Paris Picassos at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

As we think Rembrandt for the 17th Century, so we think Picasso for the 20th. Some connoisseurs prefer Matisse, who was unsurpassed in his time for purity of line and harmony of color. But Picasso— so variously gifted, so protean in expression, and so feelingly engaged with his world— is the quintessential artist of modernity.

It isn't just that Picasso could do more things supremely well than anyone else, or that he exploded the spatial grid of the canvas, or that his sheer vitality seems inexhaustible (and, it must be admitted, sometimes a little fatiguing). It's that, more than any other modern artist, he brought ugliness into the realm of art.

Great artists— I mean, truly epochal ones— always do that. Beethoven introduced unheard-of dissonances into music. James Joyce fractured language. Cubism broke the world into a seemingly discordant jumble of angles and planes, and the pinhead women of Picasso's 1920s and the weeping ones of the 1930s savaged the female form.

We can see the great Cubist paintings of 1910-11 now as luminously beautiful and classical, and the deconstructed women as contained within a tremendous arc of formal power. We needed time for that, and we need, too, to recognize that the sense of repulsion that some of Picasso's images still provokes is irreducible and inassimilable.

Even the passage of time doesn't make the ugly into the pretty. But it does redefine our sense of the beautiful.

Preoccupied with death

"Give me a museum, and I'll fill it," Picasso boasted. The just-concluded show of masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso in Paris at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts— 176 works in all— is a case in point. Room opens onto room, from the earliest Picasso (a touch of Van Gogh in The Death of Casagemas) to the very last, with startled eyes opened wide on the artist's own approaching demise. And yet we know so much more is barely alluded to, and that whole genres, such as ceramics, are missing.

It's not surprising that the young Picasso should dwell on the early death of a friend, but mortality was his lifelong obsession, and, more, a major wellspring of his art. The Richmond show— a selection curated by the Musée National Picasso's president, Anne Baldessari— doesn't particularly stress the theme, but it emerges naturally from any general survey of Picasso's work.

Like every other aspect of his art, death is a dynamic process for Picasso, one entwined with and inseparable from life. His many representations of the bullring are an obvious example, as are the furious sexual couplings he depicted in the 1930s. Violence— whether leading to love or death— is the mediating term in these works, sometimes stylized but never sentimentalized.

Why Guernica worked

Given the centrality of violence and of violent death in Picasso's work, it may seem paradoxical that he so despised war, and that his most famous single work, the Guernica, is also the most iconic antiwar image of the 20th Century. (Guernica itself is now in Barcelona, but this exhibit featured a fascinating series of photographs of it as a work in progress, documented by Picasso himself.)

This is less odd than it may appear, though. Death, for Picasso, wasn't only the ultimate destiny of individual life but, in a sense, the ultimate statement of individual personality.

War leveled and destroyed personality, however, and consequently leveled death as well, reducing it to a mechanical process. That is why, in Guernica, the victims of the Nazi terror bombing, both human and animal, so desperately assert themselves above the carnage.

World War I seems to have had less impact on Picasso than the Spanish Civil War and World War II, although his austerely beautiful design for a monument to his friend Apollinaire, a part of this exhibition, shows its lingering effect on his mind.

After Auschwitz

The Spanish war produced, apart from Guernica, the extraordinary series of weeping women who symbolized its horrors, but Picasso experienced the Second World War, as did many others in occupied Paris, as a grinding privation, both physical and spiritual. The skulls, skeletized figures and viscera that he recurrently depicted on canvases all but leached of color are both a stark acknowledgment of this reality and a heroic resistance to it.

Picasso could have known little of the mass death camps a few hundred miles from him, but no one has come closer to depicting their essence than he did in such works as the sculpted Death's Head (1943) or the nearly monochromatic Pitcher and Skeleton (1945), painted in fact only three weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz. Both, too, were in the Virginia exhibition.

Less familiar but rewarding

I've only highlighted a particular element of the show, of course, which was far too rich and various to do justice to in this short space. Suffice it to say that, along with well-known masterpieces such as Celestina, The Frugal Repast and Jacqueline with Crossed Hands, the show included any number of works less familiar to those who haven't visited them in Paris, but no less rewarding.

Some formed elegant compositional groups in themselves, particularly the set of paintings and sculptures flanked by Woman in a Red Armchair and Woman Throwing a Stone. Particularly noteworthy were the bronze sculptures, including some of Picasso's very greatest—The Jester, Head of Fernande, Bull's Head, The Goat and Man with Sheep— that, together with Death's Head, punctuated the show throughout.

At the very end, as one exited the last gallery, stood the magisterial sculptural group, The Bathers (1956), one of Picasso's final reflections on Cézanne, and his largest single work.

Only one misjudgment marred the show: a long connecting passageway of graphic works and photographs that turned into as monstrous a museum bottleneck as I've ever been trapped in.

A show like this would have been the hit of most any season in New York or Chicago, but Richmond scored the coup. More power to it.