Picasso, The Studio, 1955, Tate Gallery, London.

Picasso, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Picasso, The Studio, 1928-29, Musèe Picasso
on deposit at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

The Drawing Room

By Dan Tranberg

He's been dead for less than 30 years, yet Pablo Picasso seems in many ways like an artist from the distant past. His name alone conjures thoughts of a time now long gone, when artists’ names became household words. I remember when he died, his face was on the cover of Time. Things don’t work that way anymore.

Picasso will always be a giant in the world of art, in part because his career, which spanned more than 75 years, played a profound role in defining the course of 20th-century art. You can quibble over whether or not Georges Braque actually invented cubism, but no single artist covered more ground in his lifetime than Picasso.

A general survey of Picasso’s career could fill a football stadium. And though I like the idea of seeing his masterpiece, Guernica, covering the digital scoreboard, a truly representative sampling of Picasso’s massive output of paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and ceramics would probably be about as edifying as the Rose Bowl parade; it’s just not possible to process that much information.

Out of necessity, Picasso exhibitions always focus on a narrow theme or period. The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal recently mounted "Picasso Erotique," rounding up about 350 of Picasso’s most sexually explicit works. Alas, no major American museum has ever been host to such a bold display of erotica by any artist. In the early 1990s, the Cleveland Museum of Art assembled "Picasso and Things," concentrating on the artist’s still lifes. Now, nine years later, CMA presents "Picasso: The Artist’s Studio," a modestly sized exhibition of 45 works that highlights the studio as one of Picasso’s favorite subjects.

The main exhibition space has been completely transformed for the show, divided into seven quite beautiful and manageable rooms, five for the actual art and two for educational displays. And though opinion is bound to vary, I found the overall number of works and the way the show is arranged to be perfectly gratifying for a single visit.

But why this issue of the artist’s studio? The subject was of no small importance to Picasso; it appeared repeatedly, though not consistently, from his earliest studies to works he completed within a year of his death in 1973. According to curator Michael Fitzgerald, who assembled the exhibition, during the last decade of Picasso’s life the image of the artist’s studio virtually consumed all other subjects.

The show wavers slightly in its focus on the studio as a recurring image for Picasso, especially with the inclusion of still lifes that are not really about the studio as much as they just happen to be set in one. Nonetheless, a good number of strong paintings and drawings manage to carry the show’s weight.

In a few of the earliest works, done before the turn of the century, neither the subjects nor the settings seem especially meaningful, but that soon changes. Images of paintings begin to appear within the paintings, either resting on easels or against walls; and the artist himself appears, not sitting passively for a portrait, but participating actively in the scene.

The shift suggests, at least in part, that Picasso was quite taken with both the idea and the image of himself working away in his studio. The powerful 1906 Self-Portrait with Palette, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is practically a monument to the artist’s assuredness. He stands alone in the center of the painting, like a stone fortress, daring you to challenge him.

Many of the works in the show focus more on the studio than on the image of the artist. A fabulous little 1920 drawing titled The Artist’s Studio in the Rue La Boetie, on loan from the Musèe Picasso in Paris, depicts countless paintings and drawings strewn among upholstered chairs and a pedestal table. While the drawing clearly celebrates the excitement of an artist’s space, it also demonstrates what was arguably Picasso’s greatest talent: his supremely confident use of line. The image is made up solely of uniform pencil lines, tracing the contours of each object in the room.

In the late 1920s, Picasso’s use of line became the dominant force of his paintings. The exhibition’s second room showcases this fact with a group of works that by themselves make the show worth seeing: The Studio, from 1927-28, on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art; Painter in His Studio, a 1928 canvas from a private collection; and Painter with Palette and Easel, from the Musèe Picasso. This group conveys an overwhelming sense of how Picasso used line rather than color to sculpt forms in space. In these and other works, every shape is delineated by harsh black lines that take on a decorative quality not unlike that of wrought-iron gates and fences.

Interestingly, a tiny 1922 painting that hangs nearby functions in nearly the opposite way. Titled Nude with Drapery, it is modeled entirely with rough yet gradated brushstrokes that reveal the figure’s weighty substance. Besides being a great little painting, it highlights Picasso’s remarkable ability to paint in any style he chose.

Following the show’s chronological path, it’s difficult not to marvel at the brute force with which Picasso attacked painting. Even after the rise and fall in popularity of the neo-expressionists of the 1980s, who favored violent emotion over cool restraint, Picasso seems like a bull of a painter. And yet who paints like this anymore? Recent years have shown a rise in interest in the physicality of painting. But Picasso didn't just adopt this idea as a strategy; he lived it. In an era when twentysomething art stars appear and disappear in the span of a few years, Picasso remains a force to be reckoned with.

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This article appeared in The Free Times, October 31, 2001

© 2007 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.