range of Picasso's impact on contemporary art as well as the current importance of this ...... illustration art, Baselit
This exhibition examines the responses of contemporary artists to the life and work of Pablo Picasso during the forty years since his death, in which his significance for contemporary artists has been controversial. It addresses the question of whether Picasso continues to be important for contemporary art and considers the variety of ways in which artists are engaging his art. 2nd floor
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As the 58 works in the galleries demonstrate, contemporary artists have reinterpreted the meanings of Picasso’s oeuvre and liberated Picasso’s legacy from the constraints of past ideologies. These artists freely explore and contest Picasso’s status. They do not perceive Picasso as merely a paradigm of the 20th-century European avant-garde, but interpret him as a polyvalent model for artists worldwide to address the global expansion and diversification of contemporary art in the twenty-first century. This exhibition presents the work of 41 artists from around the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America. This diversity reflects the remarkable geographical range of Picasso’s impact on contemporary art as well as the current importance of this engagement, since many of the works were created after 2000. Curator: Michael FitzGerald
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Guernica
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Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
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Late Work
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Cubism
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Blue and Rose Periods
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Surrealism
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Guernica The global impact of Guernica (1937) continues to be immense. Since the early 1970s, the mural’s humanitarian theme and public appeal have particularly inspired artists outside Europe and North America to make work that explores the political challenges of their times, such as continuing violence over civilians in armed conflicts or political or military repression. Some European artists have also examined the legacy of Guernica to pose the question, among others, of whether artists in the twenty-first century can still inspire social change.
Rineke Dijkstra
Ibrahim el-Salahi
Maqbool Fida Husain
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Rineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman)
2009 3-channel HD video; 12 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris
Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Her large-scale color photographs of young, typically adolescent subjects recall 17th-century Dutch painting in their scale and visual acuity. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed. Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The shift of attention from a historical work to the audience’s reception is explicit in Rineke Dijkstra’s twelve-minute video I See a Woman Crying, which shows nine preteen classmates reacting to a reproduction of Picasso’s wartime painting Weeping Woman. Since the three cameras that record the group are set facing them, just as the painting does, the painting itself goes unseen in the video. The edited conversations are projected on three screens; each section zooms and pans across the students, sometimes overlapping with an adjacent section and sometimes resolving the three fields into a comprehensive picture of the entire group. Discussing her choice of Weeping Woman for this work, Dijkstra tied this system of fragmented figures and multiple viewpoints to the precedent of Cubism: “In retrospect it’s nice that this happened to be a painting where you can still see the influence of Cubism, with Dora Maar depicted from various angles in the facets, because ultimately I See a Woman Crying becomes a kaleidoscope of perspectives.” Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Ibrahim el-Salahi Formerly a politician and diplomat, while employed as the deputy undersecretary for culture in Sudan, El-Salahi was falsely accused of anti-government activities in 1975 and imprisoned six months without trial. This experience would significantly change the artist’s life and art, resulting in stark black and white drawings that reference his incarceration and reflect on the trauma of isolation. Much of his postprison work from the 1970s and 1980s, made during his self-imposed exile in Doha, Qatar, and London, England, begins on a single sheet of paper to which he would add panels from a central nucleus. Source: Museum for African Art (New York)
Ibrahim el-Salahi The Inevitable
1984-1985 India ink on nine sheets of Bristol board 211.5 × 238 cm Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art , Cornell University. Acquired through the African Acquisition Fund, a purchase fund established through the exchange of gifts from Mr and Mrs William W. Brill, and other donors
While imprisoned in Khartoum’s abysmal Cooper Prison in 1975, El-Salahi occupied his mind by planning revolutionary works. Given a sharpened toothbrush and protected by inmates, he sketched in the sand during exercise periods, always leveling the ground and burying the stylus before guards discovered his practice (no pencils or paper were allowed). After his release, he left the country and continued working on his oeuvre, and when the Nimieri government was overthrown, in 1985, his work The Inevitable became a celebration of renewed hope for the country. The composition consists of nine cardboard squares drawn on in india ink, with no added color. Besides owing a debt to Guernica, this restriction to black and white reflects El-Salahi’s attention to line as the primary element of his art, a principle he derives from Islamic calligraphy, whose sinuous strokes he modifies, however, to depict the human figure. The Inevitable is an image of subterranean horror overthrown by human endurance. Its scale shifts from the microscopic to the monumental, and from abstraction to figuration, through a constantly varying series of curvilinear shapes and densities of black and white, bounded by the rectilinear frame of each panel El-Salahi hoped that The Inevitable would belong to the Sudanese people, and he has refused to allow it to enter that country until civil liberties are restored there. The choice matches Picasso’s intentions for Guernica, a transfer that finally occurred in 1981, three years before El-Salahi began his work. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Maqbool Fida Husain
Maqbool Fida Husain Mahabharata Project Ganga Jamuna (Mahabharata 12) 1971 Oil on canvas; 177.8 × 304.8 cm The Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
Maqbool Fida Husain [...] was an artist known for executing bold, vibrantly coloured narrative paintings in a modified Cubist style. He was one of the most celebrated and internationally recognized Indian artists of the 20th century. In 1935 Husain moved to Mumbai (Bombay), where he designed and painted graphic billboard advertisements for Bollywood movies. After his first serious work was exhibited (1947) by the Bombay Art Society, he was invited to join five other painters in founding the Progressive Artists Group. Husain, who became known as the “Picasso of India,” created works that could be caustic and funny as well as serious and sombre. His themes—usually treated in series—included topics as diverse as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Indian epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the British raj, and motifs from the Bollywood film scene. Fuente: Enciclopædia Britannica
In 1971, the eleventh São Paulo Bienal invited two artists to participate hors concours: Pablo Picasso and Maqbool Fida Husain. The selection of Picasso reflected not only his worldwide fame but his historic importance for this Brazilian showcase of contemporary art, that almost twenty years earlier, in 1953, had shown fifty-one of his works (among them, the Guernica). [...] In the end, Picasso sent no pictures, but this was Husain’s debut on the world stage, and he took his pairing with Picasso as a defining challenge. [...] He chose a subject from his own culture that equaled the physical presence and humanistic themes of Guernica. “The moment I got the invitation the first thought came to me... Mahabharata this is the right thing. Then I thought of Picasso. . . only Picasso could do it justice, [but] he’d not done it. Let me try.” [...] In choosing the Mahabharata, Husain presented to global culture one of the great Hindu epics. [...] Husain’s challenge was to find a visual conception that could convey the epic’s range and spiritual depth. His paintings do not illustrate events in the Mahabharata as a traditional narrative would, but rather capture its themes in compelling images. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Cubism Even though Cubism was invented more than a century ago, its conceptual nature and its extremely varied systems of representation continue to inspire artists, some by incorporating the grid and merging planes of Analytic Cubism in combination with the large scale of late twentieth-century painting. These art historical references are often combined with imagery drawn from comic books and other aspects of contemporary popular culture, as well as with references that bring forth a reflection on contemporary events.
Zhang Hongtu
George Condo
Guillermo Kuitca
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Zhang Hongtu Born in China in 1943, Zhang survived the Cultural Revolution and emigrated to the United States in 1982, where he eventually became a U.S. citizen. As a Muslim, he feels little connection to mainstream Chinese culture or to the Communist state: “I’m Chinese Muslim.
Zhang Hongtu Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism 2008 Oil on canvas 91.4 × 121.9 cm Collection of the artist
I don’t care about anything pure—pure Chinese culture, or pure European culture. I don’t think anything is pure. I just want to mix, and from that mixture to make something new.” His choice of Cubism to attack the Chinese Communist Party certainly manifests that intellectual flexibility. Like Kuitca, Zhang understands the remarkable freedom that Cubism offers artists, and he marshals the full range of its visual and verbal elements to orchestrate an indictment that thrusts the often arcane hermeticism of Picasso’s practice into the mainstream of contemporary political protest. Zhang’s Bird’s Nest is as much a child of Guernica as it is of the Demoiselles.
Zhang Hongtu’s Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism exploits this range to articulate a remarkable collision between a visual style of the early twentieth century and the politics of the twenty-first. Asked to prepare a work for an exhibition to be held at the German embassy in Beijing during the 2008 summer Olympics, Zhang chose the style of high Analytic Cubism for an ironic comment on the event’s central feature, the purpose-built stadium known as the “Bird’s Nest.” To deconstruct this icon both physically and ideologically, he used the geometric elements, somber palette, and fugitive passages of Cubism: besides repeating fragmentary schemas of the stadium, he borrowed Picasso’s and Braque’s resort to numbers and language to augment the ambiguity of their nearly abstract fields, and his texts drive home his criticisms of the Chinese government, which promoted the Beijing Olympics as a showcase of China’s success. [...] Source (both texts): exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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George Condo
George Condo Compression VI
2011 Acrylic, charcoal on linen 205.7 × 279.4 cm Private Collection
Condo developed a unique painting style, employing the virtuoso draftsmanship and paint handling of the old masters to depict subject matter that sprang largely from his imagination. In the context of early 1980s New York, Condo’s paintings—which he called “fake old masters”—displayed a provocative untimeliness. [...] Over the next two decades, he went on to explore an astonishing variety of aesthetic territories, from Mannerist ornamentalism to Picasso-esque Cubism, drawing from Diego Velázquez to Looney Tunes. Possessed of an enormous memory bank of art historical references, Condo synthesized these past pictorial languages and motifs to create, as he put it, “composites of various psychological states painted in different ways.” Condo is exceptionally prolific and has produced an enormous body of work since the beginning of the 1980s. Source: The New Museum
George Condo’s recent painting Compression VI (2011) is a summation of his nearly thirty-year fascination with Picasso’s many styles and their relations to the history of painting. Compression VI does not sum up, but rather accumulates a wide and contradictory range of motifs, all densely massed and consummately interwoven, as the title suggests. Condo’s exploration of the Cubist grid’s capacity to integrate disparate anatomies and cultural references stretches from the pioneering compositions of Picasso and Braque to Willem de Kooning’s “figurative abstractions” of the late 1940s and early ’50s. In the 1980s, Condo turned his attention to Picasso a few years later than his friend Basquiat. Once he began, though, he enveloped Picasso in an embrace that surpasses all other contemporary artists in the range and depths he plumbs and the longevity of his grip. [...] Condo’s most remarkable feat is not his ability to absorb virtually every nuance of Picasso’s styles, but his ability to escape them. By understanding Picasso’s art so thoroughly, he forges an art that both looks to the past and is richly intertwined with life in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Guillermo Kuitca
Guillermo Kuitca Untitled
2007-2008 Oil on canvas 195 × 381 cm Friedrich Christian Flick Collection
Since his first exhibition at the age of thirteen, Guillermo Kuitca (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961) has forged a distinctive path as an artist, creating visually compelling works that reflect his intense and often ambivalent relationship to his primary medium: painting. [...] Since the early 1980s, the artist’s work has been characterized by recurring imagery, most notably spatial and mapping motifs. Central among these are images of theater sets and seating charts, architectural plans, road maps, beds, numerical sequences, and baggage-claim carousels, through which Kuitca explores universal themes of migration and disappearance, the intersection of private and public space, and the importance of memory. His prolific career encompasses a diverse body of work that inspires viewers not only to contemplate their relationship to the piece in front of them, but also to their place within individual spaces and the larger world. Source: The Hirshhorn Museum
Kuitca arrived at his Cubist technique unexpectedly, but Cubism and its progeny became a primary subject of the series. Perhaps reflecting the heavily worked surface of the first of these paintings, Desenlace I, he confided, “The past hundred years seemed to me a very dense space in relation to which I wanted to position myself, but not in the sense of a Postmodernist citation or a pastiche, or even in an ironical way. There is humor in the works, but they are not ironical.” This meditation on the past century took two primary directions: engagement with European artists or movements that derived from Cubism, and reconsideration of the history of Latin American artists’ relationship to Cubism, [which] mainly came to South America at mid-century, in a wave that swept through many of the continent’s countries with such success that it became the equivalent of an academic style for artists wishing to be modern. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) remains a primary focus for artists who examine two of the most important issues of contemporary art: the question of how we judge originality in modern Western art, and the complex questions of multi-cultural relations in the current world. The extensive response of African artists to Picasso’s use of the art of non-Western cultures is central to the exhibition. Through the artist’s work, the issue of the position of African artists in the contemporary world is addressed, as well as the process of the West’s interaction with Africa is critically reviewed.
Calixte Dakpogan
Chéri Samba
Fred Wilson
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Calixte Dakpogan Calixte Dakpogan’s Vodun heritage is intrinsic to his work. Born to a family of blacksmiths, he grew up in the Goukoumé district of Porto Novo, Benin, a district dedicated to Ogun, the god of iron and protector of cars [...]. The abundance of car wreckages in Porto Novo has provided Calixte Dakpogan with an inexhaustible source of materials. Together with his brother Théodore, he began to use scavenged car parts to create standing figures, following directly in the tradition of Fon statues made from scrap iron in the early nineteenth century. [...] Since 1990, Calixte has worked independently, using salvaged metallic and plastic elements to create anthropomorphic figures and masks. [...] His creations, full of talent, humour, and stories, are imbued with a contemporary imagination and an astounding inventiveness. Source: Contemporary African Art Collection
Calixte Dakpogan Death Standing Up (Resuscitated) 2002 Steel, metal, ceramic, plastic, glass, rubber and other found materials 59 × 40 × 29 cm CAAC - The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva
The issues of the Demoiselles, both stylistic and expressive, remain embedded in African and other non-Western artists’ interpretations of the subject that connected Picasso to African art in the first place: the mask. [...] Dakpogan scavenges car parts and other discarded materials to construct masks such as La mort debout (Death Standing: Resuscitated), works that often address history and mortality through both their titles and their use of reclaimed objects: “I work with recovered materials,” Dakpogan has said, “since they are weighed down by time and transformed by usage.” This sense of history extends from the artist’s immediate situation to the global environment: “All of my sculptures speak of my country, my culture, my surroundings, and my beliefs, as well as the entirety of my worldview.” In a sense, Dakpogan passes through Picasso’s appropriation of African masks in the Demoiselles, and the innovations of modernist sculpture, to create his own masks as a critique of Western interaction with Africa. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Fred Wilson Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954, and lives and works in New York. Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands [...]. Thus, Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections—including wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning[...] He questions (and forces the viewer to question) how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display—and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express. [...] Source: PBS Art 21
Fred Wilson Picasso/Whose Rules?
1991 Photography, mask, video 241.3 × 196.9 × 17.8 cm Matthew & Iris Strauss Family Foundation, Rancho Santa Fe, California
To attack Picasso’s appropriation of African art, Wilson used appropriation himself, presenting a full-size photographic reproduction of Picasso’s painting. On top of the work’s most explicit rendition of an African mask, Wilson placed an actual mask of the Kifwebe people, whose shape and color highlight its differences from Picasso’s simulation. As viewers examine the Kifwebe mask, they are drawn to its eye slits, which frame a monitor showing a video Wilson made of himself—an African-American—and other non-Europeans, including Africans, reflecting on the ways in which European modernism is dependent on African cultural motifs, and suggesting that the full story of modernism has yet to be told. The confrontation Wilson stages between the Demoiselles and contemporary African cultures aggressively contests the deracination of African art that was common in the practice of early-twentiethcentury European artists [...]. By asking “whose rules” now apply, Wilson constructed a message of empowerment for the people of non-Western cultures whom we see through the eyes of the Kifwebe mask. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Chéri Samba
Chéri Samba Quel avenir pour notre art?
1997 Acrylic and glitter on canvas 130 × 195 cm 132 × 203 × 4 cm 131 × 195 cm CAAC - The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva
Born in Congo, Samba began as a sign painter, as can be seen in his use of image and text. His pieces comment on urban Africa and Paris in a moral and cautionary sense, as seen in Mosali Nzela (1991; Geneva, Jean Pigozzi priv. col.). Skilled in naturalistic rendering, he occasionally exaggerates features, underscoring his moral lesson. His paintings are usually crowded with varied moving figures, as seen in Grace na tata Mobutu (1986). Self-portraits are frequent, and his palette is bright and cheerful. He uses French, English, Lingala and a French patois to narrate his pictures, often over much of their surfaces, and has said, ‘The texts that I introduce on my canvases translate the thoughts of the people I depict in a given situation. It is a way of not allowing freedom of interpretation to a person who looks at my painting. For me, my work is incomplete if there aren’t any texts; they symbolize the fantasy.’ Source: Museum of Modern Art
Samba’s triptych Quel avenir pour notre art? (What future for our art?) is his most complex meditation on the situation of contemporary African artists [...]. It focuses explicitly on Picasso’s legacy. Each canvas combines realistically painted images with texts (in two cases extensive commentaries on the scene represented). Like many African artists, Samba prefers realism to abstraction, both because of its easier legibility for diverse audiences and because in African countries, abstract art is often associated with the art training of the late colonial period. His engagement with Picasso is primarily conceptual. [...] His focus in this work extends beyond Picasso’s individual actions to the position of African art in global culture. His choice of subject reflects the common conception of Picasso as both the foremost Western modern artist and the primary one to engage with nonWestern cultures, particularly African cultures. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions, Michael FitzGerald
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Blue and Rose Periods More than a century after Picasso created his Blue and Rose works, artists in the first decades of the twenty-first century are making this art the focus of some of the most searching explorations of contemporary experience. Unlike critics who have sometimes criticized the Blue and Rose works for their sentimentality and beauty, these artists respond to the biting contrast between Picasso’s exquisite rendering and his dejected subjects of poor, dispossessed workers – emblems of the economic inequities of our time. Picasso’s meditations on artists’ problematic relation to society through the theatrical characters of saltimbanques and harlequins are adapted by artists to analyze the artists’ current situation in our society of media celebrity and commercial exchange.
Vik Muniz
Rachel Harrison
Folkert de Jong
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Vik Muniz Brazilian artist Vik Muniz radically transforms our understanding of image-making by using shifts in scale, photographic manipulation and unexpected materials — from dust and chocolate to grains of sand and industrial garbage — to explore the nature of visual cognition. He is known for his deep exploration of visual perception and reproductive technologies, informed by the history of science and art. [...] Source: Arts at MIT
At first glance, Isis appears to be a rough copy of Woman Ironing, one that outlines the figure and densely fills the field surrounding her. A close examination discloses, however, that the formal elements are not lines or daubs of color but objects, specifically worn pots, shoes, bottles, and cans. Scaled to the size of Picasso’s painting, Isis is the photographic record of an assemblage of materials culled from the Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in South America, laid out on the floor of a large warehouse and then photographed from above. Vik Muniz Woman Ironing (Isis).
From the series “Pictures of Garbage” 2008 Digital C-Print 253.74 × 180.34 cm Burger Collection, Hong Kong
Muniz collaborated with a team of men and women who earned their living by collecting recyclable materials from the Jardim, who also posed for photographs that served as the basis of the assemblages, thereby converting the historic images into versions drawn from contemporary life. A woman named Isis Rodrigues Garros, who had ended up working at the landfill after her life collapsed, became the woman ironing [...]. What first appears as a casual-looking homage to Woman Ironing, then, ultimately draws the viewer into a careful examination of the photograph and slowly divulges how seriously Muniz has engaged the theme of Picasso’s painting, projecting it into the lives of urban laborers today. [...] Muniz’s project benefited Isis and her co-workers in a very real way: they received the proceeds from the sale of a set of the photographs. [...] Muniz had found a way to remove Picasso’s painting from the isolation imposed on it by fame and to revive its compelling image, one that transforms the toil of one individual into an icon of humanity’s suffering. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Rachel Harrison Rachel Harrison’s work draws from a wide range of influence, wittily combining art historical and pop cultural references through a diverse play of materials. Grotesque and funny, Harrison’s humour derives from its carefully structured, yet open-ended suggestion, each element building up to a plausible punch line. Using visual language as a subversive tool, Harrison [...] appropriates styles and motifs with subtle knowingness, wielding artistic process as a mode of investigation. Source: The Saatchi Gallery
Rachel Harrison Sops for Cerberus
2008 Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, fake carrots, projector, speakers, DVD player, framed mixed media on inkjet print, and Vanity Fare video, 6 min (2007) 156 × 169 × 79 cm Allison and Warren Kanders
Harrison assimilates Picasso’s Harlequins into her sculpture. The work suggests a pile of boxes wrapped in a painted patern, that of Harlequin’s diamonds, and Harrison took the specific color scheme of red, yellow, and green (along with blue) from the Harlequin in At the Lapin Agile (1905), which she had studied many times in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The repetitive design unifies the irregular structure and this interplay of similar shapes in both two and three dimensions, both painted and real, creates an ambiguous presence that is matched by the exchange between real and virtual performances that it projects. She took the sculpture’s title from a New York Times essay that discussed a private equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, the multiheaded watchdog Cerberus who guarded the way to Hades in Greek myth, and the phrase “sops for Cerberus,” meaning “‘an insignificant price to pay for averting much discomfort.” To her title’s interweaving of classical Greek mythology with the contemporary worlds of commerce and politics, Harrison adds film, building into the work loudspeakers and a projector. Hollywood’s pirate fantasies collide with financiers’ self-mythologizing and the pitches of a street salesman, all wrapped in the theatrical costume of Harlequin. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions”, Michael FitzGerald
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Folkert de Jong Folkert de Jong’s world is peopled with circus artists, soldiers, art collectors, Indian gods, mountain climbers, little dancers, heads of state, sunbathing girls and skeletons. The figurative installations devised by de Jong, which are anchored in the (often mysterious) history or meaning of a location, combine an ironic reference to the Old Masters with a large dose of the present. He brings together historic figures or situations with a contemporary visual language or objects. Fiercely beautiful figures have ambiguous relationships with each other and with their environment. Folkert de Jong Circle of Trust. Scene 4. (The Apprentice; Circle of Trust II; The Banjo Player; Family Secret; Red Mary; “Laura” Hope, Love and Faith) 2007 Styrofoam, polyurethane foam, pigment 1.5 m (each); 400 × 250 × 180 cm (group of sculptures) Collection Martin Z. Margulies, Miami
With regard to materials, Folkert de Jong usually goes for massproduced substances rarely found in art, like polystyrene or composite foam. They are not meant to be eternal, neither are they environmentally friendly: precisely the unsettling properties that interest the artist. The worthless material is given huge appeal thanks to the precise execution of the work and the smart use of colour. Source: Middelheim Museum
De Jong’s sculpture re-creates and deepens the relationships of the characters in Family of Saltimbanques without copying Picasso’s painting into three dimensions, embracing a historic masterpiece in order to propel its meanings into contemporary life. Some figures share the static poses seen in the painting but others perform, blending private and public lives more directly. By constructing figures from ill-fitting sections and disjointed limbs, de Jong introduces a grotesque strangeness into the group. The use of minutely casted and moulded Styrofoam and polyurethane add a startling experience to the sculptures. The bright colours contrast with “the immorality of the materials”, which cause environmental damage by their longevity and contributions to climate change[...]. Like Picasso’s denatured icons, de Jong’s figures have an explicit artificiality and exaggeration that intensifies their expressiveness while also affirming their falsity. Orchestrating disturbing encounters with grotesque versions of Picasso’s sad performers and channeling Picasso’s historic themes, he locates artists at the center of a very contemporary problem and explores the conflicted role of the artist as an entertainer in the petrochemical age. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Late Work During Picasso’s last decades, his great fame and commercial success prompted doubts about his artistic achievements. His reputation as the leading artist of the twentieth century became controversial, and painting seemed less important for contemporary art. In the years following Picasso’s death, however, the remarkable freedom of his late technique and his courageous depiction of old age have caused his last work to be widely acclaimed. Reflections on this image of Picasso as an artist known more for his celebrity than for his art coexist in the work of some artists that consider Picasso’s late style as a precedent for combining traditional painting techniques with the crude marks of graffiti.
Maurizio Cattelan
Marisol Escobar
Andy Warhol
Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Maurizio Cattelan Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures that reveal contradictions at the core of today’s society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing critique of authority and the abuse of power. Source: The Guggenheim Museum
Maurizio Cattelan Untitled
1998 Cibachrome print face mounted 182.9 × 228.6 cm Courtesy of Maurizio Cattelan and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
Maurizio Cattelan produced what may be the ultimate parody of the MoMA/Picasso paradigm in an exhibition at the Museum in 1998. [...] Cattelan designed a costume featuring a gargantuan enlargement of Picasso’s head and a replica of the shirt. For the run of the show, an actor wearing this costume interacted with visitors. Performing like a carnival character, he became the Museum’s mascot, greeting visitors, posing for photographs, and signing autographs. As Cattelan explained, Picasso was “the greatest magician and entertainer in twentiethcentury artistic practice”—pointedly not the greatest artist, Cattelan implied, but his characterization captures a common view of Picasso during his last years. By choosing to represent Picasso in his seventies, Cattelan deftly blunted Picasso’s authority; he masked Picasso’s early, pioneering career with the image of his later decades, considerably less respected at the time. Besides poking fun at Picasso as MoMA’s signature artist, Cattelan called attention to MoMA’s self-promotion as a tourist attraction and to the art-world tendency to glorify celebrity artists. In the process, he augmented his fame and the Museum displayed an unexpected sense of humor about itself. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Marisol Escobar French sculptor of Venezuelan descent. Escobar’s images of contemporary culture, at once deadpan and satirical in tone, were produced in the context of Pop art; the personal, enigmatic, often primitive elements of her work, however, set it apart from the mainstream of the movement.[...] Source: The MoMA
Marisol Escobar’s Picasso is one of a series of sculptures this Venezuelan artist made in the late 1970s to honor artists she particularly admired, including Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Martha Graham. Each shows its subject in advanced age, and seated, because Marisol Escobar felt she needed to give the artists a place to rest in that stage of their lives.
Marisol Escobar Picasso
1977 Bronze 134.6 × 73.7 × 73.7 cm Apostolatos Family Collection
Her depiction of Picasso emphasizes his age through his deep-set, fearful eyes and the scarlike grooves crisscrossing his face. This evidence of decline, however, is offset by his sturdy legs and the solid timber supporting his massive head. Only a roughly carved heart, pierced by a nail, protrudes from this block. The hands are more ambiguous: disconnected from the torso, they rest flatly on his knees or on the chair’s armrests, as if they were no longer functional. Yet the pair is doubled, seemingly capable of superhuman feats. This haunting portrait captures Picasso at the end of his life, but rather than ridiculing him it evokes respect for his perseverance. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Andy Warhol [...] Derived from popular culture, Pop art revolutionized the art scene in the late 1950s. From telephones to soup cans, what made things pop was their everyday flavor and familiarity. Prior to the pop explosion, art was assumed to be something highbrow. Pop artists, however, loved the banal--the things that Warhol said, “anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second.” The world of Pop that engaged Warhol was distinctly American and reflected the burgeoning commercialism and vitality of post World War II America. Source: The Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol Head (After Picasso)
1985 Synthetic polymer on canvas 127 × 127 cm Galerie Thaddeus Ropac , Paris-Salzburg
The 1980s exhibitions of Picasso’s late work helped a growing number of artists to put aside the commonplace visions of Picasso’s late years as an older, irrelevant artist, and they begun to be won over, by both the pictures themselves and the impassioned advocacy of the curators, especially Gert Schiff, who held back nothing: Picasso was a genius. He was also a man endowed with an ardent soul, with passions and drives stronger and more persistent than those of most ordinary humans. To the last, he poured all his impassioned humanity into his art. Thus, his last works teach us something that cannot be deduced from the more detached works of other giants in their old age. Schiff’s exhibition presented a radically different Picasso, one who challenged Western painting traditions from within rather than by raiding other cultures. Among the artists whose eyes were opened was Andy Warhol, who, in both an acknowledgment of his longstanding respect for Picasso and a challenge to that artist’s phenomenal productivity, returned to wielding a brush in a large series of paintings based on reproductions of Picasso’s late serial drawings. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled (Pablo Picasso)
1984 Oil, acrylic and oil sticks on metal; 90.5 × 90.5 cm Private Collection, Italy
Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums internationally, but he died prematurely at the age of 27 in 1988. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992. Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies,” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a “springboard to deeper truths about the individual”, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. Source: The Whitney Museum of American Art
In 1981, Basquiat made a crucial change from graffitist to selfconscious artist, in a redefinition of his art from one based on scrawled phrases and calligraphic gestures surrounding minimal images to a grand figurative style, in which broadly painted, monumental bodies often dominate the canvases or backboards they share with texts. This transformation of subject matter and style coincided with Basquiat’s serious attention to the late work of Picasso’s that was shown that very same year. One of Basquiat’s strategies was to portray artists, athletes, and musicians he admired. In Untitled (Pablo Picasso), as if to dispell any doubt about the identity of the subject, or about Basquiat’s fascination with him, “PABLO PICASSO” is printed seven times. An inscription across the figure’s chest, “PICASSO AS A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD,” keys the image, yet this is not simply a portrait of Picasso as a teenager. While the face is youthful, the striped shirt wrapping the torso evokes the sailor’s jersey adopted by many artists to represent an elderly Picasso. Basquiat’s portrait addresses the long sweep of Picasso’s career through an almost schizophrenic portrayal that shuttles between youth and old age. Probably Basquiat was comparing his own remarkable early success to Picasso’s, and perhaps contemplating what his own end might be. In fact the figure’s broad nose and unkempt black hair bear a strong resemblance to Basquiat[...]. Ultimately this is a self-portrait, Basquiat’s contemplation of himself through a revered predecessor—the same strategy Picasso used to measure his success throughout his career. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Surrealism Picasso’s exploration of Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s has stimulated a remarkable variety of artists to explore depictions of sexuality and creativity as uninhibited and constantly changing processes. These responses range from examinations into the unlimited potential of the imagination, to conceptions of art as an overwhelming force of transformation, as well as explorations on the interaction of the spontaneous and planned in the creative process.
Georg Baselitz
Hany Armanious
Atul Dodiya
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Georg Baselitz In the 1960s Georg Baselitz emerged as a pioneer of German NeoExpressionist painting. His work evokes disquieting subjects rendered feverishly as a means of confronting the realities of the modern age and explores what it is to be German and a German artist in a postwar world. In the late 1970s his iconic “upside-down” paintings, in which bodies, landscapes, and buildings are inverted within the picture plane, ignoring the realities of the physical world, make obvious the artifice of painting. Drawing upon a dynamic and myriad pool of influences, including art of the Mannerist period, African sculptures, and Soviet era illustration art, Baselitz developed a distinct painting language. Source: Gagosian Gallery
Picasso’s late work focused Baselitz on the pictorial struggle with mortality, which he himself had addressed since the early 1960s in terms of personal and societal realities.
Georg Baselitz Ash Pots
1988–9 Oil and tempera and carved plywood 252 × 188 cm Private Collection
Beginning with two still lifes Picasso painted on 1943, both depicting a skull and a pitcher resting on a tabletop, Baselitz created a single composition, Ash Pots, in which he reduced the objects to nearly abstract ciphers painted and carved into a black ground. The strength of the painting emerges from the churning metamorphosis that Baselitz evokes through his layering of broad brushstrokes and, especially, his use of a plane tool to scrape ragged, densely worked patterns of lines into the skins of the pigment and their wooden support. Without knowing Baselitz’s sources, a viewer might never identify the origin of the shapes, which shift to resemble headless bodies, sometimes topped with a skull incised into the dark ground. The more one studies the painting, the more it comes to life as a macabre dance of death. In Picasso—especially the Picasso of the late work—Baselitz found an artist who shared his profound concern with mortality and inspired him to create some of his most compelling images. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Hany Armanious Hany Armanious produces installations, sculptures, and works on paper that engagingly investigate the relationships between artist and artwork. [...] Armanious appropriates an unlikely mix of notions with an obsessive relationship to form. In his provocative work uncanny actions take place upon unexpected materials, resulting in enigmatic objects, scenes and associations. He turns the process of casting into a witty, symbolic system, through which he detours and digresses, fostering both bemusement and engagement. Armanious’ choice and treatment of materials are bound up in layers of allegory. Nothing is sacred; his mergers of forms, substances and metaphors are perverse. Casting is always on the agenda, employed to sample and connect disparate textures and concepts. Source: Foxy Production
Hany Armanious Effigy of an Effigy with Mirage
2010 2010 Pigmented polyurethane resin, other materials and pewter; 132 × 104.8 × 83.8 cm The Michael Buxton Collection
The Australian artist Hany Armanious addressed the ubiquity of the “Marie-Thérèse” images while exploring issues of simulation and authenticity in Effigy of an Effigy with Mirage. Armanious chose Picasso’s sculpture Head of a Woman (1931) almost at random because “the Picasso head has become an incredibly familiar motif in visual culture.” [...] Unlike painting, sculpture can be editioned, and this one exists in at least four versions: an original plaster, a plaster cast, a bronze cast, and a cast in cement. Well aware of sculpture’s potential for duplication, Armanious began his work by producing several copies of copies of this sculpture, cut or casted out in cheap or inappropiate materials and from small photographs printed off the Internet. This process captures both the popularity of Picasso’s work and the radical difference between the artist’s actual work and the degraded versions widely available. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
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Atul Dodiya Through his paintings and assemblages, Atul Dodiya engages with both political and art history in a way that entwines global /public memory and local/personal experience. In his most recent series of paintings Dodiya appropriates the images and styles of famous artworks. By doing this he pays homage to his influences, but also ‘borrows’ their identities through a kind of painting role-play: copying becomes a form of ‘channelling’ or re-enactment, weaving the master’s identities and ideas to Dodiya’s own (and vice versa). Font: The Saatchi Gallery
Atul Dodiya Sour Grapes
1997 Oil and acrylic on canvas 175.3 × 121.9 cm Czaee and Suketu Shah Collection
Sour Grapes is based on a chromolithograph of the sort widely used in India for illustrations on calendars. These images were considered divine by his religious family and therefore very important, and he was fascinated by the ways the figures and landscapes were rendered [...]. The subject is one of the greatest transformations in Hindu belief, the creation of the cosmos and of consciousness. Dodiya’s figure of Brahma is the only one not copied from the popular imagery: Dodiya uses the traditional conception of Brahma as a figure with four faces (enabling him to see in all directions at once) to leap from Hinduism to Cubism, and to introduce Picasso into the narrative. His conception of Brahma is based on Picasso’s 1939 portrait of Jaime Sabartés in the Museu Picasso’s collection. Dodiya’s assumption of the role of Brahma—and for that matter of Picasso, since he is remaking a Picasso painting—constitutes a joke about an artist’s overweening egotism, even as it employs the principle of physical metamorphosis to meld disparate conceptions of creativity. Source: exhibition catalogue for “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions,” Michael FitzGerald
