[MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE MOVIES
Art When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies * _RANDY KENNEDY_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/randy_kennedy/index.html?inline=nyt-per) Published: April 15, 2007 IT was _Picasso_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/pablo_picasso/index.html?inline=nyt-per) doing the noninterview interview, decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth from his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to have heard of such a thing. “Il n’y a pas de Cubisme,” he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey. In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons. But while almost every aspect of these two artists’ live has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies. They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting in cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. “The cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy,” wrote the critic André Salmon, one of Picasso’s friends and fellow moviegoers. “It was wailing.” For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed. Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch. He enlisted Bernice Rose, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and now director of Mr. Glimcher’s gallery, PaceWildenstein, to undertake the daunting academic work of trying to find traces of the silver screen hiding among the endless histories, archives, criticism and art of the early Cubist years. The result of that work, which opens Friday at the gallery’s East 57th Street location, is “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism,” an exhibition that Mr. Glimcher calls one of the most ambitious in the gallery’s 47-year history. The gallery has gathered more than 40 paintings, collages and other works — none for sale, Mr. Glimcher said — from private collections and from museums around the world, including the Georges Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the _Art Institute of Chicago_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/art_institute_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (To get one Picasso he wanted from a museum in Prague, Mr. Glimcher even parted temporarily with a 1951 _Jackson Pollock_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/jackson_pollock/index.html?inline=nyt-per) he owns, swapping the paintings for the length of the show.) Besides paintings, the exhibition has rounded up rare examples of early cinema’s deus ex machina, the cinematograph: a whirring hand-cranked camera and projector of the kind that Picasso and Braque would have seen, not yet ensconced in a booth but out among the seats, acting as a powerful mechanized metaphor for the artist, absorbing the world through its eye and beaming it back out again. A part of the exhibition space will also be transformed into a simulacrum of an old Belle Époque movie house, where dozens of short movies from the medium’s first years will flicker again, this time through the magic of digital projection. For Mr. Glimcher the show is about personal obsessions in more ways than one. Beginning in the early 1980s — after he had a small film role in his friend _Robert Benton_ (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=212225inline=nyt-per) ’s “Still of the Night” as an auction bidder (bidding on paintings he himself had lent for the scene) — Mr. Glimcher became, as he said in a recent interview, “completely bitten by the movie thing.” He began producing movies, including “Legal Eagles”
Re: [MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE MOVIES
Thank you Freeman. I wish I could get to NYC to see this showing. How wonderful. Toochis - Original Message From: lobby card invasion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 7:34:05 AM Subject: Re: [MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE MOVIES Thank you Freeman. What a deliciously fantastic story. Truly amazing stuff!! Zeev - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 4:44 AM Subject: [MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE MOVIES Art When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies RANDY KENNEDY Published: April 15, 2007 IT was Picasso doing the noninterview interview, decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth from his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to have heard of such a thing. “Il n’y a pas de Cubisme,” he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey. In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons. But while almost every aspect of these two artists’ live has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies. They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting in cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. “The cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy,” wrote the critic André Salmon, one of Picasso’s friends and fellow moviegoers. “It was wailing.” For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed. Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch. He enlisted Bernice Rose, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and now director of Mr. Glimcher’s gallery, PaceWildenstein, to undertake the daunting academic work of trying to find traces of the silver screen hiding among the endless histories, archives, criticism and art of the early Cubist years. The result of that work, which opens Friday at the gallery’s East 57th Street location, is “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism,” an exhibition that Mr. Glimcher calls one of the most ambitious in the gallery’s 47-year history. The gallery has gathered more than 40 paintings, collages and other works — none for sale, Mr. Glimcher said — from private collections and from museums around the world, including the Georges Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (To get one Picasso he wanted from a museum in Prague, Mr. Glimcher even parted temporarily with a 1951 Jackson Pollock he owns, swapping the paintings for the length of the show.) Besides paintings, the exhibition has rounded up rare examples of early cinema’s deus ex machina, the cinematograph: a whirring hand-cranked camera and projector of the kind that Picasso and Braque would have seen, not yet ensconced in a booth but out among the seats, acting as a powerful mechanized metaphor for the artist, absorbing the world through its eye and beaming it back out again. A part of the exhibition space will also be transformed into a simulacrum of an old Belle Époque movie house, where dozens of short movies from the medium’s first years will flicker again, this time through the magic of digital projection. For Mr. Glimcher the show is about personal obsessions in more ways than one. Beginning in the early 1980s — after he had a small film role in his friend Robert Benton’s “Still of the Night
