In ​“After Picasso,” Artists Reckon With A Giant

Cynthia Beth Rubin’s collage crackles with energy, as colors vibrate off one another and forms within forms, textures within textures, rub against each other. Keen senses of both aesthetic freedom and control of technique suffuse the piece — which, it turns out, hearken back to a famous artistic ancestor.

“[Pablo] Picasso hangs over the lives of so many artists working today,” Rubin writes in an accompanying statement. ​“We do not have to admire Picasso, or even respond deeply to his work, to be influenced by Picasso. His reach was so significant that the artists many of us openly acknowledge as influence, Henri Matisse, Hans Hoffman, Miriam Schapiro, and Lee Krasner, and more, were all touched by his ideas and the energy of his work.”

She continues: ​“And yet I always denied Picasso as a source until I began to prepare for this exhibition. Then, as I deliberately looked at his work, I discovered, or rediscovered, the joy of whimsical interplay of form and color.… I am grateful to Linda Lindroth, who asked us — rather pushed us — to consider Picasso.”

Rubin’s piece is part of ​“After Picasso — The Constructed Image,” a lively and thought-provoking show curated by artist Linda Lindroth hanging in the Da Silva Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville. The show is part of Westville Open Studios this weekend, Oct. 28 and 29, which marks the final weekend of the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios, which began at the start of the month. ​“After Picasso” features work from Patrick Carroll, Matthew J. Feiner, Clymenza Hawkins, Martha Willette Lewis, Donald Margulies, Anastasia Mastilovic, Susan McCaslin, Man Ray, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Gabriel Sacco, Gerald Saladyga, Scott Schuldt, and Rashmi Talpade.

Lindroth begins her curatorial note with an article about Picasso in Life Magazine written in 1968. ​“In the opening pages, the managing editor of the magazine” explains ​“how much Picasso’s oeuvre had become a significant part of our visual culture highlighting a barrage of TV imagery, fragmented and fused advertising photos, the energy, distortion, even violence of sports photography, psychedelic and fragmented images on album covers and display ads.” 

That was five years before Picasso’s death. Today — 50 years since the artist died — Lindroth argues, it’s ​“hard to imagine any living artist working in any medium who hasn’t valued the work of Picasso in their own development.” This statement is difficult to challenge even as the canon has come under (often rightful) assault and we are reevaluating our cultural icons in part based on who they were as people. 

On this score, Picasso is a tough subject, as, for starters, his family bore the brunt of and has since testified to his narcissism and misogyny. As a 2017 Paris Review article relates:

After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. “Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: “For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Marina saw her grandfather’s treatment of women as an even darker phenomenon, a vital part of his creative process: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

And yet, the art has proven to endure. The combination of his superb technique with a brush — films of him painting capture just how confident he was with it — and the breadth and depth of his visual imagination revolutionized painting for his generation. He didn’t invent all his imagery (African art and masks, for example, were an essential touchstone in developing the style of Cubism that made Picasso and a handful of his contemporaries famous in the Western art world), but he emerged, over time, as simply one of the most successful painters at communicating modern visual ideas to a very wide audience, even as his style changed dramatically over the decades. And there was the way his enviromentalism and pacifism fueled some of his greatest pieces. Guernica, illustrating the terror and carnage of the bombing of a Basque town by German bombers practicing an early form of Blitzkrieg, was an early and potent protest against the Nazis at a time when many European leaders were still indulging in appeasement. The apocryphal story about his encounter with the Nazis later in occupied Paris, as the Guardian relates it, holds water: 

A Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”

So we reckon with him, as a deeply flawed human and brilliant, epoch-defining artist. ​“Cubism is so deeply entwined in how we look and perceive and what we know about things in space,” artist Martha Willette Lewis writes in an accompanying statement. ​“Picasso did not, to my knowledge, discuss physics, but it’s all about it: time shuffling at different speeds, the simultaneity of the objects presented, the implications of multiple dimensions.” She goes on to explain that the piece So Attracted is a crumpled 3D model crushed flat and ​“reworked by me, adding color and line, using both sides of the translucent rice paper, on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea one summer, with the air full of salt, pine, and sunshine.” The works of our artistic antecedents can have a way of seeming both quite distant in time and as relevant as yesterday, a flexibility in the understanding of time that is one of Lewis’s wheelhouses as an artist influenced by the latest science.

Gerald Saladyga’s work touches on the long legacy of Picasso both in its formal use of collage and in its engagment with violent history: in this case, the bombing of Hiroshima and the strange ways that full information about what happened took a long time to come to light. He was a baby, he explains in an accompanying statement, when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His father was a gunner on a battleship in the Pacific when those bombs were dropped. ​“He never talked to his children about his experiences in the war except for silly things that happened on board and some of the cities he had seen,” Saladyga writes. On the 75th anniversary of the bombing, he did some research, collecting newspaper articles, postcards, photographs, and other ephemera. There he learned that ​“most information about the dropping of the atomic bombs was covered up or censored by the U.S. War Department.” A photo ban wasn’t lifted until Life Magazine published them in 1952. Saladyga’s piece is about the atrocity and the way the U.S. public was shielded from it. Maybe it should not have been.

Susan McCaslin, meanwhile, reckons with the kind of pain Picasso created in others throughout his life, and left in his wake. ​“Protective spaces, both physical and emotional, are an important part of my work,” she writes. ​“In the physical, I reference protection created by the surrounding landscape — trees, rocks and boulders or of our own making, with our own hands. In the emotional, I reference the vigilance with which we protect ourselves from the past.… My work is dark, it is somber, it is not about joy, it is not about moving forward through the seasons — it is about being stuck in winter — it is about hiding, it is about clothing yourself in armor.” McCaslin recalls the damage the human Picasso did, and the damage others like him do. It’s an acknowledgment of the art, and a protest of the man, at the same time.

“After Picasso — The Constructed Image,” runs at the Da Silva Gallery, 897 Whalley Ave., through Nov. 5. The show is part of Westville Open Studios, Oct. 28 and 29, the final weekend of the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios, which began at the start of the month.