Picasso: Drawing from Life - at the Art Institute of Chicago

 A review of "Picasso: Drawing from Life" at the Art Institute of Chicago

Picasso, Minotaur Caressing Sleeping Woman, 

drypoint on copper, June 18 ,  1933, from the Vollard  Suite

I love the Vollard Suite - especially the drawings made in the Spring of 1933 when the fifty-two year old artist was midway through his affair with a woman twenty seven years younger.

Picasso, Faun Uncovering Sleeping Woman, June 12, 1936, 12 x 16"

Aquatint and sugar lift etching with scraping and engraving on copper

(After Rembrandt)

Three years later he’s applied some new techniques to a similar theme

Utterly delicious - and apparently the eager faun thinks so as well

Rembrandt, Jupiter and Antiope, 1659, 5 x 8 "

The title of this exhibit, "Drawing from Life" is misleading.  Most of the pieces, like these in the Vollard Suite, do not appear to be based on a model posing — as appears to be the case with this Rembrandt etching that inspired Picasso’s variation.

Picasso: Sculptor, Reclining Model, and Self-Portrait as Sculpture of Hercules, 

 March 17, 1933

Picasso’s vision of himself with a much younger nude woman was more benign at the very beginning of the series.  It progressively got darker:  the man turns into a man/beast and the woman falls asleep, becoming more helpless and vulnerable.

I’ve loved the above image for more than 50 years - purchasing a small pamphlet of print reproductions with the meager funds earned from washing dishes.   It looked like an idyllic life - and so much has been accomplished with such a simple tool.  The contour lines are so effective.  The overall design is throbbing.

The Art Institute owns a copy, but it was not included in this exhibit.  Picasso has become a bette noire for his treatment of women and evidently the curators wanted to confront that issue head on. Can we celebrate his art while condemning the kind of behavior that art presents - and perhaps even glorifies? Can we agree that an art museum, unlike a church, is not necessarily a place for moral instruction?  So the National Cathedral was right to cancel it’s racist stain glass windows - while it would be OK for the AIC to display them (if they didn’t look so stiff, lame, and tacky - even if that does suggest irony, intended or otherwise)

Picasso, Fernando Olivier, 1906, 18 x 24

Charcoal on cream laid paper

The prints and drawings galleries were filled with many decades of Picasso from the AIC’s extensive permanent collection.

Another small area that caught my attention were three portraits of the same woman done when the artist was  in his mid twenties.  Hanging them side-by-side gives the viewer some idea of the artist finding his voice.

My favorite is the above - and I would have been quite happy if Picasso  remained something like a portraitist of the Spanish royal family.  (Doesn’t this remind you of Goya?)

But Picasso was more ambitious than that :

Picasso, Head of a Woman, 1909, oil on canvas,  24 x 20

For better or worse, we have entered a new, more turbulent, unsettling world of conflicted, unhappy people

Picasso, Head of a Woman, 1909, 24 x 20, oil on canvas

Not as appealing as the charcoal drawing - but maybe more exciting. A new kind of pictorial space is being created with an uncomfortable tension between surface and imaginary volume.