Dennis Hollingsworth

¡Cuidado con la Urraca!

All is fair when it comes to stealing from a magpie*, especially from one as famous as Picasso. MoMA has cleared a whole floor of its' permanent collection to showcase Picasso Sculpture (September 14, 2015-February 7, 2016) and the critical acclaim is as unified as it is ecstatic. I consider the best exhibitions are the ones that generate within me, the impulse -the greater the urge, the better- to get back into the studio. That's quite a feeling, a wonderful tension, to simultaneously leave the studio with the urge to see art and to see art and feel the urge to get back into the studio again, posthaste. I've already visited this show twice, I expect to see it a few more times, so laden this magpie nest is with treasure.

However...

Have you noticed the tendency of artists who have pilfered from this particular nest to languish ...too strong a word, probably, but it has the power to convey the problematic aspect I want to communicate here... to relax ...too soft a word, it conceals the problem... under Picasso's shadow. Jerry Saltz touched on Picasso's influence: "...galleries packed with uncovered information for artists and viewers, single works that can detonate into whole careers...", but should he have also edited out the single word "into" from that sentence as well? A career can seem to detonate when it is revealed that it is merely so. Touring the exhibition, a multitude of resonances of subsequent artists' oeuvre reverberates in the mind... first, a pleasant thought and then a kind of dread creeps in. It was Picasso's coinage of the difference between borrowing and stealing that unfurls the caution flag. If you are to steal from this particular magpie's nest, do it with extreme prejudice.

There is another issue to consider as we rifle through this nest. My dictionary tells me that the noun magpie refers to "...a person who collects things, especially things of little use or value, or a person who chatters wildly". Certainly we've established in the last paragraph that if an artist only borrows from this particular magpie, the item in question will surely become of little use or value principally because it will remain Picasso's intellectual property. But beware, the thief who is only interested in formalism. The energy in Picasso's contribution to art history comes from the peculiar wave he was surfing. This wave had specific characteristics:

1) the interiority of perception of the impressionists that was translated as the isolation of the brushstroke (Seurat's pointillism, Monet's waterlilies, later as Van Gogh's wild strokes of color)...

2) the transition and enlargement of the atomized brush strokes into Cézanne's visual patches...

3) the relaxation of academic representation via the influence of indigenous art...

4) a fusing of Cézanne's patchwork visuality with the image of the specific nature of Spanish urbanism, a perspective from an elevated, isometric projected panorama (I noticed this while living in Catalunya, the elevated view of the village or city looks cubistic, a panoply of planes canting this way and that, the residue of an urbanism that was singularly focused on the street and not the rooftops)...

5) there was a movement towards abstraction that was restrained by Picasso's commitment to motif that restrained Him from launching his oeuvre completely into non-objective abstraction as did the Russians such as the constructivists and the Suprematists (but not exactly the father of the latter, Malevich, since I believe he scrambled his timeline and toggled between"pure" abstraction and representation)...

6) the art form of collage had just burst onto the scene of art history. It was the embodiment of the age, especially one so fractured by WWI and the multitude of soldiers mutilated by the industrialization of warfare. Dada was born of this. Influential critics in Picasso's circle such as Bataille was allegorizing/fetishizing collage as dismemberment.

It was all of these influences and Picasso's particular attitude that led to his artistic achievement.

So.

So, if an artist was to steal, why content oneself with a keepsake or souvenir when you can take the code or software? And if you are game to emulate Picasso's conceptual feat, (good for you), just what is the contemporary analogue to the dynamics of early modernism? One can't simply transliterate historical dynamics a hundred years forward, willy-nilly. Just what are the characteristics of our era and what exactly is the type of attitude that transmutes mere aspects into icons?

* I'm lifting Roberta Smith's most appropriate use of magpie in her recent review.