ART REVIEW : ‘Age of Picasso’ in 20th-Century Prints Exhibition

This now-guttering century has been called a lot of names, none very flattering. Age of Relativity, Age of Anxiety, Atomic Age. A new exhibition of classic prints at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art casts the first half of the siecle as “The Age of Picasso.”

That might mean that the prolific Spaniard made so much art that he crowded everybody else off the stage. What it intends to mean here is that his immense inventiveness and intense, virtually autobiographical approach to art danced to a tune of subjectivity that many an artist also heard. Some 125 European works in the exhibition include many of the great masters of the time from Kirchner to Matisse, from Chagall to Grosz.

This exhibition is the seventh in a series concocted by curator of prints and drawings Bruce Davis to demonstrate the breadth and depth of LACMA’s permanent collection. Such exercises are always important but never more so than now when shrinking resources challenge museums to creative uses of their own holdings.

In the previous chapter of the series, Davis looked at the way 19th-Century art reflected the follies and tragedies of society. Now we see a dramatic volte-face inward. It’s easy enough to ascribe this introversion to technology, to the camera automating artists out of their bread-and-butter living, but that’s a bit too facile. The coming of Freud and Jung suggests a troubled time when the species would ask itself what sort of beast it really is, a time when it would have to struggle to stay human.

The aesthetic texture of this show is not quite so pleasing as some sections but there are great and significant sheets to be seen. One is Picasso’s erotically charged dry point of Salome dancing before Herod and his “Blind Minotaur Led Through the Night by Girl With Fluttering Dove.” They inhabit a part of the show devoted to modern narrative art and the illustrated book. It’s evidence that avant-garde artists continued to address the classic texts of myth, fable and bible but images by Nolde, Beckmann and Chagall prove something more. Modern arts’ use of myth enlarges it to speak of the whole human condition while at the same time shrinking it to an intimate meditation.

When these artists depict an ancient king and queen, the distinctiveness of their styles turn the works into private musings about getting along with the opposite sex. The thought soaks through to the section on models. Depiction of the nude is such a time-honored practice that we tend to think less about nudity and more about formal demonstration of style and technique. But the pleasures of voyeurism don’t go away. Suzanne Valadon’s nude, “Kitty Stretching,” seems to project her own languorous fantasies.

Traditional nudes tend to suppress character in the model. These go for it. Max Pechstein’s angular women speak of the German longing for a return to primitive purity. Alberto Giacometti’s seated nude is the specter of a man projecting his obsession. Matisse’s brilliant “The White Boa” has so much personality we wonder why it’s not in the section on portraits.

There we encounter the autobiographical again in Picasso’s images of his lovers Francois Gilot and Jacqueline Roque. One tires but slowly of psychological icons as probing as Lovis Corinth’s “Sigbert Marcy” but enough confession is finally enough.

How about some nice still life to regain detachment?

You certainly don’t get it from Giorgio Morandi’s monkish meditations on dusty bottles. They are models of ascetic engagement. You do get it from a Wassily Kandinsky that explodes a chessboard into a galaxy or when Matisse puts collage in the service of rhythm in “Jazz.”

Maybe abstraction was invented to provide some universal relief from more overt explorations of inner space.

It’s nice to get back to engagement with the real world in the section on modern artists in society. There Picasso tries to make things better with his famous dove of peace. George Grosz’s suite of nine lithographs rails against inequality with rancor and wit. Then Graham Sutherland’s “Predatory Form” turns up. This shapeless, snarling monster is a reminder of a century that forced us to face the beast within and without.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Aug. 30. Closed Mondays . (213) 857-6000.