Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pablo Picasso
French, Spanish; 20th-century
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Picasso: Tête-à-tête)
88%
Nu drappe, assis dans un fauteuil (Olga). 1923. Oil on canvas
Picasso's "classicist" paintings can feel like bad rehashings of all the moves that led him to cubism, or they can feel like the craftsmanly calm after inspiration's storm. Seldom, though, do they feel like Nu drappe: an achievement of hard, unblemished design worthy of the artist's cherished Ingres, but also a painting that understands itself as a painting and — qua modernism — exhibits this understanding ceaselessly and destructively at every turn. For one, the way the room and the chair tilt one way and the sitter tilts the other as if she's been twisted out of position by some external force. For two, the contradiction between how supply every object's been limned and how flat the space between every line appears. For three, and most important, the vanishing palpability of the paint: it looks like there's a black underpainting over which the cream-white has been thinly layered, such that the picture's whole surface sort of vibrates with self-knowledge and potential while also serving as a perfectly neutral ground for the image. In this way, it's not at all dissimilar from the best portraits of Rembrandt. (TFS, 2025)
Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
87%
Violin. 1911-12. Oil on canvas
The brightness is almost repulsive, but it serves a handful of ends. First, and most simply, it forces you to see this painting not for any accidental niceties, but for its taut relations and the tightwire act of its spatial logic. Second, it allows the "image" (such as it is) to dissipate around the edges of the canvas, without losing any of its hard-won internal coherence (the oval shape of the frame facilitates this as well). Third, it allows for remarkably slight shifts in tone to produce enormous dimensional effects, as when the patch of deep brown just to the left of the painting's true center sets off a spiral sequence of planes pulsing forwards and back, starting with the tall white trapezoid just to its (the brown patch's) right and culminating near the base of the neck of the violin. While this painting lacks the inexplicable, undeniable fulcrum point that much of the best cubism possesses — it's almost the black squiggle at the top, and it's almost that bit of brown I mentioned, but not quite — it nevertheless never falters. A work of refinement despite its difficulty, if not quite an epitome of its style. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
71%
Woman with Mustard Pot. 1910. Oil on canvas
This is just prior to high cubism. The style is still working itself out, and so the painting lacks both the ease of earlier Picasso and the explosive novelty of what was soon to come. Of course, the fragmentation is here, and it's doing interesting things to objects and their umwelt: look at the mustard pot at left, how its mouth tips forward but the base is depthlessly flat, teeing off a muddle of grays and browns behind it. (Are these colors describing the dimensions of the [implied] table, or is its fusion complete with the wall behind and above it?) But there are issues. Picasso's facture is still beholden to modeling. That is, there's no brushwork (except for what makes up the table I just mentioned) that isn't subservient to one particular plane or another — and one of Cubism's great innovations was its consummation of the liberation of handling which Cézanne had begun. This problem doesn't remain local to particular depicted surfaces, but extends into the picture's overall design: that flowing green repoussoir at right seems to indicate that Picasso couldn't yet bear the prospect of opening up his painting to the fact of its own surface; it holds the painting awkwardly inside of itself, despite several indications that it's ready to burst free. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Picasso: Tête-à-tête)
69%
Personnage "Mousquetaire assis". 1972. Oil on canvas
It would be madness to say that a late work like this one (year before he died!) is any legitimate good, but you'd also have to lie to say that it's fully impeachable. Forget the caricaturish eyes and nose and beard, forget the aqueous fingerpaint-y handling, forget the way the linework sits thick atop the picture plane like a bad burrito sits in your stomach. Look at that shard of grey nestled in yellow at the painting's left edge, and how it calls out to the embellishments on the musketeer's face and hands; look at the way the figure's right hand clutches that patch of color, which confuses our sense of what's behind and what's before anything in this picture; look at the depth that's created by the nose and the patch of green behind it leaning off in different directions from a shared point of departure. This thing's an ugly fucking mess, sure, but you can't say Picasso didn't know about design till the last. Even here, he manages to make space seem simultaneously undynamic and bursting at the seams. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Picasso: Tête-à-tête)
62%
Maternité sur fond blanc. 1953. Oil on plywood
It's well-known that Picasso spent decades in decadence, copying himself ceaselessly from his middle age to his death. The point of experiencing his late paintings, then, isn't to take them in as total artworks — they tend to be failures as totalities — but rather to pick them apart, to sift out their moments of inspiration, and to revel in what you can. Here, there's the red right arm of the girl (shouldn't it be yellow?), the sloping lap of her mother, the white space that's bracketed by breasts and arm, and the impossible flatness of the two hands on two shoulders. What do these amount to? Very little, especially given how visually commanding that spilled milk of a background is (it gets in the way, somehow, of any of these discretely charming passages coming together). (TFS, 2025)