CURATOR'S STATEMENT

EXHIBITION FACTS AND FIGURES

FLOORPLAN

ROOM TEXT PANELS:

Section 1: Crisis
Section 2: Jacqueline
Section 3: La Californie
Section 4: Old Master Variations
Section 5: Travesties
Section 6: Artist and Model
Section 7: Pleasure and Desire
Section 8: Last Works

ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 1

Crisis

In 1953 Picasso's personal life was in crisis. Despite booming sales of his work, the general drift of contemporary art was no longer in his favour. His common-law wife Françoise Gilot had left him in September, taking their 4 year old daughter Paloma and their 6 year son Claude with her. Their departure occurred a few weeks short of Picasso's 72nd birthday. Three months later, Picasso's mistress Geneviève Laporte also broke off her relationship with him.

What were the prospects for the remainder of his life? Could he start all over again at the age of 72? The overall character of Picasso's art after 1953 bore the imprint of this crisis, marked by anxieties about ageing and fears of solitude, obsolescence and death.

Picasso took stock of his situation in a series of 180 drawings known as La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) which was published in the magazine Verve in September 1954. In the accompanying essay, Michel Leiris alluded to the circumstances behind the drawings as Picasso's 'Season in Hell' (cat. 5).

Without a woman in his life, Picasso resorted to paying a model to pose for him. He painted and drew forty portraits of Sylvette David (cat. 2) over the course of a single month. The interlude signalled a change in his way of working: between 1953-1972, Picasso often produced long sequences of variations of a motif, not just unique, isolated images.

Most of Picasso's old friends pre-deceased him, but one who outlived him was his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) (cat. 3, 4). More than anyone, Kahnweiler was responsible for Picasso's phenomenal international success. In 1957, Kahnweiler celebrated the fiftieth year of his gallery in Paris and his fiftieth year as Picasso's dealer. During 1957, his gallery sold seventy canvases by Picasso for 400 million francs -- an unheard of fortune for the time.

Between 1953 and 1972 Picasso became an ardent colourist, much influenced by van Gogh and Matisse. However, before that, he held an ambivalent attitude towards colour, which had important repercussions for his painting. He told André Malraux that 'colour weakens', yet qualified this by adding: 'All the same, before I die, I would like to figure out what it is, colour'. He intermittently returned to black-and-white, and his temporary renunciations of colour sometimes coincided with moments of unhappiness or upheaval, as was the case with works in this room.

Acoustiguide 111, 101