Thinking about Art Historical/Art Critical writing: Review on Picasso by John McDonald

Pablo Picasso never travelled to Australia. He never even visited the United States, where his reputation as the leading artist of the twentieth century was set in stone. It’s a different story for those works Picasso loved best, which have recently been seen in Madrid, Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersburg; before crossing the Atlantic, to be shown in Seattle, Richmond and San Francisco. This triumphant tour concludes in Sydney, where viewers will experience the most significant and revealing display of Picasso’s work ever to come to these shores.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK - review It’s about RELATIONSHIPS between…artworld ‘agencies.’ AUDIENCEARTIST ARTWORK WORLD

If this exhibition is a cut above the usual blockbuster, it is because it has not been pieced together with whatever items local curators can wheedle out of foreign museums. Neither is it padded out with familiar works from Australian public collections. The entire collection comes from the Musee National Picasso in Paris, and we owe its appearance in Sydney to a major building renovation. Another factor is the affection the museum’s director, Anne Baldassari, has for Australia.

In previous collaborations with the touring agency Art Exhibitions Australia, Baldassari has put together Picasso shows for the National Gallery of Victoria in 2006 and the Queensland Art Gallery in 2008, but neither of these exhibitions had such a high percentage of important original works. Picasso, The Bathers, 1918

Throughout his career Picasso ( ) tended to hoard his own art, once boasting he was the greatest collector of Picassos in the world. By the time he was fifty he was already so rich and famous there was little need to keep holding commercial exhibitions, but the main reason he kept these works was their deep personal significance.

Picasso’s oeuvre is a form of visual autobiography through which we may chart his moods and preoccupations. It has often been remarked that each time he changed his wife or mistress, the work would undergo a radical shift. … … it is mainly a testimony to the way his life and art were inextricably intertwined. This is the aspect of Picasso that appeals most strongly to [Art Gallery of NSW Director] Edmund Capon... …He loves that fact that the artist’s work “was forever fuelled by his passions and emotions and every brushstroke wrought with intensity and feeling.” Picasso, Figures by the seashore, 1931

The show in Sydney features some 150 pieces chosen by Anne Baldassari, who knows Picasso’s work like nobody else. She has produced a show that combines a strict chronological sequence with a gradual unfolding of the key themes and motifs of Picasso’s art. In ten stages we watch the evolution of a career and note the way certain themes recur in different guises. The first forays into Cubism are coolly analytical, but some later Cubist distortions have an extraordinary violence. The female body may be as soft as silk or as rigid as a primitive idol.

ANY FRAME CAN BE USED TO LOOK AT ANY ART Of course, some are more appropriate than others in certain instances…