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Times
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- 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,
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Muscle-flexing or urgent threat?' How Trump's assault on culture echoes the Nazis targeting ‘degenerate art'
Donald Trump has unveiled a new portrait of himself and it's the most autocratic yet. A painted version of his fist-pumping stance after being shot in July 2024 now greets visitors in the entrance hall of the White House. This 'Fight, fight, fight!' canvas is true strongman art. It is just the latest in a series of artistic moves by Trump that look disturbingly tyrannical. When he complained that a portrait of himself in the Colorado State Capitol building was 'purposefully distorted' it was taken down as quickly as if the US were Stalin's Soviet Union. And he has ordered JD Vance to purge the Smithsonian museums of 'improper ideology'. But how seriously should any of this be taken? Is it an urgent threat to democracy and culture or mere muscle-flexing? A show currently in Paris offers a troubling historical perspective on Trump's art antics. 'Degenerate' Art: The Trial of Modern Art Under Nazism, at the Musée Picasso, takes you back to the age of the dictators when totalitarian regimes sought to control art absolutely and use it to their own ends. I wasn't keen to plunge into Nazi cultural history after the sunny pleasures of David Hockney's epic retrospective, but I was politely dragged along. The chill was instant. The show opens with fragments of sculpture displayed like archaeological relics – which is what they are. In 2010, archaeologists in Berlin excavating land cleared for a new underground line discovered not Roman coins or a medieval plague pit but remains of modernist artworks confiscated by the Nazis, branded 'degenerate art' and dumped in a store that had been bombed in an air raid in 1944. The most compelling fragment, by the expressionist sculptor Emy Roeder, is the head of a primitive angelic being, severed at the shoulders. It's a reminder of the fate of modernist art in German museums in the 1930s. Much of it was destroyed or lost, but not all. In 1937, more than 700 works of modern art went on display in Munich in the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in order to be held up to ridicule and contempt. Afterwards, those with the most market appeal were sold abroad to benefit the Reich. At the Musée Picasso, some of these masterpieces have been reunited, borrowed from the collections where they ended up. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's 1913 painting Street, Berlin has come from MoMA in New York. Its purple and black energy lifts you, as Kirchner depicts edgy, eroticised city life on the eve of the first world war, with two women parading past a crowd of sexually intimidated men. Kirchner's painting was condemned for its attack on classical order and harmony, its jagged planes and purposeful distortions. Metropolis is another riotous vision, as the artist George Grosz equates artistic and political revolution. These and other 'degenerate' works were contrasted with the 'healthy' Nazi art that was also unveiled in the same city in 1937 in a simultaneous exhibition called Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art). Hitler was in town to open it, and in the speech he gave, he defines degenerate art as the opposite of the Nazi athletic ideal that had been celebrated the previous summer by the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Rhetorically addressing the modernists, he tells them they just don't get it with their primitivist art that looks like it comes from the stone age. They don't see the beauty of Nazi man; degenerate Art, according to Hitler, portrayed 'degenerate' people. It depicts, he claimed, 'deformed cripples and cretins, women who can only have a repulsive effect, men who are closer to animals than humans, children who, if they had to live this way, would have to be seen as the veritable curse of God!' Is Hitler's characterisation of modern art in any way recognisable? It took me a while to see why a Nazi may have been offended by Otto Dix's unflattering, vivid portrait of the artist Franz Radziwill. He poses formally holding a T-square, yet looks around vacantly with his bulging upside down pear of a face. Is this an example of the imperfect detritus of humanity? If so, it's just the tip the iceberg, for no artist so provocatively captured the freedom and experimentalism of the 1920s Weimar Republic. Dix's paintings of sex workers and sailors, circuses and sado-masochist brothels, positively embrace degeneracy. As for 'cripples', Dix, Grosz and other German dadaists after the first world war insisted on showing Germany the maimed bodies of its wounded veterans, begging on street corners or playing cards with artificial hands. In other words, the Nazi attack on modern art was really an attack on the attitudes embodied in the Weimar years of liberal hope, and on radical Weimar art that burst with sexual freedom and social compassion. It was a culture war. Marc Chagall's The Pinch of Snuff (Rabbi) is one of the most haunting works in the Paris show. Inspired by a Yiddish tale of how a snuff addiction led to a rabbi's demonic temptation, it was bought by Mannheim's Kunsthalle in 1928. It came under attack as early as 1933, when local Nazis put it on a poster telling people this was what their taxes were paying for. I look into the rabbi's eyes and see the lost world of Jewish eastern Europe that inspired Chagall, and which Nazi Germany would obliterate. In 1941, 16,000 Jews would be shot dead in Chagall's home city Vitebsk, in just one episode among many. Such colossal violence and murder has to make us a bit careful with comparisons between today's far right and nazism. Historians of the 20th century are still debating if today's populism is a type of fascism, but it's worth phrasing this another way: the Nazis were adept populists. Hitler was democratically elected in 1933 and the totalitarian regime he then built always claimed – and probably had – a populist mandate. Hitler boasted of a special connection with the 'true' German people, his base, and for whom he spoke. As for the culture war on modern art, more than a million people saw Chagall's rabbi and the other works in the Entartete Kunst show in just six weeks. L'art 'dégénéré', Musée Picasso, Paris, until 25 May.
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Picasso in Asia: At last, a Picasso exhibition that trusts people to think for themselves
More than 50 years after his death, the 20th century's most celebrated, prolific and daring artist continues to enchant and enrage us. This month, one of the most ambitious Picasso exhibitions in recent years opens at M+ Hong Kong's new mega gallery. Picasso for Asia – A Conversation features more than 60 works, most on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris – including some that have never travelled before – alongside work by Asian and Asian diaspora artists born between the 1860s and the 1990s. You might think there would be nothing left to say about Picasso. What sets this show apart is its breadth and rigour in revealing new complexities in the work of an artist who often makes western galleries and museums merely anxious. The aim of the 'conversation' format with Asian artists,, says co-curator Doryun Chong, is to show 'how artists relate to and critique one another across time and cultures'. But it is never easy to compete for attention with Picasso, who often outdoes the others on show in skill and nuance. Picasso's sophisticated cubist works, including Woman's Head (1909) on loan from Museo Sofia in Madrid, are hung alongside Gunpowder Drawing No 8-A5, a 1988 piece by Cai Guo-Qiang for which the Fujian artist literally blew up the canvas. Many more major pieces span his long life: the loving, stripped-down oil portrait of his father, painted in 1895 when Picasso was 16. Most affecting are three from the artist's final years: Couple (1970-71), The Old Man (1970) and The Matador (1970) – all painted with such urgency and scale he seems to be trying to outrun death. The show ends with a delightful installation that allows us to paint along with an elderly Picasso on digital screens as he draws flowers and animals with brief brushstrokes in films running on huge screens. The star of this show reveals itself at the end. In Massacre in Korea, a painting the quick-handed Picasso started and finished in a single day in January 1951, an armoured, masked firing squad takes aim at a group of naked women and children. All Picasso's attention is on the victims' faces and how each responds in startlingly different ways: anguished, serene, bewildered, detached. Like Guernica, this is far from propaganda; here, at least, Picasso treats women subjected to violence as complex, sympathetic and deeply human. Picasso, then 69, painted his only work on an Asian theme from his home in France – a scene from a proxy war between superpowers that had broken out seven months earlier, when the armies of Soviet-backed North Korea invaded the US-backed South Korea. By then, Picasso was a socialist, anti-war and anti-Fascist. Contrast that Picasso with the man reflected in a room elsewhere, in which the curators deal with Picasso's misogyny and sometimes violent treatment of the women with whom he was involved. Here, Picasso's portraits of Maris-Thérèse Walter, Dora Marr, Nusch Eluard and what is likely a sculptural portrait of Françoise Gilot are positioned opposite a film by British-Asian artist Nalini Malani, about a woman murdered by her lover who comes back to life to clean up the bloody mess. 'We know now about his violent temper and so we say it clearly,' says Chong. But Chong adds that Picasso is less divisive in Hong Kong, where audiences are 'not as familiar' with his work. (Chong says he tested the room's format with young women on the gallery's staff.) Making the point and moving on is one way to deal with Picasso's misogyny – albeit briefly. But at least Chong and co-curator Francois Dareau credit us with the agency to absorb Picasso's contradictions. Unlike other recent, well-publicised Picasso exhibitions, most recently It's Pablo-matic, an embarrassingly overwrought and overbearing 2023 show at the Brooklyn Museum curated by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, with a title that one critic wrote was 'so silly I can't even type it'. Picasso's misogyny is indisputable, and this show will likely enrage some people. But in a febrile debate, it's encouraging to find a cool-headed curatorial approach to the artist's faults and contradictions, and curators with the confidence to trust an audience to think critically – for themselves.
Euronews
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
'Degenerate art' denounced by Nazis goes on show in Paris
A new exhibition on the 'degenerate' art disavowed by the Nazis has opened in Paris. 'L'art dégénéré' is now on at the Musée Picasso in Paris and is the first show in France dedicated to the art which came under attack during the Nazi regime. At the forefront of the expo is an examination of the 'Entartete Kunst' (degenerate art) exhibition that ran in Munich in 1937 showing more than 600 works by artists persecuted by the Nazis. 'Entartete Kunst' was designed to disgust the German public at the output of artists from backgrounds rejected by the fascist state, such as Jews, Bolsheviks and homosexuals. Many of the artists included in the exhibition are now considered crucial avant-garde members of modern art such as Otto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The 1937 show was the culmination of a series of exhibitions promoted by the Nazi state to 'purge' the degenerate art that was a threat to German 'purity'. It followed exhibitions in Dresden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe and others across Germany that ran from the party's election in 1933. As part of the German government's sweep, over 20,000 works of art from artists including Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso were withdrawn, sold or destroyed. 'L'art dégénéré' runs at the Musée Picasso from 18 February to 25 May and features many of the works targeted during the era. It examines the way fascist governments persecute people through art and targeting artists. Other artists featured in the exhibition include George Grosz, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka. There's also a section dedicated to the persecution of Jewish artists by the Nazi regime, focused around two paintings from Jewish French-Russian artist Marc Chagall. It's the first time a French museum has dedicated an exhibition to the art branded degenerate by the Nazis aside from a small exhibition by the Goethe Institut in 1989. Other countries have run similar exhibitions in the past, including a major Berlin retrospective in 1992. Some of the artworks on display were thought to have been lost forever during the war. Sculptures by German sculptor Emy Roeder that were found during a 2010 archaeological dig in Berlin are on show. Other works catalogue the journey through the war, from ownership by Jewish art patrons to their theft by the Nazis and eventual return to the original owner's descendants. 'La Prise (Rabbin)', a painting by Chagall which takes its title from a short story by Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz was acquired by the Kunsthalle of Mannheim in 1928. As both the painter and the painting's subject embodied Jewish culture, the work was paraded through Mannheim's streets in 1933 with the message 'You who pay taxes, you should know where your money is spent' before it was shown in the 1937 'Degenerate Art' exhibition. There are also letters from artists like Dix throughout the exhibition that paint a picture of life as an artist during the Nazi era. It also tells the stories of the artists persecuted by the regime. As the exhibition debuts in Paris, the exhibition is a powerful historical document of how fascist regimes persecute culture through its art. 'L'art dégénéré' runs at the Musée Picasso Paris until 25 May.
