The fiftieth anniversary of the death of the pioneering Spanish artist Pablo Picasso began a day early, at least in the pages of The Guardian. On April 7, 2023—Picasso, you see, died on April 8—the arts editor Alex Needham posted an article titled “‘Notoriously cruel’: should we cancel Picasso?” The imperial “we” stood for a bevy of artists, curators, critics, and collectors who chimed in with their respective two cents. “The lurid radicality of his art,” wrote the art historian Eliza Goodpasture, “rests on a wanton disregard for the humanity of the women he painted and slept with.” Aindrea Emelife, a curator at Lagos’s Edo Museum of West African Art, chided Picasso’s “simplistic” take on African sculpture but noted that “as a source of inspiration, it made for great art.” The non-binary performer Hannah Gadsby was mentioned as well, having been invited by the Brooklyn Museum last summer to mount an exhibition, titled “It’s Pablo-matic,” that “celebrate[d] Picasso as the perfect mascot for such a monstrously arrogant and destructive century.”

Most functioning adults are aware that Picasso was far from an exemplary human being.

Most functioning adults are aware that Picasso was far from an exemplary human being. But can the disappointments, horrors, and absurdities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—or, as Gadsby had it, this “dumpster fire of a world where absolutely nobody is happy”—be laid at his feet? The premise (yes, it’s ridiculous) goes some way in revealing the ahistorical nature of our cultural elites. At this date, Gadsby and her social-justice minions have maundered on their not-so-merry way, having come, seen, and fizzled. Happily, New Yorkers who care about the life of culture can take solace in the fact that there are still extant museum professionals who love art, and who make a point of demonstrating why that love is warranted—even in the case of Pablo Picasso. Cue the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, institutions that, whatever their sundry foibles, have gone ahead and proved their indispensability.

The Met’s “Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn” and moma’s “Picasso in Fontainebleau” are, in point of fact, two of the finest exhibitions mounted this year.¹ They are serious scholarly elaborations on an oeuvre that a casual observer might think had been exhausted. Consider: did we really need another Picasso show? Even those of us who count ourselves admirers of the work have had it up to here with its ubiquity. There must be deserving or unlikely or unheralded figures who merit at least a modicum of institutional acknowledgment. But then there are folks like Anna Jozefacka, Lauren Rosati, Anne Umland, Francesca Ferrari, and Alexandra Morrison—cumulatively, the organizers of the Met and moma exhibitions—who put their collective feet to the ground, did the curatorial heavy lifting, and now remind us why Picasso is an extraordinary figure. The higher-ups at both institutions should give these ladies a raise. They deserve it.

That, and the three canvases dominating the Met’s small-scale show are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.

“A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn” is the more eye-catching of the two shows, if only because the title pairing is so unlikely. Picasso never traveled to the United States, let alone the borough that officially became New York City’s most populous in 1930. That, and the three canvases dominating the Met’s small-scale show are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic. Formatting isn’t everything, but it can be decisive as well as challenging for the artist, particularly when the canvas dimensions are on a ratio of, roughly, five to one. Nude Woman (1910), Man with a Mandolin (1911), and Man with a Guitar (1911/13) display our erstwhile cubist at his most stringent, especially in terms of painterly approach and composition. The latter two canvases are ruthless in their textures: rarely did Picasso layer pigment so emphatically. The monochromatic palette we recognize, and so too the fracturing of form. But the intensity of approach is atypical enough to warrant a double take. Pablo, to paraphrase the old folk song, we hardly knew ye.

The aforementioned pictures were part of a proposed eleven pieces commissioned by Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922), a Brooklyn-based critic and collector who was himself a dab hand at painting. Field met Picasso in Paris around 1909–10 and offered him a commission to create a suite of pictures that would decorate the library of his Brooklyn Heights townhouse. As Field later recalled, “I met the new god and fell under his influence.” Just how familiar Field was with the artist’s work of the time is unclear, but Picasso was told that he would have “complete freedom. Do whatever you think best suited for the room.” The paintings themselves exude determination; Picasso was clearly enthused. But the deal was never completed, for reasons that are fuzzy (Picasso’s noncommittal correspondence) and not (Field’s death). In her catalogue essay, Jozefacka relates a story Field told to the art critic Henry McBride, about how he was concerned that Cubism might upset his mother’s equilibrium. The installation wouldn’t likely take place, Field explained to McBride, until mother had gone on to her great reward.

It’s a good story that should be taken with a grain of salt: the elderly Mrs. Field was, as it turns out, a supporter of her son’s artistic endeavors. The exhibition, in contrast, should be enjoyed at face value. Along with the aforementioned paintings, “A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn” includes three additional canvases that were also scaled to the available wall spaces in Field’s library. Though they’re handsome enough, Picasso’s painterly approach isn’t as involved, nor are the compositions quite as intensive. Perhaps their conventional formatting—landscape, ho-hum—proved overly familiar to Picasso. Elsewhere there are studies done in ink, watercolor, and charcoal, as well as documentary materials including vintage postcards of Brooklyn and a letter from Field to Picasso in which the parameters of the library are sketched out. The Met show is a prize offering of intimate proportions and an intensive opportunity to commune with an artist at the top of his game.

All of which didn’t stop Picasso from getting back to work by hunkering down in the garage.

Then again, you can say the same thing about “Picasso in Fontainebleau.” The moma show is more expansive than “A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn,” but it is, in its own way, just as focused. If the Met show is based on a relationship that spanned years, “Fontainebleau” is dedicated to a few months: July, August, and September of 1921. At that point in time, Picasso was living large. Paintings that had been confiscated during World War I were sold at auction and then put on the market. His costume and set designs for the Ballets Russes had recently premiered, and the dealer Paul Rosenberg had commissioned a series of prints based on the work Picasso had done for Stravinsky’s 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Along with this array of professional accomplishments, Pablo and wife Olga had recently welcomed their son Paul into the world. All of which didn’t stop Picasso from getting back to work by hunkering down in the garage.

You heard right: the garage. Though it was modest in size—the installation at moma includes a gallery that approximates the actual dimensions of the space—the garage at his house in Fontainebleau proved surprisingly amenable to Picasso’s rather huge and seemingly contradictory ambitions. On the one hand, he had devolved painting into hieratic clusters of geometric shapes, blocky accumulations that skirted abstraction. On the other, Picasso could never abandon representation. The poet Randall Jarrell, in a provocative essay titled “Against Abstract Expressionism,” claimed that Picasso “loves the world so much he wants to steal it and eat it.” The Spaniard would have agreed: “One must always begin with something. Then one may remove all appearance of reality; there is no longer a risk, as the idea of the object has left an indelible mark.” Even at his clunkiest—say, in Still Life with Guitar (1921)—Picasso’s appetite for the world is palpable.

During those three months in 1921, as he was dabbing away at jaunty near-abstractions like moma’s Three Musicians, Fontainebleau and its more compacted cousin held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Picasso was simultaneously channeling the art of antiquity, relishing its emphasis on volume, mass, and the human form. New Yorkers are familiar with Three Women at the Spring, long a staple of moma’s permanent collection, but here it’s seen in the company of a monumental companion drawing rendered in red chalk from the Musée Picasso in Paris. These pieces are surrounded by an array of additional paintings, prints, pastels, and drawings, lots of drawings. The latter go some way in reaffirming Picasso’s prodigious gifts as a draftsman. His chameleon-like ability at adopting different manners of mark-making continues to astonish. Works on paper like Woman with Dog, Olga Giving a Bottle to Paul, and a handful of studies of the Fontainebleau residence testify to his preternatural acuity in limning contours. They are thrilling to behold.

That two seemingly incommensurate bodies of work were created within the same time-frame and within a few feet of each other has long befuddled observers. Writing in Le Populaire de Paris, a critic of the time pondered the creative wiles of “a man who can do it all, and undo it all, a Proteus. One admires it, but also distrusts it. Where is the real Picasso?” The answer lies in the psyche of an artist who craved the implacability of tradition even as he went about testing, and sometimes lampooning, its boundaries. The dialogue that took place between the variations on Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians must have been as contentious as it was enlivening. Imagine Picasso as the referee for a contest in which the rules are simultaneously elastic and writ in stone. For those three months at Fontainebleau, no one distrusted Picasso’s changeability as much as the man himself. In the end, that dynamic goes some way in explaining the electricity informing the work. What’s on the walls at moma is a gift that bears repeated viewing.