If you studied art history or any other humanities in the 1990s or 2000s—for example, if you’re around the age of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, 45—you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. At the time, it was a fashionable noun, borrowed from French, that described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. But soon, as with so many other attempts at critical thinking, “the problem” was left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. Today we encounter “problematic” exclusively as an adjective: a passing judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker uninterested in precision.
An entire cast of professional artists — restorers, designers, security guards, technicians — has been hired to create “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a small exhibit opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It’s a title so silly I can’t even type it; I’m cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many globally timed on the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially a light entertainment follow-up to “Nanette,” a 2018 Netflix special. In that routine, sort of a mix of stand-up and TED Talk, Gadsby lamented that he had “barely graduated from an art history degree,” at the undergraduate level. , and tried the Spanish artist: “He’s rotten in the facial cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” Now this entertainer has made it through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, then the joke – actually the only good joke of the day – is for you.
Like the noun turned adjective “problematic,” this new exhibition goes back from a close search for the affirmative comfort of social justice-themed pop culture. In the Brooklyn Museum you’ll find a few (very few) paintings by Picasso, plus two small sculptures and a selection of works on paper, supplemented by Gadsby’s tame witticisms on adjacent labels. Nearby are works of art made by women, almost all created after Picasso’s death in 1973; finally, in a vestibule, clips of “Nanette” are played on a loop. That’s the whole exhibit, and anyone expecting this to be a Netflix inflection of the degenerate art show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as the ritualized scapegoat, rest assured. There is little to see. There is no catalog to read. The aspirations here are GIF-level, though perhaps that’s the intent.
As far as it has an argument – a problematic — it goes like this: Pablo Picasso was an important artist. He was also a bit of a jerk around women. And women are more than “goddesses or doormats,” as Picasso boldly put it; women also have stories to tell. I wish there was more to inform you about, but that’s really about the extent of it. All the feminist scholarship of the past 50 years – about repressed desire, about phallic instability, or even just about the lives of the women Picasso loved – is being cast aside in favor of what really matters: your feelings. “Admiration and anger can coexist,” a text at the entrance to the show reassures us.
That Picasso, probably the most written about painter in history, was both a great artist and a not-so-great guy is so far from news that it could be classified as climate. What matters is What are you doing with that friction, and “It’s Pablo-matic” doesn’t do much. For starters, it doesn’t collect a lot of things to look at. The actual number of Picasso’s paintings here is only eight. Seven were borrowed from the Musée Picasso in Paris, which supports shows worldwide to mark this anniversary; one belongs to the Brooklyn Museum; none are first class. There are no institutional loans other than a few prints brought across the river from MoMA. What you see here from Picasso are mostly modest etchings, and even those barely show his stylistic breadth; more than two dozen sheets come from one folder, the neoclassical Vollard Suite from the 1930s.
Unsigned texts in each gallery are fundamental references to gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of European modern art, while Gadsby offers signed banter alongside individual works. These labels work a bit like bathroom graffiti, or maybe Instagram captions. Next to a classicist print of Picasso and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter: “I am so manly that my chest hair exploded.” Next to a reclining nude: “Is she really reclining? Or has she just fallen from a great height?”
There is a fixation on sex organs and bodily functions throughout. Every sphincter, every phallus is called with adolescent excitement; also with adolescent vocabulary. Whatever jokes there are (“Meta? Barely know her!”) remain youthful enough to leave Picasso unscathed. The adults involved with the Brooklyn Museum (mainly senior curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, Gadsby’s collaborators here) really could have curbed this immaturity, though to their credit they at least fleshed out the show with some context about the sect. of male genius or the emergence of feminist art history in the 1970s.
The problem is obvious and completely symptomatic of our back-to-front digital life: to this show the comments came first, the objects responded second. A show that started with photographs might make you wonder – echoing pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin – why Picasso’s paintings of women generally lack desire, unlike the perverted paintings of Balthus, Picabia and other cancelable gentlemen from the Middle Ages. A show properly dealing with feminism and the avant-garde might have turned to Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, or Olga Rozanova: the remarkable female Soviet artists who put Picasso’s collapse of forms at the service of the political revolution . A more serious view of reputation and male genius could at least have introduced a work An female cubist: maybe Alice Bailly, or Marie Vassilieff, or Alice Halicka, or Marie Laurencin, or Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, or María Blanchard, or even the Australian Anne Dangar.
Instead, “It’s Pablo-matic” content itself with works by women from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. These seem to have been selected more or less at random, including a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, an assemblage by Betye Saar, and Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” a 1978/79 video art classic whose connection to Picasso is beyond me. (At least two paintings here, by Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas, are based on the example of Manet, not Picasso.) The artists who created them are here, in what may be this show’s only real insult, reduced to mere narrators of women’s lives. “I want my story to be heard,” reads a quote from Gadsby in the last room; the same label praises the “all-new stories” of a new generation.
This elevation of “stories” over art (or at least comedy) was the main impetus for “Nanette,” a stand-up routine in Sydney that became a viral success during the last US presidency, shortly after Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds finally came to light. had come to light. . “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic goal for culture, rejecting the “trauma” of joke-telling in favor of the resolution of “stories” in three acts. It directly compared Picasso to then-President Trump: “The greatest artist of the twentieth century. Let’s make art great again, guys.” It even claimed that Picasso, and by extension all Old Masters, suffered from “the mental illness of misogyny.” (Given this pathologizing of Picasso, yes terribly intriguingly, Gadsby has described the Brooklyn Museum show as their own deeply desired act of sexual assault against the Malaga man, telling Variety, “I really, really want to light it up.”)
Most bizarrely, the routine rested on a condemnation of art as an elitist scam, and modernism was given a particularly hard time. “CUUU-bism,” went Gadsby’s mocking chorus, to reliable laughter from the audience. (As it is today, Picasso’s own Cubist art appears in the Brooklyn Museum through a single 6-by-4.5-inch engraving.) The sarcasm, from a comedian with moderate art-historical bona fides, had a purpose: It gave Gadsby’s audience permission to believe that avant-garde painting was actually a big scam. “They’re all cut from the same cloth,” Gadsby told audiences in “Nanette,” “Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein….”—and the art you never liked in the first place could be dismissed as the nonsense of a clique of bad men.
Not so long ago it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comfort of storytelling. What Gadsby did was give the public permission – moral permission – to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.
So who should be most put off by this show? Not Picasso, who gets out completely unscathed. But the women artists in the museum’s collection got caught up in this little joke, and the generations of women and feminist art historians – Rosalind Krauss, Anne Wagner, Mary Ann Caws, hundreds more – who have devoted their careers to thinking seriously about modern art and gender. Particularly at the Brooklyn Museum, whose involvement in feminist art is unique in New York, I was saddened and embarrassed that this show doesn’t even try to deliver what it promises: to put women artists on an equal footing with the great man.
“My story has value,” said Gadsby in “Nanette”; and then, “I will not allow my story to be destroyed”; and then, “Stories hold our remedy.” But Howardena Pindell, seen here, is much more than a storyteller; Cindy Sherman, seen here, is much more than a storyteller. They are artists, like Picasso before them, who bring ideas and images into productive tension, without certainty of closure or consolation. The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to present to all of us the full aesthetic achievements of these women; there is also room for story time, in the children’s wing.
It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby
June 2 through September 24, the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.