Yesterday I met up with my old friend Tim at the Art Gallery of Ontario for the Picasso exhibition. When I say old friend, I mean that Tim and I were at high school together back when dinosaurs roamed the planet. I mention this because of a comment Tim made at the show which requires a little explanation. We were looking at a portrait of Dora Maar and Tim said something like, “I think that one was a must know.” His comment takes us way back in time to high school art class.

Our teacher was an eccentric fellow with a very odd way of teaching art history. He had a huge collection of slides and as he showed them to us, talking about the work and the history, he would designate slides as being must knows, should knows or could knows. The deal was that if we saw a must know on a test, we had to be able to identify the artist, the work and the period or style. We had to be able to identify just the artist for should knows and for could knows, just the style or period. The approach was quite mad. I learned to identify a lot of art, but I didn’t learn the context all that well, and while the ability to identify works from slides was handy, I know it would have been much better to focus on understanding the history and the culture rather than on identification.

So there were were at the Picasso show, looking at a must know. As someone who started making paintings in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, I see Picasso as a problem figure. He was just so BIG, so studied, so influential, that getting past old Pic was a real challenge for a young painter. His vision was just so….Picasso. And Picasso the artist was such a larger than life figure.

The exhibition at the AGO is billed as Picasso’s own collection, 147 works he kept for himself. I wonder what that really means. It could mean they’re paintings he forgot about in some warehouse, or maybe ones he didn’t think were good enough to sell, or maybe some of them really were paintings he liked to have around the house. Who knows. The idea that Pic kept these particular ones for himself seems odd.

The exhibition covers work done from the early part of the century right to the early 70s – a huge span by any account. As we walked through the rooms, I could not help thinking that the early work seems really ordinary now. I once thought it was important because we studied it and it was after all Picasso…but yesterday, walking through the galleries, the early material was ordinary.  There were some compelling works from the teens and the twenties in the show but really I perked up when we came to a group of larger paintings from the 30s. Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table seems decorative today, but also confident, playful, bold and colourful. The 1934 Nude in a Garden, a strange, fleshy, erotic painting hanging near it stopped me in my tracks.  Wow, this guy really treated women as objects in his work, didn’t he?

The painter in me was very interested in a series of photos shot by Dora Maar of Picasso’s Guernica in progress. How fantastic to see this painting emerge and change along the way, starting with a line drawing, white on black ground, with the painting build in sections and transformed considerably along the way. I found that glimpse into Pic’s studio to be exciting and fascinating.

I can understand the focus historians have in the cubist works, but for me the highlight of this exhibition were Picasso’s later paintings.  I loved his 1970 Matador, and The Kiss from 1969 and most of the other late works. It seemed to me what were previously stylistic constraints had become tools or elements he could use or not use along the way. The late paintings feel direct, inventive and playful and have a feeling of spontaneity that I appreciate.  Walking through the exhibition, I thought it must have been difficult for Picasso to keep painting, to keep it interesting under the weight of his own body of work and his own stupendous fame. And yet the paintings suggest that the old guy improvised with the ease that most of us breathe.

The show was a mixed bag. I don’t think it was all good. I commented to Tim that I  found some of the paintings to not be convincing in the fullness of time, while others still held up fine through my eyes. I suppose a somewhat scattered experience can be expected in an exhibition that covers  7 decades. I haven’t really considered Picasso’s paintings in some years, so it was a great opportunity to reconsider these paintings.