Pablo Picasso

Picasso Project

At the end of Easter Week 1932 in his Normandy home, the château de Boisgeloup, Picasso painted six compositions entitled Reclining Woman on the Beach. Together they comprise an enigmatic series of works that have been little studied up to now despite the vast bibliography on the artist. The series remained in Picasso’s possession throughout his life with the exception of the last work, which was purchased by the English Surrealist artist Roland Penrose in March 1937. In his memoirs Penrose recalls that when he first saw the painting, reproduced in Cahiers d’Art, “It seemed to have a magic I had never known before”…

Web site devoted to the conservation of Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a pivotal work in the development of modern art and in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection…

Works in the Hermitage collection

Works in the Tate collection
Pablo Picasso: painter, sculptor, etcher, lithographer, ceramist and designer, who has had enormous influence on 20th century art and worked in an unprecedented variety of styles. Picasso was born at Malaga, Spain, son of an art teacher. His family moved to Barcelona, where he entered the School of Fine Arts 1895; then entered Madrid Academy 1897. Early showed great precocity. First visited Paris in autumn 1900, returned in 1901 when he had his first Paris one-man exhibition at the Galerie Vollard…

His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905) to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism [more] from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11) to its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation…

Famous as no artist ever had been, he was a pioneer, a master and a protean monster, with a hand in every art movement of the century…

The most controversial purchase was the painting ‘Femme en vert’ (1909) by Picasso. In the cold winter days of 1954 this green lady led to heated debate not only in Eindhoven but throughout the country. Press cuttings from late January and early February of that year report on a protest demonstration planned by art school students in Den Bosch, on campaigns in Eindhoven attacking the acquisition and above all on the ‘exorbitant price’ paid. The series of letters to the editor reveal the nature and extent of the opposition. The fierceness of these reactions now seems rather strange: at the end of this century French art from its beginning has become a ‘pièce de résistance’ in quite another way.

The Triumphant Years takes up the artist’s life in 1917, when Picasso and Cocteau left wartime Paris for Rome to work with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on their revolutionary production of Parade. Visits to Naples, above all to the Farnese marbles in the Museo Nazionale, would leave Picasso with a lifelong obsession with classical sculpture as well as the self-referential commedia dell’arte. After returning to Paris and marrying one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, he abandoned bohemia for the drawing rooms of Paris. Hence, his so-called Duchess period, which coincided with his switch to neoclassicism, and would ultimately be absorbed into a metamorphic form of cubism. In the summer of 1923, Picasso and his American friends Gerald and Sara Murphy transformed the French Riviera from a winter into a summer resort, when they persuaded the proprietor of the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to keep the place open for the summer. In doing so, they made the Riviera Europe’s major playground. Mediterraneanism was in Picasso’s bones. Born in Málaga, he would always identify with this inland sea. In 1927 the artist’s life underwent a major change; he abandoned society for a life out of the spotlight with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Thérèse would result in an ever-growing antipathy for his neurasthenic, understandably jealous wife. Balletic clues have enabled Richardson to identify a number of baffling figure-paintings as portrayals of Olga and reinterpret the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Picasso’s passionate love for his mistress and his passionate hatred for his wife can be fully understood only in light of each other. at amazon