CON GAMES: In The Face Of Genius

April 28th, 2007 at 07:33am Michael Conniff 2

SAN FRANCISCO—Now you see it—and then you see it again.

You go to the “Picasso and American Art” exhibit here at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and what you see is the face of genius so obliterating that lesser geniuses can do little more than fall in line.

Max Weber, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollack, and so on: they tried to keep up through the 20th Century that Picasso, the ineffable Spanish artist, did not stride upon the world of art so much as squash it. Starting with Cubism, Picasso not only re-imagined the human form but the human subconscious while he was at it. In so doing, he also re-defined what an artist could be.

That left very little for the rest of the art world, American or not, to imagine, and not until Jackson Pollock broke through with the drip paintings—represented here by the cosmic “Galaxy” in 1947, did painting take a turn that Picasso did not fully anticipate. This, at least, is my interpretation based on the exhibit, and truth be told no one was more decisively influenced by Picasso than Pollock before he came a’cropper in a car sodden with alcohol in the Springs.

Needless to say, the “Picasso and American Art” exhibit at SFMOMA is slanted to make this case, and a critic with a better eye for art than mine would see the nuanced improvements, the steps forward that Picasso not only anticipated but even inspired. The exhibit is arranged to make his influence crushing and all-consuming. By the time you make it through the multiple rooms at SFMOMA and the jarring juxtapositions that cement his influence, it’s all you can do to acknowledge that it’s Picasso’s world and the rest of us—artists included—are merely posing.

Entry Filed under: Art, Con Games, Travel, The West