ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 4
Old Master Variations
Despite his reputation as a revolutionary, Picasso had an extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge of the history of art. He believed that artistic traditions were sustained by admiration and emulation. 'What is a painter, basically?' he asked, answering: 'He's a collector who wants to found a collection, doing the paintings himself that he likes by other people. That's how I start, and then it turns into something else.'
During his last decades Picasso painted several series of paintings that were based on compositions by the Old Masters. One of his variations on Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger (cat. 19), one variation on Velásquez's Las Meninas (cat. 20), and five variations on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe (cat. 21-25) are included in this exhibition. These works belong to series that are very extensive: Picasso painted fifteen variations on the Femmes d'Alger between 1954-55, thirty-six variations on Velasquez's Las Meninas in 1957, and there are twenty-seven paintings, a hundred and forty drawings and three lino-cuts based on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe which he made between 1959 and 1961.
'I am a Spaniard,' he said. 'Just as a torero takes his bull through all kinds of passes, I like to take my pictures through all kinds of variations.'
Strange as it may seem from today's perspective, Picasso's preoccupation with the Old Masters was one of the most controversial and mistrusted aspects of his late period. With these works Picasso had deliberately violated the avant-garde taboo against emulation, flying in the face of the criteria of originality and progress that prevailed during the 1953-73 period. In disagreement with the general drift of contemporary art, Picasso was offering his contemporaries a history lesson.
Nonetheless, the British writer John Berger responded scathingly to Picasso's variations on the Old Masters: 'He has nothing of his own to work on. He takes up the themes of other painters' pictures,' Berger wrote in 1965. It was a typical response. The art critic of the Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper concurred in 1981 that Picasso's 're-staging of the Old Masters was a sign of diminished creative power', and as recently as 1990, the British critic Tim Hilton damned the Femmes d'Alger as a 'futile series of variations'.
Such opinions are now almost never heard; today the critical consensus is overwhelmingly in Picasso's favour.
Acoustiguide 104
Music 201
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