Picasso Version G is Central to the Harem

Though Picasso was a major abstractionist, he never left the figure or art history. He understood that the classical works were powerful images handed down through generations to teach successive artists secrets. He mined the ancient masterpieces for their primitive and spiritual force.

The linchpin of the Women of Algiers’ composition is the servant at the curtain who defines the depth and is the symbolic guardian of the enclave. Picasso focuses on her form in this single figure piece. The figure is given a monumental perspective and architectural role, figuratively holding up access to the harem and central to the composition, like one holding up the building as an ancient Greek Kore from 500 BC at the Acropolis in Athens. This work belongs to a private collection.

Picasso Women of Algiers Version F goes off script

In this delirious version, Picasso shifts effortlessly from lyrical to dramatic, and back.  He has replaced the center dark depth with a source of light. The servant figure, hoisting aloft an apple shaped teapot, writhes like a snake gathering the curtains and reveals a distant staircase leading to unknown territory and triggering the White Male's imagination of idyllic pleasures. In this work Picasso plays with costume, repetition and pattern.  The harem has become a Garden of Eden, given the symbolism of Eve’s fig leaf. Light falls on her breasts and the bottom of her sleeping companion’s feet. The work is sensuous and the scene is as fragrant as a brothel. Ganz sold this version in 1955 to a private collector. Where it is seems to be anyone’s guess. 
#privatecollectors #picassoseries #arthistory #interpretation #gardenofeden #brothel 

Version F translated by Tilly Strauss

Picasso's Women of Algiers Version E is Sublime

Version E interpreted by Tilly Strauss

After the barbaric splendor of the previous version, Picasso continues his elegy to Matisse in a new painting with a reduced number of figures.  Now we have the seated hookah smoker, the reclining nude, and the servant with tray pulling back the curtain. The reclining figure and the servant both recall works of Matisse’s oeuvre. The Blue Nude- Souvenir of Biskra by Matisse in 1907 was the first odalisque Matisse painted. It was scandalous at it’s first showing at the Salon des Artistes with critics calling out it’s blue shading, and thick, rough, and somewhat angular outline. Legs crossed over, the blue nude of Picasso’s has the only recognizable face in the picture, which is a deftly drawn Greco-Roman profile. The ingeniously reduced silhouette of the exiting servant recalls Matisse’s Jazz cut-outs, such as in The Cirque collage of 1943. There, for a brief moment, Picasso allows the curves, the embellished patterning and spatial lyricism of Matisse to shine through.

There is a dominating voyeuristic element to the painting. We watch a sleeping nude. Someone exits, and the hookah smoker hidden under a veil or in her drug induced haze, is absent. We are alone and awake in the scene.  The lines and shapes fit snugly together- and I delight in the way the hookah fits in the armpit of the blue nude, and the pipe tube defines the pant leg of the hookah smoker. Every shape has it’s place, fitting sweetly together.  It is a scene of sublime simplicity.  So far, of the 15 versions, this is my personal favorite. This 18 x 21 inch canvas is, I believe, in the San Francisco Museum of Art, where someday I hope to see it in real life. I hope someone tells me if it is not there!

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Picasso's Version C and D Interpreted

Version C

Version C has four figures. The servant exiting with tray and the central seated veiled figure are most identifiable. On the right side a mass of limbs and breasts are crumpled on a rug, to the left a nightmarish hookah disembodied dream. Supposedly he used Jacqueline Roque , a new lover and future wife, as model. Documenting options of playful  orchestration. Black outlines and the childlike features elimination of many details. Picasso plays with curvilinear forms against halos of repeated dashes and hatch marks.   The figures are dismembered beyond recognition and it is actually painful to look at, completely shocking. It was sold after the death of the art collector Victor Ganz in 1988.

 

Version D

Version D is at LACMA. With the four figures, Picasso starts staging some depth. The hookah smoker sits regal, in red and gold, on the left. A tiny cross-legged woman is stretching in the center, floating in the background. Broken down to shapes, she looks like the combination of male and female sex organs. The servant to her left is stripped naked except for her red waist sash, and she holds back a curtain with one hand and a teapot on a tray with the other. On the floor , front and right ,we see the first of Ingres influence. Melding romantic Ingres with classical Delacroix, Picasso has taken Ingres’ “Odalisque with Slave”(in Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge Mass) and put her reversed, with legs up in the air, crossed… a woman available and at the same time denying access. Picasso was mining the roots of Orientalism.  The color and light have undergone a crucial change. The center of the canvas is a dark rectangle tp represent the darkest recess of the harem and to tie the figures in place. The painting is overall very dark, with punctuations of red, blue and yellow. Pattern is pushed to the edges. It is not a painting with any subtlety.

Looking at Picasso's Women of Algiers

In 1954, with the news of the Algerian uprising and the death of his friend and art rival Matisse, Picasso embarked on a painted tribute, taking the subject that was most Matisse, the Odalisque, and running with it. He went back to the father of Orientalism, Eugene Delacroix, and the 1834 painting of his, the Women of Algiers in their Apartment. 

My interpretation of Delacroix' painting on a Paris map to emphasize the French fantasy of it.

Picasso had started in the 1950’s to paraphrase masterpieces of art, starting with Lucas Cranach’s David and Bathsheba. The tradition of sketching the masters has a long history. Delacroix copied Rubens, Van Gogh copied Gustave Dore, and now I copy Picasso.

laying out space for all 15 versions

My interest in the 15 versions of Picasso’s Women of Algiers is in understanding and appreciating the way a master abstractionist thinks. Picasso is playful and analytical. As we move through the series we see an entire range of approaches, thoroughly modern in style, spontaneous, creative, and smart. The artist is focused on breaking forms and flattening lines, connecting foreground and middle ground. He takes the viewer on a journey that is grounded upon a motif of classical and romantic history. We are rendered patient witnesses of the process of dismantling and reorganizing as voyeurs into the studio of the artist  as he plays voyeur into the private lives of women.

Picasso, at age 73, created in a span of three months, from December 13^th, 1954 to February  14^th,1955, 15 paintings and 2 lithographs versions. He titled them along the alphabet from version A to version O so thus we are able to follow his sequence of thought.

Picasso's version A

Version A and B were done in the same day, on December 13^th. One in color and pattern and the other in Grisaille.

Version B- grissaile- done in the same time, December 13^th  as version A Chiaroscuro renderings contrasts of lighter and darker shades

Picasso's version B

Sharon Town Hall ART show

Radiant transfer by Glen Cunningham

Sharon Town Hall Exhibition

By Tilly Strauss

This was printed in the Lakeville Journal's Compass on 10/31/19

Zelina Blagden is weaving cultural relationships all over the town of Sharon. Installing eight artists in a group show at the Town hall and helping instigate the now annual Art Walk, Ms. Blagden has set up a tapestry of connections that is bringing to light the shape of Sharon’s art scene. Whether nose to canvas in the Standard Space Gallery, standing reflective at the Ice House, sipping wine at the Edward, or dropping into Smitty’s Barbershop, artists are leaving their trace all around the green. The art show at the Town Hall exemplifies Blagden’s all encompassing approach to curating.

Wander down the first floor hall and you will see how Blagden has brought together an eclectic collection of works that can initially seem more diverse than unified. The strength lies in their individual contributions to the whole of the community. All the artists are from the hills around the village. They are all strong in their field and relatively new to the area. This is a welcome introduction.

Interested in “a summer into fall vibe”, Blagden points out that the works, though varied, all convey an exploration of texture and pattern. Her own piece in the show, an assemblage called “Maine Sparkplug”, holds an essence of spiritual revelation in the juxtaposition of peeling frame, weathered wood, rusty nails, sea shell and the eponymous sparkplug. This is an alchemy that makes us believe that an artist can reveal to us the poetics of life through objects discarded. Scavenging for the found image as well, Millerton based photographer Susan Parker, has a series of black and white pictures, many of which are of shapes within shapes, feather and bone, and nature inspired. Amanda Horton-Jones, an artist hailing from both Salisbury and worldwide residences, emphasizes surface texture in her large paintings of luscious layered silhouetted women. Victoria Selbach’s “Mielikki”, a realistic oil painting, celebrates the artist’s friend who, as an environmentalist, wellness advocate and teacher, embodies the characteristics of the heroic Finnish goddess. According to Ms. Selbach, Mielikki, here naked and crouching in a lush forest with her bare toes at the water’s edge, “protects the vast life sustaining ecosystems of the forests and all who dwell there”. The romantic possibility of advocacy through paint is significant to the artist. More of Ms. Selbach’s large paintings of contemporary women can be seen hanging at Smitty's Barbershop, 16 W Main St. If you were on the Sharon Art Walk you would have seen her husband Mike Selbach’s prints hanging next door to Smitty’s. His limited editions at the Town Hall are complex multi-colored woodcuts depicting archaic details such as the tiled walls of a Turkish bath. Visual vibrations result from a kaleidoscope of mosaic shapes that shift and strike in living colors. The architectural framework protects the totality of appearance. Another artist in the show bringing an abstract shake up is Glenn Seelenbrant who creates visual vibrations with his photo cutouts that layer transitions of complementary colors in miniature screen formats of circles, lines and squares. Arriving to Sharon through Brooklyn, the artist Glen Cunningham explores geometry and the relationship of lines and ovals in designs breaking out of the rectilinear framework. Points overlap, contract and expand. The selection of five works span the last 10 years and yet feel fresh and audacious. His shaped canvases and crisp edges contrast with painterly brush strokes and a soft application of graphite. His color schemes range from subdued earth tones in “Ellipse Aligned” to vibrant hues reminiscent of a garden in bloom in “Inflowing Ignition”. Near by, the printed collages of JodiLuby of Salisbury offer a lyrical respite for the challenged eyes. She is a well-known graphic designer with a passion for printmaking. Her printed collages embody the sensation of botanicals with layers of transparent organic forms in a soft repetitive palette of rose and peach.

The show will be up through November, possibly longer.

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Baranova at Standard Space

This article appeared in print in the Lakeville Journal's Compass 11/14/19

Brutal Flowers

Baranova's Brutal World

Do you crane your neck to see the car crash by the side of the road? Do you wonder at the story behind the anemic mug shot? Does your phone ping for every notification of a catastrophic headline? Tragedy and death may be among us, but a vicarious front row seat to it is an experience that is only infrequently offered.

For those of us in the Northwest corner, there is some quiet melodrama going on at the Standard Space gallery on the green in Sharon. It’s all drama, from the title of the exhibition to the stark display of medium-format color photographs. Florals march along the walls in single file.

Marina Baranova has titled the show, “This Brutal World” and, when asked about it, only says, “its beautiful too”. Baranova is Russian and was raised in Finland. She moved to New York seven years ago and specializes in portraits of performance artists. The fading flower series began between her photographic portrait shoots when she noticed flowers left in the studio bathroom by the neighboring floral designer. Baranova started bringing the limp bouquets into the portrait setting and through the lens of her Hasselblad camera, and with the natural studio light, she choreographed dark punctuations of a floral swan song.

Having just turned forty, Baranova admires the visual traces of age and comments philosophically on the rapid transformation of celebratory flowers to the tissue-like delicacy of the dying bouquet. Her photos capture a moment and thereby Baranova does her part to arrest time and halt the oblivion of death. She is memorializing life at its sensitive and vulnerable last gasp. You can hear the flowers moan and imagine the offering of forgiveness that can only happen at a deathbed of secrets.

The artist’s focus on the delicacy of dead flowers set against a backdrop of blackest black is far from dreary. The work summons up our collective memory of fresh blooms and hints at a feeling reminiscent of better times and richer moments. Perhaps they remind one of the slip-covered sitting room of an aristocratic auntie. Developed with a richness that is mesmerizing in its soft sheen, the photographs within their simple black frames, create an almost funereal procession.

There is something pure to the course of Baranova’s process. She shoots using real film and only under conditions of available natural light. The velvety black hand-printed square format type C-prints have a focus that is intensely shallow, literally forcing a bloom into focus and leaving the vase in a blur. Having recently moved to a new studio, Baranova commented that the light is no longer the same and the series is probably over. Though this may be a one-act play, don’t discount Baranova’s future. Her prowess with film displays an artist’s masterful control of the lens and our imaginations.

This Brutal World will be up through December 8^th.

Standard Space is at 147 Main Street, Sharon CT

Open Friday to Sunday, noon to 6pm, or by appointment.