View of “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” 2023, Brooklyn Museum, New York. Photo: Danny Perez/Brooklyn Museum.
IF SOCIAL ART HISTORY entails studying an artwork’s reception, few scholars have been so committed to this approach as Hannah Gadsby. Already in secondary school, at Launceston College near Tasmania’s northern coast, they developed a novel mode of discourse analysis. For an assignment, the future comedian was asked to “write about one piece of work.” They chose Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, “the painting that adorned the cover of my book about Cubism,” as they explain in their 2022 memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette. “I decided to co-opt the way that other people felt about Picasso’s ‘seminal masterpiece.’ I found everything I could that had been written about it, then I split the information into two parts: facts and feelings.” They then “culled” the feelings “down to those that made the most sense to me . . . casting aside all erotic readings and every phallic reference, and there were a hell of a lot of them.” The remaining sentiments were then presented alongside the facts, and the resulting essay was an academic success. “I got an A, and I barely even looked at the painting itself.”
Gadsby continued studying art history, their “first love” and “lifelong passion,” at the Australian National University in Canberra. The degree was ultimately a slog, and in the personally difficult, precarious years that followed, they developed a career in stand-up (that comedy would prove a more dependable profession than art history is a good punchline). Around 2018, research and ribaldry would combine in a seemingly perfect opportunity: “I thought I had been sent to heaven when my documentary about ‘the nude in art’ was greenlit.” Yet what became Hannah Gadsby’s Nakedy Nudes for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation “ended up being the absolute worst experience of my professional life.” A modernist bête noire returned: “At one point I got in a thorny question about a painting by Picasso, in which his penis dominates one side of his famous ‘muse’ Marie-Thérèse Walter’s sleeping face.” Gadsby’s interviewee, a museum curator, “went on try to sell it to me as an expression of tenderness and desire, and not just garden-variety sexual assault. Once he was done gaslighting me, he went on to explain what a metaphor was. As someone who was raped as a young woman while I was asleep, I was not particularly interested in metaphor.”
The curator’s admiration for Picasso and disinterest in his misogyny confirmed what Gadsby had researched at Launceston and had begun voicing in their show Nanette, which they started performing in 2017. “We think reputation is more important than anything else, including humanity.” No matter the very real cruelty an artistic lodestar like Picasso enacted upon others, especially women, such men persist in patriarchal culture as geniuses, pioneers, and the revered subjects of monographic exhibitions and classroom syllabi. Formalist appeals to the split of art and artist were in bad faith. Likewise were historicist admonitions against projecting a present-day ethics onto the past: “The greatest artist of the twentieth century. Let’s make art great again, guys. Picasso fucked an underage girl. And that’s it for me. Not interested,” Gadsby declared. Picasso would be the political and even compositional center of Nanette: For the very first performance in January 2017, Gadsby had carefully sequenced fifty cue cards to help structure the monologue. After accidentally dropping them on stage, they retrieved the prompts and chose one to read out loud: “Picasso is not my hero.” On the back, they had stapled a now-familiar quote by the artist: “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around to complicate my existence.”
Pablo Picasso, Reclining Nude, 1932, oil on canvas, 51 3/16 x 63 5/8″. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Once a version of Nanette debuted on Netflix the following year, audiences deluged with public stories of prominent men’s abuses found a gratifyingly unsparing insistence on the queer, feminist right to humorlessness. What begins in the performance as a standard repertoire of jokes about Tasmanian backwardness and lesbian severity becomes a refusal to entertain jocularity at the expense of the marginalized. Disidentifying from gendered mythologies of artistic mastery, Gadsby reserves a special ire for their former calling. Art history, they contend, legitimates a subordinated version of femininity that comedy can then exploit. For Gadsby, Picasso is the most egregious beneficiary of such a racket, indemnified by cultural gatekeepers against sullying allegations even as his artwork trades in images of violation and denigration. In 2018, Picasso enjoyed a major retrospective at the Tate Modern, a $115.1 million sale at Christie’s, and a dramatization by Antonio Banderas in Genius: Picasso on National Geographic. Nanette delivered a feminist art history to general audiences while winning some mass-cultural recognition for a discipline even more anxious about its relevance after Obama questioned the degree’s usefulness back in 2014. Five years and a pandemic later, when the Brooklyn Museum was belatedly invited by the Musée Picasso Paris to contribute an exhibition to its quinquagenarial commemoration of Picasso’s death, they knew where to start.
Funniness is fickler than trauma—who’s to say what makes anyone laugh in Gadsby’s curatorial routine?
“It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” cocurated with Lisa Small of the museum’s European art department and Catherine Morris of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art, needs little introduction at this point. The show compiles a smattering of works by Picasso, mostly interwar studio scenes and the beastly prints of the Suite Vollard, alongside the institution’s holdings of art by women across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. This countercanon of Kollwitz, Pindell, Schneemann, and others addresses Picasso only obliquely; ironically, Duchamp and Matisse, both foils throughout the Spaniard’s career, are invoked more directly by the exhibition’s artists. At times, this historical looseness elicits intriguing correspondences: The hirsute flesh of so many Vollard monsters becomes in Ghada Amer’s hands an abstract yet androgenic grid of embroidery. At other moments, the show’s rationale leans into mere historical proximity, even arbitrariness: Kollwitz is represented by a smoky lithograph of a woman worker, but not alongside any of the Picassos she actually collected. Among more contemporary work, Picasso becomes a synecdoche for the art-historical patriarchy writ large, set against an American feminist tradition as represented by inclusions such as Philip Pearlstein’s portrait of Linda Nochlin (pictured with her husband, the architectural historian Richard Pommer) and by an intervention from Betty Tompkins, whose text-based work Apologia (Artemisia Gentileschi #4), 2018, overlays former Artforum copublisher Knight Landesman’s response to allegations of sexual harassment on a reproduction of Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Gadsby’s actual role in selecting these works is hard to discern; their primary contribution appears to comprise wall texts and an audio guide, which riff on certain Picassos and excoriate the culture at large for what it means to keep celebrating “PP,” their urinary diminution for their long-term anti-muse.
View of “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” 2023, Brooklyn Museum, New York. Foreground: Works by Pablo Picasso, ca. 1920–47. Background: Philip Pearlstein, Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer, 1968. Photo: Danny Perez/Brooklyn Museum.
The Brooklyn Museum has been promoting “Pablo-matic” as the only official anniversary exhibition offering a political reckoning with Picasso. And by soliciting Gadsby, the New York venture claims uniquely among revisionist exhibitions of modern art to employ the device of humor. Funniness is fickler than trauma—who’s to say what makes anyone laugh in Gadsby’s curatorial routine? (“This painting showcases that at some point somebody got a thesaurus for Christmas,” they quip about The Supplicant Woman of 1937.) Yet if Nanette’s signal contribution to stand-up was a principled abnegation of comedy, especially as concerns all things Picasso, that contradiction is just one of many that structures “Pablo-matic” all the way down. This is not laughter as mockery of the paternal order or expression of resilience in the face of that order, but rather the museum’s conciliatory chuckle—affect management in lieu of institutional critique. Humor’s lability, its nonessence, provides the Brooklyn curatorial team with the cover to distance itself from, even minimize, its own provocations. If Gadsby’s take indeed represents something singular within the postmortem Picasso bonanza, this is all the more lamentable, for “Pablo-matic” leaves its much-needed task unfulfilled: What could a critical yet mainstream exhibition, feminist or otherwise, of the modernist canon actually look like? Can (or should) the museum be a site for anything like art-historical restorative justice?
The attempt, at least, seems to have indulged two rival camps within the artgoing public and commentariat: those who, irritated by the new museological moralism, have found in “Pablo-matic” a delectable hate object, and those who chafe against the incessant valorization of majoritarian modernists and are happy to see Picasso taken down a peg or two. The former has castigated “Pablo-matic” as an unserious yet unfunny half-gesture toward complicating the artist’s legacy. The latter has welcomed any tonal jolt that at least acknowledges Picasso’s misogynistic bullshit; the exhibition’s naysayers are in this view sententious killjoys at best and, at worst, mansplainers and apologists for abuse. Much of this reception plays out in the bad infinity of the “art-versus-the artist” conundrum, one that should be viewed as a generator of historically contingent discourse rather than as answerable ethical quandary. What scrambles any criticism of the show is comedy’s nearly philosophical dispersal of allegiance. One may laugh at the Brooklyn Museum for turning to Netflix for new curatorial talent or at the art world’s tastemakers for their shrill self-seriousness. You could laugh at Gadsby for their clueless convictions or with them for their sheer irreverence in the face of modern art. More interesting is the comedian’s own equivocation: “Humans are not doing great. We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke, or is it? I don’t know,” they sigh in the audio guide. What exactly they find funny about themselves or their project goes unsaid.
Pablo Picasso, Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Girl, 1933, drypoint, 11 5/8 × 14 7/16 in”. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
As in Nanette, the comedian reserves certitude for their critique of Picasso. At the Brooklyn Museum, their preferred approach is the identification of sex and sexual violence across the displayed works. We are instructed to look for the “cock and balls” in The Sculptor, 1931, the “anus on her forehead” in The Crying Woman, 1937, and another on the weeper in the aforementioned Supplicant Woman from the same year. Gadsby’s eroticizations often exceed the artist’s, and they leave unquestioned a presumptive link between sexual imagery and sexual abuse. Here the limited real estate for the exhibition’s subject becomes an issue, insofar as it overcommits to work that tautologically confirms for Gadbsy that Picasso was “busy creating art about his dick and all the women he was jabbing with it.” The work and its interpretation can only be staged this rigidly: man versus woman, artist versus muse, viewer versus victim. “Pablo-matic” requires a gender binary, and indeed in virtually no corner of the exhibition can one find artwork, commentary, or advocacy invested in gender divergence or nonconformity. What would it have meant to find evidence of Picasso’s brutality in case studies that otherwise mask it, whether in the “phallicism endemic to the dialectics of penetration,” as Anna C. Chave discerned in descriptions of analytic Cubism, or in the “phantasmatic act of identification across gender lines” Christine Poggi identified in the drawings made between 1906 and 1908?
Pablo Picasso, The Supplicant Woman, 1937, gouache on wood, 9 3/8 x 7 5/16″. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Needless to say, the “epidemic of extension” that Rosalind Krauss critiqued in the early 1980s—the paradoxical fixation on locating biographical truth in Picasso’s semiotic and formal deferrals—goes unproblematized by Gadsby. So too does the “naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms”—a hermeneutic rejected even in the earliest feminist art history (here by Nochlin in 1971). The historical Picasso, the person who “branded” Françoise Gilot with a cigarette like property, who dismissed his own debt to the art of the colonized, is a real subject, yet the equation of that subject with the artwork is a projection, even if that real subject ought to be dismissed, criticized, or held accountable. To refer art’s meaning back to its maker’s biography can foreclose more far-reaching insights. The Shadow, 1953, with its silhouette looming over a blanched odalisque, may be about Picasso’s undeserved sadness after Gilot’s departure, but it is also about heterosexuality as melodrama, about post-Cubism’s reliance on Hitchcock as much as Horta, about the sentimentality latent in even the most deconstructed atelier picture.
Pablo Picasso, The Shadow, 1953, oil and charcoal on canvas, 50 7/8 x 37 7/8″. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
More remarkable than Gadsby’s scholarly maladresse, however, is the way the museum apparatus leaves its guest curator to hang. Gadsby’s avowed understanding of art history as an archive of statements, evaluations, and judgements throws the exhibition’s discursive inconsistency into particular relief. Despite Gadsby’s minute attention to the sexism of Picasso’s representations, a curator claims that “it is not our intention in this show to sort of in every artwork play let’s find the misogyny.” In a questionnaire sent to the living artists in “Pablo-matic,” Joan Semmel states, “I prefer not to conflate the personality and the art.” From Judy Chicago, “I think the idea that one can separate the creator from the creation is patriarchal nonsense.” For the curators’ every insistence in interviews that “we don’t forefront those stories” of Picasso’s “poor treatment of his partners,” the online guide tells us of Picasso keeping Fernande Olivier locked away in their apartment and even of Jacqueline Roque “inflicting her anguish” on the artist’s children. “No one is questioning that Picasso is a prodigy or a genius,” Morris assures the New York Times. “I wanted to destroy the myth of the ‘genius’ and draw attention to the long history of abuses of power that dominate the story of Western art,” Gadsby establishes in their memoirs. These tensions may highlight the enduring antinomies within biographical or feminist approaches, but they also speak to a mistrust on the part of the museum in extending the fullness of Gadsby’s vision.
Here is the funny fate of the historic European avant-garde in the current culture industry, caught somewhere between devaluation and deference, at once a liability and a lure.
This mixed messaging reaches its most Pablo-matic point where the exhibition’s grandest ambitions are articulated. In the last gallery, “(Powerful) Women Doing (Powerful) Stuff,” a section that puts Picasso aside for the Brooklyn Museum’s most well-known instances of feminist art, Gadsby employs a coda to imagine an art history unshackled by legacy. “Having the white European male front, center, and wholly representative of the human condition has put the blinders on us all . . . we need to broaden our scope of what qualifies as worthwhile creative contributions . . . if we don’t try to unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves, we will be forever blind and we will be forever talking about fucking Picasso.” Yet “talking” is in fact the institutional end goal: Across interviews and press releases, “It’s not a cancellation; it’s a conversation” becomes the curatorial maxim. (If this essay can contribute anything, let it be it a moratorium on “conversation” as the master objective of all cultural programming.) “‘It’s Pablo-matic’ is not about cancelling Picasso,” Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak wrote in an op-ed for The Art Newspaper. “Quite the opposite. Cancelling means refusing to engage. Refusing to have the conversation.” These statements undercut Gadsby when they speculate that “to cancel Picasso would mean a complete overhauling of the creativity supply chain,” in short what the comedian’s revision of art history has long sought. The exhibition in its public presentation thus hedges its own directives, conflating complexity with noncommitment. Gadsby had already anticipated this response themselves: “We will bear witness to many a logic pretzeling as PP stans justify their desire to diminish his litany of abuses.”
View of “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” 2023, Brooklyn Museum, New York. From left: Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Guanaroca [First Woman]), 1981/1994; Mickalene Thomas, Marie: Nude Black woman lying on a couch (Marie: Femme noire nue couchée), 2012; Dindga McCannon, Revolutionary Sister, 1971. Photo: Danny Perez/Brooklyn Museum.
But what else could have been the result in the double bind “Pablo-matic” inhabits? That the exhibition exists at all should flag the impossibility of Gadsby’s systematic, even radical cultural politics in the context of a large museum answerable to tiers of patrons and corporate donors. The project ultimately enhances rather than negates the Picasso memory project launched by his European representatives. Instead of reputation’s dismantling, its inoculation; instead of feminist refusal, institutional accommodation. Moreover, the investment in Picasso’s sexuality may only reaffirm the subject it seeks to trivialize: “The popular image of Picasso as a sexual monster or sadistic ‘Bluebeard’ is the negative face of the personality cult,” as C. F. B. Miller has recently put it. “Although the wish to negate Picasso for his personal character may contain a salutary impulse of dethronement, it remains mystified by the glamour of the individual.” Alternatives, ways around the master and his achievements, abound in hypothesis—retrospectives dedicated to Dora Maar or Gilot, the deaccession of holdings by Picasso toward any number of initiatives, or the application of museum resources toward intensified provenance research. Here is the funny fate of the historic European avant-garde in the current culture industry, caught somewhere between devaluation and deference, at once a liability and a lure. It is an entanglement Gadsby would rather do away with. “I don’t need to label artists, such as Picasso, a ‘dick biscuit,’ as Hannah Gadsby has referred to him,” Dara Birnbaum writes in the exhibition’s questionnaire. “Gadsby also refers to the ‘Canon’ as ‘a giant cock.’ For me, this may be comedic, but it is not a simple truth to label and hold onto as a reference.”
A bank of posters for “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” near the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Photo: Artforum.
The Brooklyn Museum has not been content to let the show’s reception merely play out. Following Jason Farago’s widely circulated New York Times review, the exhibition’s organizers have elected to both disavow the real stakes of Gadsby’s contribution and burn critics on individual Instagram accounts. The latter represents a curious new frontier in the exchange between prominent curator and commentator. In one IG Story, Small, Morris, and Gadsby appear on-screen in front of a caption that reads “that feeling when / IT’S PABLO-MATIC / gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist / sorry not sorry.” Another post praises one “calm” review of the show on a podcast while separate comments in interviews shrug and point out the “hysteria” at play in male writers’ tirades. These statements may be an ironic reversal of the resignification of hysteria that feminist criticism undertook in the 1970s and ’80s, or the organizers may be delighting in mimetic revenge, casting the male critic as one who can’t even see the joke, let alone take it—not unlike complaints against Nanette’s mirthlessness. What is clear about the curators’ remarks is how they shift focus on the tone rather than substance of criticism, to dismiss dissensus in advance as mere theatrics. A pointed gesture, given the museum’s ongoing structural conflicts, as management refuses to offer a competitive contract to its unionized workers and as it passes over the Sackler name still appended to its Center for Feminist Art.* Gadsby has acknowledged such ensnarements as an inevitable, intractable condition of the official American art world, one beyond their control. Some reputations, it seems, are no laughing matter.
Joseph Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
*As reported by ProPublica, benefactor Elizabeth Sackler maintains that she has not profited personally from Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin, yet the drugmaker donated $500,000 to her eponymous center in 2011.
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