The Frick Collection Displays "Picasso's Drawings,1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition"

Written by Stanley Remington Monday, 14 November 2011 02:04

New York City.- The Frick Collection is proud to present "Picasso's Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition", on view at the museum through January 8th 2012. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest draftsman of the twentieth century. The Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., have co-organized an exhibition that looks at the dazzling development of Picasso’s drawings, from the precocious academic exercises of his youth in the 1890s to the virtuoso classical works of the early 1920s. Through a selection of more than fifty works at each venue, the presentation will examine the artist’s stylistic experiments and techniques in this roughly thirty-year period, which begins and ends in a classical mode and encompasses the radical innovations of Cubism and collage. After New York, the exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where it will be on view from February 5th 2012, through May 6th.

The show will demonstrate how drawing served as an essential means of invention and discovery in Picasso’s multifaceted art, while its centrality in his vast oeuvre connects him deeply with the grand tradition of European masters. Indeed, the exhibition will bring to the fore his complex engagement with artists of the near and distant past and will explore the diverse ways he competed with the virtuoso techniques of his predecessors and perpetuated them in revitalized form. "Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition" will feature loans from important public and private collections in Europe and the United States and will be accompanied by a full-length catalogue of the same name. The exhibition begins with Picasso’s childhood sketches and drawings he made from 1894 to 1897 as a student at the art academies of La Coruña, Barcelona, and Madrid. Drawing became a habit, and his rapid development through this period owes much to this constant practice. The remarkable leaps he made are demonstrated in prizewinning drawings after casts of ancient sculptures in which he mastered line, volume, perspective, and chiaroscuro and absorbed a love of classical beauty, as well as in drawings from live models. The lessons learned in this period of study as well as his exposure to the Spanish masters, whose work he first saw on a trip to the Prado with his father in 1895, stayed with Picasso throughout his life.

The exhibition next follows the young Picasso in his search for more expressive means as a graphic artist working in Barcelona. Early portraits of family and friends show the influence of Catalan Modernisme. From 1900 to 1904 Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris, moving to the French capital permanently in 1904. During these years, he responded to such modern masters as Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Degas, among others, and absorbed ideas from the paintings and drawings of the Old Masters and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre.  The variety of artists and periods that fascinated him is matched by his lively experimentation with diverse techniques and materials—pen and ink, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and gouache. In these years, Picasso produced virtuoso drawings as independent works that feature his perennial themes — the couple, the mother and child, the toilette, the sleep watcher, the harlequin family — and he continued to make portraits of friends and lovers.  Sheets crowded with figures, heads, and hands that reveal the impetuousness of his experimentation will be displayed alongside his finished drawings. Picasso’s development as a draftsman took place within an environment of rising public accessibility to Old Master and nineteenth-century drawings through permanent installations at the Louvre and temporary exhibitions at galleries and other museums.


New methods of photographic reproduction, the publication of catalogues raisonnés on major artists, and the availability of luxury portfolios contributed to the visibility of masterpieces on paper. In the cultural milieu of Paris as well as other European cities, an interest in drawings was in the air and spurred Picasso’s ambition to absorb the grand tradition of draftsmanship into his art. Innovation is the keynote of the following section of the exhibition, which demonstrates how Picasso developed new approaches that culminated in Cubism, the most critical development in his career and, arguably, in all of twentieth-century art. In studies of individual figures, he revealed his thought processes as he submitted the body to more abstract modes of representation that draw from ancient Iberian and African art. In highly expressive figure drawings in watercolor and gouache, color emerged as a primary means of structuring space. A sequence of radical interpretations of the female figure — standing, reclining, and bust-length—shows Picasso synthesizing insights from non-Western art and Cézanne’s analytic approach to form. These are followed by refined cubist figure drawings made from 1909 to 1912 in charcoal, pen and ink, and watercolor, in which Picasso pushed representation to the threshold of abstraction. Cézannesque landscape and still-life drawings from 1907 to 1910 are grouped with slightly later still-lifes, in which Picasso employed papier collé, exploring issues of representation in yet more complex ways. The works in this part of the show affirm that traditional graphic techniques were essential to Picasso in his bold search for new means of conveying objects in space and space itself on two-dimensional surfaces. Picasso’s proficiency in multiple modes of drawing led him to creative play with the formal language of classical drawing through dissection, reference, parody, and outright hijacking in ways that were both reverent and irreverent. In the years of and following the First World War, Picasso embraced classical modes and continued to explore the Cubist approach to representation.

His shifts in style—a means of avoiding confinement to, as he described it, “the same vision, the same technique, the same formula”—are represented in the exhibition through the juxtaposition of richly colored Cubist works and delicate naturalistic drawings produced during the same years. The multifaceted work of this period was informed by Picasso’s fresh encounters with the figural compositions of Cézanne in Avignon and the drawings of Ingres in Montauban, as well as by his first trip to Italy, in 1917. In his ongoing dialogue and rivalry with Ingres, Picasso appropriates and reinvents the neoclassical artist’s graphic style in exquisite portrait drawings of friends. In these portraits and in representations of bathers and figures in repose, a variety of idioms appear: they range from spare contour drawings and boldly graphic sheets to finely worked-up sculptural renderings of the face and body. The final ensemble of the exhibition is made up of sheets from Picasso’s stay with his wife Olga Khokhlova and baby Paulo at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1921 and just afterward. The pastel and charcoal renderings of monumental female figures from this time reinterpret the ancient statuary and Renaissance nudes on view at the palace. Several large-scale studies for an unrealized painting project transposed the classical figures from Picasso’s Three Women at a Fountain to the modern world in which women and a girl in contemporary dress appear around a nineteenth-century fountain. These representations of classical art conclude the exhibition, which examines Picasso’s style, sources, and techniques within the first thirty years of his career, revealing the extent to which he relied on drawing as a means of synthesizing past and present, tradition and innovation. As Picasso joined the ranks of the masters he admired, the practice of drawing continued to provide him with the means to give his own art a fresh and vigorous expression.

The Frick Collection is a not-for-profit educational institution originally founded by Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the Pittsburgh coke and steel industrialist. In 1913, construction began on Henry Frick’s New York mansion at Seventieth Street and Fifth Avenue, designed by Carrère and Hastings to accommodate Mr. Frick’s paintings and other art objects. The house cost $5,000,000, but from its inception, took into account Mr. Frick’s intention to leave his house and his art collection to the public. Mr. Frick died in 1919 and in his will, left the house and all of the works of art in it together with the furnishings (“subject to occupancy by Mrs. Frick during her lifetime”) to become a gallery called The Frick Collection. He provided an endowment of $15,000,000 to be used for the maintenance of the Collection and for improvements and additions. After Mrs. Frick's death in 1931, family and trustees of The Frick Collection began the transformation of the Fifth Avenue residence into a museum and commissioned John Russell Pope to make additions to the original house, including two galleries (the Oval Room and East Gallery), a combination lecture hall and music room, and the enclosed courtyard. In December 1935 The Frick Collection opened to the public. In 1977, a garden on Seventieth Street to the east of the Collection was designed by Russell Page, to be seen from the street and from the pavilion added at the same time to accommodate increasing attendance at the museum. This new Reception Hall was designed by Harry van Dyke, John Barrington Bayley, and G. Frederick Poehler. Two additional galleries were opened on the lower level of the pavilion to house temporary exhibitions. The nearby Frick Art Reference Library was founded in 1920 to serve “adults with a serious interest in art,” among them scholars, art professionals, collectors, and students.The paintings in the Frick Collection include works by Hans Holbein, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Bellini, El Greco, Titian, Diego Velazquez, Frans Hals, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Johannes Vermeer, Francois Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony van Dyck, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Claude Lorrain, Francisco Goya, Joseph Mallord William Turner, James McNeill Whistler, Francesco Laurana, Jean-Antoine Houdon, John Constable, Edgar Degas, and Severo Calzetta da Ravenna. Vermeer's “Mistress and Maid”, the last painting Mr. Frick bought, is one of three pictures by that artist in the Collection, while Piero della Francesca's image of St. John the Evangelist, dominating the Enamel Room, is the only large painting by Piero in the United States. Most of the sculpture purchased by Mr. Frick for the Collection was from the Italian Renaissance. Notable in the Collection are works by Vecchietta, Laurana, Francesco da Sangallo, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Riccio, and Severo da Ravenna. French sculpture includes the Lemoyne Garden Vase for the interior courtyard and remarkable works by Coysevox, Houdon, and Clodion. A number of splendid early North European sculptures are also in the Collection, above all the bust of the Duke of Alba by Jonghelinck, the Multscher reliquary bust, and bronzes traditionally ascribed to Adriaen de Vries and Hubert Gerhard. Visit the museum’s website at … www.frick.org

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~