‘Magician’ Frames Picasso for the Present

Pablo Picasso’s art stayed firmly in public view after his death in 1973. By now, however, a remarkably altered world has changed the way we see it.

Once considered the shocking spawn of a mad genius, his inventions have become iconic crowd-pleasers. How this came to pass isn’t easy to explain, but the Norton Simon Museum offers a chance to ponder it in “Picasso: Graphic Magician.”

Composed of 120 prints from the museum’s collection, the exhibition is, in itself, fairly unusual for the museum. It has a catalog and will travel. That’s pretty extroverted for a place that usually just relies on its treasures to bring people in.

Norton Simon and Picasso had things in common: Both believed that art is about intrinsic quality, the quest for originality and speaking truth about the human condition. In a culture that values externals, cliches and hypocrisy, art based on such principles will look out of place.

Two of Picasso’s earliest prints stake out his territory. His determination to probe the archetypal issues of sex and power is embedded in his 1905 drypoint “Salome.” Five years later Cubist etchings like “Head of a Man with a Pipe” dramatized the formal revolution he ignited in partnership with Georges Braque.

Each work assumes certain kinds of knowledge in his audience. “Salome” can’t be completely experienced unless the viewer knows something about passion and Judeo-Christian culture. Cubist pieces demand visual literacy and a capacity to grasp abstract ideas. But America isn’t noted for fostering this kind of contemplative learning, so why does Picasso seem to have such a large and appreciative audience?

Well, if a computer company advertises its own genius by plastering a photo of Picasso’s face over a 10-story wall, many people recognize it. The first 20th century fine artist to achieve Pop celebrity, the Catalan rose to such status once accorded only to towering figures like FDR and Joe Louis. It was to be taken seriously. In this great nation, that kind of fame excuses everybody from understanding what you do.

Besides--we were then told--Picasso’s art really isn’t that complicated. It’s really nothing but a masked autobiography about his neurotic love affairs.

Works from the 1939 Vollard suite that pretend to be about classic myths are really just Pablo in drag as the monster of the labyrinth. The sacrificial virgin is his Lolita-esque mistress.

Of course. Picasso confesses as much by planting obvious self-portraits in the prints and giving them titles like “Blind Minotaur Guided by Marie-Therese With Pigeon on a Starry Night.”

The proposition that all art is sublimated biography is a hack psychological truism. Framing it as an accusation or revelation suggests forces out to trivialize the work for a gullible audience that lacks the means to appreciate a Picasso aesthetically and formally. We live in an era when self-serving zealots love to debunk their betters.

Unhappily all of this has its effect even on a viewer who cheered when Picasso was art’s undisputed World Champion. Suddenly looking at his corridas is like reading Hemingway and realizing he’s pretty mannered.

Picasso’s variations on old-master themes like “David and Bathsheba (After Lucas Cranach)” look less like wise and witty allusions than like slightly desperate jokes by a man with nothing left to say.

His formal variations like “The Bull”--once so breathtakingly inventive--now appear as exercises in pointless virtuosity.

But not all the time. At moments, the very same works have the old vibrancy, but they’re mental flashbacks, instants of living in the past.

Current cultural framing makes Picasso look like a Shakespearean thespian in a Method movie too overwrought in tone, too insignificant in scale.

But late work like the 1959 linocut, “Bacchanal with Young Goat and Onlooker” does everything Keith Haring did, later, better.

An old story has it that a young collector had doubts about a work he was offered as a genuine Picasso so he took it to the master.

“It’s a fake,” said the great man.

“It isn’t yours?”

“Yes, but I make more fake Picassos than anyone.”

In that spirit, his late 1969 “Suite 347” includes a completely endearing Picasso, “The Burial of Count Orgaz (After Picasso).”

Once departed, every great artist passes through a kind of historical black hole. The exhibition leaves one certain Picasso will survive his. The subtitle “Graphic Magician,” however, inadvertently acts as a reminder that he has competition for that title, Saul Steinberg.

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* “Picasso: Graphic Magician,” Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, through June 18, (626) 449-6840, closed Tuesdays.