Everybody Loves Pablo NYTimes

Notwithstanding the glamorous pictures in it, “Picasso and American Art” at the Whitney Museum is one of those dull affairs incubated in the world of academe: a walk-through textbook that goes to extraordinary lengths to state the obvious.

It has the numbing feel of a compare-and-contrast slide lecture, the scholastic consequence of art forced to service information. Picasso’s “Woman in White,” a picture of heavenly arrogance, hangs between Arshile Gorky’s “Artist and His Mother” and de Kooning’s “Standing Man,” terrific paintings too. We are meant to register the plain insinuation of Picasso’s Neoclassicism, then move on. Next slide, please.

Fittingly, the show ends not with the lively question of Picasso’s impact on young artists today but with a virtual retrospective of the later, Picasso-inspired works by Jasper Johns, that most hermetic and constipated of American masters. In picture after picture Johns buries allusions to the great Spaniard, aspiring presumably to Picasso’s own late meditations on Velázquez. Except that even when he was old and running out of steam, Picasso still had joie de vivre. Johns doesn’t so much enthrone Picasso as repeatedly entomb him.

The exhibition tracks the impact of Picasso on American artists from Max Weber on. (Who outside Scholar World cares about Max Weber in the first place is a mystery.) Pictures by Picasso that influenced pictures by Americans have been rounded up and brought together. The scholarship, the result of years of serious work by Michael FitzGerald, a Picasso expert, seems unimpeachable and fills a fat book, where, ultimately, it belongs.

Mr. FitzGerald documents a legacy of Picasso displays: one in New York in 1911, in the Armory Show in 1913, another show in 1915, a survey in Brooklyn in 1921, yet another Picasso exhibition in 1923, at the Whitney Studio Club. That one is partly recreated here, a nice touch, with paintings by Stuart Davis in an adjacent gallery, from a year or so later, which jazz up Picasso’s Cubism by giving it various American twists (painted comics, the image of a Lucky Strike pack).

Davis holds his own in this show, likewise de Kooning, Pollock and a few others, who make a hardy case for burgeoning American independence. By the mid-1930’s, about halfway through the exhibition, the home team has almost shed its obsequiousness. At that point Picasso’s “Studio,” from 1927-28, is still the colorful Tinker Toy centerpiece in a congress of David Smiths, de Koonings, Lee Krasners and Gorkys that collectively play Charlie McCarthy to its Edgar Bergen. But gradually de Kooning and Gorky deconstruct Picasso’s linear style; they explode the tight Cubist grid, remaking their own beholden, puzzlelike images into maelstroms of fleshy pigment.

Into the 1940’s and 50’s Americans respond as much to one another as to Picasso, whose “Demoiselles d’Avignon” nevertheless remains the ghost in the machine of works like de Kooning’s blowsy “Woman” series. Pollock, literally covering up Picassolike shapes with drips and splashes, finally invents himself by this act. Louise Bourgeois fills a cameo role with a pair of pictures that eccentrically riff on Picasso’s Janus-headed motifs.

Picasso has by then become a living monument, his “Guernica” (not here of course, but at the time at the Museum of Modern Art) imitating the look of a black and white cartoon, with a newspaper illustration’s implicit delivery of second-hand emotion, felicitously helping pave the way for Pop years later.

Accordingly, the show rustles up an early Roy Lichtenstein, a delicate little nothing, from 1953, which wrestles with bits of the architecture of Picasso’s “Three Musicians.” A decade later, a mature Lichtenstein swallows whole Picassos, mixes and regurgitates them as coldly rapturous meditations on the great man’s resourceful palette, Cubist patterning and celebrity.

Lichtenstein’s laconic absorption of Picasso hawks American industry. His art looks immaculate and, like Johns’s and Warhol’s, chilly as such. Picasso, by contrast, remains dashingly, fiercely handcrafted. His pictures never try to look fresh. They just are.

All of which reiterates what we knew already. The unanswerable question is what role Picasso might play next. Historical precedents are hard to come by, Picasso being so modern, his art linked to 20th-century ideas of required novelty and constant reinvention, his fame accelerated by the mass media.

There is Rubens, the dominant figure of his day, who laid out a map for Baroque art, and like Picasso was universally admired, sought after by every patron, emulated by Rembrandt and van Dyck. But now, history having been reconfigured, it’s Velázquez, an artist few people outside Spain had heard of at the time, who looms largest from an era that also produced Bernini and Poussin.

On the other hand there is Michelangelo, as Picasso would be, a stultifying presence for generations, casting a shadow over the equivalent of countless anxious sheep, until Caravaggio came along and turned obeisance into a dialectic.

Michelangelo fell out of fashion, but he remained a persona, the heroic ideal of the artist. We could use a few more heroes in art today, don’t you think? Their absence partly accounts for Picasso’s enduring aura. At the end of his “Discourses,” delivered as lectures at the Royal Academy in London, the 18th-century painter Joshua Reynolds, whose style couldn’t have been farther from Michelangelo’s, said what plenty of artists might now think about Picasso.

“I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities, and to the taste of the times in which I live,” Reynolds wrote. “Yet however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master.”

He ended, in 18th-century fashion: “I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of — MICHAEL ANGELO.”

De Kooning said something oddly similar, out of frustration, when Picasso died in 1973. An interviewer asked him about Picasso’s influence. “There are certain things I like to keep to myself,” de Kooning barked. “He’s always with me — certain artists are always with me. And surely Picasso is one of them.”

He added: “I’m not going to answer your questions because to me the answers are self-evident.”

Which ought to have given the Whitney pause.