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Indepth Arts News:
"Picasso and the Allure of Language"
2009-08-20 until 2010-01-03
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Durham, NC,
USA United States of America
The Nasher Museum presents a groundbreaking exhibition examining Pablo Picasso's lifelong relationship with writers and the many ways in which language affected his work. Picasso and the Allure of Language comprises some 60 works in all media by Picasso, as well as select examples by fellow artist Georges Braque, and photographs, letters, manuscripts and book projects by a diverse group of artists and writers. Together, these works illuminate Picasso's deep and multidimensional interest in writing and language, which gives new meaning to highlights of his lifetime of work.
The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Yale University Art Gallery and the renowned Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, in Dallas, Texas, from which two sculptures are on loan. The works span the years from 1900, when Picasso was 19 years old, to 1969, just four years before his death at the age of 91.
The exhibition marks the first time that works by Picasso originally owned by Gertrude and Leo Stein and now in the Yale University Art Gallery's collection are reunited with materials from the Yale University Beinecke Library's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Among the objects drawn from this archive are an intimate 1914 collage made by Picasso from Stein and Toklas's calling card, as well as letters and postcards written from Picasso to the Steins, who together assembled an astounding private art collection that included works by Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others. The Beinecke materials also include Stein's original transcripts of her perceptively written portraits of Picasso, as well as audio recordings of Stein reading those writings.
Picasso and Writers
Picasso's love affair with words began soon after his permanent move from his native Spain to the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris in 1904. It was there, in his studio at the “Bateau-Lavoir,” that he formed ardent friendships with a circle of important French writers and poets, including Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who encouraged artists of his generation to innovate violently!
In 1905, Picasso met Gertrude Stein, an expatriate American writer who, guided in art collecting by her brother Leo, became the artist's principal patron in Paris until 1914. During this remarkable decade, which witnessed the radical invention of Cubism, Picasso's art and Stein's writing were equally informed by a concentration on both visual and verbal language, an interest that endured throughout their lives.
Picasso's intense relationships with other major French writers after the Cubist years, including Surrealists Michel Leiris and Paul Éluard, speak of his fascination with their craft and their inspiration for his own work.
Picasso himself turned his hand to writing in 1935 and over the course of 24 years wrote hundreds of poems and two full-length plays. From the late 1920s to about 1950, he also produced strikingly innovative work for numerous illustrated book projects, challenging traditional notions of the relationship between image and text. These ranged from charged interpretations of classical and romantic texts by Ovid and Honoré de Balzac in the late 1920s, to the passionate writings of such contemporaries as Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, and Aimé Césaire.
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