ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 2
Jacqueline
'I'm convinced that Picasso would not have lived as long or done as much work if it were not for Jacqueline,' said the American curator, William Rubin. 'Picasso went through a very difficult period just before meeting Jacqueline, and that might have been the end of his career. It is as if he had been blessed with two more decades of life when he met her. Suddenly, there's a kind of immense expansiveness [in his work]. Not simply quantitatively, but qualitatively.'
Picasso's partnership with Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986) began during the summer of 1954. Over the course of their life together, Picasso refracted Jacqueline's image through many different styles and into many different visual codes - sometimes highly naturalistic (eg. cat. 6), sometimes extremely abstracted. He prided himself on having no consistent style:
'I am basically a painter without a style,' he said. 'Style is often something that locks a painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula for years and years, sometimes for a whole lifetime...I myself thrash about too much, move too much. You see me here and yet I'm already changed, I'm already elsewhere.'
From very early in his career, Picasso was a famous 'distorter'. He belonged to a generation of artists who departed radically from naturalistic appearance. For him, painting was not a matter of copying appearances: it involved transposing an experience into a constellation of signs. 'One should have a sign for everything,' he said, explaining that 'art is a language of signs'. In effect, each image of Jacqueline is a cluster of signs, with some recurring in several paintings.
Picasso made the unpainted areas of his canvases an integral feature of his
compositions. This was a result of his fascination with the "blanks"
in Cézanne's paintings. His way of inflecting and specifying gaps in
the paint structure became increasingly subtle and suggestive -- as in cat.
8. Patches of white primer can appear hard or soft, braced or sagging, pristine
or time-worn. We may read them as plump volumes or dented planes, flawless substance
or luminous space.
Acoustiguide 102
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