Word: picasso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways, the shapes of Marie-Thérèse, smooth and closed, are like the totemic bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized building along the Côte d'Azur. But their whole import is different. There is no dislocation or fear in them: they are, as William Blake put it, "the lineaments of gratified desire." The climate...
...river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast...
...Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair...
...terms of sheer administrative labor, "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" is the most taxing show the Museum of Modern Art has ever installed. The idea for it came in 1972, when Art Historian and Picasso Expert William Rubin was visiting the artist in his villa at Mougins, in the south of France. In the sculpture-jammed studio, on the ground floor of the house, Rubin recalls, "I almost had a sense of vertigo. There was so much invention contained in so small an area. I thought to myself: There should be a really great Picasso show that combines Picasso...
...dollars in insurance (MOMA will not reveal exactly how much), the work of 30 couriers, and some 75 air shipments from different corners of the world. The cost of the exhibition was $2 million. Of the 152 lenders, among them 56 museums, only two sources balked. One was Picasso's widow Jacqueline, who, taken ill two weeks before the exhibition paintings were to be picked up, locked the gates of her villa. At the last moment Rubin wheedled the two portraits he needed from her. The other was the Soviet government, which, in the chilling of cultural relations with...