IMPORTANTE! Comprobar ancho del lomo

Pablo Picasso DIALOGUES DIALOGUES 2020–2023 MUSEO PICASSO WITH PICASSO WITH PICASSO COLLECTION MÁLAGA — 2020–2023 COLLECTION

‘In the museums, for example, there are only pictures that have failed… Are you smiling? Think it over, and you will see whether or not I am right. Those which today we consider “masterpieces” are those which departed most from the rules laid down by the masters of the period. The best works are those which show most clearly the “stigma” of the artist who painted them.’

In collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte Pablo Picasso, Head of a Minotaur, Paris, 13 December 1937 [99, p. 247]

0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 2 27/7/20 10:03 DIALOGUES WITH PICASSO — 2020–2023 COLLECTION

0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 3 27/7/20 10:03 Contents

P. 31_ Picasso: New Collection 2020–2023 Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

P. 35_ Dialogues in the Labyrinth of the Still Untold Deed José Lebrero Stals

P. 39_ Dialogues with Picasso Pepe Karmel

P. 65_ Catalogue

0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 28 28/7/20 10:36 P. 81_ The Human Figure Commented Works in Picasso’s Drawings, Javier Cuevas del Barrio 1906–1913 Interim Substitute Professor, Universidad de Málaga Pepe Karmel Cécile Godefroy Associate Professor of Art History, New York University Art Historian and Curator, Paris

P. 229_ Anna Jozefacka Independent scholar, New York Picasso’s Minotaurs Luise Mahler Michael FitzGerald Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Leonard A. Lauder Research Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the Art History Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, New York programme at Trinity College, Hartford

P. 373_ Eduard Vallès Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Museu Nacional Picasso and the d’Art de Catalunya Popular Heritage P. 403_ of Pottery List of Works Salvador Haro González Professor of Painting and Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad de Málaga

0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 29 27/7/20 10:07 Picasso: New Collection 2020–2023 Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

Over the past three years, the idea gradually emerged that the conversation between works in the permanent collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga (MPM) and those on loan from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA) would greatly benefit from a revised scenography that invites the public to discover certain of Pablo Picasso’s artworks from a new angle.

Pablo Picasso, The Siesta, Boisgeloup, 18 August 1932 [86, pp. 216-217] With a presentation that is both thematic and chronological, we have been able to establish connections between Picasso’s various creative periods and single out a number of recurring themes in his work. The purpose of this endeavour has been to highlight the collection’s extensive variety and ultimately engage visitors to appreciate Picasso’s extraordinary creativity.

The concept revolves around the exhibit of Picasso’s works in the museum’s twelve permanent rooms; it encourages more dynamic forms of viewer immersion through room texts, photographs contextualising our objective, and digital tablets showing other creations not on display. Each room has its own name and opens with an introductory text. Moreover, the permanent collection’s scenography will be modified every year in order to renew the dialogue between works.

To help bring the project to fruition, MPM and FABA invited Pepe Karmel (Associate Professor of Art History at New York University and a leading specialist in the work of Picasso) to serve as Co-curator. We worked under his guidance, along with the MPM team and its Artistic Director José Lebrero Stals, to develop the concept we are now delighted to present.

The combined visit of the permanent collection and temporary exhibition rooms will offer museum visitors many opportunities to explore formal or subjective links between the works of Picasso, his special place and influence in the history of modern art, and the manner in which other artists featured here were sometimes also inspired by their contemporaries. All artists share common resources, such as the appropriation and reinterpretation of themes

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 31 27/7/20 10:08 and forms, which they use to create their art and which can help the viewer to further interpret their creative expression.

Our programme of temporary exhibitions offers the public a variety of displays ranging from Antiquity to contemporary art, and this is why we are eager to create more interaction between permanent collections and temporary Pablo Picasso, Head of exhibitions and invite visitors to discover how different artistic trends and a Woman, Boisgeloup, 1 October 1933 [80, p. 204] movements relate with Picasso’s work.

Collaboration with the MPM’s Educational Centre and Research Centre has also made it possible to offer a variety of activities within the museum to further enhance interaction with the public. This is crucial if we are to share and transmit knowledge.

I would like to sincerely thank my mother, without whom this museum would simply not exist, and acknowledge the Andalusian authorities’ decisive role in creating this art gallery, as well as their ongoing support in its development.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the teams of the Museo Picasso Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Málaga, Pepe Karmel, Co-curator of the new display, as well as the whole team Man with Hat, Mougins, 11 December 1964 [161, p. 353] of the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 32 27/7/20 10:08 Dialogues in the Labyrinth of the Still Untold Deed José Lebrero Stals

A painting only lives through and for the person looking at it. Pablo Picasso

When museums responsibly undertake their mission as custodians of the cultural heritage they hold in safekeeping, they reaffirm their role as propitious places of culture capable of stimulating memory. This is worth remembering here, in the introduction to this new dialogue with the work of Pablo Picasso which takes shape in the publication of this second volume in which a new relationship is presented between the permanent collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga and the important legacy looked after by the FABA (Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte) family collection. Since its inauguration in 2003, this museum has displayed more than 1,200 different works by Picasso. Over the past seventeen years, these works have made it possible for exhibitions with a wide range of focuses to be presented, numerous essays commissioned, lectures of all kinds given, a range of books published, and significant amounts invested in the study and optimum dissemination of aspects of the complex visual universe created over the course of more than eight decades by the artist, who was born in 1881 in Málaga, just a few metres from the Palacio de Buenavista.

With the advantage of the perspective of time, and acknowledging the joint effort behind the achievements referred to above, I believe that the most significant success on the museum’s part is that of having assisted the millions of people who have visited the gallery from around the world to come closer to Picasso’s universe. Every time a temporary exhibition ends or a new presentation of the permanent collection takes place, as now, the excessively used but certainly accurate statement that it is the viewer, with his or her particular and unique experience, who gives ultimate meaning to the work

Gjon Mili (1904–1984) of art seems ever more true. Here in Málaga, these observers contribute new Picasso painting with light and unprecedented reflections that enrich the truth which the legacy that at the Madoura Pottery, 1 January 1949 we attentively care for contains and invokes.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 35 28/7/20 10:39 Pablo Picaso, The Artist's It is true that in all four corners of the globe experts continue to formulate Eyes, Paris, 1917, pencil on paper, 5 × 9 cm, aesthetic and ethical theories on and about the artist, with the academic Museo Picasso Málaga, Gift of Christine Ruiz-Picasso, ambition of contributing a new voice to cast light on good news or supposedly MPM1.20 [not in Zervos] unheard-of enigmas concerning a body of work of which it might seem that everything important has already been written. From the four corners of the art world experts (whether Picasso specialists or not) continue to devise exhibition projects with the aim of revealing one last hidden corner that no one has apparently previously noticed. Burning within the world’s most powerful commercial art firms is the desire to sell an oil painting rediscovered in a discreet private collection at the highest price. It would be surprising if this were not the case as we are of course referring to the twentieth-century’s most influential and famous painter. When walking through the distinguished rooms of the permanent collection, however, none of this is comparable to the experience of that fathomless emotion or profound commotion we might surreptitiously observe in the gaze of the anonymous visitors who pause before

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 36 27/7/20 10:08 ‘their’ Picasso in any of the innumerable visual encounters that arise for those who know how to look as they undertake their journey through the galleries. Let us not forget that sight develops before words and that the child looks and identifies before speaking, as noted by that playful and nonconformist British art historian John Berger, or as the Viennese Otto Pächt pontificated at an earlier date: in the beginning was the eye, not the word.

Painting is the attempt to make the world visible through the construction of the image; representing it according to some type of norm established by the person who applies him or herself to a mission of such complexity. The law is a precept which establishes a competent authority and as such, every painter commands or vetoes the set of gestures that will make possible the particular form through which he or she visualises the world. Approval, and the constant threat of failing in the attempt is a burning issue for the artist. There are no words sufficiently noble or kind that can explain away a failed likeness in a portrait. In the wise words of the German philosopher Georg Simmel, ‘the supposedly visible always remains a confused mixture of what is happening with various internal and external additions: emotional reactions, judgments, interaction with other movements and with the surrounding context; added to that confusion is the constantly shifting nature of the viewpoint and of the observer’s involvement or the practical concerns that unite men; overall, for human beings man is a fluctuating set of widely different impressions and psychic associations, of sympathies and antipathies, of judgments and prejudices, of memories and hopes.’ Demonstrable visibility thus does not exist and Picasso and the works with which we are engaged in a dialogue here demonstrate that slippery truth in an overwhelming manner. The ultimate proof of this would appear to be twofold. Firstly, the high degree of unrecognisableness of the world introduced by the artist into his images, given that he necessarily had no interest in being understood, as the professor of aesthetics Luis Puelles has noted. Secondly – and let us listen to the viewer here – it is that which is not named as it lies behind the name and the image but whose shadow falls on the object of the gaze, the labyrinth which proves that not everything has been done and much less said.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 37 27/7/20 10:08 Dialogues with Picasso Pepe Karmel

I am perhaps a painter without style. Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one’s whole lifetime. One recognizes it immediately, but it’s always the same suit, or the same cut of the suit. There are, nevertheless, great painters with style. I myself thrash around too much, move too much. You see me here and yet I’ve already changed, I’m already elsewhere. I’m never in the same place and that’s why I have no style. Pablo Picasso to André Verdet, 19631

After the drama and tenderness of the Blue and Rose periods, Picasso plunged into the cerebral experiment of Cubism. Returning to figuration during World War I, he used the characters of the commedia dell’arte to create a new, modern form of classicism. From this moment on, he worked simultaneously in several different styles. In the 1920s and 1930s, he went back and forth among Cubism, Classicism, and Surrealism, an evolution climaxing in the 1937 canvas Guernica. His creativity continued unabated after World War II, as he invented new styles for which art historians have still not found names, but which might be described as original forms of Expressionism. Picasso is best known as a painter but was also arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. And the greatest printmaker.

To represent Picasso: what a challenge—and a privilege—for any museum! All the more so because this new installation of the collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga draws both on the museum’s permanent collection and on generous loans from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA). Many of the works from FABA have never or rarely been seen in Málaga. Among this group of unfamiliar works, a 1906 drawing of the head of a young woman [8] and a 1923 portrait of the artist’s son Paulo [54] offer reminders of

Pablo Picasso, Picasso’s breathtaking talent as a ‘realistic’ artist. A 1958 tapestry [28] shows Seated Figure, how he reinterpreted his revolutionary 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Mougins, 28 July 1971 [165, p. 363] Drawings from 1907 through 1920 provide insight into the development of

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 39 27/7/20 10:08 Cubism, which changed the language of modern art forever. Although Picasso claimed to be uninterested in pure abstraction, a geometric figure of 1928 [82] and a suite of calligraphic heads from 1948 [124–128] show that he could challenge abstract artists on their own ground.

Two ‘monstrous’ figures from the FABA collection, painted in 1927 and 1929 [83 and 84 ], demonstrate why André Breton considered Picasso the epitome of a Surrealist artist. In a 1938 painting [113], the enjoyment of an ice cream cone transforms a man’s face into an image of ecstasy. Picasso’s late-life expressionism is evident in a pair of 1971 paintings, one depicting a grizzled musketeer [168], the other a pensive youth of indeterminate sex [165].

The new FABA loans also include masterpieces of sculpture and printmaking. Picasso’s groundbreaking 1914 sculpture of a Glass of Absinthe [32] translates the open form of Cubist drawing and painting into three dimensions, while two plaster cats of the early 1940s [135 and 136] exemplify a sculpture of mass liberated from quotidian verisimilitude. Some prints from the early 1930s depict Surrealist bathers [62], while others return to classical theatre. The rampaging Minotaur in Picasso’s 1933–1934 prints [93] becomes a melancholy, introspective monster in a drawing of 1937 [99].

How are we to incorporate this treasure trove of unfamiliar works into a new installation and a new catalogue? Should we emphasise Picasso’s diversity, or highlight the themes that unify his work? Should his work in different media be shown separately or together? How much attention do we want to pay to Picasso’s biography? To the history of his times?

We have decided, for this three-year cycle, to display his work in small groups of related pictures and sculptures. Each group is focused on a traditional subject such as the human body, the portrait, or the still life. One room is a ‘bestiary’, with paintings and sculptures of bulls, birds, and cats. There is also a rich selection of his story-telling drawings and prints, some illustrating Aristophanes’s bawdy comedy Lysistrata, others recounting the myth of the

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 40 27/7/20 10:08 Minotaur. Arranging the works by theme and placing them in chronological order, we have divided Picasso’s artistic evolution into three broad epochs, comprising sixteen discrete sections.

PART I: THE REVOLUTIONARY Here, in the first four sections, we trace the making of an artistic revolutionary. Born in 1881 in Málaga, young Pablo Ruiz displayed a prodigious talent from an early age, mastering first the conventions of academic art and the kind of ‘modernism’ found in different versions in Barcelona (where he attended the School of Fine Arts) and all across Europe. In 1900, one of his paintings was selected for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He began making regular visits to the French capital and settled there in 1904, having by this time adopted his mother’s family name, Picasso. In the years 1901–1905, his work evolved from the bohemian tragedy of the Blue Period to the elegiac wistfulness of the Rose Period.

In 1905, the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein began to buy his paintings, and it was in their salon that Picasso met Henri Matisse, the leader of the Parisian avant-garde. The encounter spurred Picasso towards radical innovation. His Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; fig. 3, p. 86) and Three Women (1908; fig. 9, p. 96) became the starting points for Cubism. By 1911, Picasso, together with his artistic interlocutor Georges Braque, had replaced perspective with linear scaffolding and organic form with geometric planes, laying the groundwork for abstract art. Similarly, Picasso’s introduction of collage, in spring 1912, inspired photomontage and the ready-made. His reputation as a revolutionary resonated throughout the art world. Then, in the early 1920s, he stunned his followers by adding a distinctively modern form of classicism to his repertory of styles.

1. Women and Men, 1894–1906 We begin with four small paintings from 1894–1895 [1–4]: portraits of his sister Lola and of an unidentified man, a painting of a sparrow, and a view of washerwomen by a stream. All four seem rooted in Spanish tradition with its

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 41 27/7/20 10:08 profound emotions and dark, brooding colours. (The view of women washing laundry is discussed in more detail in a text by Javier Cuevas later in this catalogue, pp. 70–73.) An 1899 canvas of a woman watching a dance [5] suggests that Picasso was already acquainted with the style of the French Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

After moving to Paris in 1904, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the artist’s model who would be his companion for the next seven years. The couple spent the Fig. 1 summer of 1906 at Gósol, in the mountains north of Barcelona. As Olivier later Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905–1906, oil on recalled, ‘Calm and serenity flowed into him as soon as he got back to Spain canvas, 100 × 81.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of […]. [In 1906] he lived for some months in a Catalan village above the Andorra Art, New York, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946, valley, at Gósol, where he worked regularly and felt far healthier […]. He became inv. 47.106 a different and altogether nicer person in that village full of smugglers, whose stories he would listen to, spell-bound like a child.’2

Two 1906 paintings in this exhibition depict Olivier [6 and 7 ]. In one, Fernande is seen from the back, in a kind of camisole that has slipped down to reveal her shoulders and the nape of her neck. In the other she is seen from the front, with a white scarf draped over her head and shoulders evoking a Spanish mantilla. Her erect posture and massive hand recall one of Michelangelo’s ignudi from the Sistine ceiling; her facial features remain undefined, forsaking the individual for the mythic. Both pictures are painted with browns, pinks, and blues inspired by the mediaeval frescoes of Catalonia. Olivier may also have served as model for a stunning drawing, in ink and wash, of a cruel young temptress. (I discuss this work in more depth in an essay on Picasso’s Cubist figure drawings later in this catalogue, pp. 82–84.)

These paintings of Olivier coincide chronologically with the long period of Picasso’s labour on his portrait of Gertrude Stein [fig. 1]. This announces a theme central to his subsequent work: the image of a woman seated in an armchair. Portraits of women seated in armchairs are rare in European art. In Western culture—as in most cultures—the armchair is a sign of elevated social status, generally reserved for men such as kings and popes. Women—even

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 42 27/7/20 10:09 wealthy noblewomen—are usually shown standing. Indeed, Picasso’s model for his painting of Stein was J.A.D. Ingres’s portrait of Louis-François Bertin [fig. 2]: a picture of a man, not a woman. It has been argued that Picasso’s choice of a masculine prototype reflects something virile about Gertrude Stein’s character. Perhaps. But this does not explain why the image of a woman in an armchair becomes a central theme in his subsequent work.

Nor does it explain another key feature of the painting: the fact that it is not Fig. 2 actually a portrait of Gertrude Stein. Usually a rapid painter, Picasso struggled Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louis-François with the canvas for months, and then abandoned it in his Paris studio when Bertin, called Bertin the Elder, 1832, oil on canvas, he left to spend the summer of 1906 in Spain. On his return, he ‘finished’ the 116 × 95 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 1071 canvas by painting out Stein’s face and replacing it with an enigmatic mask borrowed from J.A.D. Ingres’s 1812 study for Tu Marcellus eris (Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels) and other sources. The painting became a masterpiece when it ceased to be a likeness of a particular person and became instead a portrait of an archetypal figure. This tension between individualisation and abstraction becomes even stronger in the next, Cubist phase of his career.

2. Cubism: Bodies, 1906–1914 The Cubist revolution begins in 1907 with Picasso’s brutal simplification of the figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. After several studies leading up to this masterpiece, we come to a magnificent 1958 tapestry [28], executed by Jacqueline Dürrbach, in which Picasso reimagines his famous canvas.

Despite its revolutionary character, the Demoiselles also demonstrates the roots of Picasso’s work in the Old Master tradition. The immediate antecedent Fig. 3 for the Demoiselles can be found in Paul Cézanne’s late paintings of groups Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, about 1635, of powerful, awkward bathers, but behind Cézanne there stands the classical oil on panel, 220.5 × 182 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, motif of the Three Graces. Anticipating the Cubist idea of multiple perspectives, P001670 this motif famously provides artists with an opportunity to depict the female body from three different viewpoints. It was frequently reworked by Baroque painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, whose Graces embody the baroque ideals of noble mass and voluptuous flesh, with each fold and bulge lovingly detailed

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 43 27/7/20 10:09 by the painter’s brush [fig. 3]. Similarly, in the Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso divides the continuous envelope of flesh into discrete diamonds and almond shapes, enumerating its features one by one. This aesthetic of discontinuity is amplified in the tapestry version from 1958 [28]. Here, the aggressive angles and curves of the original composition are supplemented with abrupt shifts of tone and colour, and the violent hatch marks, originally found only in two of the ‘African’ faces, are multiplied.

With the Demoiselles, Picasso embarked on a voyage of ceaseless formal experimentation. A series of remarkable drawings in the present exhibition [12, 13, 17, and others] show how he worked out the system of faceting perfected in his influential Three Women of 1908 [fig. 9, p. 96]. After exploring other formal ideas, Picasso returned to this geometric approach in his summer 1909 paintings of Fernande Olivier, where he divided her face and body into coruscating spills of geometric facets. (I discuss these drawings in a separate essay in this catalogue, pp. 90ff, so I will not dwell on them now.)

Picasso’s formal breakthrough of summer 1910 is documented, here, by a canvas and several drawings [20–22]. Daniel Henry Kahnweiler—Picasso’s dealer, friend, and most perceptive critic—later noted that ‘the decisive advance which set Cubism free from the language previously used by painting occurred in Cadaqués [in summer 1910]. Little satisfied, even after weeks of arduous labour, he returned to Paris in the fall with his unfinished works. But he had taken the great step: he had pierced the closed form’.3 Indeed, in 1910–1912 Picasso said goodbye to conventional anatomy, transforming the body into an open framework of planes, cones, and cylinders—an astonishing transformation visible in another series of drawings here [23–25].

Several of these drawings depict a seated woman, as does the famous canvas ‘Ma Jolie’ (Museum of Modern Art, New York; DR430). Presumably, Picasso was thinking of Fernande Olivier or her successor Éva Gouel when he made these pictures. (Indeed, the phrase ‘Ma Jolie’—‘my pretty one’—served as a secret reference to Gouel.) Nonetheless, the women in these drawings and

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 44 27/7/20 10:09 paintings remain virtually faceless. In contrast, the seated men in 1911–1912 pictures like Man with a Pipe (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; DR422) are depicted with clearly delineated eyes, noses, and moustaches. Picasso’s 1911–1912 drawings and paintings point to a persistent paradox: instead of using the portrait format to convey a likeness, he uses it to evoke an existential confrontation. The artist probes the unknowable subjectivity of the sitter while the sitter endures the voracious gaze of the artist.

The culmination of this Cubist series is the painting Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair [fig. 25, p. 116], which demonstrates how Picasso has fused the hitherto distinct genres of the portrait and the nude. Eliminating the seductive contrapposto associated with the standing and the recumbent nude, and reducing Éva Gouel’s face to a T inscribed on a triangle, Picasso catalogues the details of hair, breasts, ribs, chemise, newspaper, and upholstery without differentiating between the human body and the objects around it. Erotic arousal is sublimated into an obsession with shapes and materials.

3. Cubism: Still Lifes, 1911–1922 Here, an important group of drawings and paintings from 1911 through 1914 [30, 31, 33–35] shows how Picasso subjected inanimate objects to the same process of disintegration and reintegration visible in his Cubist depictions of the human figure. Planes and contours, extracted from glasses, bottles, and tabletops, become independent forms, and then find new places within a three-dimensional scaffolding of vertical and horizontal lines. The drawings in this section of the exhibition lead up to Picasso’s unprecedented sculpture of a Glass of Absinthe [32] with its goblet torn open to reveal its interior. An actual metal absinthe spoon sits atop the goblet, but the sugar cube it supports is made from bronze, as are the goblet and stem of the glass. Goblet and sugar cube are painted white, while the stem is red. In a reversal of the viewer’s expectations, noble metal is disguised by ordinary paint. In effect, the sculpture is a solid version of Picasso’s contemporary pictures. Indeed, years later, he told the Italian artist Renato Guttuso that ‘sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting’.4

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 45 27/7/20 10:09 The Glass of Absinthe and its related studies receive detailed commentaries ahead in texts by Anna Jozefacka and Luise Mahler. So, instead of lingering over them, let us note that the Cubist drawings of 1911–1914 are accompanied here by additional Cubist works from the years 1915 through 1920, leading up to a rarely seen oval canvas, Still Life with Guitar, from 1920 [46]. This beautifully demonstrates how Picasso consolidated the complex linear structure of ‘analytic’ Cubism into simpler, more monumental arrangements of overlapping planes.

Picasso’s famous return to realism, in 1914, is documented by drawings like Glass and Pipe [36], while a pair of drawings from 1919, both representing a Fig. 4 Still Life on a Pedestal Table [42 and 43], demonstrate how he could combine Feminine figures on the back of an Etruscan Cubism and realism in a single image. In two drawings and a gouache from the mirror, 300–275 BC, bronze, 30.6 × 17.5 × 1.1 cm, Detroit years 1920–1922 [47–49], Picasso substitutes curves for the straight lines of Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Laura H. the Cubist grid, imbuing his pictures with the vital energy of Vincent van Gogh. Murphy Fund, inv. 47.399 4. Modern Classicism, 1922–1923 As early as spring 1914, Picasso experimented with a return to realism, drawing a seated man resembling a figure by Paul Cézanne. In his drawings and paintings of the next few years, he moved back and forth between realism and Cubism, sometimes combining the two styles in a single image. After his companion Éva Gouel died in December 1915, a tragic note entered his work, reflecting both his private loss and the larger catastrophe of the Great War. In 1916, the poet Jean Cocteau persuaded him to design the sets and costumes for a ballet, Parade, to be staged by the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, and in early 1917 Picasso travelled to Rome to work with Diaghilev and his troupe. Visiting Naples and Pompeii, he was profoundly struck by the Roman frescoes. He also fell in love with a young ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918. Their son Paulo was born in 1921.

In his Three Graces of 1923 [55], Picasso highlights the graceful contours of limbs and torsos, recalling the lithe, elongated figures found on the backs of Etruscan mirrors [fig. 4]. In other paintings of this period, such as the Three Women at the Spring of 1921 (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Z.IV. 322),

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 46 27/7/20 10:09 he depicts massive, telluric women inspired by the frescoes he saw at Pompeii. Sometimes he exaggerates the sizes of his figures’ hands and feet, invoking the examples of Michelangelo and Jean Goujon. As early as 1918, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the artist’s closest friends, wrote that ‘Picasso is the heir of all the great artists of the past […]. He changes direction, retraces his steps, starts out again with a surer step, becomes even greater’.5 In his earlier Cubist pictures, Picasso extracted shapes, colours, and textures from familiar objects and rearranged them into unfamiliar combinations. Now, he extracts styles and images from the history of art and recombines them into compositions that are at the same time classical and profoundly modern.

In Picasso’s contemporary pictures of his wife and son [50–54], he often begins with a family photograph, extracting key contours with an incisive line like that found in the portrait drawings of J.A.D. Ingres (a frequent reference in Picasso’s work of these years). However, these linear traits typically float atop a field of pale, hazy colours, whose borders only loosely approximate the drawn contours. Line and colour are separated and then superimposed in a manner anticipating the silkscreen paintings that Andy Warhol began making forty years later.

Picasso’s drawings and paintings of these and later years include many ‘classical’ figures who do not resemble any particular person. They are comparable, in this sense, to the generic women in his Cubist drawings and paintings. In contrast, Picasso’s drawings and paintings of Olga Khokhlova initiate a long series of pictures in which his muses and models are instantly recognisable: Olga by her straight nose and her wing-like eyebrows [51]; Marie-Thérèse Walter by her classical profile [112]; Dora Maar by her square jaw and pursed lips [111]; Françoise Gilot by her oval visage [122]; and Jacqueline Roque by her regal bearing [157]. Portraiture is henceforth a central genre in Picasso’s work.

PART II: LEADER OF THE AVANT-GARDE By the mid-1920s, Picasso was represented by important dealers and lived in an elegant quarter of Paris. He and Olga spent their evenings in high society

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 47 27/7/20 10:09 and summered on the French Riviera, which was just becoming fashionable. In his work, however, Picasso continued to be a relentless innovator, and the unquestioned leader of the avant-garde. Like his classical figures, his new versions of ‘decorative’ and ‘curvilinear’ Cubism inspired artists around the globe. The distorted figures of his Three Dancers of 1925 (Tate, London; Z.V.426) announced a terrifying new vision of the world, rooted in the unconscious. Responding to Picasso’s new work, the young critic André Breton drew a direct line from Cubism to Surrealism, arguing that both represented Fig. 5 a ‘purely internal model’, and adding that ‘for fifteen years now, Picasso has Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the been exploring this path, advancing deep into unknown territory, bearing Fornarina, 1814, oil on 6 canvas, 64.8 × 53.3 cm, rays of light in each hand’. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Bequest of Grenville L. The next three sections primarily address the time period 1927–1933. Section 5, Winthrop, inv. 1943.252 ‘Models, Bathers, and Defiant Women’, presents examples of Picasso’s graphic work in both classical and Surrealist styles; these are accompanied by sculptures combining both styles. Section 6, ‘Metamorphosis and Abstraction’, focuses on his radical re-invention of the human body, sometimes lyrical and sometimes seemingly monstrous. Section 7, ‘The Minotaur and Other Monsters’, includes a selection of Picasso’s 1932–1934 etchings reinventing the myth of the Minotaur; these are accompanied by two portraits of an introspective Minotaur, from 1937–1938, which are contrasted with three ‘monstrous’ heads from 1928–1929.

Section 8, ‘Relentless Gazes’, advances to the years 1934–1939, comparing portraits of Picasso’s companions Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar and presenting related works. Section 9, ‘The Anatomy of Terror’, covers the period from 1936 through 1948, when Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar, ‘the weeping woman’, served as a seismograph registering the social and political shocks of the era.

5. Models, Bathers, and Defiant Women, 1927–1933 In 1927, Picasso began a series of etchings on the theme of an artist and his model, gravely studying the paintings and sculptures that had emerged from

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 48 27/7/20 10:09 their partnership [56 and others]. The young, beautiful model was clearly inspired by Marie-Thérèse Walter; the handsome bearded artist was a stand-in for Picasso himself. The theme of artist and model looked back to Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina [fig. 5], a canvas of 1814 that inspired a Romantic school of genre paintings depicting moments from the lives of artists. Like Ingres’s painting, the genre as a whole was slightly ludicrous. Picasso redeemed it by drawing his figures and their setting with a line of classical purity.

In late 1932, he began another series of etchings inspired by Marie-Thérèse Walter, who this time served as the model for Surrealist images of young bathers on a beach, playing with a ball [62 and others]. The theme recalled a verse by Picasso’s friend Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote:

Fig. 6 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Spring, begun It was a heavenly existence on the beach around 1820, completed 1856, oil on canvas, 163 × 80 cm, Early in the morning we went out barefoot and hatless Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 219 And, quick as a toad’s tongue, Love pricked the hearts of madmen and sages.7

(Tragically, Apollinaire had died in 1918, one of the many victims of the Spanish flu that swept the world in that year; later that same year, when Picasso painted a set of murals in the house of Eugenia Errázuriz, a wealthy Chilean patron, he inscribed this verse along with his pictures.)

In 1933, Picasso created a set of illustrations for Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, a farce in which the women of Athens force an end to war by withholding their sexual favours from their husbands. Here Picasso mingled the classical and Surrealist styles of his earlier etchings [70 and 72]. The same combination appears in a powerful relief sculpture of a woman’s profile [80]. Lysistrata also provided the inspiration for a sculpted head of a Greek warrior, with a heroic crest on his helmet—and a large bulbous nose that makes him look ridiculous [81]. (Picasso’s response to Lysistrata is analysed in greater depth in a text by Javier Cuevas later in this catalogue, pp. 192–197.)

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 49 27/7/20 10:09 6. Metamorphosis and Abstraction, 1927–1932 Picasso’s ‘monsters’ of 1927–1929 return to the motif of the standing nude of the classical tradition. But what a difference! In a classical nude like J.A.D. Ingres’s The Spring [fig. 6], the abdomen is nestled within the cradle of the Fig. 7 hips, the breasts peek out decorously from the thorax, and the tilted head is Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863, oil on clasped within a raised arm, which is echoed by the other, lowered arm. In canvas, 130 × 225 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 273 contrast to this harmonious integration, Picasso’s Woman of 1927 [83] offers a collection of independent parts arranged according to the logic of desire, so that the oversized breasts point in different directions, while the abdomen is displaced to the left, forming an arch with a massive leg on the right. Spindly arms project from arbitrary points on the lower part of the figure. Such a figure exemplifies what Picasso himself understood by ‘Surrealism’. As he told the photographer Brassaï some years later:

I always aim at the resemblance. An artist should observe nature but never confuse it with painting. It is only translatable into painting by signs. But such signs are not invented. To arrive at the sign, you have to concentrate hard on the resemblance. To me, surreality is nothing, and has never been anything but this profound resemblance, something deeper than the forms and the colors in which objects present themselves.8

Concentrating obsessively on the female body, Picasso translates it into a series of graphic signs, which can be arranged freely across the surface of the canvas. However, these deeply disturbing paintings are not formal exercises, but expressions of a shared physical intimacy. They are, in effect, the results of a collaboration between Picasso and the protean Marie-Thérèse Walter, who inspired both these monstrous figures and the images of classical perfection found in Picasso’s contemporary prints. (Later in this catalogue, pp. 220–223, Javier Cuevas retraces the psychoanalytic interpretations of these ‘magic paintings’ by contemporary critics such as Christian Zervos and Carl Einstein.)

Picasso’s sculptures and paintings of the early 1930s reveal a new vision of the female body, this time as a mass of writhing tentacles. The figure in his 1931

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 50 27/7/20 10:09 sculpture of a Reclining Bather [85] has regressed down the evolutionary scale, becoming an invertebrate creature like a squid. The idea of representing a transformation from one species to another seems to have been inspired by the project of illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Picasso began work on in fall 1930.

Although Picasso’s painted nudes are typically seated, his 1931 sculpture was followed in 1932 by a series of paintings of recumbent nudes like The Siesta [86]. The lavender figure is silhouetted against a blue band above and a green band below, recalling the composition of Alexandre Cabanel’s Fig. 8 Birth of Venus of 1863 [fig. 7], an example of the academic nude at its Antoine-Louis Barye, Theseus Slaying the most salacious. At first glance, Picasso’s figure mimics Cabanel’s image of Minotaur, 1847, bronze, 45.7 × 29.2 cm, Metropolitan supine, yielding femininity. However, the contours defining breasts, arms, Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of John L. buttocks, and legs have been woven into an arabesque that emphasises the Cadwalader, 1914, self-containment and self-sufficiency of the dreaming figure, rather than inv. 14.58.131 her sexual availability.

7. The Minotaur and Other Monsters, 1928–1938 In the 1930s, as political conflict in Europe escalated toward war, Picasso appropriated Greek myth to expose the violence latent within human nature. In 1933, he began a series of drawings, collages, etchings, and paintings devoted to the story of the Minotaur, half man and half beast. Once again, Picasso may have found unlikely inspiration in nineteenth-century academic art, specifically in sculptures such as Antoine-Louis Barye’s 1847 sculpture of Theseus Slaying the Mnotaur [fig. 8], where the Athenian hero is about to plunge his dagger into the overwhelmed beast. However, Picasso revised the Greek myth, merging Theseus and his opponent into a single creature [90], who celebrates shared pleasures, commits acts of sexual violence, repents, and displays unexpected tenderness.

A decade later, Picasso wooed the young Françoise Gilot by showing her his prints depicting the Minotaur:

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 51 27/7/20 10:09 Picasso was speaking very quietly now. ‘A minotaur can’t be loved for himself,’ he said. ‘At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.’ He turned to another print, a minotaur watching over a sleeping woman. ‘He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts,’ he said, ‘trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster.’9

The Minotaur seems at first glance to be Picasso’s alter ego. (The actual, more complex relationship between them is analysed by Michael Fitzgerald later in this catalogue, pp. 229–250.)

For this exhibition, we have decided to juxtapose Picasso’s representations of the Minotaur with three paintings of women’s heads from 1928–1929 [87–89]. These heads have often been described as ‘monsters’ because of their radically distorted contours and the rearranged facial features, with eyes stacked in a column or placed at the tip of an extremity. Their mouths are open wide and lined with threatening teeth, or stitched shut like a wound. In their obsessive play with anatomy, they question conventional ideas of what it means to be human, anticipating the Minotaur’s dissolution of the dividing line between man and beast.

8. Relentless Gazes, 1934–1939 From 1930 through 1934, the garage of Picasso’s house at Boisgeloup served as the laboratory for his experiments with sculpture. Three sculptures discussed above—Head of a Woman [80], Head of a Warrior [81], and Reclining Bather [85]—emerged from this laboratory, as did Woman with Leaves [107], one of the last sculptures created at Boisgeloup. Here, as in his 1914 Glass of Absinthe [32], Picasso extends the practice of collage into three dimensions, this time by pressing leaves and corrugated cardboard into the surface of the plaster. In contrast to these clearly patterned elements, the body and arms of the figure are indicated by an eruption of raw plaster—perhaps a reaction to the new ideal of the ‘formless’ (l’informe) promoted by Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 52 27/7/20 10:09 In 1935, Picasso separated from his wife Olga; in 1936, he met the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. For the remainder of the decade, the contrasting personalities of Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar constituted the alpha and omega of Picasso’s romantic life and of his painting. Walter offered an image of blond, serene beauty [112], Maar an image of dark-haired, anxious intensity [110]. In contrast to the ‘monstrous’ heads of 1928–1929 [87–89], Picasso’s pictures of the late 1930s are instantly recognisable as human faces, indeed as portraits of individual women. However, their facial features are often rearranged so that they seem to be seen simultaneously from multiple points of view. The art dealer Julien Levy wrote later about the origin of this figuration:

‘Is this woman with one eye, or three eyes, a development of Cubism?’ I asked Picasso. ‘Not at all,’ he answered. ‘This double profile, as it is called, is only that I keep my eyes always open. Every painter should keep his eyes always open. And how does that arrive at seeing truthfully, one eye or two eyes, you may ask? It is simply the face of my sweetheart, Dora Maar, when I kiss her.’10

Similar distortions appear in Picasso’s 1938 painting of a man devouring an ice cream cone with erotic intensity [113].

9. The Anatomy of Terror, 1936–1948 Civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, followed in 1939 by a conflict that engulfed first Europe and then the world. Picasso responded to the Spanish Civil War with his 1937 masterpiece Guernica (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Z.IX.65), translating private grief into public mourning by incorporating the image of the ‘weeping woman’ from his 1937 portraits of Dora Maar. His agitated pictures of Maar from 1936 and 1939 [114 and 115] manifest the terror of impending war. A monumental seated portrait from 1943 [116] embodies the claustrophobia of life in occupied Paris. (See the discussion by Eduard Vallès later in this catalogue, pp. 272–275.) As Picasso told American journalist Peter D. Whitney in September 1944, shortly after the end of the war in Europe:

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 53 27/7/20 10:09 I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.11

In 1937 Picasso had carved faces into found pebbles. In 1943, he made artificial pebbles from terra cotta, moulding them into miniature death’s heads [117]. (Cécile Godefroy discusses these works later in this catalogue, pp. 276–279.)

PART III: THE OLD MAGICIAN After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Picasso became a celebrity like no artist before him. Journalists and photographers sought admission to his homes and studios. His life and loves were recounted in newspapers, magazines, and films. Exhibitions of his paintings announced the cultural rebirth of France after the grim years of Nazi occupation. In 1944 he declared his adherence to the Communist Party, which had spearheaded the French Resistance; in 1953 his commemorative portrait of Josef Stalin was condemned by the Party; and in 1956 he protested Russia’s repression of the Hungarian Revolution, ending his engagement with the Party. He invented new forms of sculpture, revolutionised printmaking, and explored new styles of painting, growing freer and more daring with each passing decade until his death in 1973. Like Prospero in exile, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, he summoned spirits to enact allegories of primal truths.

But Picasso’s celebrity generated a backlash among artists. Younger painters like Jackson Pollock looked for a way to escape his influence without abandoning his discoveries. While Picasso exercised a powerful influence on the postwar School of Paris, his work seemed old-fashioned compared to new movements emerging elsewhere: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism in the United States, Kinetic Art and Neo-Constructivism in Latin America, and performance art in Japan and the United States. Since the 1980s, however, as postmodernism has subverted the unilinear history of the avant-garde, the historic importance of Picasso’s later work has become unmistakable.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 54 27/7/20 10:09 Section 10, ‘Faces of War and Peace’, presents paintings and prints associated with Françoise Gilot, the brilliant young painter who became his companion in the years after World War II. Picasso always loved animals, but they are an especially important subject in his work of these years. Beginning in 1947 he spends most of his time in the south of France, where he is fascinated by the pottery workshops in the town of Vallauris. His engagement with ceramics leads to a new burst of sculptural activity. Section 11, ‘Bestiary’, brings together sculptures and paintings of cats, owls, pigeons, and bulls from the years 1941 through 1960. In Section 12, ‘Carnal Landscapes’, Picasso returns to the horizontal nude, which he depicts as an assemblage of flattened planes, unfolding across the terrain of the canvas. Now that he lived near the Mediterranean, the artist’s mind often turned to the fauns and nymphs of classical legend who had gambolled along these shores. In Section 13, ‘Return to the Mediterranean’, these inhabitants of Arcadia co-exist with Picasso’s last companion, Jacqueline Roque, who holds court like an Egyptian empress. Conversely, the faces in Section 14, ‘Familiar Gazes’, seem to belong to the real-life fishermen and women of the Mediterranean coast. Section 15, ‘The Wise Child’, presents the imaginary portraits of Picasso’s final years, where childlike simplicity alternates with decorative complexity. Finally, Section 16, ‘Made from Earth’, brings together paintings depicting the earth with ceramics made from earth.

10. Faces of War and Peace, 1944–1950 As Eduard Vallès argues later in this catalogue (pp. 286–289), a mysterious work from January 1945 [120] appears to be a disguised portrait of the young artist Françoise Gilot, whom Picasso had encountered in 1943. It was only after the couple began living together in spring 1946 that Picasso set out more seriously to portray her. At the beginning of May, he asked Gilot to pose for a seated portrait. Dissatisfied with his first sketches, he decided instead on a standing pose. As she recalls in her memoir, Life with Picasso:

The next day he said, ‘You’d be better posing for me nude.’ When I had taken off my clothes, he had me stand back to the entrance, very erect, with my

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 55 27/7/20 10:09 arms at my side. Except for the shaft of daylight coming through the high windows at my right, the whole place was bathed in a dim, uniform light that was on the edge of shadow. Pablo stood off, three or four yards from me, looking tense and remote. His eyes didn’t leave me for a second. He didn’t touch his drawing pad; he wasn’t even holding a pencil. It seemed a very long time. Finally he said, ‘I see what I need to do. You can dress now. You won’t have to pose again.’ 12

The resulting canvas, Woman-Flower [fig. 2; p. 288], became an icon of postwar France.

Returning to his original idea of a seated portrait, Picasso completed Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gilot) on 15 June 1946 [123]. As in Woman-Flower, Fig. 9 Gilot’s face is ringed by leaves instead of hair, and her breasts are indicated Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel (third version after by asymmetrical spheres. But the biomorphic forms of her body are replaced by lost original of 1913), remade 1951, metal wheel geometric ones, and the green tints and shades give way to brilliant hues of red, mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 × 63.5 × 41.9 cm, yellow, blue, and lavender. The armchair rises behind her like a mediaeval Museum of Modern Art, throne. Picasso’s mastery of colour is also evident in the 1944 Still Life with Jug, New York, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Glass and Orange [121], discussed ahead by Eduard Vallès (pp. 290–293). inv. 595.1967.a-b

In the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso had concentrated on etching as a medium for print making. In 1945, however, Braque introduced him to the lithography studio of Fernand Mourlot, setting off a burst of activity in this new medium. Of Picasso’s more than two hundred lithographs made in the next few years, many are portraits of Françoise Gilot. Some are naturalistic, demonstrating his friendly rivalry with Henri Matisse [129]. Others translate Gilot’s features into an abstract calligraphy of dots and lines, blots and voids [124–128].

Picasso and Gilot’s first child, Claude, was born in 1947; their second, Paloma, in 1949. His 1950 portrait [132] combines calligraphy, geometry, and the double profile familiar from his portraits of the 1930s (compare Section 8). The young Claude is imbued with a sadness and gravity beyond his years.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 56 27/7/20 10:09 11. Bestiary, 1941–1960 The photographer Brassaï kept a wonderful journal of Picasso’s doings and sayings during the years they knew each other. In his entry for 26 November 1946, he noted:

Picasso may like or detest men, but he adores all animals […]. At the Bateau-Lavoir he had three Siamese cats, a dog, a monkey, and a turtle, and a domesticated white mouse made its home in a drawer of his table. […] In Vallauris he had a goat; in Cannes, a monkey. And as for dogs, there has not been a day in his life when he has been without their companionship. […] If it had depended only on himself, he would always have lived in the midst of a veritable Noah’s Ark.13

Picasso’s painting and ceramics of pigeons [141–144] are strangely poignant, as if animated by the ancestral spirit of his father, who raised them. His empathy for cats is evident in two plaster sculptures made during the war [135 and 136]. (These works are discussed by Cécile Godefroy later in this catalogue, pp. 308–315.)

During the summer of 1946, Picasso and Gilot spent some weeks in Ménerbes, in the Vaucluse. At night the large owls of the region swooped down to catch rabbits or stray cats, who fought desperately for their lives. It was a real-life version of the combats between animals depicted by Romantic painters and sculptors, and Picasso would watch, entranced. This cruelty is not visible, however, in his paintings and sculptures [138–140], where the owls display a melancholy wisdom recalling their ancient identification with the goddess Athena.

The most notable work in our bestiary is the Head of a Bull of 1942 [134], which Picasso in a moment of inspiration constructed from a bicycle’s seat and handlebar. Technically, this is a readymade, like Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913 [fig. 9]. It is assembled, furthermore, from elements of the same familiar object. But the conceptual logic of the two works is completely opposed. Duchamp’s readymade highlights its own arbitrariness, insisting that any object, placed on

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 57 27/7/20 10:09 a pedestal, becomes a work of art. The Head of a Bull, on the contrary, reveals the sign language hidden within everyday objects. A bicycle’s saddle, narrowing from rear to front, shares the shape of a head, with its broad brow and tapered jaw. A handlebar curves along two axes, like the horns of an animal. Picasso transforms the everyday world into Baudelaire’s ‘forest of symbols’.

12. Carnal Landscapes, 1944–1971 Compared to his countless paintings of seated women, pictures of reclining nudes are relatively uncommon in Picasso’s work. After The Siesta [86] and the related works of 1932, there is a ten-year hiatus in Picasso’s attention to this theme. He returns to it during World War II. In the Reclining Nude of 18 April 1944 [145] the curves of the model’s body are compressed within a narrow horizontal band, under intolerable pressure from the blank spaces above and below. (See Eduard Vallès’s discussion of this key work later in this catalogue, pp. 326–329.)

The reclining nude becomes a recurrent motif in Picasso’s postwar work. In contrast to the grim Reclining Nude of 1944, Susanna and the Elders [146], painted in summer 1955, exudes joyful sensuality: the white, beige, and yellow of the figure glow brilliantly against background panels of red and blue, while the model’s body rotates like a corkscrew. Around this time, Picasso told his biographer Antonina Vallentin that ‘Art is never chaste […]. Ignorant, innocent people should not be allowed to look at it; those who are insufficiently prepared should not encounter it. Yes, art is dangerous. Or, if it is chaste, it is not art.’14

A Reclining Nude from 1960 [147] is composed like Picasso’s contemporary landscape of The Village of Vauvenargues [180]: the figure’s limbs become broad planes surrounding the bulges and crevices of the torso, like the hillsides surrounding the windows and doorways of the village. Picasso’s sheet-metal sculptures [148 and 149] divide the body into similar broad planes. After the 1960s, the drawing and brushwork of his nudes become even freer and more expressive, climaxing in the Bather of 1971 [151]. Her hands and feet extend like flippers, grasping the water, while the curves of her breasts and buttocks, painted green, grey, and yellow, meld into the waves around her.

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 58 27/7/20 10:09 13. Return to the Mediterranean, 1948–1960 Born in Málaga and trained in Barcelona, Picasso grew up on the shores of the Mediterranean. He spent the four decades from 1905 to 1945 primarily in Paris, with its frequent rain showers and its cool grey light. After the war, however, he returned to the Mediterranean, occupying a series of houses in the south of France. In 1946, the curator of the Antibes museum offered him studio space there, and he painted a set of murals for the museum depicting gambolling nymphs, fauns playing pipes, and satyrs. Picasso attributed the imagery to the influence of the ancient city, originally a Greek settlement called Antipolis:

Every time I arrive in Antibes, it seizes and possesses me, like being infested by lice! I hear the echo of something, but what? […] In Antibes I am overcome by antiquity! I had already depicted centaurs and satyrs —in Menerbes, I drew a lot of them—but I had visited Antibes long before that, years earlier.15

The fauns and pipe-players of the 1946 murals return in Picasso’s ceramics and reliefs of the late 1950s, but the brightly coloured figures of the murals have become spare linear designs, incised into white surfaces [152, 156 and 176].

In 1953, Picasso met Jacqueline Roque, whom he would marry in 1961. Her long regal profile, recalling the Egyptian empress Nefertiti, now joined the repertory of his private Arcadia. In the two seated portraits included in this exhibition [157 and 158], from 1954 and 1960, Picasso dresses her in variants of the brightly coloured harlequin pattern he had adopted fifty years earlier as a badge of his own identity. In contrast, her face is dark and mysterious: a double profile with an eye staring unblinkingly at the viewer, like a figure from a Third Dynasty relief.

14. Familiar Gazes, 1962–1965 In his seemingly naïve portraits of anonymous men and women, Picasso plumbed the mystery of the everyday. The artist himself suggested the simultaneously archetypal and autobiographical quality of such images, telling Brassaï:

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 59 27/7/20 10:09 There is a Spanish saying: ‘If it has a beard, it’s a man; if it doesn’t have a beard, it’s a woman.’ Or, in another version: ‘If it has a beard, it’s Saint Joseph; if it doesn’t have a beard, it’s the Holy Virgin.’ […] Every time I draw a man, involuntarily I think of my father. For me, man is ‘Don José’ […]. He wore a beard. All the men I draw have more or less his features.16

Fig. 10 Camille Pissarro, The Hermitage at Pontoise, 1867, The men in his pictures of the mid-1960s are often dressed in horizontal stripes, oil on canvas, 150.3 × 200 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim recalling the fisherman’s sweater that Picasso himself wore, as if he were a Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, sailor bringing back the day’s catch from the sea of images. His calligraphic Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, style of the late 1940s [124–128] makes a subtle reappearance in these 1978, inv. 78.2514.67 paintings, where black dots and lines suggest a message written across the face of one man [161], while interlocking lines enclose the eyes and mouth of another [160].

As Picasso said to Brassaï, ‘Nature […] is only translatable into painting by signs’, which are inherently polysemous. The signs that ‘write’ a woman’s face, in a linocut from 1962 [163], communicate a different meaning when turned sideways, revealing a beach scene [162]. Some of the facial features become figures on the beach; others, sailboats on the water. Brows and hair become trees and waves; a floppy hat becomes a voluptuous bather.

15. The Wise Child, 1970–1972 The cavaliers and children of Picasso’s late paintings seem to have stepped out of the pages of old romances and fairy tales.

In these final years, he works with unprecedented freedom. Paintings such as Seated Figure and Bullfighter [165 and 167] simulate the artlessness of children’s drawings. Indeed, visiting an exhibition of children’s drawings with the English critic Herbert Read, Picasso said: ‘When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them’.17 But the seeming childishness of these late works is deceptive: the sinuous curves of the Bullfighter’s face are fitted together with the same precision as the curves in the body of Picasso’s contemporary swimmer [151]. In Mother and Child [164], painted the

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 60 27/7/20 10:10 previous fall, the mother’s blank face and the sketchy contours of her body give an initial impression of casual execution. On closer inspection, the viewer discovers the graphic verve of the hat, the subtle way the massive hands are fitted within the contours of the arms, and the dramatic foreshortening of the reclining infant, grasping his genitals in a gesture that recalls and mocks the conventional symbolism of a Madonna and Child. (The psychoanalytic implications of the image are explored by Javier Cuevas later in this catalogue, pp. 358–361.)

As in many of Picasso’s figures painted after 1960, the proportions of the mother in Mother and Child are like those of a young child: large head, large torso, and short limbs. In other late works, such as Child with a Shovel [170], the elements of the reconfigured body are flattened into a grid and scored with coloured stripes, like panels of fabric. Picasso takes the colour and brushwork of German Expressionism and fits them into the framework of the Cubist grid.

The wide-eyed, childlike figures in these late paintings display a precocious wisdom, as if they were not really children but wise old men who have decided to return to childhood. They are, in this sense, self-portraits. Picasso has let go of the responsibility that comes with being the greatest artist of the century and given himself permission to paint however he likes.

16. Made from Earth, 1931–1962 Together with three painted landscapes, Picasso’s ceramics (discussed in Salvador Haro’s essay later in this catalogue, pp. 373–387) provide a coda to the exhibition.

Villa Chêne-Roc [181] records the house at Juan-les-Pins where Picasso vacationed in summer 1931. La Californie: Interior with Red Armchair [182] depicts the interior of a nineteenth-century villa he purchased in 1955, whose dainty mouldings provided an incongruous setting for his bold paintings and sculptures. In 1958, he purchased a second house, the Château de Vauvenargues, a severe fourteenth-century structure near Mont Sainte-Victoire, so often painted by Cézanne. However, Picasso’s 1959 painting of The Village of Vauvenargues [180] is not an homage to Cézanne. Rather,

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 61 27/7/20 10:10 its green hillsides, embracing the yellow and pink houses of the town, evoke the early Barbizon-style landscapes of Cézanne’s teacher, Camille Pissarro, such as The Hermitage at Pontoise [fig. 10].

Soon after moving definitively to the south of France in 1947, Picasso began a long and productive partnership with the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris. He was fascinated by the transformation that occurred when raw clay and wet glaze were subjected to the intense heat of the kiln. Each work was a gamble. As he told the scholar Pierre Daix:

Making a ceramic is like etching; putting the work in the kiln is like printing a plate. It’s at that moment that you find out what you’ve accomplished. When you see the print, you are no longer the same person you were when you etched the plate. You have changed. So you have to rework your etching. But, with ceramics, there’s no longer anything you can do about it.18

Picasso’s attraction to the medium of clay can be linked to his interest in the cave art found at Lascaux and Altamira, where prehistoric artists used earth, bones, and fire to paint pictures of bulls, horses, bison, and other animals. In a 1945 series of lithographs, Picasso began with a naturalistic image of a bull and, step by step, simplified it until it resembled a bull in a cave painting. (He then went a step further, reducing it to a geometric silhouette.) Picasso’s interest in cave painting was shared by many contemporary artists; one group, in northern Spain, called themselves the School of Altamira.

The craft of pottery does not go back as far as cave painting, but it is nonetheless very old. The invention of the potter’s wheel, around 3,500 BC, coincides roughly with the beginning of recorded history in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, and vase painting flourished in ancient Greece and Rome. By working in ceramics, Picasso was connecting with the sources of Western art. His Head of a Goat [189], from 1953, paraphrases the red-figure technique of sixth-century Greek potters, who silhouetted light figures against a dark ground. However, Picasso ‘drew’ the details of the goat’s face with a spiderweb

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0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 62 27/7/20 10:10 of white ridges, a technique unknown to Antiquity. Besides painting plates and tiles in a wide range of styles, he used three-dimensional vases in diverse ways, sometimes simply as supports for painting, sometimes as points of departure for hybrid works combining pottery, painting, and sculpture. In Insect [173], for example, he painted parts of the creature onto the surface of the vase, while adding extra handles to create the effect of multiple pairs of wings.

Picasso’s ceramics highlight the working process that made him so innovative, year after year, decade after decade. He did not use technique as a means for expressing pre-existent ideas. Rather, fascinated by technique in itself, he looked constantly for ways to push its limits, achieving effects that skilled practitioners said were impossible. By reinventing the technical languages of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics, he expanded what it was possible to say in all of those languages. In the following pages of this catalogue, the reader is invited to join the conversation.

1_ André Verdet, ‘Solitude vollzieht in Cadaquès… 6_ André Breton, cited from 9_ Françoise Gilot and 15_ Picasso, in Dor de la féconde’, in Entretiens: notes wo Picasso seinen Sommer the translation by Simon Carlton Lake, Life with Souchère, Picasso à Antibes, et écrits sur la peinture, verbringt. Wenig befriedigt Watson Taylor in Surrealism Picasso, New York, McGraw- 1960; cited in Bernadac and Paris, Galilée, 1978, p. 197. kehrt er zurück, nach Wochen and Painting, New York, Hill, 1964, p. 50. Michael, Picasso: Propos sur English translation from qualvollen Ringengs, mit Harper and Row, 1972, p. 5. l’art, p. 133. Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art, unvollendeten Werken. Aber 10_ Julien Levy, Memoir of New York, Viking Press, 1972, der grosse Schitt is getan. 7_ Guillaume Apollinaire, an Art Gallery, New York, 16_ Brassaï, journal entry p. 96, but modified by reference Picasso hat die geschlossen ‘Les Saisons’, 1915, cited and Putnam, 1977, p. 177. for early October 1943, to the original French text. Form durchbrochen’. translated in Roland Penrose, in Conversations avec Picasso: His Life and Work, 11_ Peter D. Whitney, Picasso, p. 83. English 2_ Fernande Olivier, ‘Picasso 4_ From Renato Guttuso’s London, Gollancz, 1958, p. 209. ‘Picasso is safe’, San translation by Jane Marie en Espagne’, in Picasso et ses journals, translated in Francisco Chronicle, 3 Todd in Conversations with amis, Paris, Stock, 1933, p. TK. Ashton, Picasso on Art, p. 116. 8_ Brassaï, journal September 1944. Picasso, Chicago and London, English translation by Jane entry for 15 May 1945, in University of Chicago Press, Miller in Picasso and his 5_ From Guillaume Conversations avec Picasso 12_ Gilot and Lake, Life with 1999, p. 66. Friends, New York, Appleton- Apollinaire, preface to the (1964), Paris, Gallimard Picasso, p. 115. Century, 1965, pp. 94–95. catalogue Henri Matisse – NRF, 1997, p. 242. English 17_ Penrose, Picasso, p. 275, Pablo Picasso, Paris, Paul translation by Francis 13_ Brassaï, journal entry quoting a letter from 3_ Daniel Henry Guillaume, 1918, reprinted Price in Brassaï, Picasso for 26 November 1946, in Herbert Read to the London [Kahnweiler], ‘Der Kubismus’, in Béatrice Riottot El-Habib and Company, Garden City, Conversations avec Picasso, Times, 26 October 1956. Die Weissen Blätter, vol. and Vincent Gille, eds, Doubleday, 1966, pp. 162–163. p. 287. English translation 3, July–September 1916, Apollinaire: Critique d’art, in Brassaï, Picasso and 18_ Pierre Daix, ‘Céramique’, p. 217. I have slightly Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 189. Company, p. 196. Dictionnaire Picasso, Paris, compressed this quotation. English translation by Susan Laffont, 1995, p. 171. The original German reads: Suleiman adapted from Leroy 14_ Antonina Vallentin, ‘Der wichtigere Vorgang aber, C. Breunig, ed., Apollinaire Pablo Picasso, Paris, Club des der entscheidende Schritt on Art: Essays and Reviews, Éditeurs, 1957, p. 268. überhaupt, der den Kubismus 1902–1918, New York, Viking, loslöst von der bisherigen 1972, p. 458. “Sprache” der Malerei,

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