Critics Slam Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Pablo-matic’ Picasso Show
The comedian attempts to roast Picasso, but reviewers said the joke is on the Brooklyn Museum. The museum has since hit back with its criticisms of the criticisms.
Left: Pablo Picasso, 1920. © 2023 Estate of PabloPicasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Hannah Gadsby, 2018. Photo: Alan Moyle.
Comedian and art history grad Hannah Gadsby went after Pablo Picasso in her 2018 Netflix special Nanette.
'He's rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso!' she said.
She acknowledged the liberating power of Cubism, freeing artists from a single perspective. But she also excoriated Picasso—among the greatest artists of the 20th century, but also someone who described women as 'goddesses and doormats'—for not using his technique to see women more fully.
'He basically just put a kaleidoscope filter on his penis,' she said.
Gadsby's take on Picasso is now the subject of an exhibition, It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, which opened at The Brooklyn Museum on 2 June and continues through 24 September 2023.
It's one of 50 exhibitions and events organised to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death in 1973. In New York alone, there's Young Picasso in Paris at the Guggenheim, and MoMA will open Picasso in Fontainebleau in October.
The sheer number of Picasso exhibitions taking place this year would suggest room for a feminist reappraisal of the artist, but early reviews have not been kind to It's Pablo-matic.
Writing for ARTnews, Alex Greenberger noted that most of the works by women artists, which are largely pulled from the Brooklyn Museum's collection, have little to say about Picasso.
Though Picasso's works are often 'brutal' and exhibit an 'unseemly erotic quality', Greenberger argued the exhibition fails to acknowledge how pervasive these qualities are in the tradition Picasso is drawing from.
In The New York Times, Jason Farago said the exhibition 'backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture' and 'juvenile' jokes.
He said the curators had missed opportunities to introduce works by female Cubists or Soviet artists who used Picasso's techniques in their avant-garde feminist practices, or compare Picasso's oeuvre—which he finds 'generally lacking in desire'—with 'the pervy paintings of Balthus, Picabia, and others.
Responding to these criticisms, Brooklyn Museum's senior curator of European art, Lisa Small, posted a photo on Instagram with Gadsby and the museum's senior curator of feminist art, Catherine Morris. The image was captioned 'that feeling when It's PABLO-MATIC gets (male) art critics' knickers in a twist.'
For all the problems with It's Pablomatic, it's true that interest in Picasso continues to take away from other artists.
Painter and memoirist Françoise Gilot, who had a relationship with Picasso from 1944 to 1953, died on Tuesday, just a few days after the opening of the exhibition. An obituary in The New York Times led with the headline 'Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101'.
Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men and creator of The Great Women Artists podcast, shared an image of the article on Instagram along with a caption criticising the headline.
In his review of It's Pablomatic, written before Gilot's death, Greenberger wrote: 'Gilot and [another of Picasso's lovers, Dora Maar] both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would've been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso's. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists.'
In an op-ed published in The Art Newspaper, the museum's director, Anne Pasternak, wrote that 'It's Pablomatic is not about cancelling Picasso' but inviting complexity.
It's an odd response to criticisms that called not for the curators to leave Picasso alone but to include women artists who engaged with his work and could critique him with more nuance and complexity. —[O]
