The EY Exhibition Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy
8 March – 9 September 2018
TATE MODERN
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, Royaume-UniIn March 2018 Tate Modern will stage its first ever solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work, one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will take visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’. More than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper will demonstrate his prolific and restlessly inventive character. They will strip away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.
1932 was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his celebrity status as the most influential artist of the early 20th century. Over the course of this year he created some of his best loved works, including Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, an anchor point of Tate’s collection, confident colour-saturated portraits and Surrealist experiments, including thirteen seminal ink drawings of the Crucifixion. His virtuoso paintings also riffed on the voluptuous sculptures he had produced some months before at his new country estate.
In his personal life, throughout 1932, Picasso kept a delicate balance between tending to his wife Olga Khokhlova and their 11-year-old son Paulo, and his passionate love affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, 28 years his junior. The exhibition will bring these complex artistic and personal dynamics to life with an unprecedented range of loans from collections around the world, including many record-breaking works held in private hands. Highlights will include Girl before a Mirror, a signature painting that rarely leaves The Museum of Modern Art, and the legendary The Dream, a virtuoso masterpiece depicting the artist’s muse in dreamy abandon, which has never been exhibited in the UK before.
Pablo Picasso The Dream (Le Rêve) 1932,
Private Collection
© Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018
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1932 was a time of invention and reflection. Having recently turned 50, in collaboration with Christian Zervos, Picasso embarked on the first volume of what remains the most ambitious catalogue of an artist’s work ever made, listing more than 16,000 paintings and drawings. Meanwhile, a group of Paris dealers beat international competition to stage the first ever retrospective of his work, a major show that featured new paintings alongside earlier works in a range of different styles. Realist portraits of Olga and Paulo revealed Picasso’s feelings of pride and tenderness for his family, while his sexually charged new paintings unveiled for the first time the presence of the secret woman in his life. This included the iconic trio of Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Nude in a Black Armchair and The Mirror, widely regarded as a pinacle of Picasso’s artistic achievement of the inter-war period. This dazzling series will be reunited at Tate Modern for the first time in 85 years. Picasso’s journeys between his homes in Boisgeloup and Paris capture the contradictions of his existence at this pivotal moment: a life divided between countryside retreat and urban bustle, established wife and recent lover, painting and sculpture, sensuality and darkness. The year ended traumatically when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill after swimming in the river Marne, losing most of her iconic blonde hair. In his final works of the year, Picasso transformed the event into scenes of rescue and rape, a dramatic finale to a year of love, fame and tragedy that pushed Picasso to the height of his creative powers. Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and co-curator of the exhibition said: Picasso famously described painting as “just another form of keeping a diary”. This exhibition will invite you to get close to the artist, to his ways of thinking and working, and to the tribulations of his personal life at a pivotal moment in his career. By showing stellar loans from public and private collections in the order in which they were made, this exhibition will allow a new generation to discover Picasso’s explosive energy, while surprising those who think they already know the artist. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will be open from 8 March to 9 September 2018 at Tate Modern in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. It will be curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and Nancy Ireson, Curator, International Art, with Juliette Rizzi and Laura Bruni, Assistant Curators. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Musée National-Picasso, Paris, where it will be curated by Laurence Madeline from 10 October 2017 to 11 February 2018. |
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A month-by-month journey through Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’ This is the first ever solo Pablo Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. It will bring you face-to-face with more than 100 paintings, sculptures and drawings, mixed with family photographs and rare glimpses into his personal life. Three of his extraordinary paintings featuring his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter are shown together for the first time since they were created over a period of just five days in March 1932. The myths around Picasso will be stripped away to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness. You will see him as never before. Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions with Nancy Ireson, Curator, International Art, Laura Bruni and Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curators, Tate Modern. The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Musée national Picasso-Paris. |
| Biography Pablo Picasso 1881-1973 |
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School of Paris painter, sculptor, etcher, lithographer, ceramist and designer, who has had enormous influence on 20th century art and worked in an unprecedented variety of styles. Born at Malaga, Spain, son of an art teacher. His family moved to Barcelona, where he entered the School of Fine Arts 1895; then entered Madrid Academy 1897. Early showed great precocity. First visited Paris in autumn 1900, returned in 1901 when he had his first Paris one-man exhibition at the Galerie Vollard. Blue Period paintings of beggars and sad-faced women. Settled in Paris 1904. In 1905 painted some pictures of circus folk and embarked on his Rose Period. 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' 1906-7 marked the beginning of a more revolutionary manner, influenced by Cezanne and Negro art. Met Braque in 1907 and with his collaboration created Cubism. Designed sets and costumes for Parade and other Diaghilev ballets 1917-24. Made some neo-classic figure paintings 1920-4, parallel to later Cubism. Started to make more violently expressive and metamorphic works in 1925, and in the following years frequently exhibited with the Surrealists. Important series of wrought-iron constructions and modelled sculptures 1928-34, illustrations for Ovid's Les Métamorphoses, Buffon's Histoire Naturelle etc. Awarded First Prize at the 1930 Pittsburgh International. His painting 'Guernica' 1937 was inspired by the destruction by bombing of the Spanish town of that name. Continued to live in Paris throughout the Occupation. From 1946 lived mainly in the South of France at Antibes, Vallauris, Cannes, and from 1958 near Aix-en-Provence, where he maintained a prolific output of paintings, sculptures, etchings, lithographs and ceramics. Died at Mougins, near Cannes. Published in: |
