PICASSO

This week at the Christie's sale, his 1932 painting Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust) (1932) became the most expensive work ever sold at an auction, selling for a whopping $106.5 million; his Metropolitan Museum retrospective, which includes nearly all of the hundreds of his works owned by the Met, has gotten mixed reviews, though most critics have labeled it nothing more glamorous than a big-name hodgepodge; a California art dealer in her 70's admitted to selling a fake of his work for $2 million and is now likely headed to jail; his current MoMA prints exhibition, which I saw and loved last week with my dear family friend Shifra, is yet another testament to his prolificness; a goon stumbled into one of his works at the Metropolitan, resulting in the

creation of a hole in the canvas and an expensive repair job; oh and Gagosian Gallery in Anthens just closed an exhibition of his linocuts, which is especially cool to me because I intern for Gagosian!

However, in my mind the most wonderful Picasso news of 2010, at least so far as New York City is concerned, is brought to you by sidewalk artist Hani Shihada. In four words: Shihada makes art accessible. Chalk as his medium and NYC pavement as his canvas, Shihada both replicates famous works of art and creates his own masterpieces.

Most recently he recreated Picasso's Le Reve (The Dream) (1932) outside of the Carlyle Hotel, just blocks from the Met, to draw (haha) attention to the opening of their Picasso show. Pardon the momentary tangent, but in light of the fact that The Dream is from the same period as Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (the work from the Christie's auction,) and Woman with Yellow Hair (1931), which I saw on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum just a few days ago, it strikes me as important to share with you that all three of these works are portraits of Marie-Therese, a teenager with whom a married, middle-aged Picasso had an affair. Picasso was known to have been intoxicated by his love for the young woman and thus his works in which she is the subject are highly erotic; in fact, they are often considered the most sexually charged of Picasso's works. (For example, you might notice that in The Dream the upper half of Marie-Therese's head looks like a phallus.)

So, back to Shihada for a moment: In a recent Daily News article they quoted him saying "This [the sidewalk] is my gallery, the way I like to reach people... It goes straight to the people."

I love that quote because it articulates one of Shihada's goals, which is to reclaim the word "gallery." He shows that galleries don't have to be daunting, exclusive, expensive places, rather galleries can be places that open art to the public, or in Shihada's words, places where art is brought straight to the people.

But Shihada does more than open art to the public in the visual sense, he also makes his viewers think seriously about art's place in society. He invites us to reflect on the artist's process by allowing masses of people to gather around him as he works in a public space, an unusual opportunity given that most artists create in a studio, behind closed doors. In making his process public, Shihada gives us a moment to appreciate the intensity of an artist's labor and the devotion that it takes to be an artist, to produce art. Similarly, as people pass by his work, they naturally ask themselves 'should I walk on the creation, the art, or is that sacrilegious? Why is it that it feels wrong to walk upon it?' Etc.

And even if people aren't intellectualizing Shihada's work as I just have, at least they are exposed to art, they are given the opportunity, free of charge, to visually place a painting with some big name artist they might have only previously heard of, something art historians pay thousands of dollars of tuition to do...

1. Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

2. Pablo Picasso, The Dream, 1932. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

3. Pablo Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair, 1931. Oil on Canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, New York.