"Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art"

Photograph: Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Ira Haupt Gift, 195004_Picasso-in-the-Met_The-Blind-Mans-Meal_1903_0.jpg3434151
Photograph: Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 199826_Picasso-in-the-Met_Dora-Maar-in-an-Armchair_1939_0.jpg3434172

Photograph: Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Ira Haupt Gift, 1950

It was always good to be Picasso, and apparently still is, even if the maestro isn’t around to enjoy it. Not only is the Met trotting out every Picasso in the joint for this survey, but on May 4, his Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) brought a cool $106.5 million at Christie’s, a record for a painting at auction. That such a sum was doled out for, at best, a middling canvas speaks to the so far unshakable power of his brand, or maybe to the inconvenient truth that in an age of obscene wealth amassed by a global few, money really doesn’t correlate much to caliber.

It isn’t just the swells who think Picasso (1881–1973) is the Elvis of modern art. On a recent Friday morning, crowds thronged this show, straining to see one of the largest holdings of his artwork in the United States. But not, alas, the best: That distinction belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, owner of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and many other prime Picassos that would have been here if this exhibition were a definitive retrospective. It’s not, of course, and while this seems like an also-ran collection (with the exception of a 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein and a few other pieces), even meh Picasso is better than a lot of the stuff out there. And oddly, the thinness of quality here—especially the paucity of key works from the crucial Cubist phase—provides a kind of Picasso for Dummies clarity to his career, revealing an artist whose true place in 20th-century art has been obscured by his protean achievement and outsize personality.

The Met milks both, especially the latter, beginning with a series of blown-up photos of Picasso at the entrance, self-portraits taken in his studio around 1916. While the flower of Europe’s young men were being slaughtered in the trenches, we see Picasso trying out various self-mythologizing guises: as a shirtless sexy beast; in a street tough’s outfit; and in a suit, showing that he cleaned up good. In almost all of them, he gazes at us with eyes set in his head like black coals of predation. If this guy wanted to fuck you, he could.

Picasso was probably going through women like tissues, though, before he arrived in Paris in 1904, and that unquenchable sexuality and the art-historical ambition it billowed underlies even the earliest paintings here. Woman in Profile (1901) is surrounded by machine-gun bursts of color, suggesting the result of repeated autoerotic exertion, while the androgynous subject of Seated Harlequin from the same year—a descendant of one of Watteau’s Pierrots plunked in a bistro banquette—seems coiled with seductive menace.

The latter’s combination of the timeless and the contemporary is likewise evident in Picasso’s “Blue Period,” during which he repurposed El Greco’s attenuated saints as gaunt bohemian figures bent or constrained by the limits of palette, picture frame and their own existential condition. So accustomed are we to seeing images like The Blind Man’s Meal (1903) through the prism of kitsch imitations that it’s easy to forget that had Picasso stopped here, he still would have been famous.

In the same room, the Met has hung a canvas the artist himself disavowed as a fake, Erotic Scene (1902), which shows him in repose while being serviced by a compliant model or prostitute. The wall tag rather naively wonders why the artist wears a distracted expression, but any porn star could have told the curators that if you do anything enough times, it can get boring.

However, if Picasso was as much Ron Jeremy as he was Elvis, he never thought with just the little head. He understood that the young century required a definitively new style of art, and in a flurry of activity, with Georges Braque at his side, he birthed one, or thought he had. Indeed, after Cubism, Picasso practically went into pampered self-retirement, busying himself with rehashing Neoclassicism or attempting to fend off whippersnappers of the avant-garde by dabbling in this newfangled thing called Surrealism. But ultimately, you can argue that the 20th century was won by Duchamp’s readymades. Considering that Picasso himself briefly touched upon the idea in Glass of Absinthe (1910)—which is also not in this show, and is notable for incorporating an actual spoon in its makeup—his special enmity for Duchamp is understandable. Today, as young artists struggle with the Duchampian legacy, some think they find an answer in Picasso. Although that particular hound dog may not hunt, this king still rocks.

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