Curator, Anne Umland: This picture is covered by a series of mini paintings. In the upper left corner is a Cubist vignette of a glass and cards. Immediately next to that is a couple dancing on a beach. They have shading and modeling, so they have a physicality that is very different from their cubist companion at left. And that kind of alternation of ways of representing things and people continues across the surface of this canvas.
The effect is of a collage or an artist’s studio. And in fact, you can see a relationship between this image and how Picasso arranged the pictures on the walls in the Fontainebleau garage.
Theater Director, Patricia McGregor: We often look at the final presentation of something, whether that’s a painting or a performance—there sometimes feels like an inevitability about it. And actually, the studio is the place where all the thinking, all the glorious revelations and the painful failures, that is that sacred space that holds all of it.
Anne Umland: I think this picture sums up the way, in Fontainebleau, Picasso does seem very intent on demonstrating how past and present, Cubism and classicism, abstraction and representation, figures and geometry—not only coexisted, they were created in dialogue.