Guggenheim's "Picasso Black and White'

Pablo Picasso's best-known painting— perhaps the most famous painting of the 20th Century— is, of course, Guernica, his memorial to the Fascist bombing of a small Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. It's also, of all the most celebrated paintings of Western art, the only one in black and white.

Picasso conceived it that way from the beginning, as the many preparatory sketches for it— 44 in all— attest. In doing so, he drew upon a long chiaroscuro tradition in Spanish art, as well as the obvious association of black and white with mourning. He clearly had Goya in mind (Goya was never far from Picasso's mind in any case), and perhaps the Mexican muralists.

But he was also drawing on his own substantial body of work in black and white. There was never a "black and white" period in Picasso's art as there was a blue or a rose one; on the other hand, he continued to produce monochromatic work in all his many styles and genres from the beginning to the end of his life. Much of it reflects Picasso's characteristic vigor and joie de vivre, but he also turned to it at moments of personal and artistic crisis.

Delacroix's dictum

Guernica is the most obvious example, but numerous others reflect his turn to Cubism, to Neo-Classicism, to a quasi-Expressionism during the Occupation years of the 1940s, and to his late engagement with the Spanish pictorial tradition. The key monochrome works he produced in each idiom are not merely transitional statements and experiments, however, but include some of his most important (and in some cases least-known) masterpieces.

At least part of the stimulus for Picasso's black and white corpus was the challenge of painting without color. He would, I think, have agreed with Delacroix's dictum that "You're not a painter until you've painted gray," an assertion echoed by Cézanne as well.

Great colorist though he was, Picasso occasionally expressed his contempt for the easy effects of color as a means of adorning line and eliciting emotional response. Black and white was a means of keeping his art honest.

Curator's dream

The Guggenheim's current exhibition of 110 of Picasso's black and white works, ranging from drawings and paintings to sculpture, spans the years from 1904 to 1971. It's largely the work of the Guggenheim's Carmen Giménez, who has long dreamed of mounting such a show, and has brought together a substantial number of works from private collections, in at least one important case (Boat and Figures, 1938) never previously on public display.

As the accompanying catalogue makes clear, we can't approach Picasso from now on without taking this aspect of his art as an important key to his career as a whole, and without understanding it as a significant part of his achievement.

The show's most obvious omission is Guernica itself, a painting I grew up with when it hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art but is now (rightfully, if a bit regrettably) in Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia. In its place in the present show is a large Compositional Study for Guernica (May 1, 1937), in itself a fully realized work of art. The bull and the horse— key symbols in the painting from the beginning— are present here; strikingly, in this version, a small Pegasus escapes from the dying horse's side.

Spanish tradition

A couple of smaller related sketches are also on view. Guernica is such a large subject that it really demands an exhibition in itself (Albert Barr arranged to have it flanked by its sketches many years ago), and though obviously it would have been ideal to include the finished work in this show, it would also have risked imbalancing it, and thrown some other works deserving of rigorous attention into the background.

These include, notably, The Milliner's Workshop (1926), a large, dazzlingly complex painting that both sums up much of Picasso's style of the mid-1920s and points toward to his work of the next decade; The Charnel House (1944-45), widely taken as a response to the Nazi death camps but perhaps better seen as a summative comment on the devastation of World War II as a whole; and the first of Picasso's variations on Velazquez's Las Meninas (1957), the seminal painting of Spanish art and the gateway work to his late dialogue with the 17th-Century Spanish tradition. These are the anchor posts of the exhibit, and each, like the absent Guernica, affirms the importance of monochrome art at critical junctures of Picasso's development.

It must be said, though, that less is sometimes more. Roland Penrose thought The Charnel House Picasso's greatest work; but impressive as it is, it seems to me too derivative of Guernica. Indeed, after the statement of Guernica, the horrors of war were better suggested in works more direct in their import and less burdened by symbolism.

After the Occupation

Still Life with Blood Sausage (1941), with its large knife and the forks that protrude from a crowded drawer, vividly renders both the material deprivation of war and the menace underlying it; while the stark black bronze Skull (1943) requires and in fact permits no comment at all. If the greatness of art is to say the maximum with the minimum of means, then Skull is perhaps the work on which Picasso's powers most densely converge.

If Picasso's work of the Occupation and immediate postwar years are for the most part grim, however, black and white is by no means a dour or primarily formalist medium for him. The show includes bathers on the beach, pretzel-bent acrobats and splendid portraits of Picasso's women in styles ranging from the Ingres-like delicacy of a fur-collared Olga Khokhlova to the planar representation of Marie-Thérèse Walter plowing through the waves to a monumental bronze of Dora Maar that endows that most mercurial of all his mistresses with the quality of a giant Olmec head.

But a visitor is simply spoiled for choice among so much variety of style, mood and effect. Just when one thinks one has finally taken inventory of the universe according to Picasso, a new galaxy hovers into view.

Nudes in gray

Not all these works are strictly monochromatic; touches and even small fields of color occasionally appear; and a few works, such as The Accordionist— a masterwork of Picasso's brief but decisive Analytic Cubist period— glow with a tempered inner color. Yet these exceptions only highlight the splendid austerity of the show as a whole.

If I must leave it with a single image, let me point to the small but exquisite Two Nudes in a Studio (1933), painted entirely in shades of gray, as if in direct response to Delacroix's challenge. Even in a work of the utmost reticence, you will still encounter a world of subtlety, gradation and expressiveness.

Normally, I find the Guggenheim's ramps off-putting, but Giménez has turned them to actual advantage, framing small suites of work that play beautifully off one another, and sometimes using an alcove to display a single work that requires its own space. In a side gallery midway down, too, there's a small show of Kandinsky whose vibrant colors refresh the eye.

Altogether, "Picasso Black and White" is a triumph of curatorship and display. But the real triumph lies in the art.