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Times
09-08-2025
- Times
Inside Picasso's studios: the secrets of the places where he lived and loved
Life is art. There are few artists for whom that's more true than for Picasso. You can chart the ups and downs of his romances through his canvases — and establish overlapping timelines; you can assess his emotional state; you can estimate his affluence (consistently increasing) or the size of the space he's working in (ditto). Even his interior scenes function as a kind of self-portrait. It's interior spaces that form the backbone of the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI), Picasso: From the Studio. Curated with the Musée Picasso in Paris, with a large number of loans from that elegant institution, it takes a chronological journey through the Spanish artist's career, via the key locations in France in which he worked. It will look at how the artist's environment influenced his output, from soon after his arrival in Paris from Barcelona at the start of the 20th century to his last home and studio at Mougins, through paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper, photography and rarely seen film. There are more than 150 recorded places that Picasso made art throughout his life, but the exhibition begins around 1912, as Picasso and Georges Braque were egging each other on to develop cubism. Small assemblages and collages from this time, including the gallery's own 1913 collage Bottle and Newspaper, will feature alongside works made of scavenged materials: paper scraps, stencilled letters, canvas, wood, pliable tin, nails, sand and paint. These experiments show how the studio was 'the laboratory of his work', the exhibition's co-curator Joanne Snrech says, but their modest size reflects the ad hoc spaces in which he worked — easier to lug around Paris to the next ramshackle spot. By the Twenties Picasso was a success. He was collaborating with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and having married the dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918 was a darling of society. • Picasso or Goya: who created Spain's most important painting? As he holidayed on the newly fashionable Côte d'Azur, the sea, sunlight and the company of glam pals imbued Picasso's work with a sunny exuberance. These paintings (because Picasso worked everywhere, even on holiday) exude the heat of the Riviera — a rare landscape made at his summer studio in Juan-les-Pins, where he and Olga stayed in 1920, or the jolly Still Life with a Mandolin from 1924, both in the show. During the Thirties, though, all sorts of shifts happened. In 1927 Picasso, aged 45, had met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter outside a Paris department store, and started a relationship with her. In 1930 he bought a manor house at Boisgeloup in Normandy, about 45 miles from his Paris home, establishing a studio on the light-filled second floor, and began dividing his time between it and Paris. Olga stayed in the city with their son, Paolo, during the week, so the painter was free to have his young mistress visit him often in Boisgeloup. They kept the relationship secret for eight years — goodness knows how, since Walter haunts his work throughout this period, her golden hair and almond-shaped eyes unmistakable even when distorted by cubism. Nearly all the show's works from this studio depict her, including a serene portrait from 1937, two years after the birth of their daughter, Maya, at which time Picasso tried to divorce Olga (she refused; they stayed married until her death in 1955) — and around the time that he met the photographer Dora Maar, of whom, inevitably, more later. Boisgeloup didn't just enable the indulgence of a new muse. A large outbuilding allowed him to more intensely explore sculpture, especially monumental heads and busts. You can guess the dominant subject. His next studio was on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris. Picasso liked it because the shabby 17th-century townhouse had a connection to Balzac as the residence for the painter Frenhofer, the main character in his novel The Unknown Masterpiece. It is where Picasso painted probably his second most famous work (the first being his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon). Guernica was a commission from the Republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews Maar found the vast attic studio for him — partly thanks to it being a meeting place for the resistance group Contre-attaque, of which she had been a member — and secured exclusive rights to document the painting's creation for the magazine Cahiers d'art. Quite different from Walter, whom the co-curator Janet McLean describes as 'dreamy and romantic', Maar was fiery and passionately left-wing, and as she documented his work, 'they were bouncing off each other … it was a meeting of minds for sure,' her political zeal influencing the direction of the painting. Sadly, Guernica doesn't travel, but several works from the period give a sense of the tension and confinement of those difficult years. 'I'm glad we're able to show these quite frugal paintings made in 1938, when there were a lot of refugees coming to France due to the Spanish Civil War,' McLean says. One such is Child with a Lollipop Sitting Under a Chair, donated by Maya to the Musée Picasso a few years ago. Painted in sombre monochrome, 'it's not a pretty picture of a child', McLean says; instead it has a huddled, claustrophobic feel. 'It's interesting to show Picasso connected to the world, because he really was.' It's not known why Picasso elected to remain in Paris as the Second World War intensified — he was unable to exhibit, the Nazi regime considered his work 'degenerate' — but he kept working away in his attic, photographed there in 1944 by Brassaï. A shot from this series will be in the exhibition, alongside Bust of a Woman with a Blue Hat, a portrait of Maar made the same year, just after their not-quite-definitive break-up (they continued to see each other intermittently until 1946). One of the aims of the exhibition, McLean says, is to show 'Picasso's versatility as an artist. While he considered himself primarily a painter, he was exceptional in his ability to turn his hand to any medium.' A wonderful example of this is his playful ceramics, influenced by the studio he took from 1948-55 at Vallauris, a small town on the Côte d'Azur. It was home to a number of ceramic factories, depicted in Picasso's 1951 canvas Smoke in Vallauris, where thick black puffs pump urgently into the sky from the wood-burning kilns. Inspired by Georges and Suzanne Ramié, the owners of the Madoura Pottery, he bought a villa nearby and set about learning from Suzanne, saying: 'I don't think I'm a ceramicist, next to ceramicists who are real ceramicists, I'm just […] an unfortunate amateur and an ignoramus. I try, I listen, I look, I try to pass my time.' He produced more than 3,600 pieces in just a few years, several of which will be on display, including a dove modelled ingeniously out of a few flops of folded clay. He got so into it that an American newspaper referred to him as 'left-wing ceramicist artist Picasso'. He was, at the time, active as part of the Movement for Peace and the French Communist Party. He enjoyed collaborating with his fellow artisans, and was active in the community, attending local bullfights and openings of pottery exhibitions, for which he designed the posters (free of charge), and portrayed his family life in pictures as part of a simple creative ideal. • My journey through the French region most famous for its artists A touching example of this is the 1954 canvas Claude drawing, Françoise and Paloma, a harmonious image depicting his two youngest children with their mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, whom he had met in 1943 (he 61, she 21) — except that Gilot is shown oddly only as an outline, curved protectively around her children. She had left him and returned to Paris with them the year before. Still, his time in Vallauris was transformative for his output and for the town. In 1949 he donated his sculpture L'Homme au mouton (Man with a sheep) — it's still on the market square — and in 1951 he created the War and Peace cycle in a local chapel. His presence, McLean says, 'revitalised the ceramics industry in that region'. Man of the people he may have been, but he was also very rich, and in 1955 he acquired La Californie, a des res in Cannes, where for the first time he lived and worked in the same space, which must have been inconvenient for his family (he had met his new partner, Jacqueline Roque, in 1952, when she was 26 and he was 70), given the rapid accumulation of artworks that filled every inch. The three adjoining rooms on the ground floor served as studio and living area, with rounded windows that opened onto a lush garden into which his sculpture spilled (the show features a great 1960-61 photograph of him there by André Sonine). He seems to have seen La Californie as a sort of extension of himself, judging by the vigour with which he depicts it in his art. 'This was the first time he had paid so much attention to his studio,' Snrech writes in the catalogue, 'to the extent that these works can be seen almost as self-portraits.' Several will be on display, including a magnificent 1956 canvas made in homage to Henri Matisse, who had died in 1954. The room is empty of people, but the painter's presence is suggested by paintings and objects, and in the centre a blank canvas sits expectantly on an easel. Picasso called these paintings 'interior landscapes'. Eventually the lack of privacy in fast-developing Cannes drove him out. In 1961 — the year that he married Jacqueline at the town hall in Vallauris — he moved to his final studio, the Notre Dame de Vie farmhouse in the nearby town of Mougins. Surrounded by work from across his life (an entire wing was dedicated to the display of his sculptures), this was the scene of a final flowering, a period of insane productivity. He produced about 200 paintings between September 1970 and June 1972, and he created more portraits of Jacqueline than of any of his other partners. In contrast to the hurly-burly of La Californie, he worked in relative solitude, assailed by memory — in a series of etchings, La Suite 347, created when he was 86, he returns to motifs such as bullfighters, circus performers, artists and models, mythology and literature, musketeers and animals — and by an urgent need to innovate, seen in the free, gestural brushstrokes of paintings such as Reclining Nude, 1967. It was here that he died, in April 1973, probably from a heart attack. According to Paris Match, Jacqueline called his doctor in the early hours of the morning; he died a few hours later, at 11.45am, at the age of 91. There was no will, of course (not his problem), and more than 45,000 unsold works strewn across his various studios. An artist, first, foremost and only, to the last. Picasso: From the Studio is at the National Gallery of Ireland, October 9 to February 22,
Times
05-08-2025
- Times
Picasso or Goya: who created Spain's most important painting?
The Regency artist Sir Thomas Lawrence deemed Velázquez's Las Meninas to represent 'the true philosophy of the art' of painting. A spirited public debate about who created the most important Spanish painting, however, has pitted Goya against Picasso, contrasting two visions of the country. The debate started when Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the combative bestselling novelist, challenged the assertion made by Miguel Ángel Cajigal, an art critic, that Picasso's Guernica was Spain's most significant work. Cajigal, who made the declaration during a radio broadcast, supports the broadly-held consensus that Picasso's 1937 work, which depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, is the most internationally acclaimed owing to its status as the world's most powerful anti-war painting. But Perez-Reverte, a former war correspondent and creator of the swashbuckling Captain Alatriste series of novels, strongly disagreed, stating on social media that the claim 'had left me in shock'. He then posted an image of Goya's Duel with Cudgels, an 1820s work in which two men, up to their knees in mud, club each other. 'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, prompting a long riposte from Cajigal and thousands of comments from the public, as well as media headlines about the ensuing public debate about national art. The novelist's characterisation of Duel with Cudgels echoes the description of it as 'symbolically embodying the irrationality of fratricidal violence' by Madrid's Prado Museum, where it is housed. The work has been judged as presaging the civil war of 1936 to 1939 and in recent years it has been used as an allegory for Spain's deeply polarised politics, which appears increasingly coarse and senseless. The museum interprets it as an allegory of Spain's internal conflict during the restoration under Ferdinand VII, a vivid portrayal of internal divisions. The mural paintings were among those that decorated the house known as Quinta del Sordo, where Goya lived and have come to be known as the Black Paintings, in part because of their sombre subject matter. X-rays have shown that the two fighters were not originally sunk into the ground up to their knees but stood on a grassy meadow. 'It's Spanish to the hilt,' stated Pérez-Reverte. Some Spaniards agreed with him and many argued for works by Velázquez, Sorolla and El Greco. But others backed Cajigal, with one commenting: 'It's amazing for its technique, the symbolism of the figures and colour as well as for what it represents as a story. No one is going to deny that.' The art critic pointed out that the image of Guernica adorns the UN headquarters in New York and its pre-eminent importance is underscored by numerous prestigious scholars. 'I have been teaching Spanish art classes to students from the United States for almost 20 years,' he said. 'The only painting they always know is Guernica. And then, Goya and El Greco.' Picasso's masterpiece, inspired by the devastating 1937 air raid by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion on Guernica at the behest of General Franco, was first shown at the world fair in Paris the same year. Picasso had been commissioned by the Republican government to produce a work to boost awareness of the war and raise funds. • Guernica to be declared first 'place of memory' under Spanish Civil War legislation When the Second World War broke out he decided that the painting should remain in New York for safekeeping. In 1958 he extended the loan for an indefinite period, until such time as democracy had been restored in Spain. It arrived home in 1981. The debate about which painting best defines Spain has divided broadly into those that view Guernica as the painting of a modern democratic Spain that once lived under dictatorship, and those that deem Goya's work to be no less tragic, a self‑portrait of country mired in its own history. A social media user commented: 'Guernica speaks to the world; but Goya shows what Spain inflicts on itself.'
New Statesman
30-07-2025
- New Statesman
From the archive: Why Picasso?
Photo by Robert DOISNEAU/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images In 1954, the art critic John Berger went to the Lefevre Gallery, which then stood on London's King Street, to review a new exhibition of Picasso's work. Why is Picasso the most famous living artist in the world? Why does everything he does have such news value? Why do even those of us who are more seriously interested than the sensational press, go to a new Picasso exhibition hoping to be surprised? And why do we never come away disappointed? Take the present Picasso show at the Lefevre. It contains two jokes cast in bronze. One is an ape with a toy model car for a head, a vase for a belly and a piece of an iron bracket for a tail. The other is a bird with a head and plume made from a gas-tap, a tail from the blade of a small shovel and legs and feet from two kitchen forks. The fifteen paintings include some recent (1953) sketches of women's heads in which profile and full-face are dislocated and re-assembled together, a flippant canvas of a dog and a woman wrestling hammer and tongs on the floor, and two small pictures from the tragic series of women in hats painted during the German occupation – their faces brutally wrenched into shapes reminiscent of gas masks. There are no important works in the show. Yet it remains intensely memorable. Why? The easy answer is to say: because Picasso is a great artist – because he can set a model car in clay and somehow make it convincing as a head of an ape – because he can draw a goat's skull (No 20) with such finesse that one can feel every twist and turn worn away by the muscles. But to answer like that is to beg the question. It doesn't explain why the scrappiest work by Picasso is so disproportionately compelling, or why all his work is so much more immediately arresting than that of, say Matisse or Léger who in the long run will probably be seen to possess equal or even greater genius as painters. Those who petulantly and sceptically say 'You only admire it because it's been done by Picasso,' are in a way quite right. In front of Picasso's work one pays tribute above all to his personal spirit. The old argument about his political opinions on one hand and his art on the other is quite false. As Picasso himself admits, he has, as an artist, discovered nothing. What makes him great are not his individual works but his existence, his personality. That may sound obscure and perverse, but less so, I think, if one inquires further into the nature of his personality. Picasso is essentially an improviser. And if the word improvisation conjures up amongst other things, associations of the clown and the mimic – they also apply. Living through a period of colossal confusion in which so many values both human and cultural have disintegrated, Picasso has seized upon the bits, the fragments, the smithereens, and with magnificent defiance and vitality made something of them to amuse us, shock us, but primarily to demonstrate to us by the example of his spirit that within the confusion, out of the debris, new ideas, new values, new ways of looking at the world can and will develop. His achievement is not that he himself has developed these things, but that he has always been irrepressible, has never been at a loss. The romanticism of Toulouse-Lautrec, the classicism of Ingres, the crude energy of Negro sculpture, the heart searchings of Cézanne towards the truth about structure, the exposures of Freud – all these he has recognised, welcomed, pushed to bizarre conclusions, improvised on, sung through, in order to make us recognise our contemporary environment, in order (and here his role is very much like that of a clown) to make us recognise ourselves in the parody of a distorting mirror. In Guernica the parody was tragic; there, angrily and passionately, he improvised with the bits left over from a massacre: as in other paintings, also tragically, he improvises with features and limbs dislocated and made fragmentary by the dilemmas of our time. But the process, the way he works – not by sustained creative research but by picking up whatever is in front of him and turning it to account, the account of human ingenuity – is always the same. Even when as now he makes a bird from the scrap metal found in some cupboard. Obviously this shorthand view of Picasso oversimplifies, but it does, I think, answer the questions I began by asking. And also goes some way to explaining other facts about him: the element of caricature in all his work; the extraordinary confidence behind every mark he makes – it is the confidence of the born performer; the failure of all his disciples – if he were a profoundly constructive artist this would not be so; the amazing multiplicity of his styles; the sense that, by comparison with any other great artist, any single work by Picasso seems unfinished; the truth behind many of his enigmatic statements: 'In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing!' 'To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all!' Or, 'when I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The conclusions one can draw are these: that it is Picasso's simple and incredible vitality that is his secret – and here it is significant that I of all his works it is those that deal with animals that are most complete and profound in sympathy; that to future generations our estimate of Picasso, judged on the evidence of his works themselves, will seem exaggerated; and that we are absolutely right to hold this exaggerated view because it is the present existence of this spirit that we celebrate. [Further reading: From the archive: Empty rhetoric] Related
