Picasso's Progeny

Monday, Oct. 09, 2006 By RICHARD LACAYO

The Studio. 1927-28; dated 1928. Oil on canvas, 59" x 7' 7".

� 2006 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO/(ARS), NEW YORK � THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

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It was Weber who persuaded the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to mount a Picasso show in 1911 at Stieglitz's pioneering 291 Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, Picasso's first in the U.S., included at least some of his newest Cubist images. For budding American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, it was a first glimpse of work that would transform their own. Later the inexhaustible Stuart Davis came across Picasso's work and likewise reunderstood himself. In the 1920s Davis saw the broad, sharp-edged, irregularly shaped planes of color in some of Picasso's later Cubist work and was inspired to break them out at larger scale and combine them with images from billboards and household products--in other words, to produce the first stirrings of Pop Art, nearly four decades before Andy Warhol made eyes at a can of Campbell's soup.

All through the 1920s Picasso's work found its way fitfully into the U.S., through occasional, short-lived exhibitions or dim black-and-white reproductions. But when the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) opened in Manhattan in 1929, it allowed for the first time the permanent display of a few real Picassos in the city where nearly all of the most alert American artists were gathered. That is what happened to The Studio, which Picasso completed in 1928. It was first seen briefly in the U.S. five years later. But by 1935 it had found its way into MOMA's permanent collection. In the Whitney show's catalog, guest curator Michael FitzGerald says that that canvas "would obsess Gorky and his friends for the remainder of the decade."

Gorky, who would spend years appropriating the successive styles of Picasso (plus Kandinsky's and Miro's) until he had them fully digested, apprenticed himself with typical fierceness to The Studio, to its subtracted forms, flat surfaces and shallow space. After the Tinkertoy intricacies of Cubism, this was Picasso glancing in the direction of Mondrian, arriving at something close to the railway armatures of hard-edge abstraction. In 1936, after three years of study and effort, Gorky replied with Organization, his own breakthrough into a new understanding of how soft form could coexist with hard.

And one year after that, he learned that Picasso had gone back to dripping. To be an American follower of Picasso in the '30s must have been a bit like being an American Communist. You never knew when the party line from abroad was going to take another unexpected twist. The difference of course was that Picasso had no interest in issuing directives. His ceaseless ventures in style and technique were more like challenges. And eventually the painters who would rise most spectacularly to the challenge would break out into realms of lyrical abstraction where even Picasso did not care to tread. Or was it, did not dare to? In the postwar era, as Picasso's powers of invention were waning, the Americans entered the rooms to which he had given them a key but had never entered. Just look at Pink Angels, in which de Kooning deconstructed Picasso's deconstructions of human form. In a picture like Figure, from 1927, Picasso demonstrates how human anatomy can be stretched to the breaking point. Two decades later de Kooning shows how it can be exploded. He doesn't just pull the figure apart. He leaves behind on the canvas the tread marks of the operation.