Generations

Picasso: Mosqueteros--Gagosian Gallery

Younger Than Jesus--New Museum

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984--Metropolitan Museum of Art

Compass in Hand--Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian's huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, well-heeled professionals, and European and Asian tourists, gathered together in a way I do not recall seeing before, certainly not in Chelsea. People did not just come and look. They stayed and talked about the quickening, raucous power of the paintings and prints that Picasso was making in his late eighties and early nineties. Anything by Picasso is of course a draw, and it helped that John Richardson had organized the exhibition. He knew Picasso in his later years, and the Gagosian show, while it surely had its commercial motivations, was given an intellectual lift by Richardson, whose magnificent biography of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared, is written in a prose as elegant, easy, and exact as any being produced today.

By mounting "Picasso: Mosqueteros" in a Chelsea location rather than in one of its spaces on Madison Avenue, the Gagosian Gallery meant to bring Picasso into the present--to argue that his late work has a place in the city's premier neighborhood for the exhibition and the sale of contemporary art. I think they were right; and much of what a gallerygoer saw this spring in the way of contemporary art was set in a dramatic dialogue with "Mosqueteros." At a time when many artists are cultivating a slacker style, and when gallerygoers, perhaps in response, are acting as if being blase equals being in the know, it was amazing to realize how desperately art mattered to this very old Spaniard. For Picasso, artistic tradition was so expansive and so strong that it could contain anything--a raging libido, an obsessive fear of death.

The human figure had always been Picasso's essential subject. In the years leading up to his death in 1973 he seemed to be reviewing a lifetime's experiences with the figure, along with the entirety of the Western tradition. That helps to explain the preponderance in this work of men in seventeenth-century dress--the dress of the age of Rembrandt and Velazquez, two of the essential masters for Picasso. The mosqueteros, Richardson writes, began as "a troop of Rembrandtian militia men in full regalia." In Spain, in the Golden Age, the word also referred to "the noisy groundlings in the corrales," a heterogeneous gathering of hangers-on whom Richardson sees as recapitulated in Picasso's etchings and related to the theatrical folk of the Rose Period, though "they have shed the rosewater taint of Symbolism."

In Picasso's late etchings, the narrative encounters that had engaged him throughout his life are recapitulated, with striking confrontations between man and woman, young and old, artist and model, lover and beloved. And in the paintings, many of which are as bold as playing cards, the figures are frequently picked off one by one, outlined and summarized with powerful arabesques. These late works are not all successes. Especially among the paintings, there are quite a few that feel unfinished, merely dashed off. Still, it is not easy to dismiss even the weakest among them, as Picasso's greatest successes often strike a viewer as swiftly executed. Everywhere you are aware of Picasso's intense engagement with the act of painting. You feel it in the insistence with which his drawing always enriches the essential rectangle of the canvas, and in the power of his peculiarly dissonant color combinations.

The late paintings, with their seignorial indifference to what might be called the proprieties of painting, are a volcano erupting at the very core of modern art. This volcanic power, contrary to what has been said about the unprecedented nature of the Gagosian show, has been recognized, at least by some observers, since the beginning. It is true that there have been strong voices marshaled against the later Picasso, beginning with Clement Greenberg, who in 1966 stated that on the basis of what Picasso had done in the previous two decades he could no longer be regarded as a "major" or "advanced" artist. Eight years later, however, Andre Malraux published a great book about the artist's final phase, La Tete d'obsidienne, which was published in English as Picasso's Mask. In 1981, Picasso's late work was included in an important survey show called "A New Spirit in Painting" at the Royal Academy in London, and there were memorable exhibitions of late Picasso in New York as early as 1981 and 1984. But perhaps it has taken until now, when all the theories of the avant-garde have turned out to amount to a hill of beans, for Picasso's perfervid antitheoretical avant-gardism to strike New York with its full tidal force.

It is this fanaticism that is missing in contemporary art right now, this feeling that art can matter this much. We are in the grip of an apathy so profound that it does not lift even when there are worthy things to see in the galleries, as has certainly been the case in the last few months. I was held at the Gladstone Gallery by Andrew Lord's clay and plaster sculptures, which when taken together suggest a dream landscape dotted with crumbling monuments and romantic towers. Gregory Crane, in his drawings at Cheryl Pelavin, spins quirky pastoral visions through the fantastical elaboration of a Brooklyn backyard garden and a Midwestern farm. Andrew Raftery's engravings of the interior of a house, at Mary Ryan, are executed in an academic technique so scrupulously impersonal that it becomes a personal statement. Temma Bell, at the Bowery Gallery, had her most confident show in years, her impressions of life in the Catskills rendered with exactitude and ease. At Elizabeth Harris, Thornton Willis struck out in a new direction, abandoning the triangular forms that have preoccupied him for many years in favor of rectilinear structures that suggest a painterly salute to Mondrian's New York City compositions. Robert Taplin, in a show of sculpture groups in diorama-style settings at Winston Wachter, invented some striking domestic allegories. And Lennart Anderson, at Leigh Morse, exhibited figures and still lifes in dark, rich, coppery colors that achieve a fierce yet muffled power.

This catalogue of some of the most significant exhibitions by contemporary artists does not even begin to describe the season's attractions. And yet a gallerygoer could feel something wanting--the thrilling power of artists to create force fields, to set off reverberations that stir passion, polemic, debate. I do not think the artists are to blame for this muddled state of affairs. The trouble begins with a widespread skepticism about the meaning or the value of art, a skepticism that can plague even those who want to feel otherwise. There seems little willingness to throw down the gauntlet, to go out on a limb, to argue ferociously because urgent and significant matters are at stake. This lack of excitement, I mean of the primary kind, has been variously described as postmodern, post-historical, or post-ideological, the idea being that we have gone beyond the old foolish strife, so that art can now simply be accepted as anything that anybody wants it to be.