Drab by Choice

Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim Museum 

            Pablo Picasso once said, “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?  Can one really explain this?  No.  Just as one can never learn to paint.”  Picasso seemed to have an excellent and mutually beneficial relationship with color.  Most of his greatest pieces were bright and eye-catching.  His periods as an artist are even denoted by the color he used most prominently.  So why then does the Guggenheim Museum insist, in all its descriptions of its new exhibition, Picasso Black and White (running through January 23^rd), that Picasso was a minimalist of color, believing that it sullied great art?  Picasso was certainly not thrifty with color in Weeping Woman, or Crucifixion, or Girl Before a Mirror.  But in the exhibition, the Guggenheim puts on display only the Picasso pieces which are more void of color, and, consequentially, of life.

            It isn’t that the works are bad; quite the contrary.  Picasso, while not a very good realist, was a brilliant surrealist, especially later in life, and his art is without doubt beautiful.  It’s that most of the compositions shown are actually sketches, preparations for later pieces to be done all in color.  The museum was working around the fact that Picasso didn’t avoid color at all, but in fact worked toward it and reveled in it.  Even the simpler Cubist works at least had shades of brown and blue.  Though the title of the exhibition tries to prepare you for it, it can seem that the Guggenheim is presenting us with a barrage of black and white so intense that, by its end, you ache for Three Musicians.

            The art didn’t need saving, the exhibit did.  But the only thing that could have swooped in and snatched Black and White from the depths of the despair it seems to be writhing in would have been Picasso’s magnum opus, Guernica.  An outcry against the bombing of a Basque village of the same name, Guernica is the explosion of the brooding anger and intensity that fueled all those black and white paintings in the first place.  It is the culmination, in its outburst, of everything Picasso was working towards.  Sadly, the original Guernica is immovable from the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the tapestry version (commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955 when Picasso refused to sell him the original) is on loan indefinitely to the San Antonio Museum of Art.  As a result it seems that Black and White has no real conclusion, nowhere to go.  The winding hall of the Guggenheim ends, underwhelmingly, at one of the paintings Picasso entitled The Kiss, a series in which two androgynous lovers appear to be trying to eat each other.

            The most likeable parts of the exhibition were those in which Picasso’s style had fully developed, when he had begun to use shadow and depth, and when he had abandoned entirely the idea of verisimilitude in his art in favor of the near-abstract.  This is the Picasso we all know and love, monochromatic or not, and it is a relief to see it among so many sketches and plans for pieces that either never planned out or did in a way much more interesting than what the Guggenheim currently has to offer.  The exhibition has no centerpiece, no real underlying idea but for two colors which can be found in almost any painting you care to name, and no true direction to take Black and White.  The one thing we can take comfort in is that, like any misguided adaptation of the works of a genius (this season’s The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess being a prime example), the original idea of the artist remains the same.  Here we must appreciate what we can of Picasso, while attempting to ignore the out-of-the-ordinarily mediocre curating of the Guggenheim.