In search of Picasso

The MFA's portrait of the artist as a young genius

by Jeffrey Gantz

"PICASSO: THE EARLY YEARS, 1892-1906", At the Museum of Fine Arts through January 4.

"Hats off, gentlemen -- a genius!" That's what composer Robert Schumann is supposed to have said after hearing Frédéric Chopin's Opus 2. It's most certainly what he would have said if he'd been around to see Pablo Picasso's early work. No artist of the 20th century -- visual, musical, theatrical, cinematic, or literary -- merits the accolade "genius" the way Picasso does. He might not be the greatest visual artist of his time, but he was the most gifted, and the most influential. As one of the seers of Cubism, he was to the visual arts what Stravinsky and Schoenberg were to music and Joyce was to fiction. If his 1907 breakthrough, Les demoiselles d'Avignon, turned him into a legend before his time, consider it a measure of his awesome talent that not even Picasso was able to fulfill it.

The Museum of Fine Arts describes "Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906" as "the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist's formative years ever undertaken." It's hard to believe that any aspect of Picasso's career hasn't been comprehensively undertaken. Such neglect might tempt you to conclude that Picasso's early work is just, well, early work. Think again: even early Picassos are the works of a genius. More important, "The Early Years" is a record of Picasso in search of Picasso, before he became PICASSO. You'll never have a better opportunity to understand who he was before he became who he was.

Genius is not easy to apprehend -- the young Picasso was nothing if not Protean. He was born in 1881 in Málaga, in Andalusia -- the southern Moorish fringe of Spain (also home to Federico García Lorca). His father, a provincial art teacher, subsequently moved the family to Galicia, in the Celtic west of Spain, and then to the Catalonian capital of Barcelona; all his life Picasso looked at mainstream Spain from the fringes. Despite the academic training he received (and which stayed with him -- he never entirely abandoned the practice of preparatory drawing), it was clear from the beginning that he would go his own way. The Old Fisherman was painted during a return visit to Málaga, in 1895, when he was just 13. It could pass for a Velázquez, not just in its flamboyant brushwork but in its psychological penetration. The fisherman's loose, crumpled white shirt, his ragged hair, the way he turns his face (its expression largely hidden by his beard and moustache) aside and closes his eyes, the way he clasps his hands under his knee, the mottled background -- Picasso stamps him as one of God's innumerable indispensable, neglected creatures.

Back in Barcelona and just turning 14, Picasso then executed an academic painting, First Communion, possibly inspired by the first communion of his sister Lola, and with his father posing for the priest. It's pure convention, as if Picasso were saying, "I can do even this"; yet there's a subversive touch in the way the corpulent altarboy looks at the communicant, and even more so in the painting's lack of center, of focus. Picasso is telling us that academic art, and conventional life, can't contain him.

His search for his own artistic persona is reflected in his incessant wanderings over the next 10 years. Sent to the prestigious Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in 1897, he missed classes and soon moved to Barcelona, where he became one of the leaders of Catalonian modernism. Not that Barcelona would ever be big enough for him -- it was inevitable that he would visit Paris, and the selection of his Last Moments (which he subsequently painted over with La vie) for the Spanish pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle provided the opportunity.

Picasso lost no time in making himself known; what appears to be his first Parisian painting, Moulin de la Galette, is a major statement that models itself on Renoir's 1876 Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, one of the most famous Impressionistic canvases ever. Renoir's painting, like all his best work, is a series of encounters and seductions and engagements and disappointments; like the novels of Henry James, it's grounded in the ineffable nuances of human interaction. Picasso's canvas is an expressionistic blur that nods to Rainer Maria Rilke and Gustav Klimt: the lady at the far left, with her wide red mouth (indeed, all the women in this picture are devouring red mouths), anticipates Klimt's 1909 Lady with Hat and Feather Boa; and the entire scene echoes the whirl of the dance poem in Rilke's The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke, an anonymous rush of wine and roses and passionate dreams.

Over the next six years Picasso finds himself moving back and forth between Barcelona and Paris; this was characteristic of Barcelona artists, but it also reflects his quest for his own vision. He spent the fall of 1900 in Montmartre with his close friend Carles Casagemas; they passed the Christmas holidays in Barcelona and Málaga (where their outrageous dress and behavior made it impossible for them to stay with Picasso's uncle) before Picasso decided to go on to Madrid, where he signed a one-year lease on a studio. Casagemas returned to Paris, where, despondent over the failure of his relationship with Germaine Gargallo, he shot himself in front of friends at the Hippodrome restaurant in Montmartre. Picasso returned to Paris in May of 1901, moved into Casagemas's studio, and for a time took up with Gargallo. The tragedy, he claimed, was to precipitate his "Blue Period."

Whatever its inspiration, the Blue Period paintings constitute the most impressive grouping of "The Early Years" -- which winds its way chronologically through seven well-laid-out sections that define the progress of Picasso's achievement without obstructing its flow. Excepting Tragedy (which was shown only in Washington, this show's other venue) and The Old Guitarist, all the great Blues are here: Self-Portrait (1901), Child Holding a Dove, The Burial of Casagemas (Evocation), The Tub (The Blue Room), Mother and Child by a Fountain, Seated Woman and Child, Blind Man's Meal, and, of course, La vie. What makes them great is not their seductive bluish-green tonality but the way Picasso reduces the human condition to body language and, even more, faces.

The Burial of Casagemas plays off El Greco's monumental The Burial of Count Orgaz, except that the saints have been replaced by prostitutes. Throughout his career Picasso invariably strips women to his idea of their essentials: madonnas or else whores. What might be his greatest early painting, Child Holding a Dove, shows that these basic categories don't necessarily produce basic results: the child is holding not the infant Jesus but the dove of the Holy Spirit, and as tenderly as any mother could. The prostitutes in the Prison Hospital of Saint-Lazare -- often shown with their children -- are madonnas and whores; they're depicted with compassion, without desire. Women hardly ever enjoy this kind of independence in his subsequent work; the conspicuous exception (unfortunately shown only in Washington) is his 1905 Portrait of Benedetta Canals, where he paints the friend of his lover Fernande Olivier with dignity and respect.

Picasso's Rose Period does not have, at least in this show, the impact of the Blue. In part that's because its major work, The Family of Saltimbanques, is absent (though a charcoal and gouache sketch has been obtained); in part it's because the circus performers who characterize this period are abstracted into stereotypes of shared suffering (à la Blue Period canvases like Mistletoe Seller) rather than the enduring Blue personalities of Woman with a Cap and Portrait of Corina Romeu. At least their solitude is shared -- is that what Picasso felt when he returned to Spain to spend the summer of 1906 in the Pyranees village of Gòsol with Fernande? Certainly he's more relaxed; virtually every one of his Gòsol paintings celebrates Fernande -- but specifically her voluptuous body, and its state of continuous availability to him. At the same time he's turning to Iberian sculptural models, beginning to break the body up into components.

His 1906 Self-Portrait with a Palette and Portrait of Gertrude Stein show the face starting to shear off into planes: it's the last gasp of holistic representationalism. After Les demoiselles d'Avignon, certainly after Guernica, he gave up exploring in favor of exploiting his legendary persona. Some outstanding works of art got produced along the way. But in "The Early Years," you can see him probing and poking and questioning the nature of art and humanity and the universe, turning out paintings like La vie (the couple at the left have the faces of Carles Casagemas and Germaine Gargallo) that grow more mysterious the more you look at them. It was an exciting time for Picasso.

And this is an exciting show for Boston. It's good to see the MFA back on track after last fall's ill-starred (but lucrative) Herb Ritts crossover attempt. "The Early Years" has not been over-curated. It's sensibly laid out, in chronological order, so you can follow Picasso's development; yet it's divided into seven sections, so you can get your bearings, and everything is explained in the handsome free brochure. A wealth of drawings (don't miss Two Women) and sculptures complements the canvases. And the paperback version of the massive catalogue, with its 10 useful essays, is well worth the $32.