The eagerly anticipated exhibition at the Guggenheim is a banquet of paintings from marquee artists like van Gogh, Monet and Picasso. But if you thought—as I did—that it would offer no surprises, you’d be wrong.
“Mountains at Saint-Remy” by Vincent van Gogh (itself worth the visit) is a good place to start. Painted around the same time as “Starry Night” and shortly before his suicide, its broad black strokes define the contours of boulders, lush trees and a small cottage. Swirls of boldly brushed color fill in the forms and sky, but near the cottage a small area of delicately applied thick daubs of pigment depict a white and yellow flower garden. This small, uncharacteristic detail brings instantly to life the artist who, in spite of his personal despair, could control his hand, brush and pigment to get a desired effect, if not gain command of his emotions.
Piet Mondrian, on the other hand, exercised too much control of his emotions. He is represented by two mid-career works that only partially hint at the strict compositions of straight black lines and severely limited color palette that would become the signature style of his later years. The earlier work, “Summer, Dune in Zeeland,” is a semi-abstract landscape of turquoise blue and golden yellow ribbons that define the dunes and separate sky or ocean and sand. Interestingly, the only straight line is the horizon. The work does, however, hint at the minimalism that would become his trademark.
The later and more interesting work is “Still Life with Gingerpot II.” It foreshadows Mondrian’s mature reductionist compositions, but here the numerous lines don’t divide the canvas into a few simple rectangles; they chop, crosscut, overlap and curve. The gingerpot is sensuously curved, colored a luminous turquoise, and the other objects are painted in subtle shades of blue-gray, earth tones, mossy greens and lilac—hardly the red, yellow and blue rectangles he would come to believe represented “a clear vision of reality.” This purist might have been appalled to see his designs appropriated in the 1960s for patterns on sack dresses worn with vinyl go-go boots.
Pablo Picasso’s reality was intimately connected to whatever woman was in his life. His “Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit” was painted during his hot and heavy affair with the teenage Marie-Therese. I didn’t learn this until the third time I saw this painting, but it didn’t surprise me. Clearly done in a fit of passion, its thick serpentine lines whip you around and take your breath away, while pairings of complementary colors—red/green, yellow/purple and orange/blue—make you hot under the collar.
But the rational master picture-maker is still there; shapes, lines and colors are shrewdly placed to lead your eye through the composition on an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.
If color expressed Picasso’s passion, it was Pierre Bonnard’s passion. In stark contrast to Picasso, Bonnard was a one-woman man. His longtime mistress, who became his wife, was always included in his highly patterned, vibrantly colored domestic scenes. Neurotic, reclusive and disliked by his friends, she seemed to be Bonnard’s muse. I became acquainted with Bonnard’s paintings through reproductions and was not a huge fan until I experienced the way the size of his work envelops you in color. His large oil “Dining Room on the Garden” is a late work that characteristically includes his wife and nonnaturalistic colors, the intensities of which belie the ordinariness of his domestic scenes. What makes this work so moving is the way his ailing wife seems to appear and disappear. Her flesh and hair are painted the same red brick as the wall, embedding her in the composition and arousing your curiosity about her role in his life. His feeling for her is palpable.
The exhibition offers a few small epiphanies along with the large ones. Arshile Gorky’s thickly painted expressionistic self-portrait bears little relation to his later works, which were characterized by a highly personal style of lightly painted patches of color and sensuous lines. George Braque, along with Picasso the creator of analytic cubism, is represented by three works. “Piano and Mandola” and “Violin and Palette,” both painted around 1910, are typical of early cubism’s fragmented forms and restrained beige/brown colors. But “Teapot on Yellow Ground,” painted in 1955, is a blaze of color and expressionistic brushwork that made me wonder whether his interest in cubism had led Braque to a dead-end.
There are other surprises to be enjoyed. Go now. I advise you not to take it for granted that we will always have a major art museum in Las Vegas.
Modern Masters from the Guggenheim Collection
*****
Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum, in the Venetian
Through April 27, 2008
414-2440; guggenheimlasvegas.org