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January 2012
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PICASSO: MASTERPIECES from the Musée National Picasso, Paris is the most ambitious exhibition ever undertaken by the Gallery.
Jointly organised by Musée National Picasso, the Art Gallery of NSW and Art Exhibitions Australia (AEA), the exhibition is part of the
Sydney International Arts Series, bringing the world’s outstanding exhibitions to Australia. The exhibition was conceived, curated and
mounted by Anne Baldassari, general commissioner and president of the Musée National Picasso and one of the world’s leading
experts on the artist’s work.
The international tour was initiated and created by the Musée National Picasso, the largest and most significant repository of the
artist’s work in the world. Since 2008 works have travelled to cities including Madrid, Tokyo, Moscow, Seattle and San Francisco. This
unprecedented opportunity to bring this exhibition to Sydney is possible because the Musée is closed for renovations. The tour extends
the Musée National Picasso’s highly valued collaboration with AEA, Australia’s leading manager of exhibition tours, which over the
past six years has organised tours of two of their previous exhibitions.
The exhibition occupies most of the Gallery’s ground floor and includes works ranging from informal sketchbooks to finished
masterpieces. This magnificent survey of ‘Picasso’s Picassos’ proves the artist’s assertion that ‘I am the greatest collector of
Picassos in the world’.
Picasso transformed the very definition of art. He is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the astonishing variety of
styles he employed in his work. He demonstrated uncanny artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner throughout
his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century Picasso’s approach changed fundamentally and his
revolutionary accomplishments brought universal renown and immense fortune, making him the most radical as well as the most
influential figure in 20th-century art.
Pablo Picasso. Deux femme courant sur la plage (La course) (Two women running on the beach (The race)) 1922
Gouache on plywood 32.5 x 41.1 cm
Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979
© Succession Picasso, 2011/Licensed by Viscopy, 2011
© Paris, Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Jean Gilles Berizzi
© Musee National Picasso, Paris
The Musée National Picasso’s collection
preserves the highly personal works that
Pablo Picasso kept for himself with the
intention of shaping his legacy. The
exhibition includes:
- One of his earliest Paris works:
The death of Casagemas (1901)
- The Blue period: La Célestine (1904)
- The Rose period: The two brothers (1906)
- African-inspired proto-Cubist work:
studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907) and Three figures under a tree
(1907)
- Analytic Cubism: Man with a guitar (1911)
- Synthetic Cubism: Violin (1915)
- The Neoclassical period:
Two women running on the beach (1922)
- Surrealism: The kiss (1925)
- The war years: The weeping woman
(1937), and the sculptures Bull’s head
(1942) and Death’s head (1943)
- Late period: reinterpretations of old
masters including Velasquez, Goya and
Rembrandt, and large nude self-portraits
such as The matador (1970)
Picasso changed his formal vocabulary for each new woman entering his life, and remarked, ‘How awful for a woman to realise from
my work that she is being supplanted.’ The exhibition chronicles his relationships with the six principal women in his life and
demonstrates how his art was affected by each relationship.
His mistress Fernande Olivier was the muse of the Rose period and of early Cubism. His first wife, Olga Khokhlova, is realistically
depicted in Portrait of Olga in an armchair (1918). Mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, who met Picasso when she was 17, is portrayed in
Reclining nude (1932) and in a series of five bronze busts created in 1931 that range from recognisable representations to the nearly
abstract. Mistress Dora Maar, the photographer who had a passionate and emotionally charged relationship with Picasso, is
represented in works characterised by hard- edged, jagged lines, angular forms and acidic colours, such as Portrait of Dora Maar
(1937). The shadow (1953) was painted in memory of Françoise Gilot, the mother of Claude and Paloma Picasso. Jacqueline with
crossed hands (1954) is the first portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife and last muse.
Sculpture plays an important part in the exhibition, demonstrating Picasso’s versatility and inventiveness, including an early bust, The
jester (1905); Figure (1907), a roughly hewn wooden piece inspired by Picasso’s fascination with African tribal art; Head of a woman
(1909), which is considered to be the first Cubist sculpture; the relief construction Guitar and bottle of Bass (1913); an assemblage,
The violin (1915); Bull’s head (1942), constructed from a cast-off bicycle seat and handlebars; the iconic bronze The goat (1950); and
the life-sized, six-piece figurative work created during a summer in Cannes, The bathers (1956).
‘Like God, I haven’t got a style,’ Picasso claimed, but over the course of his long and prolific career he created revolutionary works that
laid the foundations of modern art. His lengthy career spanned both world wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Korean War, and these
troubled times are mirrored in some of his darkest and most poignant images.
About the Musée National Picasso
The Musée National Picasso, which opened in 1985 in the 17th-century Hôtel Salé in the Marais District of Paris, serves as the
repository for nearly 5000 works from the artist’s personal collection that passed to the French government following his death in 1973
and Jacqueline Picasso’s death in 1990.
Pablo Picasso. Jacqueline aux mains croisees (Jacqueline with crossed hands) 1954
Oil on canvas, 116 x 88.5 cm
Pablo Picasso Bequest, 1979
© Succession Picasso, 2011/Licensed by Viscopy, 2011
© Paris, Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Jean Gilles Berizzi
© Musee National Picasso, Paris
PICASSO: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Until 25 March 2012
