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“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Tuesday so you’re hearing from us each week. Last time, Things to Do Editor Rossilynne Skena Culgan shared 10 hot tips for NYC’s biggest tourist attractions.
In a new exhibit at The Met, several of Pablo Picasso’s early works hang perfectly mounted on the museum’s walls, telling the story of a little-known residential commission the artist began but never completed. Meanwhile, across the river at the Brooklyn Museum, Picasso’s paintings are presented next to feminist works of art and damning quotes by the artist in an exhibit called “It’s Pablo-matic.”
Back in Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art is set to launch a show called “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” which will focus on the works Picasso created during three months in Fontainebleau, France. For its part, The Guggenheim just wrapped up “Young Picasso in Paris,” an exhibit detailing the artist’s foundational early years in France. Finally, The Hispanic Society Museum will display “Picasso and the Spanish Classics“ later this fall, exploring Picasso’s response to Spanish literature.
Fifty years after his death, Picasso is having a moment thanks to “Celebration Picasso 1973-2023,” a global commemoration at museums across the world. It’s organized by the Spanish and French governments as a deep exploration of his work.
Here in New York, each exhibition tells a very different story about Picasso. The stories aren’t necessarily in conflict, but it can be hard to reconcile the very different facets of the artist’s life presented in each sliver. Some will argue that every human is complicated, that he lived in a different time, and that few face public scrutiny in the way one of the world’s most famous artists has.
I believe art-goers must view Picasso’s work with some level of scrutiny or at least detachment.
But it’s for exactly that last reason that I believe art-goers must view Picasso’s work with some level of scrutiny or at least detachment.
The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition, however, takes scrutiny to a new level, eviscerating the artist in a show co-curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby. The show takes aim at Picasso’s apparent sordid history with women and how his icon status has largely gone unquestioned. Gadsby, in a Netflix comedy special called Nanette, lambasts Picasso’s alleged misogyny.
In a scathing review, The New York Times bashed the show’s title, content, its banter on the labels and lack of a catalog. It’s rare for an art exhibit review to become a hot topic on Twitter, but this one blew up. A barrage of Tweets dunked on the exhibit, but given the fact that the show had just opened when the review was published, I’d venture to guess the vast majority of people hating on the exhibition hadn’t even seen it first-hand.
The Times argued that “It’s Pablo-Matic” permitted the audience “to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.” But that’s not the experience I had when exploring the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition.
To me, the exhibit acknowledged Picasso’s brilliance while recognizing his faults. It turned away from the idea of simplicity—genius man, great art, hooray—and instead encouraged visitors to dig into the complexity of art and the question of how we separate the art from the artist (or if we can/should do that at all).
If you only know Picasso as the uber-famous artist, as I did before visiting the Brooklyn Museum show, the show proved to be an important eye-opener with facts I continue to carry with me as I traverse the rest of the city’s Picasso shows. “It’s Pablo-matic” played a crucial role in examining Picasso’s legacy in a way the other New York City shows have not. If that means putting up with a few jokes an art critic found “juvenile,” then so be it.
The exhibit isn’t about canceling Picasso, either. It’s possible to admire his brushstrokes while feeling appalled that he’s said to have uttered the phrase: “For me there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.”
In addition to quotes from Gadsby, wall texts also feature quotes from the featured artists themselves. The museum contacted every living woman artist they featured to ask for their thoughts on Picasso.
What matters is that we are able to have the discussion, the conversation about him and his work, instead of just bracketing off the one from the other.
In one of those quotes, sculptor Rachel Kneebone shared these words: “We could cancel Picasso for some of the things he did, but what he created continues to affect people and inspire them. What matters is that we are able to have the discussion, the conversation about him and his work, instead of just bracketing off the one from the other.”
That’s a conversation I’d like to see in more of the Celebration Picasso 1973-2023 exhibitions, not just the Brooklyn Museum’s take on the topic.
Brooklyn Museum doesn’t answer the question, as Lisa Small, a curator at Brooklyn Museum, put it: “What do we do with the art of terrible men?”
There is no one answer. But contextualizing Picasso’s life and hanging his work next to feminist artists who came to prominence in the 50 years since his death is a noble place to start.
So, please, I urge you to go see “It’s Pablo-matic” at the Brooklyn Museum before it closes on September 24. I also urge you to see The Met’s Picasso exhibition and the upcoming Picasso shows at MoMA and The Hispanic Society Museum—just remember that, as Brooklyn Museum put it, ”admiration and anger can co-exist.”