Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée National Picasso opens at the de Young on June 11 as part of an international tour. The exhibit showcases 150 important paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, drawn from the permanent collection of the Musée National Picasso, Paris, the largest and most significant repository of the Picasso's in the world. Ranging from informal sketchbooks to finished iconic masterpieces, this unique collection of “Picasso’s Picassos” provides significant proof of the artist’s assertion that “I am the greatest collector of Picassos in the world.”
After Picasso died in 1973 at age 91, his heirs gave many of the works to the French state in lieu of inheritance taxes. They later donated and sold others to the state-owned Musée Picasso, which opened in a Baroque mansion in Paris' Marais district in 1985. It now contains an incomparable collection of more than 5,000 works spanning the artist's astonishingly prolific eight-decade career.
While the French museum is closed for renovation, this exhibition of "Picasso's Picassos," as Fine Arts Museums Director John Buchanan calls them, is touring the world. Co-organized by the Fine Arts Museums, the show goes to Sydney after San Francisco, before the works head home to Paris.
“This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition is comprised of works from every phase of Picasso’s extraordinary career, including masterpieces from his Blue, Rose, Expressionist, Cubist, Neoclassical and Surrealist periods,” describes John E. Buchanan, Jr., director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “These works present eloquent testimony to his role as a protean figure who not only created and contributed to new art forms and movements, but also forever transformed the very definition of art itself. Following on the heels of our recent exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, this exhibition represents a natural progression forward to the masterworks of the 20th century.”
· 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 Neoclassic 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)
· Work from his late period including the self-portrait The Matador (1970)
Picasso developed a unique personal style for each new woman in his life, and remarked, “How awful for a woman to realize from my work that she is being supplanted.” The exhibition chronicles Picasso’s tempestuous relationships with three of the significant women in his life and demonstrates how his work changed with each relationship. One may admire his experiments in space and form but there is no escaping his male chauvinism.
In John Berger's "The Success and Failure of Picasso, " he comments at the end that "Spaniards are proverbially proud of the way they can swear....Nobody ever swore in paint before." Picasso forced us to question the nature of art and for this, we must be grateful to the man whose talent was equal to his ego.
Last summer's blockbusters were from France (the Musee D'Orsay) and this summer's blockbuster will be from France as well! You just might think that 19th and early 20th century Paris contained most (if not all) the important art talent in the Western Hemisphere and you'd be right. If there is one name that stands above all, it's Picasso whose influence (for better or worse) dominated the art world for over 50 years.
Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée National Picasso, Paris: Sat.-Oct. 9. M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, S.F. $10-$20. (415) 750-3600. www.deyoungmuseum.org.
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