The great Picasso charges into war at the BMA

It's hard to come up with a general statement for Picasso, who would win any contest for the edgiest and most prestigious artist of the 20th century. This difficulty in classifying him reveals the very essence of the cagey Spaniard's genius: he has tangoed with countless mediums, movements and women without entangling himself with any particular one. Instead he moved from one to another, passionately if not always gracefully, responding to their evocative power to create a style at once personal and expansively public.

The BMA's current exhibit pins down the elusive Picasso in one of his most creative epochs: his liaison with one movement and one particular woman. Picasso: Surrealism and the War Years depicts his involvement with both the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and '30s and the barely pubescent Marie Therese Walter, for whom he ultimately left his first wife, Olga, and who features throughout his work in this period.

Surrealism sparked to life in post-War France after Andre Breton published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1926. The ideas, which heavily drew on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, attracted a coterie of scarred, rebellious poets, artists, and filmmakers, who thought that straightforward representation was meaningless because man and his world were intrinsically irrational. They believed that the business of Art was to get to the subconscious, extracting the images submerged in the half-light of dreams and forbidden impulses.

Though Picasso never explicitly affiliated himself with the Surrealist movement, it clearly had a major impact on his art. Halfway through his cubist period, which he launched with his ground breaking Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, he began hanging out with Breton, Salvador Dali, and other members of the irreverent Surealist gang. The exhibit even features a portrait of a young, burning eyed Picasso by Dali, who interestingly crowns his professional rival with a faint, barely discernable crown of laurel leaves.

But the fact that he adopts Surrealism just when his cubist style has matured is no accident. It was precisely when Picasso had mastered his great stylistic innovation of breaking three-dimensional form into elemental shapes, that he was primed to open up his work to psychically charged images.

The exhibit mainly features prints from this period, in which the Minotaur--a classic Surrealist symbol that Picasso interpreted as desire and artistic frustration--is rendered with a menacing urgency. Not to forget Marie Therese--the selection clearly shows Picasso's fixation on his young mistress, highlighting the contradictory feelings of guilt and desire that she evoked in him. That she is almost always depicted with the Minotaur is no accident; the strange figure, with a bull's head and a man's body, is Picasso's chosen archetype for expressing his feelings of self-contradiction.

A classic example of ambivalence is Minotauromachy, a print in which a hulking, bestial Minotaur runs a sword through the voluptuous body of a young woman, shown limply draped over a horse. His other hand is stretched out to shade his eyes from a candle held by a young girl, who is demurely clad in a French schoolgirl's uniform. Both the lush body and the virginal schoolgirl represent Marie-Therese. On the opposite side, a bearded man--another favorite Surrealist archetype--looks over the scene from where he stands on the ladder. The bearded figure is Daedalus, the creative artist-inventor, that other personal symbol Picasso frequently evoked in this period. The lovely complex mirroring and the print's overall terrifying power make it a masterpiece of both style and subject.

Another superb print showcased by the exhibit is the set of comic strips called The Dream and Lie of Franco. Picasso, who conceived a violent antipathy to General Franco and his militarist fascist ideology during the Spanish Civil War, etched these illustrations as set of postcards to raise money for the Republican cause.

The first strip is shows just how funny and sardonic Picasso can be: the graphic story stars a furry little polyp sporting an evil grin and a number of military accessories like armor, swords, axes and spears. Voila, folks--Generalissimo Franco, himself. The other strip is its sobering counterpart; we see the stark terror of war in panels depicting a dead mother cradling her baby, a family shrieking in a bombing raid and other horrifying images. The comic strips are also significant because they are the rough drafts for his epic masterpiece, Guernica.

The exhibit, while small, lets you sample Picasso at his creative, tortured, and sarcastic best. It shows how intensely private the artist can be, almost willfully blocking our access with complex metaphors and symbols. At the same time it shows the authority of his public persona, when he uses the evocative power of art to denounce the inhumanity of war. These spotlighted years are crucial ones for Picasso's own artistic vision, as well as for our own selves, the inheritors of the 20th century's ground-shaking cultural and social movements.