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.