Picasso and his contemporaries at the Kenderdine
May 18 2012 Categorized Under: Reviews
To save you love or hate Picasso is irrelevant: his artistic influence is still relevant, and will be long after we’re all dead. He was prolific and priapic (my favourite in this show is his linocut Exposition Vallauris with a “randy” goat head) and often political. His massive Guernica is necessary to genuine art history, to speak to what Art should be: speaking truth to power. A favourite story is that when he painted that horrific, massive work about the Luftwaffe bombing into oblivion a Spanish town during the Spanish civil war, some self-important smug gov’t lackey, asking if he’d done this offensive thing, confronted Picasso. Picasso responded that they had done it, not him.
At the U of S in the Kenderdine Gallery space in the Agriculture Building (you may know it as Grant Devine’s Folly, and I think our current incarnation of Devine shot an election ad there last time, too….) right now you can see some of his prints (many were very recently donated by Frederick Mulder), along with a smattering of works by his contemporaries. This show will give you a taste, and perhaps a hunger, to see more of these artists. And when the Remai Art Gallery is here, works by these people can actually come here more often. But Picasso and his contemporaries, curated by Leah Taylor (who most recently brought us The Mechanical Self in the same space), is on display now, and runs until the end of June.
Some of these names will be familiar to you if you have a passing acquaintance with the western “canon”: Fernand Léger’s Femmes et Perroquet, Georges Braque’s La Poete, and two works by Kurt Schwitters (untitled, but lovely little collaged works, from someone who was sometimes a Dadaist, sometimes something else) are on my list of works to “relocate” to my own collection.
It’s sometimes put forth that Picasso may have stolen Léger or Braque’s best ideas, but ideas are fluid, in creative spaces – and we’re not talking about karaoke modernism here. This was one of the more exciting periods in the late 19th, early 20th century where the rules were being broken and remade, revisited and reviled (just like in the political, or economic, or racial spheres of the time – Picasso often referenced “primitive” or African art much to others’ chagrin…). It’s necessary to look at these works and think of Guernica and WWI and II, but also the social / political upheaval induced by the rise of science and how it challenged the domination of religion and other long held, unassailable ideas. Einstein’s notion of time and space influences concepts of depicting our reality, as the Renaissance notion of picture box space loses any dominance, or relevance. You can see this in the works by Marc Chagall included in this show, which often mixed past, present and memory in his practice.
But some of the artists here also look backwards: Salvador Dali’s Head of Rembrandt is a well deserved homage to one of the finest artists in European history, but also indicates the lineage within which Dali – and Picasso – exist. Picasso’s images of bullfighting – an intensely nationalist subject, that Francisco Goya also favoured – are along one wall here, also favourites of mine, in the show. A Los Toros I, III and IV are good examples of how printmaking is a drawing based medium with its rough, scrappy lines and perfect capture of the movement, frantic actions and danger of the bullfighting scenes. Drawing is an immediate medium, done to capture gestures and movements: and the strong history of printmaking in Europe is obvious here, as it was a means not just to disseminate ideas through text but also image. There’s a significant argument that some of the political cartoons printed during the lead up to the French Revolution inflamed the masses as much as the indifference of the political elite (so who’s the bull, and who’s the toreador, one might ask…).
But you can also forget all that, if you like: there are several works by Picasso here, such as Modéle et Sculpture Surréaliste, or Untitled, that focus more on the beauty of the human – specifically female – form, or Nature Morte au Casse – Croûte II, depicting that mainstay of art history, the still life. Artists need not always hit you over the head with ideas, though sometimes ideas are couched in images whose subtlety permeates….
Picasso and his contemporaries runs at the University of Saskatchewan, in the Kenderdine gallery space in the Agriculture building, and I haven’t even mentioned Oskar Kokoschka, or Henry Moore, also in this show. It’s always good to see what real Modernism was, and to then be able to understand how we define ourselves in relation to it, and not get all caught up in the “isms” of the moment … and that’s why I must end by thanking Frederick Mulder, as well, for his generosity, as he, as much as Leah Taylor, made this show happen.
