Art
Picasso’s picks
by Jill Trevelyan
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Creative partnerships and rivalries were central to Picasso’s practice, and the exhibition touches on his edgy friendships with Braque, Matisse and Derain. His relationship with Matisse – whose temperament and strengths were so different from his own – has been likened to a game of chess: each artist carefully watched the other and responded to new developments in his rival’s work. The two occasionally swapped paintings and thus Picasso acquired a major work in the exhibition – Matisse’s direct, almost childlike portrait of his daughter Marguerite. Gertrude Stein mischievously suggested he had deliberately chosen a “weak” Matisse to demean his rival, and Picasso’s friends expressed their contempt by throwing rubber-tipped darts at it. Only Picasso saw that Portrait of Marguerite was a key work.
Also included is Matisse’s great Still Life with Oranges, a painting that is utterly audacious in its colour combinations and compositional structure, yet immensely satisfying and harmonious. The knock-out work in the show, it reminds us of Picasso’s great regard for Matisse as a colourist. Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot recalled his comment about another Matisse in this exhibition, Seated Girl: he “wondered if he would ever be capable of mixing such a mauve with such a green”. (He wasn’t.)
At the exhibition opening, a special ceremony was held to welcome a work back to Queensland soil: a Mabuiag Island mask from the Torres Strait. Acquired by Picasso in the 1920s, it was part of his vast collection of tribal art, most of it from Africa rather than Oceania, but including 11 works from the Pacific. Tribal masks were a powerful catalyst for his painting in the early 1900s, but for the deeply superstitious Picasso, their interest was not merely an aesthetic one: “The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things … intercessors, mediators.”
The exhibition promises more than 70 works by Picasso himself, but some visitors may be disappointed to find the majority are sketches and prints. Images of the women in his life – always a charged subject – dominate, and the outstanding work is the extraordinarily erotic Nude in a Garden. Painted when Picasso was unhappily married to Olga Khokhlova but infatuated with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, he reduces his lover’s pale pink body to a series of voluptuous Matissean curves: breasts, buttocks, arms and neck. Every orifice is exposed to our gaze; flowers and leaves seem to sprout from her body. What a contrast is the last Picasso in the show, Seated Old Man – a helter-skelter portrait in which the 91-year-old artist seems to confront his own mortality, racing against time to get his vision down on canvas. Crude it may be, but it packs a punch.
Picasso collected mainly contemporary art and that of the recent past, and there is little evidence in the exhibition of his complex relationship with the old masters, such as Goya, El Greco and Rembrandt. This apparently iconoclastic painter was also deeply immersed in the history of art. In his studio, he declared, “I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.” But there was an element of one-upmanship in Picasso’s attitude to his predecessors. Constantly pitting his own powers against theirs, he was always measuring his own achievement and seeking a place for himself in the pantheon.
In 1936, Picasso was named absentee director of the Prado Museum in Madrid – despite never living in Spain after 1904. He liked to boast: “All these great artists finally belonged to me.” It’s a wry comment on the nature of -artistic appropriation – that unpredictable cycle of influence that occurs over time and across cultures with each new generation. Years later, Picasso brought the cycle full circle. When he came to decide the future of his own art collection, he announced that it should be left to the French state. It was to be dedicated: “To Young Artists.”
PICASSO & HIS COLLECTION, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until September 14
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