PORTRAIT WORK OF PABLO PICASSO EXPLORED IN MAJOR EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation
April 28–September 17, 1996
The first comprehensive survey ever assembled of the portraiture of Pablo
Picasso
opens at The Museum of Modern Art on April 28, 1996. Picasso and
Portraiture: Representation and Transformation is the first exhibition to
study Picasso's career solely from the perspective of his portraits.
Comprising 130 paintings and some 100 works on paper, the exhibition traces
Picasso's life through his development of the modernist portrait. Intimate
portrayals of his family, lovers, friends, and colleagues illuminate the
remarkable range of the artist's styles and reveal the connection between his
personal relationships and his work.
Drawn from public and private collections throughout the world, as well as
from the Museum's own extensive holdings, the exhibition includes many works
that have never been shown in the United States and a substantial number that
have never been exhibited publicly. The exhibition has been organized by
William Rubin, Director Emeritus, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The
Museum of Modern Art, in dialogue with Hélène Seckel, Chief
Curator, the Musée Picasso, Paris, and in collaboration with the
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris. The exhibition has its only
United States showing at MoMA; a smaller version will open at the Grand Palais,
Paris, next October.
Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, stated, "Few museums
have had as sustained an interest in the study and display of the works of
Pablo Picasso as The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum has been committed to
studying the vision of Picasso since its founding, and over time, has acquired
an astonishing number of the artist's finer works. Picasso and
Portraiture builds on that tradition of exploration and also marks the
fourth major exhibition of the artist's work organized by William Rubin. I
would like to extend our gratitude to the Musée Picasso and the
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, without whose collaboration and
cooperation this exhibition would not be possible."
Mr. Rubin, who also organized Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, the Museum's
unprecedented 1980 exhibition of approximately 1,000 works, commented,
"Understanding Picasso is fundamental to the understanding of twentieth-century
art in general. The current exhibition focuses on a relatively unstudied
aspect of his enormous oeuvre, enabling us to explore the rich panorama of
invention, symbolism, and emotion that drove this artistic genius. The
assembled works demonstrate that Picasso redefined the parameters and
possibilities of portraiture more than any other painter in the modern era."
He continued, "Picasso took the genre to a new level, redefining the portrait
as the artist's personal response to the subject. He transformed the portrait
from what had long been considered a primarily objective document into a
frankly subjective one."
On view through September 17, 1996, Picasso and Portraiture is
sponsored in part by Philip Morris Companies Inc. An indemnity for the
exhibition has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the
Humanities. The Luxury Collection of ITT Sheraton is the exclusive hotel
sponsor. The accompanying publication is
made possible by generous grants from the William S. Paley Foundation, Inc.,
and the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, with additional support from Agnes
Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Mrs. Donald B. Straus.
The Exhibition
Picasso and Portraiture focuses on the multiple portrayals of the
people central to Picasso's life and concludes with a survey of self-portraits
from his adolescence through his last years. Because Picasso's view of his
subjects was invariably filtered through his personal associations with them,
his portrayal of a particular sitter could change radically during the extent
of their relationship, ranging in style from primitivist, Surrealist, and
Cubist to Neoclassical, among others. In order to fully illustrate the
transformations applied to each subject, Picasso and Portraiture is, in
effect, organized as a series of mini-exhibitions, in which works are grouped
according to sitter, as opposed to a purely chronological arrangement.
Photographs (often by prominent artists such as Man Ray) and brief biographies
of the major subjects accompany the different portrait groups. In addition,
new research reveals the identities of some subjects who were unknown or
thought to have been invented.
The exhibition opens with Picasso's early portraits of his family and a series
of portraits painted of his childhood friend and later secretary Jaime
Sabartés. From there, it explores two early groups of portraits in
which the artist began to develop a schematic,
sculpturally precise, conceptual style influenced in part by the simplification
of features in
ancient Iberian sculptures. This style is exemplified in the head of Woman
Plaiting Her Hair (1906), a portrait of Picasso's first love, Fernande, and
in the reworked face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906).
Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballerina who was Picasso's first wife, was the
inspiration for many of his paintings from 1917 through the 1920s, a period
when the artist began to counterpoint his abstract Cubist representations with
more realistic Neoclassical images. The complex relationship between the two
styles was recently revealed in the highly abstract 1920 painting Woman in
an Armchair. Confirming Mr. Rubin's research, an infrared scan of the
painting performed in The Museum of Modern Art's conservation laboratory
uncovered a Neoclassical painting of Olga in the same position underneath; many
of the contours of the finished Cubist work were carried over directly from the
Neoclassical under-painting, including the curve of Olga's chin, her right
shoulder and arm, and almost the entire outline of the chair.
In the early years of the artist's relationship with Olga, the portraits of
her are gentle—the colors subdued and the drawing graceful. As the marriage
deteriorated, Picasso's portrayals of Olga became harsher and more transformed.
In the cold, monochromatic Seated Bather (1930), for example, a
Surrealist figure inspired by Olga is made up of largely angular, hard, and
unyielding forms, and has a head with a sawtooth, steel-trap mouth.
In stark contrast to Seated Bather, Bather with Beach Ball
(1932), a Surrealist portrayal of Picasso's then secret companion
Marie-Thérèse, depicts a carefree, soft, rounded, seemingly
weightless figure frolicking with a beach ball. Picasso's long, intense
relationship with Marie-Thérèse, who is now recognized as the
primary subject in the artist's work of the 1930s, inspired his most erotic
style of painting, exemplified by a group
of sumptuous nudes including The Mirror and Sleeping Nude, both
of 1932. Still Life on a Pedestal Table (1931), although not a portrait
in any traditional sense, envisions her poetically through the metaphor of
still life. It contains sexually suggestive forms that allude to
Marie-Thérèse as the subject: the curved contour of the pitcher
is associated with the representation of her breasts and torso from earlier
works.
Picasso's relationship with Marie-Thérèse overlapped with his
involvement with the Surrealist painter-photographer Dora Maar, which began
late in 1936. Portraits of the two women in similar reclining positions, both
painted from memory on the same day, in the same setting, and on canvases of
the same shape and size, reveal Picasso's different and complex feelings toward
them. Marie-Thérèse is depicted in sympathetic terms, her large
blue eyes dominating the soft curves of her naturalistically colored face.
Dora's portrait reveals a more conflicted visage in which her boldly colored
angular figure is set against a background of varying patterns and colors,
expressing Dora's energy and passion.
Exhibited together for the first time are a series of Neoclassical portraits
from 1923 that had long been thought to be a generic depiction of classical
beauty. Mr. Rubin has recently revealed that the portraits depict an actual
person—the wealthy American socialite Sara Murphy, whom F. Scott Fitzgerald
used as the model for his heroine in Tender Is the Night. Picasso fell
in love with Sara in 1923, although it is not known how deeply they were
involved. Her countenance is visible in several works in which the artist
insinuated
her features and hairstyle into portraits of Olga. Sara has also been
identified as the subject
of many drawings and three portraits on sand from the summer of 1923, which
culminated in the celebrated Woman in White (1923).
Picasso and Portraiture features an exceptionally rich group of some
twenty-one works of Picasso's last wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1952.
The Jacqueline portraits constitute the largest single group within his
portraiture and dominate the artist's work in his seventies and eighties.
Ranging from very large-scale oils in one gallery to linoleum prints and
charcoal sketches in others, the Jacqueline portraits show the most stylistic
variety and the widest range of mediums in any group.
Some of the other subjects included in the exhibition are Picasso's art
dealers Ambroise Vollard, Wilhelm Uhde, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; the poets
Max Jacob, André Salmon, and Guillaume Apollinaire; and his children
Paolo, Paloma, Claude, and Maya.
The exhibition concludes with a striking selection of self-portraits
representing a period of more than eighty years. Included are the brooding,
soulful 1901 self-portrait from the Blue Period; the Iberian-style
Self-Portrait with Palette (1906), a raw image of
the man as the lone worker-painter; and several self-portraits executed in 1972
shortly before Picasso's death at age ninety-one.
Publication
The first book ever published on the subject of Picasso's portraiture
accompanies the exhibition. Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and
Transformation is edited by William Rubin, who has also written the
introductory essay and a chapter exploring the Jacqueline portraits. Other
scholars and curators who have contributed essays to the lavishly illustrated
volume are Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture,
The Museum of Modern Art; Anne Baldassari and Brigitte Léal, Curators,
and Hélène Seckel, Chief Curator, Musée Picasso, Paris;
Pierre Daix; Michael C. FitzGerald; Marilyn McCully; and Robert Rosenblum.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, it contains 496 pages, 216
color illustrations, and 541 black-and-white illustrations. Hardbound, $75.00,
distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York,
and paperbound, $35.00, are both available in The MoMA Book Store.
Acoustiguide and Special Ticketing
An audiotour of Picasso and Portraiture, narrated by actor and writer
Steve Martin and introduced by Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn D. Lowry, is
available when purchasing admission or at the entrance to the exhibition.
Spanish and French versions are also available. Audiotours are $4.00, members
$3.50. Picasso and Portraiture tickets (includes general admission) are
$12.50, seniors and students $9.00. Members are admitted to the Museum and to
Picasso and Portraiture free at all times.
For further information, contact Alexandra Partow, Assistant Director of
Communications, 212/708–9756.
