On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Shab Levy wrote:

> What are some museums and/or exhibitions that deal with CREATIVITY AS A
> PROCESS in a memorable and effective way.

The 1980 Picasso blockbuster show at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York.  If you don't know, they deinstalled the permanent collection and
turned the entire museum over to everything they could get their hands on
that Picasso did over his very long artistic career.  It took my
companion and I 5 hours to go through, not counting lunch, but it was
energizing not exhausting.  The show was arranged chronologically, and
one of the most interesting things about it was that it included
near-misses and failures, so you could see Picasso trying out an idea,
not quite getting it right the first time, and then reworking it and this
time making something wonderful.  Other times, you could see him mining
an idea in a series of paintings, turning it over in his head and taking
a variety of approaches to it.  The sheer comprehensiveness also made
his various stylistic shifts seem less abrupt and contradictory than they
did for me before I saw how they unfolded (e.g. why those monumental
classicized figures came after Cubism).  The exhibition catalog and press
accounts should be easy to locate in a good library.

--Helen Glazer
Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA
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