Picasso's Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest draftsman of the twentieth century. The Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., have co-organized an exhibition for 2011–12 that will look at the dazzling development of Picasso's drawings, from the precocious academic exercises of his youth in the 1890s to the virtuoso classical works of the early 1920s. Through a selection of more than fifty works at each venue, the presentation will examine the artist's stylistic experiments and techniques in this roughly thirty-year period, which begins and ends in a classical mode and encompasses the radical innovations of cubism and collage. 

The show will demonstrate how drawing served as an essential means of invention and discovery in Picasso's multifaceted art, while its centrality in his vast oeuvre connects him deeply with the grand tradition of European masters. Indeed, the exhibition will bring to the fore his complex engagement with artists of the near and distant past and will explore the diverse ways he competed with the virtuoso techniques of his predecessors and perpetuated them in revitalized form. 

The flatness of form, mixed media, and spontaneity of execution of this drawing show Picasso responding to new currents in the graphic arts and the thriving Catalan movement of Modernisme. One of a large cycle of drawings of Barcelona's bohemian community, this work was shown in 1900 at the local tavern Els Quatre Gats, marking Picasso's public debut as an artist.

Here Picasso envisions the demise of the commedia dell'arte character Harlequin, identified by the diamond pattern of his costume. He lies with his hands in prayer, attended by mourners, recalling Renaissance depictions of Christ's entombment as well as the sculpted effigies of medieval sarcophagi. For the dog, the brown cardboard support suffices as the color of his hide..

  

Musical instruments, particularly the violin and guitar, appeared frequently in Picasso's work at this time in various media. In this virtuoso tonal drawing, fragmented lines and planes appear to be suspended in a shallow relief-like space.

Cutout pieces of commercially produced wallpaper and blank colored drawing paper represent different parts of the foreground and background of this still life, working with and against the elements that are drawn by hand.

This gouache forms part of a series of some thirty drawings based on the hotel room Picasso and his new wife, Olga Khokhlova, stayed in during their summer on the French Riviera.

Picasso’s Muse

 Ms. Gilot, also a painter, inspired Picasso’s “Femme au Collier Jaune” from May 1946.

She’s almost 90 and still living very much in the present, quietly painting every day in her West Side studio. Yet Françoise Gilot —Picasso’s muse and lover and the mother of two of his children — is about to revisit her past.

In May, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, together with Valentina Castellani, a director of the Gagosian Gallery, will present an exhibition that chronicles the years when Ms. Gilot and Picasso were together — from roughly 1943 through 1952 — living in Vallauris, a small hillside town near Cannes in the south of France. It will be the gallery’s fourth Picasso exhibition and will include paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery and prints.

Ms. Gilot, almost 90, still paints every day in her West Side studio. Her 1952 work, “The Painters.”

Jill Greenberg

 MANIPULATOR

Jill Greenberg borrowed the name “Manipulator” from the 80’s German large format culture magazine, “The Manipulator”. It was one of the many pop culture influences along with “The Face”, “Interview”, and “W” which wallpapered her bedroom walls in high school. Greenberg has been manipulating her images manually as well as digitally since 1983 and 1990, respectively.

Since the age of 10, Jill Greenberg has staged photographs and created characters using the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, film and photography. She is known worldwide for her uniquely human animal portraits which intentionally anthropomorphize her subjects, as well as her infamous series, “End Times” which struck a nerve in its exploration of religious, political, and environmental themes exploiting the raw emotion of toddlers in distress. 

Her newest work marks a return to the postmodern feminist theory that inspired her senior thesis, “The Female Object” as an art student at RISD in the 80’s: “The disciplinary project of femininity” and the predetermined failure of all women who attempt to “succeed” at it. Website

Seeing Double: A Photography Power Couple

Sometimes it takes two to build an art collection. 

Akron, Ohio, advertising executive Fred Bidwell and his graphic-designer wife, Laura, are known for their adventurous tastes in contemporary photography. Over the last 15 years they've amassed 500 pieces by such photographers as Josh Gosfield, Brian Ulrich and Edward Burtynsky. Now, the Bidwells are teaming up with the Cleveland Museum of Art to renovate a former transformer station in Cleveland in order to house their collection, some of which is promised to the museum. The exhibition space is to open next fall.

This week, the Bidwells spoke about their start as an art-collecting couple. Below, an edited transcript.—Kelly Crow

Fred: We started collecting the year we got married, 1991. We started small and a little slow, and a lot of the early images were landscapes. Over time our interest broadened to conceptual work and now lots of portraiture. It's not as if I have one sensibility and Laura has a sharply different one—99% of the time we know what each other will like.

Laura: We're drawn to images that are a little bit strange but have a real beauty to them. I think we have a David Lynch sensibility.

Fred: In our living room we've got a huge photo by Hendrik Kerstens, "Shopping Bag." It's an Old Master-style portrait of the photographer's daughter—except she's wearing a white plastic grocery bag on her head. It looks like one of those white caps wealthy Dutch women wore during the Renaissance.

Laura: We also recently bought a work by Jill Greenberg, who's known for her series on crying babies and series of animals like bears and monkeys. Ours is a picture of a lamb—sweet, fuzzy, pink-eared—and his open mouth is covered in what appears to be blood. We talked to Jill and in fact, the lamb had just eaten a jelly doughnut. People come into our house and go, "Oh!"

Fred: We're also excited about Jordan Tate. He's doing really smart conceptual works that explore the limits of image-making.

Laura: One of his works shows an iPhone on a pink pillow.

Fred: So it's a photo of a camera phone whose screen contains even more photos. We usually agree on the artist, but sometimes we have discussions about which particular images we like more. One of our favorites is the Dutch portraitist Hellen van Meene, who's done a well-respected series of portraits of teenage girls. They're strange and quirky, and she casts her subjects in interesting ways. So we'll argue over our selections, and that usually means we have to buy more to make everyone happy.

Laura: We have eight of her girls now, and we're about to buy more.

Fred: You get a better picture of the photographer's sensibility if you have multiple examples of their work instead of just one-offs. We've bought 30 or 40 images of Todd Hido's work. He lives in the Bay Area, and he's known for shooting houses at night in the fog, empty streets taken through a rain-splattered windshield.

Laura: His past always seems to be at his back. You can never go wrong with him. He's fantastic.

China's Zhang Turns Ash Into Spectacle

Chinese international art star Zhang Huan sounds wistful when he says in an interview, "It is my dream for my art to be accessible to all. But reality is cruel."

Every day, the 46-year-old Mr. Zhang and more than 100 assistants keep busy on increasingly ambitious projects: from creating paintings and sculptures from incense ash, to fabricating giant metal statues, to planning multiple public events and installations. He's among a handful of the most recognized Chinese artists. Most of them, "like most Western artists, developed an immediately recognizable style," says Arne Glimcher, chairman of the Pace Gallery, the artist's principal representative world-wide. "But Zhang Huan can be a chameleon."

In the spring, some of the big events on Mr. Zhang's schedule will be in the West. Besides presenting new works at New York's Pace, he'll stage "Semele," the 18th-century opera by George Frideric Handel, in Toronto. Mr. Zhang's version, which has already played in Brussels and Beijing, transposes the Greek myth into a Buddhist context set in ancient China.

The Rockbund exhibit features some of Mr. Zhang's ash paintings and sculptures. Since returning to China, he has made his name with these works. His staff makes contracts with temples around Shanghai and buys what's left of incense offerings. At a show earlier this year at a Louis Vuitton store in Macau, Mr. Zhang showed a larger-than-life pair of ash sculptures of likenesses of Buddha and Jesus Christ.

Mr. Zhang first attracted attention as a young performance artist in Beijing. In 1994, in one of his breakthrough works, "12 M2," he sat naked in a public toilet (about 12 square meters, or 129 square feet), attracting flies to his fish-oil-and-honey-covered body, to protest the squalid conditions of his neighborhood. In this early phase of his career, authorities often reprimanded him.

Soon after, Mr. Zhang and his wife moved to New York with $200. In his second year there, trend-setting Florida collectors Don and Mera Rubell bought up all of his work in his dealer's inventory. After nearly 10 years working in the U.S., Mr. Zhang returned to China in 2005, setting up a studio outside of Shanghai, and he embraced Buddhism.

His more recent "paintings" portray images based on photographs: old portraits and government propaganda pictures. But, unlike such controversial artists as Ai Weiwei, that's as far as Mr. Zhang delves into politics: "I am concerned with human life and people's interactions with the environment," he says. "I have never been concerned with politics; besides, I am too afraid of the backlash."

Earlier this year, at the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe, Mr. Zhang used bricks made from ash to create a tower where he installed taxidermied pigs. The work was inspired by a porcine pet that had become a media sensation after it survived for many weeks under the rubble of the deadly 2008 Sichuan quake. In 2010, San Francisco installed Mr. Zhang's giant "Three Heads, Six Arms" in the plaza in front of City Hall.

By his reckoning, 30% of those who buy his art are in Europe, 10% in Asia and 60% in the U.S., where the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum own pieces by him. "Chinese museums go for traditional oil paintings and inks," he says. "I know where they are coming from. My things are hard for them to accept as art, and [Chinese collectors also find it difficult] because of my bad reputation in China in the past."

Sculptor Revisits Early Haunts in San Francisco

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER: Richard Serra is renowned for steel sculptures that helped redefine the notion of space in modern art. What's not so well known are his roots in the sand dunes of San Francisco's beaches and a youthful job in a Bay Area steel yard.

Mr. Serra, who now lives in New York, grew up in San Francisco and went to college at the University of California, Berkeley, earning money by working in the rivet gang of an Alameda steel company.

The monumental steel forms created by the 72-year-old artist are so admired that New York's Museum of Modern Art engineered one of its floors to support the weight of the work. In San Francisco, Mr. Serra's sculptures are displayed in UC San Francisco's Mission Bay campus and at Gap Inc.'s downtown headquarters.

The artist is back in San Francisco for his first-ever solo retrospective here, a collection of his drawings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on display through Jan. 16. The Wall Street Journal caught up with Mr. Serra at the opening of the exhibition last week. Edited excerpts:

WSJ: What was it like growing up in San Francisco's Sunset neighborhood in the 1940s?

Mr. Serra: There was nothing there. There were two black-top streets that had streetcars, Taraval and Judah. Other than that, there were just sand dunes. Even to come downtown to Market Street was an event. I pretty much lived between the beach, the Golden Gate Park and the zoo. My perception was formed by the sea and the sand dunes.

WSJ: How did that shape your view of space?

Mr. Serra: The thing about sand dunes is there is no relation to a given horizon. You are always dealing with elevations. If you have to walk through the sand dunes to get to school every day, you have a different relationship to space: walking down a hill in the sand dunes, versus walking up the hill in the sand dunes.

When I was very young, I used to walk along the beach to the Cliff House. And I would say to my mother, there is something very interesting there. When I walked along the beach one way, I would have one experience. And when I got to the other end, I would turn around and follow in my previous footfalls, and what was once on the left was now on the right. The experience was totally different. My mother said, 'Oh that's interesting, but don't think about it too hard.' She didn't understand where I was going with it, but those kinds of things have always fascinated me.

WSJ: How did you end up working in a steel plant?

Mr. Serra: It was the most money that I could make in a short period of time. In high school I was working in a produce market, and as soon as I got out I joined U.S. Steel in Alameda working on a rivet gang. We were building trusses that went on to build the Crown Zellerbach building [at One Bush Plaza].

WSJ: So you learned something there about working with steel?

Mr. Serra: Yes, but I never thought I was going to use it. I probably learned more about how people organize labor. If you become a member of a steel union very early, you understand that people have to protect their rights, and part of protect their rights is to not overwork themselves.

WSJ: Did your work experience help you think of steel as art?

Mr. Serra: At first I was very reluctant to work with steel as art. If you look at the history of steel sculpture—from Picasso to Calder—they had used steel to cut and fold and hang out in space in terms of making pictures. But it was anchored and bolted into the ground, and it was false in terms of its gravitational load.

I wanted to bring the processes and procedures of the Industrial Revolution into art making. I thought, why not use steel for its weight-load, for its thickness, for its mass—and to use it in a very primary way, and to use it for its gravitational propensity. I went back to the basics of tectonics. If you look at "House of Cards" [on display at SFMOMA], that is pretty much it. Each part is in itself free-standing. None of them are dependent on welding for their manifestation. Everything is figured to balance on its own.

WSJ: What do you think of SFMOMA's plans for a major expansion?

Mr. Serra: I have a piece called "Sequence," which is going to be on the ground floor [of the new structure] on Howard Street. I have met three or four times with [SFMOMA architects] Snøhetta, who made a second-floor space where you can look down into the piece.

WSJ: Do you have any major commissions in the works for the Bay Area?

Mr. Serra: There may be a very large piece. Initial discussions sometimes lead to negotiations that lead to building—and sometimes that is three or four years in the making. Right now there is something incubating that is very promising.

Art & Design London Succeeds With an Outstanding Mix of Pieces on Offer

By SOUREN MELIKIAN: LONDON — The “Art & Design London” show put up under a vast marquee in the West End — where it opened Wednesday and runs through Sunday — is the most stimulating selling exhibition in years. There is no danger of experiencing a feeling of déjà vu here.

Now in its fifth year, the five-day event deals with modern art in all its facets from its early beginnings in the late 1870s to the present day. Simple as it sounds, the idea of displaying 20th-century paintings by the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró and the German Expressionist Otto Dix under the same roof as a console designed in the 1950s by the architect Giò Ponti or a sideboard conceived in 1969 by the American Paul Evans had never occurred to anyone before — or, if it did it, it was never implemented.

The London show, which offers an updated version of their Pavillon des Arts et du Design in Paris, is the improbable brainchild of two French art professionals. Patrick Perrin, a specialist in 18th-century furniture, now spends more time in his London office fine-tuning the details of the yearly event than running the Galerie Perrin in Paris with his brother Philippe Perrin. Stéphane Custot is a dealer in modern art who moved to London five years ago where he runs the Hopkins Custot Gallery.

While the two Frenchmen do not spell it out, Patrick Perrin is the man with a keen sense of objects and Mr. Custot operates as the arbiter of modern and contemporary art. Together they carefully determine the balance between paintings and decorative works, which gives the display its unique character.

Every selling show eventually reaches its optimum format. The Pavilion of Art & Design, as the fair officially labels itself, did so this year.

Mr. Perrin is the first to concede that what put the event on the international map was its ability to entice important art dealers into participating in it.

The presence of famous 20th-century masters means that major international collectors now feel bound to make the October pilgrimage to Berkeley Square.

On the Hopkins Custot stand, a cartoon-style oil on cardboard of 1953 from Miró’s late Surrealist phase defies precise description. A few steps away, a faceless human form almost carved into the paint by Bernard Dubuffet in 1952 offers a different version of the distortion of bodies in the postwar era.

Mr. Custot’s real gem is an abstract composition painted on March 4, 1962, by Zao Wou Ki. The picture is curiously evocative of the map of Britain seen from outer space, which does not appear to have caught the dealer’s attention.

Simon Dickinson of London also settled for celebrated artists from the European schools. Italian Vorticism in 1913 is represented on his stand by a large Giacomo Balla whose “Forme rumore di motocicletta” in oil and gouache on paper is more dynamic than figural. An abstract work by Gerhard Richter pays its due to our time.

The snarling humor of German painters in the 1920s strikes a more unsettling note on Richard Nagy’s stand. Otto Dix’s self-portrait in wash and pencil drawn in 1922 says more about his harsh sardonic vision of German society than about his empathy with small children. It forms part of a set of 16 watercolors painted as a children’s picture book that was given by the artist to the young son of the woman he courted. The German painter portrayed himself as “Jimmy the Shimmy,” the tough, square-faced character wearing American-style clothes that he impersonated at the night club where he danced with Martha Koch, young Martin Wenzel Koch’s mother.

Nearby, George Grosz’s darker humor hits at the wealthy elite’s indifference to the destitute in the Berlin of the 1920s. “Street Scene Berlin I” in wash, pencil and India ink, executed in 1928, is worth volumes of social analysis on the rise of Nazism, from which Grosz would escape to New York five years later.

The appeal of the paintings at the Art & Design show lies partly in the new avenues explored by some dealers.

On Richard Nagy’s stand, the portrait of the French writer and literary historian Georges Polti reveals the art of a little known Polish painter called Mela Muter. A mix of influences, including a Fauve strain, can be detected in the likeness painted around 1919-1920.

The most impressive discoveries, though, are to be made in the decorative arts, particularly in what could be called “the antiques of modernity.”

Yves Macaux, a Brussels dealer now in London, comes out on top with furniture designed by the Austrian Adolf Loos around 1900. A highly independent character, Loos was fascinated by Britain and was keenly aware of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1890s.

His masterpiece, a mahogany dining table with brass fittings on the legs, shows how Loos radically transformed any influence he absorbed. The smooth polished dark wood alone is enough to set it apart from the English models. The slanting legs betray the rarely acknowledged imprint that the architecture of Ming furniture from China left on the Arts and Crafts designers, and through them, on Loos. Immensely imaginative, Loos could also create such unique pieces as a pair of mahogany low cabinets that are entirely innovative.

The asking price for the antiques of modernity are in line with those paid at auction for top Art Deco pieces from France. The dining table with two extendable leaves carries a price tag of £200,000, or $312,000.

By the middle of the 20th century, furniture designers across the Western world found themselves at a crossroads.

Some were attuned to Abstractionist trends with a Cubist tendency and created furniture that looks back to avant-garde Art Deco in the 1930s.

An extraordinary sideboard conceived in 1969 by Paul Evans, a leading figure in the American Craft Movement of the 1970s, is one of the great works from that period.

It was brought to the London fair by Rossella Colombari. The Turin specialist in 20th-century design chose to display it together with strikingly different creations by Giò Ponti, whose hanging shelves or wooden console play on the lightness of the materials and on streamlined forms influenced by industrial design.

The Dane Peter Hvidt, standing somewhere in the middle between the two opposed aesthetic trends in furniture design, imagined around 1960 a circular center table in dark wood that breaks up into six independent sections, each one resting on slender brass tubular legs. At £6,000, it ranks among the more affordable pieces of avant-garde furniture in the Art and Design show.

The decade of 1960 to 1970, which is being rediscovered these days, was a period of infinite diversity in furniture design. Some of the anonymous creations of that period are every bit as worthy of interest as the pieces credited to celebrated artists. A circular bookcase in Brazilian rosewood and altuglas made in Italy around 1970 is shown by Anne Autegarden. The Brussels dealer points out that it was inspired by a model designed a few years earlier by Joe Colombo and produced in the Brianza area near Milan. It is, however, completely different. Lighter and very finely crafted, it is static, in contrast to Colombo’s piece, whose sections swivel at will.

At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, the bookshelves designed in the late 1960s by the Italian architect Vittorio Introini and executed in polished steel look like industrial units. The steel shelves are oddly reminiscent of Donald Judd’s manufactured modules, with a major difference — Introini’s pieces have a functional purpose, they are not a parody.

Louisa Guinness of London brings a suitable punctuation mark to the marriage of art and design with her jewels created by famous living artists. The brooches, pendants and earrings on her stand are all designed by contemporary artists, from Damien Hirst to Anish Kapoor, most of whom she approaches to commission the jewels. Appropriately enough, Ms. Guinness sells the baubles out of the London gallery of the renowned contemporary art dealer Ben Brown, her husband.

From tiny to monumental, Art and Design projects a view of today’s aesthetic environment — as approved by the avant-garde establishment. It deserves a look.

The Other Father of Cubism

By ROBERTA SMITH: The Acquavella Galleries’ splendid Georges Braque exhibition is a 42-gun salute to this pioneering French Modernist. The first large Braque survey to be staged in New York in more than 20 years, it musters a vigorous if compressed account of more than five decades of art making, with 42 paintings and collages, almost all top-notch. More than half have been borrowed from American and European museums; the rest come from private collections and in several cases have not been on public display in quite some time.

This show means to establish Braque’s importance in a town where Picasso, his flamboyant partner in the development of Cubism, which set so much of 20th-century art in motion, looms very large. How large? The Museum of Modern Art’s Web site places the number of works by Braque in its collection at 31. The number by Picasso (sitting down?) is 1,211. Picasso was inordinately talented and important, but 40 times more so than Braque?

 Organized by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian critic, art historian and independent curator, the Acquavella show rarely lets down its guard. In nearly every effort Braque is at his most elaborate and ambitious, from his slightly over-heated Fauvist efforts of 1906-7 to his opulent still lifes of the 1930s and ’40s and his crowded and shadowy studio interiors of the 1950s. In the show’s middle portion, of course, we see Braque the Cubist.

His collaboration with Picasso began in earnest after he first saw the groundbreaking “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in Picasso’s studio in late 1907. But by then Braque was already alert to the implications of Cézanne’s angled brush strokes and multiple perspectives and the tantalizing way they destabilized painting’s traditional unities of form and space, and therefore time.

 Braque would later say that he and Picasso were roped together like mountaineers in their invention of Cubism. Picasso saw things a bit differently, referring to Braque as “ma femme,” or “my wife.” Either way, their intensely close collaboration lasted until the fall of 1914, when Braque enlisted in the French Army early in World War I. They went their separate ways and, like many divorced couples, rarely spoke of each other.

They could not have been more different. Braque’s father was a house painter and decorator who made sure that his son learned the artisanal skills of his trade; Picasso’s was an academic painter who gave him drawing lessons.

 Braque was tall, reticent, methodical and quintessentially French, with all that that implies in terms of reason and balance. He dressed in a neat, discreetly dandyish way, was intensely private, remained married to the same woman all his life and worked in the same studio from 1926 until his death in 1963, at 81.

Picasso was short, volatile, charismatic and innately messy and bohemian, as well as Spanish. He changed houses, companions and painting styles at regular, closely watched intervals and did more than his share to establish the persona of the modern artist as celebrity, complete with entourage.

 This show confirms that Braque may have separated from Picasso, but he never really divorced Cubism, which he developed, as he later said, “above all to put painting within the reach of my own gifts.” These gifts did not include, for example, Picasso’s genius for drawing or for psychological expression conveyed by continually metamorphosing faces and figures.

 Braque was never much for figures; his abiding, even monogamous, interest lay in the complex act of perceiving and painting accumulations of objects, in his studio. Cubism gave him a system, a way of dissecting, enhancing and complicating reality that he cultivated for the rest of his life.

 The show gives a wonderful account of Braque’s contribution to Cubism and of the way that his early training in his father’s trade — which included sign painting and the painting of imitation wood and marble — figured increasingly in this project, and throughout his career. It was clearly the basis for his interest in what he called the “tactile” or “manual” space of a painting.