Hanna Gadsby, comedian and artist, was not seen at the presentation at the Brooklyn Museum. His aura, however, emerged constantly from before accessing the exhibition he is organizing.
As a welcome greeting, one of his phrases printed on the wall expresses the idea that it is useless to start a conversation about whether to cancel Picasso. “It’s impossible, it’s already happened to us. Besides, Picasso doesn’t care, he’s dead, he won’t learn anything from it. It’s a joke! It is, but not really.”
And it isn’t, because once the threshold is crossed, a different world emerges from the usual one, from the institutional tribute paid to the Spanish genius while forgetting his imperfections as a person, his masculinist and dominant character, in an era in which behavior is also observed, and not just fabrics.
The approach of It’s Pablomatic: Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby breaks with this line of absolute surrender to the iconic myth and delves into the contrast between the work and the artist from the feminist critical review that has been generated since his death in 1973.
“In this exhibition we do not intend to affirm that he is not a great painter. We all know it is, but we want to frame it in its context,” noted curator Lisa Small, who curated this show with Catherine Morris and Gadsby, who achieved widespread success with her monologue show Nanette , in which he railed against misogyny, homophobia and the canonical narrative, particularly against Picasso.
From a hundred works, half from Malaga and the other half from around thirty women artists (Louise Bourgeois, Dara Birnbaun, Kiky Smith or Cindy Sherman) and a male guest (Philip Pearlstein), it is generated a contrasting dialogue of a historical nature in the context of the transformations recorded throughout the past five decades, including the prism of the movement
The exhibition, which opens on June 2, was created at the request of the Picasso Museum in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.
“It can be said that the whole of the 20th century was, if nothing else, as problematic as Picasso himself, and feeds a large part of the current intergenerational conflict”, according to Gadsby’s statements included in the press release. “We are still ruled by monsters from the nineties. So why don’t we celebrate Picasso as the perfect mascot, monstrously arrogant and destructive?†he adds.
One of the pieces on display is one of Gadsby’s works, a painting he did in the style of Woman Reading on the Beach at the age of 17, the one Marie-Thérèse Walter had when the Spaniard boasted of being her lover.
Despite these kinds of considerations, Morris remarked that “it is not possible to cancel Picasso and he will come out of this whole process well”. But this will allow visitors to combine this overwhelming impression of the artist with the conflicting features, and see how the perception changes.
“The idea is that you can love an artist and recognize their brilliance and creativity, and now you can also know, through the juxtaposition in this space, about their biography, the lives and behaviors of these men, because in general they are men” , Small emphasized. “Your heroes, whether they are artists or not, are not perfect, no one is,” he added.
The exhibition is organized around visual and conceptual themes. The starting point is that “not all prodigies become geniuses”. The world made a space for Picasso to exploit as a genius, others, like women, never had it. This is the era of demystification.
