Friday, March 8, 2024

Happy International Women's Day!

 





Wishing you a joyous celebration of 
International Women's Day!

With love,
Beth and the New York Arts Exchange





Saturday, February 17, 2024

Last Call: Picasso in Fontainebleau, closing today Feb 17 for general public, Feb. 19 for MoMA members

Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
Three Musicians, Fontainebleau, summer 1921
Oil on canvas
6' 7" x 7' 3 3/4" (200.7 x 222.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

From July to September in 1921, Picasso rented a villa for himself, his Russian ballerina wife Olga Khokhlova, and their five-month-old son Paul Joseph (“Paolo”) in the charming village Fontainebleau, about 35 miles from Paris, best known for its glorious, eclectic château, dating back to the 12th century. In the adjacent garage, fitted out as a studio, Picasso created four gigantic masterpieces: Three Musicians (two versions painted simultaneously) and Three Women at the Spring (two versions, one painting and one red-chalk drawing). These 6-foot works towered over 5 foot-4 inch Picasso in this narrow space, generating an enigmatic puzzle for future Picasso scholars: What can we glean from Picasso’s eclecticism during this summer in Fontainebleau?

Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
Three Musicians, 1921
Oil on canvas
80 1/2 × 74 1/8" (204.5 × 188.3 cm)
The Philadelphia Museum of Art. A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York


Willing to take on the challenge and contribution to Picasso 1973-2023: The Fiftieth Anniversary, New York’s Museum of Modern Art brought these four significant works together for the first time since they left Picasso’s Fontainebleau studio in 1921. Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture Anne Umland and her assistants Alexandra Morrison and Francesca Ferrari examined the works diligently, and then had them installed with other Picasso works completed at the same time in order to study this pivotal period in this artist’s very long and extraordinarily productive career. Their query is: What was Picasso thinking?  We have, on the one hand, his late Cubist style for Three Musicians and, on the other, his “Ingres-esque” classical style for the Three Women at a Spring. What should we take away from this disparate combination?


Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
Three Women at the Spring, Fontainebleau, summer 1921
Oil on canvas
6' 8 1/4" x 68 1/2" (203.9 x 174 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil
©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York


First, let’s consider the brilliant exhibition Picasso in Fontainebleau. We enter into a huge gallery where we see numerous works of art produced within the few years leading up to the summer of 1921. Several come from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, owner of Picasso’s greatest creations, most notably, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Then we walk through a small, narrow gallery that features ghostly reproductions painted on the walls giving us a feeling for the dimensions inside Picasso’s studio-garage, 20 x 10 feet. From there we emerge into a very large gallery which displays the two versions of the late Cubist Three Musicians (from MoMA and from the Philadelphia Museum of Art), facing each other on opposite walls, and the two versions of his classical Three Women at the Spring, which face each other as well. The musicians are male and the women at the spring are – well, you know. 


Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato


It’s an intriguing ensemble of characters. The musicians seem lighthearted as they entertain us with their silent concerts. They belong to the traveling burlesque Commedia dell’Art tradition, dating back to the Italian Renaissance. Their masked faces peep out at us, eager to attract our attention. Their bodies are flat interlocking planes of solid colors: bright white, orangy red, pale green, dark blues, gray, and light brown hues against a chocolate brown background in the New York version and grassy patterned green background in the Philadelphia version. All six figures seem to exude a bit of rambunctiousness. The push-pull of the colors that share parts of their interconnected bodies produces a rhythmic quality. These guys are rockin’. The Pierrots are tooting away on clarinets or Spanish tenoras. The New York Harlequin strums a guitar, while the New York monk sings. The Philadelphia Harlequin pauses from fiddling his violin, bow in his left hand, as his neighbor, the other monk, holds his cup in his right hand and the concertina on his lap with the left. In this MoMA room they are showing off their manly skills to impress six scantily-dress ladies preoccupied with drawing water from a spout.


Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
Three Women at the Spring, 1921
Red chalk on canvas
78 3/4 × 63 3/8" (200 × 161 cm)
Musée National Picasso-Paris. Dation Pablo Picasso
©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

 

None of the Women seem to be listening to these hardworking Musicians. They are lost in conversation, too absorbed in their task and themselves to pay attention to anyone else, including us, their audience.  In comparison to Three Musicians, Picasso’s Three Women at a Spring imposes a somber note among the jazzy razzle-dazzle of their male companions. Quiet and contained within their earthy umber background, these colossal bodies, dressed in grayish-white chitons, seem more like 5th century BC Greek columns than lithe ancient Greek sculptures from the same era. They are zoftig and majestic, similar to figures in 17th century French Classicist Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, which Picasso must have studied in the Louvre. Picasso’s 20th century version of classical female figures whisper while their male counterparts, six Musicians in this gallery, bray. The women own their space with timeless, monumental stability: salt of the earth, instead of fearsome femme fatales. The musicians seem to represent an ephemeral reality, the fairytale land of theatrical performance.

 


Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego, second version, 1628, Musée du Louvre.
Source : Wikipedia. Public Domain


In short, we register an agon here between the flimsy “cubiçant” guys and the substantial “classical” gals reunited in this physical space but perpetually at odds with each other psychologically as they act out two different modes of human interaction. They're Picasso's Kens and Barbies - the Great Divide between the sexes. Nothing has changed since these huge canvases left Picasso’s Fontainebleau garage over a century ago. The four groups of only men or women still huddle on the sidelines during this Big Dance of life.


Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
Studies, 1920-1922
Oil on canvas
39 3/8 × 31 7/8" (100 × 81 cm)
Musée National Picasso–Paris. Dation Pablo Picasso
©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

 

Also, these works offer some insight into Picasso’s incipient midlife crisis, caught between his old bohemian life with his Montmartre bodies and his new embourgeoisement with demanding wife Olga and irresistibly adorable Paolo. The late great art historian Theodore Reff interpreted the tres amigos as a wistful backward glance toward Picasso’s early days in Paris when Picasso’s Gang met every day in Montmartre or Montparnasse. This analysis sounds quite convincing since Picasso would turn 40 in October, a significant age for most, usually a time to reevaluate past accomplishments and worry about the ultimate retirement in the not-too-distant future. Death, by the way, is definitely present in Three Musicians. Here’s the scoop on that interpretation.


Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato


In both versions of  Three Musicians we see Harlequin (a ne’er do well ladies man), Pierrot (a sad-sack clown), and a monk. Theodore Reff believed each character alluded to Picasso and two members of his famous entourage: Picasso as his alter-ego Harlequin, the poet/novelist/critic Guillaume Apollinaire as Pierrot, and poet/critic/artist Max Jacob as the monk. In the MoMA version we see parts of a dog under Pierrot’s chair on the extreme left. This Anubis-like creature symbolizes death. Apollinaire died from “Spanish Flu” on November 9, 1918. That summer of 1921, Max Jacob retreated to a Benedictine monastery in St. Benoit-sur-Loire, hence the brown triangle (“hood”) atop a brown rectangle with depicted rope belt in the Philadelphia version and without a belt in the MoMA version. 


Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato.

Other things to notice: Pierrot wears his signature white clown outfit and Harlequin wears his signature diamond pattern jumpsuit. Significantly, the colors for this Harlequin’s pattern are red, black, and green, the colors of the Spanish flag, which reference Picasso’s nationality. Also in both works the figures wear masks and the clothes are reminiscence of the costumes and sets Picasso designed for the Ballets Russe production of Pulcinello in 1920. We imagine these figures are performing on stage as we stand in the front row.  We also notice that in the Philadelphia version Pierrot’s clarinet contains a human profile, perhaps a direct reference to Apollinaire.



Cover photo of Annie Cohen-Solal’s book
 

Annie Cohen-Solal’s book and exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso  points out that Picasso’s identification with Harlequin references his sense of alienation. Harlequin is a stock character in Commedia dell’Arte, whose antics come from the position of an outsider, perhaps a drifter. He causes trouble with his mischievous schemes. He may be The Fool in the Tarot card deck. His character seduces Pierrot’s wife, Columbina, behind Pierrot’s back, which adds sexiness to Harlequin’s attributes, and melancholy to Pierrot’s. No doubt Picasso identified with this flattering aspect of Harlequin, the irrepressible tombeur (ladies’ man). 


Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato


Picasso’s late Cubist vocabulary continues the artist’s collage aided planar vocabulary developed during the so-called Synthetic Period of Cubism (1912-14) and connects these paintings to his studio in the Bateau Lavoir, where he created his harlequin paintings during his Rose Period (1905-1906) and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, the masterpiece that introduced his future Cubist planarity, passage, and geometricity.  From my perspective, Three Musicians, painted together in one studio, might represent his Parisian tertulia, who shared his jokes and pranks, which he performed in his Synthetic Cubist’ collages. These visual and linguistic puns were decoded for us in Elizabeth Cowling and Emily Braun’s illuminating exhibition Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another contribution to the Picasso 1973-2023: Fiftieth Anniversary celebration.

 

Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881–1973
The Spring, 1921
Oil on canvas
25 3/16 × 35 7/16" (64 × 90 cm)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Gift of Grace and Philip Sandblom
©2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

  


Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Source (The Spring), 1850
Source: Wikipedia. Public Domain 


Three Women at the Spring, on the other hand, continues Picasso’s neoclassical “Ingres Period” with its emphasis on sculptural expression. This exploration of volumetric forms seems to chisel out the face, body, massive hands, columnar pleats, and blocks of stone arranged around the standing and sitting figures. We can see the same classical robustness in Picasso’s Studies (1920-1922) and other portraits of his ballerina wife Olga Khoklova, whom he married on July 12, 1918.  


Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato

 

Picasso’s pivot to a mannered classicism began in 1914 with his unfinished (?) painting, The Painter and the Model. The following year he delicately drew in pencil several Ingres-esque portraits of his friends and dealers, including Apollinaire and Max Jacob. He hadn’t abandoned Cubism, he simply added to his arsenal of visual expressions that seemed appropriate for his state of mind and spirit (son esprit).  In 1915, his eerily smiling Cubist Harlequin, also in MoMA’s collection and included in this exhibition, seems to mark his transition from a life with his beloved Eva Gouel (his muse during the Cubist years) and without. She died in December 1915. This period of her illness (cancer or tuberculosis) caused this normally resilient artist much anxiety (described his letter to Gertrude Stein at the time).

 

Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato


In a 1923 interview Picasso explained: “If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or for the worse. The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting.  All I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it always remains in the present.” (Picasso on Art, edited by Dore Ashton, Da Capo Press, 1972, p. 5)

 



Installation view of Picasso in Fontainebleau, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 8, 2023-February 17, 2024. Photo: Jonanthan Dorato

Anne Umland observed: “these four imposing works lie at the heart of Picasso in Fontainebleau, which delves into a strikingly contradiction-filled moment when Picasso seemed intent on demonstrating how in his art, and in his conception of the tradition of painting more broadly, classicism and cubism, the academy and the avant-garde, the historical past and the contemporary present, were dialectically related and inexorably linked.”


Olga Khokhlova in Picasso’s studio, Montrouge, Spring 1918.
Photographer: Pablo Picasso (?) or Emil Delatang(?)


This phrase “dialectically related and inexorably linked” holds the key to our appreciation of this extraordinary artistic endeavor.  Rarely, if ever, do we see an artist work simultaneously in two distinctly different and contradictory styles, one flat and the other in illusory three-dimensions. Picasso clearly mastered each style at this point in his career but had also reached a crossroads that needed processing before achieving some resolution. When Marie-Thérèse Walter entered his life in January 1927, Picasso seemed to have found his synthesis, allegedly motivated by this blonde, athletic teenager. That may or may not be true, but we can’t help notice Picasso changed his style and dog (according to Dora Maar) every time he changed his mistress. The next Picasso period blends his Cubist criteria with his curvaceous figurative classicism to form his signature “Surrealist” style, perhaps his most iconic visual expression when we think of the word “Picasso” as a noun, an adjective, and a brand.

The conundrum of Picasso’s four Fontainebleau masterpieces created side-by-side in his modest garage-studio may have met its match in MoMA’s ambitious exhibition.  Or, it may remain elusive, as much of Picasso’s work continues to be. Although fifty years have passed since Picasso’s death on April 8, 1973 and 122 years have passed since Picasso’s first exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery on the rue Lafitte in June 1901, the protean complexity of Picasso never ceases to challenge and amaze. He was, and remains, one of greatest artists who graced this planet. And we have not heard the last word on his Fontainebleau period, nor any other period, guaranteed.

***

For more information about MoMA’s Three Women at a Spring, please watch this video, and their Three Musicians, please watch this video.  Both videos recount the histories of paintings as physical objects. Fascinating!

The catalogue for Picasso in Fontainebleau, featuring 15 essays, 239 color illustrations is available through MoMA and other booksellers online.



c

 





Saturday, February 10, 2024

Last Call - Picasso at Gagosian, closing today!


Photograph by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic
Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1901, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pablo Picasso, Yo - Self-Portrait, 1901, Museum of Modern Art
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Fool, 1905, Private Collection

 
A Foreigner Called Picasso
Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st Street

Curated by Annie Cohen-Solal and Vérane Tasseau

Closing February 10th

For more information, please visit the website:

Available online


 

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Happy Holidays 2023 - Wishing You Comfort and Joy!

 

Central Park in the Snow


Happy Holidays!

      Peace be with you now and through 2024 


Love and hugs,

Beth 

and the New York Arts Exchange 



Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Sarah Bernhardt in New York and Paris: A Conversation with Carol Ockman and Beth Gersh-Nesic, Thursday, November 30th at 4 pm on Zoom

 




Thursday, November 30, 2023
1pm PT / 2pm MT / 3pm CT / 4pm ET
Federation of Alliances Françaises USA

In English

Join us as art historian Beth S. Gersh-Nešić talks to Sarah Bernhardt scholar, Carol Ockman, about the recent exhibit on the famous actress at the Petit Palais in Paris.

Writer, performer, and curator, Carol Ockman is a world-renowned scholar of Sarah Bernhardt. She is co-author of Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (2005), whose awarding-winning exhibition and catalog she and Kenneth E. Silver curated and wrote for the Jewish Museum (New York, 2005-06). In addition to lecturing widely on Sarah Bernhardt, she was interviewed as Bernhardt in “Wish You Were Here,” as part of a series inspired by Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Her memoir, Sarah Bernhardt’s Handkerchief (in progress), which she wrote and performs as a one-woman show, weaves together close encounters with stardom, her father’s suicide, and the power of objects from the past to mitigate loss.

Ockman has also written extensively on nineteenth-century art (Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line) and contemporary art and culture, including art criticism and essays on Barbie, the nude, portraiture, and stereotypes. As Curator at Large for Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (Sarasota, Florida, 2016-2022), she put major works of art in dialogue with living plants, working with horticulturalists to produce six exhibitions on Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, Paul Gauguin, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. As writer and performer, Ockman also collaborates with other creatives, in works like Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities (2016-2020), a six-part piece that queries iconic dances from Nijinsky to Cunningham. A long-time teacher at Williams College, Ockman is now Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art Emerita.

Beth S. Gersh-Nešić, Ph.D. is an art historian and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service.  She writes about Picasso, Cubism, the French poet/art critic/journalist André Salmon, modernism, and contemporary artists. Her most recent book is Pablo Picasso, André Salmon and Young French Painting, a translation with annotations and an introduction by Jacqueline Gojard, Professor Emeritus, University of Paris III. She is also a staff writer for Bonjour Paris, an online magazine, and a Senior Lecturer at Mercy University. Her article on the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at Wildenstein Gallery appeared in Women Artists News (Spring 1985).

This event will be on Zoom and is free for all Alliance Française members, AATF members, and invited guests of the presenter or publicist.  Click here to register.  You are a "guest of the lecturer,"

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Thanksgiving Greetings 2023

Charles Ethan Porter, Apples on the Ground, 1878
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art



Wishing you and your loved ones
a joyous Thanksgiving celebration - 

And all the blessings of the Holiday Season!

With love and tremendous gratitude 
for 20 years of sharing art with you - 

 Beth



Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, PhD
Director/owner
New York Arts Exchange, LLC
 

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Fall Greetings and a letter from the heart

  


Mark Podwal, Jerusalem in My Heart, 2001
Etching

Dear friends,

I live with this image of Jerusalem etched by Mark Podwal. It's a rose cradling three religions, growing and thriving from its stem of thorns. It is a metaphor for the region that cradles Israel and Palestine today. What can we say?  There are no words. We feel these thorns. We pray for the survival of the rose. When will the conflict in the Middle East end? This image seems to say that the only way to see this region survive, having experienced its thorny history, is to rise above it, protecting this vision of peaceful coexistence among the main religions, if not all humankind.

I am praying everyday that all sides of the conflict will reach a peaceful agreement and work toward the survival of all who have been dragged into this horror. Their pain and suffering belongs to us all, there and here - as we worry daily for the hostages and the possibility of an all out war among Israel and its neighbors. We pray for peace as soon as possible.

My heart goes out to the mourners, whose lives have been damaged forever because of their losses. My heart goes out to the family members who wait for word from their loved ones in captivity. My heart goes out to the families who are enduring bombs on both sides, the destruction on both sides, the loss of their homes and personal security on both sides. And my heart goes out to those who tried to broker peace in the region, failed, and lived to see this horror. I remember those who died because they tried to make it happen: Anwar Sadat, Yitzak Rabin, and countless others.  

Our population on earth is enduring war, terrorism, gang violence, and personal assaults/assassinations all the time, all over the place. What can we do? 

I have no idea. . . .




Mark Podwal, Jerusalem in My Heart, 2001
original ink drawing; image courtesy of the artist


I often think about what to write for this blog and then it feels trite and inconsequential in the face of the pain of so many others. So, I don't write anything at all.  Art is all I can offer.  Is this enough for you? Does art lift you up out of your sorrow and bring relief, if only for a little while?

After the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the Purchase College class I had begun the week before, Thursday, September 6, 2001, corresponded through email to affirm our mutual decision to carry on. We must continue the class, which met weekly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We had to be together, resist fear of public spaces, support art, and support each other as we faced the unknown.  That week, we couldn't even imagine being alive today. We only worried about getting through each day and tomorrow.  

At that time, art helped us persevere because we decided to remain together and enjoy our Thursdays at the Met together. We had each other and we had the treasures in this extraordinary cultural institution guiding us out of the darkness and into the light of historical proof that humankind carries on, producing beauty despite all the setbacks imposed by our fellow humans or Mother Nature herself.

Take care, my dear friends - use art to escape from your sorrows, use art to heal. Take a moment to forget the painful truth of our present world crises as you stand in front of wondrous creativity.  

Later this week, I will post on this blog a calendar of exhibitions that I hope bring you comfort and joy.

With love and hugs,
Beth

Director/owner