Picasso Challenging the Past
25 February - 7 June 2009
"Disciples be damned...it's only the masters that matter. Those who create" Pablo Picasso.
This quote perfectly summarizes the leitmotiv of the first Picasso exhibition by the National Gallery, in London. Was Picasso an admirer of the European great masters, or was he a competitor ? I think the answer is both.
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 his own form of expression. The exhibition 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.The exhibition makes subtle reference back and forth between the works of Picasso and the National Gallery’sown incomparable collection of Old Master paintings, which is on display in the main rooms of the Galleryupstairs.
I particularly enjoyed the Velázquez's interpretation of Las Meninas which reveals again how intelligent was the original painting. The young artist first saw Velázquez’s Las Meninas when he was fourteen. 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 toweringover 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 (MuséeNational Picasso, Paris) provides another highlight of the exhibition. Now admired as a masterpiece, Manet’soriginal canvas outraged the 19th-century establishment.
All in all it's always a huge pleasure to see a Picasso's exhibition but I am slightly tired to see exhibitions of Picasso that put in parallel his inspirational painters. I remember well the Matisse /Picasso show in Paris at Le Centre Pompidou, a couple of years ago, and comparing Picasso with other masters seems like it's the easiest approach to his oeuvre.
This exhibition comes from Paris where it was held at the Grand Palais , and I believe it offered more space for the paintings.
To learn more: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
