Picasso Revisited. Again

Just about the last thing we need from the Museum of Modern Art right now is another Picasso spectacle. But that’s what it’s given us.

You’ll be forgiven for nodding off somewhere around the midpoint of “Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation,” the big and tedious display of 221 paintings and drawings from every step of the protean artist’s career, which spanned seven decades.

And as your eyelids slowly descend, you might find yourself dreaming about all the neglected figures of 20th century art who can barely get the time of day at MOMA, while Picasso once again takes up scarce wall space.

Don’t get me wrong. We both know the importance of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). His achievement is immense--and often examined.

If pressed, I’d even go for 1907’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” as this century’s greatest painting. (And the competition is pretty stiff.) But the last 15 years have already brought us three great Picasso shows, two of them organized at MOMA by curator William Rubin, who’s done the duty once again. How many times will the Picasso deck be reshuffled, while other artists languish?

“Picasso and Portraiture” means to establish the great Spanish expatriate to France as the central Modern figure in communicating psychological, poetic and pictorial values related to portrayals of specific individuals. Well, OK. But the designation would carry some real distinction if portraiture, as a Modern category, had any profound meaning.

It doesn’t. In part because of the ubiquity of the camera, portrait painting has been just one of many options in the 20th century--some new, some ancient--that artists have employed.

Certainly, Picasso painted a lot of terrific portraits, and many of them will be found in this sprawling show. (For reasons of space, Rubin writes in the exhibition’s well-researched 496-page catalog that the artist’s portrait sculptures had to be left out; he informs us that an average sculpture gobbles up the gallery space of three paintings.)

Furthermore, after all the attention typically lavished on the purely formal inventiveness of Picasso’s art, it’s refreshing to examine these pictures for their presentation of highly individuated personality.

Take the famous 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, which took some 90 sittings to complete. The writer’s face is portrayed as a riveting hybrid between a mask-like ancient Iberian form, with all the accumulation of antique wisdom that visual analogy implies, and a radically new and simplified style, which characterizes the sitter as an inescapably progressive intelligence.

Stein’s mesmerizing head, which Picasso suddenly repainted after most of the rest of the picture had been completed, emerges like a powerful modern totem from the gloomy darkness of a great hulking body, ensconced in a dimly lit room: The Oracle of the Cave.

And Picasso, as author of the picture, casts himself in the same role. A portrait painter inevitably portrays himself.

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Picasso made portraits of many writers, dealers and artists in his circle, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Daniel Kahnweiler and many more, who show up fairly early in his long life. At the end of the show, after we’ve seen portraits of his children (Paulo, Maya, Claude and Paloma), a gallery is devoted to self-portraits.

Picasso’s titanic ego is often remarked. At least one aspect of his vanity can be seen quite plainly in the self-portrait room, where several photographs are also shown for reference. Already quite bald by his mid-40s, Picasso indulged himself in one of the great comb-overs of modern times, parting his hair low on the side of his head, just above his right ear, and sweeping the spindly strands up and over the prodigious dome. He kept up the charade until around 1950.

In between the early paintings of his circle of acquaintances and the final self-portrait gallery comes what you suspect is the actual reason for the show: the long parade of wives and mistresses, whose stormy escapades with Pablo so titillate the crowds.

There’s Madeleine and Fernande, whose last names are lost to history, and Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Sara Murphy, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque. (Am I leaving anyone out?) Wonderful pictures are counted among them--although none that we haven’t seen any number of times before--at least until the end of World War II, when the pickings get sparse.

Some of this territory was covered, with insight and concision, in “Picasso and the Weeping Women: The Years of Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar,” curator Judi Freeman’s important 1994 exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In well-chosen groups of pictures, Freeman showed the pivotal role Picasso’s portraits of women played in the development of “Guernica,” the landmark canvas recording the brutality of war.

When Freeman’s modestly scaled show traveled to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art later that year, however, Met curator William Lieberman larded the sleek and absorbing presentation with a bunch of other Picasso portraits from his museum’s collection. Among them was the famous “Woman in White” (1923, and formerly in MOMA’s collection), a lovely picture from Picasso’s 1920s turn toward classically idealized imagery.

Of course, the pensive seated figure with the wispy tendrils of hair isn’t weeping--but no matter. The exhibition was being pumped up from its original size for obviously aggrandizing purposes: Picasso is big, the Met is big, ergo any Picasso show at the Met should be big.

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But not too big, apparently, if that would steal thunder from the forthcoming show Rubin had planned for MOMA. Rubin promptly cut the Met’s gassily inflated show down to size by issuing a press alert that said he had discovered the long-unknown identity of the “Woman in White”; it was Sara Murphy, wife of wealthy painter Gerald Murphy and half of the couple on whom F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled Dick and Nicole Diver, protagonists of “Tender Is the Night.” So there; just wait until his Picasso show opened!

Well, it has, and for all the many masterpieces in its vast acreage, “Picasso and Portraiture” is far less memorable than the unencumbered “Picasso and the Weeping Women,” at just 36 works. The roundelay of curatorial one-upmanship lingers as merely an embarrassing comedic interlude.

Picasso always said that Africa had produced the greatest art he’d ever seen. I’d suggest following his judgment: Rather than waste energy at the tired MOMA show, make your way up Fifth Avenue instead to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where a jam-packed survey of often magnificent objects will be found in the sprawling exhibition “Africa: The Art of a Continent.” It will be time far better spent.

* Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., New York, (212) 708-9480, through Sept. 17. Closed Wednesdays.

* Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., New York, (212) 423-3500, through Sept. 29. Closed Thursdays.