Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: L’Amour Fou at Gagosian Gallery

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: L’Amour Fou at Gagosian Gallery 21^st street location is the third recent Picasso show for which Gagosian partnered with Picasso’s celebrated biographer John Richardson. Sublime Picasso: Mosqueteros took place in this very same location in 2009. This was a show of late work, of “the race against death” as Richardson aptly called it. In the summer of 2010 Britannia Street was a home to Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-62). And at the end of that year a number of works from this show came to the Madison Street as a small show Pablo Picasso: Important Paintings and Sculpture. The exhibitions were accompanied by comprehensive catalogues edited by Richardson.

Octogenarian Richardson is finishing (has finished?) the 4^th volume of his monumental biography of the artist. The first three cover the years up to 1932 when Picasso turned 50. With his exhibitions Richardson works in reverse chronology. In Mosqueteros, Picasso’s time in life coincided with Richardson’s: the curator at the end of his life looked at the artist’s late work. The Mediterranean Years contemplated on the two preceding decades. And L’Amour Fou, which embraces the years between 1927 and 1940, overlaps with the completed years of his Picasso biography. It is as if Richardson is coming full circle in this exhibition.

All three exhibitions have been accurately described as museum-like in scale and quality, but to me they simultaneously felt strikingly personal. Contrapuntally to scholarly rigor, there was a free flowing intense intimacy in the exhibitions halls.  Perhaps, because all three shows included works from private collections of Picasso’s descendants, that is works that the artist did not want or could not part with during his lifetime. L’Amour Fou has an extra touch of affection: Marie-Thérèse’s granddaughter, art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, co-curated this show with Richardson.

Picasso’s liaison with Marie- Thérèse was a secret one; only a handful of his closest friends knew about her existence.  At the time, he was married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he then desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to divorce. This exhibition brings to light the layer of Picasso’s life during these years that was almost completely hidden from everybody at the time.

Picasso’s subsequent mistress, Dora Maar, made a keen observation that a new woman brought major changes into the artist’s life.  Or was it the change in the artist that led him to a new muse? This makes the periods when the shift was taking place, when two muses  bump into each other, simply fascinating. I wonder if sometimes it was not a change in a sense of a fresh page, but in a sense of transposing.  As if, the artist revisited places, only in disguise and in a different tonality. Olga marked Picasso’s turn to Neoclassicism. Marie-Thérèse (and her classical profile) inspired the artist’s reinvention, leading him from Neoclassicism to Classical World (and underworld). In a way it was an ancient story of transformation through love, only Marie- Thérèse was too young (17 when the relationship started) to understand the journey she prompted.

 

^{Unique cast}

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{© P.A.R. Photo by Philippe De Putter. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

The 1928 sculptural portrait of Marie-Thérèse in this exhibition is titled Personnage Feminin (La Metamorphose II). Metamorphosis is really what Picasso was in the midst of during these years, and Marie- Thérèse its catalyst. I think Picasso painted more different visions of Marie- Thérèse than he did of any other woman.  In the five halls at Gagosian we see Marie- Thérèse sleeping, dreaming, thinking, playing on the beach, reading, wearing her red beret or a wreath of flowers. But she was not just a passive subject of his portraits. She was a mythic character in many of his works, for instance, his famous etchings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , not included in this exhibition. Similarly to nymphs, she took form of objects (in his still-lives). But above all, she was a radiant force in his private universe (the dark one was Olga, and then, Dora). She is a girl with a lantern opposite the Minotaur in his etching La Minotauromachie in this show.

 

 

^{Private Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

 

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

I think Picasso’s route of metamorphosis is carved out in his sculpture of these years.  Look at the sculptures in this show – the small slim wooden figures and weighty heads – both groups have an archaic, mythical quality to them.  They are not simply portraits of Marie-Thérèse, but grasps of the archetypal. Why has this taken place in sculpture? Perhaps, because, as Picasso himself said, sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting. It may be that while painting Marie- Thérèse sleeping, he shaped the dreams in wood, metal, clay or plaster. The fleeting asked for the palpable. 

 

 

^{Private Collection}

 ^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

^{Nasher Sculpture Center , Dallas}

^{Raymond and Pasty Nasher Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo by David Heald. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

I wonder if the invisibility of their relationship found its way into his work by putting the question of seeing in focus. In his essay “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers” Leo Steinberg astutely observed that Picasso often watched his lovers sleeping. But I think that paintings of Marie- Thérèse sleeping stand apart from his other dreamers. In some of them, the artist is not watching, but is himself dreaming.  Some of them are about not seeing or being unable to look. Even the eyes possessing mirada fuerte - the untranslatable Andalusian expression for a strong, penetrating, domineering gaze, adopted by Richardson to describe Picasso’s powerful stare - must be closed sometimes. Two paintings made me wonder if his eyes were open. Both are charcoal on gessoed canvas.  Nue Endormie, 1932, in which Marie- Thérèse’s body is rendered by a faint charcoal line, is a trace of his touch, of movement of his hand feeling her body. And in Nue Couché, also from 1932, each line is a caress, a stroke, a pat, a tender brush, a rub, a fondle.

 

 
^{Private Collection}

^{“© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”.}

 

In the third volume of his biography, Richardson cites a conversation between Picasso’s dealer Kanhweiler and the artist in March 1932. Picasso invited Kanhweiler to show his new work. Kanhweiler wrote about this visit to a friend:

We saw two paintings at his place which he had just finished. Two nudes, perhaps the most moving things he’s done. “A satyr who had just killed a woman might have painted this picture,” I told him. It’s neither cubist nor naturalist. And it’s without painterly artifice: very alive, very erotic, but the eroticism of a giant. For years Picasso hasn’t done anything like it. He had told me a few days before, “I want to paint like a blind man, who does a buttock by feel.” It really is that. We came away overwhelmed.

 

 
^{Private Collection}

^{"© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .}

^{Photo: © P.A.R. Photo: Eric Baudouin. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery".}

 

There are a number of paintings of Marie- Thérèse asleep in this show; many are a blend of a memory of touch and of possessive gaze, for example, La Sieste from 1932. But what about the small painting in the 4^th hall, Dormeuse au coussin rouge, 1932, that is devoid of line? Marie- Thérèse’s body is an array of soft contoured color splotches at a point of no tension. Is it a painting of the moment when the artist is falling asleep next to her? What was he seeing with his eyes closed? We can catch a glimpse of it in his work.

This is the paradox of Picasso’s work in these years. It is about seeing, but not just with the eyes. In his biography of Picasso, Richardson quotes the artist who joked he had an eye at the end of his penis.  But he also often said to Cocteau (if we trust the latter) that painting was a blind man’s profession.

The show is closing this coming Saturday, June 25^th. Don’t miss it… and be prepared to stand in line to get in.

 Extended to July 15, 2011

Official Picasso site: www.picasso.fr  

On-line Picasso project: http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/    

 

Gagosian Gallery

www.gagosian.com

522 West 21^st Street

Take the C or E train to West 23rd Street and/or take the M23 bus to 23^rd Street and 11th Avenue

Gallery hours: Mon—Sat, 10 am to 6 pm

Comments

[freelance writers]

well these works really is extravagant a good one!!!