Hanna Gadsby, comedian and artist, was not seen at the presentation at the Brooklyn Museum. Her aura, however, constantly emerged from before agreeing to the exhibition that she promotes.
As a reception greeting, one of his sentences printed on the wall expresses the idea that it is useless to start a conversation about whether Picasso should be cancelled. “It is impossible, it has already happened to us. Besides, Picasso doesn't care, he's dead, he won't learn anything. It's a joke! It is, but not really."
And it is not because as soon as the threshold is crossed, a world different from the usual one emerges, to the institutional tribute that is paid to the Spanish genius, forgetting his imperfections as a person, his macho and dominant character, at a time when behaviors are also observed and not just canvases.
The approach of It's Pablo-matic: Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby breaks with that line of absolute surrender to the iconic myth and delves into the contrast between the work and the artist from the feminist critical review that has been generated since his death, in 1973. .
“In this exhibition we do not intend to affirm that he is not a great painter. We all know it is, but we want to put it in context," said curator Lisa Small, who has commissioned this show along with Catherine Morris and Gadsby, who achieved widely recognized success with her stand-up show titled Nanette, in which she lashed out against misogyny, homophobia and the canonical story, particularly against Picasso.
Based on a hundred works, half from Malaga, the other half from around thirty women artists (Louise Bourgeois, Dara Birnbaun, Kiky Smith or Cindy Sherman) and a guest man (Philip Pearltein), a contrasting dialogue of historical character in the context of the transformations recorded over the past five decades, including the prism of the movement
The exhibition, which opens on June 2, arose at the request of the Picasso Museum in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.
“Arguably, the 20th century as a whole was at least as problematic as Picasso himself and fuels much of the current intergenerational conflict,” Gadsby said in the press release. “We are still ruled by monsters from the 1990s. So why not celebrate Picasso as the perfect, freakishly arrogant and destructive pet?” she adds.
One of the pieces on display is one of Gadsby's works, a painting he did in the style of Woman Reading on the Beach at 17, the one Marie-Thérèse Walter had when the Spaniard boasted of being her lover.
Despite these types of considerations, Morris remarked that “it is not possible to cancel Picasso and he will come out of this whole process well”. But this will allow visitors to juggle that overwhelming impression of the artist with those conflicting traits, and see how perception changes.
“The idea is that you can love an artist and recognize their brilliance and creativity, and now you can also know, from the juxtaposition in this space, about their biography, the lives and behaviors of these men, because they are usually men.” Small stressed. "Your heroes, whether they're artists or not, they're not perfect, no one is," she added.
The exhibition is organized around visual and conceptual themes. The starting point is that "not all prodigies become geniuses." The world made a space for Picasso to explode as a genius, others, like women, never did. This is the time of demystification.
