This Exhibition Examines the Responses of Contemporary Artists
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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 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. 1st floor 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 Ground floor Room Room 1 2 Guernica Cubism Room Room 3 4 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Blue and Rose Periods Room Room 5 6 Late Work Surrealism Room 1 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 Room 1 Rineke Dijkstra 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. RINEKE DIJKSTRA Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 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 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 Room 1 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 post- prison 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 While imprisoned in Khartoum’s abysmal Cooper Prison in 1975, The Inevitable 1984-1985 El-Salahi occupied his mind by planning revolutionary works. Given a India ink on nine sheets of Bristol board sharpened toothbrush and protected by inmates, he sketched in the 211.5 × 238 cm sand during exercise periods, always leveling the ground and burying Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art , Cornell University. Acquired through the African the stylus before guards discovered his practice (no pencils or paper Acquisition Fund, a purchase fund were allowed). After his release, he left the country and continued established through the exchange of gifts working on his oeuvre, and when the Nimieri government was from Mr and Mrs William W. Brill, and other donors 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 Room 1 Maqbool Fida Husain 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 MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN funny as well as serious and sombre. His themes—usually treated in Mahabharata Project series—included topics as diverse as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mother Ganga Jamuna (Mahabharata 12) Teresa, the Indian epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the British 1971 raj, and motifs from the Bollywood film scene. Oil on canvas; 177.8 × 304.8 cm The Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. Peabody Essex Museum, Fuente: Enciclopædia Britannica Salem, Massachusetts 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 Room 2 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 Room 2 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. 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.