Man with a Cap
La Coruña, beginning of 1895
Fusain and black pencil on paper
Oil on canvas
72.5 x 50 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP1
This work is one of Picasso’s few oil paintings from his student days at the La Coruña School of Fine Arts, where his father was a painting instructor. Even at this early age, Picasso was considered a prodigy. Legend has it that his father, once asked the thirteen-year-old artist to put the finishing touches on one of his own paintings. Upon seeing the result, the elder Picasso turned over his brushes and paints, declaring that the son had already surpassed the father. In 1895, the year this work was made, Picasso and his family moved to Barcelona. It was there that he passed the entrance exam to the famed La Lljotja school at only fourteen years old. He submitted his examination work in just 24 hours, while other, far older students often required a month.


It was around this time that Picasso began to paint live models. When this work was first exhibited in La Coruña, many viewers recognized the subject as a well-known local beggar. Picasso kept this painting throughout his life as a testament to his early training, not only in the European tradition, but also lesser known regional schools, and Spanish art in particular. Here one can see the artist drawing inspiration from other Spanish painters, notably Velasquez and Goya.

Corrida (Bullfight)
La Coruña, 2 September 1894
Pen and ink on graphite pencil sketch on pape
12.6 x 19.3 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP401 (r)
When Picasso was only a teenager studying art at the La Coruña School of Fine Arts, his artistic talents were not limited to painting and fine art. Picasso was an astute and often humorous observer of life in the Spanish province of Galicia, and these genre scenes and caricatures evoke the creative wit that was growing underneath his technical mastery. He was an inveterate documenter of daily life, often compiling illustrations and newspaper-like reports into magazines, which he would send to his family back in Malaga.


Many scholars now believe that Picasso’s formative time in La Coruna was where he first developed many of the motifs that would recur throughout his life. Of these, the bullfight was one of his favorite themes. To the artist, the bull served as an artistic alter ego of sorts. Bullfights were an ambiguous symbol of passion, violence, and sexuality while also capturing what Picasso saw as a mortal theatricality that reflected the Spanish temperament. The animal would reoccur in such important works as his anti-fascist masterpiece Guernica. It would also take the form of the minotaur in later paintings in which the half-man, half-bull is a monstrous alter ego of sorts for the artist, one of which can be found later in this exhibition.

The Cutter of Heads
Barcelona, spring 1901
Chinese ink, ink-wash, and gouache on paper
50.2 x 32.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP431 (r)
As seen in many of the works on display in this section, Picasso was an avid illustrator and draftsman in addition to his oil works. After spending his youth documenting Spanish provincial life in a series of newspapers and journals, he and his friend Francisco de Assis Soler began producing a short-lived periodical in Madrid entitled Arte Joven, or Young Art. Soler was the literary editor, while Picasso was the art editor. First published on 10 March 1901 and lasting only five issues, the magazine was full of Picasso’s illustrations, including many from his sketchbooks from his trip to Paris in late 1900.


This gruesome scene depicts the aftermath of a violent decapitation. The ambiguous executioner stands before a crowd of onlookers. His back facing the viewer, he strains his neck to look down at the lifeless head. The black ink wash composes the figures, while an earthen red tone accents both the bloody protagonist and the expressions of the crowd. The way the image is structured also places the killer’s head in line with those of the viewers, a subtle indictment of violence and those fascinated by it.

El Paralelo Cafe-concert
Barcelona, c. 1900
Oil on wood
36 x 48 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Acquired by the French state, given to Musée national Picasso-Paris, 2009. MP2008-2
Picasso spent the formative years after his formal training working between Madrid and Barcelona. This painting depicts the scene inside one of the music halls of Barcelona’s Paralelo Avenue in 1900. Picasso was constantly documenting his surroundings in paintings and sketches. Here Picasso is drawing on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles, in contrast to the classical artists that informed his earlier works. This painting in particular recalls the cafe scenes, lurid tones, and loose brushwork of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.


Picasso was active in the Barcelona avant-garde, who were closely following the burgeoning arts scene in Paris. In cafes like these, fervent young artists would debate literature, philosophy, political theory, and of course new trends in art. Yet there was no substitute for seeing works in the original, so in the autumn of 1900, just a few days before his nineteenth birthday, Picasso and his friend Carles Casagemas set out for Paris together. There, they stayed in Montmartre, a bohemian enclave on the outskirts of Paris, and for the first time Picasso saw the works of artists like Degas, van Gogh, and Gauguin in person.

Celestina (Woman with a Cloudy Eye)
Barcelona, 1902
Raw earth
14.5 x 8.5 x 11.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP230
Seated Woman is the first sculpture ever made by Picasso. This figure, barely fifteen centimeters tall, was produced using raw earth in a workshop in Barcelona belonging to his friend, the sculptor Emili Fontbona. Picasso was trained as a painter, receiving no formal education in sculpture. It was only through repeated contact with his sculptor friends that he began to master the foundational methods of the discipline. Picasso created almost no preparatory sketches or studies in preparation for this piece. However, the seated nude is a subject that pops up often in the artist’s sketches. This might be considered the first time Picasso dealt with this subject in three-dimensional space. This intricate figure seems to resemble the clay figures in a Christmas nativity scene, and despite its simplistic modelling, the sculpture brims with expressiveness. The look and posture of the female subject convey an air of detachment and loss akin to other subjects from Picasso’s Blue Period.

Celestina (Woman with a Cloudy Eye)
Barcelona, March 1904
Oil on canvas
74.5 x 58.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Donated by Fredrik Roos, 1989. MP1989-5
The work Celestina was painted towards the end of Picasso’s Blue Period. Aside from painterly technique and the artist’s chosen style of expression, this portrait has much in common with Picasso’s earlier Self-portrait previously mentioned. The figure of an elderly woman, shrouded in a dark blue cape, stands alone before a backdrop of royal blue. Except for the slightest blush on her cheeks, the entire canvas is steeped in somber blue hues. When viewing the painting, one is drawn at once to the subject’s gaze. The right eye of the woman is covered with cloudy white, as if already blind. It is a stark contrast to the blue hues that pervade the painting. Rather than looking directly at the viewer, the subject stares coolly out towards the side of the canvas. The motif of “blindness” recurs frequently throughout the paintings of the Blue Period. It was used by Picasso not only to express his concern and sympathy for those who lived on the fringes of society, but also as a metaphor for his own innermost views on creativity. Taking a closer look at Picasso’s brushstrokes, one can identify the model for Celestina as Carlotta Valdivia, the proprietress of a brothel in Barcelona. This portrait’s name comes from an elderly procuress in a classic Spanish novel dating to 1499. Picasso would have been familiar with stories from this novel from an early age. This is just one example of the continuous influence of Spanish tradition on Picasso’s creative practice.

The Frugal Repast
Paris, September 1904
Etching and scraping on zinc, printed by Delâtre
61.6 x 44.3 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP1889
By September 1904, it had not been long since Picasso had moved to Paris and started renting a cramped little studio in the “Bateau-Lavoir, or “Washhouse Boat,” in Montmartre, where he lived frugally. In an attempt to save money, he chose to produce prints from a plate that had already been used. This was the second time Picasso experimented with prints. Despite having no formal training, he was able to complete his first masterpiece in this medium with the guidance of his friend Richard Canals. The work depicts a man and a woman dining together in a cafe. Such subject matter was popular at the time: starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, cafes began to appear with increasing frequency in art. The Parisian cafe, in particular, became an emblem of the modern lifestyle. At this stage, Picasso was already adding elements of his signature styles into his artworks. There are similarities between the figuration in this painting and that of the artist’s Blue Period works, notably The Blind Man’s Meal and The Ironing Woman. The Frugal Repast demonstrates Picasso’s growing mastery of printmaking. Its clean lines and natural shading give the work with an almost sculptural quality. Here, Picasso deploys his knack for tone to the bold linework of the print, bringing his unique expressive power to bear across different materials.

The Jester
Paris, 1905
Bronze, edition for the merchant Ambroise Vollard
41.5 x 37 x 22.8 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP231
This sculpture from 1905 vividly depicts the figure of a jester. Several days before Picasso created this piece, he accompanied his friend, the poet Max Jacob, to the Cirque Medrano; the face of the sculpture is reportedly modeled after the poet. According to Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover at the time, Picasso was frequently seen among the members of the circus troupe based in Montmartre. “[Picasso] could spend a whole night there, deep in conversation with the harlequin performers, approaching them with a mind that was as admiring as it was sympathetic.” Picasso had a profound fascination with the lives of these street performers and the world they inhabited: a world on the margins, filled with masks, performances, and costumes. These colorful performers began to emerge in Picasso’s paintings. His palette, similarly, became richer and more varied, resulting in several of his signature Rose Period artworks. His sculptures were affected, too. This particular jester wears a mischievous grin and a hat with a strongly geometric quality. His face seems endowed with life, as if just molded into shape by the artist’s hands. It displays a rich interplay of light and shadow and testifies to Picasso’s increasing artistic and technical prowess.

The Two Brothers
Gósol, summer 1906
Gouache on cardboard
80 x 59 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP7
Between May and August 1906, Picasso stayed in Gósol, a small village in Upper Catalonia that could only be reached by mule. Reinvigorated by the Mediterranean sunlight of the region, Picasso painted a dozen portraits and figure studies inspired by local youths, peasant girls, and his companion Fernande Olivier. The Two Brothers is from this high point of the Rose Period. It owes much of its earthy palette to the vast ocher landscape of Gósol. This gouache work, though not as grandiose as his earlier depictions of acrobats, continues the artist’s interest in those at the margins of society. The despondent faces of the two brothers and the barren backdrop evince the melancholy of these itinerant circus actors. The elder’s contrapposto stance shows the influence of classical art, which colored many of Picasso’s figures in this period. The artist’s classical roots are a thread that runs through much of Picasso’s work, in particular the Neoclassical style that would emerge in the second half of the 1910s. Here, the elongated silhouettes of the youthful figures point to the style of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose 1862 canvas, The Turkish Bath, was admired by Picasso at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. A more direct reference to Ingres can also be found in this section’s Study for The Harem: Woman at Her Toilette.

Bust of a Woman (Fernande)
Gósol, summer 1906
Boxwood sculpture with traces of red paint and features in black paint
77 x 17 x 16 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP233
In May 1906, the small village of Gósol, nestled in the heart of the Pyrenees near the border between France and Catalonia, played host to two visitors: Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier. This little hamlet of merely 300 residents seemed untouched by the upheavals of modern society. Over the weeks he stayed in Gósol, Picasso lived an extremely simple, rustic lifestyle. His creative output flourished, producing well over 300 hundred works of art. While the majority of these were paintings, he also began to try his hand at wood sculpture. By then, very few artists were still using this traditional, antiquated medium to produce sculptural works. Picasso’s adoption of this material embodied his desire to “return to the source” through artistic exploration. Relying just on the crude tools he had at his disposal, Picasso carved his wooden sculpture, Bust of a Woman (Fernande).


The sculpture retains the visual aspect of the yellow poplar’s texture. Taking a closer look at the square-shaped lower half of the figure reveals the impression of an arm, while elsewhere one sees the subtle swell of the figure’s chest and buttocks. In sharp contrast is the subject’s face, which has been meticulously carved. The figure’s hairstyle suggests that Olivier likely modelled for the sculpting process. In addition, the stylization of the facial features also shows the influence of a specific medieval wood-carving entitled Virgin from Gósol.

Self-portrait
Paris, autumn 1906
Oil on canvas
65 x 54 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP8
Self-portrait is among a dozen of such images Picasso executed in preparation for his painting Self-Portrait with Palette. This Self-portrait inherits its fleshy palette and soft ambience from Rose Period. However, compared to earlier works, its stiff and impersonal expression more resembles kouroi, a type of archaic Greek statue of young men. This shift anticipates a new phase in Picasso’s work, what is known as his Proto-Cubist or Primitivist period. Though it is a representation of sorts of the artist’s image and personality, the figure’s abstracted features bear a strong likeness to the Polynesian and Iberian objects that Picasso had recently discovered. These are reflected in his bull-like neck, enlarged ear and eyes, geometric nose, and mask-like face. The sandstone coloration of his heavily impastoed torso reminds one of an ancient mask sitting atop a pedestal. Art historian Kirk Varnedoe has noted that Picasso “pushed his physiognomy back toward that of his youth,” as this painting bears an uncanny resemblance to a photograph of the artist at age fifteen, which can be seen at the entrance to this exhibition’s first section. This is markedly different from the prematurely aged Picasso in the Self-portrait from 1901, seen in the second section of this show. The overlap of ancient inspiration and childhood in Self-portrait heralds the arrival of Picasso’s creative outburst in 1907 — the creation of his trailblazing opus Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Mother and Child
Paris, summer 1907
Oil on canvas
81 x 60 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP19
Coinciding with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in summer 1907, Mother and Child stands out in a period when Picasso’s paintings were largely occupied by prostitutes, sailors, and bacchanals, as well as themes of sex, death, and atavistic spirituality. The innocent subject matter in Mother and Child was a common trope during Picasso’s Blue Period, and the blue tonality of this work seemed to strengthen the connection. The religious implications and art historical references are myriad, from the halo-like hairstyle to the mother’s Marian blue cloth, a color often used to depict the Madonna. The implication is clear: this is a secularized portrayal of Mary and the baby Jesus. Yet despite how much Mother and Child is rooted in the pictorial tradition of European art, it doesn’t stray far from Picasso’s African inspirations of this period. The hatching of the figures’ faces evokes both masks from the Fang people of Central Africa and certain female figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This collision of Western and African art reflects Picasso’s impetus to reconcile and command these sources of inspiration.

Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Head of the Young Woman Squatting
Paris, June – July 1907
Gouache on paper
63 x 48 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP539
The famed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is set in a Barcelona bordello that Picasso frequented during his early years, which he once referred to as “my brothel.” In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso presents frightening space occupied by five prostitutes. They seem aggressive confrontational, engaging the viewer with their menacing gazes. The painting embodies Picasso’s conflicted views towards women at the time, which is reflected in the contrasting ways women are depicted in the painting. As art historian William Rubin has noted, the pictorial language of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon draws on two figurative archetypes: Eros, the god of love, and Thanatos, the god of death. The two central women are depicted frontally, their physiques less fragmented and their faces drawing on the Iberian sculptures. These figures evince Picasso’s sense of classical beauty. On the other hand, the other women are fashioned with African mask-like features and disjointed body shapes that evoke aggression and violence. The drawing shown here is a study for the bust of the crouching woman in the lower right of the final composition. This figure is often seen as the expression of Picasso’s fear of women. Her disfigured, asymmetrical face might reference the effects of syphilis on the skin, as this disease was common in brothels at the time. This sense of terror might also be reflected in the omission of the male figures. Earlier compositions included a sailor and a medical student, such as in Bust of a Man, an oil study of the sailor that is also in this section.

Figure
Paris, 1908
Oak sculpture with painted highlights
80.5 x 24 x 20.8 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
PPablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP238
This wooden sculpture, entitled Figure, was produced in 1908 at the height of Picasso’s African-influence Period, which followed the artist’s encounter with classical African and Iberian sculpture in 1906. Carved from oak with highlights of paint, this piece is a direct response to a gouache and pastel study that Picasso produced in the same year. The artist has depicted a nude figure standing with one leg forward in a bold contrapposto stance, which is a common trope of classical Western sculpture. The arms, however, are raised in a totemic fashion, recalling the shamanic qualities of African carving. Its geometric surfaces and untreated textures convey not only a desire to escape the aesthetic confines of classical Western art, but an appreciation for the raw materiality of the wood itself. With this work, two traditions of figurative sculpture are brought together into one dynamic and ambitious statement. The result is an artwork which draws upon a broad array of cultural and artistic influences yet remains uniquely and rebelliously Picasso in its vision.

Three Figures Beneath a Tree
Paris, winter 1907-08
Oil on canvas
99 x 99 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Donated by William McCarthy Cooper, 1986. MP1986-2
Three Figures Beneath a Tree was executed on a square canvas, which is rare in Picasso’s work. In this frantic composition, one sees three women against the silhouette of a tree trunk and branches. All elements are depicted with loose outlines and cross-hatching. Although the trio of women might refer to the classical themes of bathers in the wilderness or the three graces, the ambiguity of their expressions suggests African masks instead, like several of the works in this section. After creating Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso often left out sentimentality and emotion in order to stress the volumes and interiority of the human body. The limited palette of ocher, orange, grey and blue also stresses the compositional structure, or the “bones” of the painting. In Three Figures Beneath a Tree, the figures and landscape become indistinguishable: thighs turn into boulders, hair turns into leaves, and faces dissolve into the backdrop. This gesture was a major innovation of the painter Paul Cézanne, of whom Picasso was a great admirer. Picasso would take this technique even further, however. This aggressive turn to form would pave the way for the arrival of Cubism.

Man with a Mandolin
Paris, autumn 1911
Oil on canvas
162 x 71 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP35
Man with a Mandolin is a work of high Analytical Cubism. A period of intense artistic ferment that lasted from 1910 to 1912, Analytical Cubism was first named by the critic Carl Einstein in his article “Notes on Cubism,” published in 1929. Picasso invented this new mode of representation together with George Braque, whom he met in 1907. For the next seven years, Picasso and Braque were essentially inseparable—in the latter’s words, they were “like mountain-climbers roped together.” Each would visit the other’s studio every day, to draw inspiration from, and respond to, the other’s work. This period of collaboration ended when Braque enlisted in the French army at the outset of World War I, after which the two painters went their separate ways. Analytical Cubism relies on a very limited color palette of browns, greys, and blacks. Its practitioners were interested not so much in deploying color or texture, but in breaking the subject down into rudimentary shapes and overlapping planes, which seldom “add up” to the whole figure. Man with the Mandolin is no exception. Note the densely overlapping triangles and crescents that form the subject of the painting, which is difficult to identify without knowing the title. Certain motifs near the bottom of the canvas recall of the fretwork on a stringed instrument, while rounded lines evoke its curvature and sound hole. The mandolin player seems to appear in the upper half of the painting through a series of triangles that resemble limbs and a head.

Sacré-Coeurn
Paris, winter 1909-10
Oil on canvas
92.5 x 65 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP30
The construction of Paris’ monumental Basilica of the Sacred Heart, or Sacré-Coeur, lasted from 1875 until 1914. The basilica is located in the city’s Montmartre quarter, where several notable artists lived and worked in the early twentieth century, including Modigliani, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Mondrian, van Gogh, and Picasso himself. Picasso would have seen the gleaming white edifice of the building under construction on a regular basis when he lived nearby. Montmartre was a bohemian haven on the outskirts of Paris around the turn of the century, a period known as the Belle Époque. In just over a decade, the district’s libertine ambiance and density of avant-garde artists and patrons inculcated a bewildering range of Modernist culture. Indeed, it was here that Picasso met Georges Braque, with whom he invented Cubism.


In this painting, sketchy lines comprise the dome, while its two flanking structures are less distinct. Depicted in planes that appear to tumble toward the viewer, these elements bear the hallmarks of Cubist composition. The painting was still in the artist’s possession when it was included in his 1966 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Although it seems incomplete, scholars have long accepted it as a finished work of art

Head of Harlequin
Céret, 1913
Cut out, glued, and pinned paper, Conté crayon, and charcoal pencil on paper
62.7 x 47 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP377
One of Picasso’s best known motifs is Harlequin, a jester character from the Italian Commedia Dell’arte. Harlequin’s abilities, such as invisibility and shapeshifting, were said to have been gifts bestowed by the god Mercury. Harlequin featured in Punch and Judy puppet theater, and he was a ubiquitous character in Europe at the turn of the century. Picasso undoubtedly saw many such performances at this time, and even assisted in shows at the Barcelona avant-garde cafe Els Quatre Gats. The clown served as the artist’s alter ego in his paintings. Harlequin’s mischievous, fluid, lustful antics seemed to mirror Picasso’s penchant for theatricality, his constant self-reinvention, and his personal relations.


While Picasso most notably painted Harlequin repeatedly during his Rose Period, in which he often symbolized the figure of the isolated, romantic artist, the figure would recur in his Cubist and Neoclassical phases. Head of Harlequin mainly comprises charcoal squares and wedges. It is a transitional work, revealing the dull, monochromatic colors of Analytical Cubism, yet incorporating the simpler composition and collaged elements of Synthetic Cubism. Here, the sparse lines of the drawing and the beige of the paper are offset by a white paper cutout, glued and pinned to the center of the composition. This doubles as Harlequin’s face, which would have traditionally been powdered white for performances. A moustache of two crossed lines protrudes from the mouth like the hands of a clock, juxtaposed against the rectangularity of the face.

Paris, spring 1914
Oil and printed fabric glued on canvas
138 x 66.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP39
Executed in the spring of 1914, Man with a Pipe demonstrates Picasso’s movement away from high Analytical Cubism into Synthetic Cubism. Unlike the former, which employs a limited color palette, Synthetic Cubism involves brighter colors, simpler shapes, and lighter lines. Figures become less abstract and are often easier to spot. Looking at this painting, one first notices the limbs and body of the titular man, as well as the pipe he holds in his right hand. Man with a Pipe is one of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubist works that employs the technique of collage, or the gluing of assorted materials onto paper, canvas, or cardboard. Picasso developed collage alongside Georges Braque, who first incorporated objects such as sand, sawdust, and iron fillings into his drawings. Picasso took the idea further, using newspaper cuttings, tobacco boxes, fabrics, and metal. Collage does not simply reproduce an image; it directly incorporates materials with their own formal properties and associations. It implies a stronger connection to reality while evoking broader networks of meaning.


It is no accident that collage and Synthetic Cubism arose nearly simultaneously: the readymade items that Picasso laid one on top of the other on the canvas lent themselves to a composition with simpler shapes, distinct colors, and clear, crisp outlines. The background of this work is painted a blue-green color, but significant portions of the man are comprised of fabric, most notably his patterned shirt. This drastically increases the textural variation in the painting, distinguishing it from the monochrome compositions of Analytical Cubism, and anticipates the mixed-media work of later artists. It also offered artists a new way of depicting the world.

Violin
Paris, 1915
Painted, crushed, and cut-out metal sheets and iron wires
100 x 63.7 x 18 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP255
Though known primarily as a painter, Picasso was an innovative sculptor as well. However, he received no training in sculpture and was loath to part with these works, meaning that fewer audiences saw them and they received less fanfare. Many art historians consider his Head of a Woman from 1909-10 to be the very first Cubist sculpture. Though here, we see a slightly later work. Picasso’s assemblages from his Synthetic Cubism period employ representational methods similar to collage, but extend these readymade objects into the third dimension. Violin, executed in 1915, is a full meter high. It is made of cut sheet metal, but the parts are wired in and colorfully overpainted so that the nature of the material is not immediately apparent. There seems to be a contrast between the volume of the metal components and the spatial structure of the painted planes. Parts that should be in the foreground are moved back, while those farther from view are more prominent. The two sound holes are not depressions in the metal, but rectangular boxes, the inverse of their real-world counterparts. Similarly, the black paint on this sculpture, which would normally denote shadow, does not have a clear relationship with naturalistic light. This instrument is notably similar to the one in Violin and Music Sheet, also in this section. There, the body of the violin is blue, juxtaposed with the brown of the background. The instrument’s boxy, pyramidal shape also hearkens back to this earlier painting. This sculptural construction combines graphic and spatial approaches, a hallmark of this period, into a singular, sophisticated synthesis.

The Village Dance
Paris, 1922
Fixed pastel and oil on canvas
139.5 x 85.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP73
The mood after World War I has been described by the French poet Jean Cocteau as a “call to order”—a desire for stability, introspection, and contemplation after the shock and destruction of the war. For Picasso, too, they were years of relative financial and marital stability. His work was selling well, and he had just married the Ballets Ruses dancer Olga Koklakhova. The period after World War I also marked a moment in which many avant-garde painters shifted back to classical, realistic figuration. Picasso was no exception, and this phase in his work is known as his Neoclassical Period. He began to paint works with heavy, sculptural qualities. These were different than the flattened planes and abstractions of Cubism, but they often retained the jagged bulk of his Oceanic-inspired work. In The Village Dance, completed in 1922, one can see the influence of Renoir’s late paintings of robust female figures. The choice of pastel, too, is reminiscent of Renoir, who favored the medium for its hazy strokes and blended colors. Renoir also used it for some of his more intimate works. Partially featured in the work Studies, also on display here, there is a dancing woman depicted in profile. She has a high, Roman nose, though her outfit and that of her partner are modern. In keeping with the rustic title of the piece, the dancers are drawn with exceptional bulk, their poses awkward, and their clothes-ill fitting, though they retain a strangely compelling, uncanny grace.

The Lovers
Paris, 1919
Oil on canvas
185 x 140 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP62
The Lovers is representative of a later manner of Cubism, following the last orthodox phase usually called Synthetic Cubism. It departs from the sharp, severe, interlocking planes and angles of earlier Analytical Cubism by featuring brighter, bolder colors and less abstract depictions of its subjects. Artwork from both periods, however, share the same underlying principle. In both, Picasso attempts to collapse an object’s multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional plane. True to its name, The Lovers features a man and a woman embracing in front of a plush sofa. Their limbs and body parts are arranged angularly and obliquely. The man wears a tuxedo and holds the woman from behind; she, in turn, wears a formal dress. They seem to be dancing. Of note, too, is the scrawled name, “Manet,” on the top right corner of the canvas. The text hints at the admiration and spiritual rivalry that Picasso felt towards the older, proto-Impressionist painter. Years later, Picasso would write that, when he saw Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, “I [told] myself there is pain ahead.” In 1959, he would paint his own variations on Manet’s work.

Still Life with Pitcher and Apples
1919
Oil on canvas
65 x 43 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP64
Discovered after Picasso’s death in 1973, Still Life with Pitcher and Apples was painted in 1919. The work’s composition is relatively simple: four apples, a pitcher, and a plate. The seemingly arbitrary placement of these objects contrasts with their formal symmetry—the two pairs of apples mirror each other across the pitcher, which rises, monumentally, from the center of the table. The painting’s understated yet classical composition, as well as the painter’s use of chalky grays and browns, recall Ancient Roman frescoes. Indeed, in 1917, shortly before he began to work on the painting, Picasso traveled to Italy, visiting Rome and likely Pompeii. He drew inspiration from the Classical art preserved in these two cities. Nonetheless, Picasso does not just pay homage to Classical forms and colors. He also puts his own, unique spin on them, one that is informed both by Cezanne’s still lifes, for example, and by Picasso’s own earlier experiments with Cubism. Notable is the pitcher’s voluptuous shape. Its mouth resembles parted lips, and its base human hips. The feminine figure appears unexpectedly in this painting, as it does in much of Picasso’s work.

Pipe, Glass, and Playing Card
1918
Oil on canvas
38 x 46 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP58
The advent of Cubism drew the ire of some critics, who accused it of being disconnected from reality. Yet as works like Pipe, Glass, and Playing Card demonstrate, Cubism consistently placed ordinary objects at the center of its focus. In art historian Roland Penrose’s words, Picasso and Braque “based [their compositions] on a central feature supported by receding planes… supporting it are tilted parallel lines and curves placed with economy so as to give them their maximum significance.” Like other Synthetic Cubist works of this period, Pipe, Glass, and Playing Card speaks to a new turn towards representation. At the center of this particular painting is a playing card, crisscrossed with decorative lines and stamped with a club. The card also seems to rise off the surface of the canvas. By comparison, the pipe and glass adjacent to the playing card are rendered more abstractly in completely flat monochromes. To further center the three objects in the painting’s title, Picasso has drawn concentric rectangles around the margins of the piece. This idiosyncratic blend of realistic effects and highly abstracted, graphic figuration is a hallmark of this period, in which the artist’s style was more heterogeneous than ever.

Study for Tricorne Set: Model for the Final Set
1920
Stencil on paper
20.5 x 27 cm, based on the original 1919 set and costume design by Picasso
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP3576 (1)
Although not as well known, Picasso’s contribution to ballets and plays was a significant part of his career as an artist. From 1917 to 1962, Picasso was commissioned to design the costumes and sets for nine ballets in total. Picasso’s biographer John Richardson once called Tricorne the artist’s “supreme theatrical achievement.” This ballet, whose title means “three-cornered hat,” recounts the story of a magistrate who attempts to seduce a miller’s faithful wife. It was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, founder of Ballets Russes, in 1917, and premiered on 22 July 1919 at the Alhambra Theater in London. Diaghilev commissioned Picasso to design the ballet’s sets, costume designs, and monumental stage curtain. Picasso’s understanding of Spanish culture complemented the play’s Spanish setting and motifs, and Tricorne itself was innovative for adding elements of Spanish dance to its balletic language. In 1919, Picasso designed all of the sets for this ballet, and Study for Tricorne Set: Model for the Final Set seen here is a 1920 stencil based on Picasso’s originals. The painting depicts the Andalusian terrain in which the play is set, a region of southern Spain known for its arched, Moorish architecture, mountainous terrain, and bullfighting culture.

Reading
Boisgeloup, 2 January 1932
Oil on canvas
130 x 97.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP137
Reading came from a series of iconic portraits of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter produced in the year 1932 that have become icons of love, sex, and desire in the lineage of European Modernism. Described by biographer John Richardson as Picasso’s “annus mirabilis,” a year of wonder, 1932 saw both the publication of the first volume of the artist’s catalogue raisonné and the opening of his first retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in June. Now fifty years old, Picasso made a quick succession of eighteen paintings early in the year for this exhibition, including Reading. These included a number of portraits of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter in the mode seen here. She is depicted as a languorous, lilac-skinned Madonna, her face bifurcated with an elegant sweep of hair pooling down one side. Around this time, the artist’s marriage with Olga Picasso was increasingly strained, and these libidinously charged portraits of Walter were a cathartic outlet for the artist’s desire. Picasso previously sublimated Walter’s figure into paintings as symbolic still lifes and coded portraits, such as Woman Throwing a Stone in this exhibition. Here, however, her classical beautify is on full display and codified into a specific painterly language used for her alone, incorporating vibrant complementary colors and erotically suggestive objects and gestures into his deconstruction of form.

Woman Carrying a Jar
1935
Pieces of painted wood, objects, nails on base made of cement and wood
60 x 14 x 18.4 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP315
In June 1930, Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup, located in northwestern France, where he converted the property’s spacious barn into his first sculpture studio. Compared to the commanding, classical busts more common for this period, this sculpture is far more playful and intimate in its scale. This was because it was made for a specific purpose—to be a delicate puppet for his daughter Maya, who was born on 5 September 1935. The colorful palette and decorative patterns draw on both Hopi Kachina figures and traditional European wooden dolls. The assortment of household materials that comprise Woman Carrying a Jar points +to Picasso’s fondness for recycling the debris around his studio. He would later use this ability to fabricate assemblages out of discarded scraps when materials became scarse during World War II. Picasso would make a doll-like artwork again in the 1950s for his youngest daughter Paloma.

Woman Throwing a Stone
Paris, 8 March 1931
Oil on canvas
130.5 x 195.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP133
In the late 1920s and early 30s, Picasso’s first marriage to the ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova was on a downward spiral. Their acrimonious relationship would not only inspire multiple cathartic depictions of Olga as murderous praying mantis or violent monster, but also draw another mistress and muse into the artist’s orbit. On 8 January 1927, Picasso met the then seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter in front of Galeries Lafayette in Paris. He was immediately taken by her Grecian beauty, and she was a critical source of inspiration in the decades to come. Because Walter remained relatively unknown to the public and even to his close friends until late 1931, earlier portraits would hide Picasso’s new muse through various distortions and codes. Woman Throwing a Stone depicts Walter, who was an avid swimmer, as an amorphous, marine-like figure playing on a stark beach. While never explicitly part of the movement, starting in 1924 Picasso began to blend the language of Surrealism into his Cubist and Neoclassical modes of portraiture. He would also incorporate this rhetoric into his thematic interests and his global approach to creation. Later works would depict her directly in a new and specific formal language, as seen in other works in this section.

The Young Painter
Mougins, 14 April 1972
Oil on canvas
91 x 72.5 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP228
Painted a year before Picasso’s death, The Young Painter is considered to be both one of the most important works from his final years, and an oddity. The portrait is painted with a minimalist palette and loose brushstrokes on a blank canvas. While many other works from this time depict flamboyant musketeers, here Picasso renders himself as a young painter in a straw hat holding a brush and palette. Although it is an outlier in its subject matter, The Young Painter follows an underlying theme of the painter’s late works: namely, paying homage to different masters he admires. Much as Velasquez and Manet influenced Picasso’s bullfighting works, the straw hat of the young painter is a tribute to those of Vincent van Gogh and Auguste Renoir, whom he looked up to in his formative years. This painting featured prominently in a posthumous exhibition of works produced between 1970 and 1972 that opened on May 1973 at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. It was the last exhibition Picasso worked on before he died. This painting was also shown in China’s first Picasso exhibition in 1983 at the National Art Museum of China. The ethereal depiction of a youthful painter, who raises his hand to put the first touch on an invisible canvas, is Picasso’s melancholic nod to his 80 years of artistic career.

The Kiss
Mougins, 26 October 1969
Oil on canvas
97 x 130 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Pablo Picasso gift-in-lieu, 1979. MP220
Created in Mougins between October and December 1969, The Kiss belongs to a series that explores the theme of lovers in passionate embrace. Early precedents of this theme are found throughout Picasso’s life. However, unlike the more chaste renditions in his earlier works, The Kiss from 1969 is charged with immediacy and passion. This work was painted on 26 October 1969, a day after Picasso’s 88th birthday. It can almost be seen as an existential meditation. Here Picasso is confronting his own mortality and waning virility, sublimating these emotions into a violent depiction of a couple seemingly engaged in an act of intimacy. To process the frustration of aging, Picasso recasts himself, in his later works, into various avatars in his paintings, like the virile musketeers and pipe-smoking brigadiers entangled in romantic encounters with women. In The Kiss, Picasso transforms himself and his wife Jacqueline Roque into the guises of his old friend and painter Henri Rousseau and Rousseau’s wife Josephine. In his personal collection, Picasso owned Rousseau’s Self-portrait of the Artist with a Lamp and Portrait of the Artist’s Second Wife, two works whose compositions are combined here into one Picassian tribute. The gravitas and pathos he evokes in this painting, however, belong to Picasso alone.