Art review: ‘Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912’
The close and competitive working-relationship between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the radical, game-changing development of Cubist painting is a standard story in the history of Modern art. Braque, conjuring a bit of mountaineer melodrama, said, “We were like climbing partners roped together.” Picasso, employing more than a hint of sexist condescension, said that during the most intense period of give-and-take growth, Braque worked as if he were Picasso’s “wife.”
The last time the story was told in a museum exhibition was more than 20 years ago. New York’s Museum of Modern Art pulled out all the stops for “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,” brilliantly untangling a knotty artistic revolution that opened the door wide for everything from total abstraction to anti-art Dada. Nearly 400 paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and prints began with the run-up to 1907’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the Spaniard’s manifesto in reaction to Matisse, which blew away Braque when he saw it. The show then went on to survey in exhaustive detail the dialog between them until 1914, when the French painter went off to war and suffered grievous wounds that nearly killed him.
We’re unlikely to see anything like that definitive MOMA presentation again anytime soon. But now the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, have joined forces to offer a centennial look centered on the year 1911 — the most intensive in the two artists’ working relationship. “Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912,” seen already in Texas and now in California, shines light on the movement’s analytical phase. Call it Cubism 101, a primer on the start of something big.