WHO’S YOUR DADDY?
By Ariella Budick – Newsday Staff Writer
Newsday, NY
Sept 29 2006
A Whitney exhibit delves into how Picasso was the model for many 20th
century artists
October 1, 2006
Picasso was the great father of 20th century art, the fecund patriarch
who needed to be symbolically "dealt with" by scores of resentfully
indebted sons.
The Whitney’s "Picasso and American Art" tells an implicitly Oedipal
tale of how successive waves of artists on these shores came to terms
with their potent ancestor’s seminal and prodigious productivity. A
great many dimly mimed his gifts. Others struggled to adapt his
language to their own distinctive syntax. Jackson Pollock alone found
it necessary to kill him off, inventing entirely new structures for
self- expression.
Perhaps there is a concomitant Electra complex lurking in the history
of American art, an analysis of Picasso’s female followers, but the
Whitney is not interested in exploring that. Only five of the 153
works on display are by women, and the reason for the imbalance is
not self-evident. The show includes a fistful of works by Max Weber,
a shameless Picasso wannabe, but it has nothing to say about the way
Louise Nevelson struggled to break free of the great man’s grip.
One of Alfred Stieglitz’s Cubist-influenced cityscapes is here, but
his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, pulled off some muscular skyscrapers, too,
and they go missing. The Whitney has rounded up such minor figures
as Jan Matulka, Morgan Russell and Abraham Walkowitz, but excluded
Dorothy Dehner, the sculptress and partner of David Smith.
(Smith does make the cut.)
Like father, like son
But never mind the women: This is a story about fathers and sons. The
first group pretty much tried to swallow dear old Dad in one big
bite. Weber, an American born in Russia, made a painter’s pilgrimage
to Paris in 1905 and came back a Picasso convert. He met the master
through Gertrude and Leo Stein, and took it upon himself to imitate
and promote Picasso’s work stateside.
Weber followed wherever the Spaniard led. In 1910, he completed
a sculptural trio of nudes in the vein of Picasso’s proto-Cubist
masterpiece "Three Women." He also emulated the style, structure and
fragmentation of planes in "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." The worst
of these spinoffs, "Figures in a Landscape" (1912), looks like an
unwitting caricature, replacing Picasso’s scary African masks with
the delicate faces of kitschy, doe-eyed ladies.
Twenty years later, Arshile Gorky declared, "I feel Picasso running
through my fingertips." The stark linearity of the Great One’s
neoclassical period inspired "The Artist and His Mother" (1926-36),
Gorky’s tender, tragic self-portrait with the parent who perished in
his arms during the Armenian genocide.
Gorky’s stylistic leaps can be explained by tracing Picasso’s. "The
Organization" (1933-36) is an ambitious reaction to his idol’s surreal
"Studio" of 1927-28. Gorky adopts the same look and feel, the same
colors, the same use of black lines to map out the composition,
and the gridlike structure.
Gorky was a terrific draftsman, with an imaginative eye and a sure
technique, but these exercises look distressingly derivative. By the
1940s, the disciple had come into his own as the author of delicate
symphonies of line and color. None of those works can be seen here,
though; as far as this exhibit is concerned, when the progeny
definitively declares his independence, he ceases to be of interest.
Willem de Kooning was a friend of Gorky’s, and he, too, fell under
Picasso’s sway. In the 1930s he also fiddled with the "Studio,"
a not terribly productive duet. Much later, after a stint as a pure
abstractionist, he tried to return to the human body and turned for
help to "Demoiselles," just as Weber had done decades earlier.
De Kooning made much better use of precedent, and the Whitney expertly
delineates his process. He went horn to horn with Picasso in the 1948
"Three Women," which mimicked and exaggerated three prostitutes from
"Demoiselles."
Crude and cruder
Picasso’s squatting, taunting figures were crude; de Kooning’s were
cruder. He turned Picasso’s healthy pink skin to white, rotting
flesh. His women became beasts, baring fanged teeth and waving
rubbery limbs.
Having transformed his source, de Kooning performed the same grim
alchemy on his own work. The rightmost figure in "Three Women," the
one with fuchsia war paint and large vacant eyes, became the massive,
creepy heroine of "Woman I" from 1951, glaring at the viewer with
unrestrained sexual menace.
The same hag reappears, somewhat mollified, in "Woman and Bicycle"
of 1952-53. Her two mouths grin above her bubblegum-hued cleavage. De
Kooning succeeded better than any of the others at constructively
resolving his Oedipal issues. He internalized the most liberating of
Picasso’s rules: the mandate to constantly experiment and evolve.
Pollock teased de Kooning for being "nothing but a French painter,"
but despite his pioneer pose, he, too, felt the weight of Picasso’s
legacy. Unlike de Kooning, he couldn’t simply make his peace with the
old man. We can see Pollock’s Picasso fixation in "The Water Bull"
and other variations on the theme of "Guernica"; in "Magic Mirror" and
other riffs on "The Girl in the Mirror," and in his rough responses to
"Demoiselles."
Pollock admired Picasso’s raw energy, and tried to emulate it. You
can just make out the shape of a Picasso-style prostitute beneath the
scrim of brushstrokes in "Troubled Queen" (1945). But Pollock turned
the faceting of planes in the "Demoiselles" into harsh striations
criss-crossing the canvas. Picasso’s fearsomeness became Pollock’s
brutality and rage.
Soon, Pollock would abandon these congested surfaces for all-over
patterns and breathing traceries. The evidence suggests, however,
that Pollock didn’t altogether forsake representation; he veiled it.
First he would pour drawings onto the surface, then he would cover
them up with successive layers of drips. And those never-seen images
looked an awful lot like Picasso.
All of this suggests that Pollock wasn’t content simply to move in
another direction from the master or even to supersede him. He needed
to blot him out.
And yet Pollock did leave Picasso behind. The pictures he is famous
for, the masterpieces, take painting in an entirely different
direction. They represent the opposite of what Picasso stood for:
Europe, tradition, virtuosity and technique. Pollock was never much
of a draftsman, but that no longer mattered in the new world his
paintings opened up.
After Pollock, the rest of the exhibit is anticlimax. We see how Jasper
Johns and Roy Lichtenstein tried to engage with Picasso in the 1950s,
’60s and beyond, but by that time the sense of conflict, the clash of
newness and precedent, has dissipated. Pop artists’ Oedipal issues
lay primarily with the abstract expressionists who had immediately
preceded them. Pollock and de Kooning were their Picassos. The sons
had become the father.
WHEN & WHERE
"Picasso and American Art," through Jan. 28 at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, Manhattan. For
exhibition hours and admission prices, call 800-WHITNEY or visit
whitney.org.
