Yale University Art Gallery to feature 'Picasso and the Allure of Language' |
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| Wednesday, 28 January 2009 00:45 |
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Drawn from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, as well as the renowned Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, in Dallas, Texas, from which two sculptures are on loan, the varied works on view span the years from 1900, when Picasso was nineteen years old, to 1969, just four years before his death at the age of ninety-one. Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, observes, “Picasso dubbed his studio a ‘laboratory,’ and today we can still learn from the intense discussion, friendship, and collaboration that went on both inside and outside that studio. Those intellectual exchanges—among artists, writers, and thinkers of many disciplines, during the Cubist years and after—changed Picasso and, ultimately, the course of modern art.” Picasso and the Allure of Language remains on view at the Gallery through May 24, 2009. It then travels to the Nasher Museum of Art, at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborated on the organization of the exhibition (August 20, 2009–January 3, 2010). The exhibition marks the first time that works by Picasso originally owned by Gertrude and Leo Stein and now in the Gallery’s collection are reunited with materials from the Beinecke Library’s Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Among the objects drawn from this archive are an intimate 1914 collage made by Picasso from Stein and Toklas’s calling card, as well as letters and postcards written from Picasso to the Steins, who together assembled an astounding private art collection that included works by Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others. The Beinecke materials also include Stein’s original transcripts of her perceptively written “portraits” of Picasso, as well as audio recordings of Stein reading those writings. Picasso and Writers : Picasso’s love affair with words began soon after his permanent move from his native Spain to the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris in 1904. It was there, in his studio at the “Bateau-Lavoir,” that he formed ardent friendships with a circle of important French writers and poets, including Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who encouraged artists of his generation to “innovate violently!” In 1905, Picasso met Stein, an expatriate American writer who, guided in art collecting by her brother Leo, became the artist’s principal patron in Paris until 1914. During this remarkable decade, which witnessed the radical invention of Cubism, Picasso’s art and Stein’s writing were equally informed by a concentration on both visual and verbal language, an interest that endured throughout their lives.  Picasso’s intense relationships with other major French writers after the Cubist years, including Surrealists Michel Leiris and Paul Éluard, speak of his fascination with their craft and their inspiration for his own work. Picasso himself turned his hand to writing in 1935 and over the course of 24 years wrote hundreds of poems and two full-length plays. From the late 1920s to about 1950, he also produced strikingly innovative work for numerous illustrated book projects, challenging traditional notions of the relationship between image and text. These ranged from charged interpretations of classical and romantic texts by Ovid and Honoré de Balzac in the late 1920s, to the passionate writings of such contemporaries as Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, and Aimé Césaire. Picasso and the Allure of Language is organized into four sections, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of the role played by language in Picasso’s work. These are enriched by archival photographs, manuscripts, and other documentary materials that further illuminate the artist’s relationship to writing and writers. Picasso and the Allure of Language is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, copublished by the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press ($40.00; paperback). It contains an introduction by Susan Greenberg Fisher; essays that probe Picasso’s lifelong relationship to writers and writing by Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School, City University of New York; and extended catalogue entries that present new scholarship on select objects from the exhibition by modern-art scholars Jennifer R. Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery; Patricia Leighten, Professor of Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University; and Irene Small, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Visit the Yale University Art Gallery at : http://artgallery.yale.edu/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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