I trekked to the Upper East Side today to check out Acquavella’s Picasso show under the uninspired title, Seven Decades of Drawing. On my way out, I realized the KAWS show, which I was planning on skipping, was happening next door at Skarstedt.
SPOKE TOO SOON is KAWS’ fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and features new paintings and sculptures from the artist, though I couldn’t tell the recent apart from the old, underwhelming, and inconsequential stuff I paid good money to see this summer at the Brooklyn Museum.
The title of the show seems directed at KAWS’ detractors and it’s easy to be a naysayer. KAWS is gaudy and commercial, beloved by capitalists and street style devotees—mostly teens with $180 to spend on a Bathing Ape T-shirt and not much in the way of discernable taste. I went into this show a cynic, but not before I tried to genuinely connect with at his retrospective over the summer. It’s just that the only thing interesting about Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, is his early street art and his Koons (née Warhol) like ability to drum up excitement around something that is so ordinary it could be mistaken for a joke.
Instead of reviewing these shows separately, I have decided to mash them together because their proximity seems to invite comparison. Plus KAWS (1974 -) is arguably one of the 21st century’s best-known artists and Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) is undoubtedly the biggest name of the century prior.
The Picasso show is major. It “features over 80 drawings spanning seven decades of the artist's career, including works in an array of mediums such as charcoal, crayon, colored pencil, collage, graphite, gouache, ink, pastel, and watercolor,” the press release reports.
Drawing, the show contends, and it is its wont to convince us of this fact, was a prerequisite feature of Picasso’s painting practice. The earliest work is from 1900 (his earliest extant painting, not in the show, was made in 1890) and the latest, a self-portrait from July 3, 1972, was done less than a year before his death. What’s striking is how protean his style is throughout the drawings and yet how each has a Picasso sensibility to it. Apart from Georges Braque in only but a few, you wouldn’t mistake their maker for anybody else.
The same could be said of KAWS. He has carved out a niche for himself with the dead, distorted Mickey Mouse character, Companion who populates either all or most of the paintings. I’m sorry. I tend to confuse Companion with Chum so if I mistake one for the other, I hope I won’t get the cold shoulder at the next Supreme drop in SoHo.
Walking around Skarstedt, I was mostly amused. Amused when the security guard yelled at the 17-year-old kid who rubbed his hands across an all-black sculpture of Companion who is holding a limp Elmo doll. “You really have to be told not to touch a million-dollar work?” the guard asked. Then, I chuckled to myself when a guide attempted to draw a throughline between Rembrandt’s self-portraits and a KAWS painting titled THE PAINTER (2021). In it a pink Chum stands in front of an easel, paintbrush in hand, the tip aligned with a self-portrait of a red Companion, head bowed in sadness, hand meeting it as if to hide the shame.
The whole show is permeated by lugubriousness. The message, if there is one, appears to be “Hey, even success can’t fill the hole inside this tortured genius.” That said, even though I find Bri’s work shallow, I don’t lack sympathy for him if he is majorly depressed. In his Brooklyn Rail interview, he comes off as just a normal dude from New Jersey and I’m sure being lambasted by the major critics can get a guy down. Even he probably wonders, “What do the kids really know anyway?”
Let’s take a moment and, at random, choose one of his paintings and I’ll explain why it falls flat for me. I can only speak for myself, which is obvious, but it’s worth noting that for many people this stuff really is Art with a capital A. It’s also worth noting that many people hated Warhol in his time. One thing KAWS has going for him is he works in the realm of figurative painting. The public likes his recurring characters—it’s like a sitcom and Karmer has just burst through Jerry’s door. The applaud. Abstraction angers the public. In September, I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art. In the room with the Joan Mitchells and Rothkos a woman remarked, “I just don’t get this whole genre.”
I’m curious about how KAWS’ popularity and art market hold will translate into longevity. Will Companion reliefs be in the textbooks next to Louise Bourgeois spiders? My guess is—actually—yes. But only in the way that we’ve allowed nonplussed to mean the complete opposite of what it is intended to mean. A bastardizing force that proves that what’s well-liked is what’s correct. I won’t be jumping off the bridge just because everyone else has chosen to.
The show’s title is derived from a work of the same name, SPOKE TOO SOON (2021). It features the recognizable gloved hands of either Companion or Chum. There’s no way to tell because whoever it is (a stand-in for Donnelly) is submerged beneath water. The water itself, though, is made up of multicolored clouds in blues, greens, and grays. Is this a suicide note? Drowning comes up again and again. Another painting features a red Companion up to his mouth in water, the title of which is THE SEA IS ALWAYS THERE (2021).
I worry for the artist. Another painting seems to feature characters being gassed and a Companion in another appears to be entering a ditch dug for a grave. Once again, there’s a desperation to these, which does add some more depth than previously reported. In RETURNING HOME—all are 2021 apart from a sculpture which announces that it’s from 2020 in its title—Companion is barely hanging onto the ledge of a cliff. Has Skarstedt checked in on the artist?
It somehow feels like punching down when he seems to be in such a bereft headspace, but the works do little more than indebt me with a sense of sadness. That is something, though. They are effective in that manner and that’s not to be discounted. However, the actual art itself looks like it was created by an AI that knows KAWS’ standard fare. Take for instance STILL HERE. In the center of the painting is Companion. The background is a flat, dark navy blue. The figure in the foreground is a body of water of some kind. He is enmeshed by a swirling whirlpool. The whole thing can be glimpsed in a split second. Spending more time with it doesn’t add to its cause. There doesn’t appear to be a human touch. It feels dead.
In his reviews, Donald Judd used to dismiss boring art as academic. There is something intrinsically academic about KAWS art that strips it of its pathos. Instead, it’s just a picture, no different from a comic book panel at the end of the day, and while I want for the art world to be democratized (to some extent) and hope the high low distinction will be further ignored, I wish it were someone else leading the charge.
KAWS Verdict: **.5 / *****
Back to Picasso: Part of the audio tour—for this exhibit is more like a musuem show in depth than your average “Here’s 15 paintings sans any context: enjoy” gallery show—announces that Picasso was drawing a self-portrait hours before he died. The man was dedicated. He painted every day of his life and produced 50,000 individual works. How does one begin culling a representative example from such a trove, which resided in over 200 sketchbooks?
Curator Olivier Berggruen mined the collections of dozens of top instituions, including, but not limited to, The Met, The Morgan, MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Gug, and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte in Madrid.
As if to confirm the stature of his drawings, Doubeday’s 1980 book Picasso, with text by Hans L. C. Jaffé, says, “No doubt, that his drawings constitute a voice of their own within his work as a whole. […] Picasso’s drawings are entirely independent of his other works.”
Even his studies have character that is independent of the masterpieces they would become later on. It seems trite to say, but the Spaniard had the Midas touch.
It’s hard to point to a specific moment when Picasso was doing something great without giving an entire overview of his career so let’s begin at a random point. The artist claims he made his first collage toward the end of 1911, according to Clement Greenberg’s seminal essay on the subject, “Collage.” He and rival/friend Braque became a collage themselves, working closely to develop a new art form, which they abandoned altogether by 1914.
There are two collages in the show, both of which line up with the era of synthetic cubism (c. 1912 - 1914). Neither is major but Compotier avec grappe de raisin [Fruit Bowl with Bunch of Grapes] (1914) is easier to sink into. It features a vase, bifurcated to show its different angles. He’s “obtaining sculptural results by strictly nonsculptural means” (Greenberg) and atop the vase—not neatly inside but almost floating above—is a cut-out of grapes. At the time, Picasso had folders of pre-drawn pipes, cut pears, etc, that he could use as a readymade and insert into his work. The lighting is, as Picasso expert Christine Poggi points out, a parody of pointillism with deliberate misuse of the form.
Poggi, who co-wrote the show’s catalog, said this in a talk with the gallery: “Often [Picasso] does works after a major work so even after the demoiselles there will be continuing studies of some of the figures so the idea doesn’t stop when he gets to what we think of as “the definitive work.” It continues and it may morph into another so-called “definitive work.””
So when you look at something like the gouache, Deux saltimbanques avec un chien [Two Acrobats with a Dog] (1905), it doesn’t bow down to the National Gallery’s Family of Slatimbanques (1905), which features the same subject matter, because it is its very own entity. At the time, Picasso lived near the Paris circus and he was always fascinated by the downtrodden, by musicians, actors, and jokers. Painted during his Rose Period, the gouache is, like the KAWS works, sad. But the sadness isn’t gaudy here; it isn’t trying to knock you on your head. It’s subtle. The main figure, a boy, possibly a teenager, has one hand affixed to a strap of the sack he is holding, and his other hangs low as if it contains a great weight. His eyes evade ours. He and the younger boy both look away, as if to meet us would be to disrespect us. They also look away from each other and the dog the shorter boy is petting looks off into the distance, past the confines of the work. The sky is cloudless but it isn’t bright and there is no sun. It’s meditative and serene; controlled, cold, and empty.
The gouache points to what Olivier Berggruen, the catalog’s co-writer, calls Picasso’s, “fascination with what is forbidden, what might be transgressive, what—on the other hand—is liberating, what is serene.”
Finally, though there are many great works I will not get to—such as the lovely Deux femmes aux chapeaux [Two Women with Hats] (1921) (Did Picasso fetishize hats?)—a personal favorite of mine is Nu couché [Reclining Nude] (1968). This pencil drawing typifies Picasso’s interest in breaking with what is not allowed in painting. Particularly, the anus. There are several reclining nudes, but the one I like best was painted on October 31. It’s a pencil drawing of a woman who is objectified likely, and this is just me speculating, but Picasso was at the end of his life and likely couldn’t perform anymore and so this was a way to take charge.
The woman was drawn from memory—apparently, Picasso had a great memory. The lines are elongated and the features exaggerated. The woman is lying on an unmade bed, which has an almost cubist arrangement. Her hair cascades onto a pillow that is almost floating. Her asshole is a main feature that looks like a flower with an asterisk in the middle. No doubt, the old man got a kick out of this one.
There’s an old story told by Picasso’s friend, the English artist and historian Roland Penrose, that when he visited an exhibition of children's drawings, Picasso said: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” In this show, which I doubt I even needed to defend, Picasso is showing off, having fun, cutting up the monotony, all the while proving that he is the best there is at what he did.
Picasso verdict: ***** / *****