My lovely and very artistically able and art interested 11yo daughter, asked me in the fall of 2019, if we could go see the new Picasso exhibition in Arken. I was happy that she showed individual interest in specific art and as we are both very interested in art and not least "modern art", I happily agreed to go visit.
Picasso is in a category of his own and that is probably why he was (and is) so celebrated, even while he was still alive (Usually those progressive artists only receive sufficient praise long after they are gone). This has always intrigued me. I would in a sense compare him to Einstein as another of those 20th century geniuses. Einstein also became a media darling as did Picasso. It may be that it is a particular feat of the mass-media, that artists and scientists and so on, grew out of it and in some ways used it to further their art. It made it easier to sell your own personality along with the art. Just ask Dali.
As one of the most prominent proponents of modern art and basically the inventer of a new direction called Cubism (together with Braque), Picasso undisputedly demands attention. It is almost like you are not looking at art but rather absorbing an idea or a flattened 2d snapshot of a 3d existential experience.
It is a disarming kind of art where I don´t have any sense that he is forcing anything on me, but rather tries to veil his personal experience in a collage of brought together snapshots of a given situation into challenging forced perspective presentation, where you see many sides of the same personal expression and not necessarily the artists view itself
The big exhibitions in Arken, usually are placed in a specific area of the museum. It is rather claustrophobic in its intricate layout and some corridors are very narrow which makes it hard to pass by when there are a lot of visitors. I don´t mind a more intricate room structure in exhibitions, but it is nice to have room to "breathe" and be able to take time to experience the art without people passing by closely all the time.
As we already know the museum well we knew where to head to to get to the exhibition, but the signs leading there were not that easy to find if you are a first time visitor and want to have a look at the other art in the halls before you get there. Personally I have never been to happy about the layout of the rooms in this museum but again it is not the an end all problem. Some of the structure feels unnecessarily confusing.
The theme of the exhibition is the women in his life who also "ended up" in his art. I want to attach a few comments to that. I find it incredible that, while Picasso is probably the most celebrated artist of he 20th century, he has to sort of step back, to let the women he lived with and painted become the center of the show. I am pretty tired of this recurring gynocentrism. I honestly do not care what these women were thinking or what they looked like. They are not important as personalities in an exhibition of this kind. And also, how does a painting of a man eating an icecream fit into this ???
The planners of the exhibition is literally missing the whole point. Picasso goes to great lengths to actually cover up who these women are - at least as far as he does not spell it out but leaves them cloaked as representatives of the idea of a woman in situation with its environment - be that a man or a garden or something else. Just like the movie "Theory of Everything" about the brilliant physicist Stephen hawkins, which instead dealed primarily with the life of his completely unknown and uninteresting wife´s "struggles" with pathetic little everyday nonsense.
I have to admit that from an overall exhibit point of view, this unnecessary focus on the actual women in the art, destroyed a lot of viewing pleasure as I constantly felt that I was supposed to like the woman in the portrait rather than the actual art and the "emotions" of the artist. This is a sad choice of the museum and something I would recommend they stop doing from now on.
But I did manage to find a few calm spots to enjoy the old master and it was a real joy to behold this playful and anarchic artist in all his "I don´t give a fuck" (yes I believe he had that attitude) and yet he still has bucket loads of classic artistic traits that are just pieced together in a "cubist" way. It seems he just brings into the frame what he wants to be at specific spots in the painting as he sees fit. Maybe leaving out things he don´t want there.
One painting in particular had us wondering for a long time until we eventually saw what it was. The one with a yellow pitcher in the upper left corner suddenly revealed itself as a simple stil leben of a small table at a corner in the room, with small cloth on it and a carpet underneath. We were very impressed that at first we could not make any sense of it until we could fixate on a specific object and from there reconstruct everything. This is a trademark of great art.
Another intriguing one, for me, was the "woman with a dagger". How these streams of blood seems to flow and suddenly elevate, while she is screaming with a killer´s look on her face. A rather horrifying and extremely expressive work, which still has all the usual Picasso hallmarks.
One of the things that is so common, in danish exhibitions at least, is the inevitable wall of chronological biography. Personally, unless it is a chronological exhibition, I find this to be out of place. You can look it up in one of the numerous books later in lobby, or just visit wikipedia on your smartphone.
I don´t like this academic lecturing about the art or the minutia of the persons life, on the walls next to the art. let the friggin´art speak for itself. Why do you have to clutter the experience with this boring data. It soon becomes a lecture rather than an exhibition. I guess, as people become less and less self-sustained in the modern world, they need to have their hand held at all times to feel they understand what is going on.
All in all I felt it was an "ok" exhibiton. The number of paintings (and particularly sculptures) were somewhat limited and I had a clear sense they had struggled to piece something together just to make it into something of sufficient size. I did not feel the theme of the women worked at all and rather diminished the experience overall.
They did have a few film clips of Picasso himself painting on glass so that you could see the master in action yourself. I would have loved more of that, even if they were probably made as promotion and not for the art, they do give you a sense of his brush movement and how he did it when he did it. There were in my opinion, four or five masterpieces there, while a good deal of the other pieces were of somewhat lesser quality.
This exhibition gets my "accepted" rating, with a pointer in the direction of not recommended. The art of Picasso in itself is great, no doubt about it. But the setting and the theme almost destroyed the experience for me and I blame the museum for that mistake.
6/10
Arken - Museum of Modern Art
official exhibition page
https://uk.arken.dk/exhibition/beloved-by-picasso/
