If there is anything surprising about the Picasso exhibition currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, it is that there are still grand performances mounted by the legendary master himself.
The Spanish painter who was best known for restructuring and revising the trajectory of art history with his Cubist works, which fractured the painterly picture plane at the turn of the 20th Century, died in 1973; but Picasso still manages to astound museum-goers today.
In over 100 works on view spanning photographs, sketches, paintings, ceramics, and a remarkable group of costumes, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change at the Columbus Museum of Art is nothing short of groundbreaking.
The art on display, spanning the years 1912 to 1924, proves that Picasso’s seemingly consistent and steady narrative of innovative performances are interrupted by moments of struggle, as expected during the tumultuous years surrounding World War I. Picasso often grappled with the connection between his exceptionally detailed and tightly rendered pencil portraits and his well-known and highly abstracted Cubist pieces.
Paintings paired with their stylistic opposite make for an interesting exhibition and consistently remind the viewer of the prolific oeuvre the artist produced during his lifetime. Portrait of Max Jacob and Man with a Guitar are two works exemplary of this curatorial decision. The former is a nearly illusionistic rendering of the subject, which decisively shows the viewer the exceptional skill Picasso displayed as a draftsman. While Man with a Guitar is a larger painting brilliantly bursting with thick, flat planes of color which are puzzled together with crisp, jagged edges crescendo eventually with the highly abstracted figure of a man joyfully strumming a guitar.
Pairings like this punctuate the exhibition and decidedly emphasize the stylistic shifts in Picasso’s work which often happened concurrent of one another.
One particularly alluring painting, Woman with Mantilla (Fatma), completed just a couple of years after the Man with a Guitar, appears unfinished. The sketches which underscore the painting are realistic and exhibit a clear connection between the artist and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the French Romantic painter Picasso admired. A woman, her portrait executed in exquisite detail is sketched in charcoal. At points the lines are bare on the canvas, but in the center of the image a generous swarm of brightly colored individual dabs of paint are applied in the pointillist style which consequently enlivens and obstructs the woman at the center of the image. This rare view into Picasso’s process makes us wonder what lies under the most abstract of Picasso’s works.
Dazzling works surprise the viewer at every turn. Larger-than-life costumes, monumental cubist horses and men, made for the ballet, are playful and enliven the exhibition. The costumes, paired with a large series of photographs featuring Picasso and his social circle during his hey-day taken by Jean Cocteau add breath to the exhibition and weave the intricate story of the master painter together.
Punctuated by a prolific production of ceramic works, and Picasso’s more well known and decisively cubist still-life paintings, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change is an unexpected view into a lesser known period of the historic painter’s legacy.
Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through September 11. For more information visit columbusmuseum.org.
Featured Image:
Pablo Picasso Still Life with Fish, 1923 Oil on canvas 18 ¼ x 21 ½ in. (46.4 x 54.6 cm) Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Philip L. Goodwin Collection, Gift of James L. Goodwin, Henry Sage Goodwin, and Richmond L. Brown. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York