According to his mother, Pablo Picasso’s first word was “piz,” a shortening of the Spanish word for “pencil.” And although his legacy is as the co-founder of cubism and creator of such groundbreaking paintings as “Guernica,” a new exhibit of his work at the National Gallery of Art demonstrates his power with that most basic of artistic tools. “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition,” on display through May 6, explores the evolution of the artist’s style as he instigated the rise of a revolutionary movement.
Appropriately, the introductory piece of the exhibit is the artist’s earliest known drawing, a charmingly awkward sketch of a nude Hercules crafted by a nine-year-old Picasso. From this rudimentary starting point, the first section of the exhibit progresses chronologically, spanning everything from charcoal reinterpretation of post-impressionist Paul Gauguin’s work to a monochromatic portrait of his own father.
Though the disciplinary and artistic influence of his father—also a painter—is visible in Picasso’s early studies of the classical human form, the artist soon developed his own idiosyncratic approach. From the centerpiece of the exhibit, a transfixing self-portrait of a young Picasso gazing straight at the viewer, to several studies of acrobats, the artist tested the boundaries of artistic media in a shift toward more modern methods. In these works, Picasso employed heavy, dark charcoal outlines to define his figures, progressively neglecting the shading and level of detail demanded by his classical training.
The transition to the cubist method that defined Picasso’s career began with the rise in popularity of African art in European culture, and the stark lines and masklike faces of tribal work found their way into Picasso’s cannon. The exhibit deftly displays this influence, highlighting drawings that challenged the limits of perspective through a range of angles and vantage points. An extensive study of a standing female figure, using exaggerated geometric shapes to portray an abstract human form, stands out in this collection as the first instance of his cubist style.
The exhibit manages to reveal Picasso’s process as well, grouping drawings not only by period, but also by technique. A different nude study for the famed “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” an experiment in sharp angles and slashing parallel lines, reveals the same care in charcoal that Picasso lent to paint carried over into his period of “analytic cubism.”
The final section of the exhibit features both a development of Picasso’s cubist style and a renewed interest in classical art, displaying the artist’s full circle in technique. In several still-life drawings and a fascinating portrait of “The Spaniard,” Picasso uses novel materials like wallpaper to distinguish the geometric shapes that underlie his work. But, like many artists in the post-World War I period, Picasso demonstrates with these paintings a return to a more traditional style, marked by careful shading and rounded lines.
This “return to order”—the artistic equivalent of comfort food—helped an older Picasso face the era’s traumatic events. But despite this reemergence of classicism, a series of portraits in this section, which explore distortions of the human body, demonstrate that the artist was not being regressive. A portrait of Igor Stravinsky and a “Man in a Bowler Hat,” both of which challenge the traditional proportions of human form, serve nicely to illustrate that while Picasso moved back toward his classic roots, he never stopped innovating.
Picasso’s life and body of work are difficult to divide into neat little categories, and the exhibit does an excellent job of depicting just that. As both a political activist and bohemian of the free-love variety, he embodied a revolutionary spirit that challenged conservative notions of his time, and from that first drawing of Hercules to his later masterpieces, he never lost his trailblazing sensibility. Grouping works to create order for the gallery’s visitors while avoiding a categorical taxonomy of Picasso’s works, the National Gallery of Art captures Picasso’s spirit in a manner that is orderly but complicated—just how the artist would have liked it.
