Pablo Picasso, Bathers at the Beach Hut. 19 May 1929, Musee Picasso, Paris, © Succession Picasso / DACS, 2011, © RMN / René-Gabriel Ojéda.

Francis Bacon, Crucifixion, 1933, Courtesy Murderme, © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS. 2011.

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Man, 1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York, © Succession Picasso / DACS 2011.

Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925, Tate © Succession Picasso/DACS 2011.

Tate Britain
Millbank
+ 020 7887 8888
London
Picasso and Modern British Art
February 15-July 15, 2012

Picasso and Modern British Art, the first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain, examines Picasso’s evolving critical reputation and British artists’ responses to his work. The exhibition explores Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.

Pablo Picasso originated many of the most significant developments of 20th-century art. This exhibition examines his enormous impact on British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. It will be presented in an essentially chronological order, with rooms documenting the exhibiting and collecting of Picasso’s art in Britain alternating with those showcasing individual British artists’ responses to his work. Picasso and Modern British Art comprises over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso.

Picasso and Modern British Art includes key Cubist works such as Head of a Man with Moustache, 1912 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) which was seen in Britain before the First World War, when Cubism was first introduced to a British public through Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. It will also include Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet, 1911-12 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) and Weeping Woman, 1937 (Tate), works which were acquired by the two most notable British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, both of whom were to become intimately associated with the artist and his reputation.

While many British artists have responded to Picasso’s influence, those represented in this exhibition have been selected to illustrate both the variety and vitality of these responses over a period of more than seventy years. This is a rare opportunity to see such work alongside those works by Picasso that, in many cases, are documented as having made a particular impact on the artist concerned; in other cases, they have been chosen as excellent examples of a stylistic affinity between Picasso and the relevant British artist. For example, David Hockney is said to have visited Picasso’s major Tate exhibition (1960) eight times, starting a life-long obsession with the artist. A selection of various Hockney homages to Picasso will be shown. In addition Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate) will be compared with Picasso’s paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard which first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously.

The exhibition looks at the time Picasso spent in London in 1919 when he worked on the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s production of The Three-Cornered Hat. It will assess the significance of his political status in Britain, from the Guernica tour in 1938-9 to the artist’s appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section will also consider the artist’s post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by the 1945-6 V&A exhibition which re-ignited many of the fierce debates about modern art that first raged before the First World War, to the phenomenally successful survey of his career at the Tate in 1960.

After Tate Britain, the exhibition will tour to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Picasso and Modern British Art is devised by James Beechey with additional contributions from Professor Christopher Green (Courtauld) and Richard Humphreys. It is curated at Tate Britain by Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain, assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain.

Pablo Picasso, The Source, 1921, © Succession Picasso/DACS 2011, Image courtesy Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Mandolin, 1924, © Succession Picasso / DACS 2011 © Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), The Tauromachia, 1934, 296 x 237 mm.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Blind Minotauer Guided Through a Starry Night by a Girl with a Pigeon, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, 1934.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Dream and Lie of Franco 1, 1936-39.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Still Life with Fruit Bowl, 1909.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Man Unveiling a Woman, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, 1931.

Statens Museum for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
+45 3374 8494
Copenhagen
Picasso. Tales from the Labyrinth
October 16, 2010-February 27, 2011

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is a true beacon towering up above the occasionally confusing flow of new departures and clean breaks that characterise the art scene of the first half of the 20th century. More than any other artist, Picasso would reinvent his artistic mode of expression over and over again. Experimentation became his life’s work, and his immense, far-ranging body of work testifies to an artist with a rare ability to appropriate new movements while translating them into an idiom that was unmistakably his own.

The Royal Collection of Graphic Art’s new exhibitions offers a chronological sequence of important works from some of the most important periods within Picasso’s oeuvre. Right from his early production from the dawn of the 20th century with their social and symbolist undertones and his Cubist breakthrough around 1910 through his fascination with Classicism and subsequent loose affiliation with the Surrealist movement, and further onwards to his emerging political commitments in the 1930s and his cleaner, more stringent formal language just after World War II.

The exhibition paints a picture of Picasso as an intrepid innovator. Most of all, it shows that Picasso’s endeavours within the realms of graphics and drawing are most certainly on a par with e.g. his paintings in terms of originality and sheer craftsmanship.

A central feature of the exhibition is the famous Vollard Suite (1930-37), which Picasso created at a time when he was flirting with Surrealism and its concepts of art unfettered by reason. The exhibition shows 38 of the total of 100 prints in the series, summing up recurring themes within Picasso’s art. These include his predilection for Ancient art and mythology, which in the series are fused with bullfighting scenes and other favourite subjects of Picasso’s in a lush, surreal jumble of imagery. At the same time, the Vollard Suite’s disorienting and labyrinthine sequence of images points to Picasso’s lasting interest in the concept of time.

The exhibition takes its starting point in the most recent research conducted on Picasso’s art on paper. This research indicates that political aspects influenced Picasso’s artistic mode of expression as far back as the late 1920s. At that point his fascination with Classicism began to cool as it became a favourite among totalitarian political movements in Europe. More explicit political statements are made in the two prints Dream and Lie of Franco (1936-39), which is also featured in the exhibition. Employing a cartoon-like, overtly satirical style Picasso depicts General Franco as a comical knight, a modern-day Don Quixote riding a pig.

In connection with the exhibition the National Gallery of Denmark has published the catalogue Picasso. Tales from the Labyrinth. Essay by Thomas Lederballe and foreword by Karsten Ohrt. 64 pages, richly illustrated. Danish with English translation. Price: DKK 68. Available from the Gallery bookshop. ISBN: 978-87-92023-48-3.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Dream and Lie of Franco 2, 1936-39.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Les banderilles, 1960.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Buste d'homme, 1905.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), At the Lapin Agile, 1905, Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 100.3 cm, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1992, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002 (1992.391), © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Dora Maar in an Armchair, 1939, Oil on canvas, 73.3 x 60.3 cm, The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 1998, Accession Number, 1998.23, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Self Portrait: 'Yo Picasso', Paris, spring 1901, Oil on canvasm 73.5 x 60.5 cm, Private collection, Zervos XXI, 192.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Gertrude Stein, 1905-6, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106), © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Woman in White, 1923, Oil, water-based paint, and crayon on canvas, 99.1 x 80 cm, Rogers Fund, 1951; acquired from The Museum of Modern Art, Lillie P. Bliss Collection (53.140.4), © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
212-535-7710
New York
Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
April 27-August 1, 2010

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibition of 250 works by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), presents an unprecedented opportunity to view the Met's collection of the artist's work. This first exhibition to focus exclusively on works by Picasso in the collection reveals the Museum's holdings of the artist's paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics — never before seen in their entirety — as well as a significant selection of his prints.

The exhibition encompasses key subjects that variously sustained the artist's interest: pensive harlequins of his Blue and Rose periods, faceted figures and tabletop still lifes of his Cubist years, monumental heads and classicized bathers of the 1920s, raging bulls and dreaming nudes of the 1930s, and rakish musketeers of his final years. Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art features 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics, and a representative selection of prints (150 from a total of 400), all acquired by the Museum over the past 60 years. The exhibition includes many works on paper by Picasso that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before at the Metropolitan.

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art continues the Museum's tradition of organizing major exhibitions that bring to light its impressive collection of works by a singular artist or period of particular importance, such as Goya in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1995); Toulouse-Lautrec in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996); John Singer Sargent Beyond the Portrait Studio: Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolors from the Collection (2000); Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic (2002); and The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007-8).

The collection reflects the breadth of Picasso's genius as it asserted itself over the course of his long and influential career. The works range in date from a dashing self-portrait of 1900 (Self-Portrait "Yo") by the 19-year-old Spaniard to the fanciful Standing Nude and Seated Musketeer (1968), created when the artist was 87.

Picasso's iconic portrait of Gertrude Stein from 1906 — a bequest of the writer herself in 1946 — was the first painting by Picasso to be acquired by the Metropolitan. Over the next six decades, the holdings were shaped by a succession of purchases and gifts from more than 25 donors, among them other pioneering champions of modernism, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Scofield Thayer, and such illustrious collectors as Florene M. Schoenborn, Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, and Jacques and Natasha Gelman.

The collection is notable for its remarkable constellation of early figure paintings, which also include: Seated Harlequin (1901), from the beginning of his Blue period; At the Lapin Agile• (1905), in which the artist depicts himself dressed as a melancholy harlequin; and a self-portrait from 1906 that reflects Picasso's encounters with African and Iberian sculpture. Among the many other celebrated paintings in the exhibition are Woman in White (1923), The Dreamer (1932), and Dora Maar in an Armchair (1939).

The Metropolitan's collection of Picasso's works also stands apart for its exceptional cache of drawings, which remain relatively little known, despite their importance and number. Examples of the numerous compelling drawings in the exhibition are: Standing Female Nude (1910), one of the key works shown in Picasso's first U.S. exhibition, at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1911; and Head of a Woman (1922), a powerful chalk drawing from his Neoclassical period, which lasted from 1918 to 1925.

In preparation for this exhibition, all of Picasso's works in the collection have been studied closely, and many were conserved to reveal the artist's intentions or to restore their physical integrity. The exhibition will disclose a number of exciting discoveries made during the conservation process.

Complementing the presentation of the artist's works will be photographs of Picasso by Man Ray, Brassaï, and others, also drawn from the Museum's collection.

The exhibition is organized by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman, with Susan Alyson Stein, Curator, both of the Metropolitan's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of the Metropolitan's collection of works by Picasso. This illuminating publication has been prepared by members of the Museum's curatorial and conservation staff under the direction of Gary Tinterow, who edited the catalogue and wrote the introduction. A Picasso scholar, Mr. Tinterow is known for his highly acclaimed exhibitions and publications Master Drawings by Picasso, The Essential Cubism, Juan Gris: A Retrospective, and Picasso Classico.

The catalogue provides insightful entries for nearly 100 works by Picasso, furnishing the latest technical and documentary findings, along with full records of the provenance, exhibition history, and references. The 350-page catalogue also features 600 illustrations; an overview of the history of the collection; and an illustrated checklist of the entire collection of prints by Picasso, which number more than 400. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press and will be available in the Museum's bookshops ($60 hardcover, $35 paperback).

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Seated Harlequin, 1901, Oil on canvas, lined and mounted to a sheet of pressed cork, 83.2 x 61.3 cm, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. John L. Loeb Gift, 1960, © 2003 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Standing Female Nude, 1910, Charcoal on paper, 48.3 x 31.4 cm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (49.70.34), © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), The Dreamer, 1932, Oil on canvas, 101.3 x 93.3cm), The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 1997, Accession Number
1997.149.4, Rights and Reproduction, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Minotauromachy. 1935, Etching and engraving, Plate: 49.6 x 69.6 cm, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Bull, state VII, variant. 1945, Lithograph, Composition: 30.5 x 44.4cm, Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Picador. 1959, Linoleum cut, Composition: 52.9 x 64 cm, David S. Orentreich Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Picador, 1959, Linoleum cut, Composition: 53.1 x 64.2 cm, General Print Fund and Riva Castleman Endowment Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Profile of Jacqueline With a Scarf. 1955, Linoleum cut, Composition: 55.2 x 50.2 cm, Acquired through the generosity of Mrs. Edmond J. Safra and the General Print Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Sculpture. Head of Marie-Thérèse, 1933, Drypoint, Plate: 31.8 x 22.8 cm, Gift of the Associates of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Paul J. Sachs Prints
and Illustrated Books Galleries, second floor
Picasso: Themes and Variations
March 28-September 6, 2010

Pablo Picasso’s insatiable curiosity and tireless urge to create art often led him to mediums beyond painting. He fully explored sculpture and drawing, as well as printmaking and ceramics. This exhibition looks at Picasso’s engagement with printmaking over the course of his long career, and the ways it fostered his creativity by encouraging a thematic approach to his subjects and by allowing for constant experimentation.

The Museum of Modern Art presents Picasso: Themes and Variations, an exhibition exploring Pablo Picasso’s creative process through the medium of printmaking, from March 28 to September 6, 2010. It features approximately 100 works from the Museum’s superlative collection of the artist’s prints. The exhibition is organized by Deborah Wye, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art.

As a young artist, Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) bought a small printing press, and prints became part of the ongoing development of his work. His first series of etchings and drypoints was devoted to themes of the Blue and Rose periods. Examples include Frugal Repast (1904), a well-known scene of a destitute couple at a sparsely-filled dining table. Others depict itinerant circus performers known as saltimbanques. As Picasso went on to forge his Cubist style, he made prints intermittently, cross-fertilizing related drawings and paintings. One series of his abstracted images was conceived in 1910 to illustrate St. Matorel, a book by poet Max Jacob, who was among his closest friends during the first years in Paris.

While prints played a small but continuing role in Picasso’s early work, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, he became truly engaged in the medium, and remained so for the rest of his life. It was at that time that he grasped the narrative potential in his printmaking. He enjoyed propping up his copperplates and conjuring up compositions that led his invented characters from one scene to another. Later he would call this manner of printmaking his own way of “writing fiction.”

Picasso created tales of the Minotaur, of fauns and satyrs, and of bullfighting. In Minotauromachy (1935), he combined the Minotaur myth and the violence of the bullfight in a highly symbolic, enigmatic scene that is considered a milestone of modern printmaking. Especially under the influence of Surrealism, such motifs became entangled with events in Picasso’s personal life, particularly those involving his relationships with women. These entanglements are also a factor in other themes he explored, from scenes of the artist in the studio, to portrayals of sexual aggression, to tableaux in which one figure watches the other sleep.

Picasso’s focus on the women in his life also involved portraiture. Each time he became involved with a new woman, he absorbed her features into his artistic vocabulary, depicting her over time in a manner reflecting his own changing moods. The exhibition includes a range of prints inspired by these women, from the 1905 Head of Woman, which portrays Madeleine, a lover known only by her first name, to a late series of linoleum cuts presenting a complex and evolving portrait of Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s second wife and companion until his death in 1973. Also included are the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose face constitutes a mysterious presence; Picasso’s first wife, Olga, whose stirring portrait, which was recently acquired, exemplifies her role as muse of the Neo-Classical period; the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who served as model for the monumental Weeping Woman of 1937; and Francoise Gilot, the aspiring painter who spent the postwar years with the artist, and whose likeness evolves over time to show Picasso’s changing relationship to her.

Picasso continued making prints with great enthusiasm until the last years of his life. During seven months in 1968, he created Suite 347, named for the number of prints it contains. It represents an intense period of printmaking in a range of etching techniques, exploring a variety of themes. Among the subjects is the artist’s reflection back on his long life, with figures of varying scale in compositions filled with spatial disparities that suggest a flood of memories.

The master printers with whom Picasso worked provided not only technical expertise, but also stimulating collaborative partnerships. Roger Lacourière tutored him in intaglio techniques (etching, drypoint, engraving, and aquatint) in the early 1930s, as he reached a new level of complexity in such prints as Faun Unveiling a Sleeping Girl (1936). Fernand Mourlot championed Picasso’s work in lithography after World War II. The printers at Mourlot’s shop in Paris fostered Picasso’s seemingly endless experimentation with developing images, like those in the Bull series, which begins with a naturalistic rendering and ends with a few simple lines. In linoleum cut, Hidalgo Arnéra spurred Picasso on at his workshop in the South of France in the 1950s and 1960s. Picasso created masterworks like Portrait of a Young Girl in this medium, which until then had been considered secondary. Finally, in his last years, Picasso collaborated with Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who set up an etching workshop near his residence in the Mougins to accommodate his demanding schedule.

A Picasso Portfolio: Prints from The Museum of Modern Art, by Deborah Wye, was published to accompany the exhibition and celebrate the Museum’s collection of Picasso’s prints. It explores the artist’s printed work through large-scale illustrations, each with an accompanying short text. The works are presented roughly chronologically, but also organized into 17 thematic sections, each with an introductory text. A general essay, chronology, bibliography, checklist, and index complete the volume. Hardcover; 9 x 10-1⁄2”; 200 pp; 168 color illustrations. $40.00.

Pablo Picasso, Frugal Repast, 1904, Etching, Plate: 46.2 x 37.8 cm, Gift of Thomas T. Solley with Mary Ellen Meehan, and purchase through the Vincent d'Aquila and Harry Soviak Bequest, and with contributions from Lily Auchincloss, The Associates Fund, The Philip and Lynn Straus Foundation Fund, and John S. Newberry (by exchange), © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Egyptian. 1953, Aquatint, Plate: 83.1 x 47.1 cm, Gift of Porter McCray, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Bull, state IV, 1945, Lithograph, Composition: 31.4 x 48 cm, Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman Fund, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pablo Picasso, Reclining Nude, 1969, Private Collection, © photo Orlando Faria 2008 / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

Pablo Picasso, Meninas after Velasquez, 1957, Oil on canvas, 194 x 260 cm, Museu Picasso de Barcelona (MPB 70.433), © Museu Picasso de Barcelona / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d'Alger, 1955, European Private Collection, © Photo courtesy of Libby Howie / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

Pablo Picasso, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, after Manet, 1961, Musée Picasso, Paris (MP216), © RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de Jaime Sabartès en Grand Espagne, 1939, Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm, Museu Picasso de Barcelona (MPB 70.241), © Museu Picasso de Barcelona / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
44-020 7747 2885
London
Sainsbury Wing
Picasso: Challenging the Past
February 25-June 7, 2009

“Disciples be damned... It's only the masters that matter. Those who create...”

— Pablo Picasso

The National Gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to Pablo Picasso reveals how the greatest artist of the 20th century pitted himself against the great European painting tradition.

Seizing on the signature themes, techniques and artistic concerns of painters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt and Cézanne, Picasso transformed the art of the past into "something else entirely," creating audacious paintings of his own. Sometimes his ‘quotations’ from the past were direct, at other times more allusive and, occasionally, full of parody and irreverence.

Picasso: Challenging the Past features over 60 of the artist’s seminal works and focuses on the enduring themes of European art history and his own career, with sections on the self portrait, characters and types, the nude, still life, models and muses and the artist’s later "Variations." Every major period of Picasso’s oeuvre is represented with loans from among the leading public and private collections of Europe and North America.

Picasso’s complex self portraits attest to his deep fascination with a genre tackled by many of the artists he admired most. In Self Portrait with a Wig, 1897 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona), the 16-year-old depicts himself as an 18th-century gentleman, manipulating his appearance, challenging the Old Masters but also paying tribute to Goya and Rembrandt. Later in life, The Artist in front of his Canvas, 1938 (Musée National Picasso, Paris) shows the 57-year-old as the embodiment of the modern master, with palette and brushes in hand.

The artist’s close examination of portraits and genre paintings inspired a startling community of traditional male characters and "types" in his work. In his Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, 1939 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona) Picasso recasts his long-serving secretary, who had followed him from Barcelona, in the guise of a Spanish nobleman of the 16th century. In sharp contrast, the icon-like Child with a Dove, 1901 (on loan to the National Gallery from a private collection), harks back to traditional images of the Christ child, but in style it echoes Gauguin and Van Gogh.

An extraordinary painter of women, Picasso continually celebrated female beauty through the representation of the nude. The artist adapted the conventions of this well established genre to his own vocabulary and successive styles. Like Ingres, Picasso looked back to the purity and monumentality of the antique, but exaggerated and transformed it, as seen in his masterly Large Bather of 1921 (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris).

His late bold reclining nudes, such as Nu couché, 1969 (private collection) radically challenged a tradition which is strongly represented in the National Gallery by masterpieces such as Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus, 1647–51.

Meanwhile, the monumental Women at their Toilette, 1956 (Musée National Picasso, Paris) attests to the remarkable influence of Degas’s bathers, such as the National Gallery’s Combing the Hair of 1896.

A section on the artist’s arresting still lifes, including Skull with Jug, 1953 (Nahmad Collection, Switzerland), reveals a highly informed dialogue with artists like Chardin, Goya and Delacroix, as well as more contemporary figures, notably Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne. In the cubist Still Life with Glass and Lemon, 1910 (Cincinnati Art Museum), Picasso fragments form into a riot of intersecting planes, without ever losing sight of the tradition of still-life painting from which it is drawn.

The final room of the exhibition shows the climax of Picasso’s increasing obsession with art history. Late in life, he conceived a series of bold "Variations" after masterpieces of the 17th and 19th centuries. The young artist first saw Velázquez’s Las Meninas when he was 14. Over 75 years later, he completed a series of deeply personal interpretations of the same painting — three of which are to be displayed in London — including The Infanta Margarita, 1957 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona). Picasso’s most powerful tribute to Velázquez’s genius, Las Meninas (after Velázquez), 1957 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona) depicts the 17th-century Spanish artist towering over an astonishingly complex scene, with the authority of the ultimate master.

A group of four Variations after Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, painted between 1960 and 1961 (Musée National Picasso, Paris) provides another highlight of the exhibition. Now admired as a masterpiece, Manet’s original canvas outraged the 19th-century establishment. In transforming the painting for the modern age, Picasso shatters conventions once more.

The exhibition makes subtle reference back and forth between the works of Picasso and the National Gallery’s own incomparable collection of Old Master paintings, which is on display in the main rooms of the Gallery upstairs. Visitors to the exhibition will be invited to re examine the National Gallery’s collection, as it were, through the eyes of Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone, 1938, Musée Picasso, Paris(MP174), © RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

Rembrandt (1606-1669), Jupiter and Antiope, 1659, Etching, burin and drypoint, 140 x 20.6 cm, The British Museum, London (1910.0212.368), © British Museum Images.

Pablo Picasso, Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman (Jupiter and Antiope, after Rembrandt, from the Vollard Suite), 1936, etching and aquatint, 31.6 x 41.7 cm.

Pablo Picasso, Femme nue à la Source, 1962, Linocut, 52.8x63.8 cm, The British Museum, London (2000-5-21-3), © British Museum Images / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
44-020 7747 2885
London
Room 1
Picasso's Prints:
Challenging the Past
February 25-June 7, 2009

To coincide with the major Sainsbury Wing exhibition, Picasso: Challenging the Past, Room 1 hosts a display of 15 of the artists’ prints. All borrowed from British collections, they expand on the themes of the Sainsbury Wing exhibition, notably on Picasso’s "Variations," produced after masters such as Manet, David, Cranach and Rembrandt.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) had no formal training as a printmaker but even before he moved to Paris in 1904 he began to create prints. He would continue to utilise the medium throughout his career, with particular zeal in the 1930s and again during the final decade of his life. As with so much of his work, the often turbulent relationships of his private life permeate his graphic works. Themes of voyeurism — of men looking at women but also of Picasso looking at the past — are all central to the prints.

The artist’s technical variety and innovation is similarly striking: this exhibition alone includes etchings, drypoints, aquatints and linocuts. His working processes are illustrated through six working proofs for Femme Nue à la Source (1962, British Museum, London) displayed together for the first time in the context of Picasso’s printed oeuvre.

As a printmaker, Picasso responded to both prints and paintings by masters of the past. In the latter category are works that refer to French artists, such as Manet (Femme Nue à la Source) and David. He also produced variations on paintings by "Cranach the Elder and the Younger" (David and Bathsheba, 1947, British Museum, London and Portrait of a Woman after Cranach the Younger, 1958, Tate, London.)

By contrast are works that look to Degas’s monotypes and Rembrandt’s prints. The exhibition pairs Rembrandt’s etchings Christ Represented to the People (1655, British Museum, London) and Jupiter and Antiope (1659, British Museum, London) with two prints by Picasso for which they were the direct inspiration: Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman (1936, Tate, London) from Picasso’s Vollard Suite, and Ecce Homo: Le Théâtre de Picasso (1970, Tate, London).

With their echoes of much-admired pieces by Manet, David, Rembrandt and Cranach and the reference to Degas these remarkable prints elaborate on the themes treated in the main exhibition while showing Picasso’s extraordinary mastery of all print techniques from the traditional to the experimental.

Pablo Picasso, Big Head, 1962. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, Painter and knitting Model, 1927. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. © Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, September 8 1968 II, 1968. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, Salome, 1905. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. © Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

ARKEN
Skovvej 100
+45 43 54 02 22
Ishøj
Picasso & Women
September 27, 2008-
January 4, 2009

It is no secret that Picasso loved women — as models, muses, life companions and lovers. Picasso & Women includess 81 of the artist’s prints in the exhibition Picasso & Women. The light-sensitive (and therefore rarely exhibited) prints bring us close to Picasso as a man, a human being and an artist.

They are almost like pages from a diary, the 81 intimate Picasso prints in the new exhibition at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. We can follow to the very date his interests and shifting styles at the time – from frolicsome, wry Cubism to detailed, precise realism. From Greek antiquity to Freudian inspiration. Behind the many changing styles and idioms we recognize the artist’s and ladykiller’s succession of lovers, wives, models and muses. For all the works have been chosen on the basis of their subject: women.

The Erotic and Beyond. Here we have decided portraits of the women in Picasso’s life – easily recognizable or artistically distorted. But there are also book illustrations and depictions of situations between man and woman, between artist and model, between artist and viewer; often with Picasso as man and artist in disguised self-portraits – as a young boy, as a practicing artist or as the Minotaur he loved to identify with.

In the prints we experience Picasso at his most erotically unbridled. It is as if the partly unpredictable technical process and the often intimate formats open the floodgates for a special intimacy. His last series of prints tend towards the pornographic, but they are always about more than sexuality. For Picasso the erotic is inextricably bound up with the process of artistic creation; for example in 8 September 1968 II (from the series 347) from 1968, where we see Picasso amorously engaged with his model, brush and palette in hand.

The works in Picasso & Women are therefore also about art as such: about creating art, varying one’s artistic expression and looking at art. You can actually see that a new artistic period often arises when he meets a new woman.

Master of Technique. Picasso is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Picasso & Women shows that he was also a formidable printmaker. There are examples of all the most important printing techniques that he mastered: etching, drypoint, lithography, aquatint and linocut. He loved to experiment, and was extremely prolific. Like no one else, he romped through all techniques and styles, and invented new ones himself.

The exhibition extends over the whole of Picasso’s career as an artist and printmaker, with works from 1905 up to 1970. All the prints are on loan from the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Because of their extreme sensitivity to light they are very rarely exhibited.

Pablo Picasso, Faune Unveiling a Woman, 1936. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picasso-billedkunst.dk.

Gemeentemuseum
Stadhouderslaan 41
Den Haag
31-(0)70-3381111
Picasso in The Hague
December 15, 2007-March 30, 2008

If anyone deserves the epithet "artist of the twentieth century," that man is Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso in The Hague covers his entire career and reveals his untiring urge to experiment. The works on show include not only oil paintings, but sculpture, drawings, prints and ceramics. In addition, Roberto Otero’s photographs of the mediagenic artist provide insight into his turbulent life, in which work and private life were invariably closely intertwined.

The earliest item in the exhibition is a sketch Picasso made of his father in 1899, when he was 18. Other early drawings and paintings illustrate early years in Paris, when he was still in search of an individual style and taking his lead from French painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. The 1901 painting Café in Montmartre is a good example of his work during this period. The impressive 1904 etching The Frugal Repast was Picasso’s first print and is regarded as marking the end of his famous Blue Period.

His Cubist phase is represented by masterpieces, such as Girl with a Mandolin (1910), and his Classical Period, when his paintings contained references to classical antiquity, by large compositions like Harlequin with Folded Hands (1923). The period of the Spanish Civil War and World War II are likewise included. The monumental portrait Woman with an Artichoke (1942) and the View of Notre Dame (1945) are fine examples of his output at this time.

In his famous 100-print Vollard Suite (1930-1937), exhibited in its entirety, Picasso examines the relationship between the artist, the model and the final work of art. Is it the artist or the model who determines the visual image? Or is it the idea of the model that provides the catalyst for the creation of the image? The Vollard Suite is an ode both to one of Picasso’s mistresses, Marie Thérèse, and to art itself.

Among the sculptures on show are The Crane (1952), generally regarded as one of his greatest achievements in this field. At the height of his fame, Pablo Picasso suddenly threw himself into ceramics. The exhibition shows how he drew inspiration from classical antiquity, from mythology and from other cultures, and how he created — in a mere decade — an impressive ceramic oeuvre displaying the same themes as his paintings and drawings.

The main emphasis in the exhibition is on Picasso’s late works. The artist continued to work compulsively right up to his death in 1973 and his undiminished creativity in his final years will be demonstrated not only by large oils like Recumbent Nude with Bird or Musketeer and Cupid (1969), but also by a number of small, intimate pastels and felt pen drawings.

This exhibition is organised in partnership with Ludwig Museum in Cologne, where an exhibition called Mondrian in Cologne will be shown simultaneously. Picasso in The Hague is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue (published by Waanders)

Pablo Picasso, Oval platter with the portrait of a woman, 1953, Faience, engraved decoration on a black ground, 38 x 32 cm, Collection of the Ludwig Museum, c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam.

Roy Lichtenstein, Collage for Beach Scene with Starfish, 1995, Tape, painted and printed paper on board, Private collection, Photograph by Robert McKeever.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Bathers with Beach Ball, 1928, Oil on canvas, Private Collection.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Minotaur Moving His House, 1936, Oil on canvas,156 x 54.9 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris.

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and his Mother, c. 1926-36, Oil on canvas, 152 x 127 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Beach Ball III, 1977 Oil and Magna on canvas, 203.2 x 167.6 cm, Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Modern Art Foundation, Inc., © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Roy Lichtenstein, Femme au Chapeau, 1962, © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Woman in White, 1923, Oil on canvas, 39 x 31 1/2", Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1951; acquired from The Museum of Modern Art, Lillie P. Bliss Collection (53.140.4).

Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, ca. 1945, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles.

Jasper Johns, Summer, 1985, encaustic on canvas 75 x 50 in. (190.5 x 127 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson, 1998 © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, ca. 1940, Oil and charcoal on masonite, 137.3 x 91.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Albert M. Greenfield and Elizabeth M. Greenfield Collection, 1974 © 2006 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave.
Minneapolis
612-375-7600
Picasso and American Art
June 16-September 9, 2007

“Young painters should take up our researches in order to react clearly against us — the whole world is open before us, everything waiting to be done, not just redone.”

— Pablo Picasso, 1935

Picasso’s influence on American artistic production is one of the fundamental stories of 20th century art. He stimulated generations of practitioners to create innovative new work, under the sometimes anxious influence of an artist they perceived as a “master.” These contributions also include development of institutions that supported new thinking about contemporary art.

Picasso and American Art, organized by Whitney Museum of American Art, examines the fundamental role that Picasso played in the development of American art over the past century, juxtaposing his work with that of groundbreaking American artists, inspired or influenced by his example. The exhibition features nearly 30 works by Picasso as well as a wide-ranging display of works by nine American artists: Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. Each is represented by about 10 artworks spanning their careers. In addition, works by Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Louise Bourgeois, Jan Matulka, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg, among others, are also on view. The selection of American artists was determined in part by the decision to focus only on artists who addressed Picasso’s art before his death in 1973. Picasso and American Art is curated by Michael FitzGerald, Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Trinity College, Connecticut, in association with Dana Miller, Associate Curator at the Whitney.

Though Picasso never set foot in America, many of the continent’s most significant artists saw him as centripetal to modern art and defined their achievements through by his example. Picasso and American Art places artworks by Picasso near related ones by Americans in order to allow visitors to see how artists here absorbed, critiqued, or occasionally rejected Picasso’s example as they created their own significant contributions to modern art.

The majority of the approximately 140 objects in the Walker’s presentation of the exhibition will be paintings and drawings. A small number of sculptures also will be featured. Among the Picasso works on view will be two from the Walker’s collection and two on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Works in Picasso and American Art that have never before been exhibited publicly in this country include Picasso’s Still Life (1908), Louise Bourgeois’ Untitled (1940) and Untitled (1941), Jasper Johns’ painting After Picasso (1998), as well as several drawings and studies that Johns is lending. Many of the essential Picassos are coming from foreign collections and will give U.S. audiences exposure to significant works that have not been seen in this country for decades. Among these are Picasso’s Bar-Table with Musical Instruments and Fruit Bowl (c. 1913), Still Life with Bunch of Grapes (1914), and Minotaur Moving (1936).

A few of the artworks by Picasso that are coming from overseas for the exhibition may be familiar to those who attended the Walker’s 1980 exhibition Picasso from the Musée Picasso, Paris, in which these works traveled to the United States for the first time. The popular exhibition consisted of over 150 artworks given by the Picasso estate to the French government in lieu of death duties. After leaving the Walker, many of the pieces were shown in New York City as part of Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Works such as Head of Fernande (1909), Figure (1928), and The Shadow (1953) were featured in the 1980 exhibition.

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was christened with the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, Maria de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad.

Picasso's father was Jose Ruíz, a painter whose specialty was the naturalistic depiction of birds and who for most of his life was also a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first word was "piz," a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil.[3] It was from his father that Picasso had his first formal academic art training, such as figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended art schools throughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college-level course of study at the Academy of Arts (Academia de San Fernando) in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.

After studying art in Madrid, he made his first trip to Paris in 1900, the art capital of Europe. In Paris, he lived with Max Jacob (journalist and poet), who helped him learn French. Max slept at night and Picasso slept during the day as he worked at night. There were times of severe poverty, cold and desperation. Much of his work had to be burned to keep the small room warm. In 1901, with his friend Soler, he founded the magazine Arte Joven in Madrid. The first edition was entirely illustrated by him. From that day, he started to simply sign his work Picasso, while before he signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. In the early years of the twentieth century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, divided his time between Barcelona and Paris, where in 1904, he began a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier. It is she who appears in many of the Rose period paintings. After acquiring fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom Picasso called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, and writer Gertrude Stein. He maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.

In 1918 Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. In 1927 Picasso met 17 year old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia, with her. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death.

The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Françoise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Unique among Picasso's women, Gilot left Picasso in 1953, allegedly because of abusive treatment and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso.

He went through a difficult period after Gilot's departure, coming to terms with his advancing age and his perception that, now in his 70s, he was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl, including several from a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who in June 2005 auctioned off the drawings Picasso made of her.

Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. Roque worked at the Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso's life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Gilot. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With his encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children's rights. Picasso then secretly married Roque after Gilot had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him.

Picasso had constructed a huge gothic structure and could afford large villas in the south of France, at Notre-dame-de-vie on the outskirts of Mougins, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. He was a celebrity and there was often as much interest in his personal life as his art.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso had a film career, including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus. Picasso always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more." He was buried at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhône. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.

Picasso remained neutral during World War I, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. Picasso never commented on this but encouraged the idea that it was because he was a pacifist. Some of his contemporaries (including Braque) felt that this neutrality was more out of cowardice than principle. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against invading Germans in either world war. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to the country to join either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemned Franco and the Fascists in his art he did not take up arms against them. He also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite being generally supportive and friendly with activists. No movement compelled his support to a great degree, though he did join the Communist Party.

During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris when the Germans occupied the city. The Nazis hated his style of painting, so he was not able to show his works during this time. Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint all the while. Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French resistance.

In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Communist politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. His beliefs tended towards anarcho-communism.

Picasso's work is often categorized into "periods". While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1905-1907), the African-influenced Period (1908-1909), Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919).

In 1939-40 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major and highly successful retrospective of his principal works up until that time. This exhibition lionized the artist, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.

Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings. During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away; by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun. The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."

In 1897 his realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899-1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favorite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.

Picasso's Blue Period (1901-1904) consists of somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. This period's starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter — prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie, painted in 1903 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904), which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in The Blindman's Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other frequent subjects are artists, acrobats and harlequins. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso.

The Rose Period (1905-1907) is characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colors, and again featuring many harlequins. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in Paris in 1904, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting.

In the period following the upheaval of World War I Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This "return to order" is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, and the artists of the New Objectivity movement. Picasso's paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Ingres.

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a motif which he used often in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and appears in Picasso's Guernica.

Arguably Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica, Spain — Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Guernica hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981 Guernica was returned to Spain and exhibited at the Casón del Buen Retiro. In 1992 the painting hung in Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. In the 1950s Picasso's style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velazquez's painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works of art by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

Picasso's final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper, called them "the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man". Only later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.

At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he didn't need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

Jackson Pollack, The Water Bull, ca. 1946, Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 215.6 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, © 2006 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.