School Ties

Robin Rice on Visual Art: Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris

by Robin Rice

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Pablo Picasso and his Paris pals at the Philadelphia Museum of Art feels like a high school reunion. There are so many familiar faces, especially in this low-rent but beautifully mounted show drawn mostly from the museum's collections. It's great to see some of the old avant-garde again. Like our awkward adolescence, Modernism can't quite be forgotten; it hovers in the back of our minds, an indelible context for every new movement.

And Picasso could have been team captain, class president and prom king. A weakness of the selection, however, is the paucity of work from his Blue and Rose periods. With passing years, the sentimental kitsch of those paintings becomes more obvious, yet they are a pervasive unrecognized thread in popular art — including in films such as Avatar (blue people aside, consider the compositions, attenuated figures and chalky light/dark contrasts).

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On the other hand, a study for Demoiselles (pictured, detail) and other pieces from the pre-Cubist, African-influenced period show Picasso as clever and thoughtful. The Analytic Cubist section is solid, and here we meet Picasso's collaborator Georges Braque, the charismatic young genius who lost his edge after a WWI head injury. It's debatable, but perhaps without Braque, Picasso may never have reached the heights we associate with him today.

Curator Michael Taylor's brilliant re-creation of the Salon d'Automne of 1912 in one gallery, down to a good guess at the original red wall color, is the most original aspect of the show. Amedeo Modigliani and Marcel Duchamp are there, too; and Fernand Léger's 1913 Contrast of Forms is kinetic and fresher than his later robotic urban compositions.

In sculpture, Picasso's 1914 Glass of Absinthe in painted bronze with a real absinthe spoon is as fun as always. The best sculptural moment, however, is Constantin Brancusi's chic head of Mademoiselle Pogany preening beneath a rustic wooden arch. It's an elegant juxtaposition, perhaps a phrase that could well describe this whole trip down memory lane.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris Through April 25, $20, Art Museum, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-235-7469, philamuseum.org