The New Republic: Books &
Arts
06/09/11
A New Exhibit Reveals Picasso at a Rare Moment of Symmetry and Stability Jed Perl
Among the many mysteries of Picasso’s
distorted anatomies is how often they strike us as anything but distorted. When
Picasso takes one of his great flights of physiognomical fantasy, the face can
become an enchanted erotic arabesque, as inevitable as it is unpredictable. I am
thinking particularly of a 1937 portrait of Picasso’s lover, Marie-Thérèse
Walter, crowned with a wreath of flowers, one of the treasures in “Picasso and
Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour Fou,” the exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st
Street until June 25. The show has much of New York transfixed. And why not?
Here is Picasso, by some accounts the most important artist of the twentieth
century, diving into the most passionate sexual experience of his life, and with
a girl who was seventeen when he met her at the age of forty-five in 1927.
Although the biographical titillation may be what first draws people to the
exhibition, if you linger for a while in Gagosian’s big, well-proportioned
rooms, the narrative begins to fade; the life is trumped by the art. The deep
fascination of this exhibition is less in the cloisonné eroticism of the
paintings of the early 1930s—that aspect of the Marie-Thérèse story was actually
better told in an exhibition at the Acquavella Galleries in 2008—than in
Picasso’s studies of the slightly more mature Marie-Thérèse, the
twenty-something who is the mother of his daughter, Maya, born in
1935.
Continue reading "A New Exhibit Reveals Picasso at a Rare Moment of Symmetry and Stability"
06/09/11
A New Exhibit Reveals Picasso at a Rare Moment of Symmetry and Stability Jed Perl
Among the many mysteries of Picasso’s
distorted anatomies is how often they strike us as anything but distorted. When
Picasso takes one of his great flights of physiognomical fantasy, the face can
become an enchanted erotic arabesque, as inevitable as it is unpredictable. I am
thinking particularly of a 1937 portrait of Picasso’s lover, Marie-Thérèse
Walter, crowned with a wreath of flowers, one of the treasures in “Picasso and
Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour Fou,” the exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st
Street until June 25. The show has much of New York transfixed. And why not?
Here is Picasso, by some accounts the most important artist of the twentieth
century, diving into the most passionate sexual experience of his life, and with
a girl who was seventeen when he met her at the age of forty-five in 1927.
Although the biographical titillation may be what first draws people to the
exhibition, if you linger for a while in Gagosian’s big, well-proportioned
rooms, the narrative begins to fade; the life is trumped by the art. The deep
fascination of this exhibition is less in the cloisonné eroticism of the
paintings of the early 1930s—that aspect of the Marie-Thérèse story was actually
better told in an exhibition at the Acquavella Galleries in 2008—than in
Picasso’s studies of the slightly more mature Marie-Thérèse, the
twenty-something who is the mother of his daughter, Maya, born in
1935.Continue reading "A New Exhibit Reveals Picasso at a Rare Moment of Symmetry and Stability"
