, Louise Nevelson and Faith Ringgold. By placing Picasso in conversation with artists who often toiled for years in the margins, this show aims to reckon with the kind of art-world mythologising that buoyed Picasso’s career and excused his loutishness, as it did so many other men. As Gadsby notes: “Not all prodigies get to be geniuses.”
At a time when all museums are under pressure to rethink old work and revise old stories, it is not surprising that Picasso has. He had a habit of chewing up women and spitting them out, and he appropriated African art while dismissing African culture—“Like a true coloniser,” observes Renee Cox, an artist featured in this show.
Yet the challenge of deflating Picasso’s mythology is that he is still, quite plainly, a genius. Even this modest presentation of his prodigious output, which includes only eight of his paintings, demonstrates his staggering range and skill. His etchings of minotaurs ravaging female prey may be sexually complicated, but they are also energetic and thrilling. The abstracted “Woman in Gray” is hardly flattering, with its piggish nose and mournful palette, but it remains uniquely evocative.
All of this makes Gadsby’s rather blunt commentary seem churlish at times. Alongside Picasso’s slight plaster sculpture “Pleureuse ”, which hardly feels representative of his, Gadsby writes that the piece makes clear why “so many people point out that Picasso had no formal training in sculpture. It is hard to be impressed otherwise.” Elsewhere Gadsby notes that weeping women appear in “heaps and heaps and heaps” of Picasso’s works in the late 1930s. “I am not kidding. Heaps.
Still, there is something refreshing about a show that doesn’t let Picasso preen on his pedestal. Many of his works here feature an artist in a studio with a comely nude model, a tableau that feels at once charged and vampiric. The contrast between Picasso’s pert breasts and curvy hips and the female bodies created by female artists feels potent. In Bourgeois’s roundedand Nevelson’s drawings of sagging breasts is a revolution of reclamation.