Althouse: The Chicago Picasso.

August 12, 2008

The Chicago Picasso.

With dancers.

(Info on the sculpture in Daley Plaza: here. Enlargement of the photo: here.)

33 comments:

bleeper said...: Good sculpture.; 8/12/08, 4:48 PM
knox said...: Everything's better with dancers; 8/12/08, 4:54 PM
KLDAVIS said...: The Picasso is alright, but I prefer the Calder down the street.

-kd; 8/12/08, 5:03 PM
bearbee said...: Picasso having his little joke but it makes for a good jungle gym.

Chicago Chagall Mosaic; 8/12/08, 5:12 PM
Peter V. Bella said...: Ah, you snuck into our fair city.; 8/12/08, 6:16 PM
MadisonMan said...: Did you buy anything in Chicago and pay the outrageous sales tax?

I like how the sculpture is looking at you no matter where you are.; 8/12/08, 6:24 PM
Anonymous said...: Ann, did you visit the Cloud Gate sculpture in Millinneum Park? I think it is a captivating public sculpture, and every time I've visited it, it has been surrounded by admirers and photographers.; 8/12/08, 6:36 PM
ricpic said...: Picasso well may have his joke;
Picasso also mesmerizes:
Who start by measuring his work
In the end his work measurizes.; 8/12/08, 6:48 PM
Hoosier Daddy said...: When I lived up in the Region we always went to Chicago since there wasn't shit to do on my side of the border and I never did figure out what that thing was.

Looks like an antelope to me.; 8/12/08, 6:52 PM
Peter V. Bella said...: Michael_H said...
Ann, did you visit the Cloud Gate sculpture in Millinneum Park? I think it is a captivating public sculpture, and every time I've visited it, it has been surrounded by admirers and photographers.

You mean our beautiful over priced boondoggle? Frank Ghery really soaked us on that one.; 8/12/08, 6:59 PM
Meade said...: A statue of Ernie Banks
would have been a better choice,
ya big dumb shouldered
hog butcher for the world.; 8/12/08, 7:16 PM
Ruth Anne Adams said...: Meade: Hey, hey, holy mackerel. No doubt about it. The CUBS are one their way...; 8/12/08, 7:24 PM
Ruth Anne Adams said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/12/08, 7:37 PM
Ruth Anne Adams said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/12/08, 7:39 PM
Meade said...: Ruth Anne, as soon as I get my license to time travel, I'm still going back to give Dave a run for his money.

You better warn him.; 8/12/08, 7:45 PM
Peter V. Bella said...: Meade said...
A statue of Ernie Banks
would have been a better choice,
ya big dumb shouldered
hog butcher for the world

Ah, but we do have a statue to Michael Jordan. We are no longer the hog butcher. We are now known as the boodle or boondoggle city.; 8/12/08, 7:48 PM
Ruth Anne Adams said...: Don't worry. I'm auditioning second husbands. After I'm a widow. If that ever happens. Which isn't likely given the genes of the cantankerous men on his side of the family. But you're on my 'short list.'

[Better that than the 'short bus.']; 8/12/08, 7:48 PM
Meade said...: I am sort of a 'tard though.

Leo; 8/12/08, 7:52 PM
al said...: You mean our beautiful over priced boondoggle? Frank Ghery really soaked us on that one.

Just wait and see the soaking if the IOC is dumb enough to give King Richard the 2016 summer games.; 8/12/08, 8:41 PM
bleeper said...: Calders are always better than Picassos.; 8/12/08, 8:53 PM
Mark Daniels said...: I remember the controversy that surrounded the installation of the Picasso sculpture in 1967. I went to Chicago for a visit with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, who lived in nearby DuPage County, just two years later. It was the weirdest and, to my fifteen year old mind, most wonderful piece of public art I'd ever seen.

Nine years after the Picasso was installed in Daley Plaza, we had a similar controversy over a piece of public sculpture in my hometown of Columbus. A group of local patrons made it possible for the Columbus Museum of Art to purchase what I believe was then one of two renderings of Henry Moore's 'Large Oval with Points.' (A perfunctory search of the web indicates that there are a few more of them around today.) The site chosen was a parcel of land, once the location of the old Franklin County Court House, then being developed into a small urban green space.

I remember that everybody seemed to have an opinion of the piece. My wife and I loved it, for example. Friends of ours, people I would have expected to have been enthusiastic about the sculpture, hated it. (But on their honeymoon trip to Paris, they sent us a postcard to say that there they had seen a piece that bore a "pointed" resemblance to something in Columbus.)

Today, the Moore sculpture seems nondescript and invisible. Not so the Picasso piece and not just because it's much larger. It's just a great piece of art. Why, I don't know, except that like all exceptional art, it captures you.

By the way, I like Calder too. But I don't agree that Calder's work is always better than Picasso's. I don't know that I could say that any artist is or was "always" better than Picasso. But then, this business of "arts appreciation" is fairly subjective stuff.

Mark Daniels; 8/12/08, 10:56 PM
Mark Daniels said...: I know, Ann, that I totally ignored the fact that you were, in a sense, trying to present a new composition with the Picasso piece AND the dancers. Sorry. But I DO wonder about the dancers' presentation, or choreography, or schtick. I wonder about the masks.; 8/12/08, 11:00 PM
Peter V. Bella said...: al said...
You mean our beautiful over priced boondoggle? Frank Ghery really soaked us on that one.

Just wait and see the soaking if the IOC is dumb enough to give King Richard the 2016 summer games.

I hope the only soaking they give him is a total vitriolic critique on why Chicago is a poor choice. Our taxes are hig enough as it is and they would only go up to pay for King Richards Pipe Dream.; 8/12/08, 11:10 PM
lee david said...: Cloudgate was designed by an artist named Anish Kapur. Some friends of mine built it in Oakland Ca. It is probably the most audacious piece of metal sculpture ever produced. Each of several hundred pieces were bent, milled, polished and welded together to make a surface that was not only smooth but optically correct. It is a metal working masterpiece. I like it as a piece of sculpture too.; 8/13/08, 12:04 AM
lee david said...: Cloudgate was designed by an artist named Anish Kapur. Some friends of mine built it in Oakland Ca. It is probably the most audacious piece of metal sculpture ever produced. Each of several hundred pieces were bent, milled, polished and welded together to make a surface that was not only smooth but optically correct. It is a metal working masterpiece. I like it as a piece of sculpture too.; 8/13/08, 12:05 AM
lee david said...: Cloudgate was designed by an artist named Anish Kapur. Some friends of mine built it in Oakland Ca. It is probably the most audacious piece of metal sculpture ever produced. Each of several hundred pieces were bent, milled, polished and welded together to make a surface that was not only smooth but optically correct. It is a metal working masterpiece. I like it as a piece of sculpture too.; 8/13/08, 12:05 AM
lee david said...: Cloudgate was designed by an artist named Anish Kapur. Some friends of mine built it in Oakland Ca. It is probably the most audacious piece of metal sculpture ever produced. Each of several hundred pieces were bent, milled, polished and welded together to make a surface that was not only smooth but optically correct. It is a metal working masterpiece. I like it as a piece of sculpture too.; 8/13/08, 12:06 AM
lee david said...: Sorry for the multiples, I didn't think it was working.; 8/13/08, 12:07 AM
bearbee said...: Not so the Picasso piece and not just because it's much larger. It's just a great piece of art.

Part of its greatness is Picasso's joke but more that it evokes so much commentary and Chicagoans see it and use it as a fun piece, imo.

I'll speculate that after thinking about it for, what, 2 minutes?, it didn't take him more that 30 seconds to sketch it out.

Some additional info Pablo and The Boss

Here's a mouthful - his full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispín Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso; 8/13/08, 5:52 AM
Mark Daniels said...: bearbee:
I agree that humor is part of the piece's appeal. The sheer weirdness of it, a bit like Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans, accounts for its appeal, plus, as you say, the good humor with which Chicagoans and others have embraced it.

You're probably right that Picasso didn't spend a lot of time on the thing. That was sort of what he was doing in the last years of his life.; 8/13/08, 7:22 AM
bleeper said...: When it comes to monumnental outdoor sculpture, Calder is always better than Picasso. Paintings, not so much.

The Henry Moore Foundation creates multiples of Uncle Hank's work - I don't know what the total number of any work is, but Rodin's estate is owned by France and no more than 12 of any given work is cast. I would assume a similar limit in the case of Henry Moore.

But Calder wins in the realm of what he called stabiles. He was able to create massive pieces that convey the fun he had creating them. Picasso may have been able to match that, he just didn't spend the time doing it.; 8/13/08, 8:32 AM
veni vidi vici said...: man, sometimes i really miss chicago.; 8/13/08, 9:44 PM
veni vidi vici said...: kldavis, i just looked at the Calder in your link and had to do a double-take. We have a near identical sculpture (same color too) on the bank of america plaza across the street and outside my office window. i just peeked out there to see whether it was the same thing; close... very close.

pretty lame, sort of Gehry-esque, if you ask me.

see it here: http://www.losanjealous.com/img/yoshimi_plaza.jpg; 8/13/08, 9:47 PM