Displaying items by tag: Picasso

You have an interesting face. I would like to do your portrait. I have a feeling we will do great things together.--Pablo Picasso

Following the critical and popular success of Picasso: Mosqueteros in New York in 2009 and Picasso: The Mediterranean Years in London in 2010, Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the next chapter in an ongoing exploration of Picasso’s principal themes. Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou brings together the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints inspired by one of Picasso’s most ideal models and enduring passions. The exhibition is curated by the eminent Picasso biographer, John Richardson, together with Marie-Thérèse’s granddaughter, art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso, who is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s sculptures.

In 1927, on a street in Paris, Picasso encountered the unassuming girl, just shy of eighteen years old, who would become his lover and one of modern art’s most famous muses. “I am Picasso” he announced. The name meant nothing to Marie-Thérèse so he took her to a bookshop to show her a monograph of his paintings and asked if he could see her again. Flattered and curious, she agreed, and thus began a secret love affair that would establish Marie-Thérèse as the primary inspiration for Picasso’s most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come.

More than any other woman that Picasso desired and painted, Marie-Thérèse, with her statuesque body and strong, pure profile, fueled his imagination with a luminous dream of youth. Although her first appearances in his work were veiled references with her initials forming spare linear compositions, such as in the earliest work in the exhibition, Guitare à la main blanche (1927), the arrival of the blond goddess’s likeness in his art announced a new love in his life. In portrayals, Picasso would stretch her robust athletic form to new extremes, metamorphosing her in endlessly inventive ways. She became the catalyst for some of his most exceptional work, from groundbreaking paintings to an inspired return to sculpture in the 1930s, according her an almost mythic stature and earning her immortality as an art historical subject. Yet her true identity remained a secret from even Picasso’s closest friends. Even after Marie-Thérèse bore their daughter Maya in 1935, Picasso would continue to divide his time between his professional life as the most famous artist in the world, and his secret family life, spending Thursdays and weekends with her and Maya and amassing a trove of love letters and snapshots exchanged while they were apart.

The exhibition spans the years 1927 to 1940 and includes several works never before seen in the United States. The curators have assembled the group of more than eighty works to show a rarely articulated range of Marie-Thérèse’s influence within Picasso’s imagery, beyond recent headline-grabbing portraits. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a new biographical essay by John Richardson, and Diana Widmaier Picasso’s revelatory essay exploring Picasso’s portraiture, which includes dozens of never before published photographs of Marie-Thérèse from the family archives. Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Edinburgh University and co-curator of the historic exhibition “Matisse Picasso” (2002-03), has contributed an essay that examines the dissemination of images of Picasso’s sculptures through the art journals of the period.

To show Picasso’s work in a downtown contemporary art gallery creates a context that evokes the original challenges that his art presented in his own time while celebrating its enduring significance in our own. Under the direction of Valentina Castellani and installed in a dynamic transformation of the 21st Street gallery by architect Annabelle Selldorf, this unprecedented exhibition of the period will reveal Picasso’s secret muse and his l'amour fou Marie-Thérèse in a dramatic new light.

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain in 1881 and died in France in 1973. Recent exhibitions of his work include “Picasso: Tradition and the Avant-Garde,” Museo Nacional del Prado and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); "Picasso and American Art" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006) traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); "Picasso et les Maîtres," Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (2008-09); “Picasso: Challenging the Past,” National Gallery, London (2009) and “Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum”, New York (2010).

For further information please contact the gallery at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or at 212.741.1717.

A 1934 Pablo Picasso painting of his mistress may fetch as much as $35 million at Sotheby’s (BID) in New York next month as auction houses aim to capitalize on buyers’ appetite for iconic 20th-century art.

“Femmes Lisant (Deux Personnages)” depicts Marie-Therese Walter as a blue-faced, supple figure reading a book with another woman. It’s the top lot in Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale on May 3. The evening auction is expected to tally more than $150 million, the New York-based company said.

The market in this mistress has surged in the past year. The 1932 “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” went for $106.5 million -- a record for any work of art at auction -- at Christie’s International in New York last May. Sotheby’s in London sold the 1932 “La Lecture” for 25.2 million pounds ($40.6 million) in February. Gagosian gallery will open the “Picasso and Marie- Therese: L’amour fou” exhibition on April 14 in New York’s Chelsea district.

“These are images of desire and rapture,” said Simon Shaw, senior vice president and head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. Referring to “La Lecture,” he said, “the picture we just sold generated a huge competition; there were seven bidders.”

A Palestinian art academy is preparing to spruce itself up for a famous guest: a $7 million Pablo Picasso masterpiece that would be the first displayed in the West Bank. But simply arranging the painting's journey remains a far more difficult work in progress over complications such as finding reliable transport and clearing Israeli checkpoints.

The more than yearlong negotiations and planning — drawing in the Israeli military, Palestinian curators and Dutch museum officials — highlight the obstacles for even ordinary commerce or movement within the West Bank or through the few openings in the separation barrier with Israel.

"Of course, at the beginning, we saw these complications but didn't know to what extent this would reach," said Remco de Blaaij, the curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who is overseeing the proposed loan of Picasso's 1943 "Buste de Femme."

If the painting makes it to the International Academy of Art, Palestine, by the summer — and that remains an open question — it will become the most valuable and prestigious artwork ever shown in the West Bank.

The small art school in Ramallah put in the loan request in early 2010. Normally, such inter-museum exchanges are routine and take about six months to coordinate. But de Blaaij said the logistics are still being addressed for the 52-mile (88-kilometer) trip from Israel's international airport near Tel Aviv to Ramallah.

"The main concern is with getting into the West Bank and even more with getting out of there," de Blaaij said. "You never know what's going to happen at checkpoints."

Beyond that, Israelis aren't allowed to drive to certain parts of the West Bank because of safety concerns. Palestinians' freedom of movement is limited within the West Bank. Those seeking to enter Israel require a permit and often wait for hours in line at security checkpoints.

So curators are still hunting for a reliable transport company that can drive in both Israel and the West Bank. De Blaaij said they have found an insurer but didn't want to go into details.

Russia’s Federal Security Service said it found artworks by Pablo Picasso and Rembrandt and documents for offshore companies belonging to self-exiled investor Boris Berezovsky in a raid on an illegal gambling operation in Moscow.

The paintings, worth more than $5 million, and documents were found in the main office of a building in central Moscow that was once used by Berezovsky, said the FSB, as the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB is known, on its website.

The crime syndicate that operated out of building No. 40 on Novokuznetskaya Ulitsa was able to earn as much as $10 million a month in part because of the “support” it received from senior law enforcement officials in the Moscow region, including a first deputy prosecutor, the FSB said. The building also houses the Triumph art gallery.

A Pablo Picasso painting of his mistress last night sold for 25.2 million pounds ($40.5 million) as highly valued artworks attracted selective bidding.

“La Lecture” was estimated to make 12 million pounds to 18 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London. Ten of the 42 Impressionist and modern lots failed to sell, including a bronze by Alberto Giacometti.

“The auction did all right, not great,’’ the London-based dealer Alan Hobart of the Pyms Gallery said in an interview. “The auction houses are struggling to find the goods. Rich collectors are hanging on to their art. Once prices are driven up, the market becomes more discriminating.”

Classic works by modern artists with reputations such as Picasso are attracting investment-conscious new buyers from the emerging economies of Russia, Asia and the Middle East, said dealers. Choosy bidders held back on other lots, in contrast with the equivalent event last year, which raised twice as much, boosted by the record 65 million pounds for another Giacometti bronze.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) observed and absorbed the work of other artists. One artist Picasso particularly admired was Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Although the two lived in the same Montmartre neighborhood for several years, until Degas’ death in 1917, there is no evidence they ever met. Yet some of Picasso’s first images of Paris clearly echoed the subjects — café-goers, cabaret entertainers, and bathers — that characterize Degas’ work. When Picasso met and married the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, his depictions of her and her milieu similarly drew from the vocabulary established by Degas as the painter of dancers. In 1958 Picasso acquired a number of Degas’ provocative monotypes set in brothels, which he considered “the best things [Degas] ever did,” and in a series of etchings from 1971, he envisioned Degas himself within the very setting he had once depicted.