Picasso at the Brooklyn Museum: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The art and artists do the heavy lifting while the curators, among them an Aussie comic, go trite and tiresome.

I t’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby is the new, much contested exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I like the Brooklyn Museum. It’s had a crazy trajectory over its 125-year history. It has morphed from a staid high-establishment museum in a McKim, Mead & White pile to cutting-edge, bleeding-edge, and populist adventures, perennially broke, now woke, with a lovely collection, and what I think is a needed role in the reappraisal of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) 50 years after his death. Pablo-matic isn’t a bad — or awful or seditious or dumb — exhibition. It’s worth seeing.

“Pablo Picasso, like our audiences, can handle complexity,” said the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, as scalding reviews poured from that Parnassus where critics scribble. The museum’s digital communications director wrote, “Come at us, haters.” One of the curators said male critics felt threatened to the point of twisted knickers.

As in all things, I am the voice of measured moderation. My untwisted knickers are iconic. Pablo-matic is what it is. It’s part revelation, part pretense, part grift, and part delicious.

Pablo-matic has three components, more or less mixed together. There are about 50 Picasso paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures from early in his career to the late ’40s. Picasso created about 20,000 works of art, so it’s safe to say that cherry-pickers can make any point they want. The handful of paintings are good. Most are from the Picasso Museum in Paris, the more or less official sponsor of the Picasso-50th-anniversary program of shows. Picasso’s a painter but, like Whistler, Goya, and Dürer, also an extraordinary draftsman and printmaker. His Vollard Suite, published in 1939, is Pablo-matic’s anchor work. That’s his series of Minotaur etchings.

Second, there’s a selection from the Brooklyn Museum’s first-rate collection of contemporary art by women. Unlike most big-city museums, which tended to shun art by women, the Brooklyn Museum bought the best moments after the paint or ink or darkroom developing gunk dried. The Gorilla Girls, Joan Semmel, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, May Stevens, Mickalene Thomas, and many others. These are all very good artists, many in peak feminist mode. I am woman, hear me roar. That’s not a bad thing.

Then there’s Gadsby (b. 1978). She’s an Australian stand-up comic, TV-show writer, and professional victim. The exhibition’s inspired by Nanette, her 2018 stage performance. I watched it on Netflix, in the spirit of both thorough journalism and “so you don’t have to.” Clips of it are in a small, comfortable video gallery in the exhibition. “I haaayyyte Picaaaassow” is her exhibition-making, thickly Aussie line, though her take on Picasso comes toward the end. She thinks Picasso is a seducer, a misogynist, and a psycho-cad.

Gadsby’s a wide-arsed, in-your-face, rude-and-crude lesbian from Tasmania who dresses in a dark pantsuit like Kamala Harris always wears but speaks coherent sentences. Shock of shocks, since I don’t know much about hip culture, I had never heard of her, though she co-wrote the Netflix series Please Like Me, which I watched and thought charming until its “let’s celebrate abortion” episode. Nada mas. Silly me. Didn’t see it coming.

Gadsby uses “they/them” pronouns, as if one of her isn’t plenty enough.

In Nanette, she mugs and rolls her eyes when she says “Cuuubbism” and claims that the elite art world is a big swindle. “I’m going to call it, guys . . . It’s bullshit.” And so is Picasso and the cult of macho male genius surrounding him.

Gadsby’s not my cuppa. Nanette isn’t funny, first of all. Like most stand-up comedy in our dreary, anxious age, after a while it sounds like a funeral. Gadsby, though, is easy to put to one side. The Brooklyn Museum wants to look edgy. It’s in the shadow of Manhattan’s Museum Mile and needs to clamor for attention. Gadsby-as-curator got it, though she was very closely supervised and mentored by two in-house curators. The exhibition has no catalogue, so it disappears into the ether the minute it closes. It does no harm and, often, much good.

It’s easy to ignore her, in part because the art’s so good, misogyny in the art world is real, not so much now but certainly in the past, and Picasso’s own words and images are, well, here and there problematic.

Pablo-matic is in galleries right by the museum’s entrance. They’re cozy, packed with art, and dark, since so much of the work is on paper. I think some visitors would call the space claustrophobic, even subterranean, as if we’re excavating a tomb. In a way, we are. Picasso, born in 1881, is a historical figure now. It’s hard to imagine today, but as a young man, he smashed, then remade, the very notion of what art was and could be. Tomato-red, rich blue, and eggplant wall colors evoke a weird, older world and work well. Wall colors lighten as the exhibition features more contemporary work.

The exhibition starts with a massive painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II, from 2018, displayed over its entrance. It’s a dazzling, splendid thing, 26 feet wide. It looks totally abstract until we look closely, which, alas, is impossible since the picture hangs 15 feet from the floor. I saw it when it was displayed at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018, at Brian-level.

The expression “bonfire of the vanities” dates to the austere monk Savonarola’s rule of Florence in 1497, when local Dominicans demanded the incineration of jewelry, cosmetics, furs, and lascivious thoughts. Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel revived it in his story of hubris among a slice of Manhattan’s elites. Brown envisions vanity’s triumph, with vague figures in white gloves and black ties groping in operatic frenzy. Portraits of Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Donald Trump are there, stomping or getting stomped.

Brown’s pictorial vision starts with Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, from 1827, as well as work by Rubens and Bosch, both no slouches in depicting an orgy. Insofar as Pablo-matic is concerned, Brown suggests that vanity was, traditionally, mostly a woman’s evil. Its abuse was the work of the patriarchy, and so was its suppression. Today, the table’s not exactly turned, but life’s a free-for-all.

Is it relevant? No and yes. So much of Pablo-matic is a litany of “Me Too” grievances, with which Brown’s not too concerned, and her painting is hard to read, given where it hangs. That said, Triumph of the Vanities II is new to the museum, a gift in honor of Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, and must be seen as a very good 800-pound gorilla not easily placed given its size. And the label introduces the duality of Pablo-matic. Brown comes not to bury Picasso but to praise him.

There are lots of artist and critic quotes in the exhibition, which is good. “Picasso invents and invents and invents,” Brown writes. “You’ll see 300 drawings of a hand and the way he says ‘hand’ is different every time. . . . There’s a shorthand to the way he sees the body that’s this mystery thing.” No one can argue with that. Picasso’s lines — his doodles — may or may not be the stuff of genius, but they’re surely a gift from the gods.

The show gets to meat and potatoes with work by the Guerrilla Girls, the women’s artist collective from the ’80s and early ’90s. Their 1990 poster, “Code of Ethics for an Art Museum,” is there. “Thou shalt admit to the Public that words like genius, masterpiece, priceless, seminal, potent, tough, gritty, and powerful are used solely to prop up the Myth and increase the Market Value of White Make Artists” is among the mandates listed on a faux-Mosaic tablet. “Thou shalt not give more than 3 retrospectives to any Artist whose Dealer is the brother of the Chief Curator” is another. “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met Museum” from 1989 shows the image of an Ingres odalisque painted in 1814 wearing a gorilla mask. It’s a comment on the absence of women artists in the Met’s collection.

Next to the Guerrilla Girls’ work is a Philip Pearlstein portrait of Linda Nochlin, the art historian, and her new husband, Richard Pommer, from 1968. Nochlin, a Courbet scholar, wrote an essay in 1971 about why women artists were so invisible in museums and the art market. She faulted Picasso not for his part in a culture of machismo but for his view of women as “mere objects either of obsessive lust or sheer contempt.” In Pearlstein’s portrait, Nochlin is foregrounded, wearing a mini skirt and looking large and in charge. Pommer leans languidly in the background in a fragile wicker chair.

Kaleta Doolin (b. 1950) throws the gauntlet down in Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2, from 2017. H. W. Janson’s History of Art, first published in 1962, was a seminal, influential survey of Western art, used by millions of college students. It didn’t illustrate a work by a woman artist until 1986, when it included Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, owned by the Brooklyn Museum. Doolin’s sculpture from 2017 starts with Janson’s book, into which she carves an opening in the shape of a vulva.

The next gallery takes us to Picasso, who both needs no introduction and does. Very few of us under, say, 70 remember Picasso the icon, legend, hedonist, and artist. An artsy type, I do, but I’m sui generis. The front cover of a special issue of Life from December 27, 1968, entitled, simply, “Picasso,” establishes what Gadsby calls the “myth” that was the man.

Yes, he’d long been an art celebrity and called a genius, a fraud, a Communist, a lunatic, a womanizer, and the century’s greatest artist. A few works by Picasso treat his famous periods from rose to Cubist, primitivist, classical, Surreal, historicist, and back and forth. These things are modest but do the trick without overwhelming the show’s theme. Works by Louise Nevelson and Käthe Kollwitz pay tribute to Picasso’s inspiration. Nevelson says she places Picasso, with Einstein, among “the peaks of humanity.” One of the essays in the Life issue deals with the women in Picasso’s life, asking without guile “when does he find time to paint.”

Among Pablo-matic’s flaws is the absence of his fantastic work, mostly on paper but also sculpture, from the ’60s and into the ’70s. These include his 60 Series, from 1966, 347 Series, from 1968, 156 Series, from 1971, his 66 etchings illustrating a 1971 edition of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, first published in 1499. Many of these prints are exceedingly priapic but, like the work of many great artists, wistful, raging, poignant, and gut-wrenching. I don’t feel cheated. After all, we get a deep dive into the Vollard Suite and Picasso as the horny Minotaur in his prime, but without the late work, we hardly get the full picture.

Françoise Gilot (1921–2023) was Picasso’s mistress from 1943 to 1953 and the mother of two of his children. In her 1964 memoir of her years with Picasso, Gilot quoted the artist’s take on the Minotaur. “They know they’re monsters, but they live like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence,” she said he said. The Minotaurs — there’s more than one — host parties for local girls “and everyone gorges himself on mussels and Champagne until melancholy fades away and euphoria takes over,” Picasso said. “And then it’s an orgy.”

Gilot’s a decent artist and, unlike Picasso’s other women, or muses, she left him. I’d take what she wrote with a grain of salt. At this point, though, I wished Gadsby would just disappear. Her comments are that dumb. Picasso “has abandonment issues.” Of a Picasso lithograph of a reclining couple, she asks, “Is she actually reclining, or has she been dropped from a great height?”

Of a nude painted in 1932, Gadsby deplores “the way her breasts can look like a sideways owl and two donuts — at the same time.” And “it must have been very hot in Paris in the 1930s,” she says, wondering why Picasso depicts so many nude women. I’ll add “Worst. Hemorrhoid. Ever.” — Gadsby’s take on another Vollard Suite etching. This is juvenile.

Of a Picasso bullfighting print, depicting a woman toreador, the exhibition notes its conflation of death, eroticism, sacrifice, and brutality. Gadsby throws in the towel –“If PETA can’t cancel Picasso, no one can.” She’s on to something, finally.

Gradually, she fades from the scene, diminished by some very good work by women such as Joan Semmel (b. 1932), whose Intimacy-Autonomy, from 1974, is one of the best things in the show not by Picasso. It’s a female nude but also a male nude, both post-sex, both headless, but with their bodies tilted so the viewer imagines his or her head on their bodies.

And this is from 1974! This was not so much as a year after Picasso’s death, but how quickly feminism accelerated from the early ’60s, when stereotypes of women still seemed set, to the early ’70s. Semmel describes a nude, insofar as art’s concerned, as a naked woman seen by an artist and disguised or manipulated as an object. She paints naked people, real and with no subterfuges.

Of Picasso, Semmel says, “I have always loved his work and marveled at the ground it’s broken, opening new ways of seeing.” I think hers is the consensus among the women artists in the exhibition. Rachel Kneebone’s porcelain Paradise of Despair, from 2011, is a large sculpture quoting from Dante and Rodin. There’s not a single intact, full human figure. Rather, we see lots of body parts in a bizarre orgy.

I like some of May Stevens’s work but not her Big Daddy Paper Doll, from 1970. It’s a surrogate portrait of her father, who was, the label tells us, racist, sexist, antisemitic, pro-war, and pro-establishment. His phallic, bullet-shaped figure “represents the ignorant violence of capitalist, imperialist patriarchy,” a label reads. Some curatorial distance, please. It should read “represents what the artist sees as” and then rant to follow.

It reminds me of Philip Guston’s KKK figures. Some artists — and some curators — need to give the blunt-object treatment a rest.

And what, pray, does this have to do with Picasso? Nothing, except the exhibition wants us, now and then, to think of Picasso as the poster child of this capitalist, imperialist patriarchy, but the women artists don’t seem to buy this iteration of the Brooklyn Bridge that the curators are selling. I see Stevens’s work as a measure of women’s liberation, and its relevance in the show, in one respect only. Women can be artists, and they don’t have to be artists who only paint babies.

I would have ditched work by Howardena Pindell and Betye Saar since there’s enough protest art in the show. Catherine Opie, Lisa Yuskavage, Petah Coyne, Sue Williams, and Sally Mann do their own thing, not in any particular reaction to anyone or any outdated way of thinking. Isn’t that what we want? Didn’t Picasso, a radical artist at his most glorious, do the same thing?

Greek and Roman mythology, like the Bible and Shakespeare, isn’t well known today, but the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Jupiter and Semele — all Picasso subjects — were once the stuff of high and low art. They figure in Picasso’s work, as they did in the art of most Italian Old Masters, and the exhibition is a feast of Picasso’s mythological subjects. A primer would help visitors understand that these stories are not all about rape, or even much about rape as we understand it today. The Greek myths are the seminal stories of human depravity, powerlessness, and ambition. It’s always good to give them airtime.

Early in the exhibition, the art historian Linda Nochlin is quoted as complaining that Picasso’s problem wasn’t his part in a culture of machismo. Rather, it’s his “lack of awareness” of his vision of women as “a simple matter of a man’s needs and desire’s and a woman’s submission to them.” The simple, or simplistic, thing is her view of Picasso. Regarding his own relationships with women, Picasso comments with more eloquence and complexity. “In my love affairs,” he says, “there’s always been a lot of gnashing and suffering: two bodies entangled in barbed wire, rubbing against each other, tearing themselves to bits.” The artists, not the curators, not Nochlin, and certainly not Gadsby and her yukety-yuk shtick, seem better equipped to see Picasso as an onion with infinite layers.

Kiki Smith (b. 1954), a very good artist, is in the exhibition. Las Animas, or “The Souls,” is a photogravure montage self-portrait showing her aging skin, body hair, bulges, and mood swings. It’s from 1997 and a bold, frank work. “As a printmaker, I know very few who can get anywhere near Picasso’s depth of understanding and playfulness,” she says. “I was once asked by an auction house to speak on Picasso prints, and to speak critically of him as a person, but I couldn’t. . . . His prints left me humbled.”

Picasso, at the end of the exhibition, seems to recede into history. Those damning quotes — “women are either goddesses or doormats, “women are machines for suffering,” “every time I change wives, I should burn the last one” — seem to matter very little. This brings me back to Picasso’s late work. At the end of his life, Picasso’s print series are essentialist. They plumb the topics that mean the most to him.

That’s women, and there are lots of nudes, a surfeit of vaginas and big breasts, in fact. There’s also Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya, and their subjects, lots of Greek mythology, seen through the lens of the Old Masters and, then, by Picasso, his hero, Mariano Fortuny, and celestinas and harlequins. Picasso’s as boundless as an artist can be, but in many ways he’s a product of the 19th century.

One of his last works is the etching The Fall of Icarus, from 1972. Icarus, seizing wings his father had made from feathers, beeswax, and old blankets, flew the contraption like a bird, ignoring his father’s command to stay far from the sun. The hubristic Icarus flew too close, melting the beeswax that held the wing parts together, and fell to his death. Picasso was more self-aware than Gadsby thinks, and certainly more than a penis-run-amok. Picasso can indeed handle complexity.

It’s good for visitors — many not knowing much about Picasso — to experience as well as to recognize this for themselves.