THE WORLD'S MOST IMPORTANT PICASSO EXHIBITION 'BECOMING PICASSO' WILL BE AT THE COURTAULD GALLERY IN LONDON FROM 14 FEB TILL 26 MAY 2013.
Photo of Pablo Picasso
Self-Portrait (Yo Picasso), 1901
Never before has so many famous and priceless paintings been assembled from Picasso's early formative year in 1901. Most art historians and connoisseurs believe these works from this stage of his life aka Blue Period are among his most hauntingly beautiful and sublime, long before his distorted figures, angular subjects and cubism. Miss this at your peril!
This exhibition tells the remarkable
story of Pablo Picasso’s breakthrough year as an artist – 1901. It was
the year that the highly ambitious nineteen-year-old
first launched his career in Paris
at a debut summer exhibition with the influential dealer Ambroise Vollard.
Refusing to rest on the success of this show, Picasso (1881-1973) charted
new artistic directions in the second half of the year, heralding the beginning
of his now famous Blue period. Becoming Picasso focuses on the
figure paintings of 1901 and explores his development during this seminal year
when he found his own artistic voice. This exhibition is a unique
opportunity to experience works, now considered to be Picasso’s first
masterpieces, which established his early reputation. They are also among
the earliest paintings to bear the famously assertive and singular Picasso
signature, which he adopted in 1901.
1901 was a momentous and turbulent year
for the young Picasso. He spent the first part of it in Madrid where he helped to set up Arte
Joven, an avant-garde journal with ambitions to shake up the staid culture
of the Spanish capital. This role could not hold him for long as
Picasso’s sights were firmly set upon becoming a great painter in Paris , the ‘capital of
the arts’. His first visit to Paris ,
in the autumn and winter of 1900, had fuelled his ambitions and led to the
prospect of the 1901 exhibition with Vollard, one of the city’s most important
modern art dealers. In February 1901, whilst still in Madrid ,
Picasso received news from Paris
that his close friend, Carles Casagemas, had committed suicide in dramatic
fashion. Casagemas shot himself in Montmartre ’s
Hippodrome café in front of the young woman who had jilted him and his friends.
The tragedy would have a profound impact upon Picasso’s art as the year
unfolded.
Picasso left Spain
for Paris ,
probably at the beginning of May, with a clutch of drawings and just a few
paintings. He had little over a month to produce enough work for his Vollard
exhibition. Arriving in Paris , Picasso
took a studio in Montmartre at 130ter boulevard de Clichy with Pere Mañach who acted as his agent. The studio had
previously been occupied briefly by Casagemas before his suicide. Picasso
then painted unstintingly, sometimes
finishing three canvases in a single day. This outpouring of creative
energy resulted in most of the sixty-four works shown at the Vollard exhibition
(24 June to 14 July). They demonstrate Picasso taking on and
reinventing the styles and motifs of major modern artists, including Van Gogh,
Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. In works such as Dwarf-Dancer, Museu
Picasso, Barcelona ,
and At the Moulin Rouge, Private collection, we see these influences
coming together and being transformed into bold and daring expressions of
Parisian night life, captured in showers of broken brushwork and bright
colours.
The Vollard exhibition was a critical
success with respectable sales. Reviewers were won over by Picasso’s
youthful energy, creative powers and insatiable visual appetite. As
Gustave Coquiot introduced him: “Pablo Ruiz Picasso – an artist who paints all
round the clock, who never believes the day is over, in a city that offers a
different spectacle every minute… A passionate, restless observer, he exults, like a mad
but subtle jeweller, in bringing out his most sumptuous yellows, magnificent
greens and glowing rubies”. The exhibition effectively launched Picasso’s
career in Paris
but, despite this success, he took his art in
daring new directions in the second half of 1901.
Picasso evidently wanted to move away
from the belle époque gaiety of the Vollard show paintings, with their
exuberant brushwork, towards pictures that expressed a more profound and
reflective account of human existence. He was inspired, in part, by the
spectre of Casagemas’ death. The Blue Room, Phillips Collection,
Washington, is often thought to mark a turning point, demonstrating Picasso’s
move to the use of more muted colours, tending towards blue, and painted outlines
to enclose form, giving his figures an almost sculptural effect. These
qualities are a defining feature of the celebrated series of paintings of
melancholic café drinkers, numbed by ennui and absinthe, which are now
considered one of his greatest early achievements. This exhibition brings
together a number of major examples including Absinthe Drinker, The
State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg ,
which is redolent of Degas’ infamous earlier treatment of the subject. In
other café scenes, such as Seated Harlequin, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, and Harlequin and Companion, The State Pushkin Museum, Moscow , Picasso
introduces the unexpected figure of Harlequin, reinventing this familiar
subject in a highly original manner. This is the first appearance of the
mischievous Harlequin in Picasso’s paintings. The character became a
recurrent feature of his later art and indeed was adopted as an alter ego for
the artist. Related to this group is Picasso’s much-loved Child with a
Dove, Private collection, which also expresses a sense of melancholy but in
relation to the fragility of childhood innocence.
This series of works anticipate his Blue
period paintings of the following few years. They demonstrate the early
emergence of a number of major themes that preoccupied the young Picasso in the
second half of 1901 and would continue to drive his art throughout his long
career. The paintings explore the interplay between innocence and
experience, purity and corruption, and life and death. These concerns
were bound up with Casagemas’ death and further inspired by a number of visits
Picasso made in the late summer and autumn of 1901 to the Saint-Lazare women’s
prison where he observed, and subsequently painted, the former prostitutes and
their infants who were incarcerated there. Picasso’s new pictorial world
of innocence and corruption, of prostitutes, melancholic drinkers, mothers and
children found its fullest expression in his large-scale Evocation (The
Burial of Casagemas), Musée d’art moderne, Paris. This
‘secular altarpiece’ was a valediction to Picasso’s dead friend and shows
Casagemas ascending to heaven on a white stallion, surrounded by naked
prostitutes, playful children, mourners and a madonna and child. This
radical and highly unusual painting challenged the conventions of religious
art. It will form the centrepiece of this exhibition and demonstrates the
scale of Picasso’s aspirations, developed in 1901, to reinvent the language and
traditions of painting. His ambition and confidence is further expressed
in one of his most powerful and famous self-portraits in which he appears lit
up against a dark background with a bold inscription proclaiming Yo -
Picasso (or I - Picasso), Private collection.
Becoming
Picasso: Paris 1901 offers the chance to consider in detail the early
development of one of the towering figures of 20th century art at a
time when he was still just a young Spanish hopeful in Paris .
Dwarf Dancer 1901
At the Moulin Rouge, 1901
Child with a Dove, 1901
Seated Harlequin, 1901
Harlequin and Companion, 1901
Absinthe Drinker, 1901
The Blue Room, 1901
Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) 1901
At the Moulin Rouge, 1901
Child with a Dove, 1901
Seated Harlequin, 1901
Harlequin and Companion, 1901
Absinthe Drinker, 1901
The Blue Room, 1901
Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) 1901
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