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Picasso: Painter, Lover
MOMA exhibit explores artist’s creative process
Photo: Museum of Modern Art
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Picasso is almost as well known for his complicated love life as for his complex paintings. His sexual liaisons often served as impetuses for his art, and a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art that aims to explore his creative process through printmaking also offers a glimpse into his relationships with the women who inspired him.
Though Picasso is most famous for his paintings, his insatiable curiosity and creative drive led him to explore many other mediums, including printmaking. Picasso began to make prints as a young artist, and much of his early work features themes from his Blue and Rose periods. Prominent examples from this era include the Saltimbanques series, delicate line drawings that depict itinerate circus performers, and Frugal Repast (1904), which shows a starving couple at a nearly empty dining table. As he began to forge his own personal cubist style, Picasso continued to use printmaking to develop ideas that he would later use in his paintings. He valued the narrative approach that printmaking brought to his artistic process, allowing him to document each stage of a work’s evolution through successive prints. The famous Bull Series (of which five are on view in the exhibition) begins with a realistic depiction of a bull, and gradually devolves into an abstracted, cubist rendering. For this series, Picasso took the unusual (and difficult) approach of actually reworking the same tile for each print instead of creating a new one for every step of the process.
Always an innovator, Picasso refused to limit himself to the standard printmaking techniques. For one print of Nocturnal Dance with Owl, he printed in white ink, brushed over it with black, rinsed it in his shower, and then added a watercolor wash. The overall effect is a speckled, glowing look, reminiscent of springtime.
The complexity of Picasso’s relationships with various women informed his artwork throughout his life. He was married twice, had children with three different women, and took many lovers. Each time he became involved with a woman, he absorbed her features into his artistic vocabulary, allowing parts of her to reappear in different aspects of his work. His portraits, though, are often what one critic has dubbed “autobiographical portraits” – they reflect the artist’s moods rather than those of the sitter. Included in this exhibition are portraits of Marie-Therèse Walter, an early lover; Dora Maar, a Surrealist photographer; Jacqueline Roque, his second wife; and even a rare likeness of his first wife, Olga Khokhlova.
Some of the most colorful prints in the exhibition are the portraits of Dora Maar, with whom he was involved in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The vivid pinks, blues and greens echo her famously volatile personality. Also striking is a linoleum cut series of Jacqueline Roque, who, more than forty years his junior, was his companion during his later years. Changing the colors and physical details slightly with each print to create an intricate characterization, Picasso viewed none of the prints as “definitive,” and instead intended for them to be viewed as a group.
The themes found in Picasso’s other print works closely follow the ups and downs of his emotional life. Some of the most resonant pieces in the exhibition come from the Minotaur series, in which he borrowed classical imagery to personify his complex emotions during a time of personal turmoil. The minotaur, which he used as his alter ego, is shown fighting, lying wounded, or drinking. In the most poignant prints, the minotaur is blind, still powerful and yet directionless, feeling his way forward and relying on a young girl to lead him. Picasso also used the minotaur to represent unconscious and forbidden desires – in these scenes of sometimes violent sexual aggression, the minotaur is seen ravishing women, even raping them. Next to these are haunting, disturbingly beautiful images of a man quietly watching a sleeping woman; he clothed and realistically drawn, she naked and sensuously disjointed, almost abstracted.
The exhibition will run at the Museum of Modern Art from March 28 through August 30th, 2010. Tickets are $20 ($16 for seniors, $12 for students) and include entrance to the permanent collection and film series. In conjunction with the exhibition, the MoMA will launch an online project of unprecedented scale: 250 Picasso prints from the museum’s collection will be available for interactive exploration. To view the web project, visit www.moma.org/picassoprints. For more information, visit www.moma.org or call 212-708-9400.