The Master's Voice

...Robert Messenger is deputy managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly...

...in-between are a strong selection of Cubist Picassos and American responses, including work by Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler...

...These had never been exhibited but had profoundly influenced 20th-century sculpture through reproductions...

...This exhibition is more than a failure...

...The Steins—Leo, Gertrude, Michael, and Sarah—were the beginning...

...It is the antithesis of all that came before, and any claim of descent from Jarry or Dada is undone by the fact that Pop Art was not a short-lived phenomenon—a corrective to the high seriousness of AbEx—but a juvenile joke told over and over again until it became accepted as an intellectual statement...

...Artists like Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol used Picasso to crack jokes...

...From its founding in 1929, MoMA exhibited and contextualized the art of the School of Paris and became a second home for the painters who would put Abstract Expressionism at the forefront of post-World War II art— though AbExers did picket the museum in 1940 in hopes of getting exhibited sooner...

...The core of the Whitney Museum’s collection—from Edward Hopper to Barbara Kruger—is essentially a refutation of the Modern movement, and “Picasso and American Art” is the mendacious story of Picasso’s influence on American artists leading inexorably to Pop Art...

...The works were a profound engagement with Matisse and part of a lifelong attempt to understand and build upon the vocabulary Matisse had wrought...

...There is no sense of the overwhelming awe such works inspired...

...The centrality of Cubism wasn’t firmly established until the 1930s, at which time it was clear that Picasso and Matisse were Modernism’s titans...

...Drawings are needed that show a younger artist fussing with his own inabilities...

...Louis Art Museum’s 1999 “Max Beckmann and the School of Paris...

...In March 1911, Stieglitz put on the first show of Picasso’s art in America at his 291 Gallery...

...This is not something for which the curators can be blamed...

...Installed in the Whitney’s shabby fourth-floor galleries under lighting reminiscent of a high-school biology lab, in a barely coherent order, “Picasso and American Art” was hard even to enjoy as a simple visual treat, despite the inclusion of a fair number of masterpieces...

...The show was an aesthetic and scholarly triumph...

...To museums that specialize in contemporary art, the progression from School of Paris to AbEx to Pop to Minimalism to Postmodernism is written in stone...

...From the beginning, “Picasso and American Art” attempts to have it both ways: trying to display a chronological narrative of Picasso’s introduction to New York—which is appropriately a stand-in for the whole American art scene—while also building internal groupings of paintings with similar motifs, showing Americans copying and absorbing Picasso, along the lines of head-to-head match-ups of MoMA’s recent “Matisse Picasso” or “C?zanne and Pissarro” shows or the St...

...and who painted what, where, and when in response...

...He didn’t really engage with Picasso and Cubism until the 1920s (and in the end was more influenced by the Synthetic Cubism of Gris and L?ger than the prewar Analytical Cubism of Picasso and Braque...

...By 1911, Stieglitz had already presented two solo shows of the work of Henri Matisse at 291, in 1908 and 1910...

...Picasso was not the beginning of American engagement with Modernism...

...Having two approaches weakens each strand, and the sheer ambitions doom any chance at clearly presenting any art-historical points...

...The Modern has always put Picasso and Matisse at the center of its mission...

...Picasso’s development is not evident, and it is no easier to see how the young Americans are developing—who’s been to Europe...

...MoMA loaned the picture to the large “Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde” show at the Prado...

...It was an enthralling exhibition and showed that, even a century on, the lessons of Modernism are still being sought and interpreted, critiqued and absorbed...

...But little is made of the Thunderbolt that was the 1913 Armory Show, which included five Picasso oils, two drawings, and the Cubist sculpture “Head of Fernande” (1912...

...One of the most ambitious, “Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries” at the National Gallery of Art in 2001, also set the standard...

...who’s seen what, where, and when...

...There’s another weakness inherent in even a semi chronological presentation of Picasso’s influence on American art...

...it is an insidious attack on the achievements of Modernism...

...There America’s would-be collectors and artists discovered post-Impressionism: the Cone sisters and Albert Barnes rubbing elbows with impoverished painters like Alfred Maurer, Arthur B. Carles, Patrick Henry Bruce, Marsden Hartley, and all getting a chance to meet the French avantgarde...

...Picasso and the School of Paris were the last century’s major artistic challenge, and the New York School was the most skilled and most potent response...

...Picasso struggled with Vel?zquez and C?zanne to paint well...

...The latter came into MoMA’s collection in 1935 and was an obsession for artists like Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and Willem de Kooning...

...It was Picasso’s first constructed sculpture, and he gave it to MoMA in 1971, just two years before his death...

...Picasso was essential to the early American Modernists, but his influence was not in isolation, and the Fauves and Kandinsky and Picabia exerted as much...

...Alfred Maurer is absent from this show, as he was painting in the style of the Fauves in the years before World War I. Maurer was the Paris guide for so many American artists, the one taking them to meet Leo and Gertrude Stein and reporting on new work to Stieglitz and his colleague Edward Steichen...

...Though the Whitney has done many fine historical shows on the New York School in recent years, it failed these artists when they were doing their best work...

...Picasso and American Art” also manages to be a poor presentation of the introduction of Picasso to America...

...It preferred Hopper to the early American Modernists, as it later chose Pop Art over Abstract Expressionism, and today favors an anything-is-art approach for its Biennials...

...Blue and Rose Period Picasso is actually absent, though his pre-Cubist work was known to American painters and collected—as was seen at the Met’s unmissable “C?zanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the AvantGarde,” which had two of Quinn’s early Picassos: “Old Man with Guitar” and the exceptional Rose Period “La Toilette” (1906...

...They produced gorgeous work and were, even at their most abstract, in the great tradition of Western art stretching back to Giotto and the Sienese school...

...These are winning pictures, but the whole presentation is hit-or-miss...

...To cite just one that pops into my mind: In 2003, Paul Resika showed 10 new paintings at the SalanderO’Reilly Galleries in New York...

...There also needs to be some sense of the before and after that shows an artist developing, being influenced...

...The Whitney has consistently chosen to promote the least rigorous art, and it is hard to imagine any artist struggling with the mastering of craft that distinguishes the best art finding any solace in the museum’s efforts at contemporaneity...

...This ought not to have posed a challenge to the curators...

...They’ve been doing it for years...

...Abstract Expressionism comes through as a way station on the rapid road to Pop Art...

...Some fine works have been clustered to indicate how Gorky and de Kooning, in particular, reacted to “The Studio” and “Woman in White,” but in neither case does it resolve into understanding...

...Resika is nearing 80 and his vibrant, beautiful work would be recognizable to Picasso as art...

...by Robert Messenger There has been a steady stream of scholarly museum exhibits exploring the reception and spread of Modern art in recent years...

...Picasso himself had only cold words for Abstract Expressionism— at least as reported by Fran?oise Gilot in her Life with Picasso—but, love them or hate them, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler were gifted artists working through the lessons of the Parisian avant-garde...

...We get clutter instead of a linear story...

...Weber wasn’t the first American to buy a Picasso, but he was the first member of the New York artistic community to do so...

...Leaving out the “Charnel House” is particularly disastrous as it was heavily studied by New York artists and critics trying to come to terms with “Guernica...

...Up until the war, “Picasso and American Art” might have been cluttered, but it had a lot going on: major Picassos and the growing confidence of the American responses...

...And the American painters being exhibited at 291 were reacting to the whole of the School of Paris...

...Weber helped carry the news back to New York, but his real success was in exhorting Alfred Stieglitz to act upon it...

...MoMA loaned many pictures to the show, including “Girl Before a Mirror” and “The Studio...

...The show begins with the painter Max Weber, who returned in 1909 from a sojourn in bohemian Paris with a grouping of Rousseaus, a tile painted by Matisse, and a small oil still life by Picasso...

...The story of the Whitney is far different...

...The museum had finally been able to organize a show of Picasso’s sculpture in 1967 and the revelation of the exhibit was the constructed works of the prewar period and the late 1920s and early ’30s...

...In the 1910s, the jury was still out, and 291 regularly had shows of artists like Brancusi, Rodin, C?zanne, Picabia, Nadelman, Duchamp, as well as African sculpture and children’s art...

...Gorky’s debt to Picasso was obvious at Gagosian’s 2002 “Arshile Gorky: Portraits” show, which included drawings where Gorky painstakingly laid out grids to copy Picasso’s draughtmanship...

...Despite the celebration of the nihilist art of Johns and Lichtenstein in “Picasso and American Art,” the Modernist experiment is alive and well...

...The impact was heightened as the paintings, in a group, seemed in conversation, each a different facet of an experiment in Matissean color and line...

...Four of the works were on display, but in the cluttered hallway that began the show, interspersed with early works by Weber, Man Ray, Arthur Dove, and Hartley...

...With so much money invested, this show has to believe that Pop was the outcome of Picasso...

...It was jammed in at the Whitney, and because the AbExers were responding to “Fifty Years of His Art”—the title of the then-ubiquitous Picasso catalogue by MoMA’s Alfred Barr—there is little to grasp onto...

...Abstract Expressionism was the full flowering of that response, a huge and varied movement...

...Pop Art was not an extension of this...

...The Whitney’s record with contemporary art is farcical...

...I thought wistfully of that show while visiting “Picasso and American Art” when it was at the Whitney Museum...

...The show was a slog, and all the more recognizably so in comparison with brilliantly hung shows up at the same time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art...

...It manages to muddy the fascinating story of Picasso’s introduction to the United States, and to do an equally poor job of narrating how American artists reacted to his art—as react they obviously did, pushing New York to replace Paris as the capital of the art world decades before Picasso’s death in 1973...

...A wonderful show could be put together around this sole picture and its influence on American painters...

...In room after glorious room, the exhibition traced the dozens of shows that Stieglitz organized in New York, first of the great European Modernists and then of the Americans responding...

...that came with C?zanne and Rodin...

...He’d made such art’s acquaintance, like almost everyone else of his generation, in the Stein salon at 27 rue de Fleurus...

...it was a mockery of it...

...Weber’s small still life is there, as is the key work of the 1911 show: “Standing Nude” (1910), which Stieglitz himself bought and eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...The other notable omission is MoMA’s “Guitar” (1912), which, despite the date, ought to have been one of the show’s closing works...

...The latter, of course, is the one associated with Picasso...

...In the years before World War I, he was still just one painter in and amongst the fast-evolving Paris artistic movements...

...The first room is dominated at the far end by Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism masterpiece, “Three Musicians” (1921...

...Originally called the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, it quickly came to be known after its street address, 291 Fifth Avenue, a name it retained even after moving two doors down...

...It gave them an indication of the vocabulary of what would become Abstract Expressionism...

...They could have opened with the small, potent grouping of the Armory Show Picassos and then organized sections, decade-bydecade, around a representative masterpiece: the Blue Period with Chicago’s “Old Man with Guitar” (1903)— owned originally by John Quinn, the greatest American collector of Picasso— Synthetic Cubism with “Three Musicians,” neoclassicism with “Woman in White” (1923), nearabstraction with “The Studio” (1927–28), the overtly sensual MarieTh?r?se pictures with “Girl Before a Mirror” (1932), the violently expressive “Guernica” period with “Charnel House” (1945), the turn to copying Old Masters with one of the “Women of Algiers” (1954–55), and lastly one of the highly sexualized late portraits of Jacqueline Roque...

...Resika and all serious artists must struggle with Picasso and Matisse as well...

...Despite one of the great institutional missions—the cultivation and preservation of American modern art—the museum has floundered its way through 75 years...

...Thousands of artists continue to engage with Picasso and Matisse, to learn from early American Modernists and the three generations of the New York School...