Pablo Picasso’s “Night Fishing at Antibes” (1939) on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York (all pictures Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic)
A fast perusal of the headlines as of late is sufficient for one to conclude that dictators don’t die however multiply, and that historical past doesn’t repeat itself — it vomits in its personal mouth.
The yr is 1939. It’s a balmy August night time, lit by a giant, yellow moon. Two fishermen in a ship are incomes their preserve on the market off the shore of Antibes in southern France. One in every of them goals at a big, curmudgeonly fish with a pitchfork, the opposite tries his luck with a fishing line. A cautious crab retains a protected distance. Fuel lamps mirror on the water’s floor and flicker into the air. A lady on a motorbike observes the entire scene from a excessive dock whereas licking an ice cream. She’s there with a good friend, it appears.
Luxurious Monaco is lower than an hour away by automobile. Beachy Good is even nearer. Every little thing appears to be like nice and wonderful. However beneath these calm waters swirl malignant tides that portend the onset of a Second, a lot deadlier World Warfare just some weeks away.
This scene in Pablo Picasso’s “Night Fishing at Antibes” stopped me in my tracks throughout a go to to the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) on a sizzling Saturday afternoon in New York Metropolis.
At present held on a wall at a busy intersection connecting two escalators on the museum’s fifth flooring, it’s practically unattainable to have a non-public second with this Cubist masterpiece, a lot much less heed its alarm that we’re by no means actually too distant from a 3rd, infinitely extra horrific World Warfare, in all probability powered by AI.
The portray is at present held on a wall at a busy intersection on MoMA’s fifth flooring.
This sprawling piece (6.75 by 11.3 ft, or two by 3.5 meters) was acquired for MoMA in 1952 by Olga Hirsh Guggenheim, spouse of industrialist-philanthropist Simon Guggenheim, brother of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who began his personal eponymous museum on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The Guggenheims made their fortune from constructing a worldwide mining and smelting empire, which reached its peak through the First World Warfare. They, amongst others, have been accused of battle profiteering by gouging the worth of copper, which was important for the arms business. Many within the household have deserted the mining business since then. Now we acknowledge them extra as nice patrons of the humanities, simply as we do many up to date MoMA donors and board members accused of extractivism and profiting off the military-industrial advanced.
And isn’t it an attention-grabbing coincidence that 1939, the yr Picasso made “Night Fishing at Antibes,” can be the yr he loaned “Guernica” (1937), his most well-known anti-war portray, to MoMA for safekeeping after the outbreak of the battle in Europe? Such is historical past, a turning wheel of irony. The folks amassing and safeguarding the anti-war artwork are sometimes the identical ones promoting the bombs.
The folks amassing and safeguarding the anti-war artwork are sometimes the identical ones promoting the bombs.
PING! As I stood blocking escalator visitors whereas considering these entanglements, a notification on my cellphone display introduced that the US, 80 years after the atomic finish of World Warfare II, had positioned nuclear submarines near Russia.
Outdoors the museum, an August solar flagellated the asphalt roads, concrete pavements, and skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. It was a vengeful, punishing solar. A jingoistic solar that desires you to go the hell again to the place you got here from. Nonetheless, the streets teemed with folks buying, sightseeing, and licking ice cream — simply going about their regular enterprise. Each certainly one of them regarded like a Picasso fisherman to me.
