In The Galleries

Picasso is represented in the new Met Breuer inaugural show of so called unfinished works with more than one piece.  One of my very favorites is his Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), 1918, which has its home in Musée Picasso, Paris, France.  The show id dedicated to artists' works that are declared to be for whatever reason unfinished, yet they have gone out into the worold as exhibited pieces of art.  Olga, in this piece, is painted with smooth unobtrusive strokes, her demeanor indicated by her hair smoothly drawn back, by the simple fabric  of her dress, loosely falling over her body sitting in complete repose.  A little to her right there seems to be a wall, then the brush strokes cease and the untreated canvas forms the back drop to her seated in the lower foreground.  The small patch of blue wall paint is enough for me to suggest that the figure is completely psychologically and realistically in the painting, and the part of the wall painted blue is organically true to the unpainted canvas, although intellectually unpainted canvas. Thus to be the unfinished is the finished, a paradox I can live with as I understand the art process, not  to mention the life process.  It is what makes the painting so strong and memorable.  Unfinished is not meaningful here; I had the same objection to other pieces in the exhibit where process was foregrounded.  Over at the Fifth Avenue Met I saw another interesting ambiguity in a piece from the Pergamon show, one of the most thrilling shows on view this season. The art of the Alexandrian site of Pergamon in present day Turkey is in contrast to classical art and suggests the turbulence of politics, violence, emotions in the third century BCE and thereafter, so fundamentally different from the serenity of proportion, suggested for instance in the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.  This raw emotion opened all kinds of visual possibilities, it seems to me.  There was one panel in particular that fascinated me and again like Picasso's Olga it was hard to know what was going on.  It was a panel customary on stone altars and walls of temples.  Generally they depict a recognized constellation of people and events from a known myth; narrative is the key.  This panel, however, had a warrior's ornamented body shield tossed half way upside down, with the wheels of a chariot behind it, a stylized head of a horse which might have been pulling that chariot in a pose that defied gravity and logic and was posed more for decoration than anything else, next to it lay a man's head decapitated, then amputated legs.  All of this was thrilling to myself who am habituated to classical art.  The turmoil and hysteria projected by this melange is such a dramatic and pronounced feature of the period.  Yet, again, I thought looking at it another way,it could be seen as a kind of exciting very unusual abstraction in which pieces of the normal of that culture are laid out as articulations of that normal, disassociated so as to be abstract in no way a realistic take on the time.  Loved it.  And what really sold them both for me is I made up my own interpretations, didn't have to read the catalogue to find out how utterly wrong I was.  There's nothing like being a retired professor with nothing to do but pontificate to one's self whilst going through the galleries