in Fontainebleau" supplies it, at the Museum of Modern Art. It also offers the occasion to ask what had changed since Cubism and whether he was still breaking ground in 1921. Meanwhile the Met sees his breakthrough work not quite making it to Brooklyn. 
Two times two
A lot had changed in ten years, since those designs for Brooklyn failed to cross the Atlantic. The artist whose shows had looked revolutionary but sold almost nothing now had a prestigious dealer, Paul Rosenberg. He had a young wife, Olga, who was nursing his first child, Paul (bottle fed, by the way). He had a summer rental in the land of kings. Paintings and drawings of home were a celebration. Compulsive sketches attest to a love of drawing and close observation, but surely they were a celebration, too.
And then there were the big paintings, nearly eight feet tall and six feet wide. MoMA does its best to recreate the space in which he worked, a garage, where the two versions of Three Musicians face each other down from opposite walls. They seem more playful and deadly serious every day. The three figures share flat, broken fields of color, like playing cards, and one shuffles the musical score like cards, too. They could be staring out from behind masks, except that they are too polite and too absorbed to stare. They are too busy playing music and at play.
Or are they empty masks? The threat of emptiness looms over them all, especially with the darker version in the museum's own collection. Art, it suggests, is role play with no one left to play the roles, and these are old roles indeed. The three musicians are a Pierrot out of the Italian commedia dell'arte, a harlequin, and a monk. A fourth character lurks all the more in shadow, the silhouette of a dog. The second version, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum, is lighter in color and maybe in feeling, and the figures sport comic mustaches, but Pablo Picasso developed them together.
A third work should be familiar from MoMA, too, its version of Three Women at the Spring. Picasso was thinking in threes, for a binary choice was never enough. He has set the women at ease, standing, kneeling, and seated—if only you could altogether reconstruct their pose. They have all the space they need, but barely, for their rounded forms need plenty. Their six hands talk to each other as well, in a wild conversation. Their bodies have an earthy dignity, but their emotions do not so easily break through.
After Cubism, then, Picasso was modeling again. He was, that is, shading his figures in three dimensions—and what could be a more traditional tool for shading than red chalk? The other version of Three Women, from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, is entirely in chalk on the same scale as the oil painting. It has a still greater strangeness, with blank areas of paper and the mysterious face of a fourth women—a sculpted bust or only a shadow. Whatever are they doing there anyway, with their urns, columnar dresses, and occasional bare flesh? They might have come to collect water from an unseen spring and come up dry.
So where was Picasso headed, to a Cubism on overdrive or to a Neo-Classicism? They hardly seem to belong in the same period in an artist's life, much less the same garage. He was doing more as well, including set designs for Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe. They are a triumph of something else still, an overflow of detail and color. For a critic, it may come down to a choice of two common stories. For MoMA, it comes down to his marriage, to a ballerina, and those brief, glorious summer months.
What next?
For the public, Picasso is still a synonym for genius, who could do anything. For others, he was the sentimentalist of his early Blue Period and Pink Period, who just happened to luck out. He had one of the most productive relationships in art history, with Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Cubism. And then he finished his career with slapdash images of wives and lovers. John Berger popularized this story with The Success and Failure of Picasso, and it has gained new resonance in light of feminism. And yet Picasso in Fontainebleau refuses to follow anyone's story.
MoMA looks instead to images of home. You may wish you lived like that. It displays an entire series about Olga and Paul with the emphasis on their interplay and her nurturing. Picasso varies the poses just enough to show the range of their behavior—Paul from spirited to stubborn, Olga patient but giving no quarter. Picasso's choice not to stop with sketches but to pursue the subject in oil shows how much he cared as well. The museum throws in photos to show that Picasso has done his job, but who needs them?
When he does take up pencil on paper, it shows a genuine commitment, too. He ditches the simplicity of rounded flesh and clay-like features for the sheer pleasure of drawing. Line never stops, and, it seems, neither does a summer's luxury. Picasso sketches the villa's façade, the view from the garden, the salon, and Olga at the piano, one more impressive than the next and, for a few brief months, his own. The museum has a map of Fontainebleau as well, for the interest he took in his surroundings. Think back to the young artist exploring Paris and getting to know Montmartre.
He did visit the Château de Fontainebleau, the former palace, which held work after a design by Rosso Fiorentino. It also held chalk attributed to Francesco Primaticcio. The curators, Anne Umland with Alexandra Morrison and Francesca Ferrari, trace his Neo-Classicism to these Renaissance models. They note an entire series in chalk and oil—chalking it up, too, to the majesty of what he had seen. In reality, his simplification has little in common with the Renaissance, which Rosso did his best to upend anyway. Clearly something else was going on, but what?
Picasso started on these motifs before Fontainebleau and continued after he left. The show includes a guitar in pasted paper from early 1919 and a harlequin from 1915, with a seeming unpainted canvas within the canvas and, in black and white, two half masks. It is not so very far to the empty table in Three Musicians. As for sexism, the many versions of Woman at the Spring do identify women with a source of life, but they are not just posing for the tired male gaze. One woman has a bare shoulder, but they are anything but sex objects. If anything, they make clear by contrast how much the musicians aim to please.
As with Henri Matisse and his Red Studio last year, MoMA places an early modern artist in a new studio and watches the sparks fly. It cannot deliver the same magic or a revelation, but it has a point: both artists were looking back at their own work in new surroundings. Picasso knew that the collaborative spirit of Cubism was over, and he must have wondered if Cubism's experimental spirit was behind him as well. Should he lend it a greater stability, mystery, and color or ditch it entirely—and could he reimagine the heavyset women of his Pink Period as well? Two pairs of two multiply the possibilities.
Cubism in Brooklyn
Picasso did not come easily to New York. He had a solo show in 1911 at its most innovative gallery, but it sold all of two drawings—one of them to the dealer himself. Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, had opened his gallery in Greenwich Village six years earlier, but for Americans, it seems, that was just not long enough to grow accustomed to modern art. Two years later, Cubism made a sensation, but not with Picasso. Its appearance in the legendary Armory Show provoked outrage and enthusiasm, in the form of Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp. Before both shows, though, Picasso found a buyer not on Fifth Avenue, but in Brooklyn. Now the Met tries to recreate the 1910 commission.
Modernism's shocks are easy to remember, but harder over time to explain. Picasso has become a fixture, loved and hated, and an earlier show looked at nothing but his impact on American art. For years before its repatriation to Spain, Guernica seemed inseparable from New York and the Museum of Modern Art. As for Nude Descending a Staircase, it was not even a nude. Maybe that is what shocked most. Yet it had nothing on the radicalism of the work destined for Brooklyn.
Hamilton Easter Field asked for eleven paintings, for the library of his townhouse in Columbia Heights. They never made it across the Atlantic. Field, who had met him not long before, died before the job was done. The Met claims to have identified six completed paintings, on view with eight drawings, but who is to say? It does not have much to go by, beyond the dimensions of the library. Field gave detailed specs for the room as a whole and where paintings would fit, at least two of them over doors. This was site-specific work, but not a mural or, for that matter, a single work.
Picasso had mixed feelings work on commission, if not America itself. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, he dismissed the whole project as mere decoration and something he just had to do. Yet he dug right into it. He began with sketches on vacation in Cadaquês, the coastal village just outside Barcelona. He was happy enough with the surviving paintings to have signed them, and why not? This was the very height of Analytic Cubism, and Field had given him the chance to push his limits.
Would the American (himself an artist, dealer, and critic) have known what he was getting? He was that second buyer for Stieglitz, and he bought an accomplished nude (on display here) from around 1905, in Picasso's eminently accessible Pink Period. By 1910, Cubism was dismantling not just the human figure, but painting itself. Pen and oil hatching plays against the white of canvas and paper. It allows brown and blue to play against one another as well. Picasso would never work so densely or so close to abstraction again.
Two of the six paintings are nudes, standing or reclining in accord with the library's available space. Two are still life, and two are women playing the mandolin or guitar (possibly Marie Laurencin, whose paintings stood out this fall at the New York art fairs, in the Independent)—but just try to envision their subject. Just last year the Met claimed Synthetic Cubism for trompe l'oeil painting, but this is a radical assault on illusion. Nor is it, in a clichéd view of Cubism, a compendium of optical points of view. It is a compendium of ways to look and ways to think about painting. That is why Modernism is still a challenge for Postmodernism and art today.
"Picasso in Fontainebleau" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 17, 2024, his design for Hamilton Easter Field at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 14.