Sunday Extra: Peeping at Picassos

With the lodestar of Picasso and Paper,
Women at their Toilet (1937/8)

Two of my experiences with Pablo Picasso's art come to the fore: seeing his joyous ceramics in the south of France in 1984 and grasping his mind-blowing output as a sculptor at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2015.

A new show I saw yesterday, Picasso and Paper at the Cleveland Museum of Art, again opens vistas into this towering figure. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the best-kept secret of the current art season,” although it is hardly a secret to anyone in Cleveland. Its revelations come in all shapes and sizes.

Me with the Blue Period
masterpiece La Vie (1903)

Picasso’s productivity throughout his 91 years was staggering. MoMA estimates he created around 50,000 works, including paintings, ceramics, sculptures, prints, and stage designs. His artistic eras included the Blue Period, the Rose Period, Analytical Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Surrealism, and Neo-Classicism. For me, the most exciting thing about Picasso is watching him shatter the mold of traditional figuration to become a Cubist. He was at the height of his powers as a Cubist in the 1930s.

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)

Among Picasso's most famous Cubist masterpieces are the early Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (below; 1907), Guernica (1937), and Portrait of Dora Maar (right; 1937). These paintings showcase a range of subjects, from bathing prostitutes to the horrors of war to the inspiration of a lover-turned-muse. They warp perspective and favor geometry, abstraction, and the simultaneous display of multiple angles. Even today, after years of peeping at Picassos, I find his disruption of traditional modes of representation perplexing, sometimes, flabbergasting.

Prostitutes bathing:
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

“Peeping” is what one does when taking in the star of Picasso and Paper, Women at Their Toilet (above; 1937/8). This collage of cut-out wallpapers with gouache on paper pasted onto canvas forces the viewer to experience some of the voyeurism and complexity of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (left), made thirty years earlier. In both, one is drawn into a prurient, disjunctive scene he has no business seeing.

Untitled work from my collection

Oddly, Women at their Toilet made me think of a black and white photograph in my collection, where a smoking man, possibly the artist Jeff Koons in his younger years, sits on a filthy toilet with two leather-clad prostitutes by his side. I am drawn to works where I am complicit in viewing—even peeping—at a scene where I am forced to intrude.

But sometimes, encountering a quiet, lesser-known work—even a doodle—can be almost as valuable as grappling with a challenging tour de force like Women at Their Toilet.

Head of a Woman, Mougins (1962)

One of the paper works in the Cleveland exhibition, Head of a Woman, Mougins, from December 4, 1962, put the abstract principles of Picasso's art into literal perspective. The piece—possibly a study for a painting or a sculpture— showed his mind at play in three dimensions with cut and folded paper and pencil. The work lacks color or the majesty of more ambitious works but shows the pervasiveness of abstraction, geometry, and anatomical discombobulation in his practice.

“Discombobulated” is perhaps the best word to describe some of my favorite Picassos. Clevelanders are lucky to be discombobulated by Picasso now through March 23rd.

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