Getting Intimate with Pablo Picasso 2004
Ok so I've got another article for you to enjoy. I know that most people post little tid bits about their personal lives but I don't really have a lot to say that I want others to read so insted you get this, little bits of information on things that intrest me.
Jacqueline Picasso (nee Roque), the second wife of Pablo Picasso, was found dead October 15 at Mougins on the French Riviera with a bullet in her head. She was 59.
Picasso, who died in 1973, married her in 1961, when he was 79 years old and she was 35. She was a Paris-born divorcee and former dance teacher when she met Picasso, becoming his companion and the model for some fine portraits.
-Obiuary in The Times(London), Oct. 17, 1986
PARIS-Even when you're about to be buried they'll dig your reputation a little deeper.
"Picasso Intime: La Collection de Jacqueline," is the finest small show in Paris right now, in the most congenial new space, la Pinacotheque de Paris, just off a nondescript street with the too-promising name of rue de Paradis.
As its brochure admits, the Pinacotheque-in what used to be the factory/showroom for Baccarat crystal-is "derriere less Grands Boulevards." In other words it's as next to nowhere as you can get in this city.
Yet with "Picasso Intime," the Pinacotheque is muscling up against the Centre Pompidou, with its newly minted Joan Miro exhibition, "1917-1934 La Naissance du Monde," and the rest of the major galleries closer to the city centre, by asking questions about one of the more fractious art mysteries of the last century.
Who was Jacqueline? What was she? Was she merely a canny gold digger who married Pablo Picasso for his spectacular fortune? She did eventually end up with some $48 million(U.S.), long after she ruined his apparently stable relationship with Francoise Gilot, the artist's mistress for many years.
Gilot's 1965 response in her bestselling and self-serving autobiography, Life With Picasso, so infuriated the artist that he cut off all ties to Claude and Paloma, his two illegitimate children with Gilot, and erased them out of his will.
The above scenario apparently was on the mind of the Time's obituary writer who reminded the reader that Jacqueline was a "Paris-born devorcee" and "former dancer," attributes clearly meant to cast shadows on her honour. Jacqueline did little to distance from her wicked stepmother reputaion when she barred Paloma and Claude from attending their father's funeral.
"Picasso Intime" tells another story, too-in fact several other stories.
primarily it shows Picasso's fasination with Jacqueline, her dark eyes and high cheekbones, her Spanish features. Her looks were in synch with Picasso's creativity as he revisited his early days, his Spanish roots and the works of mentor-figure painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Diego Velazquez.
Jacqueline wasn't particularly tall. But in the many portraits that act as silent sentinals as you move through the exhibibition, she's shown nobly, seemingly larger than life.
Picasso viewed old age moodily. In 1963, Georges Braque and Jean Cocteau, colleagues from his earliest days in Paris, both died. And to a great degree it was jacqueline who helped him keep going-something she was unable to do for herself following his death, when her drinking grew worse and worse, the demons in her head closed in and she threatened suicide.
Sombre colours dominate the show, more like Paris in late winter than the Mediterranean under a noonday sun. There are black blues, ghastly whites, rudy browns, bold black outlines and wintry shadows-as in Portrait de Jacqueline au rocking-chair et au foulard noir (Jacqueline a l'echarpe noire) (1954)-which seem to shrowd everything in a dark fog.
The town near Mt.Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence where Picasso and jacqueline eventually settled, seems un-Mediterranean in Picasso's cool Le Vilage de Vauvenargues (April 29, 1959), with its dark greens, bland yellows and sharp hills outlined in thick jolts of black.
Your only hit of sun and glamour comes ahead of the main exhibition, in a photo display of images taken in the area around Cannes, where Picasso and Jacqueline had earliar set up house before moving to Aix. These shots reveal a sun-drenched Cote d'Azur, where the happy couple play with their animals, including the artist's beloved goat Biquette; clowns around for the camera; and welcomes the rich and the famous, including matador Luis Miguel Dominguin.
But it was Jacqueline's attention Pablo sought. Increasingly her role in his life was keeping away all the strangers while he worked, even if they weren't really strangers.
Picasso presented many of his portraits, often in her favourite pose-seated, with her arms folded around her bent knees-as presents to her,with little notes attached, such as "Pour ma femme Jacqueline 24.2.65" or "Pour Jacqueline pour se fete, son mari."
Also among the presents were early works, such as a young and intense Auto portrait (1917) where he shows himself sitting with his sketchpad on his knee. Clearly this gift was his way of bringing himself closer to her in the terms of age.
Even his later self-portraits or self-portraits in desguise-picasso as a matador or as the 17th-century figure in Homme en habit XVII siecle au fond bleu (1967)-were his way of explaining himself to her.
"I paint," he said, "the way others write their autobiography."
While the show lacks some of the more substantial later works such as Young Bather With Sand Shoval(1971), it nevertheless bustles with a vitality few older artists can match. jacqueline could take some measure of credit that "late Picasso" wasn't "forgotten Picasso."
So "Picasso Intime" may put a dent in Picasso's life long reputation as a sexist misogynistwho got his Hollywood-style comeuppance in Surviving Picasso, the James Ivory-directed rant where Anthony Hopkins plays the artist as pig and Natacha McElhone plays Gilot, the woman victim who came to hate him.
it will be a small dent, though. If Picasso's women got burned by getting close to him, he felt equally burned in return. His first marriage to ballerina Olga Koklova became so self-destructive he imagined its brutal fury with Self-Portrait And Monster(1910). For most of the other women in his life, he was the montser.
Not to Jacqueline, though. "Picasso Intime" also has work representing his many mistresses, from Fernande Olivier to Marie Therese Walter to Dora Maar(Gilot is missing).
In keeping these portraits, Jacqueline was clearly trying to cast herself above all those who had gone before by proving she could handle her husbands fascination with their bodies and, even more dangerously, their minds.
As a character, Jacqueline has already made an appearance in Picasso's Women, Brian McAvera's play about the artist seen from the perspective of the women in his life, in which Jacqueline, once played by Susannah York, is mostly a pathetic figure.
But "Picasso Intime" gives a different picture. In fact, I think there's a movie in this show, one that may in fact change what's become the accepted storyline of movies about artists as noble, silent sufferers-see Pollock, Vincent And Theo, Lust For Life and all the rest-a notion kept alive most recently in Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earing, in which 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer does the silent suffering.
"Picasso Intime" is about art that comes from interaction of the most personal kind. Of the two words in the title, it's the one about intimacy that's the most provocative. the show closes march 28.
PUBLISHED SAT, MARCH 13, 2004. TORONTO STAR.
I feel real sorry that a lot of the french words don't have the prononciation marks. I still don't know how to do the dashes above the e on the computer.
This was a very long article so I think I will put my thoughts about it in my next entry.
Jacqueline Picasso (nee Roque), the second wife of Pablo Picasso, was found dead October 15 at Mougins on the French Riviera with a bullet in her head. She was 59.
Picasso, who died in 1973, married her in 1961, when he was 79 years old and she was 35. She was a Paris-born divorcee and former dance teacher when she met Picasso, becoming his companion and the model for some fine portraits.
-Obiuary in The Times(London), Oct. 17, 1986
PARIS-Even when you're about to be buried they'll dig your reputation a little deeper.
"Picasso Intime: La Collection de Jacqueline," is the finest small show in Paris right now, in the most congenial new space, la Pinacotheque de Paris, just off a nondescript street with the too-promising name of rue de Paradis.
As its brochure admits, the Pinacotheque-in what used to be the factory/showroom for Baccarat crystal-is "derriere less Grands Boulevards." In other words it's as next to nowhere as you can get in this city.
Yet with "Picasso Intime," the Pinacotheque is muscling up against the Centre Pompidou, with its newly minted Joan Miro exhibition, "1917-1934 La Naissance du Monde," and the rest of the major galleries closer to the city centre, by asking questions about one of the more fractious art mysteries of the last century.
Who was Jacqueline? What was she? Was she merely a canny gold digger who married Pablo Picasso for his spectacular fortune? She did eventually end up with some $48 million(U.S.), long after she ruined his apparently stable relationship with Francoise Gilot, the artist's mistress for many years.
Gilot's 1965 response in her bestselling and self-serving autobiography, Life With Picasso, so infuriated the artist that he cut off all ties to Claude and Paloma, his two illegitimate children with Gilot, and erased them out of his will.
The above scenario apparently was on the mind of the Time's obituary writer who reminded the reader that Jacqueline was a "Paris-born devorcee" and "former dancer," attributes clearly meant to cast shadows on her honour. Jacqueline did little to distance from her wicked stepmother reputaion when she barred Paloma and Claude from attending their father's funeral.
"Picasso Intime" tells another story, too-in fact several other stories.
primarily it shows Picasso's fasination with Jacqueline, her dark eyes and high cheekbones, her Spanish features. Her looks were in synch with Picasso's creativity as he revisited his early days, his Spanish roots and the works of mentor-figure painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Diego Velazquez.
Jacqueline wasn't particularly tall. But in the many portraits that act as silent sentinals as you move through the exhibibition, she's shown nobly, seemingly larger than life.
Picasso viewed old age moodily. In 1963, Georges Braque and Jean Cocteau, colleagues from his earliest days in Paris, both died. And to a great degree it was jacqueline who helped him keep going-something she was unable to do for herself following his death, when her drinking grew worse and worse, the demons in her head closed in and she threatened suicide.
Sombre colours dominate the show, more like Paris in late winter than the Mediterranean under a noonday sun. There are black blues, ghastly whites, rudy browns, bold black outlines and wintry shadows-as in Portrait de Jacqueline au rocking-chair et au foulard noir (Jacqueline a l'echarpe noire) (1954)-which seem to shrowd everything in a dark fog.
The town near Mt.Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence where Picasso and jacqueline eventually settled, seems un-Mediterranean in Picasso's cool Le Vilage de Vauvenargues (April 29, 1959), with its dark greens, bland yellows and sharp hills outlined in thick jolts of black.
Your only hit of sun and glamour comes ahead of the main exhibition, in a photo display of images taken in the area around Cannes, where Picasso and Jacqueline had earliar set up house before moving to Aix. These shots reveal a sun-drenched Cote d'Azur, where the happy couple play with their animals, including the artist's beloved goat Biquette; clowns around for the camera; and welcomes the rich and the famous, including matador Luis Miguel Dominguin.
But it was Jacqueline's attention Pablo sought. Increasingly her role in his life was keeping away all the strangers while he worked, even if they weren't really strangers.
Picasso presented many of his portraits, often in her favourite pose-seated, with her arms folded around her bent knees-as presents to her,with little notes attached, such as "Pour ma femme Jacqueline 24.2.65" or "Pour Jacqueline pour se fete, son mari."
Also among the presents were early works, such as a young and intense Auto portrait (1917) where he shows himself sitting with his sketchpad on his knee. Clearly this gift was his way of bringing himself closer to her in the terms of age.
Even his later self-portraits or self-portraits in desguise-picasso as a matador or as the 17th-century figure in Homme en habit XVII siecle au fond bleu (1967)-were his way of explaining himself to her.
"I paint," he said, "the way others write their autobiography."
While the show lacks some of the more substantial later works such as Young Bather With Sand Shoval(1971), it nevertheless bustles with a vitality few older artists can match. jacqueline could take some measure of credit that "late Picasso" wasn't "forgotten Picasso."
So "Picasso Intime" may put a dent in Picasso's life long reputation as a sexist misogynistwho got his Hollywood-style comeuppance in Surviving Picasso, the James Ivory-directed rant where Anthony Hopkins plays the artist as pig and Natacha McElhone plays Gilot, the woman victim who came to hate him.
it will be a small dent, though. If Picasso's women got burned by getting close to him, he felt equally burned in return. His first marriage to ballerina Olga Koklova became so self-destructive he imagined its brutal fury with Self-Portrait And Monster(1910). For most of the other women in his life, he was the montser.
Not to Jacqueline, though. "Picasso Intime" also has work representing his many mistresses, from Fernande Olivier to Marie Therese Walter to Dora Maar(Gilot is missing).
In keeping these portraits, Jacqueline was clearly trying to cast herself above all those who had gone before by proving she could handle her husbands fascination with their bodies and, even more dangerously, their minds.
As a character, Jacqueline has already made an appearance in Picasso's Women, Brian McAvera's play about the artist seen from the perspective of the women in his life, in which Jacqueline, once played by Susannah York, is mostly a pathetic figure.
But "Picasso Intime" gives a different picture. In fact, I think there's a movie in this show, one that may in fact change what's become the accepted storyline of movies about artists as noble, silent sufferers-see Pollock, Vincent And Theo, Lust For Life and all the rest-a notion kept alive most recently in Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earing, in which 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer does the silent suffering.
"Picasso Intime" is about art that comes from interaction of the most personal kind. Of the two words in the title, it's the one about intimacy that's the most provocative. the show closes march 28.
PUBLISHED SAT, MARCH 13, 2004. TORONTO STAR.
I feel real sorry that a lot of the french words don't have the prononciation marks. I still don't know how to do the dashes above the e on the computer.
This was a very long article so I think I will put my thoughts about it in my next entry.