Picasso! (numero dos)

Last week, I spent two hours reveling in the world of the Picasso exhibit. Taken on a journey through the artist’s tumultuous life and love affairs, the exhibit (in it’s first stop at the Seattle Art Museum through next week, headed to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts next from February 19 to May 15, followed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco this summer) really does a standout job of immersing its viewers in Picasso’s “diary”. And as with any good diary, this one was full of sexual exploits and love affairs. I walked away from the exhibit impressed with Picasso, yes, but also with each of various women in his life who so impacted this artist’s incredible work (and incredible ego). Fascinatingly, Picasso recognized this intertwining (or is it dependency?) of art with love of women, by believing sexuality to be equal to creativity.

Picasso is organized into an almost overwhelming 12 galleries, each chock full of drawings, sketches, woodcuts, etchings, and of course, paintings. The exhibit begins early in his life, with an introduction to the Blue period through a painting reacting to a friend’s suicide. That work is done in a style similar to van Gogh’s, and is in stark contrast to the work hung next to it: La Celestina, a portrait of an old woman with a cataract that is in many ways typical of the Blue period.

La Celestina, 1904.

The next gallery shows Olga, Picasso's first wife, and work from his years of happy family life. His first experiments with cubism appear in this gallery, which led to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Olga, 1918.

Sacre-Coure, 1909.

That gallery is followed by a turn towards the weird during the beginning of Picasso’s family troubles and first adulterous affair, with a woman named Marie-Therese Walter in 1927. In a small room filled with bizarre distortions and increasingly sexual references, you see firsthand the turmoil the artist is going through – and putting his family through. The Acrobat provides a beautiful, if jarring, centerpiece to the room, complemented by sculptures and a lively colorful painting with penile imagery.

The Acrobat, 1918.

Moving into a blatantly sexual period, the next gallery is devoted entirely to work inspired by or picturing Marie-Therese. I reacted strongly to these works, each of which is erotic in varying degrees of intensity as well as is, well, round. Picasso obsessed over rounded lines, circles as a motif, and the sexuality inherent in curves of bodies.

The Reading, 1932.

One can only imagine how good Marie-Therese must have been in bed – and indeed the exhibit includes a quote from Picasso: “Marie would do whatever I asked.” This flexibility, utter devotion, constant willingness is evident in what I perceive as an almost perverted contrast between softness, and violent emotion or distortion – an increasingly pastel color palette with rounded lines, yet nudity and strange, shocking body positions augmented in their sexuality by abstraction.

Picasso’s next affair with Dora Maar, represented by work in the next gallery which led up to Guernica, provides a stark contrast to the imagery in the previous work. He emphasizes line even further, but this time with sharp edges and straight lines. His color palette shifts entirely to bright vivid intense colors, and the juxtaposition makes it easy to imagine what type of woman Dora Maar was –intelligent, intense, and always challenging for Picasso.

Dora Maar, 1937.

His final love affairs aren’t given as much weight in the exhibit, but I found most interesting the one woman who left him, and the woman who replaced her and remained with Picasso through his final days: Francoise Gilot (the former), and Jacqueline Roque (the latter). These works remain colorful, and continue to play with line. The portrait of Jacqueline below also shows a stronger sense of shape in throat and body, and of the hand of the artist in his palette knife scrapings in the back- and foreground.

Jacqueline, 1954.

The exhibit quotes Picasso as stating many times, as he looked back through the century of art, that when thinking of true peers, “all things considered, there’s only Matisse.” It closes with late work and some lovely photographs of the artist throughout his life, with his family, lovers, and in his studio. All things considered, this exhibit is a fantastic look at the life of a wonderfully productive artist, but in many ways most interesting for the insights about the women who were such a central influence and inspiration to his masterpieces.