ROOM TEXT PANEL: SECTION 5
Travesties
Roland Penrose remarked that: 'With Picasso the trivial and the serious lived well together. During a visit [to Picasso's home] that could begin with clowning and progress to an improvised performance on an African musical instrument, the final reward would often be a showing of some of his latest canvases.'
Penrose and his wife, the photographer Lee Miller, were regular visitors to
Picasso's homes in the south of France, and Lee Miller described Picasso's child-like
delight in dressing-up games. 'At "La Californie", his villa in Cannes,
there is a large mirrored sideboard heaped with false noses, beards and hair,
costume jackets from everywhere -- the harem, the bullring, the circus ... and
dozens of hats,' she noted.
His amusement with disguise and travesty led Picasso to paint the burlesque figures that are featured in this room. From 1966 until 1972, his paintings, drawings and prints came to be populated by a colourful cast of hidalgos, cavaliers, musketeers, merry wenches, procuresses and toreadors. They were high-spirited pastiches of Dutch and Spanish 17th century painting. Picasso's works on paper just as frequently alluded to etchings and aquatints by Rembrandt and Goya (eg. cat. 42-45).
Large numbers of these paintings appeared in two important exhibitions held in the Grande Chapelle Clémentine at the Papal Palace at Avignon in 1970 and 1973, where the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti described their rumbustious vitality:
'They [the figures in the Avignon paintings] are subjects with strong proportions, emerging from the most varied costumes and backgrounds, from the most violent dissonances, from the weirdest arabesques, from explosive bursts that are as harmoniously inharmonious as can be.'
André Malraux called these works Picasso's 'tarots' and Hélène Parmelin identified them with a so-called 'Stare Period'. The wonderful burlesque torero in the 1958 linocut (cat. 33), and The Guitarist 1965 (cat. 33) are forerunners of the zany characters of this last phase of Picasso's work, which began when he was in his 85th year.
Acoustiguide 105
Music 202
|
