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Celebrating the Muse:
Women in Picasso’s Prints, 1905-1968
Marlborough gallery / March 23-May 1, 2010
“Celebrating the Muse: Women in Picasso’s Prints 1905-1968”
opens at Marlborough Gallery on March 23 and will include
over 200 prints by Pablo Picasso in a variety of print-making
techniques – etching, drypoint, linocut and lithography – that
explore the theme of woman as muse in these media. Marlborough’s exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of this
subject as specifically depicted in Picasso’s graphic oeuvre. The
show will feature works spanning his entire career from his first
print, Le Repas frugal, 1905, to selections from the tour-de-force
of his late period, the Suite 347 of 1968. A notable lender to the
Marlborough exhibition is Maya Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s
daughter.
Marilyn McCully, in her essay for the exhibition catalogue, comments on the importance of the graphic medium to Picasso:
“Prints, which have traditionally been created in series, offered
Picasso a special opportunity to explore narrative, as one composition leads to the next. A sequence of etchings, engravings,
or aquatints, which he exploited to compose complex myths and
stories rather than simple illustrations, also allowed him to probe
visual ideas in new directions. The scenes that he was inspired
to create by a succession of Muses are acted out by a cast of familiar characters (including the artist himself), who often change
roles and appear in different combinations, performing on a very
personal stage. The intimate scale of printmaking and of the
prints themselves also provided an occasion for Picasso to reflect
on the nature of his art and the creative process and to probe
deeply into his innermost thoughts and desires.”
Marlborough’s exhibition will feature a number of early prints,
including Picasso’s drypoint Les Saltimbanques, 1905, that depicts
a group of acrobats at rest and Salomé, 1905, a scene from the
same series in which the artist’s focus is on the seductive young
woman as she performs for Herod. Both are very rare impressions before steel facing, with velvety, rich burr and luminous
plate tones.
Nelson Blitz, Jr. and Catherine Woodard are lending a number of
important Picasso masterworks in printmaking that span a significant part of the artist’s career. These include the rarely seen
Gauguinesque woodcut of Fernande Olivier, Femme de trois quarts,
1906, the haunting drypoint portrait of Olga Khokhlova, Portrait
d’Olga au col de fourrure, 1923, the monumental and groundbreaking etching, La Minotauromachie, 1935, La Femme qui pleure I, III
& IV, 1937, which relate to Picasso’s most important painting,
Guernica, 1937, and encapsulate the horror and tragedy of the
Spanish Civil War, and the bold black and white sugar-lift aquatint, La Femme à la fenêtre, 1952.
Picasso produced beautiful prints during his Classical period
(1917-1925), a number of which will be on view during this exhibition. These include La Source, 1921, and Le Collier, an elegant
composition of 1923 that derives its theme from The Three
Graces of antiquity.
The Suite Vollard is a series of 100 prints commissioned by the
brilliant, pioneering art dealer Ambroise Vollard that covers the
years 1930-1937. This tour-de-force of Picasso’s mid-career
produced some of the most important prints of the Twentieth
Century. Marlborough’s exhibition will include a number of
works from this group, including Vieux sculpteur au travail (March
23, 1933), Le Repos du sculpteur devant le petit torse (March 30, 1933)
and Sculpteur et son modèle devant une fenêtre (March 31, 1933), each
relating the artist to his female muse in the studio. In addition,
the show will include impressions of Minotaure caressant une dormeuse (June 18, 1933), Quatre femmes nues et tête sculptée (March 10,
1934), Minotaure aveugle guidé par une fillette dans la nuit (November
1934) and Faune dévoilant une femme (June 12, 1936), considered by
many to be highlights of the Suite Vollard. That a number of
these works originally came from the collection of Vollard himself and were later acquired by the distinguished French collector
Henri M. Petiet, only adds to their significance
Fine examples of Picasso’s later work will also be included in
the exhibition. Dans l’Atelier (February 7, 1964), an aquatint and
etching, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (October 26-27, 1966), an
etching combined with drypoint and aquatint, and Femme au chapeau à fleurs, 1962, a color linocut, are three works that depict
Picasso’s last muse, his wife Jacqueline Roque Hutin. The latter
work is one of a series of semi-abstract linocuts in a range of
colors from earth tones to blue and red that depict his wife. She
reappears in the beautiful Jacqueline lisant, a linocut from 1964,
that will also be in the show. McCully writes of Jacqueline in her
essay, “She is at once the supreme muse, model, companion and
an erotic presence in Picasso’s paintings, sculptures, drawings,
and prints of his last years.”
Picasso’s remarkable use of printmaking continued throughout
his life, as evidenced in the Suite 347, which he produced between
March 16 and October 5, 1968 with the young printers Piero and
Aldo Crommelynck. McCully writes that Suite 347 is “a sequence
of engravings mixing various printmaking techniques, which represented a compendium of characters from Picasso’s world: bullfighters, musketeers, commedia dell’arte and circus characters,
and many other favorites drawn from the artist’s youth in Spain,
including an early girlfriend and equestrienne known as Rosita
(No. 141)…Another narrative within the Suite 347 is concerned
with portrayals of Celestina, the celebrated old hag and go-between of Spanish fiction.” Marlborough’s exhibition will include
a number of impressions from this suite such as the aquatints of
May 27, 1968, Suite 347: No. 120 and No. 122, both with images
of Celestina, and etchings No. 236, No. 238, and No. 239, all of
August 3, 1968, in which Picasso depicts multiple figures.
Marlborough’s show is timed to coincide with three exhibitions
of Picasso’s work at important museums in the United States:
Picasso: Themes and Variations at The Museum of Modern Art,
March 28-September 6, 2010: Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 24, 2010-April 25, 2010
and Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 27, 2010–
August 1, 2010.
A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Marilyn McCully,
will be available at the time of the exhibition. Marilyn McCully
taught art history at Princeton University, 1974-81, and since then
has worked in London as an independent scholar and editor. She
has organized exhibitions in Princeton, Washington and New
York, London, Ferrara, Málaga, Istanbul, Auckland and Japan.
Current projects include Picasso exhibitions for the Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery, Washington (2011),
and for the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, in collaboration
with the Museu Picasso, Barcelona (also 2011).
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