Displaying items by tag: Pablo Picasso

In the dead of night, a 95-year-old Picasso went under the knife.

“Anything goes wrong, just stop what you’re doing,” the lead technician, Tom Zoufaly, commanded. “I don’t want to hear any screaming, yelling.”

The scene of the operation was the Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue, home since 1959 to “Le Tricorne,” a 19-by-20-foot stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso. The curtain had been caught in a dispute between the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which owns the piece, and Aby J. Rosen, the owner of the landmark Seagram Building, where it resided. Mr. Rosen wanted it taken away.

In Spring 2015, Paris’ Centre Pompidou plans to open a temporary outpost in Malága, Spain, the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. “Pop-Up Pompidou” will present rotating exhibitions pulled from the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection -- the largest modern and contemporary art collection in Europe. So far, Max Ernst’s “The Imbecile,” Francis Bacon’s “Self-Portrait,” and Picasso’s “The Flowered Hat 10/04/1940” are among the pieces expected to go on view at the pop-up museum.

The Malága City Hall will provide the institution with the iconic building “El Cubo,” or The Cube, a large glass-and-steel structure located on the city’s port, which is among the oldest ports in the world

Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.

Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality.

Life with Picasso was never easy, it seems, and neither was the €52 million renovation of Paris's Picasso Museum. After five years of delays and difficulties, culminating in a public quarrel and the firing of its president in May, the museum's reopening is finally set for the artist's birthday, Oct. 25. The public will get a preview of the new interiors, before the artworks are installed, on Sept 20-21. The renovation has doubled the public space, modernized outdated facilities and added a new entrance, a multimedia auditorium and a Cubist garden with geometric topiary trees.

The museum's 17th-century hôtel particulier was built in 1659 by Pierre Aubert, a financier and adviser to Louis XIV. He was also the salt tax collector, and his extravagant mansion was quickly nicknamed Hôtel Salé (salty). The majestic staircase, based on a plan by Michelangelo, is the centerpiece, with delicate ironwork banisters and a sumptuous array of sculpted garlands, cherubs and divinities.

In a great work of art, the artist's hand is invisible. Not so in the traveling exhibition "Revealed," which shows famous artists at work in their studios. The series of nearly 40 photographs has been culled from the archives of the French weekly magazine Paris Match by Pablo Picasso's grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso.

The pictures are showing in lobbies and other public spaces at Sofitel hotels in five cities, beginning in New York and ending in Beverly Hills next April. In between, the exhibit will be in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Montreal.

The Museum of Modern Art announces the launch of Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912–1914, the Museum’s first digital-only publication and the first monographic e-book to be authorized by the Estate of Pablo Picasso. Edited by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Blair Hartzell, independent art historian and curator, it embraces the innovative features and infinite real estate of the digital format in order to present new scholarship on a breakthrough moment in the history of Cubism and twentieth-century art. Scott Gerson, private art conservator and former Associate Conservator, MoMA, served as conservation editor on this cross-disciplinary project, which presents in-depth studies of 15 objects made by Picasso between 1912 and 1914. Contributing scholars include Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow, History of Art, The University of Edinburgh; Jeremy Melius, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University; and Jeffrey Weiss, Adjunct Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

On October 20, 2014, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the most important exhibition of the essential Cubists -- Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso -- in over 30 years. “Cubism” will feature iconic works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, which is unmatched in its holdings of Cubist art. Lauder, a philanthropist and cosmetics mogul, promised his collection to the Met in April 2013. “Cubism” will mark the first time that the collection will be shown in public.

The exhibition will explore the invention and development of Cubism, a movement that transformed the landscape of modern art. Cubism departed from the traditional interpretations of art, challenged conventional perceptions of space, time, and perspective, and paved the way for abstraction -- a concept that dominated the art world for much of the 20th century.

The Madoura Pottery in Vallauris, Southern France, is crumbling down. According to the Journal du Dimanche (JDD), the workshop Picasso used to produce some of his best-known ceramic work is in a dire state. The walls are saturated with water. There’s a hole in the roof.

Living in Vallauris between 1946 and 1955, the Spanish giant embraced ceramics with gusto, and over 9,000 pieces came out of Madoura between 1947 and 1971, many of which are now fetching top prices at auction.

The problematic Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been going through political upheaval has received some good news. Pablo Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, has donated two works by her father to the institution. Last June, Anne Baldassari, president since 2005 was fired, replaced by Centre Pompidou-Metz director Laurent Le Bon. This has created a split in the Picasso family. The changes have occured because of the delayed five-year renovation project, which has caused a massive spending deficit.

A 1908 drawing of a woman’s face in the Cubist style, containing a portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire on the reverse of the page has been gifted by the artist's daughter.

After a triumphant tour of Japan, then the United States and ending in Italy, the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has returned home to the Mauritshuis royal picture gallery in The Hague. For ever. The museum, which reopened last month after two years' renovation work, will no longer allow Vermeer's masterpiece out. Officially the Mona Lisa of the North has been gated in order to please visitors to the Mauritshuis who only want to see that painting. Its fame has steadily increased since Tracy Chevalier published her novel in 1999 followed in 2004 by the film by Peter Webber starring Scarlett Johansson. Anyone wanting to see the portrait will have make the trip to the Dutch city.

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" thus joins the select band of art treasures that never see the outside world. Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" never leaves the Uffizi in Florence; "Las Meninas" by Velázquez stays put at the Prado in Madrid; Picasso's "Guernica" remains just down the road at the Reina Sofia museum; and his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" can only be seen at MoMA in New York.