One of the most innovative and influential artists of the Twentieth Century, Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881‱973) was at his most inventive between 1905 and 1945. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris” from February 24 to April 25, surveying Picasso’s remarkable output during these years: from the pioneering role he played in the development of Cubism to his dialogue with Surrealism and other important art movements in the 1920s and 1930s.
The exhibition also explores the pivotal role that the city of Paris played in the history of Modern art, where artists from around the world made the French capital a center of innovation. It will include nearly 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and many others, who collectively formed a vibrant, international, avant-garde group that became known as the School of Paris.
Drawn from the Philadelphia Museum’s extensive collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by Picasso and others, and supplemented with loans from private American collections, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to reexamine the remarkable burst of creativity that took place during one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of Western art.
It includes a number of important works on paper, including collages that are rarely on display due to their inherent fragility and sensitivity to light, as well as important paintings that have not been on view in recent decades. Major Picasso works are included, such as “Self-Portrait with Palette,” 1906, and “Three Musicians,” 1921, as are Léger’s monumental Cubist masterpiece “The City,” 1919, Jean Metzinger’s “Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon),” 1911, Juan Gris’s “Still Life Before an Open Window, Place Ravignan” and Marc Chagall’s lyrical and kaleidoscopic “Half Past Three (The Poet),” 1911.
In the spring of 1904, when the 23-year-old Picasso made the decision to move permanently to Paris, he plunged into the city’s bohemian community, soon establishing what would become lifelong friendships with a number of fellow artists and writers, including Georges Braque who would become his close collaborator in the development of Cubism.
The exhibition will be chronologically arranged to show the rapid evolution of Picasso’s art during his time in Paris. The second gallery will highlight the lively interchange between Picasso and Braque between 1910 and 1913.
One of the highlights of the exhibition will be a partial re-creation of the 1912 Salon d’Automne, where paintings by Gris, Albert Gleizes, and Metzinger were densely hung and interspersed with sculptures by Amedeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipchitz and Raymond Duchamp-Villon.
A section of the exhibition titled “Americans in Paris” deals with the painters Max Weber, Charles Demuth and Arthur Beecher Carles who made their home in Paris and sought inspiration in the atmosphere of artistic and intellectual ferment that flourished in the years between the two World Wars.
Picasso’s experiments in Cubism were also an essential precursor to the development of Surrealism and the work of artists such as Miró and Dalí who came to prominence in the 1920s. Picasso maintained a complex relationship with this hugely influential movement, developing his own independent variant of Surrealism.
The exhibition also considers the role of Eastern European artists who joined the modern art scene in Paris, among them Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall and Constantin Brancusi.
Picasso remained in Paris for the duration of the civil war in Spain and World War II and continued to be productive. The works he created in the late 1930s and early 1940s are often somber in mood reflecting the political situation and his emersion in it.
Through the dramatic shifts in style and technique that marked the between war years, Picasso continued to be a galvanizing force and an inspiration to the artists around him. The exhibition demonstrates the tremendous variety and consistently high quality of his work during this period, and brings to life the extraordinary atmosphere of early Twentieth Century Paris and the lasting significance of the art created.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For information, 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org .
