"Europe at Midcentury: Dubuffet, Giacometti, Picasso," an exhibit running at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through Jan. 22, is like an art history course sped up and condensed. The gallery examines how the portrayal of the human figure changed in the years after World War I in Europe as abstract artists switched from naturalistic to exaggerated depictions.
The colorful works of the exhibit create an interesting and engaging collage, and the more-or-less chronological order leads the viewer around the hallway in a way that explicitly shows the radicalism of the shift in human portrayal. The styles range from cubism to outright abstraction and vary in media with a focus on the lithograph.
The exhibit also explores other themes of mass production and the creation of art. To demonstrate how artists worked within their media to get the perfect print, the gallery has four variations of the same work, "Witches' Sabbath" (1958), by the English artist Stanley William Hayter. This grouping spells out the process of creation for viewers. Even somebody who knows nothing about art can appreciate the clearly depicted development of a piece.
Like many artists of his time, Hayter used a mixed-media approach to create his works and then displayed multiple versions of his images together to allow the viewer to appreciate all of the changes made. First, there is the copper plate that Hayter used to print this series. Next, there are two proofs of the same work that differ subtly. Last but not least, there is the final version, which is a confusing and complex colorscape of blues and greens topped with abstract black and white lines. With this grouping, viewers are able to understand how these pieces were made and get a small view into the mind of the artist.
For me, the most intriguing series was Pablo Picasso's "Large Female Nude" (1962). The three works hang together where the hallway meets the staircase, and they make an intriguing hook for passersby. The style is so obviously Picasso's that one almost feels obligated to stop and take a look. The curators were lucky enough to get three versions of the same painting from different parts of the run, and the contrast between each is striking.
All done in the same brown and black palette and printed within a week of each other, the pieces raise an interesting question about mass-produced art. Should each of these three pieces be considered independent works of art? If I had seen them hanging separately in somebody's living room, I might not have been able to distinguish one from another. The lines are the same, but the colors are almost imperceptibly different.
Bearing this in mind, one of the best things about art is that every individual piece is new and exciting; even a copy of an old master's work will feature some differences from the original. If I am standing in front of a painting at a museum, I am practically guaranteed a unique experience.
With the revival of lithography, artists began to make many prints from a single image. This concept seems normal to us thanks to the work of artists such as Andy Warhol and his silkscreens, but, in the long continuum of art history, that idea has not been around for a long time at all. These serial runs changed the way art was looked at and marketed. It was no longer a singular work created for one person, but a sequence of images with the slightest variations — perhaps unnoticeable until gathered together in a single exhibit, as they are here.
