Picasso

 

Visitors line up for selfies in front of ‘The Weeping Woman’. Young children interpret the Dali with curiosity according to their own experience, innocent of surreal preconditions. Adults rest on benches before context films, Paris aflutter with light and hope in 1910. Grand Final Day was the ideal time to go to the Picasso show at the National Gallery; foot traffic was light, few mobs in front of classics. Overload, as always with this artist, was the norm and how you view with satisfaction hundreds of works in the scarce allotted hours, anyone’s guess. My approach is to size up the rooms relaxed initially, then return to the favourite impressions at length. We played the game of which painting would you take home. Carol thought about Gris’ cubist still-life with book, but finally left with Picasso’s ‘The Reader’, pictured, a portrait of Olga reading a letter lost in the words, a sign of this the shoe having slipped from her foot. I thought the garment hanging on the chairback was angel’s wings. This painting though has a sadness, she says, when we consider it is a letter from Olga’s separated family living in Russia. Seriously did I covet Bonnard’s self-portrait in the bathroom mirror but it was Braque’s ‘Woman with a Guitar’ that ended up on our wall, in order that a poem can be written about it, forthcoming. Cubism is the crunch, isn’t it? Picasso is still playing with its lessons sixty years later at his death, it’s the one constant as he moves from one moving movement to the next, exploring and exploiting the possibilities of each. His collaborations are exposed in the show as a combination of conversation, creative extension, and copying. The lines between discovery, sharing, and ripping off are never clear, but then is he ripping anyone off or just making things to see how they look, using his immense natural gifts? We see in turn Braque Picasso, Léger Picasso, Giacometti Picasso, Matisse Picasso, as the decades pass, each pursuing their own lines of enquiry, and he his. Found this time that I am so over surrealism and think it now a symptom of 30s Europe, the social illnesses and multiple neuroses come into the light through surrealism’s own unquestioned violence and misogyny. Wartime Paris paintings come as some sort of relief, artists once more living on little, nowhere they can go, all day with the brushes, in search of a possible world that is quietly governed. Overload effect soon separates our viewing into the so-so Picassos, the properly picked Picassos, the out-there Picassos, reserve-our-judgement Picassos, fabulous Picassos, and then the OMG Picassos. These last are the ones where, whatever the style and subject and other factors, his line and colour and form and daring are happening, seemingly effortless, all contributing to the subject itself, which speaks to us directly, anew, as though innocent of any preconditions.