“Time is on my side… Just wait and see… You’ll come running back to me”
—Mick Jagger

I saw the Rolling Stones play for 40 people in a tiny London rock club in 1967. And they killed. Actually, that’s a lie. In truth, I saw the Stones play for 40,000 people at Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey in 2007. But they still killed. I wanted to hate it. I really did. Culture snob, born cynic that I am, there was no way I was going to give in to a past-prime tour of musicians more corporation than band. Yet, despite the innate desire to kill one’s idols, watch them fail or falter, sell out, burn out, wash out and die, no amount of bred suspicion could overcome the fact that it was a perfect three hours of music. Every bit in their prime, only better. Seasoned, honest, brutal, sincere, but with the gifts of age: perspective, urgency, and subtlety. Traits one would expect from artists late in life, but that in our youth-drunk culture we seem reluctant to afford. Death to all skeptics, doubters and cynics —they killed. In the face of the undeniable Mick Jagger, 65 years old and still chicken-strutting the length of a one-hundred-yard catwalk, cliché though it may be, I was reduced to a swooning, halter-top-adorned puddle, waiving an eight dollar Coors Light at a football field, screaming along with all the rest of fat and happy Jersey to a slurred version of “Time Is on My Side”. Long live rock and roll.

Near as I can explain it – this is the exact experience of Picasso: Mosqueteros a stunning exhibition of Picasso’s late-life works currently on view at the Gagosian Galllery in Chelsea. The show is undeniable. Breathless, raw, expansive, historical, contemporary and deeply moving. I found myself overwhelmed with the same sense of wonder—the miraculous silencing of the ever-catty internal critic by the presence of true mastery. No small feat either. Long considered to be paintings that evinced Picasso’s descent into mediocrity, quirkiness, and the rambling madness of an old man, their legacy seemed locked in the sewers of Picasso’s oeuvre. Clearly though, they were due for disinterment. Really, that it is even possible to rethink Picasso at this point, whose work seemed immovable to me even days ago, is a testament to his boundless relevance. The counterculture junkie within wants nothing more than to scoff at the banal, cliché, mainstream and co-opted: Picasso or the Rolling Stones. Yet, in this latest exhibition, the work is so brutally good that if I could have stripped down to my halter-top and waived a Coors Light at the wall without attracting undue attention I would have.

In short, Picasso: Mosqueteros is a landmark exhibition that should be seen by all lovers of art. A large group of rich and seductive paintings (nudes, portraits, musketeers and matadors) selected with astute care by John Richardson, Picasso’s loving biographer. In addition, the exhibition presents a large group of exquisite etchings. The paintings are rich and raw, colorful, open, funny, thick and earnest, while the etchings are quiet and delicate in their masterful rendering, re-affirming Picasso as the master draftsman who carries the entire history of mark making in his arsenal. Installed together, the etchings ground the rawness of the paintings as purposeful and political acts, not the lazy gestures, nor the ineptitude of a man near death.

As he did throughout his career, Picasso takes on the history of painting in these works, wrestling with his gods to find his seat in the pantheon. The foppish characters, mustached and costumed self-portraits, tip their floppy hats to Rembrandt. The matadors and musketeers fence with Velázquez and their Spanish identities; the bold color and thick paint of the figures call out to Van Gogh; and throughout linger the mingling ghosts of Ingres, Manet, El Greco and Cézanne. This engagement with painting’s history is the sole subject of another Picasso retrospective Picasso: Challenging the Past, currently on view at the National Gallery in London. Viewing these exhibitions side-by-side, one is struck by the power and subtlety of Picasso: Mosqueteros. Foremost, the works themselves are more reverent and introspective in their engagement with the past than the arrogant Picasso-fied copies of Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” or Manet’s “Le Déjeuner” hanging at the National Gallery. At Gagosian, Picasso winks cryptically at the great masters before him from behind his own depthless black eyes, which dot the Mosqueteros. The works are plaintive attempts to understand and assert Picasso’s own place in history, and nowhere is the questing for ones relevance more poignant than in late-life work. Looking back at the end of ones life over ones life, in hopes of finding the solace of purpose before death.

Moreover, viewing these two current Picasso retrospectives in comparison, I am struck by the powerful subtlety of Gagosian’s curation and installation. As with my distrust of Giants Stadium, I have to eat some crow here and give kudos to Gagosian. Foremost, installing the works in their 21st Street space is a brilliant coup. The most contemporary of Gagosian’s galleries imbues the works with the air of life, with the space and openness to exist before each portrait, as if face-to-face with the living. Further, they curbed any inkling to mar the clean lines of the gallery with unnecessary wall text or didactics. At the National Gallery in London, though the exhibition showcases a strong collection of paintings, didacticism, lack of depth, attention-deficit and overly compartmentalized curation render the show a trite regurgitation of the commonly accepted view that Picasso cribbed from the paintings of his idols. Yet, at Gagosian, devoid of the cloying wall text, inane audio guides, or pre-chewed museum pedagogy, one can really learn something, both about Picasso and his sources. It is an affirmation of the role of the private gallery in the creation of art history. It’s also a disturbing suggestion that when the educational paradigm is removed, suddenly the exhibition gets educational.

Beyond the exploration of painting, I was struck by the sex. (Herein the comparison with a Jagger-esque virility stays firm). It is a highly sexual show, arrestingly so at times, a fact that locates the work firmly in its time, thigh-deep in the sexual revolution of the late sixties. Many of the works are raw and brutal looks at sexuality from all positions: from tender courtship in the portraits of his lover Jacqueline to the frenzied voracious appetite of copulation in the iterations of “The Kiss” to the dazed afterglow of post-coital embrace in the nudes. At once tender, loving, passionate, hungry and sated; but also chauvinistic, bored, impotent, violent, masochistic, sexist and engulfing. Though it is not always flattering, the portrayal is nonetheless painfully honest about the truths inherent in the frenzied pawings of intercourse. The work explores the full nature of coupling, of the act of two becoming one and the metaphoric implications of duality. Portrait and self-portrait, viewer and subject, lover and self, all clawing at each other, ever pushing forward and receding away, in the eternal grinding rhythm towards epiphanal cumming.

Obviously, little on this planet besides death is more universal than sex, but I can think of few painters who have dealt with the topic with such accuracy recently. Let’s face it—there’s been a lot of vagina around town recently. Just to name a few—Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, and Richard Phillips, none of whose sexual paintings seem to come from any great love of sex. Take Currin, the most sensual of the three. Another Gagosian staple, his porn show, a cribbing of Courbet, didn’t embody the sense of an authentic exploration of sexuality, nor did the paintings feel like they were even about sex. Like porn, they were more about power and masculinity, or the failures therein. And with the clinical sterility of porn, there was nothing of the messy, frantic, unflattering, tender, embarrassing, overwhelming orgasm of emotion erupting from Picasso’s work. There is something deeply raw and honest, deeply emotional and carnal in these late Picasso works that is a stunning counterpart to the cerebral nature of their historicity.

Countless critics, artists and historians have weighed in to agree that Picasso: Mosqueteros is a landmark exhibition, on an epic scale. And it is. Especially touching was Peter Schjeldahl’s review in the New Yorker where he admits and revises his own past derision of the work. Unlike Schjeldahl, I’m not old enough to remember when these paintings were derided as sub par, let alone to have derided them, and honestly, seeing them now, I don’t particularly understand why they ever were. However, it is a fact that in the past these works were overlooked within Picasso’s oeuvre, and it is a fact that right now the volume of their importance is intoxicating. So, within this divide lurks one of the greatest questions posited by this exhibition: what the hell happened?

Can work, like wine, have a vintage? Is it possible that some of the best works may need years to develop the subtle notes of their palette? Can a work actually be ahead of its time, anticipating or even creating the conditions of its future acceptance? Is it possible that in the grand scope of Picasso’s fame, the ability to see work apart from the legend is lost? I can only imagine an inherent discomfort with change when these works were produced, especially for someone so canonized as Picasso. Perhaps rather than expanding definitions or internalizing contradictions, it is far more comfortable to write off whole periods of an oeuvre. Further, with Picasso, one must posit that the short-sellers and cynics in us wish for the failure of our idols in their final moments, and not on a minor scale but in some epic way, befitting a man who lived so much larger than life—that some part within each of us waits for the train wreck, the moment when the light goes out and the genius dies. In truth, failures are usually more prosaic. There are paintings, passages and parts that fail. Yet, those were exactly the bi-products of courageous exploration that Picasso always welcomed in his practice. To strive for something new, to push against the four corners of the canvas is to remain uncomfortable and to fail at times. And in this, even the worst in this exhibition succeed as they always have, showcasing the true core of Picasso’s practice, to push for authentic and courageous exploration even in the face of the formidable trappings of legend, fame, ego and the real possibility of colossal failure.

I carried these questions about the mutable nature of significance with me as I walked through the galleries of Chelsea. I was particularly struck at Andrea Rosen by a Sean Landers’ painting from 1997, currently on view in the back gallery. The painting “Dance of Life” depicts a circle of dancing naked hippies, reminiscent of Matisse, only bigger, weirder and more out there. The painting lets it all hang out, both in its massive scale and penis-wagging subjects. It’s wild, and one can still understand why when it was first shown in 1997 it was met with tepid, if not hostile reviews. In the New York Times, Roberta Smith called Landers “in painful transition,” and said that the painting “didn’t gel, pictorially, narratively or coloristically.” For Artnet, Roger Boyce wrote that “the artlessness of [the picture left him] feeling cold and alone on a hostile planet.” However, standing before this painting today, pulled out of whatever massive storage facility it’[s been hiding in, it looks damn good. Chicken-strutting good. Truly, it’s striking to consider in retrospect how Landers marked or anticipated or maybe even caused a seismic shift in painting, currently visible in the likes of Dana Schutz. In fact, I’m lightened by the revision of its importance, more than Picasso even, because it suggests hope for the less storied amongst us—that in this dance of life, even the fat goatied hippies may come round full circle to their significance.

Enlivened by this belief in the mutable nature of quality, about the unpredictable effects of time, I wonder about the all the exhibitions I will mock and deride today. Who knows which of these heinous-looking beasts, which of these pointless, inane, time-wasting, face-cringing, embarrassing failures will emerge from a storage unit some 40 years hence to the deafening applause of an audience finally ready to embrace its genius. Time is on my side. Just wait and see.

Show details:
Picasso: Mosqueteros
March 26 – June 6, 2009
Gagosian
522 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
Tel 212.741.1717
Tue-Sat 10-6

Picasso: Challenging the Past
25 February – 7 June 2009National Gallery, London
Sullivan Wing
Daily 10-6

Sean Landers: Dance of Life
April 24 – June 13, 2009
Andrea Rosen Gallery
Gallery 3
525 2. 24th, NY, NY
10011
212 627 6000
Tue-Sat 10-6

Cynthia Daignault is an independent artist, writer and curator, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the associate director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation and a researcher on the forthcoming Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonne. Additionally, she works with a number of prominent artists’ studios to design database technology to archive their inventory and documentation. Her paintings have been the subjects of recent exhibitions at Plane Space Gallery, NY and Glenn Horowitz, East Hampton, NY. Her previous reviews for Last Exit looked at The Generational: Younger than Jesus and recent work by Justin Lieberman and Johan Grimonprez.

Copyright Last Exit 2009