The Studio as a Theater: Picasso and the Fourth Wall

Anne Umland: What does it mean to be a theater director?

Patricia McGregor: As a theater director, one of the joys is to take something that’s often one-dimensional—a script, or something as abstract as just an idea, and make it three-dimensional, to actually create a shared experience between an event on stage or in a space and an audience that is bearing witness to it live.

AU: Could you talk a little bit more about what you get in a theatrical experience that you just don’t get anywhere else?

PM: To me, it’s about when the vibrations, the molecules, the ideas that are happening on the stage are actually penetrating, in real time, the viewer. There’s a potential for alchemy, there’s a potential for change, and it’s actually a two-way street, because what the audience brings—the energy, the ideas, the responses—can also affect what is happening on stage or in the performance space, so there’s this quixotic liveness. We do all of this work to prepare a performance, and yet the missing element is the audience, and the audience always changes the event. I love that give and take.

AU: That’s so interesting, because it’s as though the reception and the audience is built into the art form.

PM: Even the sounds of words. There are nights where there’s robust laughter or a gasp or a tense, attentive quiet that changes the tenor of how an actor may read a line or play a beat because they feel what the reception in the audience is. That liveness is a joy.

AU: When painting, the audience is not typically in the room, yet presumably the artist is thinking about the people who are going to look at the work, because otherwise why make it, in a way? I’m going to use that as an opportunity to turn to the painter Pablo Picasso. What is your relationship, if any, to the body of work?

PM: I hope I’m not misquoting, but I heard once that Picasso said, “Art is the lie you tell so that you can see the truth.” And I think that about visual art, I think that about theater. My sister was a journalist for a while, and then she went back to being a dancer and a choreographer, and she said, “I needed to go back to making art so that I could tell the truth in a different way.” I hold that quote and that idea with me a lot. I also feel really lucky. My mom was a painter. We were exposed to a variety of artists growing up in the Caribbean, and Picasso was among them. I also traveled in Switzerland and spent some time in some studios that Picasso had been in, and he’s somebody who I’ve returned to in different chapters of my life in different ways, as a broad body of work that is unafraid to deal with things as political as Guernica and as personal as some of his more moody and abstract pieces.

AU: You are absolutely right about that quote, and I love it. To describe the range that can be encompassed, from the personal to the political and back again, speaks to aspects of Picasso’s work that touch me as well. The show at MoMA is a deep dive into three months when Picasso, age 39, travels to a place called Fontainebleau, France, that’s just 40 miles southeast of Paris. He moves into a rented villa, it’s like a summer vacation home, and he sets up a studio in a garage, and he sets out to paint these really big pictures. Can we talk a little about what is significant about the space of a studio?

PM: To me, the studio is a sacred space. We often look at the final presentation of something. Whether a painting or a live performance, there sometimes feels like an inevitability about it: Of course the play went that way. Of course the painting went that way. But really, the studio is the laboratory. For me, the studio is my rehearsal room. It’s the place where you get to quiet the rest of the world and do the radical experiments that sometimes are glorious discoveries and transcendent, and sometimes it’s frustrating failures. There are times where the studio might be a place where you do variations on a theme. It might look or feel close to things that you’ve done before, but you find a new angle, a new point of entry, and there are times where it might be something radical. I always love to go into studios and see what’s been discarded, what’s in the corner, and to me, that’s never trash. That’s actually vital steps on the way to where you’re going. If the theater or the museum is the home of the new piece, the studio is the house where things got to get messy.

AU: I love studios too, and I love hearing you talk about them, because my overarching goal for this exhibition was to try to recapture some small sense for our audience of just what it must have been like to be in Fontainebleau in that studio with Picasso in the summer of 1921. Looking at some paintings from this exhibition, I’d always just been so curious about how Picasso came to paint Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians in the same studio space in the same summer over the course of the same three months, because all notions of progress or stylistic evolution or anything like that that assumed a linear progression seemed to me to be undone by the simultaneity of the creation of these two big pictures. Art historians, in writing about Three Musicians in particular, have often drawn parallels between Picasso’s recent work designing costumes and sets for the Ballets Russes, beginning in 1917 with Parade, and then he does about one big production a year leading up to the summer in Fontainebleau. Are there aspects of these paintings that you, as a theater director, might connect to the world of theater and the stage? Is the space stage-like, for example?

AU: Coming off of working with the Ballets Russes, designing stage sets and costumes and working with actors and dancers who move and with issues of lighting, Picasso goes back to Fontainebleau and he’s going to work within this more constrained and limited space of his canvas surface. If you look at the pictures he made there, are there aspects of them that you think might be informed by that immediate experience of working with live art?

PM: The way in which theaters or other performance spaces zoom the whole frame of the world into much tighter parameters, and so the individual character occupies much more space in the frame, feels like it influences these pieces. There almost feels like there’s a proscenium around them. Whereas, when you see a human being in the world, the world is clearly much larger than the human being. While it might not be an absolute one-to-one, it makes sense to me that Picasso has painted these pieces after having recently come out of working in that jewel box of a space that zooms everything into the live person.

AU: Thank you. I hadn’t thought about that. I was thinking very literally about the largeness of a stage space and the animation and the movement, and forgetting that of course it too is a frame, a slice, a compression, a focusing of the audience’s attention.

PM: We often say in theater that there’s a certain point in which the audience experiences a willing suspension of disbelief, where they stop thinking that they’re in a theater and that they’re watching actors, and they are actually zoomed into the story of these human beings. They’ve released the artifice of what’s around them. It feels like these characters [in Picasso’s painting] occupy that outsized kind of relationship to space, where you’re just zoomed into them, themselves.