Since its small title, the new exhibition of the Brooklyn Museum “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby” was designed to start a conversation. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that the show, which examines the artist’s complicated legacy through the eyes of Gadsby, an Australian comedian best known for the Netflix special Nanettesucceeded in this regard.
Even before it opened, the show garnered the kind of fervent teardowns you rarely see from art critics these days. Then, just as quickly, the backlash caused its own backlash. Only three days before the opening, we already have the impression of being in the third or fourth wave of “takes”. (Which in itself is kind of funny, as both sides in the debate accused the other of indulging in the kind of quick and vapid opinions that dominate discourse on Twitter, not the legitimate ones in art history. .)
“There is little to see. There is no catalog to read. The ambitions here are GIF-level, though that might be the point,” wrote New York Times general critic Jason Farago of the exhibition in a review last week. The show, he argued, “moves away from pop culture’s narrow search for affirmative comfort on the subject of social justice.”
Gadsby continues a revisionist history with the exhibition, which is one of 50 international exhibitions presented on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The comedian aims to redress Picasso’s legacy by taking into account his fattened ego and misogynistic tendencies, his documented abuse of women and colonialist imagery.
But the gesture also extends beyond the show’s titular artist. For Gadsby, Picasso represents modernism in the broad sense; he is THE male “genius” in a decades-long movement of male geniuses, many of whom are anointed at the expense of equally talented female artists.
In response, Gadsby paired a selection of (mostly minor) Picasso pieces with works by pioneering 20th and 21st century artists – Nina Chanel Abney, Dara Birnbaum, Käthe Kollwitz, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, etc. These creators may also be geniuses in their own right, but the connection of their works to Picasso has been considered tenuous at best.
“The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to introduce us to all the aesthetic achievements of these women,” Farago wrote, before offering an alternative venue for Gadsby’s presentation: “It there is also room for story time in the children’s wing.
That “Pablo-matic” engages in superficial pseudo-historical inquiry into its chosen subject is also an opinion shared by other reviewers. art newsby Alex Greenberger writing in a review of the “disastrous” show that his “problem – Pablo-m, if you will – is not his revisionist state of mind, which precisely distinguishes him from all other festive shows by Picasso staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death… Rather, it’s the show’s disdain for art history,” he wrote, noting that Gadsby studied art history in college only to drop it out of frustration “with its patriarchal roots.
But as these and other scathing reviews circulated online, some pointed out that they came mostly from male critics. “So many angry and hysterical reviews from male art critics must mean that Pablo-matic @brooklynmuseum says something really important,‘” wrote feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, which has a track on the show, in a Instagram post.
In the meantime, Lisa Small, curator of the Brooklyn Museum who, along with her colleague Catherine Morris, helped Gadsby organize the exhibition, posted a photo of her laughing with the comedian. His caption read, “That feeling when / This is Pablo-matic / turns the panties on (male) art critics.” (Morris reposted it with the caption “@nytimes columnist got VERY EMOTIONAL about our show.”)
Australian author Kaz Cooke summed up the sentiment in a Posting on Twitter of herself: “So far the male reviewers of the Brooklyn Museum Picasso’s @Hannahgadsby exhibit, co-curated by @Hannahgadsby, have criticized it for being about Picasso, not being enough about Picasso, not not being funny enough, not serious enough, having the wrong paintings of women, & having paintings by the wrong women,” she wrote.
Shortly after the show opened, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak also chimed in. “To those wondering if Gadsby’s voice has a place in this exhibit, I would simply ask: what interests are threatened by including it? Or, who benefits from his exclusion? She wrote in a editorial for the art diary.
“[‘It’s Pablo-matic’] it is not a question of canceling Picasso. On the contrary,” Pasternak continued. “To cancel is to refuse to engage. To refuse to have the conversation. To refuse complexity. Our exhibition is an invitation to complexity. ‘invited.
“I’m also confident that our audiences can also handle complexity.”
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