The Unbearable Lightness of Smeeing

Or, A Smeeper-Up After Artists.

Picasso's “Two Nudes,” late 1906. (Museum of Modern Art/Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York), source

In 2019 I reviewed “Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse” at the MFA Boston for Delicious Line. Since the concept of Delicious Line was that all reviews were a thousand characters in length, here it is in its entirety:

The MFA has installed Jackson Pollock's Mural (1943) at one end of the Rabb Gallery, and given the rest of the space to a specially commissioned painting by Katharina Grosse. The Pollock is a masterpiece of exuberance made convincing through subtle coloration and authoritative drawing. The Grosse is art-school work executed at art-star proportions. Next to Mural, it looks idiotic.

Postwar American abstraction has had to endure a lot of disdain as a prolonged exercise in machismo. But it would be hard to imagine a more exaggerated act of empty swagger than loading industrial sprayers with the hues of the color wheel, ejaculating them all over 48 feet of canvas, and hanging the results on the floor like a bath towel flung over the side of a tub. That level of comic masculinity required a German feminist whose painting combines everything that's wrong with Sam Gilliam with everything that's wrong with Sam Francis with everything that's wrong with airbrushing.

The curators and the artist's mega-galleries want to imply lineage. Alas, progeny are progeny even if stunted.

With that accomplished, I looked around at what other critics had written about it. Thereupon I found Murray Whyte at the Boston Globe saying this:

“Mural” was a point of departure into mass scale and pure, robust abstraction. It’s the moment Pollock became Pollock, surely one of the most important works in Modern art, whether in America or anywhere else.

So why, then, does it feel so small? Maybe it has something to do with the rift between myth and reality, like meeting your favorite actor in real life to learn he’s only 5-foot-9 (they all are, aren’t they?). But “Mural,” now hanging at the Museum of Fine Arts, is keeping some overbearing company these days.

Said company was the commissioned Grosse, which was the brainchild of MFA curator Akili Tommasino. He had attempted a battle-of-the-sexes drama which featured, as Whyte put it, “a contemporary female painter taking on an old-guard patriarchal art-world order, established and owned by a cadre of artists whose brand was robust machismo — Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist crew — who re-made art with muscular abandon.” Grosse, to her credit, reportedly blew that off and did her usual thing. The usual thing prompted Whyte to squeak a reservation:

“Untitled,” at least for me, offers no choice. That room is its world. It’s engaging enough, but is it a little one note? It’s like a movie you’ve seen twice: You can only enter that room once.

“Mural,” meanwhile, reveals itself in layers. “Untitled” booms, while “Mural” quietly seethes, off to the side. You can see history itself in its hide. Amid its tangles of color and form are spatters, foreshadowing what’s to come. You can see Pollock’s hand, repeating, swinging wildly, sharp swipes of black flung head-to-toe. It can make your shoulder hurt in sympathetic pain. It feels sharply human, a roadmap of sweat and labor, ambition meted out pound by pound.

There is much to criticize here. It’s purple. “You can see” repeats in consecutive sentences. Much of it is written in second-person singular, for which there is ample precedent in art criticism but which I just goddamn hate. Worst of all is the question, to which I reply: You’re the guy in the opinion business, Whyte - make up your mind and put it on the record. (Also, it should be “one-note,” but at the newspapers these days there are more people who can read cuneiform than can edit copy.)

All this returned to memory upon reading the unintentionally amusing piece on Picasso by Sebastian Smee for the Washington Post this week, titled with the question “How good, really, was Pablo Picasso?” The subtitle is “The exemplary modern artist died 50 years ago this month, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.” Authors don’t often write their own headlines and one usually ought not fault them for whatever appears, but no, that subhed is pretty much a pull quote.

Yes, Pablo Picasso was all over the place. He died 50 years ago this month at 91, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.

When Irving Sandler titled his memoir A Sweeper-Up After Artists, he likened himself to a janitor compared to the artists whom he spent his life contemplating. Smee is following suit, but without the humility. I want you to imagine Smee donning an apron and kitchen gloves, and picking up a scrub brush with the intention of tidying up Picasso once and for all. Then go read the WaPo article, which is linked to the archived version for your clicking pleasure.

Now imagine being in the room for this episode:

I was recently at dinner with a celebrated artist and his wife, a physician.¹ Thinking ahead to this essay, I raised the subject of Picasso. “Obviously, he was amazing,” I said to the physician. “But are there any Picassos you really love? Any of his works that sit with you, that feel close to your heart? Because I sometimes struggle to think of any.” Her husband, the artist, overheard from across the room and said simply, “Dozens. There are dozens.”

He was right, of course. And it is artists, above all, for whom Picasso has been an endless source of ideas, envy and inspiration. A critic trying to question or undermine this is bound to sound foolish, presumptuous and glib.

Knowing the gun was loaded, he pointed it at himself and gave it a curious squeeze.

And yet … questioning Picasso’s greatness is part of a venerable critical tradition. Despite the underlying consensus, there have been many productively provocative naysayers.

For the rest of the article he examined the naysayers one by one, even checking in with Adam Gopnik, Smee’s predecessor at the WaPo, to see if he still stands by an essay that he wrote for the New Yorker in 1996. In the end, Smee’s judgment of Picasso is Gopnik’s, restated. Dave Hickey: “When two curators agree, their agreement is taken to represent a consensus of public taste. When two critics agree, one of them is redundant.”²

Along the way, he posed more questions about all the shows being organized to mark the fiftieth year since Picasso’s death in 1973:

What will people see in all these shows? How will Picasso’s actual works affect them? How good will the Spaniard come out smelling?

And more:

So what happens if we are turned off, appalled or simply bored by what we surmise of an artist’s inner life?

It’s obviously a problem. But are there really no great Picassos outside that 15-year period [cited previously by Gopnik]? Did nothing else he made connect with valuable meanings, emotional depth, truth?

Smee is posing a conversation that would be too boring to happen in real life, because if it did, as in the case of the celebrated artist with the physician wife, the replies would conclude with an implicit “…dumbass.”

Both Whyte and Smee are signalling to the reader that their judgments hail from a realm of uncertainty, invoked because sure judgments might come with consequences. Whyte doesn’t want to be seen comparing a female artist unfavorably to one of the notable males. Similarly, Smee doesn’t want to be seen praising one of art history’s most decorated womanizers.

That Picasso was misogynistic is not really in doubt. Yes, he was electrifying company, and, yes, many intelligent and formidable women fell in love with him. But again and again (the record is clear), he treated them abominably. Misogyny is the symptom of a narrow, thwarted imagination. Picasso’s intelligence was immense and wide-ranging, but he made his art narrower, less interesting, by turning so much of it into a bizarrely obsessive index to the churning hysteria of his ambivalence toward women.

On full display is the phenomenon first noted by Jed Perl in 2014 that “The liberal imagination all too often yearns for an art that is logical, responsible, well-behaved.” Misogyny is in no way a symptom of a narrow, thwarted imagination. On the contrary, art history indicates that misogyny has fueled some of the greatest acts of imagination ever witnessed. That’s not to recommend misogyny. It’s to make the point that the price of art is high. It will always be a mess. It will always smell. Smee’s scrub brush will never clean it to the moral sparkle and rosy ethical scent for which he longs.³

Smee is unshakably decided when it comes to judgment of Picasso’s person. This certainty about person and uncertainty about art is the exact converse of the proper business of art criticism. If you were one of the greatest talents of your century, you had an ego the size of a cement truck, and women were in the habit of regarding you as a demigod, would you comport yourself according to best practices circa 2023? Unless nubile emerging artists spread like butter for the prospect of a Washington Post review, I assume that Smee can merely condemn Picasso in the abstract.

I would in theory be interested in Smee’s opinions about the artist’s paintings, but in fact they hardly differ from those of countless rubes who never entirely got Picasso.

I’ve always found it hard to see Picasso’s best work clearly. I suspect one problem is my emotional bias toward Matisse, his great rival. Another is my sense that the early work, especially the Blue Period, was maudlin, while much of the late work was self-indulgent. A third obstacle is the sheer number of Picassos out there: He made around 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 700 sculptures and more than 4,000 ceramics. There are only so many times you can see Picasso use the same notation for a nose to switch a frontal portrait to a side profile before the trick feels hammy. Remove the calcified rhetoric — Picasso the “genius,” the “geyser of creativity” — and you’re left with a body of work whose human meanings can seem disappointingly thin.

By the time Smee got around to acknowledging Picasso’s accomplishments, they seemed hedged and begrudged. When he admits that the force of art “really can float free of its makers,” he sounds as if he wishes it weren’t so.⁴ He concluded as he began, indebted to the immeasurably superior Hilary Spurling.

“The rapacity of Picasso’s pillaging eye,” wrote Spurling (who was, incidentally, Matisse’s biographer), “was matched by the velocity and precision of his responses. … He resaw, rethought and recreated the world by smash-and-grab, wrenching form apart, ripping out connections.” Spurling’s vivid word choices evoke a violence and ruthlessness that we have come to associate as much with the man as his artistic powers. But it’s good to remember that we can be as ruthless and selfish about our own uses for Picasso as he was about the art and people he exploited.

We don’t owe him anything. But we can surely continue to make use of his art.

At which point I’m prompted to ask a question of my own: What?

The train of thought is inscrutable, but that Picasso might be put to some purpose, ruthlessly and selfishly, is clear. By all means, put him to artistic use. I’m rather a Cubist myself these days, though I think more about Braque. Smee is getting at something else, something that brings up the other part of Perl’s objection from 2014:

I believe that we must insist on the unique nature of art—the power of art to trump or confound even the abhorrent ends to which it can be turned. At least I believe we must refuse to allow these powers to be so easily dismissed. While the questions go back to Plato, for our purposes the best place to begin is with the debates that have continued for more than half a century about modernism and its vexed relationship with political and social values. What I want to suggest is that we have come to a point where the irreducible value of art, far from being a controversial value, has come to be regarded as not even worthy of discussion—just “an old illusion.” The work of criticism, so Trilling believed, was “to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Perhaps one of the reasons that criticism is so embattled today is that the essential message of criticism, the celebration of the variousness and possibility of the imagination, poses a real intellectual threat. Perhaps it is only through arts criticism and its absolute belief in art’s imaginative ground that we will be able to combat an ever-growing lack of faith in art’s autonomy and power. We will never be able to restore our embattled cultural life—reverse the budget cuts, undo the increasingly utilitarian and mechanistic arguments that are made on behalf of the arts—if we do not restore art’s freestanding value as a value worth fighting for.

We don’t owe anything to Picasso, now fifty years gone, but we owe ourselves a defense of that freestanding value. Furthermore, the art critics owe us their powers in service of that defense, and if anything they’ve sided with the attack.

1. I kept waiting for this mention of her being a physician to pay off. Perhaps she would return at the end of the conversation to diagnose Smee as a clinical neurotic. Alas, no. See Chekov’s Gun.

2. Source.

3. It’s also the case that many exhibitions that try to establish themselves on supposedly right-thinking political ground seem weirdly Bowdlerized. I’m thinking of “Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance” at the ISGM, which for all the emphasis of the artist’s identity and the invocation of “resistance,” ultimately felt pampering compared to a typical Picasso show. “Muholi holds court in the very same space occupied until last month by Titian’s six ‘Poesie’ paintings, the apex of high-Renaissance allegorical art freighted with violent, objectifying sexual narratives,” wrote Murray Whyte for the Globe. “It feels like a corrective and a rebalancing. I can’t think of a better follow-up.” Smee is not the only one with a scrub brush.

4. I count five uses of “really” in the essay, including the title. One of the problems of Smee citing Spurling et al. is that next to them his copy looks how that Grosse looked next to Pollock.