Baltimore museum puts art under the big top

BALTIMORE – Curators at the Baltimore Museum of Art knew they were getting an early Pablo Picasso masterpiece, "The Acrobat Family," in a rare loan from the Goteborg Museum of Art in Sweden. Building a show around the picture turned out to be easy.

"We looked through our holdings," said Oliver Shell, associate curator of European paintings and sculpture, "and, lo and behold, the Baltimore Museum has a considerable amount of works inspired by the circus."

Such was the offhand inspiration for "A Circus Family: Picasso to Leger," which invites visitors to step under the big top and explore artists' fascination with the circus from about 1880 to 1950. There was so much to choose from that Shell narrowed the exhibit's focus to the more intimate, one-ring circus popular in Europe, excluding the three-ring American variety.

The show includes 36 works by Picasso, most of them drawings and etchings from the museum's collection that were acquired by sisters Etta and Claribel Cone in the early 20th century. The Cone sisters later became the museum's most prominent benefactors.

"The Acrobat Family" (1905) was the first Picasso painting purchased by an American collector — Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude Stein. He hung it in their Paris apartment, where the Cone sisters saw it and were smitten, Shell said. The Cones eventually bought more than 100 of Picasso's etchings and drawings.

Many of the etchings treated subjects similar to "The Acrobat Family," a strange and haunting picture of a gaunt harlequin sitting next to his wife and child, whose pose is meant to evoke classical paintings of the Virgin Mary. To the woman's right sits a monkey that Shell calls an "odd beast" because it looks more like a baboon than a trained circus monkey.

Other major Picasso pictures in the show include "Two Acrobats With Dog," on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and "Head of Harlequin," from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

"A lot of it is slightly nostalgic. It's about being an outcast. It's about being shiftless, going from town to town, not being rooted. That's sort of autobiographical," said Shell, who noted that Picasso in 1905 was not yet a superstar in the art world and had been shuffling back and forth between Paris and Barcelona, Spain.

"For him, these figures were timeless creators, living by their skill, their wits. He felt himself to be like that, too," Shell said.

Two years later, Picasso would paint "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" ("The Young Ladies of Avignon") and revolutionize modern art. The circus pictures were part of his Rose Period, "the last big figurative outpouring before he becomes a cubist," Shell said.

Not every artist featured in the show shared Picasso's affection for the circus. Some found it grotesque. But the circus was such a force in early 20th-century popular culture, especially in France, that artists felt compelled to address it. There were five fixed circuses in Paris, with daily performances, at the turn of the century.

Other standout pictures in the show include German expressionist Max Pechstein's "The Circus" (1918), which captures the dynamism of a stunt riding act but also contains sinister overtones. Otto Dix, another German, used the circus "to underscore the seedy elements of postwar Weimar society," according to the wall text for "The Disdainers of Death" (1922), an etching of squinting, almost contemptuous acrobats.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, famous for his posters advertising risque acts at the Moulin Rouge, also did circus posters but depicted dancers as dour and unsmiling, implicitly criticizing the circus for the toll it took on its performers.

Others featured in the show brought a lighter touch to their work, including Paul Klee and Fernand Leger, who celebrated his love for the circus in an illuminated text called "Cirque" (1950). The colorful, playful lithographs from Leger's book close out the exhibit on a festive note.

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