Pablo Picasso (1881‱973), the preeminent artist of the Twentieth Century, continues to be wildly popular nearly four decades after his death. His works, which have inspired generations of artists, regularly sell for millions of dollars. At least four Picasso exhibitions are scheduled this year at major American museums, including Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view through August 1 at the great museum on Fifth Avenue.
Organized by Gary Tinterow, chairman, with curator Susan Alyson Stein, both of the Met’s department of Nineteenth Century, Modern and contemporary art, the exhibition features 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics and some 100 prints from the museum’s notable Picasso holdings.
Today “one of the great repositories of Picasso’s work,” in Tinterow’s words, the Met’s collection “developed by happenstance rather than design,” benefiting over the years from the generosity of numerous private donors. It is particularly strong in the artist’s early oeuvre.
Born in Malaga, Spain, son of an art teacher, Picasso produced significant artwork as a youngster. By his late teens he was in Paris, where he was soon recognized as a brilliant newcomer, and took up with such avant-garde titans as Braque, Derain and Matisse. Following the death of a dear friend, he launched his “Blue Period” †melancholy images of doom-laden blind, ill and uprooted figures depicted in an unearthly blue world †and then his “Rose Period,” characterized by use of grays and pinks in depicting less austere figures like acrobats, harlequins and dancers. Befriended by powerful Modern art patroness Gertrude Stein, Picasso painted a riveting portrait of her in 1906, a squat figure with a mask-hard face, which is a highlight of the exhibition.
Picasso’s experiments with African sculptures, part of his quest for new expressions of form, helped free him from the representational tradition in art. His dramatic brothel scene, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907 (owned by the Museum of Modern Art), combining elements from El Greco, Cezanne, Matisse †and African masks †announced a new direction in Modern painting.
Before long, Picasso joined with Braque in developing Cubism, breaking down planes and representing objects from several angles simultaneously. Establishing the concept that a work of art exists as an object in its own right and not merely as a reflection of a reality outside itself, Cubism became the most widely influential aesthetic movement of the Twentieth Century.
Picasso for a time adopted a neoclassical style, painting gigantic female nudes who look like they are made of poured concrete. Then, after the breakup of one of his marriages, his work became infused with a sense of emotional tenseness, a mood of foreboding and a preoccupation with anguish and despair, delineated in wild mythological scenes of minotaurs, dying horses and weeping women. This period concluded with his second pivotal work, “Guernica,” 1937 (now at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid), a massive (300 by 140 inches) and graphic black and white expression of horror at the bombing of a town by the German Air Force during the Spanish Civil War. Strongly antifascist, Picasso mixed terror and pity in this masterpiece of politically engaged Twentieth Century painting.
In the 1930s, and during years of living in Nazi-occupied France, several mistresses served as models for often harsh, extremely distorted, garishly colored images. After the war, laden with fame and wealth, he settled on the Mediterranean coast, working in ceramics and sculpture, while continuing to paint, with inexhaustible variations, old and new themes. Whether depicting centaurs, fauns and nymphs or bulls, doves and owls, landscapes, still lifes or extravagantly altered heads and figures, his art to the end was unpredictable and unsettling.
Vigorous, varied, inventive and adventurous until his death at 92, Picasso managed to impress his genius on even the smallest and slightest of works.
As this splendid exhibition demonstrates, his boldness and innovations, and the shocks he administered to sluggish ways of thinking and seeing, are of timeless importance. No man has changed more radically the nature of art. Picasso, the most original creative genius of our time, will endure as the major figure of Twentieth Century art.
The fully illustrated catalog, edited by Tinterow, with essays and entries by a team of experts, is published by the Met in association with Yale University Press. It sells for $60, hardcover and $35, paperback. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, www.metmuseum.org or 212-535-7710.
