Picasso's tragedy

Richmond, Va.--"Excuse me miss, but pens are prohibited in this exhibit. If you would like to take notes, you will need to use a pencil." The curator hands a stubby no. 2 to the girl in a teal pea coat. She takes it and looks up, hushed, at one of the first paintings: "La Celestina." A woman robed in midnight-blue looks back with one clear, penetrating eye. The other eye is cloudy and blind.

The painting is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' "Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris." The exhibit, open Feb. 19 through May 15, showcases 176 of the artist's paintings, drawings, sculptures and etchings, covering each notable period of his eight-decade career.

Badge-wearing staff on the lookout for pens roam the exhibit as the crowd navigates its labyrinth of rooms. The teal-coated girl, Chelsea, eventually comes to a picture of what looks like three balls, two wooden clubs, and one pronged horse shoe: a work titled "Woman in Red Armchair." This time, you can't even be sure where the eyes are.

VMFA's "Picasso" is drawing hundreds, the high class and the blue collar alike. Why the appeal? In its own way, the collection demystifies modernism. It is a brightly-colored explanation of why the artist, who died in 1973, is a towering figure in the art world. But there is also tragedy in the exhibit, the work of an artist who saw some things clearly but in the end seemed overwhelmed by the modernism that defined him.

Co-founder of cubism

Made possible because the Paris museum is undergoing extensive renovations that won't be complete until next year, the exhibit comes to Richmond as the second of the three U.S. showings and the only East Coast stop.

Classical style portraits of women and nude boys fill the exhibit's early showrooms. The middle of the exhibit introduces "cubism," art characterized by forms depicted in overlapping planes. Painted people gaze out from the side and straight on simultaneously. "The Acrobat" extends one leg over his head, which is not attached to his shoulders. The nudes become angular, and noticeably sexualized.

In the final rooms of the exhibit, works that Picasso completed by the 1950s such as "Guernica" and "Massacre in Korea" depict the chaotic and contorted experiences of war-ravaged people. Many of the human forms are deconstructed and creatively reassembled.

They are such a far cry from the portraits at the entrance that you may need to stop short in the middle of the floor and gather your thoughts. A Picasso quote on the wall of the final room may help: "God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things."

No real style

No real style. The patrons in the exhibit seem almost as diverse. A well-dressed woman in high heels clips smartly from one painting to the next. A weathered man in an Alan Jackson baseball cap ambles from piece to piece. A teen who smells of cigarette smoke scuffs towards the next room with a cashew-sized piercing protruding out of her slightly opened lip.

"I regard Picasso as an artist of harmony." said Young S. Kim, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Maryland, who was wondering through the exhibit. "When God made me, he put my nose here, my eyes here, and my ears here," he said. "Picasso was not 100 percent set in the harmony offered by God."

"He kept looking" said Elizabeth Miles, an art enthusiast from California. "He kept trying to see in another way."

Dr. Gene Edward Veith, former culture columnist for WORLD, later affirmed that "Picasso was seeing in a fresh way, like a child." Veith explained that Picasso's attention to forms was classically rooted, and that his experiments, some modern and abstract, can be appreciated if accepted on their own terms.

"Christians shouldn't assume that unusual hybrids, neither completely realistic nor completely abstract, are bad." Veith said. "Playing around with form in itself doesn't say anything about a particular philosophy or moral system."

"He did not paint to please other people. He painted to please himself," said Christie Hartsock, a Richmond resident and art collector. "If you asked him what his painting was about, he asked you what your breathing was about. He lived for it!"

Hartsock, a Christian, said she loves Picasso's work, and expressed admiration for the delight with which he painted every day, knowing that he was meant to do so.

"When a Christian sees a beautiful work," Veith said, "it can become an occasion to praise God for this gift to human beings."

Veith said that Picasso's beautiful works can produce appropriate praise and thankfulness to both their human creator and the ultimate Creator. On the other hand, puzzling or ugly works of art can produce the cleansing emotions of pity and fear.

"Pity and fear are helpful for Christians to experience. You can feel pity for the artist himself, and then fear lest we in our own times fall into the same deceptions."

Modernism's deception

The tragedy of Picasso, said Veith, is that he did not understand the deceptions of the modernist fragmentation of life. Painting was as close as he got to integration, but it is clear that healing and wholeness are missing from his later works.

A Picasso dictum posted in the exhibit declared, "Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange and hostile world and us." For Virginians, the locality of the VMFA exhibit provides a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see, from an unbeliever's view, the strange and hostile modern world.

For one thing, a collection this large and this representative of an artist's entire career is rare. "Seeing the actual [work] is always much better than seeing a print," Veith said. "The colors are brighter, and usually more powerful than what you would see on a computer screen. Posters almost never get the exact coloring right."

More compellingly, there is probably no better place to engage the community in life-changing questions than in an arts environment. People are surprisingly ready to talk about why they think the world is strange and hostile when there is a work of art to mediate the discussion.

"I don't understand." Chelsea said of the exhibit. "I don't know why he thought he could make everybody's nose look like that . . . It seems like he had a different aim than other artists do."

She had seen so much since she first met the gaze of the one-eyed "Celestina." Picasso clearly had as well. There was plenty to think about.

Chelsea took one last look behind her before she tucked her pencil in the pocket of her coat and disappeared through the exit doors. Chelsea would tell you: if you are looking for a detached museum visit, this is not it. This is a gripping, oversized-and-repositioned-eyed view at the best humanity can do about changing times.

P.S. "Please don't lean on the cases. They are alarmed, and a little bit sensitive."

Hannah Mitchell is a literature major at Patrick Henry College. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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