[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. All this week we've been elevating the work of women artists and the place of women in art history. We spoke with legend Dindga McCannon, an emerging artist, Aliza Nisenbaum, as we spent the week digging through Katy Hessel's comprehensive book, The Story of Art Without Men. Right now, you can see the work of some of the artists who are featured in that book, Emma Amos, Cindy Sherman, including some former All Of It guests like Mickalene Thomas and Nina Chanel Abney. They're in a show that opens today at the Brooklyn Museum. It's a feminist take on the work of famed anti-feminist, Pablo Picasso. It's called, "It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby". Yes, the writer comic Hannah Gadsby, who said this in their critically acclaimed 2018 Netflix special, Nanette.

Hannah Gadsby: "I don't like Picasso. I [censored] hate him. He's rotten in the face cavity. I hate Picasso! I hate him and you can't make me like him!"

Alison Stewart: The proud Picasso hater studied art history and curatorship at university. In another of Gadsby specials, they took us on a tour of the canon with a new perspective. This year, on the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death, the Brooklyn Museum and Gadsby put together a small show that features some of Picasso's work, and in response, work by feminist artists.

In the show's Audio Guide, Gadsby offers several spirited arguments and questions as to why Picasso is revered. Take for example this audio clip as Gadsby shares some thoughts on Picasso's famous 1931 painting, The Sculptor. It's one of the first works you'll see in the show. She says the work is egregiously phallic, but uses other words, words we can't use on public radio, and then offers this.

Hannah Gadsby: "What I keep tripping up on is why this guy? Why are we stuck with this guy? Why do we value so highly this eroticism, this eroticism born of such a deeply, deeply misogynistic mind? Even by the standards of his own day, Picasso was understood as a misogynist, and that's France in the 1930s. You would've had to try really, really hard to get your lady-hating head above that crowd. That was then, and this is now. I've got other stuff to say, but look, you can look at other paintings while I'll chat a little bit more. I'm a real rule-breaker. You're welcome.

"In a world where Johnny Depp is still a popular hero and forward/victim, I don't have much hope that the needle is going to move on PP at all. By PP, I mean Picasso. A cancellation of PP is an incredibly unlikely outcome. He's sold to us as the greatest artist of the 20th century. That's his selling point. Who ranks art? Seriously, who's ranking it? Who is ranking this? Who profits, and where are the stats? How is the ranking done? How is it measured? I want the whole list, too. Who is next? Who's number two? Who doesn't make the list, and why not?

"Seriously, who is ranking culture? Why don't you just watch sport? The patriarchy is so boring. The greatest artist of the 20th century just reeks off. It's all settled, and it was great. It wasn't great, and it isn't settled. I don't think we are doing well. Humans are not doing great. We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That's a little joke, or is it? I don't know."

Alison Stewart: The show which opens today is already polarizing. A critic for the New York Times dismissed and dissed the show, while another from AFP wrote, the show is "One of the many eagerly awaited shows under the ages of France and Spain marking the 50th anniversary of his death. The approach is more nuanced." I'm going with, decide for yourself. "It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby", opens today at the Brooklyn Museum. Joining me now are two of the show's co-curators. Catherine Morris, senior curator for Feminist Art. Hi, Catherine.

Catherine Morris: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Lisa Small, senior curator of European Art. Hi, Lisa. Nice to see you again.

Lisa Small: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, what were the early discussions like about how to mark this milestone, the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death?

Catherine Morris: I think one of the first things we really thought about was 1973, the year Picasso passed, and what that year means historically, not just with the passing of Picasso but with the passage of the Roe v. Wade Amendment, for example, two months before Picasso died, as an important marker of so much feminist activism that was emerging in that year and in the subsequent years.

One of the things that jointly emerged in that moment was a new form of feminist art history. It seemed very clear to us in thinking about the legacy of Picasso 50 years after his death, that we needed to take into account one of the most important and transformational art historical movements of the 20th century.

Alison Stewart: Lisa, anything you want to add?

Lisa Small: No. As usual, Catherine really said that absolutely perfectly.

Alison Stewart: When did Hannah Gadsby come into the picture, Lisa?

Lisa Small: Well, we had been in touch with Hannah, or rather I should say our director had been in touch with Hannah, not long after Nanette came out. She wrote Hannah a fan letter, and Hannah responded and came to visit the museum. There was conversation about perhaps doing a project together in the future. When the invitation from the Musée Picasso came around, Musée Picasso in Paris, which is supporting this roster of exhibitions around the anniversary, and when we were invited to participate in that, that was the moment we realized this is the project to work on with Hannah.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, Gadsby says upfront that they're not a professional curator, doesn't claim to be. How did you balance Gadsby's pointed humor, vision, strong opinion, with scholarship around Picasso's legacy?

Catherine Morris: Wasn't that difficult. The thing that was most challenging for us as an institution is to think about how you do an exhibition about a very serious subject starting off from a place of humor. That felt very interesting and different for us. Museums aren't always known for their humor. As a result, thinking about what humor offered to a conversation was, I think, what was really intriguing to us in terms of the organizational collaboration. It was absolutely a collaboration between the three of us.

We really focused first on Picasso and what he represented in the history of modernity, and from there, really went on to think about some of the points we wanted to make about his Picasso machine, as we started to call it. Then in response to that, thinking about the works by women artists in our collection that also could participate meaningfully in that conversation.

Alison Stewart: What do you mean by the Picasso machine?

Catherine Morris: One of the things that Hannah really brought to the conversation from the beginning was the idea, in spite of all the claims of Picasso hating, really a lot of the interest from Hannah's, in our earlier conversations, was about how Picasso became Picasso. What was it about the culture and the time and the patriarchy that really made it possible for him to become the kind of ultimate signifier of modernism? That's largely outside of any discussion of his genius. It's about how the modern machine built modern art and made Picasso the ultimate representative of it. That really was one of the driving conversations we had.

Alison Stewart: Lisa, when people talk about Picasso, and they'll say, "Oh, he's a misogynist. Oh, he treated women poorly," and say it matter-of-factly, what is an example of Picasso's misogyny that's tackled in this exhibit that you think is important to really think about, and to think about seriously rather than, "Oh yes, Picasso, he was a bad guy"?

Lisa Small: Well, I think first of all, the ideas, what we know about Picasso's biography, has come from a wide range of sources, and it's not new information. It's exhaustively documented about the various relationships he had with women over the years. I think, naturally, when possible, we wanted to rely on some of their own words when we could. Of course, Françoise Gilot's book, Life with Picasso, is a real important source for hearing from somebody who lived with him for a very, very long time.

In terms of looking at how this misogyny might manifest in his art, I think it was more just having works in the show that allowed us to look at some of these ongoing repeated themes, which by the way are not only new to Picasso. The Reclining Nude, the Female Nude, that's as old as Western art history. The kind of obsessive way that he did it, the somewhat objectifying way, I think it's not unfair to say, and the way that in so much of his work particularly in the suite of prints that we focus a lot on in the exhibition, the Vollard Suite, that are very much about the studio space and the relationship between the male artist and female model as the studio is a sexually charged space.

That, to bring back up something Catherine mentioned, the idea of the binary, the male artist acts, creates, the female model is looked at and acted upon. I think while it is not our intention in this show to sort of in every artwork play let's find the misogyny. It's more of a way of thinking about his work holistically, and most importantly, in the way that it bounces off in dialogue, sometimes surprisingly, sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly with the women artists that we've surrounded him with.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing "It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby" with co-curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, it opens today at the Brooklyn Museum. Catherine, just for people, can you give them an example of two pieces that are in conversation with a Picasso piece and a piece by one of the feminist artists, just so people get a sense a bit of the dialogue.

Catherine Morris: Sure. The second room that you enter in the institution juxtaposes two very beautiful, significantly scaled paintings by Picasso. One, a Reclining Nude, as Lisa just described, and the other also including a Reclining Nude, but is featuring the artist in his studio. As Lisa said, the studio is a sexualized place, but it's also a gendered place.

Next to those two paintings, we have a very important work from our collection by an artist named Joan Semmel called Intimacy-Autonomy from 1974. It is a play on this notion of the sexualized body that is acceptable as Picasso's works are in any museum. You probably are not going to get any pushback on a Picasso work as being pornographic, for example, but Joan Semmel's take on female and male bodies in the 1970s felt very different.

Part of the reason that I think they feel different is they feel more human. They feel more on display in a way that maybe feels more vulnerable rather than idealized, and in a way that in some ways maybe felt threatening, in some sense, being made by a woman in the studio on par with Picasso in terms of scale, in terms of intention and in terms of ambition. It's very exciting to see those works together.

Alison Stewart: Lisa, you mentioned the Vollard series. Would you explain what that is?

Lisa Small: Yes, sure. The dealer, Ambroise Vollard, very significant and powerful, influential, starting from the late 19th century, commissioned Picasso to do a series of prints, 100 actually in the early '30s. He worked on them over several years, and there were a hundred of them. Picasso in that moment, it was a very fraught time, again in his personal life with his relationships, and he used this as a kind of-- The prints together, they aren't narratively in a particular order. There's no particular thematic grouping, and Picasso himself certainly gave none of these prints a name. They depict a kind of classical world. Picasso had a career long engagement with Classicism, from the earliest part of his career right up to the end and the Vollard Suite prints, many of them take place in this kind of ancient Grecian artist studio.

There's a bearded artist that's very clearly a stand-in for Picasso. The figure of the Minotaur, which was a very important reference for Picasso, sort of his alter ego throughout his career makes its very strong appearance across many of the prints in the series. Also, he engages with other artists throughout history that he puts himself up against, Rembrandt, for example, Goya.

There's sort of like a labyrinth in group of prints in a way. You can make a lot of connections between them. As we said earlier so many of them circle back to this kind of sexualized relationship, interspecies coupling between Minotaurs and women, and Minotaurs and Amazons. It's a really psychically rich and resonant series of works.

Alison Stewart: When you first walk in, I want to talk about the setup a little bit. You see in the first room, a lot of the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, the artist activist group. We've been talking about them a lot this week on this show who emerged in 1985, I believe it was. There's this famous poster of a woman's body and a gorilla head, and says, "Does a woman have to be naked to get into the Met?"

Why did that seem like the first set of images you wanted people to see, Catherine?

Catherine Morris: Well, that one in particular, not only is that another Reclining Nude, I think in 1973. The answer to that question was yes. I think that one of the things that our show sets out to prove is that it's no longer true. Beyond it no longer being true, there's a way in which feminist art history has significantly changed not only what's seen in museums, but also how we see everything in museums, even works of art that aren't necessarily related or obviously part of a feminist dialogue. Because of this way of seeing the world, we can look at everything differently, and we should. We should think about things differently through this lens. That's one of the things that also includes Picasso.

Alison Stewart: Lisa, isn't there-- There's a piece by one of the original Guerrilla Girls, two of the original Guerrilla Girls, I think, in the show.

Lisa Small: I think so, yes.

Alison Stewart: Emma Amos?

Lisa Small: I don't know the identities of all the original Guerilla Girls, but yes, Emma Amos for sure. There's a beautiful painting by her in the show.

Catherine Morris: May Stevens.

Alison Stewart: May Stevens, that's right. Emma Amos and May Stevens. Then there's a room where you can watch Hannah Gadsby's entire monologue about Picasso. In that same room, you give people the opportunity to answer these three questions on small pieces of paper. The first question is, what does Picasso's work represent to you? How should an artist's biography affect our understanding of their art? What is feminist art? Lisa, how did you come up with these three questions?

Lisa Small: Well, since this was a collaboration obviously not only between the three of us curators, but with our larger team, there was a little bit of workshopping involved in that. I think in essence, we wanted to ask three questions that seemed to span the entirety of what we were trying to get at in the show, and make them open-ended, right?

Not necessarily yes or no questions, but questions that would echo the kinds of conversations and dialogues that we're hoping the entire show engenders. That's really the point in the sense that this is a show where we are not positing that there is one answer to any of the questions that people might reductively bring to it. Can you separate the art from the artist?

Should we no longer like Picasso because we feel that he's a misogynist and on and on and on. We are not at all providing people with those answers. What we're trying to create in sort of an experiment is a space visually and also through what's written on the wall to have those conversations, whether it's with somebody that you're with or just internally to yourself.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, what were some of the other questions that maybe didn't make the cut?

Catherine Morris: Oh, that's such a good question. I don't know what other questions didn't make the cut. I do think that, just to build a little on what Lisa said, the idea that we wanted to frame a conversation and not be a definitive voice is also probably not so typical, or maybe it's becoming more typical, I shouldn't say that, for museums. We are trying to welcome as many questions and as many voices as possible, even the critical ones, as you mentioned.

It's already an incredibly engaged conversation which is quite interesting and really reflects both, I think, the really strong touchpoints that Picasso represents, that feminism represents, and that Hannah Gadsby represents.

Alison Stewart: The show is called "It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby." Lisa and Catherine, is there anything that you'd like to address and that pretty rough New York Times review of the show. Lisa?

Lisa Small: Yes, I will. I mean, there's a lot to address. I have to say that my first reaction somewhat humorously was that it seemed a little bit hysterical, which I found rather an emotional take on it. I think that we touched a nerve . That was really my takeaway is that a review like that means that you have touched a nerve. I really hope that people who read that, who haven't come to see the show, will still come see the show.

It's open today. It's up through September 24, and the whole point of it was people's responses are their own. They're encountering these works in 2023, bringing their own subjectivities to it, and we want people to have that experience. I hope that one man's explanation of what we should have done as three feminist curators doesn't prevent people from coming to see from themselves.

Alison Stewart: Catherine, anything you'd like to address in the New York Times review?

Catherine Morris: Oh, I think Lisa said it very well, and yes, I feel like there was a bit of mansplaining, and it felt very much like the criticism that feminist critique has often raised. It's really interesting to see that very strong, very engaged, and emotional response. It's also really wonderful to be able to do a show that features feminist humor, and also is able to maintain a very serious point of view.

Alison Stewart: I should mention the final room is just art by feminists. No Picasso is in the final room. Lisa, what went into that decision?

Lisa Small: Well, that was actually very much Hannah's vision for the show. We set up this rhythm where we begin strong with Picasso, as Catherine mentioned, and he is throughout the first couple of galleries. Then, as we entered this last room, which we call powerful women doing powerful things. We felt it right, especially after they've heard Hannah's segment to have this room that was just about these really strong women's voices drawn from across the time period that Catherine referenced and really make powerful statements about agency, about their bodies, about their sexuality that comes from a place of their own center. We wanted to really center those women in the back room. I think it looks spectacular.

Alison Stewart: The exhibition is called "It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby." I've been speaking with its co-curators, Catherine Morris and Lisa Small. It opens today and runs through September 24th. Thanks for making time today.

Lisa Small: Thank you.

Catherine Morris: Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for this week. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.