The Best American Poetry

Picasso: Black and White [by Sharon Preiss]

I suppose my viewing companion and I approached it all wrong. At the Guggenheim, I like to start on thetop floor and work my way down. But the exhibit was arranged chronologically and worked its way up, -- bottom floor early paintings, top floor the later ones, with the studies for Guernica (1937) around the thirdor fourth floor. But we started with the late paintings first, with his portraits of women out-of-joint, animal-headed, grotesque, and had to make sense of where he ended up – misogynistic, misanthropic, the cubist abstraction looking painful and hateful – without the softening of watching the master’s progression over time.

 To start on the ground floor and work up would have shown the calm line of the neoclassic portraits, the faces of his muses rendered with a mostly gentler hand. You could say there was even something like love between the painter and subject, between the painter and painting. But boy, did something happen, and it wasn’t just cubist experimentation or the horrors of war. To read the paintings, particularly the portraits, biographically, when the wives, mistresses, and muses became all a-jumble, the paintings of women began to change. Certainly this is not an entire overview of his oeuvre – he created close to 50,000 works of art over his 60-something-year career – but in this exhibit, the turning point of his depiction of women is dramatic. A portrait from the early 1930s of Olga Khohklova, Picasso’s first wife, is grossly misshapen and has a slit of a vagina dentata for a mouth. This is the spot where many of the portraits turn ugly.

Of course, not all the paintings in this show are quite so jarring. Much of it is evocative and brilliant. “The Maids of Honor” is typical of Picasso’s genius for deconstructing a figure and a scene and reconstructing it into something altogether new. The flow and folds of a woman’s gown become a chock-a-block of clashing geometries and fields of hue. And “The Charnel House,” a mangle of bodies and parts sprawled beneath a table, powerfully and aptly alludes to the scenes of horror that were breaking across Europe at the end of World War II.

Though the show is called “Black and White,” the palette is mostly gray, with subtle shadings that have the effect of almost obfuscating the content of the paintings and soothing the eye. Overall, it’s a magnificent exhibit, with many of the paintings coming from private collections, being shown in public for the first time. But start from the bottom and work your way up the Guggenheim climb. Perhaps by the time you reach the top you’ll be wowed enough and tired enough not to notice what I did.

                

Do Not Go Gentle... (by Sharon Preiss)

I first fell in love with Cy Twombly’s paintings when I saw Fifty Days at Iliam at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about 15 years ago. The ten large starkly white canvases flame with a narrative of the Trojan War, mixing abstracted image, brilliant swaths of color, and scribblings of text. “Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It” (pictured left) remains one of my favorite paintings, and I’ve had the privilege of spending a good deal of time with Twombly’s work on two trips to the DeMenil gallery in Houston that houses a permanent collection of his canvases and sculptures, as well several exhibits that have hung here in New York.

I was not, however, hot to see the exhibit of his paintings that Gagosian Gallery had this past November and December. Perhaps because the show was called Last Paintings, and it’s hard for me to bear the thought there will be no new work now, no more brilliant surprises from this singular artist, but moreover because the image used on the gallery website to announce the show seemed such a disappointment. The reds and greens seemed muted and dull – not at all the vibrancy I’ve come to love in Twombly’s work. And the painting itself seemed a sort of regression back to his early days of his signature repeated squiggle  -- a row of constantly looping eeeeeeeeee that reminds me of grammar school cursive writing practice. Not my favorite work from him. Yes, I see these works as part of the magic cryptography of sign and symbol that draws me to most of his other work, and yes, I see the abstraction of… well, something. But what generally blows me away about Twombly is that amazing use of color -- especially because it is so carefully and sparingly doled out -- and his abstracted allusions to recognizable objects – flowers, boats, the shore, the sea.

I did want to see the photographs, though, so off to the gallery to pay my last respects on one of the last weekends of the show. So many flowers! And so lovely to see how he how he used the photos – often blurred tight shots – as studies for the images in his previous paintings, whether they remained as flowers or explosions or just beautiful blobs of paint. The photos did not disappoint. I’m not sure what process or lens or filter he used to achieve the muted colors and soft edges displayed on the prints, but the muting promts the viewer to understand that these are not necessarily rows and rows of tulips we are looking at, but an inconsistent and lovely repetition of shape and coloring that Twombly clearly found more compelling than the idea of “flower” itself.

And so, after looking at these lovely forms with their soft coloring that lulls the viewer into blissful reverence, on to the paintings in the gallery above.

But wait, what’s this? These six large canvases with their repeating eeeeeeeeee are not dull green and red at all. The gallery announcement’s photo reproduction has done them no justice. These are Twombly’s last paintings and they are the strongest and brightest use of overall color on the canvas I have seen in his work. The green is almost neon. The red, a brilliant tomato. And the yellow, somewhere between school bus and canary and singing. And what’s this? Oh my – the eeeeees are no longer letters, god bless us, they’re tulips!

Thank you, Cy, thank you.

Sharon Preiss is the owner of Mobile Libris, a NYC-based book-selling service that specializes in selling books at author events. She earned an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and has taught literature, creative writing and composition classes at various institutions. Her poetry and prose have been published in PIF Magazine, Massachusetts Review, 5AM, The Tucson Weekly, CoverMag, and the Albany Times-Union.