Picasso's Progeny

It was Arshile Gorky who got right to the point. "If Picasso drips," he said, "I drip." That was in the late 1930s, a time when deciphering Picasso's intentions, getting inside his darting, catch-me-if-you-can progress, from Cubism to Neoclassicism, from Surrealism to Guernica, was an all-important matter to that small but crucial category of American artists who had no use for the approved manner of the moment, American Scene realism. Grant Wood's farm folk and Thomas Hart Benton's small-town cuties were fine, if you didn't care about what painting could be. Although Picasso never set foot on American soil, in the intense conclaves of this would-be American avant-garde, his example hung in the air like the moon, out of reach but never out of sight. And the question he always seemed to pose for them was not what to make of what he was doing, although that could be puzzling enough, but what more to make of it.

Given time, it was a question that would help a handful of American artists to the breakthroughs that produced Abstract Expressionism, the triumphs of Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and so on. Picasso would not be the only model they looked to. In their late-night arguments, the work of every painter from Uccello to Kandinsky was brought in for questioning and combed through for motifs and ideas, for rules and for permission to break them. But Picasso was the man, the one continually bursting through the confines of art history and coming back with discoveries worth bursting the confines for. He gave freedom a good name.

Identifying the routes through which he made his way into the awareness of American artists and the uses they made of him is the nicely executed purpose of "Picasso and American Art," a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that continues there through Jan. 28 before moving on to San Francisco and Minneapolis, Minn. It's a show, by the way, that might just as well be called "Big Daddy." For artists seeking a way forward, Picasso was the classic Oedipal father, the man who had to be dealt with, digested and finally overthrown.

But first they had to learn that he existed at all. That turns out to be a story that begins with the painter Max Weber, a Russian Jewish émigré to New York City. It was Weber who brought the first Picasso canvas to the U.S., in 1909, on his return from a four-year stay in Paris, where he had befriended the indispensable Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, cocksure tastemakers and champions of Picasso. By that year Picasso and Braque were already off and running through the first stages of Cubism. Meanwhile, advanced American painting, such as it was, meant the Ashcan School realism of Robert Henri and John Sloan or the agreeable borrowings of Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast, who were still absorbing what they could from Postimpressionism. Even Cézanne had not entered much into American thinking, much less Cubism and its fierce extrapolations from Cézanne's faceted space.