‘Picasso And American Art’ At The San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art

San Francisco, Calif.

:Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the towering figure in Twentieth Century art, influenced artists everywhere, particularly in this country. From his contemporaries to today's practitioners, the Spaniard's trailblazing styles made him a pivotal figure that other artists related to — or rejected.

Among those most influenced by the prolific Spaniard were such leading American artists of the modern era as John Graham, Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. In interpreting Picasso's styles, appropriating his palette and using his images as points of departure, they had an impact on the next generation of American artists.

The extent of this modern master's pervasive influence is documented in a wonderfully conceived exhibition, "Picasso and American Art." Already seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through May 28.

The show was organized by the Whitney and is guest curated by Michael FitzGerald, professor in the fine arts department of Connecticut's Trinity College. Comprising more than 100 pieces by the foregoing American artists and others, alongside about 40 Picasso works that inspired them, the show offers unique insights into the Spaniard's profound effect on the course of art in a country he never visited.

"Before the mid-Twentieth Century, American art was considered by most to be a backwater," curator FitzGerald observed recently, "In the second half of the century, American art was a player. The basis of that transformation was American artists' response to Picasso's art." He effectively backs up those judgments in this exhibition.

In the catalog, FitzGerald notes that "American artists responded primarily to Picasso's actual paintings, sculptures and drawings rather than to reproductions in magazines or books." This led the curator to examine exhibitions that influenced artists who came under Picasso's sway, aiding in the side-by-side display of works in the current show.

Picasso's initial exhibition in this country in 1911 led to Americans becoming primary supporters of his career, and to the country's artists choosing "his work, probably more than any other artist, as the test for their achievements," writes FitzGerald.

Russian-born Weber (1881–1961), who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., was the most stylistically adventurous of the early American modernists. After studying with Arthur Wesley Dow, Weber spent several years in Paris, where — at Gertrude and Leo Stein's salon — he met and studied the art of avant-garde pioneers Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Returning home in 1909, he spread their message and created works featuring the multiple perspectives of Cubism, the simplified figures of the primitives and the vivid colors of the Fauves.

To promote the new art, Weber teamed up with art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, the most public advocate of modernist art in America, mounting exhibitions of the European avant-garde preceding their breakout display at the Armory Show of 1913.