Ready for yet another show on the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death? Ready for yet another pairing of Picasso and recent art, as if there were someone somewhere that he has not influenced?
If not, no need to worry, for “It’s Pablo-Matic” at the Brooklyn Museum is different. It is a joke. More precisely, it is Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby, the Australian comedian, and her selection is (almost) all women, through September 24. Now if only it, too, were not problematic. 
“It’s Pablo-Matic” never can know what to make of Pablo Picasso in America. Opening text has the worshipful but boastful tone of a museum. The show “acknowledges his transformative power” and indeed “contributes” to his influence. And then, just to the right, Gadsby’s voice kicks in, much as in her comedy act, taking him down to size. Picasso’s sexism and that very influence have held back women every since. One can hardly blame her and museum politics for competing voices and a contradiction that anyone can feel, but it is just not going away.
Gadsby herself contributes a credible copy after Picasso, but her eye is on something else again. This could be the impossible, crammed into the lobby gallery—a survey of women in fifty years of art. It ranges in approach from Joan Semmel with the awkward, inescapable woman’s body to Mickalene Thomas with her pride and glitter, Cindy Sherman with the eye patch and villainy of a pirate, and Harmony Hammond transmuting them all into sculpture and abstraction. It appropriates the gloriously active mural right outside, by Cecily Brown, as just part of the show. Otherwise it stops short of contemporary art, but how better to confront Picasso with women than to start with what you know? And yet the contradictions keep kicking in.
For starters, they never do confront one another. A modest sample of Picasso hangs apart, without a major work in sight. His Vollard Suite of prints appears mostly because the Picasso Museum in Paris made it available. Women, in turn, hardly give him a second look. Nina Chanel Abney channels Edouard Manet, Faith Ringgold Henri Matisse, Marilyn Minter Hollywood sex symbols, and Betty Tompkins the greatest woman artist of all, Artemisia Gentileschi. Guerilla Girls express their anger at art’s exclusions of women with a poster after J. A. D. Ingres.
Then, too, they hold their fire at Picasso. Käthe Kollwitz recalls purchasing a work of his, Louise Bourgeois his 1939 retrospective at MoMA. For both, the discovery opened their way to art. Kiki Smith is “always learning” from him. The women I mentioned first simply go their own way. Either way, they have one asking whether one can separate the art from the man. Sherman in a quote insists on it.
By definition, that would mean moving on. It may not be possible, but the show still feels stuck in the past. It cites Linda Nochlin, whose “Women, Art, and Power” is still essential reading, but she was not the last feminist critic of Picasso. Museums that once excluded women now seek them out, like this one. Gadsby raises the influence on Picasso of the art of Africa and Oceania, but his “primitivism” is old news. So, too, is his sexism.
Even there, though, art keeps asking for a second look. She herself she asks for one, of Picasso’s women—a long look, long enough to see how a woman’s neck and breasts have become a penis and balls. Does Picasso make everything about his desire, or does he anticipate the more fluid gender of art now? Maybe both, but all she can ask is what to say “when he couldn’t even separate himself from his art.” How about calling him an artist? The news takes time, it seems, to reach Australia, but something may be lost along the way.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.