The Show Fizzles, but Picasso Still Sizzles

What a letdown: The Whitney Museum invests 10 years, big bucks and high hopes on its “Picasso and American Art” exhibition, and it doesn’t only get thumbs down from CultureGrrl. Michael Kimmelman, in today’s NY Times, dismisses it in much the same terms.
On Thursday morning, CultureGrrl said:
A show with such a large lackluster component takes a big gamble that its academic interest will be enough to keep the visitor engaged. For me, that gamble did not pay off.
Guest curated by Picasso scholar Michael FitzGerald, the enterprise’s doggedly slogging research, unearthing every conceivable link between selected American artists and the 20th-century artworld’s most demanding and confounding father figure, would make a better scholarly thesis than a riveting exhibition or a stimulating exhibition catalogue.
Today, Kimmelman said:
[The show is] one of those dull affairs incubated in the world of academe: a walk-through textbook that goes to extraordinary lengths to state the obvious. It has the numbing feel of a compare-and-contrast slide lecture, the scholastic consequence of art forced to service information.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, the Times site provided, as a companion feature for Kimmelman’s piece, a “compare-and-contrast” slide show! But the real shocker in Kimmelman’s review was his dropping the loaded word “constipated” into his prose—to characterize the entire oeuvre of Jasper Johns. That word demands some explanation…or a laxative.
Whatever its weaknesses, the Whitney show boasts many great Picassos, gathered from disparate sources. Masterpieces by that formidable Spaniard who resided in France are always worth seeing…even in a museum ostensibly dedicated to the best in American art.