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Art dealer dies and leaves
an extensive collection of Pablo Picasso paintings updated 08/12/08 04:33 AM, EDT
NEW YORK (AP)
When eccentric socialite and art dealer William M.V. Kingsland died
two years ago, he left an extensive collection of Pablo Picasso
paintings and other works crammed into his one-bedroom apartment
-- but no will > Read more!
Picasso prints stolen from
Brazil museum updated 6:35 p.m. EDT, Thu June 12, 20088
SÃO
PAULO, Brazil (AP) A 06/12/08 06:35 PM, EDT
Three heavily armed robbers stole two Pablo Picasso prints from
an art museum in downtown Sao Paulo on Thursday, the city's second
high-profile art theft in less than a year.> Read more!
Saudi collector 'wanted
stolen Picasso' updated Wed, January 26, 2008
SÃO
PAULO, Brazil (AP) A suspect in last month's brazen theft of two paintings by
Pablo Picasso and Candido Portinari told detectives the paintings
were to be delivered to a Saudi collector, authorities said Friday. > Read more!
Museum recovers stolen Picasso,
other painting updated Wed, January 9, 2008
SÃO
PAULO, Brazil (AP) Stolen paintings by Pablo Picasso and Candido Portinari returned
home to applause Wednesday, while police tried to find out who masterminded
the robbery at a Brazil museum > Read more!
Guernica commemorates 1937 bombing POSTED:
2:12 p.m. EDT, April 26, 2007 MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Representatives from cities that have suffered bombardment joined survivors from Guernica Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Basque town's destruction by German and Italian planes during the Spanish Civil War > Read more!
Picasso breaks another record at auction , New York, USA Thursday, May 4, 2006; Posted: 11:05 a.m. EDT (15:05 GMT) A Picasso portrait of his lover Dora Maar has been sold for $95.2m (£51.8m), the second highest amount ever paid for a painting at auction. > Read more!
Settlement reached for stolen Picasso, California, USA Wednesday, August 10, 2005; Posted: 12:37 p.m. EDT (16:37 GMT) CNN The grandson of a Jewish woman whose Pablo Picasso painting was stolen by Nazis during World War II
will receive $ 6.5 million from American who later bought the work from a gallery. Read more!
Picasso breaks record at auction , New York, USA Thursday, May 6, 2004 Posted: 3:44 PM EDT (1944 GMT) BBC A 1905 masterpiece by Pablo Picasso has sold for $104m (£58m), becoming the world's most expensive painting. >Read more!
Another Picasso Museum in Málaga, Spain It was inaugurated in October 2003 Check
out the official website of the Málaga
Picasso Museum!
Picasso
on the beach,
Miami Sunday,
January 18, 2004 Over
a thousand supporters recreate Pablo Picasso's 'Amnistia' on South
Beach in Miami, Florida, to protest the Bush Administration attempts
to silence Greenpeace. See it and read all about it here.
The
Picasso Érotique show was last exhibited in Barcelona, Spain,
after a successful run in Montreal, Canada. The show drew hundreds of thousands of visitors in a handful of cities, and has inspired
people the world over. Below is an excellent reviewprepared
by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. For complete coverage (including
media reviews of the show) of this show, have a look at our special
page.
The selection of more than 350 works
- many rarely, if ever, exhibited publicly before due to reasons
of censorship - spans the artist's entire career and includes paintings,
prints and drawings, sculpture and ceramics. Together, these reveal
the profound, persistent and remarkably varied role that erotic
imagery, ideas and experiences played in Picasso's work - from the
bordello scenes of his youth in Barcelona to the epochal Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (sketches for which are included in the exhibition) and
the nudes he produced at the age of ninety. As Picasso himself once
stated, when asked about his views on art and sexuality, "They're
the same thing."
Garnered from more than forty public and private collections worldwide,
the exhibition features erotic works representative of virtually
all the phases and styles of Picasso's career. Drawn from personal
experience, imagination, mythology and earlier art, these images
- by turns humorous and melancholic, enraptured and enraged - explore
an almost encyclopedic range of sexual impulses, practices and human
desire.
"Given the enormity of Picasso's oeuvre and influence, it is
remarkable that up to now there has been no full-scale, major museum
exhibition devoted to the central importance of erotic subject matter
in his art," stated Museum Director Guy Cogeval. "Fascinating
and often stunningly beautiful in and of themselves, these works
will provide a long-overdue contribution to our understanding of
the greatest artist of the twentieth century - and, indeed, of the
nature of the artistic process and of creativity itself. It is most
appropriate that this historic exhibition should take place at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which in the past has hosted such
important displays of Picasso's work as Picasso and Man (1964) and
Pablo Picasso: Meeting in Montreal, organized in collaboration with
Jacqueline Picasso, the artist's last wife."
The Exhibition
As Picasso's numerous biographers - and the artist himself - have
confirmed, sex and the women in his life had an enormous influence
on his work. Indeed, the painter's rapid and often dramatic changes
of style are frequently attributed to the presence of a new love
interest, the waning of an old one, or both. While the autobiographical
character of Picasso's erotic art is undeniable, such subjects also
served as a means of exploring - and challenging - the very nature
of art and its role in society.
Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition is divided
into three successive phases of Picasso's career: "The Early
Years", "Between the Wars" and "Maturity",
each of which is subdivided into particular motifs or projects that
figured prominently in his erotic oeuvre. At various points in the
exhibition, there are also viewing areas for film excerpts related
to Picasso's erotic imagery.
The Early Years: The Brothels of Barcelona
Picasso érotique opens, appropriately enough, with an installation
evoking a fin-de-siècle brothel - the setting both for many
of the painter's earliest sexual exploits and for his first large
body of erotic drawings. An adjacent gallery displays a number of
these works, most of them depicting the prostitutes and patrons
of Barcelona's notorious barrio chino, or red-light district, which
the young Picasso and his fellow artist friends frequented during
the late 1890s and early 1900s. Drawn in a linear, almost caricaturist
style reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec, many of these are graphic
and often grotesquely humorous depictions of various sex acts, clearly
designed to amuse and titillate. The Mackerel (1902-1903), for example,
shows a nude woman with a long-tongued fish between her legs. There
are also poetic and quite lyrical scenes of lovemaking from this
period, such as Embrace (1901) and Two Figures and a Cat (1902-1903),
as well as the disturbing image of a nude woman in bed being strangled
by a man.
Produced at a time when Picasso was being encouraged to concentrate
on historical and religious subjects (one of his first public successes,
produced at age sixteen, was a solemn allegory entitled Science
and Charity), these brothel sketches may have then seemed incidental
to his developing career. However, many of the images first treated
in these works - the embrace, the kiss, the artist gazing at his
slumbering lover, violation, and death - would eventually become
central themes in Picasso's oeuvre, reprised again and again until
the end of his life.
This section also includes one of the precocious artist's earliest
drawings of any kind, a sketch of a donkey mounting a she-ass, jotted
in the margins of a school notebook when Picasso was about twelve.
The Early Years: Paris and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
The following galleries document the importance of erotic subjects
during the crucial period from 1904, when Picasso moved to Paris,
to the completion, in the spring of 1907, of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
a depiction of five prostitutes that is regarded as one of the most
important paintings in the history of modern art.
La Toilette, a major painting of 1906, shows a nude woman standing
before a mirror and arranging her hair. The classical pose, sculptural
form and overall dignity and restraint of the work reflect Picasso's
new fascination with Greco-Roman art - and, perhaps, with his new
mistress, Fernande Olivier. Often regarded as Picasso's first "true
love", this statuesque and elegant Frenchwoman was the model
for numerous works, erotic and otherwise, of the early 1900s. In
The Harem, a more overtly erotic painting of 1906, Fernande appears
in a variety of graceful, classically inspired nude poses, while
a powerfully built nude man, seated languorously in the foreground,
looks on. In retrospect, the work can be seen as an early step towards
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
The exhibition features a number of important studies for this revolutionary
masterpiece. Among them is a compositional drawing for Les Demoiselles
of March-April 1907, which differs from the final version in the
inclusion of two men, one entering a door, the other seated amid
the group of nude women. The presence of these men, both fully clothed,
confirms that the subject of this painting, for all its violent
distortions of form and space, is a group of prostitutes in a brothel
greeting prospective customers.
Between the Wars
The exhibition then proceeds to show the myriad and increasingly
sophisticated forms that Picasso's erotic oeuvre took during the
decades leading up to World War II.
A number of erotic works dating from the late 1920s and early 1930s
reflect his interest in Surrealism, which advocated the reconstruction
of nature according to one's imaginative fantasies. For Picasso,
these fantasies were often of a sexual nature - "Why not the
sex organs in place of the eyes, and the eyes between the legs?"
he once wondered - and the result is a series of hybrid and often
playfully erotic creatures. In Figures by the Seashore (1931), for
example, some protuberances and orifices are anatomically recognizable,
some are not; but collectively the entwining forms are an eloquent
expression of sexual union. In addition to drawings and paintings,
the exhibition also includes a number of sculptures dating from
the artist's Surrealist phase, including The Couple (1930), Head
of a Woman (1931) and Bather (1931).
The next section of the exhibition is devoted to the important group
of erotic works Picasso produced at Boisgeloup, the house he bought
in 1930 as a studio and trysting place for his new love, Marie-Thérèse
Walter. Some twenty-nine years his junior, she provided the artist
- now almost fifty and in the last stages of his unhappy marriage
to the Russian ballerina Olga Kokhlova ("the castrator")
- with a new sexual and artistic lease on life.
In such paintings as Siesta (1932) and Recumbent Nude (1932) Marie-Thérèse's
sleeping form is painted in voluptuous sweeping curves and flat
areas of gay colors. In the somewhat later Nude in a Garden (1934)
- described as one of the ultimate artistic expressions of sexual
joy - her body is abstracted and rearranged according to his desire,
becoming a series of delicately painted pink breasts and orifices.
This section also includes selections from Picasso's series of illustrations
to Ovid's Metamorphoses (begun in 1930 at Boisgeloup) and other
mythologically inspired scenes of pursuit, seduction and rape. His
personal mythologizing of himself as the Minotaur, a lascivious
half-human, bison-headed monster, figures prominently in a number
of these works, such as Dora and the Minotaur. Dated September 1936,
a few months after the beginning of his relationship with the photographer
Dora Maar, it shows the shaggy beast preparing to bury his muzzle
in his nude victim's pudenda.
Maturity
The erotic works produced during the last decades of Picasso's life
- a time when the artist enjoyed a celebrity unmatched in the annals
of modern art - often reflect an increasing awareness of his own
mortality and the inevitable waning of his sexual powers. Many of
these are self-mocking and broadly humorous, such as collages in
which a drawn image of a knock-kneed old man with glasses and a
beret ogles and fondles photographs of pinup girls cut from magazines
(1957). (Indeed, the tabloid press had made much of his liaison
with the young painter Françoise Gilot, begun when he sixty-two
and she was twenty-one). Similarly humorous in tone, but very different
in source, are the group of ceramics (1962) with crudely painted
images of aging "excited" satyrs in pursuit of fleeing
nymphs, clearly intended as caricatures of erotic scenes on Greek
vase painting.
The exhibition also features a number of works from one of the artist's
most famous and extensive projects of erotic art, Suite 347 (1968),
a series of risqué prints dealing with the imagined sex lives
of great artists of the past. A group of approximately twenty-five
etchings depict the Renaissance master Raphael cavorting with his
mistress "La Fornarina", often with the decrepit Pope
Julius II as a goggle-eyed voyeur. In a similar vein is the selection
of prints from Picasso's 1971 series - again, imaginary - of Degas
visiting a Paris brothel.
In late paintings such as The Kiss (1969) and The Embrace (1971),
a gift to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Jacqueline Picasso,
Picasso reprises themes and images that had informed the erotic
art of earlier years. Now, however, the contours are often jagged
and, in the oils, the paint is thick and applied with a new expressive
urgency. The exhibition concludes with one of Picasso's last drawings,
an image of a nude woman dated 1972, the year before his death at
the age of ninety-one. A work of enormous pathos and power, it depicts
a grotesquely aged woman, with sagging breasts and elephantine legs,
slumped against the wall. She gazes at us with one wide, staring
eye, while below, like a second eye, are the slashing lines of her
genitals.
Exhibition Tour
Picasso érotique opened on February 29, 2001, at the Galerie
nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, where it was shown until May 20,
2001. Following its Montreal showing - the only one in North America
- the exhibition was presented at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona,
from October 25, 2001, to January 25, 2002.
Exhibition Catalogue
Picasso érotique is accompanied by a Picasso
Érotique Catalogue fully illustrated catalogue with original
essays by an international team of leading Picasso scholars, including
Jean-Jacques Lebel; Marilyn McCully, independent curator; Maria
Teresa Ocaña, director of the Museu Picasso; Robert Rosenblum,
curator of twentieth-century art at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum
of Art, New York; Jean Clair; Brigitte Baer, author of the catalogue
raisonné of Picasso's prints; and writers Pascal Quignard
and Annie Le Brun, among others. It is available in English and
French editions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Organization and Sponsorship
Picasso érotique is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts, the Musée national Picasso and the Réunion des
musées nationaux in co-production with the Galerie nationale
du Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. The curators
of the exhibition are Gérard Régnier, director, Musée
national Picasso, Paris; Guy Cogeval, Director, The Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts; and Maria Teresa Ocaña, director, Museu Picasso,
Barcelona. French author and artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, guest curator
of the Montreal exhibition, worked in collaboration with Dominique
Dupuis-Labbé of the Musée national Picasso, Paris,
and Nathalie Bondil-Poupard, Chief Curator at the Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts (both deputy curators for this exhibition).
