Picasso v. Scholder

“I’m sure I’m prejudiced, but fine art is still the best racket around.”
- Fritz Scholder

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
- Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros
Gagosian, New York
March 26 - June 6, 2009

Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian
National Museum of the American Indian, New York
November 1, 2008 - May 17, 2009

Has an artist, at the end of a successful career, become the master of his oeuvre? Or is any sense of ‘mastery’ as odds with the perpetual challenge that is an artist’s essential job?

Two different solo exhibitions of late-career paintings currently on view in New York offer differing perspectives on these questions. “Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros”, at Gagosian, showcases a master of paint luxuriating in the style and subjects he spent a lifetime exploring. “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian”, at the NMAI New York, reveals an artist who late in his career decided to reject the source of his fame and seek new paths for expression.

“Mosqueteros” brings together Picasso’s paintings and prints from 1963 to 1973. These late-career works showcase the artist working at his most animated. His style is raw yet fluid, as he depicts the familiar a mix of matadors, female nudes, and embracing couples. However, while these subjects seem proverbial Picasso, their realization as compositions reveals a pulsing new energy, as the paint is applied with a messy confidence not present in his earlier oeuvre.

Head of a Matador (1970), shows a swollen-headed matador, his twisting shoulders embodying characteristic Picasso dual frontal and side viewpoints. The application of paint is so thick on the matador’s face that it creates a low-relief structure at the centre of the canvas. This contrasts with the wash of yellow background, absent in places to dramatically reveal exposed white canvas, like a halo, behind the matador. Picasso is painting with loose vigor, but he is also painting intelligently; the thick paint to create form, the sparse paint to create a void. Viewed in context of Picasso’s revolutionary development of Cubism nearly 65 years earlier, which destroyed the pictorial illusion of reality with multiple viewpoints, Head of a Matador can be read as simultaneously to coalesce and corrupt Picasso’s own vision for art. The form of the matador encompasses a new literal solidity on the canvas, while the figure of the matador embodies a quintessential Cubist distortion.

“Mosqueteros” is Picasso, and it is also a new Picasso. On the other hand, the late-career works of Fritz Scholder, on display in “Indian/Not Indian”, suggest an artist who sought the challenge of pushing his practice into new realms as a form of cathartic overhaul of self, rather than an affirmation.

In 1982 Fritz Scholder, one of the most highly regarded painters of Native Americans, praised for his social realism and pop-art aesthetic, announced he was quitting the subject of the American Indian. He later reflected, “I had made my statement on the Indian as a subject, and was ready to move in a more universal and mystical arena.” The results are a mixed bag of mythical beings, the afterlife, and the miscellaneous.

Scholder’s style, like Picasso’s, offers contrasts between painterly textures and weak scratchy infill. However, unlike Picasso, Scholder allows his paint to dry between each color layer, building up a sense of luminosity and depth in his works. Scholder’s colors remain more pure and translucent, while Picasso’s are a happy jumble of tones.

In Scholder’s trilogy, Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory (1996), he personifies the spirit realm with three grand portraits. Heaven and Hell are shown as faceless heads in typically white and red color palettes respectively. Purgatory is the surprise, with a toothy gaping mouth, the figure seems to simultaneously recede into, and emerge out of, the canvas. Scholder creates sections of flat matte black, perhaps an analogy for the empty space of purgatory, then contrasts them with textured areas of paint and collage that imply a worldly presence.

Purgatory shows the horrors of spiritual uncertainty. This sense of being attracted to exploring something awful yet unknown is also at the heart of Scholder’s depictions of vampires, hooded men and distorted figures. The final painting in the exhibition, Self-Portrait with Grey Cat (2003), puts these mystical creatures into the context of Scholder’s own doubts about mortality and the afterlife. Considering these dark artworks within the oeuvre of Scholder’s paintings of Native Americans, “Indian/Not Indian” reminds the viewer that Scholder’s paintings were never as fluffy as his ‘pop’ aesthetic suggested.

“Indian/Not Indian” and “Mosqueteros” are both intense autobiographical shows. As Picasso and Scholder’s works are testaments to their skill as painting men, they are also reflections of their states-of-mind at the end of their careers. Picasso is confident, but always pushing himself to be a better version of Picasso. On the other hand, Scholder allows himself self-doubt, and exploits this in paintings that find new subjects to reconsider old themes. The ‘mastery’ these two exhibitions demonstrate is that while being true to the spectrum of their careers, neither artist allowed the sense of challenge to slip from their practice.