This summer see the greatest Picasso exhibition ever to come to Australia.
Some 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures will fill most of the ground floor of the Art Gallery of NSW. These are ‘Picasso’s Picassos’, personal and revealing works that he kept to shape his own legacy.
Made possible only by the closure of the Musée National Picasso in Paris for renovations, the Gallery is the only venue in Australia on the exhibition’s world tour.
This is a rare opportunity to see work from the world’s most celebrated artist on such scale outside France.
An Australian first, the exhibition showcases seven decades of Pablo Picasso’s art. Every phase of his extraordinary career is represented, including masterpieces from the Blue, Rose, expressionist, cubist, neoclassical and surrealist periods.
...the reality of the 20th century is not the reality of the 19th century, not at all and Picasso was the only one in painting who felt it, the only one.
- writer Gertrude Stein
With a career spanning seven decades of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was an integral part of the birth and development of modern art. Ceaselessly innovative and prolific, he embodies the creative spirit of the modern age, yet for all his modernity he was deeply connected with the art of the past. Although he was a pioneer of abstraction, he never abandoned the figure; although he experimented with new media, he remained a master of traditional oil painting and bronze sculpture. His work lays bare his personal passions, desires and fears, as well as the anxieties of his time, the horrors of war, and the fragility and resilience of human life.
Drawn from the collection of the Musée National Picasso in Paris, this exhibition shows a rare perspective on the life and work of this iconic yet still surprising artist.
The exhibition room by room
From Spain to Paris: 1895–1905
The enchantments of Oceania and Africa: 1906–1909
Cubism, collage and constructions: 1910–1915
A return to classicism: 1916–1924
Brushes with surrealism: 1925–1935
Anxieties of love and war: 1936–1939
World War II to Korea: 1940–1951
The joy of life: 1952–1960
Last decades: 1961–1972
From Spain to Paris: 1895–1905
When I was a child, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.
- Pablo Picasso
Picasso’s talent was evident from a young age, first recognised and nurtured by his art teacher father. Several early drawings in this room, made when he was around 13 years old, show his exceptional skills in figure drawing. During his teens, Picasso furthered his academic training at various art schools in Spain and at 19 took his first trip to Paris, when one of his works was selected for the Exposition Universelle. Over the next four years, Picasso moved restlessly between Paris and Barcelona, discovering the work of the post-impressionists and befriending fellow painter Carlos Casagemas, whose suicide in 1901 affected him deeply.
Picasso drew his subjects from the underbelly of modern city life: beggars, the homeless and prostitutes. Evoking the alienation of the disenfranchised in endless shades of blue and grey, this became known as his Blue Period. While these works were inspired by contemporary art and life, they were also rooted in history: the ashen features and elongated limbs of Picasso’s figures recall paintings by his 16th-century compatriot El Greco.
Finally settling in Paris in 1904, Picasso took up a studio in the famed ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ – a complex of artists’ studios in the bohemian quarter of Montmartre. His Rose Period paintings – so-called for their palette of dusty earth tones and pinkish reds – were largely inspired by the circus and theatre. Le fou (The jester) 1905, an early foray into bronze sculpture, was inspired by an evening at the Cirque Medrano, though it is also a ‘portrait’ of the poet Max Jacob, one of Picasso’s broadening group of Parisian friends – a circle that included writers and artists who would come to define the modern era: Henri Matisse, André Derain, Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire.
La Célestine
Celestina
1904
oil on canvas, 74.5 × 58.5 cm, gift of Fredrik Roos, 1989, MP1989-5 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/rights reserved © Musée National Picasso, Paris
The subject of this painting is possibly based on a character from a 15th-century Spanish novel, a brothel keeper named Celestina. The milky appearance of the woman’s leucoma-affected left eye is one of many references to blindness in the works from Picasso’s Blue Period. Almost a monochrome of blue-grey, the figure is given only the slightest hint of warmth in the rose blush of her left cheek, suggesting the humanity of this forlorn woman, isolated in the cocoon of her inky blue cloak.
‘The enchantments of Oceania and Africa’: 1906–1909
Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.
- Pablo Picasso
In 1907 Picasso painted the complex and now iconic Les demoiselles d’Avignon. A dense and shallow composition of angular, contorted figures, it shocked and perplexed even his most avant-garde contemporaries. Matisse thought it an ‘audacious hoax’, a parody of the increasingly abstract treatment of figures in modern painting. Picasso himself called the painting an ‘exorcism’.
His studies for Les demoiselles d’Avignon on display in this room reveal the range of influences and approaches that went into producing this landmark work. They are not studies in the traditional sense but, typically for Picasso, explorations of possible types that may or may not be included in the final composition. Particularly evident is his growing fascination with tribal art, as seen in the mask-like, chiselled features and angular bodies that caused such extreme reactions to the final work.
Captivated by the Tahitian-inspired works of Paul Gauguin and the Pacific and African collections of the Louvre and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l’Homme), in 1907 Picasso acquired a carved tiki figure that influenced his first wood carving, the totemic oak Figure 1907. The sculpture’s rough-hewn appearance captures the ‘naive’ quality of so-called ‘primitive’ art that Picasso and several of his contemporaries found compelling. Tête de femme (Fernande) (Head of a woman (Fernande)) 1909, a bronze portrait of his lover Fernande Olivier, uses a more complex, rhythmic repetition of angular forms – a suggestion of the ‘cubist’ style that would dominate his work in the coming years.
Autoportrait
Self-portrait
1906
oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm, Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979, MP8 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/René-Gabriel Ojeda © Musée National Picasso, Paris
This self-portrait hints at Picasso’s burgeoning interest in the art of ancient cultures. During 1906 he spent time studying the Louvre’s collection of Iberian sculpture and travelled to the Catalan village of Gosol, where the distorted and exaggerated forms of the region’s carved figures greatly affected him. In this self-portrait, the almond-shaped eyes, deeply etched and ringed in black, are asymmetrical – a characteristic of all his portraits. Adding further to the figure’s stony appearance, the subtle pink and flesh tones are a paler version of his true Rose Period palette (such as Les deux frères (The two brothers) also in this room).
Cubism, collage and constructions: 1910–1915
Cézanne was my one and only master! I spent years studying [his pictures] ... Cézanne! It was the same with all of us – he was like our father.
- Pablo Picasso
For Picasso and many of his contemporaries, no recent artist was more significant than Paul Cézanne. A retrospective of Cézanne’s work, held after his death in 1906, galvanised his influence, and it was around this time that Picasso met Georges Braque.
Over the following years the two artists worked in tandem, visiting each other’s studios almost daily and sharing ideas about painting. Picasso’s Paysage aux deux figures (Landscape with two figures) 1908 typifies their early shared style – a Cézannesque, jagged landscape with blocky, visible brushwork. Their collaboration ultimately produced perhaps the most significant innovation in modern painting: cubism, which combined several possible views of a three-dimensional object in the one image. Braque described their collaboration as ‘like two mountaineers roped together’, evoking at once their co-dependence and the pioneering exhilaration of their artistic endeavour.
In the wake of their six-year collaboration, Picasso and Braque each took cubism in different directions. Picasso continued to work in collage, incorporating wallpaper, cut pieces of canvas, newsprint, lettering and other materials into his compositions. His innovative constructions in wood and sheet iron, painted and wall-mounted, combine the qualities of painting and sculpture. Dispensing with the time-honoured methods of carving or modelling, this was an entirely new way of creating sculpture.
Cubism opened up infinite possibilities for painting, including pure abstraction, and was developed in many forms by artists across Europe, America and Australia. However, the classical realism of the unfinished Le peintre et son modèle (The painter and his model) 1914 proves that even at the height of his cubism, Picasso was not constrained by it as a style.
Homme à la guitare
Man with a guitar
1911
oil on canvas, 154 × 77.5 cm, Pablo Picasso gift in lieu, 1979, MP34 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/René-Gabriel Ojeda © Musée National Picasso, Paris
By 1911 Picasso’s and Braque’s work had become practically indistinguishable. The distinctive grey and ochre ‘scaffolding’ of this painting is typical of their work of this time, known as ‘analytical cubism’. The extremely limited colours focus our attention on the complex interlacing of lines and shaded planes. Enigmatic lettering in the top right-hand corner seems to be a reference to the newsprint Picasso had begun to incorporate into his cubist collages.
A return to classicism: 1916–1924
The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
- Pablo Picasso
While World War I sent many Parisian artists to the front, Picasso, as a foreign national, continued to work largely undisturbed. He travelled to the south of France and to Italy for the first time, and his experience of the art of ancient Rome and Pompeii brought a renewed emphasis on classical beauty and naturalism.
In 1916 Picasso befriended the writer Jean Cocteau, who introduced him to the founder and artistic director of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev. The three collaborated on the ballet Parade, composed by Eric Satie. The avant-garde score and circus imagery of Parade called for a decorative use of pattern and colour that carried through to Picasso’s work beyond the stage.
Perhaps in accord with the postwar mood described by Cocteau as a ‘call to order’ – a desire for stability, introspection and contemplation after the shock and destruction of the war – Picasso returned to the classics. The heavy sculptural quality of his 1920s figures could hardly be further from the flattened planes and abstractions of cubism, though they often retain the jagged bulk of his Oceanic-inspired work. Yet again, Picasso’s sources were eclectic: the influence of Renoir’s late paintings of robust female figures can be seen in La dance villageoise (The village dance) 1922, while domestic life inspired tender images of his new wife Olga and playful portraits of their first child, Paul.
Portrait d’Olga dans un fauteuil
Portrait of Olga in an armchair
1918
oil on canvas, 130 × 88.8 cm, Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979, MP55 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/René-Gabriel Ojeda © Musée National Picasso, Paris
This elegant portrait of his new wife, Ballets Russes dancer Olga Koklova, recalls classical Greek and Roman sculpture. The stylised twists and folds of Olga’s dress and fan are echoed in the subtle wave and sheen of her hair. Likewise, the smooth modelling and cool tones of Olga’s face, neck and arms give her flesh the appearance of marble.
Brushes with surrealism: 1925–1935
We claim him unhesitatingly as one of us.
- surrealist André Breton
Jean Cocteau introduced Picasso to André Breton and his surrealist circle. Picasso showed some of his cubist works at the first surrealist group exhibition in 1925 and designed the cover of the first issue of their journal, Minotaure. Revived by the surrealists, the half-man, half-bull minotaur of classical mythology also became a kind of alter-ego for Picasso, reappearing throughout his career.
The surrealists advocated no one style of art but operated with deliberate irrationality, evoking subconscious associations and dream states. This found a parallel in Picasso’s expressive and sometimes extreme distortions of the figure, often into animal-like forms. However Picasso’s involvement with the movement remained marginal: as in most of his artistic associations, he always remained strongly independent.
In the early 1930s, Picasso produced a number of spare landscapes peopled by extremely distorted nudes. Combining eroticism and violence, they leaned ever closer to surrealism, while a series of enormous bronze heads cast in 1931, brought their rotund, pebble-like shapes into three-dimensional form.
La lecture
The reader
1932
oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm, Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979, MP137 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/René-Gabriel Ojeda © Musée National Picasso, Paris
This portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter bears many of the hallmarks of Picasso’s series of nudes inspired by his young lover: lyrical curves, joyous colours, decorative patterning and an emphasis on her defining blonde hair. The pair met in 1927, when Walter was aged 17, and Picasso created clear references to her in his work while trying to keep their affair clandestine. Later in life, Picasso revealed that even the large still-life Grande nature morte au guéridon (Still-life on a pedestal table) 1931, also in this room, was a disguised ‘portrait’ of Marie-Thérèse, the parts of the table and its contents doubling as parts of her body.
Anxieties of love and war: 1936–1939
For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart.
- Pablo Picasso
The 1930s was a turbulent decade for Picasso. His marriage to Olga broke down when his lover Marie-Thérèse became pregnant, and in 1935 he began a relationship with the surrealist photographer and writer Dora Maar. For the only time in his career, he ceased to paint for some nine months in 1935–36, instead writing poetry in the manner of surrealist ‘automatic writing’. The outbreak of civil war in Spain disturbed Picasso greatly and his monumental mural Guernica, commemorating the bombing of the Basque town by right-wing nationalists in 1937, remains a potent anti-war image to this day.
Maar photographed Picasso many times in his home and studio and famously documented the evolution of Guernica (these photos are also displayed in the exhibition). In turn, using Maar as his subject, Picasso created some of his most complex portraits, combining aspects of cubism, surrealism and the expressive colours and angles of his ‘weeping women’ to convey a distinctive psychological intensity.
Animal imagery was a significant part of Picasso’s output at this time. Guernica was dominated by the bull and the horse and these symbolic animals reappear as symbols of male vigour in works such as the enigmatic La Minotauromachie (The Minotauromachia) 1938, where again Picasso casts himself as the minotaur.
Portrait de Dora Maar
Portrait of Dora Maar
1937
oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm, Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979, MP158 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Jean-Gilles Berizzi © Musée National Picasso, Paris
Although the pose here suggests a profile, all of Maar’s facial features stretch across her face, multiple view-points fused into one. Her formidable presence stems from a confident yet nonchalant pose, her mismatched eyes framed with their distinctively splayed lashes, gazing headlong at the viewer. She is contained within a tight white niche, which Picasso has diffused by scratching back into the paint to reveal brightly coloured areas beneath – a curious blending of interior and exterior.
World War II to Korea: 1940–1951
Real death was outside, real fear grounded within, and Picasso’s iconography narrowed upon it.
- art historian Leo Steinberg
In 1940 the Nazis invaded Paris. During the occupation, Picasso continued to work, albeit under the watchful eye of the German authorities. Many of Picasso’s friends fled or were driven from Paris, including the writer Max Jacob who was interned and eventually executed in a concentration camp.
Capturing this atmosphere of tension and uncertainty, symbols of death, particularly the skull, pervade Picasso’s work. While such mementos mori have a long history in Western art as reminders of our fleeting existence, the bare honesty with which they are painted and sculpted by Picasso transforms them into poignant emblems of the death and destruction of the war.
Where many of Picasso’s earlier works depict the bull in conflict with a horse or matador, he now shows the bull alone, cast simultaneously as a symbol of strength and vulnerability. In one of the more whimsical appearances of this favourite motif, an old bicycle seat and handle bars are combined to create a dada-like assemblage resembling a bull’s head (1942). In contrast, L’Homme au mouton (Man with sheep) 1943, one of Picasso’s most ambitious bronze sculptures, is a powerful allegory of human fragility. It became one of only two sculptures by Picasso to appear in a public space in France (in Vallauris, near Cannes).
Throughout this period, Picasso’s success continued to grow. Major retrospectives of his work were held in New York in 1939 and in 1944 at the first Salon d’Automne to occur following the liberation of Paris. Around this time he also met artist and writer Françoise Gilot, who later penned memoirs on her life with Picasso. Together, they had two children: Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949).
Massacre en Corée
Massacre in Korea
1951
oil on plywood, 110 × 210 cm, Pablo Picasso gift in lieu, 1979, MP 203 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Musée National Picasso, Paris © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Jean-Gilles Berizzi
Depicting an assassination by firing squad during the Korean War, this painting reveals Picasso’s passionate objection to war and commitment to communism (he had joined the party in 1944). The composition is based on Francisco de Goya’s well-known painting The third of May, 1808 1814 in which the two halves of the panel contrast the brutality of the perpetrators of war with the naked vulnerability of their victims.
The joy of life: 1952–1960
I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary…
- Pablo Picasso
Picasso’s work from the mid 1950s reflects a more cheerful outlook and time. In 1953 he met and fell in love with Jacqueline Roque and in 1955 they moved permanently to the south of France. Picasso depicted Jacqueline more than any other woman in his lifetime, creating in one year alone over 70 portraits of her.
In his later decades, Picasso reworked some of the themes, methods and styles of earlier years, particularly cubism. The planes of solid colour in La liseuse (Woman reading) and L’ombre (The shadow), both painted in 1953, evoke the quasi-abstract layers of earlier paper collages and assemblages. In Jacqueline aux mains croisées (Jacqueline with crossed hands) 1954 and Femmes à la toilette (Women at their toilette) 1956, Picasso interprets the body as a construction of grey and white planes, as if made of folded card, recalling the monochrome scaffolding of analytical cubism. In all of these paintings, the vividly coloured interiors reflect not only a more positive post-war outlook but also the influence of Henri Matisse. Picasso often visited Matisse in the years before the latter’s death in 1954 and held a singular respect for Matisse’s handling of complex colour.
In the summer of 1956, Picasso made an extraordinary series of sculptures inspired by bathers on the Mediterranean coast (on display in another room of the exhibition). Cast from assembled found objects – with picture frames turned into arms, parts of a bed into feet, a broom handle into a backbone – this series is one of his most striking and playful.
L’atelier de La Californie
The studio of La Californie
1956
oil on canvas, 114 × 146 cm, Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979, MP211 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Jean-Gilles Berizzi © Musée National Picasso, Paris
Depicting his new house and studio in Cannes, this painting celebrates the fresh colour and clear light of the Mediterranean, and reveals the pervasive influence of Picasso’s friend and rival Henri Matisse.
The interior is described in calligraphic, lyrical lines that play on the patterns created by the decoratively perforated windows. Jaunty palm trees outside are composed of quick, gestural strokes of pure colour in the manner of Matisse. The studio is scattered with canvases in various states of finish. On the sole easel at the very centre, one remains tantalisingly (or perhaps frustratingly) blank.
Last decades: 1961–1972
I am a Spaniard. Just as a torero takes his bull through all kinds of passes, I like to take my pictures through all kinds of variations.
- Pablo Picasso
By now acclaimed as a master of modern art, Picasso worked with an urgent and defiant creativity. In printmaking, he collaborated with master printers Piero and Aldo Crommelynck. In sculpture, he produced new works in sheet metal based on cut and folded paper models, which also seemed to hark back to his cubist metal constructions – for example, La chaise (The chair) 1963. In his late self-portraits, Picasso cast himself in an array of roles: as a sword-wielding matador, an ageing artist with his young model and, most poignantly, as a wide-eyed, youthful artist, palette in hand.
At times, Picasso’s late works drew criticism for being repetitive or derivative, including those inspired by iconic paintings from the history of European art by artists such as Velázquez, Goya, Poussin, Delacroix and Manet. Yet it was always Picasso’s enduring bond with the history of painting that brought about innovation in his work, or as he put it: ‘What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea… And it’s at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.’
It is only more recently that the significance and innovation of Picasso’s late works have come to be appreciated, with many art historians, critics and particularly artists acknowledging Picasso’s continuing and insatiable creativity. As his close friend, the photographer Brassaï said: ‘He thought that if he stopped working, that was death’. In Picasso’s words : ‘I paint just as I breathe’.
‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ d’après Manet
‘The déjeuner sur l’herbe’ after Manet
1961
oil on canvas, 81 × 99.8 cm, Pablo Picasso gift in lieu, 1979, MP216 © Succession Picasso, 2011/licensed by Viscopy, 2011 © Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Jean-Gilles Berizzi © Musée National Picasso, Paris
Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 1862–63 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) created a sensation when it was first exhibited due to its unconventional juxtaposition of modern clothed men and a confronting female nude. Painted almost 100 years later, this is just one of dozens of versions Picasso made of Manet’s composition, albeit with great artistic licence: he has altered the poses of all figures, eliminated the picnic in the foreground and increased the proportion of women to men, emphasising their voluptuous poses before the shadowy male observer.
