A quick trip to this exhibition, actual title Picasso: Love, Fame, Tragedy, on its penultimate day. Reviews
here and
here and elsewhere... I thought I "should" go, and really enjoyed the concept, the layout, the works.
Picasso was 50 years old in 1932, and had a new lover, the 22 year old Marie-Therese Walter. He was about to have an important retrospective show. He embarked on "furious creativity". Expect plenty of portraits....
As expected, the galleries were crowded -
I tried to choose just one picture in each room, and either photographed it or did a quick sketch in the little book they give you, both to see better and to remember -
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| (still haven't read the text...) |
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| First room - the colours and neutral space drew me |
Same sleeping nude, different contexts, painted days apart. Interesting to see development of a theme, and recurring motifs (the philodendron leaves, for instance) -
Here are those leaves again, "Woman in the garden", metal sculpture
A canvas that never got painted - one in a series of possibilities -
The crucifixion series, after his study of Gruenwald's "Issenheim Altarpiece", of which Picasso said: "I'd hardly begun to draw it when it turned into something different"
Flute players figure large in his classical/mythological imagery - I was drawn to the colour and tonal contrast of this one -
A tiny collage, string heavily gessoed -
In the final room, "The Rescue" interested me - a painting (one of
many) resulting from (I presume) a series of drawings. The coloured areas reminded me of
a little book I made many years ago in an illustration course - a recipe for making blackberry "vinegar", a sort of cordial ... I don't know where the idea came from to put down bits of paper just where the important items were to be drawn, but I enjoyed the way it worked - and maybe Picasso had that same enjoyment -
Exit via the gift shop, needless to say. The quote (from Michael Lewis, who he?) says: "Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we will never forget it."
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| The painting is another "Rescue" |
I tried to choose just one picture in each room, and either photographed it or did a quick sketch in the little book they give you, both to see better and to remember -
Here are those leaves again, "Woman in the garden", metal sculpture
A canvas that never got painted - one in a series of possibilities -
The crucifixion series, after his study of Gruenwald's "Issenheim Altarpiece", of which Picasso said: "I'd hardly begun to draw it when it turned into something different"
Flute players figure large in his classical/mythological imagery - I was drawn to the colour and tonal contrast of this one -
A tiny collage, string heavily gessoed -
Exit via the gift shop, needless to say. The quote (from Michael Lewis, who he?) says: "Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we will never forget it."
Saw this earlier in the season and just loved it. In all honestly I don't really know much about Picasso and this really helped understand some of the work and the context in which he was producing work. It was packed then and interestingly you have identified works that I don't remember so perhaps they were blocked by people lessening their impact when I was there. Not sure I can quite get my head around his attitude to women. Was he a bit mysogonistic? Exploitative ? Don't know - but it was a very powerful shoe and the concept of just one year was, in my view, genius.
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